City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  Off the quad and onto a sidewalk. Crunch, crunch, crunch. She passes posters taped up along a cement wall: Math tutor available, Black Lives Matter, 2000s-themed party at the student center, Campus Republicans meet next week, Study Korean, Rape Crisis Hotline, Vote in the student elections. A black-and-white photograph of a young black woman at what looks like a graduation ceremony has handwritten text underneath: Say Her Name. Next to it, another, half torn down.

  She thinks about her own students, hopes that the grad student—not even a lecturer—who agreed to cover her classes this week at least takes attendance. She knows she is supposed to resent her students and the time they steal from her, but she likes them this semester, likes them every semester, really. They are young and bright. She knows, of course she knows, that she thinks about them much more than they think about her. They tug her away from her own work, her own research; she frets about their little ideas, the shortcomings of their work, which are of course her own shortcomings, the concepts she has failed to make clear.

  “Professor, I know how to make buses materialize,” one of her favorite students said to her recently. He was walking gingerly to her desk with two Styrofoam cups of tea.

  “Let’s hear it,” Samar said.

  The boy’s name is Hamid. A bit naughty, but hardworking. The years he took off between finishing high school and starting university—working, saving money—have given him a certain hunger that Samar recognizes and respects.

  “Yes,” Hamid said, putting the cups on her desk and pulling up a chair so they could go over his most recent essay, line by line, together. “The trick is to light a cigarette.”

  “A cigarette makes the bus come?”

  “Yes. Listen, I could be waiting for the bus for ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour, it doesn’t matter. The minute I light up a cigarette—yalla!—the bus arrives, and I have to throw the cigarette out or stink up my jacket by putting it back in the pack, half-smoked.”

  “So maybe it is time to quit smoking,” she said, knowing it was expected that she prod him a little. A childless woman at her age is a mother to all.

  “But, Professor,” Hamid said, “if I quit smoking, the bus will never come.”

  In the Chicago cold, Samar holds her hands together such that her jacket sleeves meet and cover her wrists completely. She has seen monks walk through Bethlehem this way. She is walking in the direction of her room. Chicago is filled with things to see: the Art Institute, the giant Anish Kapoor bean in Millennium Park. But the university is in the south, and the conference schedule is quite packed, and Samar really hasn’t gone anywhere in the city. It’s not simply that she has obligations for the conference, although she does. And it’s not simply that the cold makes wandering seem less appealing, although it does. Traveling consistently reveals to Samar how small she makes her own world, how she feels compelled to stick to the places that become familiar: the few buildings she knows on campus, the room where she is staying, the coffee shop between campus and her room. It was like this in Oxford, too—a constricted orbit.

  When Mother called to plead with her to come home, to leave Oxford, it was the middle of the fall term, Michaelmas. How strange and enchanting the names of those terms—Michaelmas, Hilary, Trinity—like words from a secret runic language. It was evening, dark already. By Hilary, the days would be ending midafternoon, Samar knew, but most likely, she would not be at Oxford then: her twelve-month postdoc research was essentially finished; she had only two more months of funding. The evening Mother called, Samar had been sitting at the flimsy, pale plywood desk in the Saint Anne’s graduate dormitory, reviewing a copy of the publication on which her name appeared. It was thrilling, yes, to see her name in the journal’s table of contents, to flip carefully to page forty-seven, and see her name there again. But under the excitement was a tug of frustration. In both places, her name appeared under her advisor’s name. She knew that this was the way things worked, and yet it was Samar who had furnished the central idea in a seminar paper that, initially, her advisor had been incredibly critical of, unconvinced, apparently, that the Israeli Apartheid Wall might be understood as a kind of war memorial. But something must have convinced him, because a few months later he asked her to help research a paper that “picked up where Samar left off,” but that, as far as she could tell, was actually just her idea, expanded upon. She remembers the odd, exhausting mix of feelings: excitement and gratitude that her advisor involved her at all, didn’t simply steal Samar’s idea and call it his own; resentment and humiliation that she had to be grateful for scraps, as if she herself didn’t believe she deserved more.

