City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  “To Ori?” Rachel asks.

  “Yeah, will there be consequences?” Is the kid a traitor to Israelis now? How would that work?

  Rachel shrugs. “He’s safe, baruch haShem.” She hasn’t looked up from Vera’s phone. Tap, tap, tap. “Oh, look! An engineer!”

  Vera feels herself letting go of the conversation about the Girl and the Soldier. She drains her wine and leans over the edge of the bed to pour more, coming up with a full glass in one hand and the bottle, which she extends toward Rachel, in the other.

  The night will continue like this. Wine and strange men on the internet. All of it a kind of foreplay for when the girls lie in the dark and make confessions. They have to wait; they have to work up to the point when their hearts spill over. Whispering, whispering, lying still on Rachel’s bed, hiding from her flatmates in the closed room. This is how it works. They tell each other stories in the dark. Scary stories. Stories of themselves. They alternate, like children: your turn, my turn. Who threw up all through high school, whose father consistently introduces her as his wife then stammers an apology, whose mother shook her till she blacked out, who is begging an unkind man to fuck her, whose body was punished, by whom, how. They crack themselves open; they convince themselves that they love each other like sisters; they say it, again and again—“I love you; you’re my sister,” which is something that, surely, no sister has ever had to say.

  Rachel tells her about the religious lessons for young brides. “Miriam, my kallah teacher, says that love is a state of knowledge.”

  “Your what?”

  “My marriage guide, remember?”

  “Right,” Vera says. “Miriam says what?”

  “That love is about knowing someone,” Rachel says. She talks about the verb “to know” in Hebrew, how it’s also a verb for sex. Vera feels a pang of jealousy, that Rachel has this framework—this ancient framework—for understanding what happens between her body and another.

  “So what’s wrong?” she asks, cutting Rachel off.

  “My fiancé thinks I’m disgusting,” Rachel says. “There’s so much we don’t know, and I wanted, I mean, I was just curious . . .” She pauses here.

  Vera: “About—”

  “I mean, what it would be like, you know? If he came on my face.” Her tongue sounds swollen in her mouth.

  Vera nods. It must be nice, actually, for everything in sex to be so illicit, so charged. Rachel lives in a world of boundaries, all of them waiting to be crossed. Once, it was like that for Vera. When she made it to the university in Heidelberg, free from her parents’ obsessive surveillance of her body, everything was new. She woke up in a series of strange rooms. Then it wasn’t so new.

  Vera lifts her chin to manage more wine, puts the glass back down on the nightstand.

  They are lying facing the ceiling, heads almost touching. Vera lets her head loll sideways to watch Rachel as she talks. Rachel is rich, and therefore Rachel is beautiful in the sense that she’s well maintained. Facials, hair masks, eyebrow sculpting, whatever. But the closer Vera looks, the uglier Rachel gets. Two thick black hairs sprout from her chin. Vera wants to lick them. Why not? She’s asked herself this, of course. Why not? Rachel’s complaints all come down to this: she wants more from her fiancé. More sex, more desire, more kink, more orgasms. By Rachel’s telling, her future husband is content with quiet, sleepy, lukewarm sex once a week or so. Middle-aged pacing. It sounds pretty nice to Vera, at least in theory. Anyway, the question: Why not? Why not have sex with this girl? Why not split her open? But that’s a mean way to say it. Also, self-aggrandizing—as if Vera gave such life-ruiningly good head. Here’s a kinder question: Why not bring each other some comfort, some pleasure? Why not?

  Instead she asks, “Is coming on your face, like, not allowed religiously?”

  Rachel lets a hand drop to the bed in frustration. “Technically it’s not, like, ideal,” she says, tsk-tsk. “But not forbidden the way some things are.”

  No period sex—Vera knows this one. “It gives me privacy,” Rachel said when she first explained it, as if the pussy-terrified rabbis who wrote these laws set out to empower teenage brides, as if a woman were even a human being to them. Ask Miriam the kallah teacher about that.

  Rachel says, “It’s like, they think you’re either a virgin or a whore.”

