City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  Leila told Mai she was pregnant the day that settler died. It was night when it came on the news. The blood, the EMT crying. Mama made sure that their gates were locked, the front door bolted. All around Jerusalem, they knew, Jews were watching the news and deciding to make someone pay. Maybe they were already circling the neighborhood in cars with the windows rolled down. Maybe already spray-painting those four Hebrew letters on Palestinian homes: נקמה. Nekama. Revenge.

  Leila wasn’t home. Or, she was at home with her husband, so she texted Mai to check in. Are the boys inside?

  Yes, Mai responded quickly. Yes, we are safe.

  She isn’t sure why Leila decided to tell her at that moment, but she did. I’m pregnant. Pause. Six weeks.

  Mai’s first question after the obligatory hearts and exclamation points: Does Mama know?

  No, Leila wrote, you’re the first. Although she meant the second, of course, after Tariq.

  A few days later, Leila came over to tell Mama and, over Skype, Baba. By then, Salem Abu-Khdeir was in a coma. The Jews had found their victim. On Al Jazeera they kept showing a still from the security footage: the blurry image of Salem’s body, the way they left it in the street. It was a Palestinian taxi driver who took him to Augusta Victoria Hospital. “Why not Hadassah Hospital?” the news anchor asked him.

  The driver was older than Mai’s father. “He was so light,” he said instead of answering the question. He covered his eyes with a hand pressing into his brow bone. He tried to say something but choked on the words. The news anchor touched the man’s shoulder gently.

  Leila hopes she will have a girl.

  The Indonesian contestant has made a frankly stunning comeback just in time for the final judging when Leila hits mute on the TV. “What’s that?” she asks, straightening to attention. “Do you hear sirens?”

  Mai sits up, reaches for her phone. “I’m not sure.” She goes to the window that faces the nearest street. She hears them now, faint sirens. How did Leila hear that? “Maybe something is happening over in the camp?” She lets the curtain fall back and is about to sit back down when she hears the unmistakable boom of a teargas canister and, almost simultaneously, an alert to her phone.

  Leila is already rushing toward the door of the house. “Muhammed,” she yells from the threshold. “Muhammed! Farouq!”

  Mai looks at her phone. “Salem Abu-Khdeir is dead,” she says, “and they are coming for him.” But when she looks up, Leila isn’t at the door anymore.

  Mai cries out for her sister, crossing the room and running down the front steps. Outside, the day is bright. Across the garden, she can hear her aunt calling to her cousins. “Come home,” she shouts. “Come inside!” There are more sirens now, and the booms from teargas down the hill. There must be soldiers close by, although she can’t smell the teargas in the air yet. “Leila!” Mai calls.

  “I’m here,” Leila yells, closing the gate behind her. She’s coming up the driveway with the boys. Little Farouq, in khakis and a striped red shirt that Mai picked out because it makes him look Parisian, holds Leila’s hand, but Muhammed keeps trying to free himself. He wants to go with the older boys, Mai knows, to see what is happening.

  There’s Mama in pajamas at the threshold of the house. “Yalla,” she yells to them. “Get inside, get inside.” Her hair is covered simply with a kerchief like an old mother-in-law.

  Mai is the last one in. She closes the door.

  They’re all on the couch watching the news. None of them wants to cook, so Mama brought out bread and slices of cheese. They eat while they watch. Mama in the middle, Leila and Mai on either side, the boys lying on the floor with blankets. The news shows the scene from a distance. The shabaab down the hill at the hospital, trying to lift the body in the sheet over the hospital wall. “God rest his soul,” Leila says. She’s rubbing her belly in circular motions, as if she could protect the baby from the unfolding atrocity.

  “Why are they doing this to him?” little Farouq asks, adjusting his glasses.

  “The Jews want to steal his body,” Muhammed answers quickly, “to degrade us.” Sometimes he seems older than ten.

  There are shots now. Hard to tell if it’s from the TV or from somewhere outside. Muhammed runs to the window that faces the street. “Come back here,” Mama says sharply, and he does, although he doesn’t sit so much as lean against a couch armrest until Mama pulls him into her lap. He protests mildly—listlessly pushing her away with his lanky arms—but eventually settles into her lap.