  When Mother called, Samar was sitting at her desk, tracing over her name in the journal, and wondering, sincerely wondering, if she could handle this. Not the work itself, but all the battles one must undertake for the sake of the work. Did she have the strength to defend herself and her ideas in a climate where the stakes were so low that all the arguments—petty, academic, brilliant, self-referential to the point of irrelevance—took on a kind of hysteria? In a way, she is still answering this question. But that day at Oxford it was dark and cold already, and Samar was feeling the disappointment that comes with getting something you thought you wanted and finding you want more, when her telephone, a landline (although nearly everyone but Samar had a cell phone), startled her out of her thoughts.

  One month later, she and her bags were on a flight to Jordan, where she stayed in Amman with her mother’s sister until an uncle on her father’s side had a permit to take the long drive from Bethlehem to Amman to pick her up, to take her and her three huge suitcases home. It was supposed to be temporary. That was a decade ago now. A decade ago. How does it happen? She was thirty years old and she was making good time. She had just finished her postdoc; she had begun to publish. She was earning, as they say in English, a seat at the table. She’d thought she had time, and then she came home, and it began to slip away.

  But what Samar has been trying to remember is exactly what was said on that phone call. Did Mother ask her to come back? Did she demand it? Did she tell her that Father was sick, that he was fading away? Does it matter? Wasn’t telling Samar about Father’s weight, a ghastly number, a kind of demand anyway? But it matters. It matters to Samar. She wants to know how much she embellished the story, what she added, where she made assumptions, and what those assumptions have cost her. She wants to know but doesn’t know how to start.

  She continues along the sidewalk toward the room she’s been put up in, past houses split in two symmetrically, one family in each half. Or not families, maybe, but student apartments with rotting couches on the porches and wind chimes everywhere. The sun is relentlessly bright.

  She is within a boundary that the medievalist described to Samar during their conversations over Skype: a few blocks by a few blocks. “Those are the safest areas,” she said, smiling. “I’ll email a map.” Samar knew this code, what “safe” meant in this context, coming from this woman. Safe meant not black. Safe for whom?

  That was one of Mother’s words back then. Safe. “I’m trying to keep you safe,” she would hiss, with what seemed like rage to Samar at the time, but now seems to be more about fear. Love, fear, control, hate. It is so hard to distinguish.

  What was it Mother feared when she stood in the doorway waiting for Samar to come home from high school, ready to interrogate her? Mother had no shortage of children to yell at, but it was Samar—the only girl and yet, no denying it, the most like her father—that Mother singled out, or so it seems to Samar. It always started the same way: “Let me ask you a question,” almost sung to her, gently. Then it was a careful, strategic series of moves, establishing that perhaps Samar had not come directly home, but had stopped for a can of soda or an ice cream with friends, and then Mother could finally yell out what she wanted to yell out, which was something along the lines of: “Do you know what people will think of you?” These were the years that her father had spent in Saudi Arabia, earning money as a trans
lator for American businessmen and sending most of it home. So maybe Mother was afraid of her own loneliness, her own isolation, and somehow, Samar’s world, already opening up and expanding, terrified Mother, too. That might be a true answer, but it strikes Samar as an incomplete one.

  Even today, the words “Let me ask you a question” freeze all the water inside Samar. Mother still says it, but when she says it, she’s really just asking a question. “Let me ask you a question,” she’ll sing out, then ask about some neighbor’s son, or whether the grocer across town has been caught weighting his scales yet. Samar has seen forty springs, but in those moments, at their slightly lopsided table in the kitchen, the apricot tree tapping its branches against the window next to the sink, she is thirteen again, and she is terrified.

