City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  And Vera nodded, wrote it all down in her notebook. But privately, so privately it was in a space she wasn’t sure her mind would let her touch again, she thought, Yes, of course that’s love. Because this was how her parents had loved her, or what they called love. What other people would call control, her parents had called love. Vera unable to leave the house. Vera unable to take a phone call from a boy. Vera barred from movie theaters, which her parents imagined as places where all kinds of dark gropings might happen. Her parents weren’t religious. Their fixation was more private than that, harder to explain. Vera’s body was as regulated as the contested ground she writes about, or so it seems to her. Today, despite knowing that her parents were wrong to conflate control with love, Vera finds she can’t quite unlearn the conflation.

  Later, after the van arrives without incident in Hebron and after Vera has done her man-on-the-street interviews there—walking around the contested city split down the middle, ancient residences now used as army posts, after she is done holding up a cutout of the Girl and the Soldier from an Israeli newspaper and asking beleaguered Palestinian merchants and children, “What does this mean to you?” and getting mostly bewildered answers like, “No, I’m sorry, I don’t know who she is,” or, “That photo is a fake,” or, mercifully for Vera’s copy, a child who laughed out in English, “Hope! Hope! Hope!”—after all that, Mo asks Vera if she has eaten.

  They are sitting on the steps of the towering Ottoman-era Tomb of the Patriarchs. Like everything in Hebron, it is split. One entrance for Arabs, one for Jews. For hundreds of years, the Ottomans forbade Jews from entering the holy place to pray; now Israeli soldiers stand around with knee pads (snipers) and stun grenades (police), speaking clipped Hebrew into walkie-talkies. “Have you eaten supper?” Mo asks, watching the soldiers as Vera flips through her notes.

  Vera recognizes the invitation. “I need to get back to Tel Aviv,” she says, hoping she sounds regretful. She has eaten at Mo’s home before. A small and lively home. White stone on a hill. Plastic chairs in a garden tended carefully with rationed water. A sturdy wife who delights in her grandchildren, a strong-fingered woman with whom Vera can speak only in Arabic. Sons and grandsons older and younger than Vera who eye her with interest, ask her opinions on Brexit. A beautiful place. A tiring place. A place that requires Vera to be at her best—her most present and generous. And tonight, Vera wants to be at her worst. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Another time,” Mo says, his hands on his knees, sounding neither surprised nor disappointed. Then, ever the fixer, he says, “The name for this city comes from the word for ‘friend.’”

  “In which language?” Vera asks, knowing the city has two names: Hebron, Al-Khalil.

  “In both languages,” Mo says. “Put that in your notes.”

  They are sitting on the steps of a resplendent site of worship. Underneath the shrine is a cave—a burial cave. Once, they say, it held the body of Abraham, root of the Abrahamic faiths. Down there, deep below, his body turned to dust along with his wife, Sarah. Isaac and Rebecca were buried there, too. Jacob and Leah. Only one matriarch is missing. Jacob’s favorite wife is buried elsewhere: Rachel. Rachel is not here.

  Later that night, Rachel is on Vera’s phone and Vera is on Rachel’s tablet. Vera is checking her email. Rachel is talking to strange men, pretending to be Vera, so, pretty typical as far as their nights together go. It’s the dating app that everyone uses, grim and unavoidable: a few profile photos and a one-line bio. “The meat market,” Vera calls it. She hasn’t used the app in months. Isn’t that what made her ill-fated obsession with Amir a kind of relief? No more compulsive checking of the app to see who chose her; no more setting out to explain herself to strangers, or maybe better to say, to articulate a version of herself that they might want. But Rachel is delighted by the whole setup. “Look at all these guys!” she exclaimed the first night Vera showed her how it worked, how when a match’s picture popped up, you tapped here to show you were interested, tapped there if you weren’t. “They are everywhere!” Rachel said, tapping out approvals on every match that came her way. “This guy is 250 meters away, and he has a motorbike.”

  Vera doesn’t fully understand why she has started spending so much time with Rachel, why she craves their time together even as she finds Rachel immature and annoying. Before Vera broke up with Amir, Rachel was just another overly friendly, lonely girl who texted Vera more than Vera texted her. They went from zero to sixty, as it were—from seeing each other for coffee once, maybe twice, over several months, to seeing each other a few times a week. Surely, Vera thinks, the sudden intensity must indicate an instability. How long can this last?

