The Collaborator of Bethlehem

Chapter 11

The wind drove cold through the open sides of the jeep. The policemen hunched their shoulders inside their parkas. One of them made his teeth chatter loudly to amuse the others. From the front seat, Khamis Zeydan turned and silenced his men with a disapproving click of his tongue. Omar Yussef shivered in his tweed jacket. He almost regretted the coat he had left with George, but he could stand a little chill for a short time if it made his friend more comfortable in that bare cell.

The freezing drive to Irtas seemed to go on forever. In the time it took the jeep to leave Bethlehem and cross the hill to the Abdel Rahman family’s house, Omar Yussef felt that his mind raced a distance ten times further. Who could have killed Dima Abdel Rahman? He felt sure her end was connected to that of her husband. It occurred to him that Louai’s killing might perhaps not even be linked to his status as a resistance figure. If Louai had died at the hands of the Israelis for his actions against them, Omar Yussef couldn’t see how that would lead to Dima’s murder. Even if they targeted him as a terrorist, they wouldn’t care about his wife. Only if Louai were killed in some criminal conspiracy did it seem possible that his murder would also bring this girl into the compass of death.

Omar Yussef rubbed his hands and blew on them. He grabbed the side of the jeep as a sharp corner threatened to toss him from the bench. It was as though the sudden bend snapped his mind into a new channel. The road sloped down toward the valley of Irtas and Omar Yussef could see the Abdel Rahman house and the glade where he had stood with Dima, and then it hit him: it was because of him that Dima died. Someone had seen her talking to him. Someone noticed her gesturing toward the spot where Louai died and telling the story of how it happened. The cause of her death could be that she had talked to Omar Yussef.

Nauseating pain gripped him in his guts. Wedged between two policemen on the benchseat of the jeep, he wanted to sway side to side in grief. Had he killed her? His stupid ideas about investigating Louai’s death and saving George Saba had only accomplished the death of an innocent girl. He closed his eyes and saw himself in his classroom making a joke, and Dima was laughing. She was such a pretty girl, with a serious face, which was only more beautiful when laughter crossed it. In that way, she reminded him of his granddaughter Nadia. What would he give now to be back in that classroom listening to Dima reading aloud her homework paper on Suleiman the Magnificent, rather than bouncing down the hillside in a police jeep to see where she died? He heard her voice, deep and gentle even when she had been a child, telling him about her husband’s death, and he wondered what the last words had been that she spoke in her precise, intelligent diction.

Khamis Zeydan turned to his squad and issued orders to cordon off the Abdel Rahman house, as the jeep reached the floor of the valley and sped toward the murder scene. When he sat back, his eye caught Omar Yussef’s for a second. It scared the schoolteacher, because it was such a severe, intent, dark glance.

Omar Yussef watched the police chief. Perhaps no one had seen him with Dima at the mourning tent after all or, if they did, no one thought it suspicious for an old teacher to console his former pupil. Who had Omar Yussef told about that conversation with Dima? Who knew that she had told him about “Abu Walid”? He felt confused. He thought he had told his son and his wife, but he couldn’t quite remember. The only person he was sure he had told was Khamis Zeydan.

The police chief looked back at him again, but Omar Yussef glanced away immediately. Could it be that his old friend had betrayed him? Had Khamis Zeydan informed Abu Walid that Dima was able to incriminate him? If so, that meant the policeman knew who Abu Walid was. But why would he tip him off? It wouldn’t have been the first time Khamis Zeydan was involved in a double game. He had followed his people’s leaders all over the Arab world and Europe, assassinating rivals, murdering innocent people who got in his way. I was, for many years, what the world chooses to call a terrorist. Yet this was worse. This was his old friend Omar Yussef whom he had betrayed.

The jeep pulled into the field outside the Abdel Rahman family’s home. The officers piled out noisily, stamping their feet to get their bodies moving again after the cramped ride. Khamis Zeydan distributed them around the house with a clap on each shoulder and the point of a finger. He reached up to help Omar Yussef down from the jeep, holding out his prosthetic hand in its tight black leather glove.

“I can get down myself,” Omar Yussef said.

Khamis Zeydan turned and strode toward the family, which was gathered by the cabbage patch in front of the house. Omar Yussef stepped stiffly off the back of the jeep and landed awkwardly on a clump of grass that disguised a small rock. His ankle twisted. He shook his foot and grimaced. He followed Khamis Zeydan and noted that his friend seemed to move with greater power now that he was on an operation, in command. Or perhaps he just seems stronger now that I believe he played some part in the death of an innocent girl. She may even have died while I was in his company this morning.

