City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  Of course, since she got pregnant, Leila’s body has changed. There is so much that Mai can’t ask about, or is afraid to ask. She doesn’t know how to talk about the details of marriage. Before, they were so good at being close. Of course, they had their own rooms, but how many times had Mai fallen asleep in Leila’s bed, their hair braided together in imitation of something they saw on some fashion page? Soft R&B songs playing. They sang along to lyrics that sounded nothing like the English they learned in school, waiting for the words they recognized. Baby, baby, love, love, love.

  Today, Mai and Leila get the news at the same time, hunched over their phones, scrolling. A new martyr. Not at the checkpoint, but at a train station in Tel Aviv. He was a construction worker from a village outside Ramallah.

  “Sixteen years old,” Mai says, reading off her phone. He secreted a kitchen knife across Qalandiya Checkpoint, slipped away from the construction site at lunch, and walked to the Tel Aviv train station, where, by reconstructed accounts, he sat on a bench for about fifteen minutes before stabbing a soldier in the neck.

  Mai and Leila show each other images and updates on their phones. They martyred him in the station. Executed. The word the Jews use for this is “neutralized.” On her feeds, she sees that Hamid has reposted cell phone footage of the Jews shooting the boy. In the video, which Mai doesn’t show to Leila, but which she watches on her phone, he has already been shot, but he’s alive—his head lolling side to side in pain or delirium.

  Mai forces herself to watch the video. Recently, she’s been forcing herself to watch everything horrific, even going back to rewatch the security footage of the mob attacking Salem. A kind of penance.

  Hamid has captioned the posted video: They shot him down like a dog. He has currency at school, and the videos he posts always get at least a few hundred likes. Before, Mai would have left a comment under the video to praise the martyr. But not now. Something is off with Hamid. They aren’t in touch over text, obviously—that would make her an easy girl. But before, when she commented on any of his posts, he always liked the comments, maybe even replied. But since the explosion, he’s ignored her completely, and she wonders—is this paranoid?—she wonders if he knows something. If he’s one of the few who doesn’t think the photo was a fake.

  “Halas,” Leila says. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  The day of the explosion, Noor and Mai had class in the morning—a not entirely unpleasant degree prerequisite on academic writing taught by an unmarried woman. Professor Samar Withered Branch—that’s what some of the students call her behind her back. After, Mai and Noor walked around campus together, letting the late morning draw out. The weekend had already begun and it was the middle of the day. Such luxuries! Together, they walked under low-hanging trees with tiny, silvery leaves, their heads tilted toward each other as Noor whispered knowing little jokes about the sleep-deprived newlyweds walking side by side around campus. It had taken Mai by surprise at first, Noor’s humor coming from a girl who seemed so careful, so traditional—natural makeup only, no loofah to volumize her hijab. But their friendship had been instant, as if they’d known each other since childhood, not met less than a year ago at a welcome lunch for biology and chemistry first-years. Mai fears a friendship that started so fast could end just as quickly.

  “But what even is a calorie?” Mai was asking Noor as they made their way back from the snack vendor. Mai had bought a package of sweet-sour candy, because Noor said that each one had only fifteen calories. Noor knows the calories in everything. It’s crazy. Probably actually crazy. Mai teeters between finding it kind of fun—feeling like a woman, reciting the grams of sugar in soda—and finding that she’s edging closer to something along the lines of concern for impossibly skinny Noor.

  “Units of energy,” said Noor. “How does someone so good at orgo not know what a calorie is?”

  “Hey, how did you do on the mass spectrometry quiz?” Mai asked.

  Noor didn’t answer. Instead she looked across the small square to a group of their classmates, the young men in their self-conscious little circle. She was watching them as she said to Mai, “That boy is suicidal over you.” Hamid, slim and capable, was working up the courage to come over, looking at Mai then back at his friends, laughing too loudly, then looking again. “Suicidal,” Noor repeated as she brought her phone to her ear.

  “Don’t you dare,” Mai hissed in a whisper.

  But Noor was already speaking into her phone as if there were someone on the other line. “Hello? Hello?” she said, sidestepping to answer it, creating an opening.

