City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

Emily is writing a memo for a new client—another Tel Aviv health and wellness guru—about how to brand her social feeds more effectively when a text comes through.

  Jeremy: شو هو قال لك؟

  Very committed to practicing his Arabic, this kid. For a moment, Emily doesn’t recognize a single letter of the script, just sees something foreign, threatening. Then the letters organize to sounds, shu hu ‘allik? Finally words: What did he say?

  He could be texting from the West Bank or from East Jerusalem. That’s his job. He leads tours for a nonprofit that “fosters Jewish-Palestinian encounters.” At least for now. Jeremy’s life here is nothing more than a glorified gap year that will end in the summer, when he starts some urban planning master’s at MIT.

  She responds to Jeremy’s text in English because she hasn’t bothered to download an Arabic keyboard yet: He said no way . . . too dangerous

  Jeremy, switching to English: Hmm. Let’s talk in class tomorrow.

  Their Arabic class meets on Monday and Wednesday nights. They aren’t learning literary Arabic, but rather the local dialect, which the language school, deferent to Israeli sensibilities, refers to as the Levantine (as opposed to Palestinian) Colloquial. Jeremy is the class baby. He’s the only student under thirty and the only man at all in a room filled with mothers who are all older than Emily—middle-aged potters and acupressure masseuses with wild gray curls and piles of hand-dyed indigo scarves. All Jewish. Like Emily, these women live in stately, Ottoman-era homes with leaky pipes and year-round drafts. Rarefied discomfort. A few of them are native-born Israelis, but many are Americans or South Africans—women who married Israelis or who immigrated here with grown families. Sometimes one of their daughters will drop by during a lesson—diligent, plain-faced girls who come straight from the army bases where they train boys to disable bombs or jump out of planes or snipe. Then Emily will elbow Jeremy and mouth, Ask her out, while Jeremy gives her pleading eyes that say, Please! Stop! It! But usually Emily and Jeremy are the two youngest in the room, despite over a decade between them.

  They sit side by side in chairs with tiny desks affixed, always in the first row. It’s easy around Jeremy. Nervous and affable, he seems more Jewish—more familiar—to her than any Israeli. They take breaks together, perched on a bench in the language school’s leafy courtyard garden.

  There are many laudatory reasons to study spoken Arabic, but none of them are Emily’s, not really. In some ways the language itself is incidental. What she loves is that for a few hours each week she must give herself over completely to not knowing. She’s a baby who must learn it all again, must learn the world through language. These are the only real hours that she spends apart from Mayan. Teething, fussy Mayan. True, her baby is blessed by late-afternoon naps during which Emily rolls out her yoga mat in the living room for her practice, sometimes with a private teacher, often alone, but the fact remains that before Arabic class—all winter, for example—Emily was never more than a few feet from her daughter. At a certain point she began to scare herself, desperate for two contradictory things: to feel like her own person and to have Mayan be part of her body again. While Ido spent long hours working at the animation studio, Emily might lie with Mayan on her belly, this belly she has worked so hard to smooth back down into a beautiful shape, a shape that excludes Mayan, warm and chubby. All winter, Emily was obsessed with the thought that Mayan would never fully return to her. All winter, she held Mayan against herself in a state of without. Never again, never again would they share a body.

  And sometimes the opposite. Sometimes Emily needed to pull back against Mayan. Sometimes Mayan would be screaming from her crib, hungry, always fucking hungry. Emily alone in the house, Ido at the animation studio all day. Emily working, yes, but doing social feeds from home now, not even going into Tel Aviv to meet with clients, keeping it all to Skype, keeping it all contained to their home, stuffy and containing, but somehow cold, always cold. Mayan was screaming. Emily felt every cell in her body lurch toward her child. But she stood at a threshold, stood under prayers folded and hammered to the doorway, under crystals lining the shelves, under feathers hanging from the ceiling, under all these promises of love, Emily pulled back from the maddening octave of her child’s screaming, just to feel, for a moment, separate from her. “Cry,” Emily would whisper. “Cry, you bitch.”

