City of a Thousand Gates Read online

  Epigraph

  “It seemed—even though outside in the world the high drama of history might be going on—that this, for all its painful aspects, was one of the moments for the sake of which God had created the earth.”

  —Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (trans. Eithne Wilkins & Ernst Kaiser)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Cast of Characters

  Winter Crossings: Hamid, Vera, Ori, Samar

  Reserve Duty

  Daughters

  Salem Abu-Something

  A Good Arab

  Yael’s Room

  Strangers

  Orchards

  Salem Abu-Khdeir

  Spring Augusta Victoria

  Sisters

  Mejiddo

  Samar in Chicago

  Rachel

  Water

  Foudah

  Inside

  Green Room

  Checkpoint

  Thursday

  Three Seconds

  Summer Match

  Vera’s Room

  Noor’s Way

  Come Home

  Brothers

  Meir’s Mum Watches TV

  Emily in Rechavia

  To the Sea

  Samar’s Fast

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Cast of Characters

  (roughly in order of appearance)

  Hamid: first-year student at Bethlehem University, resident of the Palestinian city of Bethlehem

  Oum Hamid: Hamid’s mother, employed by a nonprofit in the nearby city of Ramallah

  Fadi and Sami: Hamid’s younger brothers

  Muhi: Hamid’s childhood friend

  Salem Abu-Khdeir: fourteen-year-old boy beaten into a coma by a mob in a Jerusalem mall parking lot

  Yael Salomon: fourteen-year-old girl stabbed to death in her home on an Israeli settlement in the West Bank

  Vera: German reporter in her midtwenties

  Amir Oved: Vera’s sometimes lover, a professional soccer player in his midtwenties

  Rachel: an acquaintance of Vera’s, a Jewish American teenager living in Jerusalem

  Emily: a new mother in her thirties, Jewish American, married to an Israeli (Ido) and living in Jerusalem

  Ido: professional animator, reservist in the Israeli army, originally from Tel Aviv

  Mayan: their newborn daughter

  Ori Lev: enlisted soldier whose family lives in the Israeli settlement of Gush Etzion

  Miriam: Ori’s mother, a religious instructor for young brides

  Yuval: Ori’s father

  Tovah and Avital: Ori’s younger sisters

  Meir Klausman: professional soccer player, Ori’s childhood friend, Amir’s teammate

  Danny: a unit-mate of Ori’s

  Professor Samar Farha: PhD in comparative literature, teaches at Bethlehem University, lives with her mother in Bethlehem

  Fatima: Samar’s sister-in-law

  Shibi Hassin: professional soccer player, teammate of Meir and Amir, Palestinian resident of Jerusalem with Israeli residency

  Amal: Shibi’s wife

  Nasir: their young son

  Mai: university student at Bethlehem University, classmate of Hamid, Palestinian resident of Jerusalem with Israeli residency

  Leila: Mai’s sister

  Tariq: Leila’s husband, Mai’s brother-in-law

  Muhammed and Farouq: Mai’s younger brothers

  Noor: student at Bethlehem University, classmate and friend of Mai, resident of Bethlehem

  Hussein: Noor’s brother, interned in an Israeli prison

  Winter

  Crossings: Hamid, Vera, Ori, Samar

  Hamid is fucked. He knows it now. If he hadn’t let his boss convince him to stay an extra hour to finish installing the last air conditioner. If he hadn’t stayed to work inside Israel for nearly a month already—all that pay carefully folded into his wallet and, for good measure, his socks. If he wasn’t rattled and jumpy, hearing about the boy the Jews beat half to death in a settlement parking lot last night. If he actually had a permit to be here. If, if, if.

