City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  Amal, he thinks. Let’s start again. Her hair is dark and mussed across the pillow. He thinks of last night. She in tears and he with his head in his hands, pacing the room. Nasir awake and clinging to her, sobbing. He tries to remember the last time they went three days in a row without fighting. When did this become the routine? He thinks it may have changed when he moved her to the Jewish part of the city. He can’t let himself say, That was a mistake. But he does admit that, yes, there were trade-offs he hadn’t foreseen.

  On the futbal pitch, there are no surprises. Shibi can dip into the flow of the game, anticipate it and—so naturally! so easily!—alter it, like changing the course of running water. Off the pitch, he’s like some mediocre defender, always on his heels and reacting after the fact, unable to foresee or predict. He didn’t know. I didn’t know. He didn’t know she would be choked like a flower by weeds in the Jewish neighborhood. Is that how it started? With her isolation? They are close to home. Just a short drive across the light rail tracks to his parents, to her parents. And yet it is also true that now, Shibi and his wife live in a different world. That was part of the appeal. Not the distance from their families but the luxuries of living in a place as expensive and well tended to as this. The neighborhood actually gets garbage collection, has reliable drinking water, parks. But maybe he didn’t consider the costs to his wife and their baby boy to spend so much time in the Jews’ world. He wonders if part of him wanted to feel less lonely here, in their world—in their futbal arenas, on their talk shows, on their cereal boxes—so he brought Amal and Nasir over to this side, and now they are all paying for it.

  Once, it would have been impossible for an East Jerusalemite to play for a Jewish team or to live in a Jewish building. Not so much because of the Jews but because of your own neighborhood—how they would look at your family, at you. For most of Shibi’s childhood, the threat of collaborators was everywhere. You never knew who the Jews had gotten, what they had beaten out of him, bribed him into. Shibi was young when he heard about the dog who middlemanned a real estate deal for the Zionists to start spreading past Salah ad-Din Street. After, he hanged himself, or was forced to, maybe. But things are shifting. Nobody can wait forever, not even a city. All his childhood, they were waiting for Palestine to rise up and take them back, take East Jerusalem back into her arms, free them. Now he plays futbal for an Israeli team and there is a Palestinian candidate in the Jerusalem mayoral election. Shibi is not the only one participating in what thinkers call “normalization,” but he’s one of the most visible. “I can’t stand you,” a woman yelled at him recently. A young Palestinian woman with the look of an artist, long scarf. “You normalizer!” she screamed. “It is shameless, it is collaboration.” They were in his parents’ neighborhood, and everyone on the street looked away, including his wife.

  On his jersey, his family name is written out in Hebrew letters: hassin. That’s his name, but also—in the brutal, blocky letters of the Hebrew alphabet—not his name.

  At first it had been funny, almost hilarious, to live in the snobby West Jerusalem complex. Every few months, the lobby was decorated for a different Jewish holiday. Little flags, celebrating the capture of Jerusalem, the founding of their state. None of it seemed real. Even greeting their neighbors in friendly Hebrew was a kind of farce. His wife had laughed, too. It was a joke they both were in on. But when the joke wore off, this was still their life, waking up in an apartment complex filled with strangers, no neighbor to come over and help her hollow out zucchini, nobody to talk to (to really talk to), and if she is on the phone in the hallway speaking Arabic, the long looks. Nobody says anything. Not the young family who moved from France—father is big in shipping—not the elderly couple whose high-tech son bought them their condo. Nobody says anything but nobody has to say anything. Last night, Amal said not for the first time, “I can feel them watching me.” Her hand gripped her chest. Purple-red manicured fingernails, stacks of golden rings, eyeliner smudged. “I can feel them watching us.” She was terrifying, Shibi thought in that moment. His own worst fears alive in this woman.

