The Celestial Gate by Avital Dicker (red white royal blue txt) 📗

the afternoon. Her shift at Israel’s first aid organization, MDA, started at four.

Anise loved being in the ambulance, where nobody cared who she was or what she believed in. All that mattered was saving lives and the patients were grateful for the help they got. She remembered that the station director had asked her to bring in her vaccination card, which they needed for insurance or something like that.

She finished her snack, turned off the TV, and went into Sual’s bedroom.

Her mother thinks Anise doesn’t know where she hides her important papers. In general, her mom is sure Anise doesn’t know many of the things she knows. In Sual’s mind, Anise is still a baby, even though she’s almost fifteen. Her body remains thin and boyish, but lately, men in the street have started to give her weird looks.

Anise opened the middle drawer inside the closet. Under a stack of bills, she found a large brown envelope. She took it out and opened it. It contained her mother’s ID card, her own vaccination card, and a bunch of old photos, some in black and white. She still had a few minutes before she had to leave the house and Mom never showed her pictures from when she was young. Curious, Anise took out the photos.

In the first picture, she saw a woman wearing a burka. It was difficult to see much through the thick scarf covering almost the entire face, but Anise knew it was her mother. She’d know those eyes anywhere. And, on her right hand, she saw the ring with the large red stone her mother always wore. It’s weird she used to dress like this, Anise thought. Next to her mother stood another burka-clad woman who, based on her posture, must have been older.

The second photo, apparently taken at some family event, showed several people. Anise recognized her mother who, this time, was wearing just a hijab covering her hair; her face was exposed, maybe because she seemed very young, close to Anise’s own age. Next to her mom, close but not touching, was a skinny teenager with black hair and a hooked nose. Mom never talked about her family, and whenever Anise asked about them, Sual almost always found a way to avoid answering.

Anise looked at her birth certificate. At the top, it said she’d been born at Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem, and underneath, in the line intended for the father’s name, it said “Mahmud Issa.” Which totally made no sense at all. Long ago, when she was little, her mother had told her that her father had died before she was born, in which case the certificate should have read “Mahmud Issa, deceased.” That was not the case. She stared at the paper for several long minutes. It isn’t possible that my father is alive and that mom is hiding it from me, she thought. It had to be a mistake.

That evening, Sual came home at the usual hour, put her bag and laptop down in the entrance, and hurried to the kitchen to start making dinner. Anise was sitting upright and rigid in a kitchen chair. Seeing the look in her daughter’s eyes, Sual realized that the moment she’d been afraid of had come.

When Anise was little, she never stopped asking where her father was. Mor had a dad, so Anise wanted one too. Sual couldn’t tell her the truth. For one thing, Anise was too young to understand the need for secrecy and was liable to blurt out the truth to the wrong person. Also, Sual didn’t know how to explain her complicated life. How do you tell a five-year-old child that her mother’s family had forced her to marry at sixteen? She wouldn’t understand. And that was the easiest part of the whole story.

Sual didn’t regret a thing. Against all the odds, she was now leading a life that, as a child, she had never imagined possible. Still, she’d been raised as a very observant Muslim in a culture where many subjects were taboo, and to this day, it was difficult for her to speak of the circumstances that led to Anise’s conception and birth. She had no idea where to start. How, for example, would she explain to her daughter – who was growing up as an equal member of society – that she, Sual, had been raised in a culture where women had no rights at all?

Sual busied herself at the kitchen counter, making hot chocolate and cutting a thick slab of the chocolate cake she’d baked that morning. “Eat and then we’ll talk,” she said in the calmest tone of voice she could muster.

Mom had lost all the color in her face, and it was obviously hard for her to talk. But the last thing that interested Anise at this point was how her mom was feeling. She wanted to kill her. Mom started speaking, saying that she’d been born to a very religious Muslim family and that she’d only been a smidge older than Anise’s age when her family married her off to the son of a neighboring family, a boy she’d been promised to from the moment she was born. That’s what the families had decided and nobody asked her opinion on the topic because, as a woman, what she thought was totally irrelevant.

Then, Mom said, they’d forced her to stop going to school. She wiped the tears that wouldn’t stop rolling down her face and then blushed when she came to the part about Mahmud being homosexual and how they both had to keep it a secret, otherwise the family would have killed him.

Anise found it hard to buy that last bit. At her school, there were kids who had two dads and nobody made a stink. These days, nobody was bothered by gay men or women.

Finally, her mom came to the part Anise had been waiting for: her real dad. Sual stumbled around for the words, saying his name was Michael and that he was