“She’ll go when she’s ready,” Mother has always said to aunts to uncles to neighbors when they asked about Samar’s spinsterhood, which wasn’t—this is what nobody said but everyone knew—natural. Only the Christian sisters lived like that. “She’ll go when she’s ready.” All the way until Samar turned forty. Did Mother want to keep her close? Afraid she’d run away again? Was it love or some form of punishment, and why, why, is it so hard to tell the difference?
She awakes to the knock at the door. The room is shades of blue and gray, dolorous light of early evening. She sits up in bed. Small knuckles, knocking at the door, not pounding, but urgent, rapid. She moves her feet to the floor, quietly, gingerly, so that the covers don’t make any noise. She stands in front of the door, one hand holding up her trousers. The handle is shaking, harder, harder now. Outside, someone is trying to get in.
Rachel
“Look at what my friend wrote,” Rachel says in English, holding her phone up to Miriam.
They are sitting in Miriam’s kitchen with cups of green tea. There’s another half hour in Rachel’s lesson, and she’s trying to distract Miriam so they don’t have to go back to talking about the rabbinic basis for covering her hair after she’s married. Every week, Rachel comes to Miriam’s kitchen to prepare for being a wife—kosher sex, kosher living.
Miriam clucks with impatience but takes Rachel’s phone. She puts on her reading glasses. Rachel likes that Miriam has a lively face and close-cropped hair that she covers in a spunky little beret. She’s petite and pixie-like, although she must be about the same age as Rachel’s mom. She has a son Rachel’s age. Uri? Ori?
“Aval zeh katuv b’Germanit,” Miriam says, looking up from the article.
They flow between Hebrew and English—mostly Miriam speaking in Hebrew and Rachel, who finds that kind of annoying, answering in English. “Yeah, it’s in Der Spiegel, so it’s German,” she says, plonking her tea bag up and down in the steaming mug of water. “Don’t you speak German?”
“A little,” Miriam says.
“From your parents?” Rachel asks.
“From my parents,” Miriam confirms. “And their parents. Although mostly, they spoke Yiddish.”
“That’s so cool,” Rachel says. Yiddish strikes her as strange and lost, dusty and obscure. Everyone speaks English, everyone speaks Hebrew. Who speaks Yiddish? Black-hatters with twenty kids, and Holocaust survivors—the few that are left.
Miriam smiles. “A bisl,” she says, returning to the article.
Rachel runs her finger around the rim of her mug. All of Miriam’s mugs are super cheesy: covered in hearts and hamsas. This one has two cats on a tandem bike. It’s stupid and cute.
“This is about the Arab,” Miriam says, the phone impossibly close to her face. “The boy from the mall?”
“I think so,” Rachel says.
“You know this journalist?”
“We’re friends.” Rachel can hear her own defensiveness.
“What, you’re a leftist now?” Miriam laughs, handing Rachel’s phone back to her.
“She’s smart,” Rachel says, struggling to explain what pulls her to Vera. “She’s different.” Everyone Rachel knows from back home in LA, everyone in her community there and everyone in her community here, in Israel, has different variations on the same opinion. Everyone agrees the Arabs are a problem, and they have different ideas about how to solve that problem. Vera rejects that premise altogether, which Rachel finds thrilling even if, deep down, she knows in her heart that Vera is wrong.
“Let’s continue with the lesson,” Miriam says.
Miriam is super popular with girls from Rachel’s seminary because she makes sex sound so beautiful. How perfect that her last name actually means “heart.” “You have to go to Miriam Lev,” everyone says. They come back from lessons with Miriam in a state of divine horniness—ready for the bliss promised by kosher sex with their soon-to-be husbands. They’d stand under the chuppah that afternoon if they could.
Rachel will be barely twenty when she gets married in the fall. Vera—her German friend—can’t believe this. Vera is older and a little slutty, which Rachel thinks is amazing. “But you’re a baby,” Vera said.
“I know,” Rachel moaned, enjoying the attention. They were in Rachel’s bed drinking wine. “I’m not even old enough to drink in America,” she said, in the most childish voice she could conjure.
