The Collaborator of Bethlehem

Chapter 4

The path through the valley was marked by a languid stream of mourners for the martyr. They sauntered along the track to the Abdel Rahman house, chatting idly. Omar Yussef cursed himself for wearing only a jacket that morning, as the wind rushed down the valley of Irtas and through his tweed. He decided to put on a coat every day until April, no matter how bright the weather looked from his bedroom window when he awoke. He moved as fast as he could, but was passed by almost everyone, though they seemed to be in no hurry. He was thankful at least that he wore a beige flat cap of soft cashmere to warm his bald head and to keep his strands of hair under control in the stiff breeze.

Omar Yussef came to the end of the path. There were two oil drums with the palm fronds and black flags of mourning bending in the wind. The flags were mounted on bamboo poles and their ends clicked and scratched around inside the barrel as the wind whipped them, as though they thought they could escape. Omar Yussef wound through the rows of men sitting on white plastic garden chairs under the fluttery black tarpaulin of the condolence tent. He joined the queue of men who passed along the family receiving line, limply shaking hands and muttering that Allah would be merciful to Louai Abdel Rahman. At the end of the receiving line was a thin young man with a bony resentful face. Omar Yussef assumed this was the dead fighter’s brother. The kid alternated his fierce glare between the edge of the woods beyond the vegetable patch and the entrance to the family’s house. Omar Yussef held the youth’s hand and asked him where to find Dima Abdel Rahman. He detected a flash of hostility before the young man told him she was inside with the women.

“Please go and get her. Tell her it’s her old schoolteacher.”

The young man hesitated, while Omar Yussef kept his hand in his grip. Then he pulled his hand away and went into the house.

Omar Yussef would have liked to accept a small cup of qahweh sa’ada. Any other time of the year there would have been a teenager circulating with a plastic flask of the unsweetened coffee at a funeral. But it was Ramadan now, and there would be neither coffee nor anything else served until darkness fell. Omar Yussef didn’t need Ramadan to remind him that there were things from which he ought to refrain. He remembered that when he was a student an old woman once slapped his face because he smoked a cigarette on a Damascus street during Ramadan. He ought to have kept her around to batter him every time he did something forbidden. How long, he wondered, would it have taken him to quit alcohol if he’d received a sharp jab to the head every time he sank a scotch on the rocks? Instead, he hadn’t sobered up until his late forties. By that time, the spectacular relish of his early drinking days had vanished. Even he could see that he was pathetic. He had stopped because it embarrassed him to notice men twenty years younger look with pity at his bleary eyes and shaky hands.

From behind the mourning tent, there were three sharp, loud shots, but only Omar Yussef ducked. He turned quickly to follow the gaze of the other mourners. Along the path came a troop of Aqsa Martyrs Brigades gunmen. A big man who wore a bandoleer across his chest led them. Omar Yussef pushed his gold-rimmed glasses up along his nose and saw that it was Hussein Tamari, the leader of the Martyrs Brigades in Bethlehem. He carried the big gun everyone talked about. Tamari’s head was widest at the bottom, bulky and jowly. He had a thick, black moustache and trim, black hair that seemed of necessity to be short, as there wasn’t much real estate for it to cover. The top of Tamari’s head narrowed to a third of the width of his neck. The tapering, in-bred head seemed to Omar Yussef to be a declaration that his brain wasn’t the source of his swagger.

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 had 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.