That day, after Baba got the cash, the three of them walked up the boardwalk, north past the port where men fixed fishing nets and tourists ate fried seafood from paper cones, north until they reached steps that took them down to a beach, a small beach, not with umbrellas and lifeguard stands, but just a sandy place you could descend to. They had less time than they’d thought they would have—in a day of buses, each one takes slightly longer than you expect, and the end result is no time at all. But still, they descended down the stairs from an overlook surrounded by people taking photos and a man with puppets performing for change. That was not the first day he saw the sea, and it would not be the last, but it’s the time he remembers best because it was the first time he felt he understood what he was seeing: a fucked-up version of history that happened to be true. He looked up the coast to the skyscrapers of Tel Aviv, he looked behind him to the familiar white buildings of Jaffa, and understood that he was in an inverted world where the Jews lived in the grand villas of murdered Palestinians and Salem lived in a camp that was walled off and forgotten by everyone, even their own government, who Baba said were as bad as the Jews and not to repeat that.
Young as Salem’s brother was that day, he acted even younger, running toward the water then running away. He wouldn’t have done it in front of anyone from home, Salem knew, but they were far away from home. Salem found himself kicking rocks. On the beach, a settler couple pushed a baby stroller in the sand. The husband was not carrying a handgun. Elsewhere, a man was photographing another man with blue hair holding a violin. Gays? Salem kicked a rock. He felt a surge of annoyance, rage. Up north, farther north than they would go that day, he could see the glittering towers of Tel Aviv—the Tel Aviv that people talk about. Blue glass, green glass, balconies. Already, Baba was mounting the steps to go back, to go home. Salem’s brother shouted at him, “Baba is leaving,” then to Baba, “Baba, wait!” Salem kicked a rock. Seeing that Salem was coming, his brother, scrawny kid, ran after their father, who was already halfway up the stairs to the street. Salem paused. He turned to the sea. He bent down and picked up a stone, a perfectly smooth gray stone that he truly expected to throw as hard as he could into the water. But he didn’t. He lingered one more moment on shore, looking out at all the blues of the sea, all the nameless shades of blue churning. His thumb moved over the rock. Now there is nobody on earth who knows how Salem did not throw the stone into the sea, but slipped it into a pocket. He took the small stone home and then almost immediately lost it, of course he did. But he remembers the pull in his gut. Or, better to say, his gut remembers how Salem was pulled between the sea and his father, between disgust and fascination for the glittering Jewish city.
When the beating started, Salem fought back. The news reports don’t mention this. They talk about him like he was helpless, but he did fight back, and he made good contact: someone in the face, someone else right in the solar plexus. But after one of the Jews kicked Salem in the nuts, he went down and it got bad. At first the kicks sent something horrible through his whole body, waves of hell. He threw up. They didn’t stop. He tried to crawl away. He fell back down in his own vomit. Someone kicked him in the face. He was blacking in and out when his nose broke. Snotty blood down the front of him. When the heavy dark washed over him—a dark that has not lifted even in this hospital room, where Mama holds his hand and cries while a machine goes beep-beep-beep—when it washed over him he was, for one perfect breath, back at the sea, his brother calling after him and Salem half turning, saying, “Hold on, I’ll be right there, hold on,” the stone unthrown in his pocket, waiting.
Spring
Augusta Victoria
Vera is hungover in Bethlehem. Any day now, Salem Abu-Khdeir is going to die. The article Vera successfully pitched to Der Spiegel promises an intimate account of nationalism and violence, hence this interview with a Palestinian professor at Bethlehem University. Professor Farha—“Call me Samar, please”—is a carefully dressed middle-aged woman. Dress slacks, no hijab. They sit at the professor’s desk, which Vera will describe, when the time comes, as buckling under the weight of stacks of papers and books in English, Arabic, German, and French. Her article will not mention that Samar shares her on-campus office with two other instructors, also women, lest it undermine Samar’s credibility.
