City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  Yes. Emily almost says the word aloud. Ido is in the kitchen clanging around with the dishes in the sink, trying to drown out the story.

  “And then it was over.” Vera claps her hands, startling Emily.

  “What do you mean over? Like, over-over?”

  “Yeah he came after, I don’t know, two minutes?”

  “No, shut up.”

  But yes, he orgasmed almost as soon as he entered her, one of those subdued, wincing orgasms like he’s stubbed his toe. “He’s still inside me at this point,” Vera says. “I’m straddling him like, Is this for real?”

  What would Emily have done? Probably fallen in love with him, she thinks. Probably enlisted herself to the project of his dignity and married him.

  “So I told him,” Vera says, “‘You have more work to do.’”

  Emily feels her eyebrows go up. Imagine being able to do this.

  “He said to me, ‘But, mami, you will taste like condom.’ So I push down on his throat, not hard or anything, just to put a little pressure, and I say to him, ‘Shut up.’”

  Emily touches her own throat at the base—that tender spot where so much feeling is contained. “Then what?” she whispers.

  “Then,” Vera says, “the score was two to one.”

  Emily wants to ask her what happened next, if the score kept changing, but before she can, there is a sudden sharpness everywhere. Too much light. Ido must have switched on the dining room lamp—large rectangular fluorescents over the table. It is overwhelmingly bright. The muted evening of the house feels now like an operating theater. All at once, Emily sees that the girl isn’t young. Why did she assume? It’s as if she has aged twenty years in front of Emily. There are deep laugh lines, crow’s-feet around her eyes, an infestation of gray hairs at her part. She has to be thirty. At least thirty, or maybe older, maybe older than Emily. Forty. Fifty. Older, old as Emily’s own mother.

  “It’s late,” Emily says, but it comes out too soft.

  The woman doesn’t seem to notice. She’s talking about how this guy hasn’t texted her back, how she doesn’t know what to do. “He ignores my calls,” she says. She gives an unhappy, wild laugh that, surely, must come from a dangerous and unstable person. Emily is searching the woman’s face for traces of the girl. And Ido. Where is Ido?

  Outside, the kibbutz dogs begin to howl.

  Orchards

  It’s not exactly remembering, the way that Zev thinks about her, about what he wants to call the last time he saw her, but it isn’t, couldn’t have been the last time, because she didn’t pack up and leave the kibbutz that morning—the morning she asked him. He thinks about that morning all the time. All the time. Not exactly an active recollecting, but rather that it’s always happening in a part of his mind that is, apparently, reserved exclusively for the memory of the way she asked him on that morning so long ago. How long has it been going on? The looping? He became aware of it only recently, only during his evening walks around the kibbutz, but it seems to him now that he may have been replaying that morning for the past fifty-something years, that most of his life has been spent remembering.

  The two of them—two kids, really—used to watch the sheep graze in the gray dark before the day began, fog lifting off the hills like a veil. Her in her boots, those boots, two sizes too big so that they swallowed her freckled calves. Her hair wild, and a perfect drop of moisture suspended from her lovely nose. Once, she asked him a question, in an accent that he wants now to call elfin. She turned to him to ask a question that he did not answer. The last time he saw her, or it feels that way.

  He’s an old man now, nothing to be done. Every day he tries to get his steps in. His steps. That’s what he’s learned to call the amount of movement he has done in a day, as tabulated by the thin, rubbery watch-looking thing that a grandson-in-law, the computer programmer, gave him for his eightieth birthday. Zev hadn’t expected to use it, but it turns out he’s grateful for the reminder on days when he’s spent too many hours inside, reading and drinking weak tea, just how he likes it, listening to the rumblings of ceaseless construction on the kibbutz; it seems that everyone is in a constant state of remodeling or tearing down and starting again.

  Often, it’s twilight by the time he leaves the house. He walks through the near dark after sunset, down the main kibbutz road, which for a long time was the only road you could take a car on, not that any of them had a car back then. He walks until he reaches the hole in the fence—he has spent his entire adult life stepping gingerly through this hole—and into the high grasses that buffer the avocado orchards. Here, he first learned what it means to work the land, to turn soil, to nurture and tend.