  But for now, they’re in Rachel’s bed, Vera up against the headboard, Rachel stretched feline over her feet. Vera sends off another email to the travel website that still owes her for months of copywriting. So sorry to be a pest!! she writes, which she hopes comes across as Fuck You, Pay Me. This is her life, isn’t it? Begging for her little scraps. Small consolation: it’s delightful to finger-tap out emails on Rachel’s tablet. Tap, tap, tap. It makes Vera feel rich, spoiled. Safe.

  She taps to her feeds. Right away, there it is: the photo from the explosion, the Girl and the Soldier, the photo that launched a thousand shitty, derivative think pieces on war and violence. A girl in a hijab helping a wounded soldier, her so-called enemy, to safety. Every time you see it you notice a new, poignant detail. Her hand is clutching his waist, his ruined leg is bent—he must be hopping. Around them is the explosion’s smoke and rubble. You look at it and you think, War, but also you think, Future. You think—goddammit, you really do—Hope. This is what hope looks like.

  Neither the girl nor the soldier is looking at the camera, but somewhere beyond it—toward wherever they were trying to go. This creates the effect of them moving past the viewer toward some distant, hopeful future that only they can see, that they will lead us to. The soldier is fair. His body dominates the frame. You can’t see much of the girl but the hijab. It is white, perfect, or rather perfectly defiled with a dark patch of what is either dirt or blood, his or her own. Her face, in profile, is almost entirely obscured; you see the suggestion of the nose, the mouth. You project expressions onto her. A smile, a grimace, a cry. She might be wearing jeans. There are, amazingly, no other clear photos. Nobody knows who the girl is.

  Vera has forty-eight hours until her deadline. She taps to an article published earlier today by someone she used to work with at the university newspaper. It’s a feminist hot-take on the gendering of the image, the fetishization of the hijab. It’s wise and insightful, and nobody will read it. What Vera does learn from skimming through the vaguely condescending article (written by a white woman who does not wear a head scarf) is that an American pop singer with a huge following posted a photo of herself wearing an oversized T-shirt with the photo silk-screened on and what looks like no pants, just knee socks. Her caption: This is what hope looks like, y’all. She has over one hundred million followers. One hundred million. That’s more than the population of Germany. This is what hope looks like.

  “Fuck me,” Vera says.

  “We’re working on it,” Rachel replies cheerfully.

  Because Rachel is engaged to be married, they keep up certain pretenses, namely, that Rachel is looking for potential matches for Vera. And yes, okay, it’s a little weird to have Rachel talking to strangers pretending to be Vera, but Vera can’t help it—she feels bad for Rachel. The girl is nineteen and engaged. Nineteen! Rachel’s fiancé—whom Vera has never met—is barely twenty-one, Israeli-born son of South African parents on one settlement or another. He’s finishing his army service—a “warrior,” Rachel says, who uses a night-vision scope to go raid Hamas safe houses. Rachel’s complaints about him have an indulgent ring: “He comes home, smelly and exhausted. He’s away for ten days, for two weeks, the whole time we’re talking about how badly we want each other, how we’ll do this, we’ll do that . . .” Duh, they have sex, she said when V
era asked, What, like, you think I’m Mormon? “But when he gets home, do we make love? No! Of course not, no. He sleeps the whole time.” Vera has the sense that Rachel is reading off some sort of army girlfriend script.

  You’re twenty-six, Vera scolds herself. So why do you spend so much of your time with a nineteen-year-old Zionist? Fresh from high school, Rachel came to Israel last summer to do a few months of volunteering at some day care. She met her fiancé at a friend’s party; he took her home that night, not to fuck her but to meet his parents. They all sat around a well-lit kitchen eating coffee cake. By the end of the summer, Rachel was engaged. She hasn’t been back home to LA since. What is Rachel running away from? Vera wonders but doesn’t ask, because then she’d have to answer the question herself.