One of the policemen went to the glade where Louai had died. He stood sentry over a lumpy object covered in a white sheet. Omar Yussef stopped. That must be Dima’s body. He choked on a gulp of bile and coughed to get his breath. He turned his eyes to the ground, but he swayed, dizzily. He looked up at the gray sky and spread his legs to steady himself. He breathed deeply until he felt able to follow Khamis Zeydan.

The police chief was listening to Muhammad Abdel Rah-man describe how his daughter-in-law’s body was found. The old man went silent as Omar Yussef approached and stared suspiciously at him with his black eyes, but Khamis Zeydan told him to continue.

“I awoke for the dawn prayer and found my son Yunis downstairs. He told me that he saw something through the window. We came out to look, and over there, we found her, just where her body remains now. We put a white sheet over her. From the position in which we discovered her, I believe some sex pervert must have killed her.”

“Did you see anyone else?” Khamis Zeydan said.

“No one. It must have happened during the night. We all turned off the lights at the same time last night.”

“What time was that?”

“Just before twelve. We are all up late for Ramadan these days. We have a lot of family visitors, as well as people wishing us their condolences for the death of my son Louai.”

“Did anyone visit you last night? Was there anyone in the house who didn’t usually stay here?”

“No, our guests left at least half an hour before we went to sleep. Dima went to her room at the same time as the rest of the family.”

There was something unemotional and organized about Muhammad Abdel Rahman’s answers that disturbed Omar Yussef. He spoke up: “Did Abu Walid come to see you last night?”

Muhammad Abdel Rahman looked angrily at Omar Yussef. “You are not a detective and I’m not a schoolboy. Why should I answer a schoolteacher’s questions? Fuck you. This is not your classroom. Go and order someone else around. I’m not one of your refugee children.”

Khamis Zeydan put his hand on Muhammad Abdel Rah-man’s chest and gave it a warning tap. “Watch your mouth, Abu Louai. I brought ustaz Omar Yussef here as my friend. You had best be civil to him. But it is true that he’s not authorized to investigate.” He looked sharply at Omar Yussef.

“Then you ask him that question,” Omar Yussef said to Khamis Zeydan. “Ask him what I just asked.”

Khamis Zeydan took Omar Yussef aside. “I think he’s already answered it, quite clearly, don’t you?” he whispered, firmly. He turned back to the family. “Let’s go and see the body. There’s no need for you to go through this again Abu Louai. Please wait here.”

Under the pines, Khamis Zeydan looked at Omar Yussef, hard and questioningly. Omar Yussef nodded. The policeman lifted the white sheet.

The body lay on its side. Black hair spread around the head, as though the corpse were drifting in still water. A spray of that hair fell across the face. Khamis Zeydan lifted it and Omar Yussef recognized Dima Abdel Rahman. She was pale and her lips were the color of a bruise. Her eyes were open only slightly, as though she were rousing herself from a long sleep. Her tortuous posture reminded Omar Yussef of the Rodin statuette in George Saba’s living room. He had held that bronze of a prone woman tenderly in his two hands, fearing to let a work of art drop to the ground. He wanted to lift the body of Dima Abdel Rahman, to cradle her as he had the statuette and to discover that she was merely posing for a sculptor. Omar Yussef cursed himself. He had held her just as securely as he did that naked objet d’art. She was his pupil and her father was his friend. He encouraged her to come to this house because he believed she would find love here. Instead, it was a place of death. He had dropped something much more fragile than a bronze cast. He punched a frustrated fist into the palm of his hand.

“Her throat has been cut,” Khamis Zeydan said. “There’s something shoved in her mouth.” He pulled at the end of a piece of cloth until a few damp inches of it dangled from between her teeth. “She’s been gagged.”

Only then did Omar Yussef notice the gash across the jugular and the coagulated blood on Dima’s shoulder and outstretched arm. He experienced the choking sensation once more. The coldness of the morning left him and he was very hot. He removed his flat cap and let the wind chill the sweat on his scalp. He shivered.

Khamis Zeydan lifted the sheet further. Dima’s nightdress was ripped from the hem as far up as her shoulder blades. There were scratches on her naked buttocks.

“Has she been raped?” Omar Yussef asked.

Khamis Zeydan covered the girl with the sheet. “It looks like it, but she’ll have to be examined.”

Omar Yussef came close to Khamis Zeydan. “They are involved, aren’t they? It’s them.”

“The father and brother? Yes, I expect they are the ones who did it.”

