City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  By the time Vera gets off to East Jerusalem, it’s late afternoon. When she pushes through the grand wooden doors of the hospital, she recognizes Sara immediately. This bitch. These are the first words she thinks—in English, oddly—when she sees the American journalist and peddler of emotional porn in the marble lobby. Wide-hipped with her hair in a wispy braid, Sara sits on a wooden bench, typing something into her cell phone. It’s obvious that both women are here to write about Salem. Fuck.

  Sara catches sight of Vera and stands to greet her—flowing over in some flattering, expensive-looking caftan in a neutral color that disguises her body. Vera is aware of her own cheap harem pants, bought for a few shekels in Tel Aviv’s central bus station.

  “Vera, right?” Sara says as she approaches. Men would shake hands, but the two women merely stand in front of each other, close enough to throw a punch, or to hug.

  Vera nods. “Sara?” she confirms tentatively, as if she hasn’t read everything Sara has ever published, repeating especially indulgent sentences aloud to herself in a voice brimming with gleeful disdain. She picks awkwardly at a torn cuticle.

  Sara nods then gets right into it. “Any idea when the director is coming out?” she asks. She breathes heavily through meaty nostrils. On the intercom, a doctor is paged. Vera doesn’t catch the name.

  And of course Vera has no plans to meet with anyone. She didn’t think—what an amateur!—to reach out to the hospital director, but she says, “Soon, I think.”

  “I hope so,” Sara says. “We need an update.” Her hair is in a long braid that falls over her right shoulder, gray hairs peeking out from her part. It’s girlish in a way that is entirely unerotic on a woman who is at least forty.

  What’s more repulsive than a woman who doesn’t act her age? When Vera was maybe twelve—this is among her least favorite memories—she watched her mother try to sit on her father’s lap. Almost fifteen years ago. She remembers Mother talking in a baby voice, but can’t remember what she said as she flung herself into Father’s lap, maybe something about Santa—all this in front of Vera—before he gently pushed her off, saying something along the lines of, “Come on now, dear, that’s enough.” What Vera remembers clearly is his reaction before he spoke: his thin face contorting in disgust.

  “Well,” Sara says, “nothing to do but wait.” She returns to the wooden bench where she was sitting before, and Vera hesitates uncertainly until Sara gestures for her to join. They sit together. Afternoon’s fast-draining light spills across the clean marble floor. A tall, lean doctor clips by, speaking hurriedly to a nurse trailing behind him. Sara and Vera follow him with their eyes. They are the only white women in the room. The women behind the administrative desks wear hijabs.

  The waiting room has all but cleared out; the light has faded. The receptionists are shutting off their desk lamps when Sara exclaims, “Shit!” She is reading something off her phone. Then, presumably in some sort of gesture to Vera, says, “Scheisse.”

  “What?” Vera asks, seeing no alerts on her own phone. Could Salem have died already?

  “Did Kareem just blow you off, too?” Sara asks.

  “Who’s Kareem?” Vera responds, picking up on it too late and hating herself. She presses at the tender crease on her thumb, the little patch of living skin revealed by all her picking.

  “Oh, the hospital director.” Sara eyes Vera appraisingly. “He texted, No improvement. Talk tomorrow. That’s it.”

  It’s early enough that Amir might text yet. “Beer?” Vera asks tentatively. The hospital is famous, Vera knows, for a small café run by German church volunteers. Actually, she’s avoided it for that reason—too close to home, too much to get away from. And yet.

  “They’ll have wine, right?” Sara asks, tucking her phone into her shoulder bag—an orientalist affair with tassels and beads. She explains she’s keeping kosher for Passover, meaning no bread, no beer, no grains but that unleavened matzah-bread.

  Vera nods. She knows about the holiday from Amir. “They’ll have wine,” she confirms, not knowing but assuming. A bottle of house red that’s been open for a few weeks, rancid and warm.

  They exit the grand hospital building, through the lobby, down the white steps into the vestibule and out the double doors. The grounds are quiet as the sun continues to sink. You could run to the café in less than a minute, across the wood-chipped path, but they walk slowly, turning around to see the hospital, the incongruous bell tower, white and looming. Neither woman speaks.

