City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  Mejiddo. After the raid they brought him inside to prison. It was almost impossible to get a permit to visit him. “It’s not so bad,” he told them from his lawyer’s phone, a Jewish woman who is, Hussein told her, a good person. “The men stick together. We make salads.” He learned to chop vegetables with the edge of a tin can lid. He told them it was not so bad, but it was so bad. She could hear it in his voice—anyone could hear it—that it was so bad.

  He doesn’t speak about the interrogations, but he must dream about them. She dreams about them, too. She’s in a room and there is a man slamming his hand down on a table in front of her, a man pressing a knee into her stomach, her hands tied above her head. She knows this is called a stress position but is not sure how she knows that.

  The Jews held Hussein for months and never charged him with anything. They came in the night and took him into their truck, hands bound in front of him. Thank God, he was dressed at the time. Their faces were covered in black; they crouched when they walked, lit their way with the bright lights on their guns.

  It is hard to say if her brother will ever get married. He sleeps a lot.

  Sometimes when she’s hurting herself—riding a wave of rage at her own body—she thinks about stabbing a Jew. Not doing it at the checkpoint itself, because that’s what they expect, but doing it once she got inside. On the street, from behind maybe. Not with the razor she uses on herself, obviously, but something from the kitchen. Stab a soldier’s face. The head, they say, go for the head, the neck. She’s seen the videos. Go for the neck, the Jew’s neck. You have to move fast before they shoot you to death on the street.

  What would happen to her parents if she did it? They would be distraught and brokenhearted, of course. Also, proud.

  It is beyond belief how the Jews multiply—the religious settlers especially, with their packs of vicious children, righteous and armed. They won’t stop coming. They’ll never stop coming, chewing up the land, building their new cities. The hills are choked with their construction. An infestation. Rats. She’s seen pictures online of Jews drawn as rats, rats with their weird side curls, their vicious scrunched faces. Yes, she thought, those are my neighbors, my neighbors the rats.

  Every year they inch down the hill, they inch down the hill and what are we supposed to do? Sit and take it? Let them take more and more until there is nothing left? Already, it is like choking. How many times has she canceled plans with a friend in Ramallah, said she was feeling sick or Mama needed her help around the house, because she couldn’t bear the thought of the journey, because when the soldiers stop the car, stop the bus with one of their floating checkpoints and traffic has stopped, traffic has slowed, settler cars are zooming by on the highway but you are sitting there, you are waiting, and in the waiting you know, you feel that they control not just the roads and not just your body, but time itself. Often, Noor finds that the only way she can survive the waiting is to float away from herself—the soldier is shouting something, the soldier is walking away with your hawiyya, the soldier has wandered off and comes back with a bag of chips he’s eating, you have to pee, you are drifting away from yourself. That’s survival. That’s something like survival.

  On herself, Noor is careful. The razor blade is clean—sterilized each time with rubbing alcohol—and she cuts no more than once a month, hardly ever more than once in a month. But the knowledge that she can do this to herself (that she has, that she will) is a secret she carries with her everywhere. A threat, a promise. Precious.

  It is a relief. Each time she makes the slash, the skin kissing open, the moment suspended between the wound and the coming of blood—each time, it is a relief. Even after—after the blood and the cleaning, the bandaging and the dressing again—the cut can take care of her for days. When she finds that she’s not acting like herself, when she feels trapped in her own mask—amused and slightly bitchy, trying to impress Mai, a girl who shines brighter than she—when Noor finds herself hiding her own pain too well, hiding the desperate, drowning girl she thinks of as herself, as her true self—then it is her most recent cut she goes to touch. I know you, the gesture says. I see you, I feel you. Tender, sore spot. A threat, a promise. Sustenance. And maybe—is this possible?—maybe a form of love.

  Before, she didn’t feel particularly close to Hussein. She’s always found him overbearing. He began asking her when she was going to veil when she was maybe ten, which was annoying, because obviously she was going to do it and she didn’t even mind being the first in her year but none of the girls above her were veiling yet and it felt kind of ostentatious. She was eighteen when they dragged him to Mejiddo. When he came back, she was already a student at Bethlehem University and there was nothing he could do.

