City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  At the café, Emily picks at the wooden table. The middle-aged Palestinian man addressing the group is holding up a laminated map as big as his torso. He’s referring to violated borders, to international crimes. They are the only people at the outdoor café. The seating—mismatched wooden tables contrived from barrels and planks, haphazard rugs heavy with dust—is orchestrated to overlook a rocky incline dotted with determined olive trees and shrubs, all unfolding toward a dry wadi, which will remain, for Emily, nameless. So this is the West Bank.

  From here, you can’t see the Tunnels Checkpoint, but it’s close, mere minutes driving down the steep road out back. The Palestinian speaker—what’s his name?—is pacing in front of the seated group. Jeremy is hunched over, legs crossed, and rapt. “I am from here,” the speaker says, his finger nearly in the map’s pale blue sea, somewhere south of Tel Aviv. “I am from here, but we were chased from our land.” He’s showing the expansion of the settlements with a red marker. At first, he was drawing imaginary lines with his fingers, but sweet Jeremy ran up with a handful of dry-erase markers. “You think of everything!” Omar exclaimed—that’s his name, Omar—and since then he’s been making lines and hasty shadings to show the steady creep of boundaries pushing Palestinians farther east.

  Emily spells out his name with her finger on the table, the grain rubbing against her phantom script: guttural ayin, meem, raa. Omar. It means “age.”

  “Today,” Omar says, his finger in the interior of the map, “I am also from here.” For three generations, his family has lived in a village south of Hebron. It took him four hours to arrive to this café today. Omar spreads two fingers on the map: his village and the café. “It’s so close,” he exclaims. “Look how close!” He speaks English from somewhere deep down in his throat. It makes the language sound older than it is, at least to Emily. Yet, he continues, it took him hours to get here: checkpoints, random searches, rifles with their safeties clicking off, guard towers with snipers manning the roundabout where their army has killed seven Palestinian teenagers this year alone. “If only,” he says, “I could drive my car as the crow flies.” Pause. “Or maybe,” now speaking with the practiced cadence of a showman, “better to say, as the dove flies.” The rabbis sigh, always sighing, these rabbis.

  Emily looks again at Jeremy, sitting with his clipboard on his knee, face crinkled in attention as he listens to Omar. She knows it’s stupid, but she is jealous of his attention. She imagined—this is so dumb, but she imagined that he’d be looking over at her, monitoring her to make sure she absorbed what she was supposed to bring home. Now, here at the café, sitting at a table across from a young rabbi with wild, curly hair and her freckled wife (from Chicago: the weather! yes, the weather), Emily feels oddly alone, adrift. Phone out, she checks on her head scarf selfie, finds that the post is doing pretty well. Your eyes!!!! comments a fairly famous mommy blogger. Emily hearts the comment.

  Omar started his presentation by talking about the Nakbah, a word Emily knew and assumed the rabbis did too: “the disaster,” meaning the ethnic cleansing at the founding of modern Israel. His thesis statement, if you can call it that, is that the Nakbah isn’t a distant historical event but an ongoing one. On the laminated map, his Xs mark the spots of destroyed Palestinian villages in 1948 and in 1967, yes, but also earlier this year in Palestinian village lands that the army commandeered for drills, a practice Emily had been only vaguely aware of. The story of Omar’s life, the story of his family, is in a way the story of this whole place. “It cannot go on like this,” he says.

  A hand goes up from the table next to Jeremy’s. It’s the rabbi working on the gender-neutral siddur, the one in the smart suit. “Where did you say the checkpoints were?” he asks, serious and diligent. Emily finds herself wondering how gender-neutral pronouns work in Hebrew or in Arabic, where every form is gendered, even the plural ones.

  Omar re-explains the concept of floating checkpoints. “The Israelis control all the highways. They can stop us, arrest us, even when we are in Palestinian areas.” He says “Is-ra-el-is” in four distinct syllables. Emily wonders if he had to practice saying that instead of saying what he would say in Arabic: al-yehud, “the Jews.”

  Text from Ido: How is it? You beseder?

