City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  A few days later, Hamid and Muhi met for coffee. It was night. All around them were guys their age drinking small coffees before moving on to hookah places. Muhi chose a café that Hamid hates. It has a phony French vibe and insists on serving espresso instead of normal Turkish coffee. Muhi sat low over some weirdly tiered cappuccino thing and sucked down cigarettes with an intensity that Hamid had not expected. In the street below he could hear cars driving by, blasting wedding music into the night. Hamid was surprised by his own nervousness. “So, how was Norway?” he asked.

  Muhi laughed unhappily. “Life,” he said. “Over there, it’s life.”

  “When are you going back to school?” Hamid asked.

  Muhi shrugged, winced.

  “For summer school?” he offered.

  “Have you seen this?” Muhi asked, not looking up from his phone. “The Jews are spreading a lie that Salem didn’t die from organ failure, but that his own mother suffocated him.”

  Hamid had seen reports of that particular lie, yes. The Zionist propaganda said that Salem was a homo, that it was an honor killing.

  “How can I go back there?” Muhi said. It took Hamid a second to understand he was answering the question about his law degree. “Go back to Ramallah, back to pretending we have a state?”

  Please shut up, Hamid pleaded silently.

  Muhi kept going. “This isn’t living,” he said. He said it again and again throughout that afternoon, as the power flickered on and off in the café. “This isn’t living.” Suddenly it was all intolerable to him. The soldiers stopping you to check your hawiyya on the highway, no matter where you were in the West Bank, no matter that you were going from one Palestinian city to another. He tried to go to Ramallah yesterday, he said, and the journey should have taken forty minutes, but it took three hours. “Believe me, the Jews have their wall,” Muhi said, “but they are pushing farther and farther in. What is left?” He was talking to Hamid as if Hamid were some Norwegian, some Chinese, some American, whatever, that needed to have this explained to him. They check our papers on our own highways. They come into homes in Areas A, B, C, and believe me, if there were an Area F, they’d come there too, they come and take whoever they want, do you understand, do you understand how your grandmother’s lemon trees are dying, you are taking one-minute showers but up there (waving toward the settlement of Efrat, which creeps down the hill toward Bethlehem more each year) up there they have swimming pools, actual swimming pools filled with our water, with our water, have you ever been in a swimming pool? Of course you haven’t. Because believe me, believe me (shaking his head bitterly), this isn’t living.

  Hamid watched the rage and desperation leak out of his friend’s long-lashed eyes, he watched it drip across the table toward him. Even then, he knew that Muhi’s voice, his refrain, would remain lodged in him for the weeks to come. Because Muhi was right. He was right that the Jews had cut water off to Hamid’s zone, that the already-low cistern grew lower after an already-dry winter. Muhi was right. He was right about Teta crooning over her drooping lemon trees, about Hamid taking thirty-second showers and Mama calling out to him the second he went over: “Habibi, our water!” Sitting at the table with Muhi, under the café’s flickering lights, Hamid knew that each time he rushed to rinse his hair, each time he stood under the nozzle of hot water begging for a minute to himself, just a minute more before Mama called out to hurry him, Hamid would hear the words Muhi planted in him that night at the café. Believe me, this isn’t living. This isn’t living. Believe me.

  At the café, Muhi talked about water shortages, about Oslo, about jurisdiction over Highway 60, about collective punishment. He talked about the Israeli prime minister, the American president, the careers built on compromises in bad faith. A panic threatened to choke Hamid. Every sentence he’d ever thought and suspended was back, spilling out of Muhi’s mouth and tightening around Hamid’s neck.

  “They know everything. They see everything. They control everything,” Muhi was intoning. To the beat of his sentences he brought down an open palm on the table, causing the small dish of sugar packets to convulse. “What protest happens except that they let it? If they want to shut it down, what do they do?”

  Hamid knew the answer: They send in their secret police, disguised as one of us.

  Muhi said it as Hamid thought it, word for word: “They send in their secret police, disguised as one of us.”

  Hamid needed to go, wanted to go, but stayed seated.