  It was a relief to have created this space for herself. And yet she has consistently woven Hussein into her persona while at school. It feels good, complaining about his overbearingness to her classmates. She enjoys rolling her eyes when, walking arm in arm with Mai, they see maybe a Russian wife in a tight-fitting shirt; she enjoys whispering, “My brothers would kill me!” She feels precious in those moments, protected. Loved.

  Sometimes she wonders if she has relied too heavily on this feeling.

  She and Mai got along instantly. They always have the same read on situations. They understand each other without words. When the rich, unveiled Christian girl in their organic chemistry class is distracting the study group by going on about some gown that she is having made, Noor and Mai can exchange a single meaningful glance that says, Can you believe this girl? and then go back to reviewing their notes, and never have to say a word. But sometimes, Mai refers knowingly to her brothers, about Hussein in particular, and that makes Noor feel used, even if Mai is just following the lead that Noor herself established by talking about them that way first.

  “What would your brothers say?” Mai might ask, when a woman tourist descends from the checkpoint bus in shorts.

  And it feels unfair, somehow, for Mai to get to make these jokes when she has only younger brothers and a father who leaves it up to his daughters about what they wear. Noor wonders if this is what attracts Mai to her—that she is living a life that is more truly Palestinian, that she makes Mai more authentic, Mai who takes a bus back into Jerusalem, whose mother drives a black SUV—she’s seen the photos online—who has gone on trips alone to England, where her father keeps a house.

  Mai hasn’t been to school since the explosion. Noor messaged her a screenshot of the Girl and the Soldier and wrote under it, “My brothers would . . .” waiting for Mai to finish the sentence, but Mai didn’t say anything.

  Hussein did genuinely freak out about that photo. “It’s disgusting,” he said.

  “But it’s faked, isn’t it?” Noor said. It was after dinner. They were all drinking tea in the sitting room, the TV on.

  “Who knows?” Hussein said. “The Israelis can get to anyone.” Then he got up and went to his room. And Noor, very discreetly, pressed over her clothes into a cut place.

  Obviously, she worries about scarring. That one day she’ll have a husband who might ask, What is that on your legs? What happened? What is wrong with you? But she is careful. The blade is clean; the wound is tended to. No more than once a month, sometimes twice, sometimes twice. When it heals, she dabs the spot with vitamin E oil to help the skin recover. In the year she has developed this practice, only two puckered scars—each the length of a finger joint—remain visible on her upper thigh.

  She wants to live. Doesn’t she? She doesn’t want to die by cuts. She doesn’t want to die by Jewish bullets. Anyone who attacks a soldier gets shot on the spot. Stripped down by the Jews. If she ever managed to get the knife across—that alone, impossible—she would probably do little more than graze the soldier’s ear before they shot her and let her bleed out after ripping off her clothes, her scarf. You see it all the time. Blurry images of a boy or a girl, stripped down in the street, limbs all wrong and blood smeared.

  She wants to live. And yet it’s t
rue that what you do to survive can kill you.

  When the little mouth of her new cut fills with blood—irreversible as it always was—Noor feels horror and disappointment but also pride, because she knows that nobody—nobody, not the Jews who tortured her big brother, not her brother—nobody can hurt her more than she has hurt herself.

  Come Home

  Every day is another day that Mai does not tell Leila what happened at the checkpoint. They are in Leila’s bedroom, the bedroom she shares with her husband. Leila is looking through her closet for clothes that Mai might want, stuff that doesn’t fit her anymore. “I’ve been trying to walk more,” Leila calls out, her voice echoing from the closet.

  “Oh?” Mai says. She’s lying on Leila’s bed, Leila and Tariq’s bed, propped up by the astounding array of throw pillows. Where do they go at night? The pillows. On the floor? In a secret chest? Or do Leila and her husband sleep with pillows piled on top of them, like children hiding? It’s late afternoon. Sunlight filters heavily through the rich, ornate curtains that Leila took forever to pick out. This is the softest, happiest part of the day—when the housework is done, before Tariq comes home from work.

