It’s late in the day, a Thursday. Each of them has a paper cup of black coffee at his feet, undrunk and cold now. Hamid came here straight from campus; his book bag is under his chair. They’ve opened the small door of the storage room to let in the still air, which at this hour is almost cool, spiked with the coming evening. Soon the maghrib call will waft in, and Hamid will stiffen alert, because he knows from Facebook that this is another one of Muhi’s hopeless threads: This year on Isra’ Mi’raj the Jews are coming for Al-Aqsa Mosque, coming to raze the golden Dome of the Rock and rebuild their temple. But for now, it’s back to peeling stickers.
Hamid doesn’t understand what he’s doing in the dingy storeroom of a souvenir shop. No, that’s not true. He’s here because he’s worried about Muhi and wants to stick close. Really, Hamid doesn’t understand what Muhi is doing here. He’s supposed to be at university in Ramallah, studying law, leaving them all behind. But suddenly now he’s taking a semester off—we all know how that goes—to work for a cousin by his maternal uncle who is the manager at this souvenir shop, whatever it’s called, one of the interchangeable joints dotted around the Church of the Nativity. Hamid hates the idea of Muhi working the sales floor: wearing a stupid Santa hat on his stupid head, stooping for commission from fat tourists, all Yes, yes, locally sourced olive wood, yes, with his hands folded. He hates the thought of him servile, feminine even.
Better to take the risk and slip inside the Wall if it means real work. Hamid made good money installing air conditioners for Segev the Russian Jew, who paid good cash to his small crew of workers, all of them inside without work permits. He paid at the end of the day, every day. Can’t do much better than that. It was tuition money. Segev was funny, cigarette dangling from his mouth, sweater pattern like bus upholstery, saying in Hebrew that even Hamid recognized as slightly off, “Arab, Jew, what difference for me?” He kind of got off on giving Hamid advice. “Nobody to tell you your price.” That was a favorite of his.
“Nobody but you, you mean,” Hamid finally shot back in his ever-expanding Hebrew vocabulary. He was hunched with the weight of two air conditioners on the seventh flight of stairs in a building with a broken elevator in Ashdod, or was it Ashkelon? Some southern city. Segev was carrying—what?—a toolbox maybe, if that.
From behind Hamid on the stairs, Segev the Jew laughed in a single syllable, tapped on the boxes Hamid was carrying, but not too hard. “You’re smart,” he said. “Learn Russian, or better, learn English.” Hamid remembers the building had no glass in the windows, just holes where the glass would go. That was a year ago, last Ramadan, a hot one. Hamid fasted with the others while they worked. He remembers looking out at the sea, looking south and wondering if he could see Gaza—the battered city, surrounded by the Jews on all sides.
He’s hoping Segev will take him back to work during the summer vacation, although whenever he texts him the responses are noncommittal. Good, good, talk to me when you’re free.
Hamid peels off another albania sticker. It leaves a slight residue on the wood of the cross, which is otherwise smooth and swirling with browns. He thinks about making a joke: You’re lucky you’re so crazy-depressed that I come here to peel stickers with you. But he decides not to risk it. Instead he asks, “So you’ll come tomorrow? To lunch, yanni?”
“What’s Oum Hamid cooking?” Muhi asks, without subtext.
“Whatever she wants, but come. Everyone asks about you.” Once again, he finds himself searching Muhi’s face, as if another Muhi were hiding in there.
“I’ll probably come.”
“Come, come,” Hamid says. The news lady is on about a not-so-secret partnership between the Saudis and Israelis, which Hamid fears might set Muhi off, so he makes a quick grab for the tablet. “Yalla, enough of the news,” Hamid says, fumbling to close the video. He searches for songs from the guy who won the last Arab Idol.
The problem is that Muhi got away and then he had to come back. He’s smarter than Hamid, it’s fine, it’s true. All of last year—the year Hamid spent working inside, the year he spent in the inky predawn waiting for the guys who take you down south to smuggle you through the unfinished parts of the Wall, past the sights of the snipers, around the army patrol routes, all the way to the pickup spot, yanni, the year Hamid spent installing air conditioners for Segev—Muhi was already studying in Ramallah, well beyond the reach of Hamid’s test scores. So yeah, he’d been jealous of Muhi in his businessman-looking shoes as he showed Hamid around a campus that wasn’t just Palestinians but also international students, guys in hiking boots and white girls in enormous, flashy earrings who wanted to talk to you, with meaningful, pleading eyes, about the occupation, the word sharp in English, like four hard knocks on the door.