Using each of her fingers in succession, Vera pushes at a torn cuticle on her thumb. So far, she has not gotten the intense, powerful quotes she had hoped for from the professor. “Let me ask you directly,” she says. “What do you think will happen when he dies?” Salem has contracted some kind of infection in his breathing tube. He will not emerge from the coma the Jewish mob beat him into.
Samar tugs self-consciously at her dark blue patterned blouse. “As you know,” she says, “most likely, if Salem dies, the Israeli army will kidnap his corpse.” The woman’s German is superb—an effortless Berliner’s Hochdeutsch that Vera herself is careful to use, lest she sound like the Swiss milkmaid her classmates used to joke that she was. Outside the office window, pale leaves shimmer in clear light. Spring in Bethlehem, nearly Easter.
Vera fights an urge to check her phone for messages from Amir. She’s on airplane mode, not so much to prevent him from reaching her, but so she’ll stop hoping that he might. His chat icon is a newspaper photo of him moments after scoring a goal, on his knees, back to the camera, tattooed arms open to the futbal stadium. The icon tells her he’s online, that he’s seen her messages and is ignoring them.
Samar continues, “That is why you are writing this article, yes? On the assumption that the army will come for his corpse?”
Rather than indulge Samar’s rhetorical question—obviously that’s why Vera is writing this article, obviously Der Spiegel finally accepted her pitch because the boy is going to die and someone must write a grievous, enraged account, and obviously she saw her chance and took it—Vera pushes on. “Why would the Israeli army steal a young man’s corpse?” Sometimes, conducting interviews, she feels guilty, as if the interview were an inherently violent, combative practice. And yet, she needs quotes from this Palestinian woman: powerful quotes, ones that will bolster her own ideas about what the violence done to Salem means.
Samar echoes the question. “Why?” She looks tired. Her hair is dyed black. Vera wonders how old she is. Early forties? Everyone knows that the army steals corpses to prevent martyrs’ funerals from becoming protests, but that’s not what Samar says. “All nations sustain themselves on violence.”
That’s not bad. Vera writes that down. All nations sustain themselves on violence. Does that sound too academic? Her editor at Der Spiegel is worried about the article feeling too academic. “When people are killed here, it’s like their bodies belong to an ideology,” Vera said to him on the phone recently. Think of it: nearly Easter. Christ is about to be executed in accordance with the scriptures. Holy Week. In the story, he is at a Passover seder—the last supper of his life—holding up the ceremonial matzah to say, Take, this is my body. On Friday, Christ will die. The son of God, a corpse. And it will be this body—the body nailed up and dying in public, the body carried limp and torn down from the cross, bloodied in its burial shroud—this is the body, behold, this is the body that will inflict millennia of believers with a madness to kill and die. Teenagers are dying, and it is Easter in Jerusalem. At this point, her editor had cut her off. “Fine, fine, fine,” he said. “Just don’t get too theoretical.” She’s never met the editor in person. She pictures a neatly dressed man in his thirties—that mystical age of fruition—who wears wire-rimmed glasses.
Vera wonders if she should give up on the professor and pack up. After all, she needs to get to Augusta Victoria Hospital soon in case it happens today. Perhaps the interview was doomed. Samar seemed disappointed right from the start, as Vera used her phone to take photographs for the story and video for the online version. “I thought there might be a photographer,” Samar said, tugging at her blouse. All downhill from there.
But just as Vera is abo
ut to ask Samar if she’d like to make any final remarks, there is a knock on the office door. Two students, girls in hijabs—one in pink, one in white—lean their heads into the doorway.
“Excuse me,” Samar says to Vera in German, then louder, in Arabic, “Tfaddalen, yaa banat.”
The girls step into the room. “Professor,” the one in the white hijab says in Arabic, “are you busy?” Vera worries that she always sees a woman’s hijab as her defining feature. She tries to notice another detail. The girl is very thin.
The one in the pink hijab says, “Oh!” when she sees Vera. “Excuse us,” she says in English.
Samar does not seem upset. “Hello, girls.” She smiles, speaks warmly. “I am in an interview.” She introduces them in English. “These are two of my favorite students.” Noor, skinny in the white hijab; Mai, pretty in the pink.