Omar Yussef had meant the Martyrs Brigades. He frowned.

“No one could come out here and take a woman from inside the house without the family hearing,” Khamis Zeydan continued. “It had to be the father and brother. It might be an honor killing, or maybe she knew something about them that made them want to silence her.”

“But the father more or less admitted that Abu Walid had been here. That’s why he got so angry when I asked him about it. Maybe it was him. Maybe it was Abu Walid again.”

Khamis Zeydan looked hard at Omar Yussef. “We don’t know who Abu Walid is.”

“I think we do.”

“But we don’t. Not for sure.” There was a warning in Khamis Zeydan’s eyes. “Abu Walid could be any number of different people.”

“There’s only one Abu Walid who could have left behind the bullet casing I showed you.”

“That bullet casing was from a massive machine gun. It’s too bulky to bring on an ambush here.”

“You told me Abu Walid takes that machine gun with him everywhere. It’s his symbol, you said, his emblem. You said he probably even took it to the bathroom with him. So maybe he would bring it to an ambush like this.”

“The Abu Walid to whom you’re referring is a murderer, I agree. But he hasn’t killed anyone without what he, at least, would think of as a good reason.”

“Then we have to find the reason he killed Dima.”

“Then you’d also have to find the reason Muhammad and Yunis would protect him after he killed her.” Khamis Zeydan clicked his tongue. “I shouldn’t have brought you. I thought it would cure you of this obsession. I thought that once you’d seen a dead body you’d realize that you aren’t a policeman. You’re a schoolteacher. Stick with that.”

“You’re right. I’m a schoolteacher. I taught this girl, who now lies dead. I taught George Saba, who’ll be dead soon unless I help him, because nobody else will. I’ll tell you what I taught them, too. I taught them that the world is a good place and that they must use their intelligence and their hearts to contribute to its improvement. Do you see that if I let these things happen without taking any action, I’ve been lying to thousands of little children for decades? Most of all, I’ve been lying to myself.”

“Don’t make it such a big thing. It’s not all about you.”

“Listen to me, sometimes I feel like I’m not in the best of health. I feel that for a man in his mid-fifties I move slowly, my hands shake, I ache in every part of my body. I feel like death is taking me over.”

“You’re not old. This is just your morbid reaction to seeing a corpse.”

“It’s more than that.”

“Why are you so obsessed with death?”

“I’m waiting for my own murderer.”

Khamis Zeydan threw up his hands and stared at Omar Yussef. “This is crazy,” he said, walking away. “I’ve got an investigation to conduct. I have a lot of interviews with potential witnesses here. I’ll have one of the men take you back to Dehaisha.”

Omar Yussef’s head, which had felt so hot, was cold now. His shock at seeing Dima’s dead body was replaced by a determination not to let go of Khamis Zeydan now that he had him rattled. He put on his cap and followed him across the grass.

“You’re not really investigating, are you? You know something and you won’t tell me what it is. It’s a charade, asking these people questions. There’s something they know, and you know it, too. What is it?”

Khamis Zeydan turned. “I heard that you retired from teaching. I think you ought to reconsider. I think you ought to go back to work, so you don’t have so much time on your hands. It’s making you crazy to be a prematurely retired guy. I shouldn’t have let you see George Saba, but it was a humanitarian gesture for an old friend who I sensed was in distress. Well, I’m sorry I let you into the jail. Now go back to the school and leave this to a professional.”

Omar Yussef grabbed Khamis Zeydan’s shoulder. “You told them, didn’t you? You told Hussein Tamari.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’re the only person I told about what Dima said to me. You’re the only one who knows she told me about Abu Walid. You passed it on to Tamari and he came here and killed her. You’re in with them.”

“Now you’re making me angry, Abu Ramiz.”

“Why should I be surprised? Ever since we finished university, you’ve made your living by terrorism. You said so yourself.”

Khamis Zeydan pushed Omar Yussef’s hand from his shoulder. His jaw was tight and he growled out his words. “Believe me, I wish I was finished with all that. But maybe it’s not possible. Life is terrorism, so spare me your indignation. Life is one big infiltration of our secure defenses. Some people put bombs on buses and blow them up: those are terrorists. Some people speak to you and their words blow you up: what would you call those people? Life is a condemned cell. If your friend George Saba finds himself locked up on death row today, it’s only because he never had the brains to realize that he lived his whole life there. That’s the only way to protect yourself, Abu Ramiz—to understand that you’re always under sentence of death and to try to get a temporary remission.”

Omar Yussef was shocked. “I can’t believe you think this way,” he said, quietly.

