City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  “Well, we miss you,” Alon says, generously. Ori wonders if he had to force Danny to come. Soon, Ima will come down and tell Ori it’s time for his physio appointment, and the guys will go back to being soldiers.

  “It’s weird being home,” Ori begins. It’s weird not having a weapon, he’s about to say.

  But Danny breaks in: “What did she smell like?”

  “What?” Ori asks.

  Danny repeats himself. “What did the Arab girl smell like?”

  It takes Ori only a second to process the question for what it is: a test. Alon and Moshik shake their heads, but they don’t tell Ori not to answer and they don’t tell Danny he’s an idiot for asking. They wait. Ori remembers so little from that day. Her voice coming to him as if they were underwater. Floating, soft. The ambulances, I’ll take you to the ambulances. She didn’t save his life, but she didn’t not save his life. She helped him walk. Her body, so small, propping up his. Her hands gentle around his rib cage. Slowly, she said. Why him? That question, surely, is a boundary that now exists between Ori and his unit-mates. Is he some kind of Arab-lover? They all must wonder it.

  Danny is waiting for Ori to answer. What did the Arab girl smell like? The question is a test, yes, also an attack, sure, but most important, it is an opportunity. It doesn’t matter what happened. It doesn’t matter what Ori felt—brought to safety by a girl with a soft voice and gentle hands. All that matters is right now, what he says to his brothers next.

  “Like hummus,” Ori says.

  Danny looks up at him, hopeful and relieved. “What?”

  “Achi, I’m telling you,” Ori repeats, holding eye contact with Danny, “the bitch smelled exactly like hummus.”

  And then Danny is laughing, and Alon and Moshik are hooting in disbelief and Ori feels, for a beautiful second he feels, like maybe everything is going to be okay.

  Meir’s Mum Watches TV

  Susan Klausman pauses in folding the laundry—she’s waiting for Meir to come home from futbal practice—as she watches a BBC update on the recent terror attack over in America, and it’s horrible, obviously it’s horrible—twelve Jewish teenagers killed when a gunman walked into a JCC, bloody footprints on the sidewalk in the afternoon, Jewish blood—yes, it’s horrible, it’s horrible, just like all the American Jews crying on TV are saying, parents doubled over like they’ve just been kicked in the stomach. “It’s horrible, it’s so horrible,” they say. “I never thought, we never thought,” then not finishing the sentence, but Susan knows exactly what they did not think, which is that it could happen there, it could happen in America, in the northeast of America—not in the dark tangles of that country’s fetid South but in the northeast—filled with liberals and smug ideals, the same way nobody thinks it could happen in London, and this is what gets to her, because of course they never thought it could happen to them, of course they thought they were an exception, but now they see, now they see, now they see, and look, it would be wrong—it would be incorrect—to say that Susan is happy it happened. How could she be happy that those babies were massacred? How could she be happy to see Jewish blood spilled? No. No, obviously Mrs. Klausman is not happy it happened. That’s a disgusting thing to imagine, being happy it happened. But—at the same time—there is a fist inside her that is raised, that is vindicated. Watching those parents, those weeping parents, she shakes her head to herself and says, “Now you see, now you see, now you see.” Who is she talking to? To those Jews who stayed behind in England, in America, in France. The diaspora. The doubters. Now you see that they hate us. Now you see that they will always hate us. Who is “they”? Everyone. Everyone who is not a Jew. The man who did it was white. No matter. The Arabs, the Muslims, the Nazis. The goyim. Now you see why we came to Israel, why we need Israel. Now you see what we have known, what we have always known, what we cannot forget because every day they try to kill us. Mrs. Klausman is surrounded by newly washed, unfolded dish towels, by piles and piles of Meir’s boxers and compression shorts and futbal socks. Last week, the only news she saw on the BBC was about that photograph—the Arab and the Soldier. Who cares? Where was the coverage of the most recent stabbing? An Arab stabbed a boy Meir’s age in the middle of Tel Aviv. Right in the bus station. Now it’s all about this attack in America. On TV, the parents are screaming about gun control. Gun control this, gun control that. What they don’t see is that you fight hate with power. You become powerful, so powerful that if someone hurts—hamsa, hamsa, hamsa—if someone hurts your baby, if someone touches a hair on the head of your precious boy, you can make them wish that they were never born.