  Mai uses her knee to nudge little Farouq, who’s seated in front of her on the floor. He absently elbows her back. Delicate bodies of their boys, their little men, so vulnerable with their bruised shins and dark, uncombed hair. She kisses the crown of his skull fiercely, never taking her eyes off her phone, which she finds gives better news than the TV. On her feeds, everyone is posting about it like crazy. Ever since she made the decision to study biochemistry at Bethlehem University—crossing the Tunnels Checkpoint every day to come home—she has found herself more connected to the news, more aware. Her closest friend at school was born in an actual refugee camp in Bethlehem. Noor. She has a brother in Mejiddo prison, and even though Mai doesn’t ask about it, this fact animates their friendship—Mai can feel the knowledge of Noor’s brother pulsing under the surface. It makes Mai feel that she is doing more to resist than anyone in her family—more than Baba, who is away earning money, more than Mama, who sleeps all day (sorry, but it’s true), more than Leila, who would have been willing to study at the Jews’ university. Mai does more and she is proud of this. Having a friend like Noor makes her proud.

  Online, Noor has reshared cell phone footage from someone who is clearly at the hospital. What it shows: Salem being slammed into the wall again and again as the shabaab try to lift him—his corpse—over the wall of the hospital. All this so he can be buried like a human being. Mama leans over to look at Mai’s cell phone. “God rest his soul,” she gasps when she sees Salem’s body in the sheet, the bloody sheet. A single pale foot dangling out. On the TV, the news anchor is repeating the same information that everyone knows—about Salem being beaten to death at the Pisgat Ze’ev mall, about how no Israelis were ever charged. They don’t show the image of him in the hospital bed, his head swollen and bandaged, his mouth mangled. In the video Mai is playing on her cell phone, a boy in a red shirt turns to yell at someone behind him. He is holding up what looks like Salem’s shoulder. “Brother, help me,” he cries out. Then the video cuts.

  “Let me see,” Leila says, but Mai hates handing over her cell phone, so she copies the link for Leila.

  “I sent it on WhatsApp,” Mai says.

  Leila watches the footage. “God rest his soul,” she says, her hand still on her belly. Mai can hear the small, distant voice of the boy in the video: Brother, help me. Then her phone starts ringing. “It’s Tariq,” Leila says as she stands to take the call. “Allo,” she says into the phone. “Yes, we’re fine. All of us, yes. We’re inside. Okay.” Pause. “Are you sure?” Pause. Mai can’t hear what Tariq is saying. “Please be careful. Yalla, bye.”

  “Everything is okay?” Mama asks.

  “Tariq will come by,” Leila says. “He’ll take me home.”

  After Leila was married, Mai found herself trying to observe Leila without Leila noticing. She was looking for signs on her sister’s body—the way she moved, the way she adjusted her hijab—signs that she was not a girl anymore. This is a stupid thought—such a stupid, super-weird thought she would never say aloud—but why can’t Mai be the baby growing in Leila? Why does growing up mean pulling apart? Why can’t it mean coming together, becoming closer and closer until they are entwined like a single braid woven from two girls’ hair?

  “Are you sure it’s safe?” Mai asks. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay over?”

  Leila smiles, her hand still on her belly—does she ever take her hand off her belly? “I need to go home,” she says.

  Mejiddo

  Hu
ssein’s lawyer will have to come back another day because the entire prison is on lockdown. When you hear the siren, you know what to do: on your knees, hands behind your head, as if you were being arrested all over again. He’d been waiting—lying on his bunk, reviewing questions he wanted to ask his lawyer—for one of the guards to escort him to the area with the phones—blue metal cubes with glass partitions, talking into a phone, the whole thing. You sit on white plastic chairs during your phone calls. When Hussein tries to imagine an Israeli home, what he imagines is the Jews all sitting around on those white, plastic, Keter-brand chairs—all of them in prison guard uniforms—eating hummus under a portrait of their wife-of-a-dog prime minister. But anyway, there would be no visit with his lawyer today.

