City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  Why are we still doing this? Samar wants to ask the ghost of her mother, her mother who is very much alive and napping—Samar’s younger brother has informed her via text—across the ocean in Bethlehem. Why does her mother come to her this way, haunting her in the stricken faces of foreign women every time she goes abroad?

  Samar is standing by a cheese table, clutching rubbery cubes and a glass of sparkling water. Reception fare. Less than half an hour ago she was presenting a paper (new work!) at this hodgepodge conference—sociologists, philologists, and cultural theorists presenting alongside geneticists, biologists, and physicists, all under the auspices of “Memory Studies.” By all accounts, she should be feeling good; she should feel like a woman for whom doors are opening. Late, yes, fine, maybe late. She is forty—barely, but she is forty. It is true. It is all happening late. But it’s happening, isn’t it? She remembers the quiet, chest-bursting joy of getting the email from the conference organizer—a woman, a medievalist—inviting her to present. She was at the home office she has made from what was her father’s study. She was sitting at a desk that felt too big for her. After she read the invitation email, she closed her clunky laptop. She closed her eyes. She said to herself, Remember this. Remember this feeling.

  The red-haired woman looks at her expectantly, waiting for a response. Is she Jewish? Hard to tell.

  “Say again?” Samar says.

  “How can you critique whiteness within a white institution?” the white woman asks.

  Samar’s presentation was on narrative and memory in Palestine. Ask me about my work, she thinks. About my work. “That might be a question for someone else,” Samar says, careful to say it gently, arching up the statement into a question—gently, gently—lest she hurt this woman’s feelings and be left to deal with the ensuing hysteria. She awkwardly shifts the plastic tumbler—lemon-lime seltzer—and the napkin of cheese cubes into her right hand. There is a pressure in her lower back, radiating down her legs and into the arches of her feet. She wants to double over, release the tension in her spine, but knows that this is impossible until she returns to her room. She’s felt stiff ever since she got off the plane two days ago—a long wait to leave Jordan; a long layover in Istanbul where she slept fitfully on a faux-leather chair, clutching her purse; then an hour or maybe more in the windowless Chicago airport room where she waited to get her passport and paperwork back from the American border control—“Ma’am, we simply need to confirm a few things.” The only other traveler in that room had been a man who remained in a far corner, throwing up into a plastic bag.

  “I mean, because, you know, us white folks can be so defensive,” the red-haired woman says, spilling over her words, her eyebrows are in alarming arcs. A familiar expression, Mother’s expression: a woman who has lost control of her shopping cart, a woman who is scared of what she’ll say next.

  “Right,” Samar says, “of course,” trying to smile in a way that says, But not you, no, no, not you. All around them are white academics in sweaters and blazers, holding on to cubes of cheese, plastic glasses of wine. And yes, she could excuse herself from this conversation if she did it gently (gently, gently), but her other concern, aside from the white woman’s feelings, is that tactically speaking, it might be better for Samar to be seen talking to someone rather than to be seen alone, which always seems to lower one’s value in a crowd, such herd animals are we. The red-haired woman is now explaining to Samar that she is aware—so, so aware—of her privilege. Samar will give this until she finishes her seltzer.

  What she wants is to find the medievalist who invited her to this conference in the first place. She seems kind. Frizzy hair, gummy smile. Samar will find the medievalist, and in that way, get introductions to helpful contacts who are here at Chicago or elsewhere. Networking. The word gives her a creeping feeling, but what can she do? Everyone does it. If she thinks about her situation too much—her age, not on a tenure track, teaching lower-level classes for the English department at Bethlehem University, and yes, publishing, but no, maybe not enough—she feels some combination of grief and panic. She hears, in her mother’s voice, a nagging refrain that she is too old, that it is too late. Although Mother has never said such a thing to her. Those aren’t Mother’s words. They are words Samar says to herself in her mother’s voice. Enough. Stop it. Enough. She’ll find the medievalist. White face in a white room.

