City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  Even before the students begin to clamor and phones begin buzzing with news, it is a distant, percussive sound that jars Samar out of her concentration, eyes open. Her first thought: They are invading again, like they did in 2002. Tanks storming the Church of the Nativity, artillery echoing across pink marble, and all over the city, bombs falling. The campus is up on a hill, and, surely, that makes it vulnerable. Should she get down? To the floor, yanni? The room is eerily still. Her fingers are still hovering over her keyboard. If it were close—whatever it was—she’d surely hear car alarms going off. So something far. Now, outside, she can hear students calling out to one another. “Are they here?” a boy shouts. “Have the dogs come?” You never know when the Israeli army will fight their way onto campus to arrest one teenager or another.

  “What does it say?” another boy is shouting. “What have you heard?”

  The wooden door of Samar’s office flies open and Noor, a reticent and terribly thin girl from her writing seminar, appears at the threshold. “A bomb at the checkpoint,” she says, almost pleading.

  Samar beckons her in. “What?” she asks. “A bomb? Can it be?”

  Noor comes to her desk, all angular and cheekboned. “A bomb at the checkpoint,” she says again. “And Mai is there.”

  Samar is frozen in her chair. Paralipsis. That’s the word that she was looking for. Paralipsis.

  Three Seconds

  Hamid runs down the hill toward the Tunnels Checkpoint. Smoke in his throat. He trips over a twisted sheet of corrugated metal, maybe part of the checkpoint overhang, or maybe just an old scrap, who knows. Even as he’s stumbling, he’s asking himself what Mai is wearing today. Blue, right? He saw her after class. Image of Mai turning away from him, always turning away. And yes, blue. Some kind of blue dress-shirt thing with ruffles.

  When Hamid heard the explosion, he was in a place he goes to be alone—a secluded old ruin in Area B, a grassy stretch of nothing just off the road that leads to the checkpoint. The past few days have been unbearable. Ever since the night when they took Muhi—the vicious jeeps sweeping in, pushing Muhi to the ground, and, maybe this was the worst part, letting Hamid go, not even arresting him, letting Hamid go and driving off with Muhi—Hamid has felt the stranglehold of despair that previously gripped Muhi. Like he contracted it.

  At first, he’d assumed the explosion was a missile. He was so close to the checkpoint, it was almost as if he’d been expecting it. As he ran, he prayed, or something like praying. Please, not her too. Please. He ran down the hill toward the checkpoint, ran to where he thought Mai might be, making her way home from school. Words from Muhi—Where are you, Muhi? What are the Jews doing to you?—echoing in his head, Love means protecting. Hamid ran through the barbed wire to the Tunnels Checkpoint. The chaos of the explosion kept him safe. If they shot at him, he didn’t hear it. By the time he reached the checkpoint, the Jew paramedics were already loading their people onto gurneys, inserting IVs, shouting into cell phones too fast for Hamid to understand.

  Now: sharp smell of smoke at the back of his throat, burning bus where the highway to Jerusalem should be. Now, he understands it was a bomb.

  He’s tripped into a soldier. Wait, no, a large woman in green, the same ugly green of the Jews’ uniform, but this is a big woman in long, flowing clothes, like a dancer or a cartoon witch. Her back is to him, and when she turns to face him, Hamid sees that her face is falling off. There’s no other way to say it. Both of her hands are held up to a curtain of blood coming through her fingers. Hamid lets out a cry, but the woman doesn’t say anything as she continues her unsteady walk toward the Jew paramedics.

  Sirens, smoke. If Mai is conscious, she might get in an ambulance going into Jerusalem; if she’s unconscious, the Zionists will probably send her to a Bethlehem hospital. He passes a compact settler car, new-looking, all four doors open, people gone like in a zombie movie.

  Mai, where are you? He finds himself backing away from the center of the fray, into an area more peripheral. He steps back onto something soft, please not a body part, but no, it’s a kid’s backpack.

