City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  Yitzi is right about this pointlessly complicated, time-consuming arrangement: They’ll walk all the way to the armory. Two k, at least, and from there somehow get to the fake Arab city for the simulation. It makes no sense. Why can’t they go from here? What’s the point of such wasted time? When he was young, this was the part about the army that made Ido want to smash his head into a wall—the lack of coherent explanations for anything. But these days, he loves it. He craves the nonsensical chain of command, not having to think, just to do what someone tells you to do. It makes him feel like a child.

  From the day that he and Emily brought Mayan home from the hospital, he had been secretly hoping to get that text message from Gil, telling him to pack a bag and drive south from Jerusalem into the desert for training. He knows that it makes him a hopeless trope—the newly minted father looking to the past to escape a beautiful if exacting wife—but he can’t help it. When Gil’s text message finally came, it was apologetic—congratulating him and Emily on their little girl, offering assurances that, if necessary, Ido could skip this round of reserve duty. It wasn’t a huge deal, Gil said, just some training on the new rifles. Which is, of course, not how Ido relayed it to Emily. “Baby, you know I wouldn’t go if I didn’t have to,” he said in English, almost always in English. She was holding their baby like a prop, as if Mayan were somehow part of the argument.

  Ido crossed the bedroom to her—sweet Emily, scented by the organic rosewater she sprays on her face throughout the day; little Emily, in mismatched wool socks and with her still-soft belly, which embarrasses her so much but which he wants to squeeze and kiss. He took her hand, knowing that she would pull it free—the pattern of her rejecting his touch was exhausting and, frankly, unoriginal—and she did.

  “Are they sending you into the West Bank?” An annoying question, but not a stupid one: reserve units often work the checkpoints, sometimes deeper in. It takes a lot of manpower, “oppressing a civilian population” (Emily’s words in his head).

  “They are not,” he told her.

  “But if they ordered you to, you would go.” The baby rested over her shoulder in a little striped onesie Emily’s mom had sent over from the States. He knew without seeing that their daughter was grasping for Emily’s hair, the gold of it fallen loose from what she calls a messy bun, which always makes Ido think of German pastries.

  “They haven’t ordered me to.” He rose from the bed and walked over to her; the room lit softly by the small fairy-style lights Emily had used to frame the doorway and the bed’s headboard. They stood in a room filled with framed photographs of them smiling alongside framed prayers and mantras scribed by Emily with a quill—real feather and ink, a brief fixation of hers—to yield a shaky, imprecise Hebrew. This is Emily, his American Jew, hanging the feathers of birds of prey in their windows.

  “But you would go,” she insisted, trying to catch his gaze as he looked away.

  Once, when it seemed like it would never happen, he’d told her he would refuse to serve if they tried to send him to the West Bank; he’d go to jail before he let them use him that way. But that was never true. They’d tell him a place to show up, and he’d show up, same as always.

  “That’s not what my reserve unit is for,” he said, needing to force her out of the question she was trying to ask, needing to shut down the insane, hysterical morality test she was attempting. He took the baby, her weight in his arms a precise calculation. He knew Emily was struggling with herself in that moment. He knew that she would give in, that deep down, she likes to give in to him. He felt the scratch of his cheek against the baby’s soft head, wispy hairs. He knew before it would happen that the baby would make an adorable, helpless grab for his caterpillar eyebrows, and Emily would try not to laugh, and that would be it. The question about his reserve duty—about his participation in the military and what it meant and who it hurt—would once again dissolve.

  Ido and Yitzi are trudging side by side while Yitzi takes selfies to send to his wife. So begins their two-k trek along the unpaved road toward the base’s center. Always familiar: the weight of the packs pinning you to the earth, fixing you to the rhythm of your stride, a stride somehow matched by everyone else’s. When did it become so miraculous to Ido, the unity between bodies?

  It’s been about a year since he and Yitzi caught up; Yitzi didn’t make it to the last training. They’re all connected on social media, but you know how that goes—you mean to look at other people’s lives and just end up clicking backward through your own photos, watching yourself dissolve into a young man. Or is that just Ido?