  He’s hungry. He’s hungry, and the cement floor is hard against his knees, but he doesn’t get up. He can hear the echo of the gates opening and closing, the yelling of soldiers in Hebrew. They are maybe three cells away. It’s not the regular guards—the chubby, listless brown Jews who are almost sincere in trying to make small talk, bringing up Israeli futbal teams like, “Shibi. You like Shibi?” As if any of them would ever watch an Israeli league, would watch some collaborator playing with the Jews—no, it’s the soldiers in black with their faces covered. For all Hussein knows, the same guys who came to arrest him that night, that long night—Mama and Noor in the driveway screaming, trying to fight the soldiers off him. Noor is a brave girl, a good girl.

  Without meaning to, he is imagining minced lamb and rice. Bowls of yogurt for dipping. Real food, food of his family. Mama and Noor, scolding the little ones who run in to steal a taste before they sit for the meal. Hunger. Does he have any of those crackers left? Maybe better to wait until the chaos has passed.

  It’s just him and Said in the room right now, almost everyone else out in the yard walking around, stretching their legs. Hussein stayed behind because he was waiting on the meeting with his lawyer, and Said was . . . who knows, whatever Said does. He naps a lot. When the siren began, Said climbed down from the bunk above Hussein and they both knelt on the floor. Now Said turns to Hussein, his hands still behind his head. “Any more of those crackers?” Said asks. Said is older. Everyone who bunks in this room is older than Hussein. It was, actually, kind of a fluke that put Hussein in this room, which should go, according to the hierarchy, to someone here for something substantial, someone who has been here for a long time, will probably die in here. Hussein should be out in the yard, in the overflow tents the Jews put up. That’s where most of the teenagers are, kids even younger than Hussein—eighteen, fifteen, eleven—who are here for throwing stones at soldiers. Some of them learn to read here.

  “One moment, uncle,” Hussein says. “I will check.” He is careful to speak respectfully to Said, to all the older men. Keeping his hands on his head, kneeling as if in prayer, he turns to his bunk and, yes, he’s got a packet of crackers there. It’s a Jewish cracker, their holiday of unleavened bread. All week, there is no real bread in the prison, just this burnt, bubbly cracker. It’s oddly satisfying to eat. Hussein has heard of guys who buy it even when they get out. Said told him that the Jews eat it to celebrate their freedom. Hussein grabs the packet and hands it to him: “Tfaddal.”

  Said nods, takes the packet, still back on his heels, and eats some of the crackers. White crumbs on the gray sweater he wears over his brown jumpsuit. There is yelling from another cell. Closer now. Sometimes shots, but sometimes it’s a metal door being beaten in, for reasons Hussein does not understand. Hussein has learned to keep breathing even when it’s going crazy. Said eats his crackers. He’s an unassuming guy, slight and dark. He stabbed that settler-girl in her bedroom. What was her name? It doesn’t matter. The miracle was that Said made it there—past the settlement’s security, all barbed-wired and motion-detected. A miracle the window was left open. In he went, carrying a kitchen knife. A miracle that he survived even though the Jews shot him, even if he’ll be in prison forever.

  Hussein has been here for five months and hasn’t been charged with anything yet. At least, as far as he knows, and he won’t get to see his lawyer today. She’s a Jew, his lawyer. A Jewish woman with a huge, appealing mouth, tired eyes, and wild hair. Hussein has no idea who pays her. The guards call her a Communist.

  The metal door flies open, and the Jews with their faces covered burst in. Said is still eating the crackers. Matzah, that may be what the Jews call it. Said looks unfazed, puts his hands back behind his head. He leaves a jagged piece of matzah half-eaten in his mouth. It dangles there while the Jews scream and grunt at one another. Hussein’s knees are on fire, the floor so hard. They are pulling down books, they are looking under posters of Real Madrid, they are squeezing out a tube of toothpaste—Rami is going to be annoyed when he comes back—looking under mattresses. There are collaborators everywhere, informants everywhere. Who knows what information they are going on.