  Vera wonders what Sara will write about the hospital itself. Augusta Victoria—such a dramatic setting for this inevitable tragedy. Have they both noted the stately white bell tower, so European and misplaced? Who will work in the detail of the preposterous bell, installed by the hospital’s founder, Her Imperial Majesty Augusta Victoria, the last German empress? Who will linger for a moment on the early, rosy days of the twentieth century, before all its teeth were ripped out? Did they both scribble notes as they wandered the sequestered hospital campus, dry pine needles crunching under their feet, noting the picnic tables filled with Palestinian parents eating packed lunches? Surely, Vera hopes, Sara had no need to mention the banner draped above the entrance: easter blessings from our family to yours, written in German, English, and Arabic. No Hebrew.

  Vera enters the café behind Sara. The music playing from the speakers swells with heartfelt guitar chords. The only person in there is a pimply teenager hand-washing glasses—“A Lutheran!” confides Sara. Vera takes a bottle of Palestinian beer—brewed clandestinely in a Christian village—from a fridge filled with Evian and Fanta, no Israeli brands. Sara orders her glass of wine at the bar.

  Vera picks at her cuticles. “So what’s your . . .” She hesitates here. She knows the word in English. Not approach, but kind of a synonym in this context. “What’s your angle?” That’s it: angle.

  “Well, my work probes the emotional reality,” Sara says, taking a small, reluctant sip of her wine. The damp wooden table where they sit wobbles.

  “The reality of whom?” Vera asks, intending the question to be harsh—a critique on Sara’s trite navel-gazing.

  “Sorry, I don’t quite understand.” There is no apparent edge in Sara’s voice. “What do you mean, ‘the reality of whom’?”

  Vera feels a wave of embarrassment. She thinks of her English as perfect. “I mean, whose reality do you probe?” She takes a long pull of her beer. Bitter bubbles.

  Vera wants to tell this woman that she speaks three languages. She wants to say it in German and watch Sara’s stupid face contort in confusion. Mostly, she wants another beer, but feels weird fetching one in front of Sara, who has barely touched her wine.

  “Give me a second?” Sara says. “I’m going to find the bathroom.”

  As soon as Sara has disappeared, Vera gets up to grab another beer from the fridge. She begs herself not to check her phone, then checks it anyway to find, of course, no messages from Amir. She begs herself not to text him again, but she does that, too.

  When Sara comes back from the toilet, she’s wiping her hands dry on her caftan. The way Sara’s eyes shift to the bottle, it’s clear she’s noting Vera’s new beer but deciding not to say anything. Vera flicks the dry tail of her thumb cuticle; Sara picks right back up, talking about her angle. “I’m focusing on the mothers,” she says, touching the stem of her wineglass.

  “Which mothers?” Does Salem have more than one mother?

  “I’m starting with Yael’s mother.”

  It takes Vera a beat to place the name. “Yael is the settler who was murdered?”

  “She was fourteen,” Sara says. Now her voice is not without an edge. “Like Salem.”

  Already, Vera can anticipate that Sara is going to write about cycles of pain and revenge. She will focus on these two mothers; she will make their lives symmetrical, and in that way, she will avoid the complication of acknowledging the disparities in power that define their respective lives.

  “I’ll work in the mother
s of Passover,” Sara continues. “It’s a story filled with lost sons, after all.”

  Vera can also anticipate that Sara’s article will be almost unbearably poignant—dripping with meaning. Politics simplified into feelings. Passover. Dead children. Spots of red wine on a white plate, blood of the firstborn son.

  Vera wonders if Sara knows how lucky she is to have sons. What an atrocity it is to have a daughter. It was not long after Vera’s father pushed Mother off his knee that Vera made a show of sitting in his lap while her parents sat reading in silence on the couch. “You’re too old for this,” he cried out, but he was joyous, overflowing. Vera’s delightfulness told him something he wanted to know about himself.

  “Anyway, what about you?” Sara asks.

  “My angle?” Vera clarifies, unnecessarily.

  “Yeah.”

  “Bodies,” Vera says. “The symbolism of bodies. It feels like the right fit for my readers.”

  Sara doesn’t ask who those readers are, which annoys Vera because Der Spiegel still carries weight and actually pays pretty well, almost as well as the in-flight magazines she spends long days writing for each week: fluffy, adjective-heavy write-ups of restaurants, yoga retreats, all of it—this is Vera’s stipulation—without a byline. But Sara asks, “Were you all day at the hospital?”

  “No,” Vera says, “I was in the West Bank most of the day, in Bethlehem.”

  “Oh?” Sara hasn’t drunk more than half a glass of her wine.