That year, all Muhi talked about was how he was going to do a semester abroad. His plan, he said, was to write to a bunch of the schools that sent their students to Ramallah on study-abroad, assuming these schools might host a Palestinian. Hamid and Muhi were rock-throwing by Rachel’s Tomb the first time Muhi explained all this. It was winter, and the Jews were bombing Gaza again. It was all they watched on the news every night. The week of the bombardment, there was no work, too risky to get inside. Instead Hamid spent his days at Teta’s with the boys. Mama and Baba came after work. All of them stayed up late every night, watching the buildings crumble, watching Jewish snipers pick off Palestinians at the Gaza border fence, Baba shaking his head and leaving the room then coming back, Mama and Teta clucking dolorously, all of them huddled around the space heater.
At the demonstration in solidarity with Gaza, Muhi tugged down at his hat excitedly, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the shouts of the shabaab throwing stones at the invisible soldiers on the other side of the Wall. A static of imperatives was coming down from the loudspeakers affixed to the army guard tower, a mix of Hebrew and Arabic. Soon the fog of teargas would rise, and everyone would scatter, which meant that the Jews might come out from behind the Wall. They only come when the crowd is scattering. Shots in the back. Muhi was explaining—raising his voice so Hamid could hear—that once he found out which foreign school would take him for a semester, he’d petition his administration to give him credit. He bent down to pick up a nicely shaped chunk of concrete. The group that day was small, maybe a few dozen kids from the camps. Their attention was lasered on the Wall, on the place from which the canisters would come. Muhi and Hamid moved with the group, tentative surges forward, pedaling back. Behind them, a boy was yelling up toward the guard tower, “Come out, dogs, come out.”
When the first teargas canister popped itself about three meters in front of them, a kid with a red T-shirt tied around his face, maybe the taxi driver’s kid, came running to kick it back in the direction of the soldiers, the thing streaking a noxious white. It’s familiar, less a smell than a burn in your throat that brings on nostalgia. Years ago this had been them—Hamid and Muhi—stringy-armed youths from a nicer part of town who came down to the camps to do their part. Back then the Wall wasn’t finished. The settler army had less to hide behind, and you had more chances to watch as your stone sang your name into a soldier’s face. Hamid is pretty sure the Jews use more live fire today than they did even a few years ago. Or is that just nostalgia? After all, Hamid wasn’t much older than thirteen the first time he held a friend’s skull together, felt the plates shifting in his hands under the thick blood.
That day last year, Muhi adjusted his grip on the concrete chunk in his hand, as if they were teenagers again. Just before Muhi let it fly—long limbs configuring to snap the thing over the barrier (he’s always had an amazing arm)—he shouted to Hamid, “It’s about building your own destiny.”
That was winter. Hamid spent the spring and summer working extra for Segev—things really pick up in the hot months—and by the next winter he had saved enough money to start at Bethlehem University, maybe not the most prestigious, but a degree is a degree. By then, Muhi really had done it. He was away. For the first month, it was all
selfies from Norway: Muhi in a wool hat holding up a meatball on a stick, smiling with a bunch of blond people; Muhi posing in the snow with an Asian guy, his roommate in the dorms. Is he Chinese? Hamid asked over text. He’s Norwegian, he was born here, Muhi wrote. But yeah, he has family in China . . . if that’s what you mean. Hamid wasn’t sure why this answer made him feel so far from Muhi, so left behind, but it did. Maybe it was that Muhi’s life over there seemed capable of carrying more nuance and care than anyone was allowed over here. Hamid has never traveled, unless you count Jordan, which he does not, or Saudi, which he was too young to remember.
Sometimes it seems his entire life has been worn down to the few city blocks of Bethlehem between school and home, each inscribed in him: each dip in the road, each dusty corner, each dumpster, each double-parked car, each misspelled and off-brand store filled with junk from Turkey, from China. He wonders if that’s a version of love—familiarity so deep it awakens dread.
