City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  “Fast feet,” Coach yells, at no one in particular. “Yalla, pick it up.”

  They’re practicing in the Jerusalem stadium today. Last year, when Meir went pro, the stadiums had felt, well, holy. He had wanted to kiss the grass each time he ran onto the field, the announcer calling his name. He wanted to kneel or something, like the players in Brazil and Portugal do, all those goyim with glints of gold crosses on their open chests. Now he understands that it’s not the stadium on its own that is holy. The stadium is only the stadium when it’s full, when barbarian fans with faces painted red hoist their sons on their shoulders and scream until their eyes bulge. It’s only the stadium when the loudspeaker voice is trembling across grass cast greener than green in the nightmare of white lights.

  Cradle, touch, tap. Meir is gentle with his feet as he maneuvers around the cones, aware of Coach watching with his clipboard resting on his belly. Meir whales into a cross that, fuck, swings way out past Shibi. Cus emek.

  “Oy va voy, Klausman,” Coach cries out, his hands on the back of his head, a fat, frustrated old mermaid.

  It’s a miserable ball. Anyone else would let it fly out, but Shibi—that Arab psycho—books it, one leg extending out of bounds in a freakishly effortless-looking limbo move that flattens out his torso. He could be in a Gatorade ad, cus emek. The moment is suspended, airless. Someone whistles in admiration. Shut up, Meir thinks.

  For a while after getting called up to the Premier League—eighteen when he got the call last year, one of the youngest—all Meir could talk about was Shibi Hassin. At dinner, in the family group chat, walking home from services on Saturday. Shibi the playmaker, the true number ten. Shibi the broad-shouldered Arab with a shaved head like a bullet, the cleft-chin Arab who was bulky but somehow agile, accelerating like a guy half his size. An Arab, yes, but different from the Arabs who came to work on the settlement, guys from Palestinian villages who did construction and got paid in cash. Shibi was different.

  Aba listened when Meir talked about Shibi, listened and nodded his head. He sat at the head of a Shabbat table that was covered in disposable tinny lasagna dishes and half-empty soda bottles. Gray hairs sprouted out his nose. He said to Meir in Hebrew, always in Hebrew—Talk to me in English, Meir wanted to say. Talk to me in your mother tongue. But always in Hebrew, his father said, “Remember, they only look like you.” There is a Jewish soul and there is an animal soul, and nothing in between.

  In the yeshiva, debates were ongoing about whether Meir would be desecrating Shabbat by playing on Saturdays when the games started before sundown. For a while, it seemed that every observant Israeli had an opinion on whether this was permissible, everyone knowing that of course it was basically not, but enough people wanting it to be permissible that they finagled an interpretation of the commandments. Kula v’Khumra, the lenient and the strict. What it comes down to, really, is how far you have to push the boundaries of the issue to protect its heart. How many hours to put between eating meat and dairy? Or, maybe better to say, how close can you cut to the heart while still preserving the heart? How late in the day can you pray the shema? There are times for Kula and times for Khumra. This is what Meir’s aba said when he gave the lengthy explanation that concluded, as everyone in the room knew it would, with the decision that Meir could play on Shabbat. The real reason, in Meir’s opinion, is that he’s the youngest—the blessing of his father’s old age. Aba already has a son to be proud of—one who served with combat engineers, studied Torah with his M16 resting under the yeshiva bench. His father already has eight grandkids by Meir’s two sisters—one in Jerusalem and another way out beyond the safety of the settlement gates, in a trailer encampment on a hill that one day soon will either be recognized by the State or evacuated by it, protected by a husband who goes every morning to shacharit services with a handgun tucked into his jeans. What could Meir give his father that he doesn’t already have? Let the boy play, Aba must have said.

  On TV this morning, there was a photo of the Arab from the mall. At least on the UK news that his mum streams at home. She had it on while she packed Meir the lunch he’d bring to practice. “The sandwich wraps are corn flour, so say Shehakol on them, not Hamotzi,” Ima said, fussing with Tupperware at the kitchen island next to the dairy sink. “Hello-o, Merush, do you copy?” She said it in English. She talks to him in English except around Aba.

