A grave in Gaza oy-2 Read online

  A man in light green scrubs entered through the office’s second door, which was marked Surgery. Behind him, Omar Yussef saw light glimmering off stainless steel freezers. He closed the door and greeted them. “I’m Doctor Maher Najjar, the hospital pathologist. In fact, the only pathologist in the Gaza Strip.”

  “You must be a very busy man,” Khamis Zeydan said.

  “I have six trainees. It’s an expanding profession,” the pathologist said.

  Najjar was broad and bulky under his scrubs. A surgical cap rested on the back of his bald head and his face mask was pulled halfway down his gray beard. Omar Yussef looked for signs on his face that would mark him as the man who saw every corpse in the Gaza Strip, opened them up and queried them, called death by what it was.

  “Are you a colleague of the deceased gentleman from the United Nations?” the doctor asked Khamis Zeydan.

  “No, I’m accompanying my friend Abu Ramiz. He’s been working with the UN man.”

  Najjar turned to Omar Yussef, gravely. “Allah will be merciful upon him, the departed one.” He shook Omar Yussef’s hand and placed his palm over his heart. “Would you like some tea to steady your nerves before we identify the body?”

  Omar Yussef shook his head. Najjar took his arm and led him into the bright light beyond the Surgery door. The walls were banked with stainless steel freezers. A red circle on a white background affixed to the first freezer indicated that they had been donated by the Japanese government. Najjar led Omar Yussef to the four mortuary tables at the center of the room. The first table was empty. There was a hole at its center to drain blood to a gutter in the floor tiles. The other three tables were occupied, each by a body covered in a cream plastic sheet. The body closest to Omar Yussef was very tall. He could have told Najjar that this was Cree without lifting the sheet, and he was glad the Scot was intact enough after the explosion that he could still recognize him by his height.

  “I’m sorry for the number of bodies. These are unusual cases. I must think hard about them.” Najjar seemed to choose his words carefully. “Usually the bodies that come in here aren’t so complicated: either they are domestic accidents, or car crashes, or some member of the resistance killed by the Israelis. These two in the back require more thought.” He held Omar Yussef’s shoulders and guided him to the side of the table which held the long body.

  Omar Yussef nodded. Najjar lifted the corner of the sheet.

  Cree’s face was red and black, as though it had been skinned. At the nape of his neck, his hair was scarlet with blood and the rest was burned away. His lips were gone and his teeth were bared and ghastly. Traces of his mustache feathered the remnants of his nose. His puffy face had tightened as it burned. He looked like a slightly damp mummy from an Egyptian museum. Omar Yussef nodded and Najjar replaced the plastic sheet on the body.

  “There’s some paperwork, but first I will bring that tea, after all.” The doctor left Omar Yussef with Khamis Zeydan.

  Omar Yussef looked at Cree’s body, covered now. He wondered if they would bury him with his great-grandfather in the British War Cemetery. Probably the UN would ship his corpse home. He imagined the cold ground where they might lay him in Edinburgh. He noticed Khamis Zeydan cradling his prosthetic limb in the palm of his good hand. The policeman pulled tight on the black leather glove he wore to disguise the false hand. “Have you ever seen a body look this way?” Omar Yussef asked, gesturing toward Cree’s table.

  “I’m sorry to say that I have,” Khamis Zeydan said. “It’s my misfortune that, if you lifted the sheets on the other two tables, I’d probably have seen dead men who looked just like those, as well.”

  Omar Yussef wondered what horrors his friend had experienced in his decades roaming the Middle East and Europe for the PLO. He imagined the rough field-surgery where Khamis Zeydan had been treated for the loss of his hand to a grenade in Lebanon.

  The nurse brought two plastic cups of tea. Omar Yussef breathed the heat from the steaming water. The temperature gauge on the Japanese fridge read three degrees Celsius. That must be the temperature at which they store the bodies, he thought, with a sudden urge to feel as warm as he could be. He sipped at his tea and felt it scald his throat.

  As he leaned against the empty dissecting table, he imagined it might soon bear his dead weight. He wondered if Najjar would describe his death as routine, or if his would be a complicated case that required a lot of thought on the part of the pathologist.