As the months passed, more and more time went between messages from Muhi, and more and more of Hamid’s video calls went ignored. He didn’t give it too much thought. He was busy himself at the university now, catching up on premed courses, struggling through the yearlong Writing in English class, which was where he first saw Mai, carefully lining up pencils on her desk, carefully ignoring the men in the class, careful, careful, clean, and careful. A good girl.
Hamid had assumed Muhi would be back in Palestine for the winter semester, but he stayed away. Hamid wrote to check in: You coming home? And in the chat screen, he could see that Muhi spent a long time typing and pausing, typing and pausing, until he wrote only, It’s hard.
At some point, he’s not sure exactly when, he couldn’t see many of Muhi’s photos anymore. It meant either that Muhi had taken down a bunch of posts or, possibly, he was hiding more and more from Hamid, from everyone at home. You can do a lot with your privacy settings. What are you hiding? Hamid wondered and then immediately stopped asking.
Some things you have to force yourself not to see or forget as soon as you see them. Going inside Israel to work for Segev taught Hamid that. The scariest part wasn’t the soldiers, he learned. Because the soldiers are everywhere, and after a while you realize they are fat and lazy and stupid, eating cheap sandwiches and draining blue cans of the same energy drink that Hamid favors. They only bother you if it’s their job to bother you, on Highway 60 for example. No, the scariest part is seeing how permanent the Zionist state looks from the inside. It’s the highways, the glittering stacks of skyscrapers, the trains, the car dealerships, the malls—everywhere you look, malls with American brands, malls like the one they killed Salem in. It’s fortified with money, so much money. American money. Saudi money. It’s permanent.
Once, when he was inside working for Segev, Hamid fucked up in a big way. He rushed onto the wrong bus. Turned out, this bus went direct to the Central Station in Tel Aviv. There’s nowhere more dangerous for a green hawiyya without a permit. The place is legendary—a massive concrete maze crawling with soldiers whose job it is to catch you. Three arrests and your life becomes one long interrogation.
The day he got on the wrong bus he’d been so sure it was the end for him that it really was a bit like dying as the bus pulled in. But a small, bitter miracle: he slipped by the women soldiers guarding the exit while they were busy brutalizing an old man dressed with painful dignity, someone who came in from a village, you could tell, someone’s grandfather. When Hamid saw his chance, he slipped by and into the bright afternoon. It was like being reborn. Stupid as it was to linger, he’d actually spent a good twenty minutes wandering in a vague circle around the slummy blocks filled with stolen DVD joints, filthy-looking butcher shops, kiosks selling calling cards, calling cards, every place advertising calling cards in an alphabet that Hamid did not recognize. He passed thin black men, silent in doorways. Refugees. Hamid was almost back at the tinny lean-to of shared vans that shuttle people between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem when a woman in her underwear tumbled onto the sidewalk in front of him. She seemed to have come out a side door of the bus station itself. He peered in. Wisps of smoke and flashes of yellow reached out from the darkness in there, he could hear a beat. A club? She looked up from the sidewalk, her face a blur of colors. She really was in her brightly colored underwear. It was the middle of the day. Hamid remained frozen as two other women rushed out the yellow door, picked up the woman from the sidewalk, one under each armpit. They were wearing long silky robes and pants but no shirts, just black Xs taped over their breasts, their nipples. Garbage. That’s the word that came to him. Garbage, used up and rotting things. “She had a bit too much,” one of the girls said in Hebrew but with a foreign accent. They’d thought he was a Jew maybe. The underwear girl’s head was lolling. They brought her back into the yellow light, the curling smoke. As the door closed behind them, Hamid thought: Nobody will believe this.
When Muhi got back from Norway, Hamid heard about it not from Muhi but from Mama, who has been friends with Muhi’s mother since before they were born, back when both their fathers were away in Kuwait earning money. Hamid had been sitting at the plastic table in Teta’s kitchen. How is Hamid always with his mother in her mother’s kitchen? Teta was having a lie-down. Mama adjusted the dials on the stove, pots steaming with, he would soon learn, chicken and the last of the summer maluchiya from the freezer. Mama hadn’t even changed out of her work clothes yet, the dress shirt with the ruffly neck, the business slacks. She comes home tired from the long back-and-forth to Ramallah, slowed down in the afternoons by the Jews stopping traffic again and again on the roads that the Jewish settlers use. She said Muhi’s mother was worried about him. Hamid should have been doing his composition assignment, but always he finds himself drawn to the kitchen once Mama gets home.