  The day before the explosion, Vera blocked Amir’s phone number—not so much to prevent him from reaching her, but to stop herself from hoping that he might. The space he left behind has given Vera a breath of almost divine clarity; she sees herself as she really is. She is a scraggly and helpless planet, flinging itself from the gravitational pull of one obsession to the next. There she is. You can trace her trajectory back, all the way back before Amir, before her college boyfriend, and all the lovers in between, all the way back to her mother, the one who broke her heart first and irreparably. Mama, her rival in Father’s affection. Vera won—of course she won, lovely and clever, brilliant and thin. Vera won her father but lost her mother, who does not—no other way to say this—particularly like Vera. There she is. Mama, burning, as Vera’s father smashes their house phone into little plastic bits. A boy has called the house for Vera. Mama watching, Mama behind a closed door.

  The day of the explosion, Vera wasn’t at the Tunnels Checkpoint, but she was just up the highway, at an obsolete church, for a pointless magazine assignment, and as the smoke rose and the sirens colluded toward a point down the highway, she wasn’t thinking about reportage or even survivors. She was thinking, joyously, really, This. This is the perfect excuse to text him, to text Amir. But she didn’t. She was good. She’s trying to be good. She’s trying to remember that you can’t convince someone to love you, not if they don’t want to.

  “Stop it.”

  Vera looks up. Rachel is up on one forearm, pointing at her. Rachel with dark, curly hair and strikingly full eyebrows; Rachel in an expensive, loose T-shirt, and diamond stud earrings. Real ones. Rachel says again, “Stop it.” She wags a finger. “Your nails! Stop chewing them.”

  Vera has been at her cuticles again. They are rough, and where she has peeled the dry skin away there is a tender pink, obscene and new. “Okay, okay,” she says, annoyed and happy every time Rachel nags her about it.

  Rachel rolls back onto her belly, engrossed in all the formulaic exchanges that talking to strange men entails. Let’s adventure together, the messages say. Let’s go to Iceland, to Nepal, to Berlin. You could show me around Berlin. Always the same.

  Since Amir, Vera has been on a few dates. The most successful one, if that’s not a ridiculous thing to say, was with a recently divorced guy from the Belgian embassy in Tel Aviv. In his company Volkswagen, she straddled him as they made out, and when he pressed his fingers up into her, he had such a dopey, blissed-out smile on his oblong face that immediately and viscerally, Vera missed Amir, missed the molten center between them—a wanting so heavy it came out like anger. She made a quick retreat, hurried out of the car and walked home to South Tel Aviv to masturbate in peace.

  Rachel has chosen new photos for Vera’s dating profile, insisting on the kind of slutty-looking one where she’s holding a glass of rosé in a low-cut gown. The photo was, actually, taken at the embassy gala where she met the divorced Belgian. Vera explained all this to Rachel—why not? “Your life is so stupidly cool,” Rachel said. That is, of course, plainly untrue, but Vera liked that it might look that way to a repressed teenager.

  They are in Rachel’s bedroom in Jerusalem, avoiding the flatmates that Vera has seen only fleetingly in the common areas. Rachel’s room is filled with marvelous, gilded details: sugar body scrub in a glass jar on the edge of the dresser, the obscene price sticker still on; rich, heavy-smelling candles on a mirrored tray next to bottles of perfume. Her floor is covered with laundry—jeans crumpled and inside out, lacy thongs curled like dry leaves. Some dumb reality show is streaming on Rachel’s laptop. A woman in a gorgeous gown is weeping. “I thought I’d have more time,” she moans. Vera drinks deeply from an expensive wineglass. This is what she has chosen over dinner with Mo and his family. Instead of long discussions about life in the West Bank, Vera chose this. Wine-drunk and watching bad TV. Familiar.

  “Shoot, this guy is texting me in German,” Rachel says, looking up. Clear skin, full eyebrows. Her hair is a gorgeous waterfall of tight ringlets, always clean and soft.

  “Wait, you gave him my number?”

  “No,” Rachel says, making the impatient tsk-tsk sound. “No, I mean on the app. He’s texting me in German.”

  “Tell him you’re practicing your English,” Vera says, going back to searching for additional images of the Girl and the Soldier. What she should be doing is typing up her notes from earlier today. Fast turnaround. Two days. She takes a sip of wine. Then a gulp.

