The Collaborator of Bethlehem Page 4

  Next to Tamari walked a thin, dark man Omar Yussef had seen around town. His name was Jihad Awdeh. There was a gray hat that looked like a furry fez on his head. Omar Yussef struggled to remember the name for this style of hat. No one wore such headgear in Bethlehem. Old men from the villages wore traditional keffiyehs, and kids wore American baseball caps. Most heads were bare. Jihad Awdeh’s hat seemed extravagant and sinister. Omar Yussef thought immediately of Saddam Hussein, who used to wear just such a hat on winter occasions. Astrakhan, that’s what they call it, Omar Yussef thought. He gave a short sardonic laugh and shook his head.

  Hussein Tamari fired off a few rounds into the air with his massive machine gun as a mark of respect to the dead man, resting the butt against his hip and holding it in one hand with casually ostentatious power. It was a deep noise, wide and impressive, and Omar Yussef noticed that some in the crowd seemed about to applaud the show. The gun had a wooden stock and a dark metal barrel. It looked to be over four feet long.

  The gunmen came under the tarpaulin canopy and, cutting in front of the line of mourners in the cold wind, shook the hands of the family members. Omar Yussef saw that Louai Abdel Rahman’s father seemed particularly cowed and didn’t look directly at the gunmen, though they lingered before him longer than was necessary.

  Omar Yussef went to the door of the house. He glanced into the living room. There was a mural painted on the wall, a Swiss alpine landscape. A fawn gamboled in the deep grass at the edge of a cool lake. A wooden house hugged the slopes of a snow-covered mountain, bright as a picture in a children’s book and clumsily cartoonish. Many Palestinians decorated their walls with scenes of the Alps. It was, no doubt, a pleasure to gaze at such a prospect during the stifling summer, he thought. But perhaps it also was calming, as though by looking at the terrain of a peaceful country one could forget the violence all around, dream oneself onto a mountain elevation, breathing cleanly and easily. Omar Yussef noted that there were never any people in these murals.

  In front of the alpine tableau there was a crowd of women. They improvised a song of blessings on the mother of the martyr for the bliss that her dead son would now be experiencing. A woman would chant a verse and the others would join in, clapping a rhythm, and another would take over for the next stanza. They did the same thing at weddings. At the back of the room, Omar Yussef noticed Dima Abdel Rahman. He waved for her to come outside. She half-smiled and walked to him. As she reached the steps, Omar Yussef saw the young man who was supposed to bring her to him watching balefully from the door of the kitchen.

  “Allah will be merciful upon him, the deceased one,” Omar Yussef said.

  “Thank you, uncle,” Dima Abdel Rahman replied. “I’m glad you came.”

  “Who’s the kid I sent in to find you?” Omar Yussef gestured discreetly toward the youth.

  “That’s my husband’s brother, Yunis.”

  “He seems more angry than sad at his brother’s death.”

  “He seems more angry than anything,” Dima said.

  They stepped away from the house and the mourning tent and came to the cabbage patch. Dima stared at the spot where her husband had died. She began to cry. Omar Yussef took a handkerchief from the pocket of his tweed jacket and gave it to her. She wiped her eyes and smiled, embarrassed. Then she pointed: “This was where Louai died. I found him here.”

  Dima cried again. Omar Yussef spoke quietly to her. “It’s appropriate that you should cry, my dear. Firing guns in the air is wrong. But crying is good.”

  “Louai’s mother said I should be crying out with joy now that he’s a martyr,” Dima said.

  “That’s just a show for all these people. I’m sure she doesn’t feel it deep in her heart,” Omar Yussef said.

  “I just can’t rejoice that he’s dead, ustaz. I just can’t.”

  “When I was a young man, my dear father passed away. I remember crying, and all the people in the house told me I shouldn’t, because my father lived to be an old man and I ought to behave like a man. But I had an uncle who understood me. He said, ‘Let the boy cry. Can’t you see, he loved his father?’ So don’t worry. You can cry. And you can keep the handkerchief, too.”

  Dima smiled through her tears. “I was very happy when you were my teacher,” she said.