  He walks with a staff, one he sanded himself, a habit he got into back when he tended the kibbutz sheep. It’s a craggly thing with good weight. More than once, he’s used it to clock a mangy wild dog that was getting territorial with Sumsum, the ancient bitch with the torn ear that follows him around when she’s not napping in a hazardous way that strikes Zev as narcoleptic. If you hear a car horn honking in the kibbutz, it’s probably some city person trying to startle napping Sumsum out of the middle of the road.

  The orchards are quiet just before the first stars begin to show. Can it really be decades ago that he worked this land with a pocketful of salt? That was all you needed on harvest days: when it was time to break for water and a snack, you took an avocado from the wood shipping crates and halved it in your own hand, sprinkled it with salt, and ate it standing. Creamy, rich, fresh. But now, a private company farms the orchards, and so it’s technically illegal for Zev to pick one of the fruit of these trees. He hears that these days, the avocados are exported abroad anyway.

  On the radio earlier today: news of a Tel Aviv skyscraper that when completed will be the tallest building in Israel. It could be a dispatch from a foreign country.

  Back then, in a country of dirt roads, Zev was falling in love with a girl he did not marry. A freckled gentile who came from Norway to work on the kibbutz. Why did she come to the kibbutz to farm avocados? It was never clear. Something about socialism—sure, why not? He had his own small place then, not exactly a house, but living quarters. No kitchen, no fridge, just a hot plate for the kettle. But he had a bed and a window, a few books on a shelf he built, and a Norwegian girl who would pretend to be mad at him when he pretended to be her mother—a woman he would never meet—reacting to him, to Zev, should this girl ever bring him home to Norway. “Le juif,” he would say, with a sour expression he imagined an old goy might wear. “For what you bring le juif?” His imitation was bad. It all came out like the accents he’d heard in Paris after fleeing Algeria in ’54, at the outbreak of the Arabs’ revolution. Zev and this girl spoke a broken-winged hybrid of French, English, and Hebrew together. She would turn away from him in bed squealing, “Ce n’est pas juste!” And he loved to take her protesting face in his hands and kiss her nose and mouth and ears and cheeks until his kisses subdued her.

  You could always tell her from her too-big rubber boots. When she worked in the orchards she looked like a fly-fisher. Zev could spot her goofy silhouette from a distance in the hills as he tended to the modest flock of kibbutz sheep, not a cash flock but subsistence: enough for the kibbutz itself. They scraped by with a little of everything back then, and no one on the kibbutz had a private bank account.

  They were always wearing the wrong shoes. All of them. One of the men from the kibbutz—Avi, a simple-minded guy who tended beautifully to the kibbutz gardens, coaxing them into lushness and order—showed up for the Six-Day War in leather sandals. 1967. There had been no time to change before catching a ride to the bus stop that took them to the northern front—an Egged bus, a city bus, the radio playing reserve announcements, messages from families to their sons and fathers, as the men watched the farms disappear and the Arab villages begin.

  He can’t remember when his own clothing started to feel like a costume. Visitors to the kibbutz, who rent houses for a weekend away, for example, have t
aken photos of him when they think he’s not looking: a rustic figure in jeans and a denim workshirt, the leather shepherd’s hat pulled low over his forehead, and Sumsum trailing behind.

  What he had loved back then was that if you dreamt it, you really could build it. Everything was new, everything was poised to be rewritten. His father had been an accountant in Algiers, then a nobody in Paris. But here was Zev, wandering among the flocks of sheep like King David, an alternative Jewish history springing up under his feet. He loved to awkwardly wade into Hebrew, which he learned only at sixteen when he took a one-way boat ride to the port of Haifa, then a bus inland, until he reached the kibbutz he’d been assigned to. He was always scribbling notes in the journal he’d bought before he left. Stitched pages, creamy and unlined—the journal opened the wrong way, the gentile way, so Zev wrote in it from back to front so that he could write in Hebrew, right to left, the way he’d seen Algerians write in the Arabic that he never learned in school. He wrote down new names for ageless plants, either resurrected from the Bible or invented anew. He wrote down the antiquated Hebrew phrases he heard the survivors use, the ones still struggling not to speak Yiddish. They spoke like Moses. “And I spake unto the taxi driver, saying, ‘Lo! Do you take me for a proletariat that you have tithed me thusly?’”