  The white lady comes out of nowhere. She’s in front of Hamid, about two strides away, dressed in greens and blues. Weirdly clean-looking. Untouched. She’s holding up her cell phone, taking photos or maybe even live-streaming the destruction. When her phone rings, she answers it. “Ido, baby, I’m okay,” she says in English, her voice breathless. “I don’t know, but I’m okay, I promise I’m okay. Hold on.” Then—and Hamid cannot believe his eyes—she holds out her phone and takes a selfie. What the actual fuck?

  Men are hosing down the burning bus. He takes out his phone to check for messages. Just Mama. Where are you? Twelve missed calls. He rubs his thumb across the long crack in his screen.

  He doesn’t know what else to do, so he does something stupid: He searches through a group chat containing everyone from his composition class. He finds Mai. He dials her number. Ringing, ringing, ringing. He’s about to hang up. Then: “Hello?”

  “Mai!”

  “Hello?”

  “Mai, can you hear me? It’s me, it’s Hamid. Where are you? Near the ambulances?” He does that thing that fathers do when they take phone calls, pressing his hand over his free ear so he can hear what she’s saying better.

  “What should I do?” Her voice is at once clear and floating.

  “I’m near the ambulances,” he says.

  “The ambulances,” she echoes. “The ambulances.” Then the call ends.

  Hamid pulls a handful of his own hair. Focus. She sounds like she hit her head, which must mean she was close to it when it happened. Maybe, then, she’s near the place where the buses pull over for the soldiers. He thinks he knows where that would be, where that was, before the explosion.

  He sees Mai from a distance. He knows it’s her without having to get close, just from her shape—womanly, something elegant in the hands. She’s helping someone, getting them to safety, and he’s about to call her name when he stops. Ugly green, and this time it really is a soldier. He’s wounded, the soldier, and he’s taller than Mai. A settler. A dog who hops on one leg, while Mai, please no, stands with him, supporting his weight so that he can keep moving toward help. Her body is small under his arm. The two of them aren’t farther from Hamid than—what?—maybe the distance across a wide street, but somehow it seems at once closer and farther, distorted as through warped glass. He can see how their bodies are pressed together, almost rubbing as the soldier hops forward. It is disgusting.

  “Oh my gosh,” says a voice to his left.

  He turns to see the white lady, the one he saw taking a selfie, brandishing her phone. She crosses in front of him. She takes a few pictures with her phone held above her head. She’s standing right in front of him. Hamid wonders if he’s invisible or maybe dead. Standing behind her, he can imagine the frame of the photo she is taking, how it must appear on her phone. He stands and watches the living image. For a second, when the soldier’s head pauses in its bobbing, the two of them, Mai and the soldier, look straight ahead. He sees the image they will make, the two of them. He sees it the way it will be seen not just by people he knows, but by strangers to this place, by tourists, by Jews, even: a torn uniform, a bloodied head scarf, two bodies in support of each other, four eyes focused in the same direction. He could stop it. He could run and smack the phone from the white lady’s hand. He could stand in front of her, blocking the view of Mai. He could grab Mai’s hand, pull her from the danger of being seen this way. But he does not move. He stands still and watches as the image is minted, the image that will (surely it will, won’t it?) ruin this girl’s life.

  Summer

  Match

  Vera’s sometimes-fixer Mo is pointing out sniper positions on Highway 60 when Vera catches sight of Rachel—the Orthodox teenager she’s been getting drunk with recently. In an effort to put some distance between them, Vera’s ignoring Rachel’s texts, or at least lengthening the time between receiving the text and respo
nding.

  She and Mo are in a communal van, an “Arab bus,” driving by an illegal Israeli settlement that juts out onto the highway. Humvees idle around the settlement gates. The homes inside seem pretty. White stone, red tile.

  “Sniper,” Mo says, pointing to the junction ahead.

  Vera is, like, not entirely certain whether Mo is trying to get her killed. She’s taking an optimistic tack. In the version she’s telling herself, Mo doesn’t want her to actually die today, just wants her to feel how easy it would be to die, meaning how it feels to have your life treated as expendable, meaning like a Palestinian, like him. So fine, yes, Vera is riding around in a communal van imagining all the ways there are to die. All this in the name of a more expansive empathy. The van’s other passengers, eight people, pay no attention to Mo or Vera. The men, all in work boots, may be coming from construction sites. The only other woman is a young mother seated next to Vera with her son on her lap. When Mo first began to point out snipers, Vera looked around her, anxious that such talk would disturb the other passengers. But of course, even if they had understood the German, why would it shock them? This is their life. This is their commute.