  It was a successful morning. Samar must hold on to that thought. She presented a paper in progress. It was tempting to wait, to hold back, to present something else, something more finished, but Samar knows that more good comes when you let the ideas be tested before they’re sealed up, before they are varnished into place. It takes a certain bravery to let people touch the insides, to expose the inner workings—the gears or stuffing or maybe (why not?) the guts of the paper. When it was her turn to present, Samar sat at a table onstage, behind a microphone and two bottles of unopened water, and she read a few pages aloud.

  The conference is on memory, which is perfect for Samar because for years she has been writing about national narratives as forms of codified misremembering. When it was her turn to present, she spoke about forgetting. “In the memory economy,” she said, “the ultimate luxury is to forget.” Empires forget; their walls let them forget. Imagine, she said, an empire that memorialized the names of the people it killed in its invasions. Imagine the names of the Vietnamese dead on the American memorial wall in Washington. Impossible. It was satisfying, sure, to see approving nods as her audience scribbled notes on conference notepads. But mostly, the pleasure Samar felt came from articulating her own ideas clearly. Here are the concepts she has brought into the world. Here is the work she has defended against everyone, even herself. We live in a world of violence and chaos. Nobody can argue otherwise. But in her writing, Samar finds a way, if not to order this chaos, then at least to make the chaos legible. Despite the pressures that threaten to kill her, despite the checkpoints and water shortages, despite the liability of her own aging and childless body, Samar commits—again and again—to imagine beyond her own survival. Her own voice will survive her, and knowing this is what keeps Samar alive.

  Still, she was careful of how far she went. The last time she presented abroad it was at a conference on women and resistance, and the presenters were from all over the Arab world—Palestinian exiles, Lebanese scholars, brown women wearing kaffiyeh. There, she said things she did not say today. Today she did not say the words “BDS” or “Nakbah”; she did not read off the names of Gazan children killed in Israeli air strikes; she did not say the name Salem Abu-Khdeir, the teenager kicked to death by settlers. The way she spoke, you’d think she lived outside of history.

  “I mean, I get it, obviously,” the red-haired woman says, “the irony of, like, me playing the woke white lady.” She says these last three words in air quotes with the hand holding her wine tumbler. Her other hand stays glued to her lower stomach, a self-conscious pose that Samar recognizes as nearly identical to her own. Mirror image. Didn’t Mother have a theory about twins?

  Samar drains the rest of her seltzer. Halas, social currency be damned. She would rather stand alone by the window and watch the snow fall. “Excuse me,” she says, and at the exact moment she puts down her empty plastic tumbler on the cheese table, she is startled by a gentle touch at her right shoulder. Ah! Here is the medievalist, the very one she has been hoping to catch, smiling gummily.

  “Deborah!” Samar exclaims. “It’s so lovely to see you.” She thinks they are the same age, she and the medievalist, who has two young children.

  “What a marvelous presentation,” the medievalist says, stepping toward her. The three women stand in a circle now. The red-haired woman sips her wine. The medievalist’s hand is over her own heart; she smiles and nods at the red-haired woman, mouths Hi in a way that is friendly but also suggests no response is necessary, then to Samar, asks, “How are you feeling?”

  And finally, at last, at last, the red-haired woman slinks away.r />
  “It felt wonderful,” Samar says, hoping it sounds bright and sincere, “such a wonderful room to be in.” She is trying to enjoy this moment—a brilliant and, yes, well-connected woman admiring her work. But also, Samar must stay agile, must be sure she’s moving toward something, that she is starting conversations that might lead to an offer to come lecture at Chicago, even if just for a quarter. Crazier things have happened. “I’m looking forward to hearing your talk on . . .” Samar hesitates, forgetting the exact nature of the talk—something related to the Crusades?

  “That’s so kind,” the medievalist says, her palm still on her chest. “Do you have a moment to meet some colleagues?”

  Samar discreetly slips the cheese cubes, folded in their napkin, into her purse. She spends the next half hour talking about dream work and, somehow, Air Canada with three tenured men-professors in the English department: one specializing in African American performance art, one in Sufi literature, and the third a doubled-over Chaucer scholar who did not extend his hand to shake Samar’s. All white.