  Of course Hamid sensed the moment; of course he began to walk toward her, hands in his pockets, body curved, boyish. Standing in front of her, he spoke hurriedly, almost mumbling when he said, “I’ll walk you to your bus.” No greeting. Just that: I’ll walk you to your bus. His voice was raspy. She could smell his cologne.

  “I’m walking,” Mai said stupidly. He was an arm’s length away, but she took a step back.

  “Walking all the way to the checkpoint?” His hands were crammed into his front pockets.

  “No, I mean walking to run an errand and then walking to the bus,” she said, so obviously lying that she couldn’t make eye contact.

  He smiled like there was someone with a gun to the back of his head, telling him to smile. “Okay, so next time,” he said.

  It’s not that she doesn’t want attention, just that she doesn’t want the consequences—the pressure to drop out that comes with marriage no matter what he promises beforehand, a mother-in-law demanding Mai move to Bethlehem, too far from Mama, from Leila. Or, if not, the exhausting, maddening bureaucracy of the paperwork it would take to make someone like Hamid into a legal resident of East Jerusalem, the impossible years living in a nebulous zone at the cusp of the Wall before permission was—or was not—granted to her husband to live inside it. Everything is so adversarial. Your will pitted against another’s, again and again.

  Mai helps Leila down the steps—going ahead to steady her sister on her forearm—and out the gate. It’s cool enough now, the late-afternoon breeze arriving from the Judaean Desert. They’re hurrying to avoid Leila’s mother-in-law, a thin woman with a squished nose who always finds a way to make you feel fat. Her house is on the other side of a large garden almost identical to Mama’s—filled with citrus trees and tangled mint, squash, tomatoes, and small, sweet cucumbers. They timed their exit by the pulling out of her SUV from her driveway. She comes by Leila and Tariq’s place daily while Tariq and his father are selling cars. She brings foods that are good for the baby and side-eyes the dishes left in the sink. Leila said that the first month was the worst, Tariq’s mama coming over to criticize everything about the way she ran a house, just because she could.

  “Is she still driving you crazy?” Mai asks, closing the green gate behind them.

  “Now, with the baby,” Leila says, hand resting serenely on her stomach, “it’s like we’re on the same team.”

  “Right,” Mai says, her voice heavy with skepticism. “Remind me, why are we sneaking out again?”

  Leila laughs, a concession. “Maybe a little crazy,” she says.

  “Yalla,” Mai says. “Before she can ask me what I’ve been snacking on.”

  They make their way down the street, almost clean—this is maybe the loveliest part of the neighborhood—past the gates to compounds, the mosaic tiles, the cheerful colors, down the sloping hill to the corner store, where they’ll buy chocolate milk, an excuse for the excursion.

  It feels like a lifetime ago, although it was just a few years that they walked home daily from school together. Leila’s last year at the academy, Mai two years behind her. They walked home every day in their uniforms, ignoring the boys and ignoring the Jews, absorbed in each other’s impressions of the French teacher, and unafraid. Always, they ended up a bit entangled. One sister’s head on the other’s shoulder at a stoplight. One tugging on the other’s blouse, not to communicate anything specific, just to say, I�
��m here, You’re here. It was like your own body, the body of a sister. Only you loved it more, or, with less reservation. There is nothing about Leila that Mai would change. Not even now that she has stretch marks scratching down her belly.

  Easing themselves down the hill, Leila takes Mai’s hand. They went together to get their nails done yesterday—matching sets in a subdued, elegant pink called “Bubble Bath”—for cousin Rania’s wedding tomorrow. Leila’s fingers are thin, all joints, all little knots. Bony fingers tickling her ribs, squeezing her elbow. Is that why Mai felt so immediately close to Noor? Because she’s a thin girl with Leila’s bony fingers?

  It’s true that in some ways, Mai has tried to re-create sisterhood with Noor—the tender exchanges, the conspiratorial laughter, the whispers in sunlight. Only it never quite works. There is no way for her and Noor to belong to each other so fully. Always a certain sizing up of the other, always keeping something close to one’s chest. Always measuring words, your own before you speak, and after, hers—just to be sure, just in case a note of hostility was detected. Care, yes, love even, but also caution.

