City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  Amir waits, then keeps talking. “But they were all kids, the whole crowd, just teens.”

  “He didn’t die,” Meir says.

  “Beseder, achi,” Amir says, like he’s calming Meir down, which makes Meir more annoyed. He looks for Shibi, but he is gone.

  “Sprint it in,” Coach yells.

  No more thinking, just the mechanics of legs pumping. Sprint it in.

  The night it happened, Meir didn’t see it begin. He was inside the shopping center. He and Liran and Ori used to go to one mall or another every week after Shabbat went out, to wander for a few hours, eat waffles, check out new cell phones. Now that Ori and Liran are in the army, it’s different. They’re home only once or twice a month, and rarely at the same time. But anyway, this time it worked out, so Liran drove them to the Pisgat Ze’ev mall in his dad’s hulking Oldsmobile, which always smells of cigars though his dad swears that he’s quit. Each time Meir sees his friends they look different. First they were buzz-cut, then they got skinny, now they’re getting strong. He doesn’t always understand them anymore, their slang, their complicated opinions on the best way to make black coffee, the most effective method to mop up blood. Meir was young when his brother was in the army. He remembers he slept a lot and never let anyone touch his weapon, no matter how badly Meir wanted to.

  At the mall, Ori was carrying around his Tavor because, he said, there were some Arabs in his housing block these days, doing renovations and installing air conditioners, and so his commander told him not to leave it at home. Meir suspected Ori made it up so he’d have an excuse to bring out his weapon. Ori and Liran both wore their own clothes—jeans and a sweatshirt with their unit decals, something with bat wings. Ori stopped wearing his kippa as soon as high school ended. His parents don’t mind, he says, as long as he wears his kippa when he’s at home. At the mall, Ori leaned against the frozen yogurt display case and looked so bored, looked so good-looking bored—all blue-eyed and armed. He had always been the pretty boy, not as fast as Meir and not as strong as Liran, but he had done this prerecruitment training regime—running the dusty trail around the settlement carrying cinder blocks, and lo and behold, Ori made it into a halfway decent infantry unit. Poor Liran got stuck in a tank.

  Ori’s hand was resting on his Tavor. “Do you even know how to shoot that thing?” Liran asked Ori as he handed him his frozen yogurt, smothered in gooey strawberries. But of course he did.

  Meir didn’t know it then, but the guys who led the beating were already out in the parking lot. Four of them, or maybe it was five, circling, waiting for the Arab, for the right Arab, an Arab alone.

  In the locker room, Meir finishes his shower first. He grabs his duffel bag and goes to the parking lot to wait for Amir. Outside, there’s just one other person, sitting on the bench between the locker room and the parking lot. Meir gets closer to see that it’s Shibi, doubled over to untie his cleats. Usually, he’s with the two other Arab guys on the team, midfielders both of them. Even among themselves, Meir has noticed, they all speak Hebrew, at least within earshot. But now Shibi is alone.

  “Hey,” Meir says. He’s standing off to the side at a clean angle for a pass, actually, if Shibi ever decides to pass the ball to him. He is stupid and nervous, feeling like a kid, carrying his oversized duffel bag, his cleats tied around his neck, flopping along in dorky shower shoes.

  Shibi sits up. The cleft in his chin really does make him look famous.

  “Aren’t you that guy from the cereal box?” Meir says, pointing his fingers into pistols, awkwardly because he’s got his phone in one hand. It’s all so lame, but he can’t stop himself.

  Whatever is the smallest amount of smiling that can pass as a smile, that’s what Shibi gives. He says, “Today you don’t walk home.” Meir is, frankly, flattered that Shibi knows this about him—that when games fall on Saturday evening, he walks to the stadium to avoid travel by car before the end of Shabbat. But that’s only on Saturdays.

  Meir hears the Arabic shadowing Shibi’s Hebrew, a deepening of the sounds at once dangerous and exciting. He gets an image of himself slamming Shibi up against the side of a car to handcuff him, the way you see soldiers making arrests on the highway. “No, not today,” Meir says. “I only walk when it’s forbidden to drive, yanni fi yom al-sabt.” He says the last part in Arabic just to see what happens.

  What happens is Shibi ignores it. “Today you drive,” he says.

  “I’ll get a ride with Amir, yeah.”

  Shibi looks right at him when he says, “I could drive you.”

