Vera watches Sara, who has her own thoughts, keeping her eyes on the twisting road as she drives. All is quiet as they pass the high walls of the Old City, the dark loomings of the Lion’s Gate, Herod’s Gate, Damascus Gate, then up past the ancient fortified walls, cut deep with slits for archers. Vera loves these landmarks. She loves them because they replaced her childhood bedroom, the cold quiet of her parents’ living room, the lonely slope of the playing field outside her elementary school. The longer she stays, the farther she feels from home.
The first time a boy called the house, Papa slammed the telephone back into the receiver. Not just once, again and again until the handset smashed, bits of black plastic on the kitchen floor. Mama watched from a doorway in fear but also, Vera saw, in a shuddering excitement—this was new. A new possibility was taking form. Whatever was missing between her parents, they could plug it up, stuff it with their daughter’s body, Vera’s body.
Once they reach the Jaffa Road intersection, the women have passed the invisible but undeniable border that separates East Jerusalem from West. Vera tells Sara where to pull over. The car idles under the glossy, unlikely complex of Mamilla Mall, so much like an airport but so close to the mess of things. Why would he choose to live here? It’s a building of pied-à-terre duplexes, a glossy, empty palace where half the apartments sit vacant most of the year. A few months ago, she reviewed a decadent hotel nearby.
Vera unclicks her seat belt, turns to Sara to say, “Thanks.” She opens the door. Warm nighttime air, filled with promise, and something else, something Vera can’t name, swirls around them.
“Do you want me to text you tomorrow,” Sara asks, “if I hear anything? In the morning, I mean?”
“Sure,” Vera says over her shoulder. When she gets out of the car, she sees herself the way Sara might see her: a girl disappearing toward a dark room where a man is waiting for her.
Vera opens her eyes to a room filled with too much sunlight, heavy midmorning light that tells her it’s no longer early. Shit. Her phone is vibrating. Shit. She gropes the sheets, her hands sliding around the inexcusable red silk material—no, silklike material, like something out of a lusty paperback for housewives. Next to her, the mass of Amir heaves, sinks heavily into the mattress. He groans and pulls a pillow over his head, revealing Vera’s phone underneath. Please, she begs, don’t let the message be from Sara. Don’t let it be about the boy.
She unlocks the screen. Sara. Shit. He’s dying. Shit, shit. Get up, you stupid slut, get out of bed. Amir rolls more tightly toward the wall, the muscles on his back and arms adjust, shifting those absurd tattooed gashes—or are they supposed to be thorns? Scratch marks? She wants to cling to him from behind. The more he turns away, the harder she wants to hold on. But no, she has to get up; she has to get to the hospital.
She stumbles into Amir’s pristine bathroom, into the shower with its absurdly good water pressure, the small, high window overlooking the steeples of the Old City. How different from her damp, dim apartment in south Tel Aviv—drain clogged by long hair, dead cockroach Vera’s roommate smashed on the kitchen floor, a trail of ants leading from the dead thing into the wall. She hurriedly scrubs herself with a bar of perfumed black soap. She hopes the scent, earthy and robust, expensive-seeming, is enough to overcome the smell of last night’s drinking. After a few seconds in the hot water, of course she has to pee. She knows she should climb out of the shower to sit, dripping wet, on the toilet, but she doesn’t, and all at once she’s peeing in the shower, her hips jutted out into the hot water. Relief, immediate. The pee is bright yellow on the tastefully mismatched mosaic tiles of the shower. She thinks, You’re dehydrated. She washes off the dried blood flaking from her thumbnail.
She dresses without toweling off, clean underwear from her backpack, the clothes damp on her. She pauses in the doorway of Amir’s bedroom. She is late; she needs to rush down the stairs, to catch a cab to take her back to the hospital, but she stays inside this moment, watching his back, feeling and resisting the pull toward him. She thinks, This is what I’ll remember—a gesture that excludes me, him facing the wall.