  Over a decade ago—cus emek, well over a decade now—he had been in basic. His father waited with him at the bus stop that would take him to the base, Ido with his high school backpack and a buzz cut, one he’d done himself; it made him look like a penis. Other families turned out in big numbers to see off their own—Mizrahi mothers with tan arms stacked with clacking bracelets, crying out in deep, exotic accents, pressing their sons into giant tits. His father, stiff and uncomfortable, leaned against the bus stop; they were in some southern neighborhood of Tel Aviv where all the roofs were tin.

  “Why are you doing this?” his father asked. He was a fleshy man who ate unsalted food and read Bialik in leather-bound volumes, wore pastel polo shirts bought in America. “We don’t have to do this,” he said. He meant, people like us aren’t cannon fodder. At that time, boys were still dying in southern Lebanon, and in a few months, the Second Intifada would rear its head. It was unusual for someone from Ido’s neighborhood to choose to go to infantry. Most of his classmates—kids of lawyers, architects—would go serve in desk jobs, even the guys. One or two might ascend to the ranks of the air force demigods. But Ido had been set on infantry.

  He and his father stood under a tree with large, oily leaves that cast shadows like hands on his father’s face. Ido answered. He said, “I’m doing this because it’s mine to do.” And then the bus pulled up and he got on, feeling bigger than himself, bigger than his father—a jobnik who had spent the Yom Kippur War on a telephone in the Kirya base in central Tel Aviv. Now Ido can’t imagine using a line like that—it’s mine to do—and keeping a straight face. Some things you can only say when you’re eighteen.

  “How old is your boy now?” Ido asks Yitzi between breaths.

  “Shilo, the little prince, he just turned four,” Yitzi says. He makes some quick movements with his thumb over the screen then holds it out to Ido: a naked child with a garden hose. He’s lighter than Yitzi.

  “What a cutie,” Ido obliges. “And the cold war?” This is how Yitzi refers to relations between the mothers-in-law. Ido remembers when Yitzi first got married to that Ashkenazi girl. “It’s hard to say whose mother considers this a bigger tragedy,” he said at the time.

  “You know how it goes, Abuya,” Yitzi says, breathing through his mouth as he adjusts his pack. “Now that they have a grandkid to fuss over, they don’t worry about us.”

  Ido knows if he checks his own phone there will be messages from Emily and photos from yesterday’s visit to his parents’ condo—his father holding the baby, grinning up at the camera or staring down at her in terror and wonder, as they are all prone to do. Emily gets along too well with his parents, who are delighted with the enhanced credibility—of the educated, Ashkenazi, upper-middle-class persuasion—brought by this pretty, American leftist. She is a kind of ornament that confirms their worldliness, their good taste, as if they weren’t invested in the status quo and all it has given them. And yet, a sudden memory of Yitzi at, cus emek, nineteen years old, coming over for Shabbat dinner. The relief to find that it was easy, fun even—Yitzi making his parents laugh with Arabic expressions he learned from his ancient safta come over from Yemen, his father breaking out some great stories Ido had never heard before about bartering cigarettes for Adidas track pants back when everyone was on rations. Even sixteen years ago, it had mattered more, much more than now, what kind of Jew you were: your last name, your skin tone. So m
aybe he’s being unfair, or underestimating them.

  “Yitzi, how long . . .” Ido hesitates. “How long, I mean, after the baby, how long did it take for things to go back to normal?”

  “Between you two, yanni?”

  “Between us, yeah.” He’s embarrassed. He doesn’t look at Yitzi.

  “Give her time. It’s been what, five weeks?”

  Ido nods. “Yeah.” Although it’s been only three.

  “So tell her she’s beautiful and be the big spoon. The rest will come, Abuya.”

  Emily and Ido were in their twenties when they met by chance in a claustrophobic bar favored by Jerusalem art students. This bar—did it still exist?—always played the right music from the wrong place: ’80s hardcore out of Jamaica, ’60s girl groups from Sri Lanka. There, among the braless and dull-eyed, was Emily, soft-haired and open-faced, so unlike Israeli girls, who treated dating like a hostage negotiation. He sketched her on the back of a coaster. In those days, halfway through his animation degree, he was always drawing. Even seeing was a kind of drawing. That’s how they trained you in the sketching courses—bodies moving broke down in his vision into cones and squares, triangles and arcs, always arcs, in the pelvis, in the neck, in the hair. He wouldn’t give her the coaster with her portrait until she gave him her phone number. It seemed like what an American girl would expect an Israeli to do.