  By the time Hamid got to the bus stop, it was midmorning. He was supposed to wait for a bus that would take him in the general direction of Jerusalem. From there, he could get home to Bethlehem. He waited at an overhang by a highway, cars rushing by. On the other side of the road were a gas station and an “American-style” waffle place. A few Jews were waiting for buses—women with their hair covered tending to babies, guys maybe his own age talking over a cell phone that blasted the latest Israeli pop song to rip off Palestinian music. My beloved, my beloved, my beloved, the singer trilled in Arabic. Hamid’s real phone doesn’t get service this far inside the Jewish areas, so he used his shitty phone—the one with an Israeli SIM card—to read about Salem Abu-Khdeir. Someone posted what looked like security footage of the beating, but his phone wouldn’t load it. At the bus stop, Hamid began noticing how the Jews his own age seemed to be drifting closer to him, saying something among themselves that made them laugh, and then looking at Hamid again. He wondered if they had seen the video. He wondered if they were in it. Fuck this, he decided, and the next bus that stopped, he got on, not even bothering to ask the driver where it was heading. Anything was better than being beaten half to death in some suburban bus stop. Right?

  Wrong. Because now he is so spectacularly fucked. Ever since the bus flew by the junction and continued down the highway, he has known that he is fucked. Because this bus will not take him to the outskirts of Jerusalem, to a place where nobody checks your hawiyya to see if it’s green or blue, to see if you’re from the West Bank, to see if you’re allowed to be here without a permit. No, this bus will take him—he’s sure now—deep inside, all the way to Tel Aviv, all the way to the Central Station, a place where every hawiyya is checked as they funnel you out of the exits, a place where he’ll be caught. Fucked.

  On the highway, they speed deep into the interior of the Jewish state, past fields of brown grass. In the distance, dystopian-looking power plants vibrate. Signs for Tel Aviv begin to appear. Hamid presses a hand up to the glass. Breathe, he tells himself. There are probably a lot of bus stations in Tel Aviv. He doesn’t actually know this to be true but it stands to reason. There are a lot of stations, so who’s to say that this bus is going to the one station that he absolutely, absolutely cannot enter?

  Ask someone, he begs himself. It might not be too late. He might be able to get out before they pull into the Central Station, before he’s forced to show his hawiyya and his expired permit to the soldiers there. But he doesn’t move. The bus’s seats have soft fabric that was probably itchy once, long since worn away. He’s sitting near the back, and there’s nobody immediately next to him, but there are people around. A tourist-looking white lady, European maybe, writes in a journal. A couple speaks Hebrew a few places up. In the back, some tired, refugee-looking black guys watch something on a cell phone held between four hands.

  There are two soldiers on the bus, but they are sitting closer to the front, and anyway, as he’s recently learned, outside of checkpoints most soldiers aren’t working. They take buses from this place to that place; they wander around in little packs waiting for some train; they eat falafel. When he first began to come into Israeli territory without papers, he was shocked to see off-duty soldiers—like an action movie showing the villains making coffee or taking a shit—but the more times he comes inside the Wall (the fucking Wall) the less bewildering it is. They are dangerous only contextually. They don’t ask you to produce your hawiyya—match the picture to your face, ca
ll in the ID number on a walkie-talkie—they don’t do all that unless it’s their job. Unless they’re manning, oh, say, one of the countless security checks at the big bus station in Tel Aviv. Even when he has the right papers, he doesn’t go near that big central station. Everyone avoids it if they can. What’s to stop one of them from pocketing the document, or tearing it up, or finding some otherwise unnoticed flaw? Because really, their job isn’t to check for the right anything. Their job is to catch him.

  He thinks about texting Mama, but what would he even text to her? Don’t wait up. They got me? He rolls his head to face the window, lets out a whimper. What is Mama doing now? She must be home from work. Cooking, probably. Cooking in Teta’s kitchen while Teta has her late-afternoon lie-down. He hopes it’s something simple, something comforting. His favorite meals are the ones she makes in a rush. Macaroni and cheese, baked with strips of chicken. His empty stomach clenches acidly. Whenever he comes back from working inside, Mama and Teta lament how skinny he’s gotten. Will he spend tonight in jail? Will they shoot him on the spot?

  His elbows rest on his thighs, his face in his hands. It was supposed to be easy today. Just a few final air conditioners to install before he went home. Cash and no questions from the boss, Segev. He’s a decent guy, a Jew, but not a real Jew—a Russian with Hebrew worse than Hamid’s. The work was brilliant all summer and fall, the pay so good that Hamid enrolled in university for the winter. But now he’s fucked. “Fucked” means going to jail, of course, but it means more than that. This will be the third time. The first two times, it’s just a day lost in handcuffs and getting printed at some station. But the third time is jail time. How much is impossible to say. How much do they feel like giving you? Are you on any lists? Do you want to find out? Jail means being taken inside, far inside—an inside so deep that nobody, not even God, can reach him. Once they have him, Hamid feels in his heart that they will never let him go.

