City of a Thousand Gates

by Rebecca Sacks

  Mai hands Leila the lemon segments without looking at her. “Better,” Mai says. Leila hasn’t asked her when she’s going back to school, but surely, she must wonder; surely, that must be the question underneath her question, so Mai answers that question, too. “I’m feeling almost ready to go back,” she says as she rinses off the cutting board.

  She saw his feet first, his boots. After the explosion, as Mai got her bearings, it was his boots that she saw first. They were jutting out from the other side of the cement slab. She couldn’t see the rest of him, only his boots. A dead body, she thought. She was lying next to a dead body. The two of them had lain side by side, as if buried together. Just as easily it could have been her, she knew, crushed by the cement block, lying dead next to a stranger. God is great, she reminded herself as she crawled toward the boots, past the tangled rebar clogged with chunks of dirt and asphalt. She needed to check. Why? Why didn’t she run? She has asked herself this. Her only answer: because it could have been her, on the wrong side of the cement slab.

  On the ground, bits of metal glinted. Please, she begged silently, don’t let me see a headless body. Then she looked up. She saw past the boots—green uniform, no weapon. A soldier, a Jew.

  Breathing. He was breathing, pants sticky with blood, arms obscuring his face in pain or delirium. It was quiet. Too quiet. It can’t have been that quiet after a bombing, she knows, but that’s how she remembers it. Silence in the smoke, him sensing her and slowly bringing himself up to sit, gingerly, the way less than a minute before, Mai must have done. A beautiful boy, almost sleepy-looking, tousled, like a child roused from a nap. She and Noor have joked about this, how some of the Jews are, like, objectively handsome. Beautiful monsters, they call them. He had no weapon that she could see. Her hands were up. That was a strange thing to realize. She’d been holding her hands up, as if he were about to shoot.

  It depends on the day. Sometimes Mai will try to pull Leila into nostalgia, and Leila will resist. Remember the French teacher? she’ll say. Remember the girl with the buckteeth? Leila will shake her head, tell Mai that it was years ago, years and years ago, and she can barely remember it now. As if it were a decade ago and not two years, barely two years. But today, Leila is game to re-create the past, which is why they are back in the bedroom now. Tariq’s meal—covered to keep it warm—is waiting for him on the smaller table in the kitchen. They are playing songs from Mai’s phone and bouncing on Leila’s bed, on Leila and Tariq’s bed. “Bouncing” is maybe too strong a word. They are wobbling on the bed, moving gently, letting the bed squeak, squeak, as they sing along to the indefensible pop songs of their youth, the ridiculous saccharine auto-tuning. “No, no, no.” Leila’s voice trembles as she waves her finger and her giant hips.

  Mai doesn’t hear Tariq come in, but she can feel everything in the room change. Suddenly it is drafty, the open door, yes, but something more, a sense of being exposed, like, fine, yes, like the wind that used to draft through the window with the tarp over it, until Tariq had the workmen fix it.

  He is standing at the bedroom threshold, compact in a suit. Mai steps down from the bed. She watches Leila’s eyes go over to Tariq, the music still playing from her phone. They watch each other. “No, no, no,” Leila says, mouthing the words to him. Now it’s teasing, now it’s for him. He’s in dark trousers and rolled shirtsleeves; his watch glints. A man who sells things; a man watching his wife on their bed. It is as if Mai isn’t here. All at once, she knows that Leila has been waiting all day for this. All day, she has waited out the hours with Mai for this, for her husband to come home and want her. Mai feels betrayed, invisible. Alone.

  Why? Why didn’t she run? When she saw that it was a soldier lying there. Why didn’t she run? The soldier had gotten himself up to a seated position, legs straight out. Something was wrong with his right leg, twisted up all wrong. The angle of the kneecap was revolting. He didn’t speak, but he knew she was there. Her hands were up, as if he had a weapon, but he didn’t. Smoke swirled around her, and far off now, she heard shouting.

  He made a sound that might have been “Mama.” His head was dipping and weaving.

  In the story Mai tells about this day, she is already gone; she is not standing here doing something doomed and stupid. But she didn’t walk away. She took a step toward him and bent down slightly, as if talking to little Farouq. She could have said anything. She could have spoken to him—this blue-eyed colonizer—in the Arabic that all the soldiers know, the phrases they repeat in clunky approximations: “Give me your ID.” She wishes she’d said that to him. “Give me your ID” or “Open the trunk” or “Stop or I’ll shoot.” But she didn’t. Instead she asked, in Hebrew, “Are you okay?”