  So when their bright-eyed neighbor, a famous choreographer with a house full of daughters who all got out of army service on notes written by compliant doctors, ran into Emily (with Mayan strapped to her) at the shuk, sifting through burlap sacks of organic lentils, and told her about the Arabic classes that met twice a week in the evening, Emily said, Yes, yes, even before checking with Ido that he could get home in time to watch Mayan. “Of course, yes, yes,” he said later in bed. “It’s a great idea.” Emily was almost certain she detected relief. He kissed her nose, her eyebrows. “It will be great,” he said. “You’ll be brainwashed by the resistance. I’ll have more time for my comic strip.”

  His online comic strip, a side project, is becoming a little famous. Emily and Ido. Sweet vignettes of them, or a version of them, and their domestic life. A burly man with sardonic eyebrows who trails after his impossible, irresistible woman-child wife—she of the tiny waist and long eyelashes. He’s always drawing cartoon-Emily in boy shorts that let her butt cheeks peek out the bottom. In one of his most popular scenes—available as a postcard, a print, and even a mug (who would want such a mug?)—Emily is slung over Ido’s shoulder the way soldiers carry each other, her cute butt up by his ear. She’s holding a wineglass. The swirls around her head show that she’s dizzy, drunk. The caption says, “Once a year, I let her have that second glass of wine and . . .” In another, Emily is wrapped in a short towel; her impossibly long hair piles up, filling half the comic’s frame; Ido is pulling the stuff out of the shower drain. Not rotting and matted with skin and snot—the way hair actually comes out of the drain, the way it did when she was losing handfuls a day after giving birth—but shimmering and untangled. Flaxen gold. Caption: “Life with Rapunzel.” In another, cartoon-Emily is in underwear and a T-shirt, held like a baby, like Mayan, in Ido’s arms. He sits on the couch. The TV is on, its glow lights up his face, but he’s watching Emily, his sleeping wife, with all the wonder and terror of a parent. Caption: “Night watch.”

  Cartoon-Ido and Emily don’t have a baby. Mayan is never in the frame. At first, Emily kept waiting for her to show up. It seemed inevitable: the three of them on the big master bed, big spoon, little spoon, littlest spoon. Something like that. But nothing, not yet.

  Emily hasn’t asked about it, but her mother-in-law has. Ido was complaining about how much tax he has to pay now that he’s making real money as a small business. His mom was holding Mayan, singing a song about a butterfly, a cute word in Hebrew: par-par. “Nu, when are you going to give them their baby?” she asked.

  “Who?” Ido asked.

  “Emily and Ido!”

  Ido laughed. “Nu, one grandchild isn’t enough for you, Ima?”

  His success has made their lives easier. The cartoon brings in money, sure, but what really matters is that Ido now finds he’s respected at work—new title, better projects, a seat in the right meetings, whatever those are for animators. It’s a change; it’s a relief. As recently as this past winter, Emily had wondered if they hadn’t reached their end. They took a trip up north for a night—their first night away from Mayan. It was tense, miserable. They picked up some German girl hitchhiking whom Ido tried desperately to impress, talking about the shows he’d worked on, as if he’d done anything other than draw backgrounds; he was trying to make himself look big, feel big. This was before the Emily and Ido comic, before the balance started to tip back in his favor. Emily had sat in the passenger seat, silent, as Ido talked to the girl in the rearview mirror; in her grew the unspeakable fear that her husband was pathetic, a loser. That was the fear that haunted their winter.

  Funny how something so small as a comic stri
p could shift it all back into place. Now, just a few months later, Ido is—Emily doesn’t know how else to put it—Ido is a man again.

  The next night, in Wednesday Arabic class, Jeremy leans from his desk toward Emily’s before the lesson starts. “So, wait, what exactly did your husband say?”

  “He said it’s too dangerous,” Emily answers.

  “But the group is all Jews,” Jeremy says. “Rabbis! Did you tell him it’s a bunch of American rabbis?” He’s speaking in a hushed tone, even though all the other women are chatting as they wait for the instructor, Mary, to arrive. “We’re not going into Area A. Did you tell him that? The café is in Area B, not far from the tunnels.”