  “Yeah,” Vera says, “I interviewed a professor at Bethlehem University. She writes about nationalism and violence.” What she doesn’t mention is that she found Samar by searching nationalism violence Israel Palestine on Google Scholar, then clicking around until she found someone who had published in German.

  “Oh, wow, academic,” Sara says, which makes Vera cringe, thinking of her editor.

  Vera begins, “I’m not saying that Salem’s body is like the body of Jesus, but . . .” She stops herself. Sara is not looking at her, she’s texting something on her phone. Vera suddenly feels embarrassed, or maybe exposed, like she’s too sincere, like she’s the only one who is letting this kill her. “Who are you writing for?” she asks abruptly. She has to know.

  “The Times,” Sara says. “The New York Times.”

  Well, fuck. It makes it worse to know that Sara can’t read the German article Vera will write. Even if they do translate it for the English site, Sara still probably won’t read it. Neither will Amir.

  Sara’s thumbs hover over her screen a moment, then she starts texting, mouth vibrating in a private little smile. There’s only one reason for that expression: a woman knowing that a man wants her. Does Vera look like that when she’s reading a message from Amir?

  Imagine this: it’s Amir that Sara is texting with, Amir sending Sara a photo of himself standing in his bathroom mirror, cock in his hand. Revenge of the mothers.

  Vera wants another beer, doesn’t feel these two—three?—as much as she would like, but has to be careful about overspending the story advance. Who still gives a story advance? A luxury. But she wants more. She wants to feel good, or maybe just not shitty. She wants a lot of things. She wants to be valued, to be read. She wants to touch people, touch everyone, but can’t quite bring herself to admit it. Is this what holds Vera back from being a real writer? That she writes not to seek after the truth, but to be loved, or at least admired? She wants all of her ex-lovers, all the men who let her go, to read her work—never mind that Amir doesn’t know German and may well be illiterate—to read her and in that way, to know her, to really know her, from an inside that even in sex she couldn’t communicate.

  She can’t bite down close enough to get rid of the last bit of cuticle skin, so she takes a risk and rips the cuticle off her thumb. Immediately there is blood—a vibrant moat filling the space between her thumb and nail. Under cover of the table, she presses her thumb into a damp napkin, hopes that Sara doesn’t notice.

  “Well, your angle,” Sara says leaning forward, putting her phone screen-down on the table, “about bodies and how they are, maybe, exploited? It sounds very brave.”

  And maybe it’s the flush of goodwill that beer cracks open from her heart, or maybe it’s the way Sara’s face seems old and unfuckable and tender, but Vera wants to be known by this woman, to say something sincere rather than always thinking one thing and saying another. Vera says, “Nothing here means what I think it means, yeah?”

  “I think I know what you mean, but what do you mean?” Sara says.

  “Like, the first time you went to a refugee camp, didn’t it seem misnamed, somehow?”

  “I’ve never been.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, I took Israeli citizenship, so—”

  “But Shuafat camp is around the corner from this hospital,” Vera says. “It’s between us and the university.”

  Sara nods, like she’s interested.

  “His camp, Salem’s camp, the dying boy’s camp,” Vera says, unable to stop her voice from raising. “Sara, it’s inside Jerusalem. It’s right here.” She gestures vaguely behind herself.

  Sara presses her lips together.

  “You really haven’t been?” Vera is almost pleading.

  “Like I said, I focus on motherhood,” Sara says, her mouth hard.

  You can live inside a place and refuse to see it; you can live inside a marriage like that, too. Her parents tell themselves a story about themselves. Whatever doesn’t fit, they ignore.

  “What I was going to say,” Vera takes a breath, “is that a Palestinian refugee camp isn’t what you picture.” She is trying to push forward, not to lose faith and give up on this entirely. “UN canvas tents, bags of rice, yeah? But it’s not. Imagine the southernmost slum in any Mediterranean city.”

  “A crumbling maze?” Sara asks, leaning forward.