Originally, Vera interviewed Rachel about politics or something—research for an article that it seemed Vera never ended up writing. But since the interview, they’ve begun hanging out. Vera chews at her fingernails and tells Rachel about all her horrible dates. Once, Vera said she was making out with some guy at his place, straddling him, and when she felt his hardness on her thigh, pushing through his pants, she realized that he had a small penis—a tiny prick of a dick that, Vera said, wouldn’t bring even a mouse to climax—so she pretended suddenly that she had a headache and ran home. “I needed a real fuck,” Vera said, and Rachel spilled her wine laughing. What Rachel likes is that Vera is slutty but, like, cool about it. How many times has Rachel sat through some endless Shabbat lunch with a newly shomer negiah girl in an overly modest peasant skirt down to her ankles? These are girls who have sucked off half the graduating class at Yeshiva U high school, and then suddenly decide they won’t shake a man’s hand, as if, like, that reconstructed your hymen? Such bullshit. At least Vera doesn’t pretend.
Rachel runs a finger around the rim of her mug again. Miriam is rifling through pages in a folder, no doubt searching for the next photocopied section of Talmud, when Rachel asks, kind of out of nowhere, “Why isn’t a man niddah after combat?”
Miriam looks up with lively eyes. “You mean, why doesn’t blood from a wound transmit impurity?” she clarifies.
“Yeah,” Rachel says. “Men bleed all the time.” Her fiancé—it still sounds so strange, that word, and soon she’ll have to get used to another one, husband—comes home with dumbass injuries all the time. He got burnt on the chest with a contact radio overheating. He somehow managed to scratch his face on a bunk bed. They go for walks on Shabbat afternoons, before he has to go back to the army on Sundays. He talks about guys in his unit; he falls asleep in her lap. Some of it is horrible, but he never reacts to it much. “The stone-throwers hit a guy right in the face,” he told her recently. “Split his cheek like a fruit. Blood everywhere.” It had felt like a test, like she had to find the right thing to say, to comfort him, to be a good partner. All she could think to say was that it was horrible.
“You know this answer,” Miriam says.
Of course Rachel knows: only blood from the womb carries niddah—not the blood spilled in combat. “But why is it all on me?” Rachel asks. She began this line of questioning just to prod Miriam a little, just to be a little difficult. But now she finds she’s really asking. “Why is it the woman who carries something bad inside?” She thinks about her and Vera, drinking too much wine—far too much wine—and talking about sex while Vera rips at her cuticles.
The way that Miriam talks about sex, it’s beautiful and important. Pleasure, she has reminded Rachel, is mandated by the marriage contract itself—an obligation that a man owes his wife. But the way Vera talks about sex, it’s like the sex is a metaphor for something else, for some darker, stronger need that nobody can name. Vera tells Rachel about Amir, this loser soccer player who strings her along, spanking her, pinning her down. She talks about riding him hard, about hating him and that hate making the fucking—she actually calls it “the fucking”—better. Rachel wonders if she and Vera both carry the same darkness inside, and if, perhaps, they recognize that darkness in each other.
Miriam squirms in her seat. Rachel has seen this before, how excited Miriam gets when she’s making an argument for the unspeakable beauty of the commandments. “What verb does Torah use for sex?” Miriam asks.
“‘To know,’” Rachel says. At some point, they switched from English to Hebrew, but she can’t remember
when. “As in, Adam knew Eve.” She tugs at her hooped earrings, embarrassed and annoyed at her own embarrassment.
“Good girl,” Miriam says. “Listen, marriage isn’t about rules. It’s about coming to know. Within certain parameters, sure. But coming to know.”
Rachel thinks about her fiancé’s jawline, how it clenches when he’s close to coming. She gives, she happens to know, amazing head. Her boyfriend in high school had a car. Once, she even did it to him while he was driving, accelerating up the PCH late at night. The car bouncing over uneven pavement, lights from the streets flashing into the window, as Rachel loved him with her mouth. Ira. He made aliyah to Israel too, she heard, and now he’s in the army. Anyway, her fiancé’s parents leave them alone in his room. They are engaged, after all. Sometimes they have real sex, although it’s always quiet, tame, breathless. It doesn’t sound like the sex Vera has—animated by an emotion that Rachel wants to call anger.