  “You’re a bright woman. I’d be very glad if all my pupils were like you.”

  His pupils were Omar Yussef’s legacy. After all his years of study and struggle, after his doubts that he was able to make a difference in their lives, the belief that he had truly left traces of knowledge and wisdom and goodness in other humans kept Omar Yussef from depression. Dima and George Saba and the few others like them must make the world the kind of place where Omar Yussef could live in happiness.

  There were more shots from near the mourning tent. Dima gasped. “Who is the man with the big gun?”

  “That’s Hussein Tamari.”

  “The Martyrs Brigades leader?”

  Omar Yussef nodded.

  “I saw him at the autoshop once. He came when I was alone. I didn’t know who he was,” she said, staring over the cabbages toward the gunman. Dima shook her head. “Why did my husband allow himself to be killed, uncle? He never said he wanted to be a martyr, but everyone talks about the martyrs all the time. Maybe Louai started to think that way, too.”

  “In the end, everyone dies. I’m getting old and I’m starting to feel death creeping through me, taking me over limb by limb, organ by organ. I hope my mind will be the last part living. But, in any case, some people might think it’s better to go quickly, when you’re younger, and to be remembered as a hero, rather than someone who clung on until everyone was sick of him.”

  Dima seemed to want to talk, so Omar Yussef let her tell the story of the night her husband died. “Before the shots, I heard Louai speak to someone, and then I saw something strange. I stood at that window there. I saw a red dot, like a light, that I now think was shining on Louai. It moved about, as though it was trying to settle on him. It was there, by that tree. Then he was shot. Two times.”

  “You heard him speak? What did he say?”

  “He said: ‘Oh, it’s you, Abu Walid.’ He sounded relaxed.”

  “There was someone else out here?”

  “Yes, I suppose there must have been.”

  Omar Yussef thought of George, arrested for collaborating in the death of this young man. But George was not called Abu Walid. “You didn’t see anybody when you came outside, except Louai?”

  “I just ran to his body. I didn’t think of anything else.”

  “Who is Abu Walid? Which of Louai’s friends is the father of Walid?”

  “I don’t know. There could be lots of people with that name, couldn’t there?”

  “Yes, but not so many who might have been on casual speaking terms with a man on the run from the Israelis. A man who was in hiding for months.”

  “I really don’t know, ustaz.” Dima hesitated. “There was something strange about the way Louai’s brother reacted, too. He seemed angry with me.”

  Omar Yussef paused, then he put his hand on Dima’s shoulder. She looked down and smiled. He let his hand rest there. “My sister, yours was a short marriage, but you were lucky enough to have that brief time with a man who loved you. You know enough about the way things are for women in our society to understand that this is a blessing.”

  “Yes, uncle.” She blew her nose in his handkerchief. “I have to go back to the kitchen now. I’ll come and visit you soon. Please give my greetings to Umm Ramiz. A generous Ramadan.”

  “Thank you. Allah lengthen your life.”

  Omar Yussef was moved by the girl’s emotion. He would have liked to stay with her longer. He didn’t want to go back to the men in the mourning tent, so he shuffled through the grass to the trees. He leaned against the pine where Louai Abdel Rahman had been illuminated by a small, red light. Omar Yussef looked about him. A strip of grass had been wrenched from the ground in front of the tree. Maybe Louai ha
d slipped and uprooted these blades when he was shot. Omar Yussef stepped a few paces to his right. A patch of grass and underbrush about the size of a man’s prone body had been crushed and flattened behind a tree. This must be where Abu Walid—if he existed—had waited. But why would he lie here? Had he shot Louai Abdel Rahman from this hiding place? There was only space in the flattened spot for one man, so there couldn’t have been an Israeli hit squad there with him, whoever he was.

  Omar Yussef looked closely at the spot. He ruffled the flattened grass stems with his foot. Something bright came to the surface. He bent stiffly and picked it up. In his palm he held a spent machine-gun cartridge. He kicked about in the flattened grass to see if there were more. Dima had said that Louai was shot twice. But there was only one cartridge case here. He couldn’t see anything else on the ground.