  “Beseder, Ima.” He knew he should answer in English—he needs the practice—but it takes too much effort.

  He always tells himself that he won’t bother with the blessings over food when he’s at practice; if he’s eating bread, won’t bother to go to the bathroom and rinse his hands with the two-handled jug, the one that Coach himself—after meeting with a rabbi about how to accommodate Meir—made sure to put in there so that Meir could fulfill the commandment. He tells himself he won’t bother, won’t bother to step out of the bathroom before he says the words he’s been saying his whole life, Blessed be thou, oh Lord our G-d, king of the universe, who has sanctified us with your commandments and commanded us on the washing of hands. But he always does. Maybe that’s how it is, growing up the way he did—it’s easier to keep going than to stop.

  The image on TV was the Arab in a hospital bed. His face, what you could see of it, was ballooned. Hard to tell where the eye was supposed to be. Blood-damp bandages, neck splint, arm in a cast. An older woman was holding up his face for the photographer, so you could see the dark wound of his mouth. Maybe teeth missing, hard to tell.

  Meir was eating cornflakes that had a picture of Shibi on the box. Every few months it’s a different futbal star, and this month it’s Shibi—the first time they chose an Arab. Meir doesn’t stand a chance to end up on a box unless he’s starting.

  The news anchor said something about internal organs. They cut to a video, security footage from the mall parking lot. The news anchor said the Arab’s name: Salem Abu-Something. Ima muted the TV, but the CCTV footage didn’t have sound anyway, just the date and time on the bottom of the screen.

  What the video showed began before Meir had gotten there, when it was just a few guys outside Burger Ranch, waiting for the Arab to come out. Four then five guys. Later, he’d found out that the initial group had planned it—not to get this Arab in particular, but to get one of the Arabs that hung around the mall, to wait outside the burger place until they got one alone. Revenge, they said, for Yael Salomon. Fourteen years old when she was stabbed to death in her bedroom. Everyone had seen the photos on Facebook—blood smears on the floor. But at the time, Meir didn’t know it had been planned; all he knew was that he was part of something. The video pauses when the scrawny Arab comes out of the burger place. Red circle on the screen. He’s the only one who doesn’t know what’s about to happen. Then the video jumps ahead again. The crowd is a teardrop now, maybe ten or so guys, not quite encircling him yet. You can see the Arab trying to get away without breaking into a run. Someone hits him with something. Meir wasn’t there for that either. It’s blurry on the screen, shot from above in black-and-white by a camera mounted on a streetlamp or roof, but it seems like maybe they hit him with a stick or a baton or something, hitting the Arab’s back. You can see that he staggers. But it hasn’t really started yet. Something is holding the guys back. A few of them run up and shove the Arab, then return into the crowd. The video jumps forward again. He’s on the ground now, and you can’t see him anymore, just the bodies pressed around him, jerking, jerking—something is making them convulse.

  Meir couldn’t pick himself out in the video. That’s you in there, somewhere in there. He tried to make himself know it, but it all seemed so far away somehow.

  Certain things you can’t see at all in the video. You can’t tell that by now, he’d wet himself. Meir remembers someone yelling, “He’s pissed himself, the Arab pissed himself.” You can’t hear that. And you can’t hear the groans—not from the Arab, he stopped making noise after a while, but from each guy who kicked him in the back or balls, or stomped down on
his fucking head. That’s not in the video either.

  Another jump in the footage. This last part Meir hadn’t seen: the crowd gone, the Arab lying in the street. You can’t tell it’s a person, just looks like an old towel or something. People walk by.

  Ima turned off the TV. She didn’t ask if Meir was there when it happened. On the cereal box, Shibi is holding the ball under his elbow. He’s not smiling but looking intensely out at Meir, like, Game on, motherfucker.

  Meir resumed eating his cereal, though he wasn’t aware that he had stopped. A familiar swell of frustration grew in him. He could just release it, like going into the bathroom to jack off, but Ima would probably start yelling for him to hurry up and get to practice and it would all be ruined.

  “Why does the news keep saying the Arab was a boy?” Ima asked. “He was in a gang!”

  “They come up from East Jerusalem,” Meir said. “They bother the girls.”