  She was visiting Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, visiting Tel Aviv from Michigan, or not really visiting, she said, doing her master’s degree in “conflict resolution.” The way she described the degree, it sounded vaguely recreational—mostly guest speakers, all in English—but anyway, she said, she planned to have a career in something more creative, working with brands, maybe. What he noticed was that her lips touched between words.

  The best part about being with an American Jew was how sad you could make her. Ido remembers them sitting together on his narrow bed, the chill seeping out of the bloodless Jerusalem stone, while he told her about the Second Intifada—the fire and the mobs, the bodies in the street, the haunting echo of their call to prayer. She was almost in tears when she said, “But you were just babies.” He told her the only Arabic he knew was Show me your ID. Stop or I’ll shoot.

  “How do you say, ‘My name is Emily’?” she asked.

  He laughed, delighted to have been set up so perfectly. “Emily, we don’t introduce ourselves.”

  At that, her face had contorted into a tragic mask that, later, he would connect to the expression she made as she orgasmed, fighting off something inside herself as she kicked against his legs and he repeated in her ear what she had begged him to say, “You’re mine, you’re mine, you’re mine.”

  Should he have been paying more attention to the divide? Until the baby, their political differences had never seemed to be more than a kind of elaborate foreplay, a site of difference that excited them both, like the weight of his body against her smallness, the smoothness of her tummy and arms against the monstrosity of the little black hairs that cover him like a pelt. But now, those differences are taking on concrete significance.

  Any day, Emily is going to begin insisting that they look into some mixed “hand in hand” day school where all the students learn to write their names in Hebrew and Arabic. A school like that is a natural target for right-wing hard-liners with firebombs, probably Hamasniks, too. And for what? So his daughter can have friends who live in East Jerusalem neighborhoods he won’t let her go to? And every time there is a terrorist attack—a stabbing, a car ramming, who knows what else—Ido will have to wave at women in hijabs dropping off their kids, wondering if they were among those celebrating in the streets, ululating like animals at the news of spilled Israeli blood.

  The armory is a busted yellow trailer, draped half-heartedly in camo netting. By the time they get there, it’s nearly noon and the sun is harsh. The others wait outside, eating the candy bars and protein drinks they brought from home. Ido goes in hoping to escape the too-bright sun. Inside, the air is stale. The counter is strewn with broken staplers (Ido just knows, broken) and coffee-sogged paper cups. On the wall, a hand-drawn poster wishes some departing officer well—Good luck, Gabi!—with cutout photos of smiling girls and jobniks chasing one another with staplers. Behind the counter, the oily jobnik who signs out the weapons looks up.

  “No air conditioning?” Ido asks.

  He could swear the kid rolls his eyes. Shithead. He looks like the kind of guy that girls talk to when they are having trouble with their boyfriends, the kind you worried about while you were out in the field. Fucking jobnik. Calm down, Ido catches himself. What’s wrong with you? He’s a kid. They’re all kids. He goes back outside.

  Outside the armory, Gil is using his shoulder to talk on his cell phone so he can pick at his fingernails, while around him, the guys lean against one another or squat in the red earth. The scene looks oddly composed, like a Renaissance painting of early martyrs. Yitzi in quiet conversation with Erez, who is now in real estate, while Tal and Tal—both young, both in their twenties, both studying at the Technion, both Tal—lean against the pile of packs and stare somewhere off canvas. The sun passes behind a cloud. “Beseder, okay, no problem, beseder, achi.” Gil puts his phone in his cargo pocket and addresses the group. “So Golani is lending us a few young ones,” he says, “for the drill.”

  Ido and Yitzi sit in a beat-up desert jeep on either side of an enlisted soldier who has, no joke, the kind of features you’d hand-select if you were custom-ordering a baby boy: a strong chin, jawline like a model, blue eyes like a Swede. Beautiful kid. The jeep bounces across packed red earth, shifting all of them on the hard seats of the open vehicle.