  Obviously, Shibi is fucking with him, and, like, okay, ha-ha, very funny, like they’d even open the settlement gates for Shibi. Meir says, “No need.”

  But Shibi won’t let it go. “Don’t we live pretty close, one to the another?” he asks in his weird Hebrew. When he stands up, he’s taller than Meir, but not by much. And it might be the way Shibi angles his shoulders or the way his jaw clenches, but it’s obvious to Meir that Shibi heard him talking about the mall, about what happened to that kid, and that even if Shibi doesn’t know Meir was there, he may have guessed, or maybe can feel it, smell it, like an animal. Late-day sun breaks through the clouds as if an angel were about to descend. Light glints off the windshields of parked cars. They are both within arm’s length. If Meir says the Arab’s name, if he says, “Salem,” they will fight. It’s simple.

  Meir says, “I don’t know where you live.” He once heard that Shibi lives in some shitty village. Is it inside the Wall? Outside the Wall? Meir doesn’t know how to ask these kinds of questions. They’re not his problem.

  Shibi says, “Or would they shoot me?”

  “What?”

  “At the gates to your settlement, would they shoot me?” And then he laughs in a way that makes his face seem tight.

  Shibi thinks he’s so smart with his little games. All this talking without saying what they are talking about. Your mum’s a whore, Meir wants to say. Talk about that. Of course, he knows, that’s a great way to get stabbed. These people. They are so primitive when it comes to their women.

  From the locker room door, it’s Amir’s voice. “Sha-bi-bi sheli!” he cries. “You’re making us look bad in those drills.” He’s got his duffel bag over his shoulder and a towel around his neck, stepping lightly as he surveys the parked cars, flicks his chin toward Meir. “Yalla, habibi, let’s go.”

  Now it’s Shibi’s turn to make an impatient click with his tongue. “No, achi, I’m driving Meir home.” His voice is smoother than a moment ago, without barbs. It’s a move Meir recognizes: by being overly friendly to Amir, Shibi can communicate to Meir how much he dislikes him—Meir, that is—while also making it impossible for Meir to bring it up with Amir afterward, because no matter what Meir describes, Amir will say, Oh, weird, but he seemed cool to me. A defensive play. Even when he’s being a dick, Shibi is so tactical about it.

  Amir laughs. “Oh yeah? You’re going over for dinner?”

  “Should I bring my own spices?”

  Amir lets out an appreciative howl. “Have you seen this boy’s lunches?” He ruffles Meir’s hair. Meir throws him off with an elbow. “I ask him, ‘Where’s the flavor?’ He says, ‘There’s salt.’ Salt!”

  Meir throws up his hands like, You guys got me. But inside, indignation prickles at his chest and up his neck. He feels wronged and excluded with Amir and Shibi laughing at him.

  “Yalla,” Shibi says. That means they’re done.

  “Yalla,” Amir echoes, and heads toward his car, Meir following after him like a kid.

  Shibi and Amir click buttons to make their respective cars chirp. Shibi’s sedan—black, European—is not flashy but sturdy, elite. By contrast, Amir drives an absurd luxury car. Its doors open like the wings of a terrible insect. Meir climbs in the passenger side. As soon as Amir turns the ignition, there’s a brain-deadening club jam playing full blast that Meir dials down to a normal volume. Amir goes to Tel Aviv for parties and comes back with stories about getting suck
ed off in the bathrooms of clubs, or double-teaming some girl in her apartment after. To hear him tell it, the minute you get into Tel Aviv, they’re jumping on your dick, but Meir isn’t exactly sure he believes him. It sounds like something you’d make up to shock your religious friend. When Meir goes into Tel Aviv, all he seems to do is walk around for hours and eat overpriced pizza.

  “Yalla,” Amir says, and they’re off.

  As they maneuver toward the highway, Amir is talking about practice, but Meir ignores him. Instead he slips into a recurring fantasy—it happens a lot when music is on—where he’s the guy performing the song he hears. He’s behind a DJ setup, whatever it’s called, the record thing with the headphones. He’s focused on what he’s doing in the dark club with the seizure lights. A crowd is pressing around him, beneath him, bodies he is making move, they move through him. They watch him, but he watches his own hands on those control things, the levers and dials. He’s woken up something in them that they didn’t know was there, and now they need him.

  Amir nudges him. “I said, so you were there?” He’s driving with one hand.

  “What? Listen.” He can feel his heart in his temples.