  “Have you ever written a Facebook post they haven’t read? A text message? Have you taken a shit they don’t know about?”

  Now he’s going to lean over and show me Salem’s photo, Hamid thought.

  And that’s what Muhi did. He stuck his phone in Hamid’s face. On the screen was the famous hospital image. It was taken the day after the beating. Oum Salem holding open the boy’s mouth, a dark wound in there, the head swollen beyond recognition, yanni, beyond being recognizable as a human.

  It’s true, there are martyrs all the time. In a single week: boy shot point-blank in the face by a border guard, elderly man at a peaceful protest asphyxiated on teargas, teenage girl with a knife at a checkpoint gunned down by five soldiers before she could get the thing out of her bag. They tore off her hijab, they tore at her dress. All of these came as alerts to Hamid’s phone. But Salem stuck with Hamid in a different way, something about how he died—buying a hamburger at the mall.

  “This is us,” Muhi said. “This is them erasing us.” Hamid felt a surge of hate rise up in him, not at the Jews for doing it but at Muhi for saying it. And wasn’t there something else? Something else in Muhi’s rage. Something that Hamid could not name, could not let himself name. It was Salem, but it was not Salem. It was the Jews, but it was not the Jews. It was Norway. The answer lay in Norway, and Hamid did not want to know it.

  “How old was he?” Muhi said, lighting up another cigarette. A waiter approached their table, then, halfway there, paused and turned around back to the espresso bar. “Not much older than little Fadi, no? Sami’s age?”

  In that moment, Hamid could have flipped over the table. He put his head into his hands and made fists of his hair. He pulled hard. If Muhi had kept talking, Hamid really might have hit him, or at least walked out, but Muhi stopped, perhaps aware that he had gone too far, or maybe preparing himself to go one step farther.

  “I had a friend,” Muhi said, quiet now, almost soft. “A friend in Norway.”

  He said “friend” with a strange, implied significance that Hamid tried to ignore.

  “I explained to him, this friend, about my life in Palestine. I explained to him the raids, the checkpoints, the fucking Wall, the lack of water. I explained that I had to fly to Spain to see my own sea.”

  Hamid was scrolling through his feeds trying to be anywhere but where he was. Here was a post from Mai’s friend Noor, so typical for a religious girl: an image of a rosebush with, like, twelve of her cousins tagged, one for each rose. Muhi kept going. “The more I told him, the less it sounded like my own life.” He paused. “I learned things.” He paused again. “I learned things about myself there.”

  Hamid couldn’t bear it, couldn’t bear to let Muhi go on. He smashed through. He slapped the table, sugar packets jumping, and said, “Have I told you about this rich girl? She’s killing me.”

  Muhi slunk back in his chair as if he’d been unplugged. No more talk of the friend in Norway as Hamid detailed his failed attempts to get Mai’s attention. And that’s how it started—the dynamic that continues to play out between them today in the souvenir shop. Hamid stuffs his doomed obsession into any space between them. He’s got a whole routine about her, the rich girl, up there in a villa, tucked away in the hills of East Jerusalem; the rich girl who comes down, yes, she comes down, to study biology in the West Bank. Then she goes back up. She ascends. She’s up there, dressed in white. She’s a cartoon princess. Birds are feeding her pomegranate seeds.

  In performing his obsession for Muhi, H
amid hears how he protects Mai from himself with distance and money. The Lexus in her Instagram photos, her villa, her father with an office in London. All of these boundaries are as real as the checkpoints between their houses. She is above him. In his most private moments, what he imagines is pulling her down. The fantasies aren’t specific. There is a vague sense of desecration, something elaborate and procedural. It is at odds with what he believes he likes about her. A good girl. A pure girl. It is too complicated to explain.

  He’s caught himself being mean, or at least unkind to her. Recently, she was telling a group of classmates about the soldiers making two little boys at the checkpoint unzip their coats and lift up their shirts, all to see if they had knives on them. Mai had a hand over her eyes like a visor against the harsh afternoon sun as she told this story. Next to her, thin, brittle Noor squinted into her cell phone. Something about what Mai said allowed for some transference. She didn’t have to say, Next, they’ll be making me do that, but you could hear it, you could hear the threat of her violation hinted at in the story.