  “I’ll tell him.” Emily has her phone out to check how many people have liked the photo she recently posted to her personal account: an overhead shot of her Arabic notebook lying open, an olive branch from the language school’s garden taped to the page, her illegible writing in black ink working its way around the branch. At the bottom of the page, two words are large and legible, one in Arabic, one in Hebrew: the words for peace, salaam, shalom. She deliberated over a caption but went with: “ . solidarity . sister tongues . tikkun olam . ” Barely a thousand people have liked the post, which shouldn’t annoy her but does.

  “I really think you should come,” he whispers. He fiddles with the corner of his textbook.

  “I know,” Emily says. “I just need to convince him.” She would never admit it, but she likes this tug-of-war—Ido and Jeremy—over her.

  Before Jeremy can ask her why she has to convince her husband at all, Mary enters and greets them: “Marhaba.”

  “Marhabtain,” they all respond in unison.

  Then they begin their lesson.

  Jeremy calls Mary a Palestinian. Ido calls her an Arab, sometimes, an Arab-Israeli. She comes from the Galilee, a Christian. She teaches in the evening. By day she’s finishing coursework for a PhD in Arabic literature at the university in Jerusalem. During the unit on family, Mary told the class about her two children (eight and ten, girl and boy). Her children and her husband live with her in-laws up north. Mary drives up every weekend to spend time with her family. To clean the house, to do the cooking for the week. Then she returns to Jerusalem. A pretty woman, probably Emily’s age, pale and dark-haired like Mayan.

  Sometimes, instead of waiting for Emily after class, Jeremy will walk Mary to her car, talking politics maybe—a topic Mary avoids at all costs in the classroom. Emily thought poor Mary would faint the day that Jeremy brought up the murdered Palestinian boy. It was around Passover. At the time, their class was completing a unit on hospitality and greetings. To practice, they pretended that they were an extended Arab family at a meal. They pulled their desks into a circle and served one another imaginary cups of tea, heaped invisible spoonfuls of rice and meat onto one another’s plates. Mary’s suggested topics for mealtime conversation included current events, entertainment, and family updates. They were talking about an imagined wedding in the family when Jeremy, in his flattened-out Arabic—his is by far the worst accent, somehow even more American-sounding than his Hebrew—asked the dinner party: “Did you hear what the police did to Salem Abu-Khdeir?”

  Emily, who at the time hadn’t quite understood all of what Jeremy said, asked, “Shu? What?” Her accent is better, but her Arabic remains rudimentary.

  “They sara’u his body,” Jeremy continued.

  Emily didn’t know what that word meant, and it appeared the other women didn’t either, because they looked to Mary, who kept glancing at the classroom door as if she expected someone to charge in. Then Naama, who improved the quickest because both her boys serve in something called “human intelligence” and learned Arabic fluently through the army immersion program, said in Hebrew: “Lo ganavu et ha-gufa shelo.” We didn’t steal his corpse. What are you talking about? Her silver earrings swung clackily as she turned to frown at Emily, as if Jeremy were Emily’s responsibility.

  Still in Arabic, Jeremy was trying to explain that it’s true, the Jews hadn’t succeeded in stealing that corpse, but they had stolen others—this was their new tactic (a word he said in English).

  What did he expect? That they would stay in character? That this classroom of Jewish women would talk about the event, about Israel, the way that the Palestinians talk about them? “Al-yehud, al-yehud.” The Jews this, the Jews that. And what next? A conversation about the Yael Salomon, blaming that girl for her own murder just because she lived on a settlement?

  Mary spoke up. “Allahyerhamo, zichrono l’vracha,” she said. A bilingual pleasantry to bless the dead boy’s memory. Then she suggested, in Hebrew so that everyone understood, that they discuss something more familiar—“easy” was the word she used—like the results of Arab Idol, which they have been following as a class.

  After the lesson, Emily and Jeremy sat on their favorite bench in the garden. It was night. They were lit by streetlamps. Heady scents of jasmine and tuberose in the air. He was disappointed that the discussion about the dead boy had been cut off. Trying to comfort him, Emily spoke, maybe inanely, about how he should try to find the gift in every situation, even difficult ones, try to find the lesson.

  He made a face. In his nasal voice—a voice made to haggle over the price of fish in some shtetl, to yell out pro-union slogans in Yiddish—Jeremy said, “What? Like the world was created for the sake of your own self-understanding?” He gripped and ungripped his pale hands. “Emily,” he said, so earnestly that she wanted to kiss him, “we killed that boy. We desecrated his body. There is no lesson there.”