  After a few seconds, Rachel lets out a frustrated sigh.

  “What now?” Vera asks.

  “This is just so”—she hesitates—“so fun. It’s fun to do this, to be like this.”

  It strikes Vera as a bit too cruel to explain to Rachel what she means: that it’s fun to act her actual age. “Have you seen this?” Vera asks, turning the tablet to Rachel to show her the image of the Girl and the Soldier.

  “Yeah, obviously,” Rachel says. “We talked about it in my Hebrew class.” Twice a week Rachel takes lessons in a language she refuses to practice. Vera has heard her on the phone: Excuse me? English, please, yeah, English, Anglit, English.

  “And?”

  “And what? They are going to kill her,” Rachel says. Tsk-tsk. “Hamas, or someone.”

  “Kill the girl who helped the soldier?”

  “Yes,” Rachel says, “I mean, they kill traitors, don’t they?”

  “A lot of Palestinians think it’s faked,” Vera says.

  “Hmm,” Rachel says, already back on her phone.

  The exchange strikes Vera as fairly representative. When Jewish Israelis see the image, they see a “good” Palestinian doomed by the brainwashing of their own leadership. “We fear an honor jihad,” the Israeli minister of culture said recently, inventing a phrase that doesn’t exist in Arabic or Islam. The minister is an unsettlingly beautiful woman who kohls her eyes. That phrase—“honor jihad”—was later repeated by the American envoy to the UN, while night after night, young Palestinian men in zip ties were brought out to Israeli jeeps in their pajamas. Conversely, Palestinians look at the Girl and the Soldier and see a faked image, and in that way, they see confirmation of Israel’s total control. Only foreigners see hope—two sides, both alike in humanity. Romeo and Juliet, but with semiautomatics.

  This may be what makes Vera so uneasy about the image. It says whatever you need it to say. This was the crux of the New York Times article not written, thank God, by someone Vera knows—she couldn’t handle the jealousy if, say, that American cow Sara had landed the byline—but by the head of the paper’s Israel bureau, an elderly white woman, Jewish, with chunky bangles. Vera has unsuccessfully pitched her a handful of times. “An Explosion, a Uniform, and a Head Scarf: Image from Israel Inspires and Incites.” The article reported that on both sides of the Wall (Americans love this turn of phrase) there is suspicion about the photograph. A well-designed graphic reproduced the paranoid deconstructions found on Facebook in Hebrew and in Arabic—ones that magnify the photo until it’s pixelated, mark it with red circles and arrows, pointing to the supposed digital traces of photoshopping. Mossad did it! No, ISIS did it! No, the Jewish media did it! No, the girl isn’t helping the soldier—look closer!—she’s trying to kidn
ap him.

  “What about the soldier?” Vera asks. She sometimes uses Rachel in her magazine stories; it’s truly half-assed reporting—quoting Rachel man-on-the-street-style, filler stuff.

  “Ori Lev?” Rachel looks up again. “I know his mom!”

  “Wait, what?”

  “Yeah, she’s my kallah teacher.”

  “Your what?”

  “Someone who helps brides prepare for marriage.”

  “Your marriage counselor is the soldier’s mom?”

  “She’s not a marriage counselor, but yeah.”

  Vera is so close to asking, So, like, you all know each other? But realizes in time that it might come off wrong, so instead says, “What a small country.”

  “Totally,” Rachel says, rolling onto her back, still engrossed in Vera’s phone. “I mean, I don’t know Ori, but yeah, Miriam is great.”

  “Can I get her number?” Vera has to ask, right? She might be sick to death of this dumb, fluffy story, but a connection is a connection.

  “She’s changed her number,” Rachel says, rolling back over to her tummy. “But you know she’s already done, like, a bunch of interviews, right?”

  This is true. Vera has seen video clips of a woman with her hair covered in a vibrant blue wrap, saying to the camera, We’re grateful he is alive. Vera isn’t sure she believes Rachel about Miriam changing her number. Then again, she’s not sure she really cares. She doesn’t want to interview Ori Lev’s mom. She doesn’t want to cover this story at all. Still, she’s curious. “Wow, well, what do you think will happen to him?”