  Hamid said something stupid and jokey like “We’ll have to get you a suit of armor,” smiling idiotically at sweet Mai, at terrifying Noor with her brother in Mejiddo. But Hamid could hear in his own voice the strain, the hostility.

  Sometimes he lets himself imagine defending her. Some Jew-soldier tries to rip off her hijab, to pull down the shoulder of her shirt, everyone knows what they want. He imagines punching one of them so hard his fist breaks the Jew’s face—a punch that surely would break his hand, but in this version, he smashes his fist into the dog’s face and feels it all cracking, the nose bone, the plates of the cheek, all of it making a sickening, bloody crunch, and Mai seeing him now as someone strong and powerful. But mostly, he wishes she could see him as he really is. How he is with Fadi, for example, holding his brother’s squirmy body in his lap, saying sweet words so that Fadi will hold out a palm for Teta, who needles chopped parsley into the tiny wart they are treating.

  Hamid never met his great-grandfather, Teta’s father, but knows from Teta’s stories that in the years before ’48—before the Nakbah, before the slaughters, before the displacement—the family’s lost land had been adjacent to a so-called kibbutz. His great-grandfather had taught them how to work their fields: pale Jews being punished by the sun, the women all in underpants-looking shorts, struggling to speak in their non-native tongue. They watched Hamid’s great-grandfather carefully. How to till like him, how to tie a kaffiyeh to keep the sun off. Like animals imitating a human. Later, they would chase the family off their land, shoot Teta’s uncles in the fields and leave them for the flies and dogs beneath the olive trees. But before all that, Hamid’s great-grandfather taught them to till. “I saw them up close,” he said, or Teta says he said. “I saw them up close, and I can tell you, they did not come from God.”

  Hamid thinks of this sometimes when he’s inside installing air conditioners for Segev. He’s seen men walking close, not like friends or brothers, the arm carelessly flung over the neck like he and Muhi used to walk home from school. No, not like that but like a man and a woman. One hand in another’s back pocket told you that these men had been inside each other. One of them had become a woman, had let himself be a woman. They’ll be out in public, like, on a street in the middle of the day. They did not come from God. When Hamid thinks about it, it doesn’t make him angry so much as terrified.

  At the souvenir shop, he and Muhi are finishing up the last of the merchandise. Hamid doesn’t know how much Muhi gets paid for this work, but can’t imagine it’s more than a few shekels an hour. A joke. The crosses are ready to be sold tomorrow. Fifty shekels each. It’s evening now. Hamid can’t see it, but he can feel it, the way time has shifted and something has drained away.

  He finds that he wants to tell Muhi one true thing, an offering to replace whatever he can’t let Muhi say. “I hate how I act around her,” Hamid says.

  Muhi is texting with someone, doesn’t look up.

  “Mai, I mean. I try too hard, I’m a clown.” It’s true. He does everything wrong. He knows you’re supposed to give the girl only a little at a time, to hint toward interest but make it uncertain, so that it could just as easily be her own imagining. You make her want an idea that comes from her own head. But Hamid goes too far, always too far. He’s nodding at Muhi, who’s nodding back at him. It’s an understanding. That’s the lifeblood of survival, isn’t it? Being understood?

  “I get trapped inside how I act,” Hamid says. “I can’t stop.”

  Muhi shakes his head. “Believe me,” he says. “I know. I know this so well.” He rubs a hand hard through his hair. “I’m always performing. It’s never me but a version for other people.”

  “Wallah,” Hamid says, “exactly.” He isn’t sure he knows what Muhi means, but he thinks he might. It has something to do with the way he laughs too hard whenever Mai makes some inane remark, yes, but also, it has to do with how Baba spreads his knees on the couch while Mama serves tea to company, the way he talks about his wife’s work like it’s an indulgence he permits her—the hours on the highway, the thankless office job, the negligible pay barely covering the cost of transportation. Everything his father says really means this: Don’t think for a second that my woman earns more money than I do. And everyone always laughs, nods their heads, agrees. Everyone tends to the fragile blossom of his father’s dignity. Everyone. Even Hamid.