Outside the kitchen window, the nameless white cat was pacing, gangly and filthy. At the first sign of spring she’d busted out kittens under Teta’s lemon trees out back. Hamid’s little brothers torture the poor things with their love, carrying them from cushion to cushion. The kittens cry out as the boys hold them up by what Hamid wants to call their armpits, hind legs dangling, white torsos stretched beyond reason.
“Mama, is Muhi ever coming back?” Hamid asked.
“Yaa Mama, this is what I am saying,” Mama said, rinsing cucumbers. “He’s been back for a month.” She used her free hand to massage her left temple, a gesture of exhaustion not related to Muhi, Hamid was fairly sure, but to the length of her day, the demands of it. He hates that she works. She doesn’t have to; everyone insists that she doesn’t have to, even Teta. It’s like she has two jobs, one at home, one at the water sustainability office. When Hamid was very young, he remembers his parents arguing about it. He remembers Mama closing them in the bedroom while Baba yelled outside, “I am the man.” Again and again. I am the man. Sometimes they slept at Teta’s. But that was a while ago. Now, if things haven’t resolved, they have in some way mellowed.
“I’ll see him,” Hamid said. “I’ll see Muhi soon.”
He could tell by the way Mama turned down all the burners that the food was ready. All she could do now was keep it warm until Baba came over. He stops at home before coming to Teta’s. Hamid suspects it is a subtle protest to being stuck so often at his mother-in-law’s. The boys were in the salon. Hamid knew without looking how they melted down the couch, their bare tummies exposed, each of them holding a screen up to his nose, one of them on Mama’s tablet, the other on her cell phone. The one real conversation he ever had with Mai was about having younger brothers.
“A martyr,” Fadi called from the salon.
Mama glanced up at Hamid, raised her eyebrows with a certain resignation, so he rose to go see. “What is it, yaa kitten?” he said, sitting down on the couch next to Fadi, the littlest. Fadi wriggled up so that he was lying atop Hamid’s thigh, a tiny leg bouncing against his own. Hamid could see the screen from where he sat. It was hard to tell what it was, a blur of shapes.
“The Jews kille
d him,” Sami said from across the room on the couch, not looking up from the tablet. Sami isn’t yet twelve, but he’s determined to attempt the full Ramadan fast this year.
“Who?” Hamid asked Sami. “Yanni, where?”
Sami ignored the question, engrossed, long thin limbs flung all over the couch.
Fadi, next to him, pointed at the screen, into the crowd. “He’s in there.” A body raised up, a bloody sheet. Then Hamid’s phone buzzed in his back pocket, and he took it out to see the alert that, yes, early that day Salem Abu-Khdeir had died in Augusta Victoria Hospital. His corpse was smuggled out for burial, before the Jews could take it.
In the video little Fadi showed him, the hand that held the camera (a cell phone) was shaky. A foreign woman was saying again and again, mein gott, mein gott, as the corpse banged again and again against the garden wall that they were trying to secret him over. The sheet covering the corpse became bloodier and bloodier. For some reason, the video made Hamid think of Professor Farha, the unmarried woman who teaches composition. “All boundaries are porous,” she once said. “It is this porousness that excites violence.” He hadn’t bothered to write that down, but he remembered it anyway.
When Hamid took the phone away, Fadi complained but only for a bit, only until Hamid ruffled his hair and stood to throw him over his shoulder, saying, “What do I do with this kitten? What do I do with this adorable kitten?” He was terrified by Fadi’s lightness, the soft vulnerable tummy, the twiggy spine, the shoulder blades like chicken wings, and Fadi oblivious to his own delicacy, laughing as he pretended to be a kitten: Mew, mew, mew. Later that night, after Baba came over, swirling his harsh, glossy energy through the door and into the house, talking loudly about his day and asking prodding repetitive questions to his sons while scrolling through his phone—“Ahh? Oh? Yalla”—barely listening to the answers, after cups of tea, after they piled into Baba’s car to go home, after sitting at his own desk in the quiet house, attempting to do the writing exercise that Professor Farha had assigned, after the lights in the house went out, Hamid lay in bed and rewatched the shaky cell phone footage of Salem’s corpse being smuggled out of the hospital. And actually that night it was Muhi who messaged him first. Did you see what they did to him?
City of a Thousand Gates Page 22