  He said, “Please,” in Hebrew. That’s all he said.

  She knew then that she wouldn’t walk away. She knew she was going to help him even if she hated him, even if he was a monster. She was not—is this the right word?—she was not brave enough to walk away, not even from someone who thought of her life—Mai’s life, Mai’s own life—as a problem.

  She has no memory of answering her phone and no idea how it survived the explosion, but she was speaking into her phone then. “Hello?” she said. There was a distant voice on the line. Maybe that’s me, Mai thought, calling myself. “What should I do?” she said aloud. On the other end was a jumble of voices. Later, she saw that an unknown number had dialed her, and out of fear that they would call her again, she blocked the number. But that was later. At the time, she only echoed the distant voice she heard coming from her own phone. “The ambulances,” she said. “The ambulances,” she echoed. Then she hung up.

  On the ground, the soldier was trying to stand. His leg twisted horrifically. He cried out in pain.

  “Hold on,” she said in Arabic, then, in Hebrew. Hakeh reg’a. She hesitated then added, “I’ll help you.”

  In the car, dropping Mai off at home, Leila and Tariq sit up front. Mai is in the back. Leila is talking quietly with Tariq about one of their neighbors—the one who keeps letting stray dogs into her yard. “I don’t know what goes on in that house,” she says. They drive past a Jewish settlement block, spreading out across the old neighborhoods. The huge, gaudy Israeli flag flies next to a huge, gaudy American flag, side by side.

  “Still not back at school, ah?” Tariq says to Mai in the rearview mirror. Hanging from the mirror beneath his eyes: an air freshener and a pendant of the golden Dome of the Rock. He doesn’t pray every day, but on Fridays goes to Al-Aqsa, often bringing the boys. Tariq smiles. He has perfect teeth. He does well at the car dealership, Leila tells Mai. That’s why everyone—Leila, Tariq’s mother, even Mama—drives new Volkswagens. Not a tall man, but powerfully built. He moves knowingly the way a cat lurks before pouncing.

  “Not yet, but soon,” Mai says.

  He laughs. “Good, good,” he says. Teeth flashing. She’s never seen him angry, but she can imagine it: an affable rage.

  Then to Leila, in a quieter voice, he explains that he’ll be late to cousin Rania’s wedding tomorrow. “Forgive me, my queen,” he says.

  Leila sticks her tongue out at him.

  “What’s this?” he exclaims. Looking at her, then at the road, then back at her, furious with joy. “Mai, your sister is a very bad girl, do you know this?”

  Last year, Mai found a recent photo of Tariq and Leila on Leila’s phone. It was of the two of them, taken by Tariq from a high angle. He had a shirt on, but it was kind of unbuttoned. Leila was in a tank top, the kind you’d wear as an undershirt, not a real shirt. She looked up at the camera, her eyes big. Leila’s head came up to Tariq’s chin, and her expression—this was on purpose, maybe—was girlish, wide-eyed. She looked like—how to explain this?—like she belonged to him. Mai wanted to throw the phone across the room, but also to keep it forever. Now, Mai supposes, she has a secret from Leila. The Girl and the Soldier. Whenever the image appears, Mai is there, hiding in plain sight. She has a secret from Leila the way Leila has secrets from Mai. Th
e way secrets live in your body and alter it, Mai has that, too.

  Once she got the soldier standing, they began to walk. Slowly, carefully. She kept him off his injured leg by having him hop, supporting him under his armpit and gripping his waist a little. He was thinner than she thought he’d be, thinner than Mai. He smelled like burnt earth. She had never been this close to a man who was not her father. She could feel something slip inside her—a sense of resolve leaking out from a newfound porousness.

  They were only like that for a few seconds, a minute at most. She has no idea when the photograph was taken of the two of them. The two of them. She didn’t notice anyone noticing them—just the opposite, actually. After a few careful steps, when they entered the periphery of the explosion—the bus burning, the Red Crescent ambulances to the right, Red Star to the left—she was struck by how close they had been to the ambulances the whole time, not much farther than the length of a playground. How weird, she thought at the time, that nobody stopped her. Though people only see what they expect to see. Hadn’t someone said that? So maybe, she thought, she and the soldier were invisible together.