  Najjar entered with a clipboard. He asked for Cree’s details, so far as Omar Yussef knew them, and gave the board to him for his signature. “Will you ask the United Nations office to contact my nurse? She will get the full details and next of kin from them,” the doctor said.

  Omar Yussef nodded. “Did he suffer?”

  “Abu Ramiz, the compassionate response to that question is always ‘no,’ but in this case I can honestly say that it’s the correct answer. He died instantly. The shock waves from the explosion killed him, rather than the flames.”

  Omar Yussef felt his anger straining through his chest. He wasn’t angry at the doctor, but someone had to get it. “How about this one?” Omar Yussef said, pointing at the next corpse. “Or this last one over here? Did they suffer?” He let his cup tilt and the tea burned his finger.

  “I said that my response was always ‘no.’ But that’s just a matter of sensitivity toward the relative or friend who identifies the body,” Najjar said, calmly, watching Omar Yussef and measuring the schoolteacher’s emotion. “I’m free to answer you truthfully in the case of those other two. This one in the middle, well, I can’t tell for sure, but I suspect he died a long and lingering death from infection. The third one I can assess with absolute certainty: he suffered terribly.”

  Omar Yussef looked at the two bodies. He remembered the black binders on the pathologist’s shelf. So many ways to die. So much suffering, so much to be feared. So many people ready to take another’s life.

  “I’m sorry for speaking angrily, doctor,” he said. “It’s only that I came to Gaza three days ago, and since then one of my colleagues has been kidnapped, another is in jail under torture, and now this one has been killed. It’s too much for an old history teacher.”

  Najjar reached for the clipboard and, as he briefly checked the details, took the opportunity to turn the talk away from Cree’s body. “A kidnapping? Of whom?”

  “A Swede named Wallender. He was kidnapped by the Saladin Brigades last night. They’re demanding the release of one of their men from jail in return for his freedom.”

  “These things happen frequently in Gaza, Abu Ramiz. The government always gives in. Don’t worry. They’ll free this Saladin Brigades man and your friend will be released.” The doctor countersigned the form on the clipboard. “It won’t be a pleasant process for you or for him, but you can be calm about the outcome.”

  “I’m not so sure. The Saladin Brigades man killed a Military Intelligence officer. General Husseini seems determined to give him the death penalty.”

  Doctor Najjar froze.

  “Doctor?” Omar Yussef frowned.

  “He killed a Military Intelligence officer?”

  “Yes, the one who was buried two days ago. Lieutenant Fathi Salah.”

  Najjar glanced at the dissecting tables before him. His eyes leaped back and forth between Cree’s corpse and the body on the furthest table. “Bassam Odwan,” he said.

  Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan suddenly straightened.

  The doctor went to the door and shut it. “Do you know what Bassam Odwan looks like?”

  “I saw him in jail this morning,” Omar Yussef said.

  “Is this him?” Najjar pulled the sheet partially back from the last table.

  Bassam Odwan’s wide shoulders were naked. His face was pale and his thick lips protruded purple from his black beard. His hair was shaved above the ears and the skin there was yellow and blue and singed.

  Omar Yussef turned to Khamis Zeydan. “It’s Odwan.”

&nb
sp; Najjar covered Odwan’s face, but Omar Yussef pulled the sheet away, revealing the man’s entire body. He recoiled, with the sheet still in his hand.

  Odwan’s heavy, muscular torso was so bruised he seemed to be wearing a camouflage T-shirt. His genitals were partially shaved and cut. His fingertips had been sliced off and there were bloody scabs where his nails should have been. The Husseini Manicure. A stink of burned flesh and feces emanated from the body.

  Khamis Zeydan took the sheet from Omar Yussef’s hand and covered the corpse. He glanced at Omar Yussef and his expression was desolate and angry. “I assume there’ll be no paperwork in this case, doctor,” he said.

  Najjar nodded. “There won’t even be an official autopsy,” he said. “The prison guards brought him here not long before your friend from the United Nations arrived. The prison doctor said he died of a sudden heart attack. I wasn’t even sure it was Odwan, because they’ve brought bodies here under false names before, when there’s been a death in the prison.”

  “Do they bring many people dead from the jail?” Omar Yussef said.