  Emily in Rechavia

  Emily knows that she’s better suited to live in Tel Aviv, in one of the gentrified neighborhoods with abundant Pilates studios, pop-up shops for crystals, and weekend-long probiotic workshops. But she and Ido live in Jerusalem, and this feels right, because (1) she and Ido have a car, of course, which means they can escape the claustrophobic shutdown that reigns each week for twenty-five hours from Friday night through Saturday night, and in that way, the city isn’t too oppressive; (2) Ido’s parents gave them a house, like gave them an actual house, where Emily tends a garden filled with kale and rosemary, breastfeeds her baby in rooms with high ceilings—an Ottoman house, some call it; others, an Arab house, because of who was chased out; (3) Ido’s job is in Jerusalem, at an animation studio in an industrial zone on the outskirts of the city, and even if his web comic has kicked off in a meaningful way, and even if Emily’s own posts have begun generating considerable revenue since she photographed the Girl and the Soldier, she knows that Ido will continue working at the studio for the simple reason that he likes having somewhere to go every day.

  But (4) may be the most important reason to stay: Jerusalem is magic.

  Or a kind of magic. Emily’s acupressure masseuse, an Orthodox Jewish woman originally from Florida, described Jerusalem’s magic as “touching planes,” which doesn’t quite make sense but is also perfect. So for example, you’ll hear a song, and it will make you think of a woman you knew only briefly. Or, no, you didn’t really know her, not really; she was someone who sold tiny flower bouquets out of a nonkosher café on Fridays, before Shabbat came in. They were wildflowers, bound together in twine, and affixed to them, always, was an unbearably short poem in Hebrew that Ido, when Emily brought one home, would help her sound through. B’stav—“in the autumn”—matok—“sweet”—hiyah pardes-i—“was my orchard.” Ido told her that the word for “orchard,” pardes, was associated not just with fruit, but with learning to the point of a divine encounter that drove some to madness. Emily thought pardes sounded like “paradise,” the English word, and looked online to find it wasn’t a coincidence: the words sprang out of the same Persian root, firdaus, which in Arabic came to refer to a layer of heaven. Emily saved that particular poem, or verse, and even now, it is tied to one of the bunches of dried sage and rosemary she keeps hanging in the windows. How did it survive all those moves? That brown slip of paper? But it’s there, though you’d never notice it unless you were looking for it, hanging in the stately bathroom window, the frosted glass overgrown with creeping vines that tremble pale green in the sun. B’stav matok hiyah pardes-i.

  That was all a long time ago now. They were both students. It was the winter when they began, Ido and Emily, a rainy winter. Nearly every weekend, Emily, who was at that time in Tel Aviv for a master’s, and who had no expectation of staying more than a year, took the forty-minute bus ride to Jerusalem, because Ido had a one-bedroom apartment, but she lived with a roommate whose small dog was always pooping in their living room, which was also their dining room.

  Even before she moved to Jerusalem, she felt at home in the city, or at least, in Ido’s gentle part of the city—a place that invited walks to and from cafés with mismatched tablecloths and slow service by barista–art students who were discussing a poet, a documentary, a feeling; a place where trees older than the state of Israel shaded crooked sidewalks and rain-blanched
benches. Emily felt herself a bit more dreamy here than in frantic Tel Aviv, more quieted. She loved wandering with Ido around the bookshops of his neighborhood. Ido looked for old children’s books, interested in the drawing style. Emily pretended to consider volumes of poetry while watching people come and go: old-world men with scholarly stoops and worn-out coat collars who inspected the volumes, or were hurried along by wives with plump wrists and thin gold watches, scolding their husbands in Polish, in Yiddish. The old men left trails of papers, shedding papers like dandruff: sheet music for violin, photocopies of rabbinic commentary, humanist critiques of Zionism in German. All the old men carried the heavy plastic shopping bags they took to and from the National Library, where bags of any other sort are forbidden.