  Someone named Abu Walid had been here, lying in wait long enough to flatten the grass. Louai Abdel Rahman had known him. One spent cartridge case had been left behind. Did that mean Abu Walid had taken one shot at Louai, while someone in another location fired the other? What was the red light that Dima had seen?

  Omar Yussef made his way back to the mourning tent. He put the bullet casing in the pocket of his jacket. Hussein Tamari was talking about Louai Abdel Rahman in a loud voice at the edge of the tent. “The martyr,” he called him. It struck Omar Yussef that there was security in the thought that a man died as a martyr. There was no groaning and bleeding and wishing not to die in a case of martyrdom. For those who lived on, it was as though there had been no death.

  There were different ways to defend oneself against the fear of death. Omar Yussef thought that only the dead could truly protect you from death. When you realize that someone is gone and always gone, there is no longing for their return. If death is simple and absolute, there is no doubt, no wondering whether the deceased received a good reward or was consigned to the flames—and doubt is a much more protracted torment than any kind of death. When you can look at a headstone and think simply to yourself, “That lump of gray rock is what prevents the dust of my beloved blowing all over the cuffs of my pants, and that dust is all that there is left of him,” then you can truly live until you, too, die.

  Omar Yussef ran his fingers over the cartridge casing. That’s what I believe about death, he thought. But murder is different.

  Chapter 5

  Omar Yussef considered himself a long way from Paradise. No prayers preceded the iftar at his house. He broke each day’s fast during Ramadan simply, with his family around the dining table in the drafty entrance hall of his old stone home. The lights already had been on in the house most of the dismal afternoon since Omar Yussef had returned, chilled through, from his condolence call to Dima Abdel Rahman. He was deeply disturbed by the thought of George alone in a jail cell, facing the possibility of a death sentence for collaboration. The heavy gloom of the overcast afternoon became cold, black evening. The streets, almost empty because of the threat of rain, were cleared utterly by the festive break fasts.

  Omar Yussef’s wife, Maryam, sent his grandson, little Omar, into the salon to call him to the table. Omar Yussef put down his tea cup and pressed his hand to the boy’s cheek.

  “What’s for dinner?” he asked.

  “Grandma’s food,” little Omar said.

  “What did she cook? Did she make something sweet for your sweet tooth?”

  Little Omar nodded and wriggled away. Omar Yussef called him back and gave him a sugar cube from the china bowl on the coffee table. The boy smiled and ran to the door. Omar Yussef heard his wife bringing a pot to the table. Little Omar popped the sugar into his mouth. Evidently Maryam noticed him crunching it in his small jaw.

  “Omar, you’ll spoil the boy’s appetite,” she called.

  Omar Yussef came laughing into the hallway. “You know the proverb, ‘The Lord sends almonds to those who have lost their teeth.’ Let the boy enjoy his sweets innocently, before he gets to the age where nothing is fun any more.” He took his seat at the head of the table, as the rest of the family filed in.

  Ramiz, Omar’s eldest son, came up the stairs from the basement, where he lived, carrying his youngest daughter. His wife, Sara, ferried a final pot from the kitchen to the table, and Maryam fussed the children into their chairs. When all were seated, Maryam spooned ma’alouba from the wide platter at the center of the table, serving her husband first. Omar scooped some of this rice and chicken into a clammy yellow Ramadan pancake. He loved Maryam’s food and ate at home every night, unless he couldn’t avoid an invitation to a restaurant. He spooned out a helping of fattoush, a Syrian salad of mint, parsley, romaine lettuce and chopped pita bread. He had only to place Maryam’s fattoush in his mouth and the sharpness of her lemon vinaigrette would transport him to a café in the Damascus souk where he had spent many wonderful times in his youth. Maryam hadn’t been there with him, but somehow she seemed to have tasted what he had tasted. It was as though her cooking made a map for him of his life story. It was comforting, like a well-bound, old atlas that took your imagination across mountain ranges without the physical exertion, annoyance, and inconvenience of actual travel. He wondered if Louai Abdel Rahman felt the same way about Dima’s cooking. Perhaps he hadn’t been married to her long enough for the taste of her grape leaves to supplant that of his mother’s in his memories of taste and happiness. Omar Yussef thought that, as the fugitive crept home through the dusk, he would have been struggling to concentrate on the dangers around him. A mother’s cooking and its redolence of home was powerful for any Palestinian. He was comforted that at least the boy had died anticipating pleasure.