  “What’s your name?” Ido asks, keeping his voice low so it travels. His hair is a little in his eyes, the dirt and sand are everywhere—it’s great.

  “I’m Ori,” the beautiful kid says. He’s affected the glazed eyes of an overworked warrior, but his half smile reveals a dimple. Pretty boy. The guys in his unit must give him shit. “You?”

  “I’m Ido, and he’s Yitzi,” Ido says, gesturing to Yitzi, who’s on his cell phone, bouncing with the motion of the jeep as he types away.

  “What?” Yitzi looks up from his phone and yells across Ori to Ido, into the wind of the moving vehicle, the dust stirred up by the treads.

  “I said you are Yitzi,” Ido yells. “Yitzi!”

  “What?” Yitzi yells.

  This embarrasses Ido more than it should, his friend’s inability to hear what’s going on.

  After a couple more attempts to get them to repeat stuff—“What? Nu, what?”—Yitzi gestures to his ears to say, Can’t hear you, and begins filming the ride on his phone, the bleak desert flashing by. Videos to send home, to say, Here I am.

  But sitting as close as he is to Ori, Ido finds that his voice carries, he doesn’t even have to yell when he gestures down at Ori’s rifle and asks, “So, how do you like the Tavor?” Then, immediately, he hates himself for asking.

  Ori glances at him, already bored, probably. “You know, beseder.”

  “When I was a soldier”—Ido can’t believe he’s starting a sentence like this—“when I was a soldier, we were on the M16s.”

  “Some units still use them,” Ori says flatly.

  “The trigger on the Tavor is a little heavy, you know?” He wants to stop but doesn’t know how, so he keeps talking. “But great firepower.”

  “Sure,” Ori says, and Ido decides to leave it at that. On the hilltop opposite them, a Bedouin ignores his scattered goats and talks into a cell phone. Ido knows from Emily how the army is dispossessing them of their land, village by village, to create more firing ranges. Someone will have to chase this man out of this area one day soon. Someone else.

  After Ido finished basic, his father pretty much gave in. He said something like, “Well, if someone has to be doing it, at least it’s you and not some extremist.” At the time, Ido found this inspiring, but now he’s not sure. Was he any more gentle than the next guy when i
t came to putting a teenager’s wrists in zip ties?

  The training facility rises out of the desert in the not-too-far distance. Ido has trained here twice before and he still can’t get over the size of it. Hundreds of buildings, they say, six kilometers all told, and he believes it. The army did an amazing job, right down to the burnt-out Mercedes stuck in the dirt, the posters of martyrs, the hurried graffiti over the three- or four-story buildings. No smell of rotting trash, though, no burning rubber, no human shit, and of course, no Palestinians.

  The jeep stops outside the city’s perimeter. The road is asphalt here; they paved it and everything. Where it enters the city, the road forks into two almost immediately, but not before creating an anxious little bottleneck where they’ll be running the drills. Ugly cement buildings regard them—perfectly spaced windows and doorways like eyeless sockets, like toothless mouths. No curtains, no glass, just holes. From across the city comes the barking of dogs, which must be the K9 units.

  Their small group gathers around Gil, who explains the exercise. “Listen,” he says, “we’ll warm up with a sweep.” Gil no longer seems goofy but impressive, capable. He nods a chin toward the enlisted soldiers. “You guys, too.” Already, Ido feels embarrassed about how rusty he’ll be, how heavy his equipment will feel.

  Gil says that after an hour, they’ll switch to an enemy sniper drill. He holds up a few kaffiyeh scarves—authentic ones with the white and black checkers. Ido sees Ori nudge another enlisted soldier his age, and he knows they are hoping they’ll get to be Arabs for the drill. Soon they’ll begin a simulation of combat that feels more real than anything that’s happened to Ido in the last year. Ido will crouch in the thresholds of houses that have never been homes and hunt the gray and empty city for Ori the blue-eyed terrorist. Gil won’t be filming anymore. Instead the entire thing will be caught on the closed-circuit cameras that monitor every inch of the city. It’s all there, being recorded so that afterward they can do a play-by-play: See, you wouldn’t have died there if you’d been paying more attention to the upper floors.