  She wonders if in retrospect, this will feel like a kind of interview for some job at Chicago—even if it’s not tenure track, some guest-lecturing position that leads to more, to more and more—and so she asks what she hopes are the right questions, not ones that show off her knowledge, but ones that give each counterpart a chance to show off his. She asks about diaspora; she asks about politicized bodies. The scholar of African American performance art, a trim middle-aged man with a cultivated almost-handlebar mustache, says he is thinking about exile and “misremembered pasts” as “the postmodern condition par excellence.” He is wearing a plaid waistcoat.

  “I can certainly relate to that,” Samar says, and the man looks momentarily startled, like he was remembering something about her, and so that he won’t feel bad, or like he said something wrong, and in that way have a negative memory of this interaction, which might cause him to later describe Samar as a difficult or aggressive person, she smiles in a way she hopes is gentle and good-humored, but that also doesn’t create wrinkles in her forehead, as she’s aware that her plausibility as a hire—if they are even considering her—has much to do with how old she is, meaning how much time she has left.

  The medievalist is asking the Sufi scholar about his most recent monograph. It strikes Samar that none of the men has asked about the women’s work, meaning the medievalist and Samar. Over her shoulder, she sees the red-haired woman pouring herself another glass of wine; Samar feels a sense of palpable relief to have made it out of that conversation. Her back is growing more and more sore; her bones feel heavy, soggy. She tries to discreetly shift from left foot to right foot to left again.

  “By the way,” the medievalist says, turning to Samar, “I so admired your remarks in the Der Spiegel article about that poor boy.”

  “Thank you.” In truth, Samar was disturbed by the German journalist’s article on Salem—specifically, how Palestinians were not permitted to represent themselves. Samar herself was one of two Palestinians quoted in the article, the other being the head doctor at Augusta Victoria Hospital. Everyone else was reduced to a state of animal noise: Salem’s mother screaming out the hospital window; young men crying out in pain, in frustration; or Salem himself, nothing but the sickening sound his life-lost body made as it rammed again and again against the hospital’s garden wall. She was wary of how this white journalist positioned herself—as a translator of these cries into language, as the one who made them legible, as if they didn’t speak for themselves. Even Samar felt somehow reduced by the article. Her own quotes seem to her now like acts of ventriloquism: her words coming out of the white journalist’s mouth.

  “Well.” The medievalist looks at her watch. It’s a child’s watch, Samar notes, plastic and pink, perhaps a gift from a daughter. “Shall we reconvene at six?”

  The men nod. A look is exchanged that Samar pretends not to notice, not yet knowing its valence, then the medievalist asks, “Do you have dinner plans? We’re eating at a cute sushi place, I mean, if you . . .” She suddenly looks panicked, holds up her hands. “I mean, if you eat it. I mean, if you want.”

  “Oh! Thank you!” she exclaims. She’s holding up her hands too. Both women hold up their hands, like they are assuring each other they don’t have a weapon. “That’s so lovely,” Samar continues, trying to convey her sincerity with her eyebrows. Because it is lovely, it is lovely to be invited, and maybe this is the door. But Samar isn’t sure. It may be expensive, the restaurant. And even though, yes, this is what the generous per diem is for, Samar knows she will feel guilty if she can’t afford the probiotic pills she planned to bring home for Mother. And yet, Samar wants to say yes. Conversations are happening; ideas are being refined; she wants to be there for it. Perhaps she can go and eat only a soup? But also she is tired. She is so, so tired of being so, so careful. Perhaps it is time to go back to her room, to stay there. “I am a bit exhausted,” Samar says, in a higher octave than natural.

  The medievalist’s hands are still held up, palms out. “No pressure!” she exclaims.

  Samar feels herself deflating. “May I get in touch later, after I’ve rested?”