  I’m beseder, she writes to him. Then, because she knows he’ll like it: Kind of boring

  Ido: Don’t tell Jeremy

  Emily: Can we make coconut milk ice cream for dinner?

  Ido: Only if you and Mayan sing the Israeli national anthem first

  In Ido’s mind, everything is the simplest version of itself, the cartoon version. Emily knows, for example, that he’s made Mayan a zero-sum game: she either waves an Israeli flag on Independence Day, or she rolls in ashes and mourns the Nakbah. She either learns about the Holocaust or she learns the names of the villages the Jewish fighters erased in pursuit of a state. For a while, he was convinced that Emily wanted to send Mayan to a bilingual preschool when the time came—one where the students come from Jewish and Arab homes, where they learn in both Arabic and Hebrew, side by side, hand in hand.

  At so many points, Emily had the chance to correct him. “Where did you get the idea that I have this plan?” she could have said. Sure, it’s true, she does have friends who send their kids to such schools, but it’s also true that she’s not sure those kids get the best education, despite receiving the most ideologically sound one. Because sound ideology won’t get you decent SAT scores, and if Emily has a long-term plan, it’s that Mayan could, if she wanted to, make a life in America, make a life somewhere less pressurized and limiting. Anyway, many times she could have told Ido that he was mistaken, that she and he weren’t as opposed as he was imagining. But she didn’t. She let him cast her in this role.

  Just before Passover, they went down south for two nights. Mayan stayed with her grandparents for the second time in her life. Two nights. The longest Emily had ever been apart from her. She and Ido stayed in a desert bungalow; the quiet was like wine. They were celebrating. Emily and Ido was now a success, had been featured on multiple websites, and was getting the kind of traffic advertisers are interested in. That was the weekend the hand-in-hand school was firebombed. Not during a day with classes, thank G-d, but on a Saturday night. It was hard-core settlers who did it. They waited for Shabbat to go out, then they bombed the bilingual preschool. They did it without violating the Sabbath.

  “You see,” Ido had said. They were in the rental house’s kitchen—tiles of burnt orange and bright blue. Emily was cutting vegetables. That’s all a vacation is: same chores but in someone else’s kitchen. Ido was leaning against the fridge, reading from his phone. “You see? It’s not safe, these schools, they aren’t safe.” He sounded like a child. You see, you see?

  And instead of saying, What has convinced you I want to send her to this fucking preschool? Emily said, “Okay, Daddy, you’re right.”

  “Say it again,” he said, something joyous breaking through his concerned face. He was behind her at the cutting board. She had put down the knife.

  She turned to him, his body pressing her against the counter. This is what they wanted, what both of them wanted. For a moment then, she understood why she had not cleared up Ido’s confusion, why she had not shown him that they didn’t have the opposing positions he had imagined: it’s because of this, because she knew they would both feel good when she acquiesced, that they both need him to feel powerful, and sometimes it’s her job to orchestrate moments when he does. “You’re right, you’re right,” she said. “Are you happy?” She sounded pouty and miserable, but she was overjoyed. Something had been restored. She was once again his hippie wife, hanging prisms in their windows, bringing feathers home from walks in the Judaean hills where they took Mayan after it rained, with the sunlight cracking through dark, low clouds in scenes that made you say, Oh, of course the Bible came from here, of course a man walking in these hills after rain could imagine G-d coming down to walk among the tents of Abraham.

  At
the café, Omar is taking more questions. A voice from the back, a New Jersey accent, asks with frustration, “Isn’t it illegal? What the army is doing?”

  Omar shakes his head, a sad, quiet laugh as he fiddles with the dry-erase marker. “It is legal because they write the laws,” he says. “This is the undramatic heart of the occupation.” Pause. Then, making a gesture with a marker like a wand: “Bureaucracy.”

  The New Jersey voice speaks again: “So what do you want?”

  The other rabbis shift uncomfortably. Emily does, too. Hard to tell how aggressive that question was meant to be. What do you want? Jeremy turns to eye the person who asked, a concerned look on his face. Emily is ashamed of the question, the indelicacy of the question. But also she wants to know the answer. What does he want? What do they want?