  She didn’t know what to say then, so she chattered on about messages from the universe, about how she had known she was pregnant (after a year of trying, finally pregnant) before she peed on the stick, because that was the week she dropped and shattered three water glasses in three days.

  But later—after she and Jeremy said good night, and Emily walked home to her leafy, wealthy neighborhood—she found herself pressing Ido about Salem Abu-Khdeir’s death, like suddenly she was playing Jeremy and Ido was playing her, playing Emily. She perched on Ido’s knee while he sat at his computer, coloring in some background for his comic strip. Mayan was next to them in her crib, lying on her back, huge eyes taking in the world, determined not to sleep, not yet. Ido had a mug of chamomile tea, made from the loose, dried flowers that Emily buys from the Arab vendor in the shuk, who carefully packages each purchase in plain, waxy paper. Outside the night wind moved through the flowering willows that line their street, planted, the story goes, by a widow of the Six-Day War. That week, Mayan would begin to crawl, but she hadn’t started, not yet. The room was still.

  Emily and Ido had never talked about the dead boy before, not even after the mall footage of his lynching—that’s not the right word, “lynching,” so why does it feel to her like the right word?—was released. But now, she brought it up, the beating, the lack of criminal charges, the perversion of the army trying to steal a dead boy’s body. For what? To avoid a protest? To silence a cry? “Aren’t you ashamed of this country?” she asked.

  “What can we do?” he said in English. “Sometimes the tactical move is horrific. That’s our reality.” He’ll say this sometimes. Racism isn’t ideal, but it’s the reality.

  “We killed that boy twice,” she said, getting up from his knee swiftly, wanting to go outside but knowing she had nowhere to go.

  She disagrees with both of them. She needs both of them. It’s as if she’s cast each of them, Ido and Jeremy, Jeremy and Ido, to voice opposing elements of the dilemma within her. She’ll echo Jeremy’s words to Ido, yes, but just as quickly echo Ido’s words to Jeremy.

  “Racism might not be ideal,” she said to Jeremy not long after, “but maybe it’s our reality.” Class was over. Everyone had gone, but Emily and Jeremy remained seated—two students at their little desks in a classroom decorated with Hebrew and Arabic letters, all written out in ornate calligraphy.

  “You don’t know what you’re s
aying,” he said.

  “I know exactly what I’m saying,” she said, and because it would give her an edge, added, “I’m a wife here, a mother, not just someone passing through.”

  “Don’t get mad at me just because you’re seeing things you don’t want to understand.”

  “Maybe I do understand,” Emily said. She knows a lot more than people expect her to know. She knows Israel was founded on a series of colonialist atrocities, yes, and that she perpetuates them, fine. “Maybe I understand perfectly. Maybe I just don’t care.”

  She had startled him. He of the concave chest, of the pale, studious arms, the family tree of Hasidic rabbis and Derrida scholars. Finally he said, “I don’t think it’s true that you don’t care.”

  They turned their faces away from each other. Emily was burning, but she didn’t want to get up and leave. That’s when he asked her. That’s when he planted the idea about the West Bank. “Please come,” he said. “Come on one of the counternarrative trips I lead.” He touched her shoulder lightly, so lightly.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She began to doodle the word “counternarratives” in the margin of her notebook, open to that day’s lesson on the Arabic verb system, nearly identical to the Hebrew verb system. She knew that later, when she described the scene to Ido, she would contain Jeremy in her descriptions: his youth, his size, his delicacy. This is how she makes him seem lesser. Less what? Important? Forceful? Does that mean masculine, in Emily’s world? She’s not sure. Little Jeremy, sweet Jeremy, hopeless Jeremy, as if talking about a pet or a child, never mind that he’s taller than she. In this way, Emily also contains the opinions that he’s come to represent, dismissing her own misgivings about the life she’s choosing, day after day, for herself and for her daughter.

  “Please,” Jeremy said, pleading. “Think of it”—he interrupted himself with something between a laugh and a sigh—“I don’t know, think of it as a gift. For Mayan, for a different future.”