  Vera has thought this exact same sentiment herself, but somehow, hearing Rachel say it makes it seem stupid, sophomoric. And really, Vera knows precisely why she’ll never kiss Rachel: because she doesn’t want to be the one thing that makes Rachel happy. She doesn’t want this sad, unfulfilled girl to become obsessed with her, to become her problem, to spill her sad, sticky feelings all over Vera. She doesn’t want to deal with the disgusting overflow of Rachel’s need. It is possible that this is exactly how Amir has come to think about Vera, why he’s begun to ignore her so completely.

  When it’s her turn to start talking again, Vera is sitting up against the wall. Rachel is drifting in and out of sleep, or maybe consciousness. “Do you know,” Vera whispers, “how men talk about being tortured?”

  Rachel’s head is in her lap. Vera touches her hair. Soft hair, rich-girl hair.

  “No,” Rachel whispers. A single perfect sound that Vera wants to make her say again.

  So she tells her about interviewing Palestinian men who were tortured by Israelis, interrogated in nameless prisons. The ones who get really fucked up, the ones with unhealable shoulders, the ones who look a little to the side when they speak to you—these men, they revere their torturers. Or maybe it’s the pain they revere. They talk about pain the way you’d talk about a religion. It is a strange, impenetrable bond that develops between the body and its pain.

  “You’re scaring me,” Rachel whispers.

  What Vera says: “Shh, little one.”

  What Vera thinks: Good.

  What Vera wants to say, but never will: Do you know how lucky you were? Your people, I mean. You went all those years, those hundreds of years, thousands of years, and never had a state, an army—never had the means to oppress. Do you know what you gave up? Now your fiancé is off shooting teenagers in a field; they’re falling down right now, right now, the smoke from tires wafting past their perfect child bodies bleeding out in the dirt. You are the first Jews to do such a thing.

  There are years never spoken of in the homes of Vera’s grandparents, but once, Vera found an old photograph tucked away in an old Bible, of all places. A black-and-white photo of her mother and a young man. Or that is what she thought at first glance. But no, she realized after looking a moment longer, it was Oma, her maternal grandmother, looking young and bright with a face scrunched up in laughter, posing with a young man who must have been Vera’s late granduncle. In the photo, Oma and her brother are waving little swastika flags. When Vera thinks of that photo now—the one she pressed back into the spine of the heavy, leather-bound Bible in her grandmother’s sitting room—she feels shame, yes, of course, but also defiance. Because now she knows. Looking at Rachel, she sees it and she knows that anyone—anyone—can find themselves on the so-called wrong side of history.

  The late-morning sun is hot on the top of Vera’s head as she and Mo walk toward the entrance to the camp, which is built on a hill like a city in the Dark Ages, when the streets rejected the Roman grid in favor of something more tangled. There’s dust and a faint smell of sewage. A young boy wheels a younger boy in a cart. They cry out to Vera in English: “Hello! Hello!” Her hangover is blooming down her spine; her tongue feels foreign. Dammit, Rachel.

  Mo, looking plucky in his cargo pants with zippers and pockets galore, asks which families the boys are from, and in this way, Vera assumes, shows that he is from here, or at least used to be—was born here. The boys run off, maybe to herald their arrival. Mo turns to Vera, his face round beneath his khaki fishing hat, the drawstring long under his chin. He says in his whistling German, “Welcome, Vera, to my birthplace.” Then he turns to walk up the hill and Vera follows. She’
s lucky he keeps making time for her. He doesn’t have to; he’s a great fixer and in demand, has been for years. His full name is, of course, Muhammed, but he is always Mo to foreign journalists. Without Mo, who was born in this camp, who made it out but whose brothers remain, Vera could never enter here to wave around a photo of the Girl and the Soldier asking, What does this mean to you?

  Vera understands Mo’s frustrations with the story she is writing; she shares those frustrations. She wants to write something urgent and true. It’s possible that the success of the Salem Abu-Khdeir piece—her well-received (and now prize-nominated) coverage of the body-snatching from the hospital—gave her the false hope that all her future work would feel as important and consequential. But, of course, she can only write what editors want to buy. “We’ll try to make it informative,” she told Mo in the van yesterday. “Like tricking a kid to eat his vegetables.”