  Omar says, “I want to drive without being stopped. I want to build without being destroyed.” Pause. “You see this checkpoint?” He points toward the Tunnels Checkpoint. “You know I cannot cross it even with entry papers for Jerusalem? I must go through Checkpoint 300, like a dog in a cage.”

  The man from the back won’t let up. “So let’s say the Israelis get out of Area C settlements. Is it enough?” he asks. “Will that be enough?”

  “No,” Omar says, his face hard to read. Amused? Or maybe strained. “No, it will not be enough. Because Jerusalem is not free.”

  A quiet murmur from the rabbis. Jerusalem, Jerusalem. It’s always about Jerusalem. Femme fatale. Jerusalem—the city where Emily lives in a gorgeous, pillaged home that she will never, never ever, give back. She feels the flexing of a possessive muscle she did not know she had. She wonders if the rabbis feel it too. A coursing in them that says, She’s ours, it’s ours, Jerusalem is ours. These thoughts surprise Emily, but also, they do not surprise her. It’s Ido’s voice she hears inside her. Mine.

  “But surely, the real problem is the settlers,” another rabbi says, a large, avuncular-looking man with a colorful kippa. “The settlements in the West Bank.”

  Omar waves his hand in annoyance. “Israel is all settlers. Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, it’s all settlements.”

  “No,” another voice says, “like, you know, the illegal settlements.”

  Omar says, “Well, for some people that is all of Israel.”

  The possessive muscles in Emily surge again. She can feel it in the others, the arguments coming: The land we bought, we paid for! The swamp we drained to build Tel Aviv! The blooming in the desert! And what of the refugees? The boatloads of survivors, tattooed with concentration camp numbers. These are settlers? We are settlers? Impossible, Emily thinks, and all the rabbis think. She hears someone whisper, the right to exist. And aren’t they the good ones? Emily, Jeremy, and all of these nice rabbis? Here they are, listening to this Arab talk. They don’t have to be here. Surely, they are different from the wild-haired extremists who set fire to Palestinian schools, who take and take and take. That is not them, no, not them, not them, no, no.

  Jeremy stands up quickly. “This may be a good time to break for lunch,” he says.

  Right now, more than anything, Emily wants to go home. She is tired of how complicated things feel here, how uncertain she is of her own moral superiority. It’s easier with Ido: he’s the right wing, militant and unsympathetic; she’s the left wing, charitable and good-hearted. Two wings. Who is she here, listening to this man talk? A settler, apparently. An aggressor. It’s too much, it’s too complicated. She wants to go back. She wants her bed, her baby. She wants her husband’s body—that familiar, loving expanse. Her husband wearing his boxers in the kitchen, cooking eggs. Her husband dancing around their house with their baby, Israeli folk music blasting. Her husband spreading her, moving his tongue over her clit for as long as she needs. Her husband with his finger in her asshole, making her move. Her husband, her man, her ba’al. A comforting thought: soon, she and the rabbis will pile into the two vehicles they took over and head back onto Highway 60, through the checkpoint, waving curtly to the soldiers who will think they are Jewish settlers coming in from a settlement block in Area C. They’ll drive through easily; they’ll go home.

  Jeremy continues, speaking to the group. “These are difficult conversations and important ones,” he says. “But they’re a lot harder on an empty stomach.”

  For lunch, the restaurant is serving a vegetarian meal. Rice and lentils. It has a name, this dish. Emily learned it in Arabic class—hospitality unit—but she can’t quite remember. The Chicago couple are eating boiled eggs out of a Tupperware container, presumably because they are observant enough that they don’t eat food from nonkosher kitchens, vegetarian or otherwise. Then again, who knows? Maybe it’s not religious at all—maybe the couple is afraid that Palestine is rampant with dysentery. Jeremy is still seated with Omar.

  Emily has taken a few bites of the lentils—“Nice but a bit greasy,” she told the two Chicago women—when she gets the terrorism alert to her phone:

  Stabbing, Damascus Gate, one fatality, attacker neutralized.

  These updates are sent by the army. She and Ido get them all the time, and usually ignore them, but already, he is texting her: Where are you?

  Then: Come home.

  Then again: Where are you?