  Leila emerges from the closet holding up the ugliest blouse Mai has ever seen. It’s pink, it’s blue, it’s splashed in silver sequins. Disco vomit. “How about this one?” Leila says. She holds the thing up to herself. It couldn’t so much as fit over her shoulders now: swollen Leila, a cream puff almost in her ninth month.

  Mai says her sister’s name sternly, in two descending syllables. “Leila.” She says it like their father used to when scolding them. “Leila. I wouldn’t wear that to clean the house. Never mind to a wedding.” Their cousin Rania’s wedding is tomorrow.

  Leila sticks her tongue out. Pointy, pink. She looks so young, so familiar. Sister. “Why?” Leila demands. “It’s cute!” She shakes the hideous blouse at Mai; its sequins tremble. So tacky, so offensively off-brand for Mai, who takes pains to dress elegantly: Audrey Hepburn–style pearl buttons and round Peter Pan collars with lace detailing.

  “Maybe as a dish towel,” Mai says.

  Leila throws the hideous shirt at her. “Ungrateful girl,” she says joyfully.

  Mai has a feeling of lightness, like shrugging off a backpack after a long day. What am I forgetting? she wonders. What have I put down? Then it weighs her down again. She remembers. The explosion. The photograph.

  When she sees the image—the girl helping the soldier stand—she says to herself, That’s you, but she doesn’t believe it. Every day she almost tells Leila. She almost says, That’s me, and then she does not. In the image, she’s unidentifiable. She’s sure. She’s almost sure. You can’t tell it’s her. So many times she has inspected the figures, tried to see them the way that Noor or Leila might. The soldier takes up most of the frame, hopping on one leg, yes, she remembers that, getting him to the ambulances that way. Even in the slightly blurred photograph you can see that he’s beautiful, lips and cheekbones. The girl, meaning Mai, is eclipsed. Most of her body hides behind his. You can see her face, but only half of it. Most of what you see is the head scarf, smudged with blood. Foreigners love that it’s blood, she knows, love that her head scarf seems white in the photo although it’s not—another fact that obscures her—it’s pale pink. She threw it out. Hard to tell what she’s wearing. Her jeans could be a long skirt. Her ballet flats—also pale pink—are indistinct. She loves those shoes, but she hasn’t worn them since that day.

  Since the explosion, Mai has spent almost every day here, helping out Leila during the last weeks of her pregnancy and recovering from her injuries—the slight concussion, the relatively superficial cut on her head. Yes, she could have gone back to school already. But she hasn’t, and maybe—who knows?—maybe she won’t.

  The first few days were an actual nightmare. Mai’s head echoing, damp sheets in bed, hazy, dream-wake, checking her phone, knowing only that there was something she could not tell anyone, anyone, anyone. The image of her and the soldier was everywhere: on all her feeds, in all her group chats. She thought interest would fade, but it jumped the way a spark can—suddenly, the image was on the American news and all over her social feeds. There were girls with hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions, of followers posing in T-shirts silk-screened with Mai and the soldier; she watched in horror as the image became, for foreigners, a shorthand for the fantasy of a symmetrical conflict. Three stupid seconds, now somehow extended, given their own history and even their own tagline: This is what hope looks like. She dreamt about herself in the image, about the image walking toward her, about knocks on the door, about explaining herself to Noor, to Leila, to Mama. She would wake up unsure how much of it she had dreamt. She would dream she’d dreamt the image, that it was all a fabrication. And then she would wake up and it would be as it was before, only, in the time that had passed, the image’s reach had grown.

  She tries to assure herself that the power of the image—the fuel for the foreign obsession with it—is its very inscrutability. The girl in the image isn’t a person to the people who see it—she’s a symbol. And if there is a violence in that, it’s a violence that keeps Mai safe. Nobody she knows thinks that the photograph is real. It’s all part of the lie the Zionists created—like the explosion, which they planned as an excuse for the raids. Nobody knows it’s Mai, except Mai. She’s sure; she’s almost sure.