On her way out, she grabs a bottle of fancy water from the fridge, her hand almost slipping. It’s clean and orderly in there: just rows and rows of bottled water, a few kosher-for-Passover hard ciders, and a stack of plastic food containers from, Vera just knows, his mother—a woman Vera will never meet.
She’s out the door and down the clean staircase, adjusting her bag on her shoulders, squeezing past an elderly couple who coax a small dog down the stairs, out the door clutching her bag before realizing that, shit, shit, shit, she didn’t brush her teeth. An acidic boozy smell is no doubt festering in her mouth, but what is there to do?
She runs. Her billowy pants and linen top cling to her damp body. She speeds past a café. A middle-aged tourist couple with coffees lean over an unfolded map. Is it? Yes, they are speaking about church service times in German, from the north, it sounds like. They look up at her as she passes. Once she hits Sultan Suleiman Road, she begins to swivel her head back as she runs, looking for a cab to hail.
She’s confronted with the sudden, shocking memory of Amir’s orgasm last night. How he sat up while she straddled him, riding him but also kind of cradled by him, his huge arms supporting her to intensify the motion of her moving up and down on him, him in and out of her, a rocking motion. When he came, he pressed his forehead into her shoulder, and she touched the back of his skull, the way you’d comfort a child. Amir is fastidious about using condoms, which she generally appreciates, but now, all at once, she feels empty, and she wishes he had come inside her and was dripping out.
A honk startles her into a stumble. A cab! The driver has slowed to trail behind her. The cars behind him honk. He pays no mind. The driver, bearded, manipulates prayer beads in his right hand as he leans across the seat to shout out the passenger-side window at Vera, “Where to?”
She hurries out of the taxi without bothering to wait for change. The grounds of Augusta Victoria Hospital are quiet: empty picnic tables under silent windows. Vera pushes the heavy, arched doors, her sandals squeaking on marble. She’s panting. She slows to a walk. The second set of hospital doors are—somehow this is not surprising—locked. Something has changed. She stands in the clean, well-lit foyer under signs in Hebrew and Arabic and English. no smoking. Enormous thirst grips the back of her throat. She finds the water bottle in her backpack, sucks down a third of it in deep, rhythmic gulps.
Shut up. Listen.
She forces herself to hold her breath so she can hear. Cries from out back. Behind the building? Possible. She doesn’t want to run anymore, her whole body feels heavy. Still, she runs out of the hospital’s entrance and toward the back of the building, into the sound that you might confuse with sirens. What it is, she realizes as she takes out her phone, ready to record, is not the sound of sirens but of women screaming.
It takes about thirty seconds to reach the back of the hospital, where there is a small paved lot for overflow trailers and, beyond that, an empty field buttressed by a cement wall. Vera looks up to the hospital’s third floor—so that’s where his room was—to see the women are leaning out the hospital window. Women in hijabs. No sign of Sara. The women have torsos out the window, are pointing toward the wall beyond the lot, where, Vera sees now, a scrum of young men are moving around something. There are no police here, not yet. She does not know what the young men are doing, down by the wall between the hospital and the Palestinian village on the hill.
She runs toward them, the screaming of the women growing distant, the shouts of the men growing louder. Past the empty office trailers, the lone olive tree in the dry lot. As Vera approaches the men, she sees they are pressed up against the wall, an unfinished cement thing with metal rebar protruding. A few of them are straddling it, the hospital wall, which is taller than any man, over two meters high.
The men on the ground surge up against the wall. Surely, they are not trying to escape, because if
they were, the men straddling the wall would simply jump over. So, what? On the other side of the wall, men and women from the village on the hill lean out the windows of unpainted cement houses to watch, saying nothing. Steady, she tells herself. She needs to keep her phone steady as she films—needs this footage to be actually usable when she sends it to her editor to put up on the feed. The young men cry out, and behind Vera, from a hospital window, the screaming of the women emerges at a chilling pitch. She remembers learning how the Roman emperor Augustus prohibited the ululation of women, for fear it would bring back the dead. And maybe it’s this very thought that allows her to hear, to really hear, the voice inside the screams, the single pitch repeating, Ibni, ibni, ibni. “My son, my son.” Her son. The body. They are trying to hoist the boy’s body over the wall. They need to smuggle the corpse away before the police come. This is the only way he will receive a timely burial.