  Of course, survivors lived on different kibbutzes: rich Ashkenazi kibbutzes that got more government funding, never mind the reparations the German government threw at them. The Norwegian girl had been confused by all the distinctions, the hierarchy of Jews. “But you are all Jews, non?” she asked.

  “In a few years it won’t matter,” Zev said. “Soon we’ll all be Israeli.”

  Most mornings, he left her sleeping when he went off to his sheep before dawn. But sometimes she would rise with him, and they would dress silently to spend a dark hour together in the fields. The sheep munched at the dew-wet grasses while Zev and the Norwegian girl wordlessly shared an apple. They took turns eating pieces off the blade of his long, thin pocket knife. Those mornings, Zev treated himself to a quiet assurance—that anything he dreamt was possible, and even what he had not.

  Over the years they exchanged a few letters. After the Six-Day War, he wrote to her about the wonder of seeing the Western Wall, about the horror of watching Arab fathers and sons butted along by rifles as if they were the fleeing Jews. By then, she and he each had their own families and, over the years, the letters trickled off. The last letter she sent came in 1974. Months after he got back from Sinai, her letter came, asking if he was alive. She said she had watched the Yom Kippur War unfold on TV. Heard about the Israelis still held in Sinai, tortured in Egyptian prisons. The letter felt so foreign, so out of touch—Zev didn’t make a decision to not respond to the letter, so much as he kept not responding to the letter, and in that way, it became a decision.

  He thought of her sometimes, things he wondered if she saw, when the first skyscraper went up in Tel Aviv, for example; or things she would never know, like how the kibbutz decided to try out a collective car. What a disaster, he could imagine telling her. You had to sign up for the car. The sheet was on the bulletin board near the dining hall where they all, all of them, ate every meal. The kibbutz car keys somehow always ended up with pushy Ruti—cunning, that woman. Now Ruti has got one of the nicest homes on the kibbutz. When the kibbutz privatized—let go of the commune ethos and became something closer to a suburban outpost—Zev wondered if the Norwegian knew, but then again, who would report on that outside of Israel? “Of course we must privatize,” Ruti said in the meetings where privatization was first brought up. “We must evolve with the times.” And everyone had nodded along. Everyone, it turned out, had some source of income on the side. Even Avi, whom Zev had always looked on with something approaching pity, had invested in real estate in Haifa. Where had the money come from? How had they built their money? Had everyone managed to develop a contingency plan? Yes, apparently. Everyone but Zev, who spent all those decades tending sheep, scribbling in the cloth-bound notebook on the hills around the kibbutz, which shrank every year, more and more land given to the nearby infantry base, to the private developments that crowd the kibbutz lands. He hadn’t known there was an alternative future he was supposed to plan for.

  He doesn’t remember the day she left, or how it ended. He remembers that she was increasingly annoyed with elements of kibbutz life she had initially professed to find endearing, like how everyone knew when she and Zev fought, when they had made up, not necessarily because of someone’s gossip, but because the kibbutz members seemed to share a central nervous system, never quite existing apart. In those days, they were still raising kids collectively—all of them sleeping in the children’s quarters rather than at home with their own parents. The Norwegian girl claimed she could hear them crying at night. All of this had been increasingly disturbing to her.

  She only asked him once. It was dark, and they were sharing an apple. Mist was rising from the fields, Zev’s favorite ewe, an oddly affectionate creature, was already covered in burrs. The hours before dawn and the hours after sunset look similar, if reversed. In a photograph, you might not be able to tell which was which, but standing in the field you always feel whether it’s the beginning of the day or the end. She asked him once. She said, “Come with me, come back with me.”

  He hadn’t answered, had he? He kissed her forehead, then went to pick the burrs off his wandering ewe. He isn’t sure, he still isn’t sure, if he’s replaying that moment because he wants to know what would have happened if he had answered differently, if he had imagined his own life as separate from a collective future that never materialized anyway. What he means is, he’s not sure if he regrets it, wants a chance to try again, or if he simply wants to return back to a time when all decisions were possible, were laid out before him like a feast, waiting for him to choose.