  The young men who worked in the bookshops were shy and helpful. Thin and overworked, in wire-rimmed glasses, they had the same bent posture as the old men. The Rechavia Stoop, Emily called it to herself. Rechavia was the name of the neighborhood. All the streets were named after Jewish writers and philosophers, poets, translators of Homer into Hebrew.

  That winter, she and Ido fell into each other quickly, and right away, it was more than dating. They called it playing house. In their version, playing house involved cooking elaborate, beautifully seasoned meals together and making love—sometimes sweet, sometimes rough—on every chair, couch, and window ledge in the leaky, creaky apartment. That’s how they imagined married life. Each week, Emily came in on Friday and left on Sunday. The café, the one where the young woman sold flowers, was on Emily’s way from the bus station, just as she descended the hill that constituted Ido’s neighborhood. She’d stop at the café so that she could knock on Ido’s door bearing flowers. On Fridays, and maybe every day, for all Emily knows, the café was always playing Israeli folk music. One song in particular always seemed to be on rotation: a sleepy children’s song about David and Goliath. The girl—the florist—was Emily’s age. She wore an apron with many pockets, each of them with different types of scissors for different types of flowers. She sat at the table the café let her use; she fashioned bouquets from flowers in buckets at her feet. Because Emily came each week, the florist—Inbar, maybe her name was—began putting bouquets aside especially for Emily. Wild bunches of purple thistles and unnamed yellow flowers, filled in with sprigs of rosemary, plant of remembering. B’stav matok hiyah pardes-i. In autumn, my orchard was sweet. Sweet was my orchard in autumn.

  But where is she now? Emily wondered recently, when she passed an open window and heard that particular song—that sweet, silly folk song that nobody plays anymore, a children’s story, a murder, David and the giant—the one that was always playing as Inbar bound her bouquets, and in that very moment, eleven years later, on a street in Rechavia, there she is, as if the song summoned her. Here is Inbar, walking down the main street of Rechavia, not as she was, meaning not a mirage, but really Inbar, appropriately aged and holding the hand of a little girl, maybe five, who wears a sweater stitched in a floral pattern, vines and blooms all over the little torso. “Yalla, Stav. Yalla, Stav-chik,” Inbar is saying to the child. She named her Stav, autumn. B’stav matok, sweet in autumn. And before Emily can say anything, before she can lift her hand to wave, to say, You know me, before any of that, the woman and child have rounded a corner, and they are gone.

  To the Sea

  They call it going to “The Sea.” Hamid can’t remember which of his friends came up with the name. Maybe Muhi? Poor Muhi. Finally out of jail, never leaving his house. This never ends, does it? What is “it,” even? But it never ends. Hamid is alone. He has come here alone. The Sea. To get here, you ease yourself down the terraced slopes of Beit Jala, down among the shards of white stones like scattered teeth, like fragments of bone among the grapevines and olive trees. It may be fifty kilometers inland, but they call it The Sea because it’s as close as they can get to the sea, this in-between place.

  Hamid eases his way down. Behind him, the unpaved road curves toward the closed Tunnels Checkpoint. Maybe it was fate that put him here on the day of the explosion. From here, he was able to run to the checkpoint in just a few minutes.

  The Jews forbid anyone to build here—in the sloping zone between the road and the checkpoint—although probably, one day, the Jewish settlements will spread to here, too. But for now, it is just the hills, sparsely green and farmed by Palestinian hands, dotted with a few crumbling ruins of old stone houses. Going to The Sea means perching up on a ruined roof, somewhere private—hidden from the road by the incline of the hill above, hidden from the wealthy Christian houses that dot the ledge, hidden from the checkpoint, from the settlements. Hidden.

  Hamid hoists himself up onto cool stones. The valley unfolds beneath him, hills and wadis flowing westward, all the way to the sea. In another life, a freer life, Hamid could walk all the way there, past settlements and army bases, walk into the past itself, through the ruined fields of his grandparents’, the ghosts of villages, all the way, all the way to the sea.