The men cry out in one voice. Because she’s using her phone to film, she can’t take notes, so she mentally recites the observations she’ll put into the article later. How many young men? She is trying to count. At least fifteen young men, yes, fifteen shabaab, maybe twenty.
A young man in a red T-shirt falls to his knees, his head in his hands, pulling back at his hair, his mouth opening grotesquely in a private grief.
The body is wrapped in what looks like sheets. White with a delicate floral pattern. Perhaps his mother brought them from home. You can’t see the body itself, just the outline. Is there a body bag beneath that? Or do they not have those at hospitals? Vera doesn’t know. But it seems like maybe not, because you can see the outline of his feet under the clingy fabric; you can see the place where his head is. She’s never seen a corpse before. It’s bleeding, or at least, it’s bloody. A woman’s son. Ibni, ibni, ibni.
The way you’d hold up a child to wade through flood water, that’s how the shabaab hold up the boy’s body, trying to will the thing toward the wall headfirst. The patterned sheet has a splotch of blood that is growing. They lift him up to the waiting hands of the two men straddling the wall—jeans and T-shirts—who try to take up the body but can’t seem to hold on to it right. They lose their grip. It shudders, flops, would fall but for the men on the ground who catch it. It tugs a memory in Vera, a body moving like that.
One of the two men on the wall turn and yell down to the other side, so there must be people there too, waiting to receive the body.
Where are all the reporters? Usually in East Jerusalem, you have so much as a tire fire and there are five news outlets filming it. Here, Vera is alone. Sara must be back in the hospital, in the room where the mother is screaming out the window. She is sequestered there, making her own mental notes. Maybe watching Vera. Maybe live-streaming the whole thing. Does she see Vera stepping closer? She is so close that now, when the men farthest from the body fall back, they must sidestep to avoid bumping into her, which they do without looking at her, like she’s a post or a tree. When someone bumps into her shoulder, she doesn’t fall down, she withstands the impact. She is at the center of something—something horrible, something that matters. She thinks, to Sara she thinks, Watch me.
When the body bangs against the wall, the blood at the head grows. Red smears against the concrete. She didn’t know a corpse would keep bleeding. On her phone, she switches from the camera to her own feed and starts a live-stream. This is too good to wait. She needs everyone to know that she is here. That she is at the center. She needs them to know that this is her story.
The men adjust their grips, struggling with the body. What is this weight that only the dead have? She can ask that question in her article. The situation is profound enough that she will be able to get a little literary with the prose. Every part of us wants to return to the ground. Yes. Earth is calling us home. She recalls something the professor said that will be perfect to use in this scene. We forget, the professor said. It is so easy to forget. We forget that they are, we are, all of us sacred. Each one of us. Never to be replaced, never ever.
Another man falls, maybe praying. Or has he been hurt? But no, he’s kneeling. Now the boy in the red T-shirt stands on the kneeling man’s back, one hand against the cement wall, to balance himself as he supports the body from underneath, acting as the critical intermediary stage between the men on the ground and the men straddling the wall, lifting the body up, up. Vera feels herself gasp as the bloody sheets lift over the wall, wail of sirens in the background now.
At some point, she stopped filming. Her phone is hanging by her side as the exposed, pale feet disappear over the wall, into the arms of someone waiting below, somebody none of us can see. This is my body, this is my body, this is my body.
And then he is gone.
In the absence the boy’s body leaves, the sound of sirens is suddenly enormous, coming from all around them, other sounds too, cries of a woman, boom of a teargas canister. As Vera heads back toward the hospital, she quickly ends the live feed and uploads the recorded video to the cloud, then hides her phone in her bra, where, she hopes, it will be safe from a search. She does this by instinct, although she’s never done it before.