  Now she waits behind him while he knocks at a door in a well-lit side alley. “The man we will meet,” Mo says to Vera, “is a father to me.” He knocks again. Inside the house, a woman’s voice—high, gentle, but slightly urgent—asks them to please wait a moment. Mo checks something on the ancient flip phone he uses. “I hope he is awake.”

  The heavy metal door opens, seemingly on its own, but no—it is a tiny boy, very young, with a backpack as big as he is, who opens the door and greets Mo with a terribly serious little handshake before running down the steps. Perhaps he came home from school for lunch. Mo laughs as he steps inside the home; Vera follows.

  Inside, the curtains are closed against the daylight. A voice from upstairs, the woman’s voice again, greets them, asking them to hold on a moment, please, to please sit, please and welcome, welcome, welcome. Vera is able to follow the Arabic.

  She and Mo are in a sitting room of heavy fabrics and low tables. The young woman comes down the far stairwell, rushing. “Please,” she echoes herself, gesturing toward the couches. “Please.” Her long khimar frames her face and covers her torso, like a girl’s cloak in a fairy tale. She pauses to exchange greetings with Mo and Vera. Keyfak, alhamdulillah; w’anti, keyfik, kol ishi tammam, alhamdulillah. She is harried, but there’s something graceful in it, the way she disappears into what must be the kitchen and in an instant is back with a tray—little crystal glasses filled with fruit juice. “Just a moment,” she says, as she puts down the juice on the low coffee table in front of them—“Tfaddlu”—then she’s rushing back up the stairs.

  “Not his daughter-in-law,” Mo says, sipping juice, “but his granddaughter-in-law.”

  “How long have you known this family?” Vera asks.

  “As long as I have known my name,” Mo says.

  The old man is descending slowly, with the girl’s help. He’s in a pale blue thawb.

  Mo stands. “Yaa haaj,” he says.

  The men grasp hands. Mo moves to hug his elder—no, wait, not a hug but a deferent kiss. Mo kisses the older man’s right hand. Their Arabic is too quiet and quickly spoken for Vera to understand. She is aware of her intrusiveness here.

  Mo introduces Vera: “A journalist.”

  “Welcome,” the elder man says.

  “This man is as my father,” Mo says to Vera, helping him sit. “Abu Rami.”

  “Welcome,” Abu Rami says again, and Vera thanks him.

  “He fled the village with my parents,” Mo says in German.

  Vera nods. She wishes she were writing a better story, had better questions to ask this man. This is, probably, exactly how Mo wants her to feel.

  The soldier, Ori—what’s his last name? Lieb?—was interviewed on Israeli TV for the first time today. A beautiful kid. Blue-eyed and full-mouthed, with a cast on his leg, sitting on his mother’s leather couch, he said, “I’m grateful to the girl, whoever she is. I hope she’s safe.” This is the current line from the Israelis: The people want peace, but Palestinian leadership demands violence. The Israeli army’s social media platforms—they are savvy, so savvy—released a series of announcements in English and Hebrew, promising to protect the girl if Hamas clerics issue a fatwa for her death.

  Over the course of the next hour, men from the neighborhood trickle in. Some of them Mo recognizes instantly; some of them need introductions—this one’s son, all grown up; this one’s brother, back from Saudi. Each man shakes hands with all the others when he enters the home, and, when Vera rises, they shake her hand too, looking amused about it.

  They drink strong black coffee and eat from plates of fresh figs brought in from the backyard by their host’s great-grandson, a wiry boy who brings handfuls of the fruits—splitting with ripeness, revealing their own pink insides—to his mother in the kitchen, who plates them and brings them into this sitting room where the men talk about their children, the lack of rain, and the new roadblock. They show Vera photos of their dead. Shot unarmed, shot in a protest, here, a gurney soaked with blood, he died here. Phones out to show Vera, who has seen, at this point in her career, enough corpses to know it’s not a peaceful expression that the dead wear but a look of exhaustion that not even death can end.

  On the couch opposite Vera, her elderly host eats a piece of melon, slowly, nodding his head to something that Mo, next to him, is saying.

  “My cousin,” a man in a Real Madrid T-shirt is saying to Vera, pressing his phone toward her. “In Gaza, my cousin.” It’s a video, a man dying on video, lying on a stretcher, his hands reaching toward or past the camera, and all around him, Red Crescent workers hunched over, no IV in sight, nothing but some gauze. He’s bleeding out from his side.