  In the years since high school, The Sea has become Hamid’s refuge. He comes here alone as much as he comes with his friends, and has to assume that they do the same: that each of them has, in turn, come to sit on the ruined roof alone. Who built you? he wonders. And who was chased away? Who was murdered? Who is gone? The foundations indicate that it once stood at four rooms, at least, but most of the walls are gone. Now, as afternoon slips away, Hamid is alone with the gnarled trees, the blameless sky, and his own confused thoughts—Ramadan thoughts. The fasting makes all his thinking at once more spectral and more lucid.

  Hamid is not sure he’s religious anymore. Not that he thought of himself as religious before, just he never really thought about it at all. But still he fasts, because, well, that’s what you do.

  Recently, it’s been impossible for him to hold on to a single thought, any thought, for more than a second, before some contradictory notion comes crashing in. He tells himself he’s losing interest in religion, that what matters is people: humanism. But almost in the same instant, he feels a deep sense of betrayal by almost every human being he has ever known. At least the Jews are open about it. They are what they are, they kill who they kill, and they don’t pretend otherwise. But then there are the Palestinian police, secretly collaborating with the Jews, or beating up shabaab at protests in Ramallah, just because it makes them feel like men. And Mai. She wasn’t who he thought she was. She wasn’t the girl he dreamt, wasn’t anyone at all, and he won’t tell—he’ll let the story slip away, won’t reveal what he knows about that day, but he won’t forget. She didn’t come back to finish the semester before the break began for Ramadan. Maybe she’ll never come back. It truly does not matter. All he knows is that now, he is twice as alone as before. Hopeless. Everything feels hopeless. The animal of this place is eating its own tail. When it becomes too much, he comes to The Sea.

  Hamid rests his chin on his knees. He is alone. Here, it is only the land. Hamid and the land. No people, no history, even. He closes his eyes. He lets himself imagine that from here, he can hear the sea, the crashing of waves traveling to him over the hills and wadis. He imagines he can hear the sea making its persistent promise, whatever that is—something about eternity, about oneness, about annihilation. He keeps his eyes closed. He can do that here, at The Sea, because he knows when he opens them again, there will not be another soul in sight—only a stray cat, too far from whatever dumpster it calls home, stalking tiny white butterflies in the blurry, nostalgic light before the sun begins to set.

  Samar’s Fast

  No, Samar never called the German journalist back, did she? Lingering in the back garden, alone among her father’s fruit trees, Samar is listening to old voice mails that need to be deleted—Your mailbox is full. And no, she never did call her back, Vera Something, the German journalist who, back in the spring, left three (a bit excessive) messages—“Marhaba, Dr. Farha; Guten tag, Professor Farha; Samar, hi, it’s me”—asking if Samar would please (please, please, please) comment on
the Girl and the Soldier, the photo that the Israelis may not have faked, Samar isn’t as sure as everyone else, but that they certainly capitalized on. Now it’s summer. Samar doesn’t know if Vera is still here, or if she’s off documenting war elsewhere—white supremacy in America, who knows.

  The back garden is mercifully cool near the end of the day. Samar, hazy and dehydrated in the final hour before the fast breaks, lets herself weave in and out of the plum trees, the apricot trees, the lone almond tree, with its hard-won, fuzzy fruits. Her senses are precise, sharp with hunger. The flutter of bird wings ripples like the pages of a heavy book. Some of these trees are as old as Samar. The two olive trees are older. Siblings. Inside the house, her sister-in-law is in charge. Fatima. Sitting by Mama’s bed, adjusting her IV, rushing back and forth to the kitchen to check on the Iftar meal.

  “Welcome,” Fatima said when Samar got to the door. “Ramadan kareem.” Her pudgy little face was glowing. Playing hostess.

  “Welcome?” Samar said archly. Then gave an insulted little cough. As if Samar had moved out already, as if Fatima and Samar’s brother no longer lived in the apartment down the hill that Father bought years ago, as if this house were already Fatima’s. “Ramadan kareem,” Samar said as pointedly as she could, walking past Fatima, through a doorway that is more familiar to Samar than her own body, the dip of the threshold worn over by generations of feet.

  Fatima trailed behind Samar, talking sweetly, eagerly: “The new IV is more comfortable for Mama.” A girl, Fatima, her youngest brother’s young wife—glowing with health, with youth, with yet another pregnancy, like a sweet little overstuffed confection. She has the look of a country girl.