  “And it’s just a matter of time,” she said.

  “Through a fence, you mean.” Through a window, into a little girl’s bedroom. Meir knew that Ima was already making Facebook posts about what happened, writing stuff in English for those back home, or back in England, whatever he should call it—he wasn’t born there. Sure, the Western media picks up on this unfortunate event, she’d use those words, “Western media” and “unfortunate event,” but where was their coverage of the terrorist attack less than a week ago? What did the Western media say about Yael Salomon? What did the Western media say about the carnage in her room, the blood on her floor?

  “Wall or no wall,” she said.

  “I know, Ima.”

  “Fourteen years old.” She covered half her face in her hand, like she was praying, but she wasn’t. Ima went to Yael’s funeral. She knows her mom.

  “Ima, I know.” He felt the rising panic of knowing his mum might cry.

  Meir doesn’t ask himself a lot of questions. He has his goals, he has the enormous task of maintaining those goals, maintaining his body in service of his talent. But every now and then, maybe when the World Cup is on TV and Israel hasn’t qualified, or when he hears one of the trainers talking about one of their part-time jobs, questions sneak up on Meir. What if his parents had stayed? What if he’d grown up playing on the futbal pitches of England, in their youth clubs? No army, no terrorists—or, well, not as many terrorists. But he can’t let himself go any further than that. Something in him folds away from the questions. So he tells himself, Look, you would have been a thin, nervous outsider touching your kippa, okay? How many Jews do you know playing for Man U? Okay? He’d be bruised knees on the Tube. Jew boy with shtetl Hebrew like Aba. He’d miss the league tryouts for Shabbat, since it’s different for Jews outside of Israel, how careful they have to be. His parents had left England so they could stop being weak Jews. Aba and Ima wanted Hebrew-speaking babies who ate raw cactus fruits and shot rifles, so here Meir was.

  After the drill, the guys cool down by running a few laps. Coach stands at the center of the pitch, slapping his thigh, all yalla yalla, and reading inspirational quotes from this stupid book he loves, Life Lessons from Athletes, or something like that. With his inflated-looking belly and stick legs shooting out from his shorts, Coach really does seem like a lollipop, hence his nickname. When the guys use it, as in, “Lollipop was killing me today,” they use the Tel Aviv word for lollipop, which matters, as Meir learned recently in the locker rooms, because the word for lollipop in his slang, the Jerusalem-style slang they use on the settlements, actually means blow job in the rest of Israel. It’s like the secular are from a whole different country: a different language, a different calendar. Lollipop—currently standing in the middle of the field, yelling about freeing the mind from the body—probably can’t even name the Jewish date, the real date.

  As he jogs, Meir looks down at his body in motion: the automatic legs, the unmistakable imprint of abs against the snug, sweat-wicking top his aunt sent from England. A warm pleasure rises in him, not the sudden rage of being turned on by some slutty girl posting a photo of her ass for attention, but a quiet, stable gratitude he feels toward his own body, his beauty, really. He thinks of the prayers he has said every morning as long as he can remember. Give thanks that your soul has returned to your body; give thanks for the Torah and the commandments that separate us from them; give thanks you are not one of them, not a goy, not a slave, not a woman.

  He pulls back against his instinct to speed up and pass Amir, instead slows down to match his pace. Amir lumbers along, his bulky, overproteined shoulders outweighing his slim waist. Meir and Amir have an understanding because they were both raised religious, even if Amir isn’t observant anymore. His forearms are covered in thorny-looking tattoo branches, or maybe they are supposed to be claw marks. Still, he seems close with his family, always complaining about his mother’s meddling, his sister’s shithead fiancé. In a Mizrahi house, things are less divided, Meir thinks. Half of them keep Shabbat, half of them are using their cell phones under the table, but they all go to Torah services together on Saturday morning, even if half of them drive to the beach after.

  Meir nods at Amir, who slaps him on the back a little too hard. Showy guy. “Achi.”

  “Achi.” Call and response. “How’s your brother-in-law the shithead?” Meir asks.

  “Achi, he’s still looking for a job.”

  “Tell him we need a new goalie,” Meir says.