  Omar Yussef watched his family take their first swallows of the meal. At the Ramadan break fast, he could sense the irritability of a day without food passing in the relief and comfort of the heavy, fatty goat’s meat Maryam boiled in milk and the green chicken broth of her mouloukhiyeh, thick with cilantro and garlic and mallow leaves, poured over rice and beans.

  Omar Yussef stopped eating after a few bites. There was something different tonight. It wasn’t the quality of the meal itself, he was quite sure. Rather it was the way his body responded to it. It was the herbs Maryam used that made her cooking so special to him, the black pepper and mint she mixed with garlic and kebab. But tonight he felt revulsion as he bit into the meat. It was as though, for the first time, he considered that the basis of the food and all its nourishment was dead flesh. Did something have to die so that he could live? Did the meat have to be flavored with spices to fool his tongue, to sneak a murder past it? How much killing can we swallow, so long as it goes down easy and doesn’t tax our digestion? He glanced at his grandchildren and watched them push little lumps of animal flesh around their plates. Perhaps they instinctively understood what only now occurred to him. Everywhere there is hearty food, and it gives you a good feeling as it enters deep into your innermost organs. But if you are watching carefully, you will notice that death is gorging its way to the cemetery and you are its main course.

  His eldest granddaughter, Nadia, filled his glass with water. She was twelve years old, with skin that was pale from passing the summer inside, under curfew, but her eyes were dark, with a light of intelligence gleaming in them. She was Omar Yussef’s favorite grandchild. She loved to hear his stories. Nadia often asked him to tell her the story of how he came to this house.

  It was fifty-six years since and Omar Yussef had been only a few months old, but, for the sake of the tale, he claimed to remember the arrival. His father told the servants to pack enough belongings to fill four carts. Others traveled lighter, expecting a short exile until the Arab armies expelled the Jews, but Omar Yussef’s father later told him that he had known they would never return to their village. As the carts joined the refugees on the road to Bethlehem and Hebron, his father looked back at the village where he had expected his son one day to be headman like him and watched a tractor crossing the fields from the kibbutz with a handful of people walking behind it, heading for his village
. “It’s gone, you know,” his father had told him, when his growing son first began to talk about politics. “The village, the olive trees, the position of mukhtar. All gone. So forget about it. Don’t listen to the people who think we can return.” Even as a young boy, Omar Yussef knew his father was right. The loss of land and privilege felt like less of a burden to him than it did to his friends, because he knew he always would have the protection and wisdom of his father.

  The family came to Dehaisha on the edge of Bethlehem with the rest of their clan, which was called Sirhan. In Dehaisha, the peasants from their village set up in the canvas tents provided by the United Nations. Omar Yussef’s father rented this stone house between Dehaisha and Bethlehem for twelve dinars. He paid the rent until he died, when his son took over the payments. The Sirhan clan spread over the Bethlehem area, until it was a respectable group of about two thousand people, professionals and tradesmen. The clan was strong because its people never caused trouble with other families, and because some of them were influential in the political factions and had the protection of their militias. There were Sirhans who were powerful in the local branch of Hamas and others who climbed to prominence within the biggest faction, Fatah.

  It made Omar Yussef happy that Nadia seemed to grasp his meaning when he told her this story, as though it were his dear, omniscient father who sat before her talking, rather than Omar Yussef. He felt he took on the nobility of his father as he spoke to her. Somehow, Nadia led him to the honorable essence of himself. He thanked her for the glass of water and squeezed her cheek.

  The family finished their food in their accustomed quiet. The kids milled about the table absently as Sara went to prepare tea. Ramiz peeled an orange and dealt out segments to his children.

  “I went to Dima Abdel Rahman today, for a condolence call,” Omar Yussef said as he sliced an apple.

  “Ah, the poor one,” Maryam said. “To be without a husband.”