“I’m interviewing your professor for Der Spiegel,” Vera says in English. “May I”—she glances at Samar, who nods—“may I ask if you have heard of Salem Abu-Khdeir?”
“Of course,” Noor, the thin girl, says, almost derisively, so stupid the question must sound to her. Who hasn’t heard of the boy? For months now he has lain in a coma, kicked into a vegetative state by a settler mob. “Mai lives not far from the beating.”
“In East Jerusalem? In Shuafat camp?” Vera asks, surprised. It’s a rough place, and the girl in pink has a real princess vibe in an expensive-looking floral blouse buttoned all the way to the top.
“Not in the camp,” Mai says, touching her sternum elegantly, “in a villa.” Then she says something in Arabic to Samar, too fast for Vera to follow.
Samar translates: “Mai says it’s no surprise that the Israelis did that to Salem, only surprising that anyone cares.”
Once the girls leave, making arrangements to review their essays with Professor Farha in half an hour, Samar and Vera continue the interview. The professor speaks with an increased intensity, which Vera isn’t sure how to account for. Perhaps the presence of her students reminded her that she, not just Vera, has something to gain from the article—a certain acclaim. “The Israelis say that we are a ‘culture of death,’” she says. Here, Vera makes a note to herself: “Embed footage of Hamas martyr’s funeral.” (Her editor pushes for this type of “multimodality” for online versions.) They are afraid, Samar continues, of Palestinian pain, Palestinian grief. The Israelis are haunted by the current of despair that accompanies a young man’s body through the streets of his village or refugee camp, lifted high and wrapped in a flag, the energy that unfurls into rallies and protests. It terrifies them to the point that they have begun stealing the bodies of the Palestinian dead. You’ll get special forces in a hospital—nurses cowering with trays of pudding, unarmed doctors with clipboards standing bravely, uselessly in the doorways of their dead patients. The Israelis come in and they take the bodies. “Who has the culture of death,” Samar asks, “if they are the ones stealing corpses?” Then she says—and this is the part that Vera underlines twice in her notebook, with two stars in the margins and the recording’s time stamp circled—she says, “And what do we have left? Not even the right to mourn.” There it is. This is what she needs, what will probably become the headline. Here are the words that Vera came to extract: Not even the right to mourn.
On the bus back from Bethlehem to Jerusalem, Vera finally checks her phone, but her restraint was for nothing. Amir has not responded to the single text she sent from Bethlehem: a poster of a martyr with the caption Hi from the territories. She used the Israeli word for Palestine, a shameless attempt to coerce a response from him, maybe a text saying, Be careful, along with a few knife emojis in reference to the recent stabbings. But no, nothing.
Amir Oved. Jewish and Jerusalem-born, and yet, not exactly not Arab, although he’d freak out if she said that to him. His grandparents fled Iraq. Now here he is, the tattooed and coddled son. What a joke: Vera obsessed with an actual pro futballer.
Over the course of these humiliating months, their sex has developed a deep, ecstatic rhythm. His fingers in her mouth, his slow, agonizing thrusts opening her. Never two nights in a row. Always three days apart, or four, or a week, or once, when she called him too many times and he seemed annoyed, ten miserable days. But when he is inside her again, the wound repairs and deepens, repairs and deepens in the same gesture.
She hardly notices when the bus stops at the checkpoint before the tunnels. There is no need for someone like Vera—white, German passport—to get off the bus, but the Palestinians file down and line up outside to have their identification checked. Vera remains seated, merely holds up her passport open to the visa page with her left hand; with her right hand, she keeps scrolling through her social feeds. People who aren’t her have birthdays, stories not written by her are being shared by other journalists. Here’s my take on the most recent stabbing. Here’s my take on Hamas beheadings. Here’s my take on the finances of the Occupation.
Two Israeli soldiers board the bus, one of them joking in Arabic to the driver. Sometimes they are friendly; other times, they play tough and bark at tourists for their visas. You never know what you’re going to get.