“Love is a state of knowledge,” Miriam says. She is almost intoning at this point. “To know yourself,” she says, “and to know him. Most of all, to know yourself through him.”
Rachel closes her eyes. She wants to believe in the version of love that Miriam is offering. And yet, in some margin of consciousness, she has an image of Vera—fucking a man she does not love. Loving it.
Water
Oum Hamid does not have time to be waiting at this roadblock while the Jew-soldiers hold everyone up. If she’s late for work again, that little brat Mona—the rich girl who doesn’t even care about water sustainability, just enjoys the opportunity to travel for conferences—will have scooped more files off her desk. A long line of cars and vans curls up ahead of them on the highway leading to Ramallah. There is a fantasy version of her commute from Bethlehem that takes forty minutes, on a day without roadblocks. Not for the first time, the woman seated next to her sighs in frustration. Their shared taxi-van inches forward.
On the left side of the road, the settler cars are rushing by, unstopped by the soldiers. “Why don’t we have our own roads?” little Fadi has asked her more than once. Oum Hamid is almost certain that when she dies it will be an innocent question that kills her—the heartbreak of explaining some mundane horror to a child.
Again, the woman next to her sighs heavily. She is wearing a nice pantsuit and her hair is not covered. “What’s the holdup?” she asks, agitatedly trying to see outside. In another context, they might strike up a friendly conversation, but Oum Hamid doesn’t have the energy to engage.
Nobody in the van answers. The woman is shifting in her seat. “Really,” she says, “what’s going on?”
It’s the driver who replies. “The man, the one they say killed the settler-girl,” he says, “the Jews are bulldozing his mother’s house.”
A Jew-soldier in a cruiser drives by, shouting out of a loudspeaker. “Hebron residents: go home,” he says. “If your hawiyya lists Hebron as your residence, go home. You are not getting through today.” It is almost nine. Oum Hamid has been in this shared taxi-van since just after seven in the morning.
“What about Salem Abu-Khdeir?” the woman asks, her voice verging on shrill now. She must be a visitor—a Palestinian who lives in comfortable exile in California or London or Argentina—someone who watches from the outside, someone who keeps score. She goes on. “Who will bulldoze the homes of the men who did that to him?” It’s a rhetorical question. Nobody answers.
Oum Hamid takes out her phone to text Hamid. Are you awake? He has a lecture at ten.
No, he writes back, I am asleep, I am dreaming. His profile photo is of Salem Abu-Khdeir. Every time Oum Hamid messages her eldest son, she sees the dead boy’s face, not bloated and cracked from the beating, but smiling and happy—a photo his family circulated.
Drop off the boys with Teta, she writes, if Baba has left for work already.
Hamid responds that he was thinking of leaving them alone at home. Then sends one of the crying-laughing emoji faces. Just kidding, he tells her. Yes, of course I will drop them off. He’s a good boy. She had him at twenty and only took one semester off. Wrote undergraduate papers while nursing him, his father already spending long hours working at the bank. Baby Hamid never made a fuss.
She doesn’t want to be one of those nightmare mothers for whom no one is good enough for her son—the kind of mother-in-law she herself has—but she knows she’ll probably end up that way. Because how could anyone be good enough for Hamid? So tall and clear-skinned, so ambitious and able, so decent. He worked month after month, installing air conditioners who knows where; now he’s earning a degree in the sciences; next, he’ll be in medical school. He’ll be a natural provider. His current crush—Oum Hamid has ways of knowing—is a classmate from East Jerusalem. “Don’t be ridiculous,” she told him, when he asked ostensibly hypothetical questions about marrying a girl with Jerusalem residency. He laughed: I know, I know. But did he know? This girl—Mai—is a princess. Her father works in London. She’s a rich girl who is, probably, as bad as Mona: entitled and stubborn, someone who would never live in Bethlehem, who would try to wrestle Hamid away from her. Focus on your degrees, she told him. Then you can marry whomever you want. “You mean, whomever you want,” he said in his teasing way. She was stirring tomatoes and onions in a frying pan, turned around to swat at him with a wooden spoon. He dodged it, laughed. Her sweet boy.