  Now that Nasir has become chatty, it is definitely worse. Yet another thing that Shibi failed to anticipate: how much Hebrew his son will have to speak, day in and day out, even if he goes to a diplomats’ school where they learn mostly in English and Arabic, a bit of German, and minimal Hebrew. There are questions they have not discussed and that Shibi does not know the answers to. Should they speak to Nasir in Hebrew when they are in public? When they are in the hallways of their own apartment building? Will he be safe? Will he be safer? They are rich, so they are supposed to be safe, but they worry. They worry. How many were watching while the boy from Shuafat was beaten? For over five minutes they beat him. Five minutes. One, two, three, four, five. Nobody stopped them. A kid. He turned fifteen in a coma, Shibi heard—as a vegetable in Augusta Victoria Hospital.

  In a horrible way, it had been a relief when news broke about the beating, because in the days after the settler-girl was murdered, everyone had known that some kind of retribution would be coming. True, the Jews had shot down the man who did it. True, he had survived and would now spend the rest of his days being tortured in Mejiddo prison. True, the Jews would bulldoze his mother’s house. True, they would expand some settlement in that girl’s name, chase a family off their olive groves. True. But none of that would be enough. For the Jews, nothing is ever enough. Shibi had known and Amal had known and everyone they know had known that the Jews would come for blood. Once they got poor Salem, at least the wait was over.

  But last night when Amal listed these horrible facts—Salem in a coma, the way everyone watched him being beaten, Nasir speaking Arabic, how scared she is for him—Shibi found himself carried off in a wave of frustration, maybe even rage. “Halas, it’s nonsense,” he cried, throwing her hand off his arm. He has had those very same thoughts, but he could not bear to hear her echo his fears. He could not bear the accusation of it: How can we choose to live among them when they want to erase us? He said, “I am doing the best I can.” Don’t they have two cars? Won’t his son go to a private school with the children of diplomats? Shibi is the starting number ten on a team that has a solid chance at winning the league this year. He is in his midtwenties and has—inshallah—a long career ahead of him. He is giving her a beautiful life. He yelled it—“I’m doing the best I can!”—and then almost immediately caught himself lest the neighbors hear words they didn’t understand and call the cops. Angry Arabic.

  Amal saw it. She saw the moment of Shibi holding himself back, of Shibi anticipating their Jewish neighbors’ response and silencing himself. She saw it and laughed. “What are we doing?” she said. “Can we really go through with it?”

  She was referencing the secret that they speak of only in whispers. A secret so big they have not explained it to Nasir, not told their parents. The secret is this: they are in the process of applying for Israeli passports. It is too hard to live like this, to accept the stateless limbo of being an East Jerusalem Palestinian: not an Israeli, not in Palestine, just a symbol buckling under the weight of a million bureaucratic anomalies. Traveling abroad, for example, is insane: driving all the way to Jordan with a slew of laissez-passer documents and visas, no passport, no citizenship. The Israelis will grant his application for a passport, he knows. He is, to them, the model of a good Arab. (He hears a rejoinder here, in the voice of the young artist who yelled at him in the street: To them, the only good Arab is a dead Arab.) They’ll give him the passport. Under nationality it will say “Israeli.” Nasir’s will, too. His son, an Israeli. His son, a Palestinian barred from entering Beirut, Baghdad, Damascus, Muscat. But fuck it, Shibi thinks. Fuck the Arab world that has watched the dream of Palestine rot for generations now. Fuck everyone. Israel is haram, they say. Fine, so is America haram? Is it forbidden to get an American passport? Would he be a collaborator if he were applying for an American passport? All his life, outsiders have been piling contradictions upon his back, and now
all he wants is to protect what is his. That’s what he’s doing, isn’t it? By moving to this part of the city? By taking their paperwork, accepting their government?