  The Israelis had already detained a few shabaab, lining them up against a jeep. Young men, her young men, though no one she recognized, looking up at the border police—hands up, each with his hawiyya between his fingers. The boys were zip-tied, she could tell, by the way they held up their hands together, a gesture of supplication, a gesture that looks like praying if you don’t know what it is. They were zip-tied, but the Jew shot one of the boys anyway. Mai didn’t hear the shot, but she saw the boy collapse onto his side, then the other boys yelling, trying to inch over to help, the soldier waving his weapon, shouting at them too. “No,” she said, she said it aloud. “No.” The boy lay on his side. Not moving.

  And then the Jews were running toward her, two paramedics in blue, running toward her with weapons. One of them a woman with a ponytail, one of them a man in settler clothes, fat, with strings hanging out of his pockets.

  “Stop!” the woman yelled in Arabic. “Stop or I’ll shoot.”

  “No,” Mai said again. Then, “Please.”

  But they only pushed her. The woman paramedic pushed her, hard in the chest, pushed her away. She fell onto the ground coughing. Later, on the news, this woman would insist that the girl in white must have been trying to kidnap Ori—that’s his name, Ori—because if she had nothing to hide, why did she disappear so quickly?

  Get up, Mai said to herself, gasping on the concrete. Get up. She heard them speaking to the soldier rapidly in Hebrew, My brother, what unit are you in? Then, to each other, Radio in, tell them we’ve got a flower. She’s still not sure if she misheard. A flower.

  Then she really did run.

  Back at home, the boys are finally in bed. Mama and Mai watch TV in the salon. All day, Mama was at her own sister’s home, hollowing out zucchinis to be stuffed for Rania’s wedding tomorrow. Mama, who gives and gives. Now, on the couch, Mama rests her bare feet in Mai’s lap. The news is on. Saudi atrocities in Yemen, American atrocities in Iran, the winner of Arab Idol. Mai is rubbing her mother’s feet with a lovely, thick lotion, scented with geranium.

  “Worse and worse,” Mama says.

  Mai rubs her knuckle along the tender arch of her mother’s foot, the lotion is slick on her hands. “I know, Mama,” she says.

  “Look at me,” Mama says, “putting you to work on my old feet.”

  Mai runs her hand over the delicate bones of Mama’s foot bridge. She wants to say, I’m trying to protect you. Instead she quotes a hadith. “Paradise is at the feet of our mothers,” which gets a laugh from Mama.

  The news anchorwoman, whose lipstick is a warm, purply brown that would look nice on Mai, says, “We now continue ongoing investigation into Israeli terror tactics.” Today, they examine Israeli soldiers disguising themselves as civilians. Footage, now, of the disguised agents: video from Mai’s campus of the “journalists” in their press vests, dragging away the student union leader; images of “aid workers” in Gaza handcuffing an elderly man in a wheelchair. “Recently, the Israelis have begun to use women as undercover agents, too.” Then there she is. Mai on TV, Mai with the soldier. Rubbing her mother’s feet, Mai thinks, That’s me, that’s you. Mai is too scared to look over at Mama, so she stays fixed on the screen, which has already shifted to footage of shabaab in protest. Now that the Jews are done terrorizing families with the raids, they have begun to claim that, in fact, it was a gas leak that caused the explosion.

  “Yalla,” Mama says, “time for bed.”

  In the morning, the three of them are together at home. Mai, Leila, Mama. They are folding sticky sweet cheese into cream wraps for halawet el-jibn to bring to the wedding this afternoon.

  Mai is reducing rose blossom water to a syrup in the big, dented pan that her parents have had since they first married, so out of place in the renovated kitchen, the sleek stove range hood, black and soundless. Leila and Mama are lining baking sheets with plastic wrap. The boys are at school, the only traces of them are little figurines popping out of every corner—toy soldiers in the fruit bowl, behind the drying rack, in the deep sink.

  Mai remembers the three of them preparing desserts for Leila’s wedding. “This is the last time,” Mai had said to herself then, stirring the same syrup that she is stirring now. That day, she knew, it would never be the same. And she was right. All she wants, all she has wanted, is for time to stop, just a little bit, just a pause. But the harder she tries to stop it, the more it hurtles her forward. She says, aloud, she says, “It’s me.”