  He knows the bus is pulling into the Central Station because it slows to ascend a ramp. The closer he gets, the calmer he gets. None of this is intuitive. He’s never terrified when he should be terrified. The first time Hamid came inside without papers, he was stupid about it, and so of course got tear canisters shot at him. This was before he had the job with Segev. Before he knew how it worked—the early-morning rides down south to spots where you can slip through, the waiting cars—before it was all a routine. He had seen a rope that someone else had used. He took his chance, hoisted himself over the cement slabs like a mountain climber. His palms, not yet hardened with working blisters, tore. Before his feet hit the ground, the live canisters were coming, and, from the guard tower, the voices shouted in Hebrew. Even then, he was calm. He knew what to do, the way to run, to zigzag, only later stopping in a side alley to puke.

  The bus brakes squeak to a stop. People begin to move, bags crinkle, sweaters are unfolded. He closes his eyes. Come on. He doesn’t move. Come on. Then, aloud to himself: “Yalla.” And he gets up, takes his backpack from the seat next to him, and descends from the bus.

  They’re posted just outside the exit so that you have to pass them to get out, which he needs to do if he wants to catch a shared van going southeast. If he can make it to East Jerusalem, getting to Bethlehem from there won’t be so bad. Gray uniforms of the border police, each with a handgun and a semiautomatic, a pair of silver handcuffs dangling from a pocket. They are standing in the sun. Another weird thing Hamid has almost gotten used to: a lot of them are girls, the soldiers in gray who get in guys’ faces to check their papers and pat them down. Teenage girls his own age—crazy humiliating, that it’s a woman who does it to you. A woman treating you like a woman.

  Hamid is under the fluorescents of the bus complex. There is nowhere to run. Inside the station is a labyrinth of cheap clothing shops and closed storefronts, Filipino grocers, and, he’s heard, a complex of clubs and abandoned movie theaters underneath.

  His skin is prickly. What he needs is to buy himself some time. The corridor leading outside, leading past the soldiers, has a few shops. Who would come here to buy anything? Who would come here voluntarily? There’s a rip-off cell phone kiosk and next to that, a guy with a little falafel stand. The falafel guy—a heavyset Jew, with signs saying the food is kosher; Hamid can read enough Hebrew to tell—is sweaty and unshaven and putting on a little show, flipping around his spreading knife, throwing falafel into the deep fryer then opening up a pita, each movement marked by a tap of the knife. His stall is decorated by a string of palm-sized Zionist flags. Somehow, a gray dove has gotten inside. It mills around the exit like a tiny businessman.

  From where he’s standing, Hamid can watch the soldiers at the exit checking papers and try to divine some kind of pattern. They check almost everyone, almost. Sometimes they let someone pass, but without any detectable reason. Of the two soldiers, one is unsettlingly pretty: long hair, small waist pinched in by a belt. It makes it worse, somehow. The falafel guy is still moving, bobbing, smacking out rhythms with his dull spreading knife. Knife in her face, slashing her fucking face. Shut up, focus.

  “Im hakol?” the falafel man says in Hebrew, calling to someone down the hallway, to the guy who ordered. Hamid hears the Arabic in the Jew’s accent—always an odd sensation to know that the man’s family came from Iraq or Morocco, came here to invent Israel. Hamid stays focused on the exit, which is quiet for a moment. Not a good time to go. He leans against the falafel stand’s display glass. There are piles of chopped cucumber and tomato, cabbage pickled purple—a landscape of plenty. A few more people pass him where he stands, must be another bus just got in. One of the soldiers pulls aside an elderly man, someone’s grandfather, in from a southern village. Yaa haaj, what are you doing here? The soldier talks into her radio while the haaj tries to explain something to her. He points to a document that she holds in her hand now. She doesn’t acknowledge that she hears him. The man is stooped with age, thin in a cheap striped T-shirt, which is clean; it is the necessity and fragility of his dignity, of the clean T-shirt’s dignity, that makes it so hard to watch. And Hamid knows that it has to be now. If he’s going to make it through, it will have to be now, while they are dealing with someone else but before the situation escalates and the soldiers go crazy, before they arrest the old man or he starts crying. Hamid feels like a bastard, but what can he do? Twelve steps and he’s out. Twelve steps.