  The music streaming from Muhi’s tablet is interrupted by an ad for hand soap. “A clean family, a safe family,” says a woman’s smooth voice in Fus-ha.

  Muhi grimaces, like he’s remembering something beautiful or horrific, it’s impossible to tell. “My friend, my friend in Norway,” he says. He’s careful with each word. “He tried to, I mean, he said if I wanted, I could stay.”

  “What do you mean, stay?”

  “He’d help me stay.”

  “Without papers?”

  “Yeah,” Muhi says. “That we could live, like, I could live, you know, with him.” Muhi breathes in. “When I say ‘live with him,’ I mean he and I—”

  But Hamid can’t let him. I’m sorry, he thinks, but even as he thinks it he’s forgetting. He’s forgetting what Muhi almost said. Hamid says in a too-loud voice, “But what if she wants to keep studying?” He cuts Muhi off.

  “What?” Muhi looks like he’s been woken up from a dream.

  “Mai. What if she wants to get a master’s degree, yanni, to work. I want my woman at home. A woman is a woman, you know?” Hamid wants to stop talking but can’t. “A woman is a woman, and a man is a man.”

  For a second, Muhi’s eyes are panicked, drowning.

  And then they’re not.

  Muhi sits back, slaps his thighs as if a decision has been reached. He says, “She’s from Jerusalem, yeah? A rich part?”

  “A rich neighborhood, yeah,” Hamid says, relieved. That was easier than it might have been, distracting Muhi again.

  “Not from Shuafat camp?”

  “Definitely not.” No rich girls in that camp.

  “But nearby.”

  “Not far from there,” Hamid says, warming up. “I’m telling you, she’s in a rose garden right now, white roses, she’s—”

  “She’s in danger.” Muhi cuts him off.

  “What?” Now it’s Hamid’s turn to feel smacked awake.

  “The Jews are going crazy,” Muhi says. “They won’t let anyone into Al-Aqsa.”

  “Well, I know, but . . .” Hamid pauses.

  “The Jews are shooting people in the street.”

  “But she lives in a villa,” Hamid says, a weak protest.

  “She’s just now on her way home,” Muhi says, looking at his watch. His voice is rich and assured as if he’s announcing this on the news.

  “Probably.”

  “Taking the bus to Checkpoint 300.”

  “No, she goes through the Tunnels Checkpoint.”

  “Ah yes,” Muhi says, his eyebrow going up. “She’s allowed
to use that checkpoint.”

  “Yes,” Hamid says, mesmerized by this answer-and-response he’s fallen into with Muhi.

  “And now she’s getting off the bus.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Yes, now she’s at Damascus Gate, where the fighting has begun in the streets.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “And there are snipers there already.”

  Shut up, Hamid thinks, but only starts to say, “We don’t know—”

  “There are snipers there already, and the girl you love is alone.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve seen what they do to girls.”

  Hamid stands up. All of him hot.

  “You know what they want.” Muhi is rising slowly too.

  It feels possible that they might fight; something is snapping in the air. “This is what you want?” Hamid says, his voice thick. “This is what you want?” Everything is about to end. All of it. Or it was already over. It was over from the first time Muhi mentioned his stupid fucking “friend” in Norway.

  Standing, Muhi is taller, thin and taller, thinner and thinner. “Let’s go there,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Let’s go there.”

  “What?”

  “What? What?” Muhi mimics. “Isn’t that love?” he says. “Protecting what is yours?”

  “What, like you have a special permit to get inside?” Hamid says, casting his eyes around the room for anything else to focus on. Brown boxes filled with crosses. Prayer rug. Light bulb. Filthy gray utility sink in the back. “Hi, yes,” he says in a sardonic voice into his hand, held like a cell phone. “What’s up, Jews? Listen, give me a six-hour permit so I can go bodyguard an unattainable rich girl.”