  “There seem to be a lot of heart attacks in the jail,” the doctor said, with a quiet, conspiratorial edge.

  Omar Yussef felt a jolt of tension pulsing through his own heart. With Odwan dead, the Saladin Brigades will kill Magnus in revenge, he thought. Now I have even less time than I expected. “What has been done to this man, doctor?”

  Najjar looked hard at Omar Yussef, before he spoke. “He has been given electric shocks on his temples and genitals. He has been beaten. You can see what has happened to his hands, of course. I can’t tell you if these things killed him, but I doubt it. I would have to examine his brain, for example, to see if it hemorrhaged when he was beaten. The inside of his mouth and his upper esophagus is badly cut, which is something I can’t quite figure out. It’s as though he swallowed razor blades.”

  Najjar lifted the lids of Odwan’s eyes. Omar Yussef let out a little gasp as the dark, blank eyeball gazed at him. “You see just here, there’re burst blood vessels, tiny ones in this membrane where the eyelid is joined to the eyeball,” the doctor said. “That’s a sign of asphyxia.”

  “He choked to death?” Khamis Zeydan asked.

  Omar Yussef recalled Odwan’s shudder of fear as he had confessed that he gave himself up to Husseini’s men for fear of suffocating in the tunnel under the Egyptian border.

  “Not on a piece of kebab. Remember the lacerations in his mouth,” the doctor said. “I’d have to do an autopsy to be certain. Until I’ve seen if there’s an obstruction further down in the trachea, it’s really hard to say for sure that someone died of choking.”

  “When will you have the results of your autopsy?” Omar Yussef asked.

  “I remind you that I have been ordered not to perform an autopsy. The verdict of the prison doctor is sufficient for the authorities.”

  “A heart attack?”

  “It’s something to tell the man’s relatives. The body should be buried today, of course, but I’ve been ordered to keep it here until the authorities decide to tell the family that he has died. Of a heart attack.”

  “No one will believe it,” Omar Yussef said.

  “No one is asked to believe. They’re asked only to be quiet. As quiet as Odwan’s body, here.”

  “Quiet?” Omar Yussef said. “When I look at his body, I feel as though I can hear him screaming.”

  “The poor one, may Allah be merciful upon him,” Khamis Zeydan said.

  Omar Yussef tapped the end of the second dissecting table and turned to Khamis Zeydan. “Everyone I meet in Gaza is tortured or killed. If I didn’t see you standing before me, I’d assume you were lying under the sheet on this table,” he said.

  “Thankfully we met long before you came to Gaza. Otherwise I would be in extreme danger,” Khamis Zeydan said.

  Doctor Najjar stroked his beard. “As a history teacher, Abu Ramiz, you will be interested in that body. It’s not really a body; it’s just bones.” He took the sheet away. On the table, a skeleton lay, yellow and dusty. Thick wedges of dry earth were attached to the joints of the shoulder and knee. “This fellow came to me two days ago, all in pieces. The police brought him in a plastic trash bag. I put him back in order. I’m not sure what to do with him really. I’m waiting for the religious clerks at the waqf to decide where to rebury him.”

  Omar Yussef recalled the story from the bottom of the newspaper’s front page, below the coverage of Lieutenant Fathi Salah’s funeral. “This is the body that was discovered by a farmer in Deir el-Balah?”

  “Yes, in the corner of his field. He reported it to the police and they brought him to me.”

  “Him?”

  “Yes, him. The pelvis is heavier and thicker than a woman’s. Also the opening of the pubis is triangular, whereas a woman’s has four sides.”

  “Are you supposed to identify him?”

  “That would be almost impossible. It’s an old skeleton. There’s no soft tissue left, which means he’s been buried at least five years. But the bones aren’t yet crumbly, which is how they get after a hundred years in the grave.”

  “So he’s been dead between five years and one hundred years.”

  “It’s very difficult to be more accurate than that. I could test to be sure that it wasn’t more than a hundred years by cutting through a bone.” The doctor laid his hand sideways like a saw on the skeleton’s long thigh bone. “Under ultraviolet light, there’d be very little fluorescence in a bone more than a century old. It’s not as pressing, of course, as the cases of Odwan and your friend.”