  Vera is wearing the dorky press vest, which Mo likes to point out probably makes her a sniper target. He’s looking his full seventy years in a cargo-pocket vest and a bucket hat getup that seems, to Vera, like something you’d wear fishing out on a lake in Bavaria. Get this guy a canoe. But no doubt he’s right in his tactic: dress like a tourist, (probably) don’t get shot.

  Nearly a week after the explosion but no word yet on which side was responsible. Palestinians or Israelis. Arabs or Jews. Each claims the other did it. Some theorize that it was actually an engine fire on the bus. From the dismal strip of Gaza, Hamas, for once, has not claimed responsibility, but that hasn’t stopped the Israeli army from conducting a crackdown on what they call Hamas operatives in the West Bank. Their latest tactic is a disturbing one: posing as journalists. The undercovers who took away two student leaders from the university in Ramallah yesterday presented themselves as press; Vera suspects this is a two-birds move, in that (1) it allows even non-Arabic-speaking army operatives to maneuver with relative ease in the West Bank and (2) it screws over the despised international press. Now Vera keeps a digital portfolio on her phone: screenshots of articles, links to YouTube videos of interviews. She has anxiety daydreams about her phone dying, leaving her unable to prove to a group of desperate, enraged men that she’s not a spy.

  For now, Highway 60 is still blocked off at both checkpoints serving Bethlehem: the Tunnels Checkpoint, what’s left of it, is letting only Jews through, and Checkpoint 300 is shut down altogether. The Palestinian workers who commute inside must cross elsewhere, lining up as early as two in the morning just to make it to construction sites by eight a.m. Vera has tried and tried to pitch a story on the aftermath of the explosion for Palestinians, but all any editor cares about is the photograph—the image that emerged from the wreckage and quickly went from some Instagram mommy’s live feed to every screen on the planet: the Palestinian Girl and the Israeli Soldier. Who is she? Who cares? Most Palestinians assume the photo was faked. Resigned paranoia of a people who live under the heel of an empire. But elsewhere, the photo has become the obsession that Vera knew it would. From the first time she saw in her feed—standing by Highway 60, watching the police cars scream toward the checkpoint—she knew the photo would take on a life of its own.

  “Sniper,” Mo says, pointing out one of the van’s windows at a metal guard shack crouched by the side of the road. Everything here is painted an ugly shade of military yellow. Next to Vera, the boy seated on his mother’s lap is asleep.

  Mo doesn’t like the angle of Vera’s new assignment, and to be fair, he’s right: the story she’s been hired to write is garbage, more sensationalized junk hyping up the Girl and the Soldier. Mo has been pushing her to write about something more substantial—the water shortages or the nearly daily raids by Israeli special forces, who seem to be working through the camps with a systematic vigor. How to explain how hard it is to get editors interested in the same news always coming out from here: oppression, power, and irony. But the image of the Girl and the Soldier is fresh and promising. Mysterious, suggestive. Hopeful.

  All last week, Vera had been waiting for it to fade but it grew and grew. The internet has christened the photograph with a caption: This is what hope looks like. If Vera cared to, she could read a variety of metamedia articles about the origins of that phrase. This is what hope looks like. Yesterday, the actual president of France tweeted the photo out to his several million followers: Voici l’espoir. And so Vera caved. She wrote to her editor at Der Spiegel and said, Look, I’ll go around the West Bank and ask people what the image means to them. He bought the story on spec. Two dollars a word. She needed the money.

  Mo is looking up something on his phone now. The van is quiet but for the prayers coming from the radio and the woman sitting next to Vera who whispers softly to her toddler son, waking groggily from his nap.