  Amir ignores this. “What kind of man? You know what I mean?” His torso is very erect when he jogs. He takes sips of breath between every few words. “I should have known. In the army, he was a fucking jobnik.” He looks at Meir. “Nothing personal,” he says.

  Everyone knows that Meir will serve a desk job in the army. Not a warrior, no, but a jobnik. Nothing personal. Fuck you. Later, Meir knows, probably in the shower, he will get trapped in a fantasy version of this conversation where he replies in a way that makes him seem smarter, more powerful than Amir. What he needs is a plan—a line he’ll use for the coming years, as he finds himself, again and again, on the wrong side of the warrior-jobnik rivalry.

  Meir’s army summons came maybe a month ago—deferments all used up—complete with the blessed papers confirming his special athlete’s accommodation: a desk job with few hours, no combat, barely any basic training. The only way to do less in the army is to do no army at all, like a black-hatter Charedi supporting twelve kids on unemployment in Bnei Brak, or like an Arab, like Shibi, who will spend his afternoons on the pitch while Meir slouches around in a polyester uniform stapling duplicates together in an office with girls who smell like cheese.

  Amir somehow did it all. Before he went pro, he was a warrior. Nothing elite, something to do with tanks, but still, a warrior. During the war in Gaza, not the one last year but one before that, his reserve unit was called in to help with a sweep. A video of Amir filmed by one of his tank-mates got pretty famous: he’s shirtless in his army cargo pants and combat helmet, juggling a ball in a makeshift camp outside the Gaza border fence. You can still find it on YouTube. When the video starts, Amir is already talking to the guy filming. “Yalla, achi, let’s beat Hamas in futbal instead,” he says, eyeing the ball as it bounces from his thigh to his chest down to his feet then back up to his thigh. “Five on five,” he says. “Winner takes Gaza.” His dog tags smack, smack, smack against his bare chest, smooth and hairless thanks to laser removal, Meir knows. Amir talks about it without shame. He got his hairy ass done, too. In the video, Amir is filthy but in a way that seems kind of glamorous under the harsh desert sun. The whole thing looks like a war movie. In the background, a soldier in boxers pours a bucket of water over another soldier who is in briefs. They wash their armpits, handing a bar of soap back and forth between them. The water reddens the earth where they stand.

  They played the video on the news pretty much constantly during the ground invasion. When Amir came back, they put him on a cornflakes box, too.

  If you saw Amir on the street you might think h
e was Arab, his coloring is olive like that. His grandparents walked from Iraq—literally, arrived in Israel by foot. The guys in Amir’s family find ways to announce they are Jews: his dad wears a kippa, Amir has his tattoos, his Star of David pendant, his deep-V tee.

  Amir gets girls. They like his swagger and indifference. He’s talking about his current fuck now—some German girl—how he’s driving to Tel Aviv to see her tonight. “She’s crazy,” Amir says, stretching his arms as he jogs. “Which, you know, has its benefits.” Amir’s eyes are electric, sensuous. Meir recalls the story about Amir losing his virginity—his dad taking him to a whorehouse when he turned thirteen. Meir didn’t tell him how his own father listens outside the bathroom to make sure he isn’t jacking off.

  Meir asks, “Did you see the video?”

  “What video?” Amir pants. “You mean the Arab?”

  “Yeah, well, maybe. Which one?”

  “You mean the terrorist?” Amir says. “The car ramming?” This is their most recent tactic: mowing people down at bus stops.

  “No. Wait, when was the car ramming?”

  “I don’t know, there’s always a car ramming.”

  “Achi. No.”

  “You mean the video of that Arab getting beat,” Amir says.

  “That one, yeah,” Meir says as he scouts around him. He spots Shibi, running a few paces ahead. He wants to make sure Shibi doesn’t hear. Or no, maybe he wants to make sure Shibi does hear.

  “That video is crazy,” Amir says.

  “Yeah,” Meir says. He thinks, If only you knew. It feels good.

  “That poor kid.”

  “He wasn’t a kid,” Meir says. Up ahead, Shibi doesn’t turn around.

  “He was like, what, fourteen, fifteen,” Amir says.

  “Look,” Meir starts to say, but he stumbles and has to catch up a few steps.