  She’s been keeping up with her schoolwork from home. Noor texts about the assignments—new chapters twice a week in the organic chemistry textbook, all kinds of biology lectures to watch online—and takes photos of her own corrected assignments (balancing endless oxidation-reduction equations) so that Mai can check her answers against them. With her brothers’ records, Noor is only very rarely granted a permit to cross from her home in Bethlehem into Jerusalem. Mai finds—here’s a horrible thought—relief in the fact that Noor can’t come knocking on her door. Mai doesn’t know if she’ll return to write her exams.

  Noor was texting her today. How are you feeling, habibti? When you text Noor, no profile picture comes up. Instead it’s an image of a butterfly. Her “about me” reads, “A girl should be like a butterfly: beautiful to look at, impossible to catch.”

  Mai: I’m still weak, but better.

  Noor: Will you be coming back? For the exam?

  Mai has wondered if Noor knows, of course. But it seems impossible. Noor is so principled, so unequivocal—surely, she wouldn’t pretend if she suspected. She would call and if Mai didn’t pick up, she’d leave a voicemail: “What is this? How could you? Who are you?” Or maybe just text her a single word, “collaborator”—the ugliest word—before blocking Mai’s number. Something. So Noor must not know. Right? She must not.

  After Mai got Noor’s text this morning, she hesitated, shifting onto her stomach in bed. The family doctor, an elderly man with long, elegant limbs, has told Mama that Mai is fine to go back to school, but Mai keeps stalling. She tells Mama she doesn’t feel well enough yet, but the truth is that she still fears she’s misread the situation—that she’ll be recognized. I have to see what the doctor says, she wrote to Noor. Then, How is it there? Then, Yanni, what’s the mood?

  Noor: No raids today. Mai saw the most recent one on her Facebook feed: Jews posing as journalists, dragging away the student union leader—a charismatic senior.

  Mai knows she should go back. She knows. It wasn’t so long ago that she convinced Baba to let her enroll in Bethlehem University in the first place. “You’ll spend all day on the bus,” Baba said, his face pixelated on the computer screen. They were Skyping; he was in his office in London. He had a point: not the getting there, which was easy, but getting back through the Tunnels Checkpoint, lining up off the bus to show your papers to the soldiers. “It’s not even a top school,” he went on. Implied in this comment, a question: Why not go for one of the Jews’ universities, closer and so much more convenient? She didn’t indulge the phantom question, but rallied on: “Their environmental science department i
s well regarded,” she insisted, then began listing off the publication histories of various faculty members. He folded.

  Between the two sisters, everyone had thought that Leila would be the one to go to university, and she had, at least for a time. Two semesters at the Jews’ university up the hill—so close, a short bus ride away, and better than any Palestinian university. Leila’s Hebrew was good enough to do it. Not just any degree program—the law one. Top of the top. So good they ignored the painful details, like how, technically, Leila had to register as an international student. Jordanian. “I’ve never lived in Jordan,” Leila told the clerk, who shrugged.

  Leila was friendly with her classmates, nearly all of them Israeli Jews. Why wouldn’t she be? Sometimes she stayed after to study with girls from her class. Leila said some of the Jewish students ignored her while others seemed overly cordial, but for the most part, everyone got along. They fastidiously avoided political topics as they quizzed one another on the vestiges of Ottoman laws in the Israeli legal system. This is a part of Mai’s life that she would never be able to explain to Noor: how normal it could all seem. In a Jewish restaurant, at a Jewish school, on a Jewish bus.

  When Leila began her studies, Mai was still in high school. She used to bring Leila cups of tea alongside a few of their aunt’s date cookies on a chipped plate, Leila’s favorite, the floral one with no discernible provenance, part of no set in their house. Leila bent over her books—everything in Hebrew. Mai was proud of her sister. Then she came home one evening to hear that Tariq and his mother had been by. Mai expected Leila to be droll and dismissive, but her sister was flushed and nervous when she talked about the car salesman who had come looking for a wife. Mama was every bit the proud hen as she hustled Mai out of the room so that she and Leila could get on a video call with Baba to discuss. Two months later, Leila was engaged. She decided to drop out of school before the wedding. “I’ll be back,” she insists whenever Mai asks her about it.