  Last night, he didn’t answer his wife’s question. He left. Out the door of their apartment, the sounds of her crying chasing him down the hallway. He got in his car—his European car, tinted windows—and drove through the Jewish streets. He went north on the empty boulevard, waiting at the interchange while the light-rail—the last one of the night, no doubt—crisscrossed its way north, too. He drove past settlements, past the invisible entrance to Shuafat camp, carefully obscured from view. He didn’t realize where he was driving until he got to the mall where they beat Salem. Aldo, American Eagle, Burger King. He idled out front. He watched a settler woman with a stroller—they never seem to sleep—and two young children hurrying home, maybe. The woman glanced at Shibi’s car, perhaps nervously. What did she see? Black, luxury vehicle with dark windows. Then he turned around. He headed home. He said to himself, When I get back, she will be gone. She will have taken Nasir and fled.

  When he got back, she was not gone. She was in bed, already asleep, her face puffy from crying. She hadn’t left. Then again, where would she have to go?

  Now, in the dawn, in the silence of their high-ceilinged apartment, in their West Jerusalem palace, where they cannot even hear the muezzin’s morning call, Shibi lies in bed with his pointless hypotheticals. He asks himself how far back they would have to go. Back before each interaction was dancing over pain, through pain, in pain. And the ones that aren’t—the interactions where they laugh sincerely—feel inordinate in their relief. We’re fine, right? We’re fine, we’re fine. Back, back. Back before he guided her through this newly built apartment, making her touch each marble counter. Back before she wept at the threshold of her mother’s house. And why not back further? Back before the wedding, her hair huge and her face pale. A gorgeous stranger.

  It’s not that he regrets coming to know her. Her beauty and her quiet smiles are now substantiated by moments he has seen her in anger, accusing him of not helping enough with Nasir; substantiated by the stories she told him about her childhood: her long walks to school as a girl, the pets she kept in secret, kittens and—she insists this is true—a praying mantis; substantiated by secrets he has learned of her body, how she sleeps with one delicate foot curled into the other, the way a dove hides under its own wing. It’s not that he regrets coming to know his wife as a person, no, it’s becoming known to her that he regrets—becoming known to her and disappointing her.

  He reaches out to touch her. He pulls his hand back.

  But did he force her to leave? Did he pull her away from her mother’s house screaming? No. They had talked about it. They had talked about the parks, the water, the privacy—not living under the constant watch of neighbors, of relatives, not sucked into the endless petty battles over money, over insults. What a relief it was to walk hand in hand through streets where they did not see a single person they knew. What a relief it was. And now? Now he realizes that he is even more visible here than he ever was back home. More visible and yet invisible. Ignored. The Jews, they look right through you. During the painful, lonely hours he spends in bed as dawn slips away, Shibi goes over it again and again. He can’t go back. He can’t go on. He can’t go back, but he wants to go back. Back before he built her a marble kitchen. Back before those initial anxious meetings at her parents’ in their salon. He fidgeting with the cuffs of the dress shirt he had bought with Mama. Back even before the first time he saw her, still in her pleated high school uniform, laughing brilliantly in a group of dowdy friends. Back, maybe, before either of them was born, before their villages were erased, their cities smashed up, before they were herded into the slums that their parents will never, ever leave. How far back is that? How far back is far enough?

  Shibi turns away from her, readying himself to get up—to make his protein shake, to head out for his first workout of the day, to continue to provide for this family. He turns away from her, the luxurious bedsheets crinkling softly. They lie back to back, two people facing opposite directions. One facing forward, the other facing back. Which is which? Who is who?

  Just as he is about to rise, he feels her shift, and all at once, her small body is surrounding him. She is holding him—her arms pulling his rib cage toward her, her birdlike pelvis pressed into his back. How did someone so tiny bear their son? It is a miracle. Such compact strength. She presses her face into the nape of his neck. He can feel her hair in his ear. He puts his hands over her hands, which are pressed hard against his chest, pressed so hard that he knows she is not sleeping. She has been lying awake, scared as he is, anxious in her own, private ways. She is so warm, so strong. She envelops him, despite the difference in their size. She pulls him into her rhythmically, gently. She is rocking him. Like a child, she is rocking him. “Shh,” she whispers, her voice soft and distant, “my love, my man.”