  Sound of footsteps. On the sidewalk behind Samar there is the sound of footsteps. No. Please. She tries to turn, but it’s too hard in the puffy coat and winter scarf. Sound of footsteps, approaching, faster, a man because it’s always a man. Hot coal at the base of her spine, moving up. She is trying to breathe deeply, slowly, but the breath doesn’t seem to reach her lungs, not the deepest part that she needs it to reach. It’s coming from behind. He’s coming from behind and there’s no time, no time, she needs to spin around but can’t. There is no time. On the other side of the street, a woman with a furry hat is leaning over her baby stroller, adjusting an enormous blanket that must have a baby under it; ahead, a man in a long parka, jeans tucked into snow boots, is facing a brick wall, maybe against the wind to light a cigarette. These are the people who will watch when what happens happens. It is a bright, freezing spring afternoon. All these people are here and none of them are going to help her when he comes for her, closer now, oh my God, just let it happen, just let it be over. There is something worse than pain. It is the world itself crushing you, saying, You deserve this, you deserve this. It is believing it. Here it is.

  The jogger says, “On your left,” as he passes.

  The panic evaporates and floats up into a clear sky. A man jogging, that’s all. She wants to weep but knows she will not. The woman with the stroller is gone. The man in the parka leans against the building wall, smoking now.

  Two blocks later, it’s into the building using the plastic keycard hanging by a lanyard around her neck, up the linoleum stairs, unlocking the room door. There is a chill at the backs of her knees as she locks the door behind her. Safe. She sits on the bed, her coat on, everything on, trying to feel the word. Safe.

  She’s careful when she unzips her coat—warm, puffy thing she bought so many winters ago, back when she was still at Oxford, for a wintertime conference in Vienna. The zipper is a little tricky these days, but she hopes she can get another year out of it. Feeling prickles back into her cheeks and nose. Soon she will be hot. She remembers this. The incredible heat in places that were built for cold, against the cold. In places like this, there are no fire hazard space heaters, no tile floors like ice, no mornings sitting on your hands when you go to the loo—all the features of a Bethlehem winter. Instead the buildings have sources of heat like a central nervous system, or maybe she means cardiovascular system. Scalding hot pipes or dusty electric coils pulsing in the walls. At Oxford, back then, it was a radiator that took coins and got hot enough to melt a shoe. Here, in Chicago, it’s a dial on the wall of the room and hot air breathed invisibly through some vent.

  She unbuttons her trousers, then at long last allows herself to double over, drooping with her head heavy as her hands slowly tend toward the floor. She wants to groan aloud but won’t. Her lower back elongates, a feeling like the muscles yawning. Plane rides get harder and harder. All throughout her thirties and, now, into her forties, she has waited for her body to return to normal. The stiffness in the morning, the unstable joints, uncooperative neck, clenched hips—when will it go away so that she can be Samar again? But this is her body now. She takes another deep breath then slowly uncurls to stand up.

  Dizzy, she sits on the bed she slept in last night. The organizers of the conference have arranged for her accommodations, which is a civilized way of saying that they put her in a dorm room. It’s not so bad. There is an adjoining toilet, private, and shared showers down the hall; there are only women on this floor. Samar has the whole room to herself, although it was built for two occupants—two narrow beds, two dressers, two desks looking out one big frosted window. White light plays brilliantly on the glass, on the delicate crystal flares left by the cold. The window glass is reinforced by wire, but why? What act of violence do the windows anticipate? Samar trained herself to think like this, to see the resistance that the State feeds its imagination on. On one desk, she has positioned the conference materials alongside the paper she is currently revising; on the other desk, she has stacked the student papers she needs to mark, and beside the papers, three green apples and an unopened bag of almonds. It is a nice arrangement, she thinks, to have two desks for two sets of work. It is good to have separate zones. The room answers itself. Left side, right side. She thinks, not for the first time today, about Mother’s theory of twins.

  Ah, the cheese! She gets back up, and leaning over the other bed, feels around her purse for the folded napkin. She places it by the apples. These are the foods she lives on at conferences: bits of reception cheese, crackers, almonds bought in a campus convenience store, apples from the breakfast table. No need to waste the daily allowance on food. She always loses a pound or two at these things, dreams of properly seasoned chicken, the right kind of rice—real food you get only at home.