The young men, cut loose from their mission, head back toward the action, prepared to get their noses broken, or worse, maybe today is the day; those who can’t afford another arrest try to scramble over the wall to the village. Soon soldiers in body armor will come bursting out the hospital doors, too late for the body they sought, and charge into this dusty field, this place between places, this no-man’s-land high above Jerusalem, high above the village, so high that you can see, in the distance, bare hilltops where the villages and settlements end and the desert takes over, the sweeping red hills of Judea, out of which men continue to stream, mad with love.
Sisters
Mai and Leila are sprawled out on the living room couch, just the two of them, with the TV on. Mama is upstairs napping. The boys are outside playing futbal with neighbors in the grasses between villas. It’s nearly noon on a Friday. Mai and her brothers spent the morning cleaning—Mai directing the boys to push around the sudsy water on the balcony and in the kitchen, making sure it drained properly, making sure they swept up the bits of hair and trash around the drain (a job that makes them squeal like the little boys they are) while she herself scrubbed down the counters, bleached the sinks. The activity is familiar—weekly for the whole neighborhood, everyone splashing soapy water out of windows and doors, bubbles accumulating in the gutters as the muezzin sings them through Friday. Leila isn’t having morning sickness anymore, but Mama went over anyway to help her clean her own home, and after, they both came back here. (Mai still finds it weird that when Leila says my home she no longer means home-home but Tariq’s home.)
Now the sisters are lounging in matching pajamas—soft sweater-y gray sweatpants and tops. Leila leaves a pair here; even in her second trimester she can still fit into a lot of her old clothes.
“This woman is nuts,” Mai says, eyes on the TV.
“I know,” Leila says, hand on her belly in the standard pregnant lady pose, “it’s amazing.”
They’re watching one of those fashion design reality shows where contestants create clothing with various restrictions. Some Indonesian girl with pink streaks in her hair is having a meltdown because she’s run out of the fabric for her ball gown—a Scottish-looking tartan that Mai said reminded her of Alexander McQueen but Leila said that was a stretch. The Lebanese host is trying to calm her down.
Mai’s head rests on a pillow in her sister’s lap; the windows open to the first of the warm spring days. They can hear the boys, brothers and neighbors and cousins. “Goal!” someone yells.
“Should we get up?” Mai asks. They’d told Mama they’d take care of lunch.
“Five more minutes,” Leila says.
Always it is this dynamic—Mai a little deferential to Leila, adjusting herself (without being asked) to the parameters that Leila establishes.
When Mai and Leila were young girls, Mai was Leila’s li
ttle shadow. This was back before Baba spent so much time in the U.K. growing his business—when they were a family of four, without any little boys yet. Mai trailed everywhere after Leila, in the garden, through the house, into the room they shared. If Leila wore red, Mai had to wear red. If Leila ate a plum, Mai wanted one, too. Predictably, Leila spent most of her time avoiding her younger sister.
It might have been Baba going away that brought Mai and Leila closer. Now he’s back once, maybe twice a year, returning enough that his residency status won’t be revoked by the Israelis. The money he sends home pays for the upkeep of a villa older than the Zionist state, a remodeled kitchen straight out of Bon Appétit, the mosaic in the fountain out front, the garden out back. In his absence, theirs became a house of women, a gentle loneliness pervading each afternoon they spent brushing Mama’s hair or picking up the boys from school when Mama felt overwhelmed or when she needed help with chores. If before the sisters had been like rival states, competing for the commodity of their parents’ attention, now they were something else, almost like coparents to their mother and brothers, to each other, and there was something blissfully enchanted in it. Up until Leila got married last year, they were princesses tending to the castle. They were intimidating, Mai knew. Haughty sisters—impenetrable and discerning as they walked home from school together, trying on each other’s rings and holding them up to the light.
City of a Thousand Gates Page 14