  “You and some preteens . . .” But Amir can’t finish the sentence, he’s laughing too hard. He tries again. “You and some preteens taught that bad Arab a lesson?”

  “Achi, shut up, it wasn’t like that.”

  Amir ruffles his hair. “Yaa weled,” he says, in a jokey Arabic accent. “Hurry up and go to the army.”

  “Enough, yaa homo.” Meir shakes off Amir’s hand. “Hey. Where does Shibi live?”

  “He’ll be harder to beat up, achi.”

  “Fuck you,” he says, in English.

  “You think you can take him?” Amir is grinning like a drunk.

  “Fuck you.” They’re on the highway. Soon they’ll be driving out past the Wall. For now, they’re stopping and starting behind a white truck.

  “Originally? He’s from some camp,” Amir says. “You didn’t know?”

  “What, like in the territories?”

  “No, some East Jerusalem ghetto. But he moved to a luxury condo near the center. A big thing. He took shit from both sides, but he was funny about it, like, ‘Fuck it, the Jews have better water pressure.’” Amir does a solid imitation of Shibi’s accent.

  Meir shifts in the seat, a soft material that passes for leather. Amir spent more than he should have on this ridiculous sports car, especially considering that one day soon it will probably get dented to shit from the stone-throwers who lurk the highways between Arab villages. But maybe Meir would do it, buy something crazy, if he got officially signed to Div One. His Div Two contract gives him enough to, like, maybe buy a fridge. Ima puts it all in savings for him.

  On his phone, Meir scrolls through his feeds: pics of food, ad for deodorant, a chubby girl’s selfie, and here’s a photo of Ori, or at least Ori’s boots and the muzzle of his rifle. What did he call those? IDF dick pics. Meir starts to write a comment but erases it. He looks at the comments other people have left. “Achiiiiiiiiiii” from the guys. Girls wrote stuff like, “Thank you for guarding over us,” with little heart icons. It’s a great photo—Ori’s boots up, his Tavor or whatever resting on his leg, all like Here’s what I’m working with.

  Amir is talking about the goalies he wishes they had, and Meir does his part with a few grunts of agreement. He keeps waiting for Amir to ask him about what happened that night, but he’s moved on already, and it seems to Meir that maybe he’s been waiting in the creeping-slow days since it happened for someone—Amir or Liran or Ori, or Ima, even—to make a thing out of this, to make it feel like a big deal. He wants someone to ask, “But how did it start? How did you come to do such a thing?”

  That night, the night at the mall, there was something electric, something sharp in the air. Nobody talked about Yael or the photos of her room or her mother screaming on TV, but still, you were kind of thinking of it when you held the gaze of the Arab guys who swept the floors or worked the registers, searching for traces of a smirk. Although really, the problem wasn’t the ones who came to work, for the most part. It was the Arabs who slunk in from the nearby camp, not to work, but to hang out, to litter empty energy drinks on curbs and whistle at Jewish girls as if they had a right.

  Who had said it? Someone running by maybe, running toward the exit. A guy in cargo shorts holding his kippa as he ran. “They’ve got an Arab.” Or something like that. And all of them had followed immediately, pulled by a force, out the turnstile, past the aging security guard leaning against the wall, past the dead fountain filled with wet leaves and Styrofoam cups.

  You couldn’t see at first what the crowd, maybe twenty guys, was moving around. Later, Meir would learn that the initial group—the few who had planned to get it started—had already more than doubled, more guys jumping in as the energy grew, the energy that tugged at Meir, that pulled him out of those doors. Everything began to seem clear, simple. Girls in long skirts were prowling the perimeter, yelling with their arms crossed, “Terrorist! Go back to Gaza.” Meir let his cup of yogurt fall to the ground, strawberries and cream.