One of the settler cars in the left lane slows down so that he’s idling right next to the shared van. Oum Hamid looks straight ahead. She keeps her eyes trained on a crack in the faux leather of the driver’s headrest. The settler is yelling not at them but at the army jeep. “Shalom!” he says, his tone friendly as he leans out the driver-side window of his car. Then he asks a question in Hebrew, something like, What’s going on? You can tell he’s from America by how flat his words sound. They’re mostly from America—the settlers who come here screaming about their birthright and tearing up the olive groves.
Oum Hamid and the woman next to her keep looking straight forward. Without understanding all the Hebrew, she can hear that the settler is making a big show of joking with the soldier. “Achi,” he keeps saying, “my brother, achi.” They are probably talking about the demolition today. Let it be a lesson to them, the settler may be saying in his tough-guy performative way. Is it for me, Oum Hamid wonders, for us, this performance? Would they even be Israelis without the audience of Palestinians? I make you, Oum Hamid thinks.
“Yalla, bye,” the settler calls, and the soldier waves, and then the car drives off. The shared taxi-van hasn’t moved yet.
Oum Hamid puts on her headphones. She tries not to think about Mona, snooping around her desk. Mona, young, plump, and venomous. Recently, she made a big deal out of Hamid’s age—“A son already in the university! But I thought you were my age!” Such a brat. The kind of girl whose mother is supposed to open up a clothing shop for her, a little spot filled with junk jewelry from Turkey and polyester blouses that fell off some Israeli truck. What is she doing working in government? And why is Oum Hamid the only one who sees through her? Finally the taxi-van inches forward.
By the time she gets to the office in Ramallah, Mona is there, of course she is, poking around Oum Hamid’s desk, which is really just a cubicle outside the director’s office.
“Marhaba,” Oum Hamid greets her, coolly. The girl is wearing an absurdly childish cardigan with embroidered flowers and pearl buttons. Grow up, she thinks.
Mona returns her greeting. Then she’s peeking over Oum Hamid’s shoulder at the director’s office. “He’s in there with some British man.”
“Oh?” Oum Hamid makes sure no files are missing from her desk.
“A dignitary,” Mona says. “Here to talk about water treatment.” Mona’s lipstick is incredibly pink.
Oum Hamid is about to ask a question when the two men walk out of the director’s office. The director looking dignified, as ever, in his dark suit and graying hair; the dignitary much more casually dressed, without a jacket or tie. The direc
tor gestures to Oum Hamid and Mona. “These are my coworkers,” he says in English. He makes the introductions.
“Tsharrafna,” the guest attempts in Arabic, for some reason speaking in feminine. Nobody corrects him. He is young. Flushed, well-fed cheeks.
“Pleased to meet you,” Oum Hamid says in English.
“Your director and I were just talking about peace,” the British man says.
“As one does,” Oum Hamid responds, pleased to note that Mona has not yet said a word.
“Yes, quite,” the man says. And everyone laughs. “You know, I am always telling the Israelis—the Palestinians want peace as much as you do.”
“Of course,” the director says. “We all want to live.”
“Both sides have suffered,” the foreign dignitary continues. “But you know what they say.” He looks around, as if one of them might guess. Then he covers his right eye with his right palm. “An eye for an eye,” he says as he places the left hand over his left eye, “until the whole world is blind.” He stands there a moment, his eyes covered. He is wearing a small gold cross.
Oum Hamid glances at Mona, who is looking down at her hands. The director clears his throat.
Finally the man uncovers his eyes. “And when will it end?”
“When they will it, I suppose,” Oum Hamid says. Her boss glances at her. She knows he’s thinking about the funding for the water treatment project.
City of a Thousand Gates Page 18