  “Of course,” the medievalist says, seeming relieved; she enters her number into Samar’s phone. It might work. If she orders only a soup. It might work. She might have to leave early, if the dinner goes late. She likes to be by her phone, and she’ll need Wi-Fi, at night, in case over in Bethlehem, nine hours ahead, her mother is having trouble in the morning, and one of her brothers needs to reach her. Oh, she doesn’t know, she doesn’t know.

  At the coatracks, Samar searches for her puffy black coat. Next to her, two young women with ponytails are putting on hats and mittens: “Since then, he’s kept his door open during office hours,” one says to the other, her voice low. Samar continues to rifle through the rack for her coat among various ski jackets, peacoats, and the odd sweater.

  “But about myths of women’s purity,” someone says from the other side of the coatrack, and Samar looks up in surprise. The two women with ponytails are gone. Instead it’s the red-haired woman, still carrying a full plastic tumbler of red wine, talking as if their conversation had continued in Samar’s absence. “Such myths are, of course, crucial to myths of racial purity.”

  For a brief, alarming second, Samar wonders if the red-haired woman is real, meaning physically present. Or is she a phantom emanating from her own mind? Her own guilt about leaving Mother, her own ambivalence about wanting things, wanting to succeed?

  “Your work,” says the red-haired woman, leaning across the garments, “on the wall and the ethnic fantasies it invites—”

  “I’m sorry,” Samar cuts her off. She’s searching for her coat again. “But I’m starting to feel the jet lag.”

  The lady is undeterred. “The wall, like any barrier, necessitates a gendered nationalism.” She’s speaking fast. Her eyes are like Mother’s again, panicked and searching.

  “The jet lag,” Samar says, frantically riffling through all the black coats, so many black coats. Why does Samar have to have a black coat?

  “On both sides, actually.” The woman is gesturing with her plastic wineglass, which splashes a little. Red runs down onto her fingers.

  “Right, right.” Aha! She has found it. She hurriedly pulls on her puffy, black coat, careful of the tricky zipper.

  “Over a meal!” the woman exclaims, walking around to stand in front of Samar.

  “What?”

  “Perhaps a meal, after you’ve rested?” Her breath smells acidic.

  “I’m awfully tired,” she says, her coat now zipped.

  “But maybe later, a meal together?”

  “Oh, we’ll see.” Samar adjusts her purse as she heads for the door, adjusting her trajectory to avoid a notorious scholar of Deleuze, who is towering over a thin woman with tattoos on her arms, perhaps a grad student, looking rapt and terrified. “Nice to see you,” she calls out to the red-haired woman behind her, as sh
e rushes through the wide, wooden door frame; she has one hand on the banister to guide her as she hurries down the heavy, slate staircase, her boots scratching and echoing.

  The woman is leaning over the railing. “But when?” she calls down, her voice distant in the stairwell, her mouth a desperate shape.

  “Okay,” Samar shouts, unsure what else to say, then pushes the heavy fire door and steps out into the brutal, unfriendly sun.

  Cold, the shock of it. How lovely. And how good it is to be out of that room. Cold. So cold, it hurts to breathe. From her bag she pulls out the accessories. Hat on, scarf around her neck, last of all, hands into gloves. Bought as a set: all purple with a silvery filament woven in. Kind of girlish, but why not? She walks quickly in what she hopes is the right direction. She walks with her hands bunched in the gloves, her periphery obscured by the scarf bundled around her neck and ears. She heads across a quad covered in a thin, filthy layer of snow, crunching along the salted path. She looks down at her feet, she looks up at the huge, Gothic buildings covered in dead ivy like stilled veins, then back down at her feet. The leather boots she wears are cute but not much against the cold. She grips and ungrips her toes as she walks, hoping that keeps some blood in them.

  This is her first time in America. She has some distant cousins in California—years ago, they came to visit Palestine, but it’s been a long time since the Israelis let them in. Before she flew, she sent a message to two of her California cousins with questions about Chicago weather and safety, if there were guns on campuses, white supremacists. One of the two wrote back: I hear it’s cold there, she said. Also, if you are alone, don’t speak Arabic in public—not even on the phone.