  The street is quiet this afternoon except for two boys around their brothers’ ages, running after a soccer ball, kicking it uphill then chasing it when it rolls back down the middle of the street. They are Jews from the nearby settlements, with the strings hanging from their pants and their prayer caps. Slowly—or not so slowly—they are taking over East Jerusalem, Palestine’s last holdout in the city. Around the settlers, Mai is careful; she walks closest to the road to keep Leila on the inside. Two army jeeps cruise by slowly. The wiring on the windshield makes them look like they have gritted teeth. Neither girl looks at grimacing jeeps as they pass nor at the Jews inside. They are girls who know not to look. During the Al-Aqsa Intifada, there were tanks parked in their neighborhood. This was in the long weeks after the Jewish prime minister tried to claim Al-Aqsa. Mai doesn’t remember, was a baby, but Leila told her how Mama would push baby Mai in the stroller right past the tanks. “We ignore the dogs,” Mama would say, clutching Leila’s hand and looking straight ahead. It’s a phrase they love to repeat, Leila imitating Mama, who laughs and shakes her head. We ignore the dogs.

  On the day of the explosion, Mai stood in line at the checkpoint. She stood behind two little girls, dressed like two little dolls, in red and white with hair ribbons and Mary Janes, both clinging to the wide expanse of their black-clad mother. Earlier, when they were waiting at the bus stop, Mai and the mother had exchanged greetings. Mai complimented the girls’ dresses, and the woman complimented Mai’s eyeliner, a painstaking feline wing tip. The woman was on her way back from visiting her own mother. At the checkpoint, the little girls tugged on their mama’s long coat, shifted their weight from leg to leg until their mother gripped their hands to say, “Halas!” Mai remembers the shape of them, a trio, moving toward the soldiers when they were called up. Soft smudges of black and red. And then they died. All three of them. Mai learned about it after. There was a photo that Mai was almost sure was one of the girls: a tiny hand dangling from a stretcher. But that is not the image that became famous.

  For a week after the photograph of Mai and the soldier was taken, Mai was ready, waiting for someone to ask: Mama, Leila, Noor, a cousin. Anyone. The answer was always on the tip of her tongue. No, that’s not me, of course it’s not me. But no one asked.

  Baba came back for Leila’s wedding, of course. He comes back when he can. Mai knows it’s not easy for Mama, all alone. For months, they lived with a blue tarp flapping in the upstairs window because the contractor would not rush for a woman. (Tariq got it fixed with one phone call.) But that’s the arrangement Mai knew best: the father goes away, the mother stays home. Had she thought that Tariq, like Baba, would go away? Would come back once or twice a year, to give Leila a baby, to dance at her cousins’ weddings? But of course, it was Leila who went away. Not far—still in East Jerusalem—but away.

  Even before the explosion, it was different. In some ways, the explosion didn’t change anything—just pronounced the changes and, in that way, showed Mai what she already knew: you can’t go back; Leila won’t come home. Leila lives in her husband’s house, tends to the plants of her mother-in-law’s garden. When Mai comes here, she keeps her head scarf on, because she’s in Tariq’s home, even when he’s not here. There are so many bodies between their bodies now. Tariq, the baby. Maybe, really, maybe the soldier too. Is that why Mai did what she did that day? She doesn’t know; probably, she’ll never know.

  The thing about the explosion is that it’s always happening. Or no, it’s always the second before it happens, the second before Mai’s world splits open. This isn’t new, not really. Her whole thinking life, she has thought of this fact as something she knew: that everything can change, all at once, in horrible violence. She thought she knew it, but she didn’t know it, not really. She didn’t know it in her body, it wasn’t a truth that lived in her, and now it is.