  Yael’s Room

  All the furniture is white. Wood and wicker. She said she liked how clean it made the room feel. He remembers the afternoon that she got him to carry that old dresser out back and together they painted it white. He didn’t think to put down a tarp. White paint on the lawn.

  That’s how she was once she got an idea in her head. As a girl, she had insisted on a bunk bed for sleepovers. By fourteen, she had come to regret it, perhaps, but she was stuck with the bunk bed. Now the bottom mattress is missing. Whoever got rid of it must have been the same person to clean up all the blood. Who was it? A neighbor? An EMT? Yael’s father never found out. When he got back from the hospital where they told him what he knew, that his daughter was gone, the room had been cleaned, but he still had Yael’s blood on his clothes.

  For days after, when washing his hands, he found her blood sticking between his nails and cuticles like gold leaf. Each time, he put his fingers in his mouth rather than let these last parts of her disappear down the drain.

  Yael’s father lies on the top bunk. It still has a mattress, which sags under his weight. His feet hang over the back edge. He is not sure if he will sleep here again tonight. He knows he is hiding from his wife, cannot bear the feeling of his own grief magnified in her. He has spent so much time in this room that he is fairly certain this room lives inside him now, that his own memories have taken its shape—his own childhood of playing in the irrigation sprinklers of the desert is waiting for him in the closet, where, he knows without getting up to look, his daughter’s ballet slippers are still hanging. And under the bed, her pink Converse sneakers waiting for spring. He is not sure how long he has been lying in his daughter’s bed today.

  If he opens the drawers of her dresser, he knows he will find carefully rolled socks and neatly folded T-shirts organized by color. Yael likes order. And yet, she is so creative. Dance class, poetry for school projects, painting a delicate border of flowers around the frame of her mirror. Perhaps that is how it goes. Creativity requires structure.

  Everything is here. Hair ribbons tied to the neck of a standing lamp. Picture frames shaped like hearts displaying photos where two, three, or even four girls are cramming their joyful faces into view. Seashells she collected from visits to Tel Aviv and a family trip to Greece last year, lined up along the window. That window. Everything is here, but everything is gone.

  He closes his eyes. Sometimes he can feel—or almost feel—Yael there, in the bottom bunk, shifting in sleep or texting furiously on her phone, delighted by one of the dozens of group chats that mapped out her social life. What will happen to Yael’s phone number now?

  He lies on his side, hugging his belly. His body does not know that Yael is gone. His body still conjures her in dreams, pulls her close, as if that could repair what was ripped away the night the emergency workers lifted her onto a gurney.

  If he sleeps, he may wake to the sound of Yael screaming. Ima, she screams. She died crying out for her mother. Only sometimes, in his dreams, it’s Yael as a baby—crying in the dark hours
between night and morning, and he will wake up into the sound and his first thought will be, She’s hungry, as he shakes awake his wife, who cries and says, “Please, no more, please.”

  And, oh, the darling sound of Yael’s chewing. When she was a toddler—Yael, little Yaeli with those dimples, where did they come from?—he used to listen to the sound of her chewing by bringing an ear up to her cheek. Tiny, determined crunching sounds while she ate spoonfuls of cornflakes. It was intoxicating.

  He never told anyone this, but when she was born, he sometimes let himself imagine that Yael had grown inside his belly, that he’d carried her. In his heart of hearts, he has to believe that every father has had the same thought. How could they not?

  Flesh of my flesh.

  There is a story from Talmud that he has always hated. Two sons die on Shabbat. Their mother covers their bodies behind a closed door, then lies about where they are to their father. Only after Shabbat does the father begin to insist, saying, “Come on now, where are they?”

  She answers with a question of her own. She says years ago, a man loaned them something, and that on Friday, this very same man had come by to ask for the return of what they had borrowed. “Should we do as he says?” she asks her husband. “Should we return what we borrowed?”