  Jeremy seems to have gotten the news too, because he’s scrolling intently through his phone. The rabbis are oblivious. The rabbi in olive-green linen is standing over Omar, speaking animatedly. Others are eating or taking photos of one another standing next to olive trees. Finally Jeremy glances over at Emily. She holds up her phone to indicate that she read it, too.

  Jeremy jumps up on a table. “Excuse me,” he says. His voice, unaccustomed to yelling, strains. “Because of an incident in Jerusalem, we’re leaving early.”

  “An incident?” the freckled Chicago woman asks her wife, who is already tugging a blue baseball cap over her curly hair, then to Emily, “What kind of incident?”

  “A terrorist attack in Jerusalem,” Emily says.

  The rabbis are suddenly alert, electric. Hurrying toward the cars, conferring with one another, yelling updates from their cell phones, checking the army Twitter account for confirmation. As if they have a clue, as if they are from here and know how any of this works.

  Emily texts Ido: Baby I know. I’m coming.

  Where are you? He’s insistent. Eifo at? He wants to protect her. He’s calling.

  “Hi, listen,” she answers.

  “Eifo at, mami?” His voice is edged with panic. Where are you? Where are you?

  Usually, she would answer in English, but right now, she wants to be speaking Hebrew, she wants to be home, to be closer and closer to home. “Anachnu adayn kan,” she says. We’re still here. She’s walking with the group toward the cars, parked precariously on the incline. “Netzeh aud daka, beseder?” We’re still here but we’re leaving soon. The rabbis glance over at her as she talks. She likes what they see: a woman who has chosen to be from here, capable and bilingual. A woman loved by a man who knows how to protect what he loves. I’ll update you, she says. I’ll update you, and I love you.

  They are in the car after hurried handshakes with Omar, who watches them drive away. How will he get home? Emily wonders, and then immediately understands that she does not care. Maybe later she will think about it, text Jeremy to see if he’s heard from the man they met today, but right now she cares only that she is going home. Back to her familiar kitchen, her sheets, her baby, her husband, her objects, her place in the world. She texts Ido: We’re on our way. Jeremy is driving. This time, Emily is in the back, next to the heavyset rabbi in a green linen tunic. The Chicago couple are in the car, too.

  Down the hill toward the Tunnels Checkpoint. Wheels on loose dirt and stones—a soft sound. “So sorry, what exactly is the issue?” asks the rabbi in the blue baseball cap, trying to keep her voice level.

  “Well, because of a stabbing,” Jeremy starts.

  “A terrorist attack,” Emily cuts in. Ido has texted her details. “They killed an Israeli girl.
”

  “A border guard,” Jeremy says, looking back at her in the rearview mirror.

  “A teenager,” Emily says.

  The rabbis tut-tut cluelessly.

  Emily closes her eyes. It’s a gift, think of it as a gift. Here’s the gift: you get to go home. No more tragedies, no more maps, just the knowledge of your family, the bodies of your family, your baby, your husband, waiting for you.

  They round a curve, and the highway unfolds below them, to their right, the metal overhang of the checkpoint. Jewish cars take the left lanes, whizzing through. They don’t have to pull over to be inspected; they don’t have to do anything. Rabbi Green Linen has put on a sun hat, and Emily feels a surge of gratitude toward the woman: she did it because the soldiers might have balked to see a woman wearing a kippa, would have assumed that something was wrong, something was up, would have needed to clarify: Are you a Jew? Are you one of us? She put on a sun hat so they could breeze through. Home, home, home.

  On the far right shoulder, one of the ugly white-and-blue Arab buses pulls over for inspection.

  Emily can’t see the Palestinians getting out of the bus, one after another, but she can see the soldiers in their flak vests, leaning against the guard shack, speaking quietly to one another. She thinks of Ido, young and bored, on guard duty in Nablus, in Gaza, in hell, a lifetime ago, waiting for her.

  Before she hears the sound, she feels it. The sound is enormous, less a sound than a vibration. Then movement. Then it’s all movement. The car swerving drunkenly. The car smashing into the concrete divider. Jeremy’s nose cracking against the steering wheel.

  Inside the car, it’s snowing. Winter of a childhood in Michigan.