  The dinosaur security guard was watching, and not far away, a police car was parked. Meir assumed someone, some adult, would come stop them eventually. When did he realize that Liran and Ori had held back? They weren’t with him. It was just him, walking into the crowd, the tightness of the guys around the Arab. He was on his knees, a hand held across his ribs. He was wearing jeans in that bleached-out style worn by the especially trashy ones who come up from the camp. Meir couldn’t see his face. There was a lull in the action. How did Meir know that’s what it was? But he knew, knew that it would pick up again soon, that they were riding out an energy they had created but that was also outside of them. They were working up to it. The Arab let out a low groan that sent an electricity through him, and the crowd pulled closer, drawn in by the sound of it. Meir didn’t know the guys here, the mall being pretty far from his settlement, and none of them looked at one another for long. It was kind of understood that you wouldn’t make eye contact, that you’d focus on the Arab. Someone said, “No cell phones, boys.” The Arab began to crawl, or try to crawl—he sort of lunged forward like maybe he was trying to run away, but instead he fell, awkwardly, back to the ground. And this is what did it. This is what got them going again: watching the Arab get up and struggle. They were at it all at once. Kicking his legs and nuts, his head and back. He was moving a little, trying to cover his face.

  Meir was part of it. He shifted his weight. He let the momentum take him forward. He kicked the Arab.

  After a while, it was clear he wasn’t going to start moving again. Someone spat, a few of them spat. The Arab wasn’t moving as they trailed away, as the last of the girls came to take a look. Nobody stopped them.

  When Meir got home, he peed first. A long, deep pee that felt like the entire universe was rushing out of him. Then he went upstairs to the only bedroom he has ever had. Took off his shoes and socks, got down to his boxers. He should shower, he knew, but he let himself crawl into bed. The sheets were worn thin and fuzzy with time. Geometric shapes in primary colors, pure ’90s stuff. They were bought for some older sibling and had made their way down to him, the only one left in the house. He’d lie there for a minute. Just a minute, he told himself. Just a minute, then I’ll get up and get clean.

  A Good Arab

  They fought again last night. Why wouldn’t they? Night after night. Invariably, Shibi says something that annoys his wife. It was just the two of them—Nasir had gone down easily—and Shibi thought that maybe he and Amal might watch a movie, a TV show, really anything but the news, which was showing the same horrifying photo of Salem Abu-Khdeir in his hospital bed. Face swollen, bloodied, all of this on the seventy-seven-inch screen, ultra-high definition, that they have mounted up on the wall in a setup so involved it’s not called a TV but a “home theater.” Amal was leaning toward the television from the couch. “You wan
t me to change it?” he asked. She turned to him but didn’t respond, her eyes glazed over as if she saw Shibi perfectly and was disappointed but not surprised. When did he come to expect this look? When did it start making him so angry? Instead of responding as he once might have—perhaps with gentle teasing—he found his voice rising, so satisfying that it was like scratching a bug bite. “Are you deaf?” he cried. From there, it all went downhill.

  Night after night, it goes like this. Is this how it’s supposed to be, a marriage? He doesn’t know how to formulate this concern into a question he could actually ask anyone.

  Shibi wakes first. No light filters through the heavy, sumptuous curtains that Amal has hung in their bedroom, but he rises with the dawn regardless. It’s an old habit from the training he put himself through each morning before high school. Those empty-stomach runs—his mother worried the neighbors would think he was crazy—made him the sprinter he is today. His modern wife sleeps late. No matter. There’s nothing to cook, because his nutritionist insists that his first meal be a chalky protein shake from a mix. Shibi orders the powder from Germany. Expensive stuff. He’d never tell Baba how much he pays per tub. Shibi finds this atomized intake for most of his nutrients these days—powders, elixirs, capsules—a bit depressing. Doesn’t a body need living sustenance? Meat and greens and love? Still, his nutritionist is adamant on this regimen, and the guy gets results. You can see him in promotional videos on his social feeds, doing one-armed push-ups over a plate of sushi. Cheat day.

  Some days, Shibi rises as soon as he wakes to mix his breakfast in their splendid marble kitchen. But today, he remains in bed with his sleeping wife and tries to understand where he is, where they are. Her back is toward him. Her breath is even. Their sheets are soft and cool; their duvet is stuffed with real goose feathers—all of this bought at some Israeli store that imports everything from Europe. He shifts to his side, facing her facing away from him. It is stupid, he knows, to compare his life now to when they were young. They are a family now, a real family, with baby Nasir. Before, they were just two people in love. So young. Newlyweds in his parents’ home, left to themselves. A half day when he wasn’t training became a universe. The soft creases of her elbows, her little sighs. Time, time, time. They wallowed in time. All morning they lay in an unmade bed that sopped up rich sunlight. They were sleepy with pleasure. That’s how Nasir was conceived: in a state of sustained, blissful exhaustion. Where are those beautifully squandered hours now? Now, when he reaches for her, it is across a dark water.