  It was a sound but also it wasn’t a sound. She remembers this. The sound was so big she didn’t hear it, only knew it was ripping her apart. One second, she was standing in line at the checkpoint, waiting her turn to go up with her hawiyya, careful with her hands, hands out of her pockets, Jewish cars speeding by as Mai and everyone else waited. One second, she was in the world, thinking about Noor or about Leila, thinking about fashioning her day into a story she could tell them, tell herself. One of the woman soldiers was wearing lipstick—red a shade too dark on lips in desperate need of exfoliation. It was almost funny. A dog in lipstick. Oppress them, but make it fashion. Those thoughts, or ones like them. Mai was wearing her petal-pink flats that look—they really do—like Chanel. She was thinking about how to make Noor laugh with the lipstick comment, or about whether she wants to complete her Audrey Hepburn aesthetic with a string of pearls. Those thoughts, or ones like them, second to second. She had her hands out of her pockets. Her hands were not in her pockets, and when the lipstick Jew called her, she went.

  When it started, she thought she’d been shot. The rush of heat was monstrous. It turned the world inside out and sucked everything in then threw it up again in a rage against gravity. But not a bullet. No, it was a sound. A sound so big it was white, a sound so big it was erasing her. Those are the only words she has for it. That was the bomb exploding.

  After, when she got home—bleeding in the taxi, the driver refusing to take her money (would he recognize her in the photo? Mai has wondered, but after this much time she must assume he has not)—Mama and Leila came rushing out, enveloped her completely. All of them were crying, crying out. They took her inside to bathe, her brothers hiding behind doors, scared by Mama’s fear. Someone, Mama or Leila, got her into the bathtub. It was Mama’s fingers—strong, thick, able—that washed off the grime, used the pitcher they keep for the boys’ baths to wash Mai’s hair, gently cleaning away the blood from the cut on her head—“It’s not so bad, my heart, my life, it’s not so bad.” They wrapped her in clean sheets, like a corpse, and laid her out on the bed to wait for the doctor.

  “Who did it?” Leila asked from the doorway. Mai knew without seeing her she had one hand over her mouth.

  “Let her sleep,” Mama said. Her perfect body, thick and full, weighing down the bed. Strong hands, worried eyes.

  “I woke up and I didn’t know my name,” Mai told them. “Then I ran.”

  “Rest now,” Mama said. “The doctor is on his way. Rest now.”

  The story Mai told—that she woke up and did not know her name—is not exactly a lie. It is true that when she opened her eyes, she didn’t know her name. That part is true. The first thought that came to her was a pure pronoun: I. Her second thought: My legs. She was certain that her legs had been blown off. You must sit up, she told herself. But she was scared of what she would see, so she remained on her back for another second, just another second. The sky was gray and pulsating with light. She ran her tongue around her mouth to check if her teeth were still there. Then, in a single
motion and before she could think better of it, she sat up into a headache that bloomed out from her temples. She saw her body unfolding beneath her—tummy to legs, legs to feet. All of it whole, complete, Mai. She thanked God. She wanted to weep, but she did not.

  Not an arm’s length away was a huge cement slab with a tangle of steel wire sticking out like wild hair. Just a little closer, and it would have crushed her. Here, she thought, here is something else that did not kill me today.

  In the kitchen, Mai finishes off her chocolate milk while Leila warms up the light evening meal for Tariq, moving gingerly. In a single impulsive motion, Mai hugs her sister from behind. “Mama,” Mai says. She can feel the stretched orb of her sister’s stomach, and sometimes can feel the baby kicking in there, although not now. Leila is so big that Mai can’t enclose her fully in a hug. Sometimes Mai will let herself imagine. Imagine we came from each other. Imagine if there were nobody else, if nobody else ever touched us. “Mama,” she says again.

  Leila clucks, shimmies away as she fishes out olives from the massive jar she keeps under the sink. She hefts it up, a jar as big as a toddler, to hold the contents up to the light. The olives are starting to brown a little. Leila might add a lemon.

  “What do you think?” Leila asks. “More lemon?”

  “More lemon,” Mai confirms, reaching for one from the basket on the microwave that Leila and Tariq leave unplugged when it’s not in use. She cuts it into halves, then quarters, then eighths.

  “Habibti,” Leila says, “how’s your head today?”