  Salem Abu-Khdeir

  Salem is not dreaming. No, he is not dreaming. Still, his body pulses with memories. Broken repository. His whole life lives inside a body lying on a hospital bed. What you might call his mind is not there. But his body remembers. His body holds every day of his short life. In the deep center of his right palm, for example, beneath the IV drip needled into the veiny bridge of his hand, is the feeling of the curve in the street just before his block, the curve that always told him, when he was a child walking home from the UN school, that he was almost there, almost home to his mother’s bustle and scold. All the days of his childhood the feeling of rounding that curve accumulated inside him, stored itself in his right hand like water drips into a pool. Memory lives in the body, moves through the body, picks a place to house itself and stays there. At the base of Salem’s throat—alongside the hospital tubes that now keep him (technically) alive—resides the thrill and wonder that rose up in him on the day a friend’s father took the boys up to a rooftop and ripped away a tarp to reveal an enormous cage of electric green parakeets, gorgeous and shrill.

  Right shoulder: He is three years old and Mama is shaking him and yelling in her hoarse voice, yelling at him for crying, to stop crying, because he’s not a baby. Shaking and shaking. Stop crying.

  Along his spine between his shoulder blades: The gentle crinkle of the small plastic bags, purple or yellow or black, that Mama carried home by the armful from the vegetable vendor.

  Lower down on his spine: The safe and enclosed feeling of pretending to be asleep so Baba would carry him from the couch to his bed.

  Tender crease of his left hip: He’s maybe twelve and he’s just stolen some Jewish bitch’s phone right from her open purse on the Jerusalem tram; he’s slipping out of the automatic doors as they close and she’s realizing it—one second too late, just as the doors are closing, she realizes it and begins to yell and Salem turns back (the doors separate them now) to see the bitch’s face, shocked and unbelieving and Salem thinking, Yes.

  They got him in a parking lot when he was alone. He and a few of the guys from the camp liked to go to the Jewish mall. Walk around a bit. Lo
ok at the sneakers, the phones. Groups of nervous Jewish girls would look at them and walk faster. Swish, swish, go the jean skirts. Now and then, Salem or one of the guys might make a little hissing noise to watch the Jews scurry, but mostly they just looked at stuff and then bought chips. The Jews who jumped Salem got right into it. “What are you doing here?” “What do you mean what am I doing here?” A shove, another shove. There were two of them. Settlers his age or maybe a little older, all dressed in hiking boots and sweatshirts. A police car cruised by without stopping. Salem figured he’d get a few hits in before it got broken up. Then there were four of them, six of them.

  In Salem’s gut, beneath his navel, there is a tangled contradiction: repulsion and attraction, knotted into each other. Times when he felt one or the other, times when he felt both, or felt one disguised as the other—it came from his gut, and then it lived on in his gut. So much has been lost; so much survives. When the mob kicked Salem’s stomach, he threw up chips, then later, blood. But inside his body is another body, the body that remembers, and in this body it is the day that Salem went to the sea.

  It had been a hot day, too hot, with swampy air. “This is it?” Salem thought. This was Tel Aviv? Low buildings, dirty streets, whores at bus stops. It wasn’t his first time coming in on the shared van, but it was his first time since he started middle school. Baba needed to pick up cash from someone, some job he’d worked where the pay had been delayed. Salem and his brother tagged along, all the way from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv—“This is it?”—then south to Jaffa, all with the promise of the beach after.

  The three of them walked the streets of Jaffa, Baba on his old cell phone, confirming side streets. Salem’s family had never lived in Jaffa—before the Zionist disaster, his great-grandparents had lived in an inland valley—but it felt like he could have been from Jaffa. The villas were almost familiar, reminded him of the rich neighborhood uphill from the camp. Almost familiar. They could not see the sea, not yet, but the streets were filled with tourists wearing shorts, carrying towels. He saw boys his age on bikes—Palestinians with full Israeli citizenship—yelling to each other in a garbled mix of Arabic and Hebrew. Familiar but not familiar at all.