  Hussein hasn’t heard the long-term guys talking about what they did to get here, but he knows anyway. The knowledge kind of seeps into you. He knows Said stabbed that settler-girl the same way he knows that Rami drove the car into the bus stop. Killed two of them. He knows but isn’t sure how he knows.

  Sometimes, at night, Hussein will feel Said’s dreams drip down from the upper bunk. He’ll dream about the mess of it, of his body, of her body, the knife. For every good hit Said got in—for every time he stabbed her chest, her neck, her arms—he missed and skidded off her thin shoulders, her forehead. The knife was slick with her. A girl’s room on a settlement. A bunk bed, but no one in the top bunk. Everything in the room pink and girlish.

  He cut himself, stabbing her. Her blood, his blood. His hands. Stabbing the Jew, stabbing and stabbing the Jew. She was fourteen. It never seems like enough. No matter how much you stab, no matter how dead she is, her face a cavity of blood, her arms flung useless in front of her, no matter how much, she can’t be dead enough.

  None of this Said has told him, but Hussein has felt, has dreamt.

  Knees slipping on the blood-slicked floor long after she has stopped screaming. By the time her parents made it into the room, the floor looked like a child’s finger painting, all in red. Said doesn’t remember much of the arrest and subsequent interrogation except that he lost a tooth and has not had full range of motion in his arms since because of what happened to his shoulder blades.

  The Jews are out of the room after no more than twenty seconds. Everything tipped over, spilled. There will be so much to clean.

  By the time Rami and the guys come back from the yard—“Haram, look at this mess”—Hussein has wiped up the toothpaste from the floor. There are eight of them crammed in this narrow room. He can’t believe how well he has come to know the others: Said by his naps, Hashim by the way he farts in his sleep, Rami for his patience, which is not to be confused with softness. Hussein has watched him choke a guy out because he was suspected of stealing. The eight of them, all bumping into one another, pick up their torn-apart cell until it is time for Dhuhr. Rami is the one who leads them through the midday salah.

  “Will they let us out?” Hashim asks, tucking in the corners of his bed. They have all learned to clean here, to cook here. They are their own wives.

  The cell is barely big enough for all eight of them to stand by their bunks, never mind to carry out the prayers. And anyway, this room is filled with images: posters, photos. Instead they go out into the hallway.

  “Hakol beseder,” Rami says in Hebrew. It’s fine.

  The cell door is indeed open, and they shuffle out into the hallway, arranging the flattened produce boxes on the ground in lieu of actual prayer mats. Hussein is proud to be in the Hamas block, how good it feels to stand together in proud rows behind Rami, eyes closed, setting their intentions on prayer. How good it feels to move together, to lean forward with flattened backs, to fall to their knees, to sit back on their heels. He is proud to be Hamas. Fastidious in prayer. He has seen how some of the other factions pray, rushing through the obligat
ions as if they had never heard the hadith about the worst of all thieves—the thief who steals prayer from himself.

  Hussein is on his knees, kneeling on cardboard. All noses tending downward in the position of seven bones: feet to the earth, hands to the earth, face to the earth, and knees to the earth—yes, knees to the earth—all day, Hussein has had his knees to the earth.

  Samar in Chicago

  As Samar watches her mother flash across the face of the red-haired woman in front of her, what she feels isn’t horrified so much as annoyed. Or maybe she means exhausted. This white woman, some English adjunct at Chicago, is talking about “whiteness as pathology,” and—there! There it is again. Something in the red-haired woman’s mouth: the way her upper lip sticks on her dry teeth, glint of canines, like she’s trying not to smile or she’s getting ready to spit out an accusation, you can’t be sure. That’s Mother.

  Not Mother as she is now. No. Not Mother who hobbles from the bathroom to the sitting room, who falls asleep watching reruns of Egyptian soap operas with her swollen hands folded in her lap. Not the old woman who grows sweet in her decline, on the phone with her eldest sister in Jordan, speaking about Samar as “my sweet Samar, my professor.” No, not that woman. But Mother as Samar remembers her: young and terrified, wearing a look of surprise, a kind of pleading in the eyes, gentleness and fury.