  Mama and Leila don’t look up. Mama tells Leila to begin coating the trays with vegetable oil, but very lightly.

  “It’s me,” Mai says again. “In the picture, it’s me.”

  They pause what they are doing and look at her.

  “The Girl and the Soldier. It’s me. I’m the girl.”

  Mama and Leila exchange a startled glance in which they determine—Mai recognizes this exchange, has participated in ones like it—that Leila will be the one to speak. “You thought,” tender little sigh, “you thought we didn’t know?”

  Mai: “How?” She’s not sure if she says the word aloud.

  “We knew as soon as we saw,” Mama says.

  Mai has stopped stirring the syrup. Could they tell from the wound? From the cut on her head? Had they deduced the connection between that and the photo?

  Mama looks almost pained when she says, “I would know you from your shadow.”

  “I don’t think—” Leila starts.

  Mama finishes, “Nobody else can tell.”

  “Your face is hidden,” Leila says.

  “And the colors are wrong,” Mama says. “The pink looks white.”

  What now? When Mai imagined this conversation, she imagined that it would end with her apologizing, asking forgiveness, begging even. She should feel relief. Instead what Mai feels is a loss so complete it is as if her legs really are missing. Everything has been changing for a long time. She has known this but hasn’t wanted to let go of the possibility that they could go back, that time could reverse, that Leila would come home and the two of them would become girls again. But everything is always changing, and never again will Mai belong completely, perfectly and completely, to her mother, to her sister. Never again. Never again a child. Never, ever again.

  Mama draws her daughters close. The three women draw together, as if around Leila’s belly, as if the three of them were carrying Leila’s belly together, as if the one inside were each of them, each of the three women, inside the others.

  Brothers

  Ori is the only one in civilian clothes, sitting in the special chair that lets him rest his leg, still in a cast that goes up past his knee. All the guys in his living room—Danny, fat Moshik, Commander Alon—are in uniform, all of them carrying weapons. And then there’s Ori, in sweatpants and an old T-shirt with the neck cut off. So far, nobody has mentioned the photo of Ori with the Arab girl.

&nb
sp; “So what’s it like in Hebron?” he asks, not sure which guy he should look at.

  Alon shrugs. “You know how it is, achi.” He takes a cookie from the plate that Ima brought out earlier before squeezing Ori’s shoulder then disappearing upstairs to give them, the boys, privacy. “A lot of action,” Alon continues, “a lot of bullshit.” His Tavor rests on his leg.

  Ori assumes it was Ima who orchestrated this visit from the guys, even if she insists it was his commander’s idea. Strange to have them all in his living room—on the couch, their boots on the carpet (Ima told them not to worry about taking them off). He hasn’t seen them since the explosion. The initial handshakes were awkward, and not just because he was in a cast. It has been a month. A lot can happen in a month. A lot of distance can develop. And who knows if Ori will be allowed to reenter his unit when his leg heals. Who knows if he’s still considered a fit soldier.

  “The Arabs in Hebron are wild,” Moshik says more to Alon than to Ori. “Always filming everything.”

  “And the internationals?” Alon says to Moshik. “Remember, Mosh, those Christians from Germany or Sweden or wherever?” He shakes his head.

  “Nazis,” Moshik says, his mouth filled with cookies.

  “Exactly,” Alon says. “Remember that old lady?”

  “Achi, that was crazy.” Moshik smacks Alon on the shoulder—a casual touch that makes Ori feel very far away from them. “She kept calling us the SS!”

  Danny still hasn’t said a fucking word. Ori tries to make eye contact but Danny won’t look at him.

  “Anyway,” Alon says, turning to Ori as if he just remembered Ori was there, “how are you feeling, achi? How is the leg?”

  “The cast itches,” Ori says, directing his answer at Danny, “but it’s not so bad.” Danny is fiddling with the strap of his rifle and doesn’t reply. Ori and Danny became close after the final march that initiated them into the unit—each pushing the other to keep going, keep going, achi, and when one thought he would drop dead from exhaustion, from despair, from fatigue, it was the other who placed a firm hand between his shoulder blades—Yalla, achi, you can do it, and they did. Only now, Danny won’t look at him.