  “Allahyerhamo,” Vera says. The day’s hot sun filters through the heavy curtains, the still air. Vera writes down the dead man’s name. She glances at Mo, who won’t look at her. There is something she is meant to do. She’s being paid to ask about the Girl and the Soldier. She underlines the dead man’s name. She is stalling. She takes a sip of dark Turkish coffee. She wishes she could ask this question to a woman, to the granddaughter-in-law, for example. But she is not here. The women are in other rooms, in anterooms. Vera takes out her phone. “May I ask,” she says in her careful, overly formal Arabic, “what do you think of this?” She holds out her phone to the man in the Real Madrid shirt. She shows him the image of the Girl and the Soldier. “What does this image mean to you?”

  The man with the dead cousin looks to Mo, evidently confused. “Shu bid-ha?” he asks Mo. What does she want? Then, to Vera, “Why are you asking about this?” The photo is a fake, he says, a trap by the Israelis. “It is to kill us,” he says in English. The room is looking at them, at Vera. Doesn’t she understand? He asks this to Mo in Arabic: “Doesn’t she understand?”

  Vera is trying again. Trying to ignore Rachel’s texts. She’s tired of being around such a miserable person, such a self-hating person. Also, tired of being so fucking hungover.

  Her story is due tonight. She’s in Jerusalem, riding the tram, riding along the seam that divides the city. East-West, Arab-Jew. The train is northbound now, just past Damascus Gate, with the gold crown of the Old City—the Dome of the Rock, how many have died to protect it?—disappearing behind them. She knows that at some point, between now and the next stop, the tram will cross the 1949 armistice line as it plows its way into East Jerusalem. A line will be crossed and nothing will change, except that technically, by the time she gets to the next stop, Vera will be in the West Bank. Every few months, someone publishes an article about this tram, about the divisions it both enacts and erases.

  Vera is not here to get man-on-the-tram quotes from anyone. She sits in silence, watching the city go by. White sun, white stone, new condos, glimpses of old ruins. She’ll ride the single line all the way up to Pisgat Ze’ev, to the mall where Salem Abu-Khdeir was beaten into the coma that killed him, then back down to the central bus station, where she’ll catch the bus back to Tel Aviv. The ride serves no purpose, except that it gives her time to think about causality: one event leading to another, one act of violence necessitating another.
/>   Most recent text from Rachel: Are you even getting my messages?

  Vera doesn’t answer. Instead she opens up her dating app—something she hardly ever does without Rachel. The most recent conversation is with a guy that she told Rachel not to message. Nimrod. This is, Vera has learned, an actual name that some Israeli men have: Nimrod. His profile includes two shirtless photos, both of them at the gym in front of weight racks, his shorts low enough to show the curve of muscle disappearing below his waistband. It’s a photo that says: Message me if you want to fuck. Dammit, Rachel.

  The most recent part of the chat:

  Nimrod: So its just you 2 girls?

  Vera: Just us.

  Him: What would u do if I was there?

  Her: What do you want?

  Nimrod sent a devil face.

  That’s Vera. But it’s not Vera. But it is Vera. Rachel’s words, Vera’s face. She wants to throw her phone away. She’s sitting between the thick bodies of two elderly women who are, in the ways of their respective religions, entirely covered but for the face and hands. What would these modest women think, Vera wants to know, if she explained the situation to them? Basically, I’m being pimped out by a child-bride to help her feel less trapped in her own life.

  Instead of heading back to Tel Aviv, Vera gets off the tram at Damascus Gate and takes a short bus ride to Ramallah, a city that Israelis call the “Tel Aviv of Palestine” without ever having seen it. Fantasy of symmetry. She wanders around Al-Manar square, a roundabout with low-slung buildings clustered nearby. Young men and couples circle the shops. The atmosphere is subdued. Weekday evening. In the center are four stone lions midroar, each facing one of the cardinal directions. Large green signage advertises the Stars & Bucks Cafe complete with copyright-infringing mermaid—a favorite of tourists because, Vera assumes, it suggests a certain inextinguishable pluckiness. Here she is, making a last-ditch effort at reporting.