The Collaborator of Bethlehem

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.”

“Is it so bad to be without a husband?” Omar Yussef laughed, brief and guttural. “Sometimes you have been known to suggest that husbands are lazy and messy and a nuisance about the house.”

“Omar, you know what I mean.”

Maryam wagged her finger at him, jokingly. Lines stroked downward from her eyes and mouth, giving her face a sad cast, even as she smiled. She wore her hair in a soft wave, parted at the side and falling a few inches below her ears. She dyed it a stark raven color and always dressed in comfortable black clothing. As she aged, her skin had turned a deep gray, so that she sometimes stood out in a room like a single figure from an old movie inadvertently omitted from the colorization process.

The feelings of a man for his wife are very complex, Omar Yussef thought. It’s a shame our women can’t acknowledge that their relationships to their men are not so simple, either. It would be a better thing.

Omar Yussef needed the companionship he found with Maryam. She was born at the same time as he was, but in the north of Palestine, in Nazareth. Her family fled first to Jenin and then to Bethlehem. He had met her when they shared a taxi south from Jenin, where she still had relatives. He was beginning the final stage of his journey home from university in Damascus. They were bound together at first by their political views, their Arab nationalism. Defiantly, Maryam never covered her head as Muslim women do, though motherhood and the responsibility of the home eventually made her politics more simplistic, more average. She gave birth to three sons. Ramiz lived in the apartment downstairs, but the other two had emigrated, to the United States and to Britain. Instead of the politics of her people, Maryam fretted now about when she might see her faraway boys, a concern that could have applied to any mother anywhere in the world. Perhaps it isn’t Maryam who’s become less smart. Maybe everyone was deeper back in my student days, when they didn’t see the threat of a Zionist conspiracy everywhere, Omar Yussef thought. It quietly infuriated him to hear Maryam talk about politics these days, but at least she never spoke of the dead as martyrs.

In any case, Omar Yussef wanted to talk to his son about George Saba and the thoughts about the case that had come to him after his visit to Dima Abdel Rahman. Ramiz ran a mobile phone business and his customers kept him informed about new developments in the town. Omar Yussef hoped his son might know something that would clear George’s name.

“I can’t help feeling that George is being set up somehow,” he said. “I just don’t believe that he would collaborate with the Israelis.”

“People will do very desperate things,” Ramiz said. “George’s business was selling antiques to Israelis on the bypass road. He can’t do that any more, because there’s a siege here, and his Israeli customers are afraid to come. So his business is suffering. Maybe he got desperate. Maybe the Shin Bet got to him and told him they could solve all his problems if he did something for them.”

“It’s because he’s a Christian that he has been accused. That’s all. It isn’t because he actually collaborated.”

“Maybe it’s because he’s a Christian that he’s willing to help the other side.”

Omar Yussef was shocked. “I remind you that you were educated by the Frères. You studied at the very same Christian school as George Saba, the Christian school where I used to teach.”

“Dad, I’m just saying that people will do things under circumstances like these that we would never expect from them in normal times.”

“Like accusing all Christians of being traitors?” Omar Yussef leaned forward angrily.

“That isn’t what I meant. But, look, Christians are already on the outside of our society, these days. Maybe they feel they owe less loyalty than a Muslim does.”

Omar Yussef put down the paring knife and ate some of the apple. “I saw some of your loyal Muslims firing guns into the air at the mourning tent for Louai Abdel Rahman this afternoon.”

“I gave that a miss, because I went to the funeral earlier this morning,” Ramiz said. “It was the usual show from the gunmen then. So they turned up at the mourning tent, too?”

“Yes. But something is strange about what happened at the Abdel Rahman’s place,” Omar Yussef said. He looked around him to be sure the children were out of the room. “You remember that Dima is a former pupil of mine. She told me that she heard Louai talking to someone outside the house just before he was shot. And she saw a red spot of light that seemed to be trying to settle on him.”

“He spoke to someone?”

“Yes. He said, ‘Oh, it’s you, Abu Walid.’”

Ramiz sucked on a segment of orange, slowly. “Dad, let me say two things. First, when the Israelis use collaborators, they get the collaborators to go really close in, just to be completely sure that they’ve got the right man. When the collaborator gives a signal, they know the identification is made and they hit their target.”

“How do you know this?”

“Uncle Khamis told me when I visited him at the police station. He was reading an intelligence report on one of the Israeli assassinations in Gaza.”

“So Abu Walid is the name of the collaborator? The one the Israelis needed to lead them to Louai?”

“Yes, that sounds like it. Someone who knew Louai would have to make the identification, obviously. He would need to be close enough to recognize Louai, even in the dark.”

“Well, George Saba wouldn’t recognize Louai. And George is Abu Dahoud, not Abu Walid. So there’s the proof of his innocence.” Omar Yussef put down his food and threw his hands wide in excitement.

Ramiz hesitated. “That brings me to my second point. Dad, please don’t get involved in this. If you try to tell someone in the security forces about this, you might find they’re working for the Israelis. They could silence you because you threaten to expose one of their agents. Also, the people who arrested George Saba wouldn’t have just picked him up without reason. This was a good excuse to even a score with someone who must have crossed them. That’s how it works these days.”

Omar Yussef thought of the night he had watched George Saba rush into the darkness toward the gunmen firing from his house. Someone who must have crossed them. He cursed himself for walking homeward down the hill, instead of helping George. Perhaps George ran into men that night whose ghastly revenge was now under way.

Maryam put her hand on Omar Yussef’s arm. “Don’t do anything risky. You always criticize me for saying how bad these swine are. But the Israelis could come right in here and take you away, if they think you’re trying to expose one of their collaborators.”

“I haven’t done anything,” Omar Yussef said, irritated. “The Israelis aren’t coming for me.”

“Don’t even think about doing anything. Please, Dad,” Ramiz said.

Omar Yussef was about to reply, but Ramiz raised his eyebrows and gestured with his head toward the kitchen door. Nadia was leaning against the doorframe, looking concerned. She held her index and middle fingers in her mouth, nervously. Sara came past the girl from the kitchen, carrying the tea. Omar Yussef wondered if Nadia had listened for long. He cursed the weakness he had shown. Because he thought he could save George Saba and protect the legacy of his teaching, he risked bringing his family into contact with the dirty side of the intifada. If he wanted a legacy, it was standing in the doorway, looking frightened, and it was he who scared it. He was a schoolteacher. He was not a detective. He could feel the bullet casing in his jacket pocket even now. It felt like a ton of molten metal. He wondered how soon he might get rid of it.

He held up a slice of apple. Nadia came forward with a half smile and reached for it. As she did so, her eyes caught something in the frosted glass of the front door. Omar Yussef turned to follow her gaze. There was someone there, silhouetted by the streetlamp and wearing a military beret. He felt a flash of fright and dropped the apple, before Nadia could take it.

The figure reached out and knocked on the door.