It has only taken a few months for this ethnic sorting to become familiar. At first, it shocked her. When she landed in Israel from Berlin, she went to passport control with her visa and a letter from the editor at the in-flight magazine confirming she wrote for them. A woman, no older than Vera, in a tight bun behind a high desk in customs shuffled through the file. “You Jewish?” the agent asked in English. Vera heard herself gasp. Such a question seemed to emerge from the nightmare of history, a question from Vera’s own history, or the one she inherited, haunting her now in the mouth of a woman, a girl her own age. “I am not Jewish,” Vera said. Then after a pause, scrambling to say something neutral, “You have a beautiful country.” The agent didn’t respond to this.
Now Vera looks up when the soldier reaches her seat. The one who seems to be in charge leans forward to inspect her passport photo, matching it to her face. He is a pale teenager with prominent ears. The soldier behind him in a bulletproof vest is black, Ethiopian Jewish, presumably. Vera flashes a tight, brief smile, and the soldier continues down the bus aisle.
After she puts away her passport, she scans a disgustingly popular article about love and violence by a Jewish American journalist named Sara. Vera actually met this woman last fall at a film screening, introduced by a mutual Israeli friend. “It’s cool you two meet. You’re similar.” Vera and Sara, Sara and Vera. The occasion was a documentary screening—a series of frenetic jump cuts in which the director, a woman, re-created her mother’s madness. In the lobby of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque, Vera and Sara had circled each other, throwing out attentive-seeming questions, each growing infuriated as the other willfully misunderstood perfectly clear responses. Or was that just Vera?
“Why you didn’t get off the bus?” The soldier is yelling at someone closer to the back of the bus.
Vera and the others crane back. She can’t make out the person being yelled at.
“Why you didn’t get off?” the soldier yells again, for some reason in English. Then, “Btehki arabi?” You speak Arabic?
The response is mumbled.
“Yalla, get down, get off,” the soldier says.
Vera goes back to her phone. Since meeting Sara, Vera has undertaken an obsessive binge of the American journalist’s oeuvre. Sara writes frequently about her sons, currently in Israeli elementary school, in a way that’s unsettling but, fuck, so effective. Sara doesn’t so much toe a line as maintain a contradiction, in which she’s a liberal who bemoans the loss of any human life, and yet also a Zionist willing to make the sacrifices that a Jewish state requires. This maudlin gunk generates tens of thousands of retweets and shares. Vera’s editors constantly remind her that this kind of “engagement” really does matter. In one article, Sara wrote about summer camp, how she was a camp counselor in Vermont the summer before she went to college, but how her young Israeli sons,
when they come of age, will be in basic training not long after they turn eighteen. I don’t believe in weapons, she wrote, but my sons will sleep with M16s under their twin beds. Sara closed that article by saying she wasn’t sure she was a believer, but like every mother whose sons are fighting, I will pray. The image this sentence conjured for Vera was Sara as a giantess, looming in a ragged toga, gobbling up her blood-pulped children as in the walls painted by Goya in his blindness.
Finally the two soldiers leave. As the bus pulls back onto the highway, Vera is aware of her hangover pulsing down from her temples into her empty stomach. She briefly considers going back to Tel Aviv. Just an hour by bus from Jerusalem to get back to her mattress on the floor, her clean white sheets, her dried lavender in an old beer bottle. But she worries that if she returns to her apartment, she’ll activate some greater irony, and Salem Abu-Khdeir will die without her there to witness it. She’s gotten superstitious, as if she and not Amir were the professional athlete.
All day, she has been waiting for him to respond to her texts with the one text she hopes to see: Come over. He had physio today, and sometimes he likes to nap after. She hates that she knows his schedule, can recite the days he’s got futbal practice in the mornings, his game days, his off days. His hours are etched into her own, but the reverse is not true. He’ll go for days without responding to her messages. Each time, she promises herself that she’ll ignore him when he stops ignoring her. But when he finally does send her some indifferent sentence fragment, she replies right away. If she could only ignore him long enough to make him feel something.
City of a Thousand Gates Page 12