  They drive slowly past another settlement gate. There are bus stops, heavily fortified against missiles, against car rammings. All around them are soldiers with scraggly forelock curls, women in head wraps, men in jeans with tasseled tzitzit (as Vera has learned to call them) and handguns tucked in their pants. These are the settlers. Religiously devout, undeterrable. And there, among them, in a knot of settlers, is Rachel. There. Rachel waiting for the bus. She’s leaning against the cement bunker of a bus stop talking into her phone, gesturing with her free hand. Vera feels a dirty pull at her throat. Her heart is too loud.

  The van is close enough that Rachel, if she looked in expecting to see someone she knew, might recognize Vera. If this were Jerusalem or Tel Aviv or even Berlin, Rachel might peer into the slow-moving van, just out of curiosity. But here among the Palestinians, Vera is invisible to Rachel, who is—Vera sees now—not Rachel at all. That woman isn’t Rachel. Of course she isn’t. Vera doesn’t know what she was thinking. For one, this lady has her head covered in a wrap, which Rachel will do only after she is married, if she actually goes through with it. Also, this woman is too old to be Rachel, who is still, technically, a teenager. All the details are wrong. How could Vera have gotten it so wrong? The settler woman at the bus stop is heavier than Rachel, and though her features are similar—those striking eyebrows—they are less pronounced, less beautiful. Vera can imagine Rachel’s complaint: “That’s what you think I look like? That??” Tsk-tsk. That’s the sound Rachel makes. Tsk-tsk. A kind of exasperated punctuation. Tsk-tsk. A sticky and irritating sound, like Velcro being pulled off the back of your neck.

  Vera has known Rachel for the better part of the year. They met when Vera was researching an article (never published) on the so-called modern Orthodox American Jews of Jerusalem, how their military zeal and their money have reshaped Israeli politics. But in the last month, since Vera broke up with Amir—really, for the last time this time, really—she has found herself almost inseparable from Rachel. Vera stays over at least once a week with Rachel in Jerusalem. It’s easier to stay with Rachel at her apartment in Jerusalem than to take the one-hour bus all the way back to her own apartment in Tel Aviv. But more than that, it’s easier than being alone, than drinking alone. Here they are. Two girls, afraid of the dark.

  Leave me alone, Vera thinks.

  As if the words are a spell, some summoning magic, Vera’s phone starts vibrating. Rachel’s name on the screen. It’s Rachel calling. Calling, calling, calling.

  Vera doesn’t pick up, but she sends a text message with a lot of exclamation points, which is meant to convey, I’m not mad at you (!!). I’m reporting!! she texts to Rachel, I’ll call you later!!

  Wifey, Rachel writes back. This is how she refers to her. Come over tonight. I have too much wine.

  No, Vera thinks. But she knows she’ll end up going.

  In the van, Mo begins again. “In the last year, nine Palestinians have been shot at that interse
ction,” he says. “Two in the last week.” He looks out the window as he talks. He’s old enough to be Vera’s grandfather. Most of his life he worked in government. His wife likes him to keep busy, he told Vera, so in his retirement he tours around journalists and aid workers. His German is superb; his accent, lovely, almost a lisp. He quotes Old Testament verses ironically. “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” he might say, when describing for Vera the recent settler attacks on Palestinian schoolchildren. He’s been working with the magazine for years.

  “Sniper,” he says, pointing to more metal trailers crouching by the road. “Sniper.” His voice is joyous, triumphant. “Sniper,” he says, now pointing to the road back behind them, where the woman who isn’t Rachel is waiting for the bus.

  The danger past, they fall into silence again.

  “How can they say they love this land,” Mo asked her back in the spring, “and yet they do this?” It was just after Easter, not long after Salem Abu-Khdeir died at Augusta Victoria Hospital. Vera and Mo were following a farmer through his ruined olive grove, ancient trees the villagers have tended for generations, trees older than any living community member, hacked and burnt by the settlers. Mutilated arms, charred limbs. Mo was translating for the farmer, whose rural Arabic was tricky for Vera to follow. “We have named these trees for our mothers,” Mo cried out, echoing the farmer. Then, in his own words, to Vera, “Vera, is this love? What these settlers do, is it love?”