  He walks toward the exit, two steps, four, seven. He is looking past the soldiers as if he were already outside, as if he had momentum. Hawiyya out of his pocket. Nine steps, almost there. He feels a freezing-cold dread rise up from the deepest part of his gut as the soldiers turn at the same time to look at him, and he knows he will not make it. He will not make it. They are going to get him.

  Then a voice behind him.

  “Achi!”

  He stops.

  “Achi!” The falafel guy comes out from behind the counter, carrying a falafel in bread. The Jew laughs, says a jumble of words in Hebrew. They filter toward Hamid: Forgot, you forgot, didn’t you forget, aren’t you forgetting something? An olive-colored man, swarthy and glistening. An Arab in another life. He’s speaking in Hebrew, but Hamid has been working with Segev long enough to understand him.

  Information reorganizes itself; the situation appears to him in separate parts being fit back together, him in it and all the other little pieces. This man has confused Hamid with someone else. With whoever ordered. But how? The soldiers are still watching. Is this a joke? A trick? A dream? Does it matter? Hamid adjusts. He is focused. He is present. Now he knows what to do.

  In Hebrew, he says, “Ken, ken, shakhakhti,” And takes the bread, heavy with falafel and salads and sauce. It is warm in his hand. The smell is overwhelming. He thanks him: Todah.

  Something about this exchange, the normalcy of this exchange, has opened a door, has created a moment. Now, now, it has to be now. Hamid has the green plastic case of his ID in one hand and a dripping pita in the other. The soldiers have returned their attention to th
e short man whom Hamid cannot bring himself to look at. He smiles like a clown, a little sauce dripping down his hand. Warm sesame. He’s young, and he looks younger, a skinny guy in fashionable sneakers with a pita the size of his own head. He’s moving, expired permit held up to the sexy soldier, who nods without bothering to inspect it. She wrinkles her nose as if the falafel stinks—it probably does. Hamid walks out into the acute angle of a midday sun. He keeps walking, as if he has any idea where he is going, keeping his pace even, not breaking into the run that is itching up his legs. Behind him, a man is being harassed, maybe arrested. Somewhere else, a young man—a boy named Salem—has been chewed up by the Jewish machine and lies nearly lifeless in an East Jerusalem hospital. Above Hamid, a dove has taken flight into the filthy sky. But Hamid is walking up a crowded sidewalk still holding the uneaten falafel, his hawiyya back in his pocket, and to the God he is no longer sure he believes in, he is whispering, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  * * *

  Vera nearly bumps into the dazed-looking guy holding the overstuffed pita as she hurries around the corner. “Slicha,” she says in Hebrew, and then, for good measure, “Asfa” in Arabic. She’s never sure which language to speak to people in Tel Aviv, but anyway, he doesn’t respond to either. She hurries toward the lot of shared taxi-vans—monit sherut, she’s heard Israelis call them—that ferry people back and forth between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. She gets the last available seat, which means as soon as she gets in, the driver closes the sliding van door behind her and they are off. She checks the time on her phone: still morning, technically.

  It’s been a week of tit-for-tat violence in Jerusalem that started when the Israelis announced the expansion of several settlements. That night, a fourteen-year-old Jewish girl, a settler, was stabbed to death in her bedroom. The Palestinian who did it was shot but survived; he’s probably being interrogated (tortured) right now. Then last night, a mob of Jewish teenagers beat up a Palestinian kid—also fourteen—so badly that he’s now in a coma. A revenge attack, people are saying. It happened in a Jerusalem parking lot. But, of course, Vera is not rushing into Jerusalem to write about cycles of violence or cultures of revenge. Oh, no. She has received an assignment from an in-flight magazine that wants a mindless, fluffy write-up of a newly opened hotel. Already, cheesy descriptors float around in her head: “a stately property” that “oozes Levantine charm.” This is the bullshit that pays her bills.