  Really, she should call home. Find out how Mother’s doing, listen to her complain about her youngest daughter-in-law’s cooking, although she’s right, the girl does needlessly put sugar in everything. Samar flips open the welcome package, finds the insert about connecting to Wi-Fi, sits back down on the unmade bed, feet on the floor. She takes her phone from the bedside table and tries to follow the instructions, fiddling around. Keeps getting error messages. Well, anyway, it’s late in Bethlehem now.

  She takes off her shoes, puts a little lotion on her hands. Smell of cheap vanilla. She eases herself down to lie on the starchy white pillow, on top of the scratchy blanket. A heavy, delicious feeling pulls her deep into the bed. She closes her eyes. In another lifetime, maybe, she will be someone who can take naps, but lying in a room filled with afternoon sunlight, Samar knows that she will not be able to sleep.

  Mother’s theory of twins goes like this. It is always the case, Mother said, that with identical twins, one is left-handed and the other is right-handed. Therefore, Mother reasoned, all left-handed people were twins once, at the beginning, anyway, twins who lost their double at some point during gestation. Samar doesn’t know if any of this is true, even the premise. What about triplets, then? Or do triplets not come from the same egg? She doesn’t know. A geneticist would know. It would be so easy to check, but she doesn’t want to know the truth about twins, she wants to know the truth about her mother. What is her left-handed mother trying to tell her? What is the absence that living has left in her? Her mother was born in a house built from ancient stones, and now it’s gone. The Zionists turned their fields into an airport. At ten years old, her mother fled with her parents to a cave, then a refugee camp, and then, at last, to a small house behind the bus depot in Bethlehem. Left-handed mother, forced to eat with the right, gesture with the right, never the left, the unclean. At sixteen, she left school to wed. What is her mother telling her when she talks about twins, her imagined twin, her disappeared sister, the right-handed version of herself? The correct version, the halal version, not the one living in this nightmare version of history, not the refugee.

  Her father never doubted that he was the true version of himself. Never doubted his view of history moving toward progress. Never doubted the essential, prevailing human tendency toward decency. He insisted that the Jews would not build the Wall, and privately, Samar thinks this is what killed him: the loss of the fallacies that sustained him.

 
; Uninvited, the red-haired woman’s anxious face swims into Samar’s thoughts. Leave me alone, she almost groans aloud. There are so many things she could have said to that woman, so many lines she thinks of now. Why is it, she might ask, that you can imagine anything but your own capacity for terrible violence? She’s not sure if she’s talking to the phantom of the red-haired woman or to whatever part of her is torturing herself this way.

  Sometimes Mother comes close to apologizing. Samar’s hand in her swollen hand, and she’ll begin to say something, like, “When you were young, I was young too, I didn’t know,” but Samar will cut her off. “You took care of me, Mama, as best you could.”

  They’ll sit with the TV playing low, Samar’s head inclined to touch her mother’s head. Mother is smaller every day, small enough to fit inside her daughter’s body. They sit in blue-gray rooms, the day already over, these two women, each the thief of the other’s girlhood.

  Forgiveness is divine. God forgives us constantly, they say. Right now, for example. So why won’t Samar let her mother apologize? What would she have to know about herself to know the answer to that?

  Samar knows, by now she knows, that her mother is not the adversary. The woman who haunts her through the faces of unkind women is not Mother but is Samar herself, the argument is one she is having against herself—an attempt to expel an idea, or maybe a fear, that she has internalized, an idea that she wants to get out of her but doesn’t know how. What’s the idea? Something not quite articulable about her value, her odds. It is not the ghosts of her living mother she encounters, but emanations from inside herself. Perhaps, if Samar had married, if Samar had had daughters, she would understand. Mother used to say that. “When you marry, you’ll understand.” She doesn’t say that anymore. It’s possible that if Samar had married, if she’d had a daughter of her own, she would have, in some way, acted like Mother—wary and controlling, aware of the scrutiny their community casts on young women, how that can mark a girl forever. But Samar didn’t marry and doesn’t have children, so perhaps now, she treats herself like her own daughter—not letting herself stray too far, always calling herself home, or maybe better to say, calling herself back.