  “Perhaps this one’s old enough to have died a nice peaceful death in his home,” Omar Yussef said.

  “The skeleton is old, but I didn’t say that he was an old man when he died. In any case, you forget, Abu Ramiz, this is Gaza. The odds are against a peaceful death.” Doctor Najjar pointed to the ribcage of the skeleton. “Look at the third rib on the right-hand side.”

  The rib was snapped jaggedly halfway along its length. “Here’s the end of that rib,” Najjar said, holding up a few inches of bone. “But it doesn’t fit together with the rib from which it was broken.”

  “What does that mean?” Omar Yussef said.

  “It didn’t just snap. It was shattered. If we had opened up this fellow’s grave, rather than finding him tossed in the corner of a field, we would probably have seen many tiny fragments of this rib. I believe this is a gunshot wound. The bullet struck the rib and shattered it.” The doctor sighed as he put the fragment of rib on the metal table next to the skeleton. “It would have been a terrible injury. Shards of bone from the impact would have created multiple lacerations in the lung behind it.”

  “So he died from a shot through the lung?”

  “The puncture of a bullet, even right through the lung, wouldn’t kill you. But the massive destruction of tissue by all those tiny fragments of bone would have been impossible to repair. If this was a poor man with no access to proper healthcare, or if he was living in Gaza a long time ago-let’s say, early in our range of five to one hundred years-the infection from those many little wounds would have killed him.”

  “And now he suffers the indignity of having his bones strewn in a farmer’s field.”

  “No indignity should surprise us in Gaza, Abu Ramiz.”

  Omar Yussef took in the three tables with their awful freight. The way death finally took a man seemed always to be a grisly surprise in a place like this. To be alive was to know the constant threat of death and the macabre reality of its arrival. But even beyond that moment there was no peace, not even when your bones were almost crumbled to dust.

  “I’m staying at the Sands Hotel,” Omar Yussef said to Najjar. “If you have questions about the deceased one, James Cree, I hope you’ll call me.”

  Najjar looked firmly at Omar Yussef. His eyes were frank and his jaw was clenched beneath his beard. He glanced at Odwan’s table. “I’ll be busy all night in this autopsy room. You’ll hear from m
e.”

  In the morgue’s entrance, Khamis Zeydan lit a cigarette. “You’re running out of time,” he said.

  “Now that Odwan is dead, will they really kill Magnus?” Omar Yussef leaned against the handrail of the steps.

  Khamis Zeydan’s silence was his answer. He smiled grimly. “James Cree and Bassam Odwan, dead in the same room. You certainly came to the right morgue.”

  Omar Yussef waved to Sami, who pulled the Cherokee through the deepening darkness to the foot of the steps. “What do you mean?” he said. “Doctor Najjar said it’s the only morgue in Gaza.”

  “Then I should rephrase,” Khamis Zeydan said. “You were the right man to come to the morgue.”

  Chapter 18

  As Sami sped through the twilight, Khamis Zeydan turned in the front seat and looked hard at Omar Yussef in the back of the car.

  Omar Yussef frowned and lifted his chin. “What?” he said. “What are you looking at?”

  His friend stared. “I have to go to the president’s residence now. The Revolutionary Council is meeting.”

  “If you decide to start the revolution, let me know. Otherwise, you can all go to hell.”

  “I’ll be sure to put that on the agenda. Look, I don’t want to leave you alone. I’m worried about you. Sami will stay with you.”

  “Sami’s your bodyguard, not mine.”

  Khamis Zeydan raised his eyes and sighed.

  Omar Yussef stared out the window, as they slowed in the heavy traffic around Palestine Square. The more crowded the streets became, the lonelier he felt. He had to acknowledge that he didn’t want to be alone, with his head full of the horror of the bodies in the morgue. “Take me to Salwa Masharawi’s house. I’ll spend a couple of hours there, while you’re starting the revolution. It’s a good family. It’ll help me calm down after all this.”

  When they reached the sandy lane to the Masharawi house, Khamis Zeydan grabbed one of the two cellphones from Sami’s belt. “Take this,” he said, tossing it into Omar Yussef’s lap. “If I need to find you, I’ll call you on that.”