  Who let this dumb cunt write anything other than YA novels? Vera truly wants to know. “Yeah, exactly, a crumbling maze.” Already, she has lost the stamina to try and explain what it’s like being in a room filled with young men, lean powerful bodies, telling her a story and watching her, watching the way her body moves, deciding which kind of woman she is; there are exactly two. How part of you is listening and the other part has separated, aware of the knife on the dish, put out by some young Palestinian wife when she came in with the juice and fruit. Don’t narrativize the facts, but establish them, keep them handy. The father comes down now, shows you where the Jews came in, the soldiers. You move from room to room together, him having you picture the screaming women, the breaking lamps. The young men all follow behind like a chorus, watching. Where are the women? Invisible. Stop at the bedroom, when he enters the bedroom, stop at the threshold. Keep taking notes, look up, look down, but do not enter the bedroom with the man. Don’t let those facts—your body, the bed—be correlated. Stand on the threshold, while he stands by the twin bed, and tells you about his three sons in zip ties, led off into the harsh lights of the IDF jeeps, led to a room where the Shin Bet guys were waiting. One son came back with his jaw broken. He is not even in high school yet.

  To Sara, Vera says only, “They are weird places, is all.” She picks at an imaginary table splinter. She checks her phone to find that Amir hasn’t responded to her most recent text, the one promising that she was a little tipsy, and all that entails. Remember this, she begs herself, please remember this: the acid shame of someone not wanting you. Remember. But even as she begs herself, she is forgetting, she can feel herself forget, feel it slip away. She can see that Sara might be making moves to go, slipping a notebook into her bag, probably texting her husband that she’ll be home soon. If she leaves, Vera has to leave. How else would she get a ride down the hill at this hour, down to the corner where the shared taxis huddle, shuttling people to and from Tel Aviv.

  Sara scoots her chair back. “What time will you get here tomorrow?” she asks. The pimply teenager comes over to clear Vera’s bottles and Sara’s wineglass, still half-f
ull.

  “Early,” Vera says. What to do now? Back to Tel Aviv? Is there anyone in Jerusalem she could stay with? The only people she knows here have been her subjects—a trio of Israeli leftists who recently got out of military jail for refusing to serve in the West Bank, some PR contacts, and an Orthodox Jewish teenager named Rachel whom Vera interviewed for an article she never wrote about American Zionism—no one she could call a friend.

  “Will you stay in Jerusalem tonight?” Sara asks.

  The question is like an incantation that makes Vera’s phone vibrate. If it’s Amir, don’t respond. Remember, she begs herself.

  Amir: Come over.

  Grief, joy, maybe even hope. “Yeah,” Vera says, “I’m staying with a friend.”

  Sara gets up. Standing over Vera, she smells like rosemary. “Do you want a ride down the hill?”

  They drive down from the hospital campus, through the shuttered shops of the village, down past the Mount of Olives, past the unforgiving settlement block there, past the Israeli flag the size of a dump truck, past the silent graves like teeth in the moonlight. Sara’s car is something clean and white and compact, as Vera knew it would be. Near the dip before the gas station, their windows are lit up by an army jeep, the kind with metal grilling over its windshield to block the stones Palestinian boys throw. Vera knows what they see: two white women. Nobody stops them.

  The first time they slept together, Amir asked her why she lived in Tel Aviv. She lay in bed as he dressed to leave. “Why not live in East Jerusalem?” he asked. “Why not live in Ramallah or Bethlehem?” If she was going to spend all her time writing about them (about them) anyway? At the time, watching him buckle his belt with his back to her, feeling bereft and empty already, yes, already desiring his little pig grunts on top of her again, she answered something convoluted about needing to experience life on both sides of the conflict. Bullshit, he said. Bullshit. “You’re scared of Arabs.” She had responded by saying something along the lines of, You’re too beautiful to be such a bigot. But who knows. When she first got to the area (the area, so euphemistic), armed with a few assignments and a solid set of contacts, she had briefly lived in East Jerusalem—in a cheap apartment with high ceilings not far from the hospital. She hated it. She hated the pressurized scrutiny, the walk home looking straight ahead, straight ahead, because only a whore would turn to the toothy hisses made from darkened doorways, the men muttering next to her, walking alongside her, their eyes on fire. She hated the restrictions, the secreting of wine empties into black plastic bags discreetly left in public trash bins. She hated the shame her body brought. Maybe most of all, she hated that nobody had to teach her to think this way. It didn’t matter that as a child, she had splashed naked in ponds and lakes, never questioning the tuft of her mom’s pubic hair, the floppy dark below her father’s navel. Despite how she was raised, some part of her knew, by instinct, how to fear her own body. As soon as she came to Jerusalem, she understood something she had always known, always felt, ever since she became—she hates this word, even today she hates this word, a word that is dripping and fleshy, a punctured word—ever since she became a woman.