“Well, I certainly hope you didn’t believe I was operating on high moral principles. I assume you know me better than that.”

“This wasn’t how you used to be.”

“Things have changed. I discovered that our people’s struggle is run like a crappy casino, and after forty years gambling in it the only chip I have left is the one on my shoulder.” He swung his arm with its gloved prosthesis to take in Dima’s dead body under the white sheet, the armed policemen, the hostile glare of Muhammad Abdel Rahman and his son Yunis. “I lost the bet, as you can see. I fucking lost.”

Khamis Zeydan pushed his beret back and rubbed his forehead. His anger seemed to leave him and Omar Yussef thought he looked pained, sad, lonely.

“There’s more to this business with the Abdel Rahmans than you know, Abu Ramiz,” Khamis Zeydan said. “Excuse me.” He walked quickly to the Abdel Rahman family. He beckoned Muhammad to follow him to the salon and told the women to go back into the house and await questioning.

After the family entered the house, no one remained by the cabbage patch except the police cordon and Yunis Abdel Rah-man. Omar Yussef felt his ankle seizing up where he’d twisted it descending from the jeep. He limped over to Yunis.

“May Allah bless her,” Omar Yussef said.

Yunis barely nodded his head. He’s a handsome man, Omar Yussef thought. A handsome boy, really. His face had a fine, almost feminine jaw and light hazel eyes. His neck was thin, a skinny teenager’s neck. Omar Yussef read an arrogance in him of the kind that the young so often wore these days, full of the sense that their elders had failed to fight hard enough for the freedom of Palestine, convinced that they would be the ones to make the great sacrifices that would liberate their land. It was the pity for their humiliated elders and the anticipation of surpassing them in a hurry that made young men like Yunis Abdel Rahman insufferable to Omar Yussef. How many times had he faced the same aloof, defiant expression he now saw on this boy’s face, in the UN schoolyard or on the streets of Dehaisha? But there was something else here, something more hostile, reckless, guilty. That was it, Omar Yussef thought, as he looked closely at the boy: I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who looked more ashamed of himself and more desperate to hide it.

“May this sadness end all your sadnesses,” Omar Yussef said, offering another formula of condolence. “Who would have imagined that I would be back here again so soon after your brother’s death?”

Yunis looked over to the corpse and back to the cabbage patch. He seemed to be imagining that other body, his brother’s, clad in denim and splayed across the green leaves on the ground.

Omar Yussef decided to test Yunis. “Where will you work now?”

Yunis looked puzzled.

“Now that the Martyrs Brigades have taken over your family autoshops,” Omar Yussef explained. “Where will you work?”

“It’s not your business.”

“Your employment? No, perhaps it’s just that as an old schoolteacher I always worry about young people.”

“That’s not what I meant. The autoshops are not your business.”

“Neither are they yours anymore.”

“We’ll manage.”

“Why did they take the business away from you?”

Yunis was silent again.

“I thought they were Louai’s friends,” Omar Yussef said. “He was in the same faction as the leaders of the Martyrs Brigades. They should be looking after his family, not stealing its livelihood. And why did they come and kill Dima?”

“Who told you that?”

Omar Yussef feigned surprise. “That’s the conclusion of the police.”

“The police just got here.”

“You know that the police operate on intelligence information, not on things that they find on the crime scene. You see, the crime scene can be tampered with, or even set up, faked. But intelligence, the things their informants tell them, that’s something the police can rely upon.”

Omar Yussef watched the boy very closely. Yunis’s left eye twitched nervously. Omar Yussef decided to press the boy. He spoke more loudly, with almost casual, confiding assuredness. “Look, they came here to kill Dima because they feared that she knew something about Louai’s death—something that they wanted to hide. It was they who killed Louai, not the Israelis. This Christian guy that they’ve arrested had nothing to do with it. You know that.”

“How would I know?”

“What if the Martyrs Brigades killed Louai and blamed the Israelis, so that they could take the family business from your father? You were helpless to prevent it. But the Martyrs Brigades found out that Dima knew something about them. Maybe that she saw something or heard something when she was waiting for Louai to come home that night. So they killed her. They made it look like some kind of sex crime, so that people would assume it’s just a random nasty pervert who took her life.”

“The Martyrs Brigades are fighters, strugglers for our people.”

“Like your brother?”

“Yes. Like my brother.”

“How well did you know him, eh? Did you really know everything that he was into?” Omar Yussef looked over at the white sheet, lumpy with the body beneath. “They have all kinds of tests these days. Genetic tests. You’ve seen where Dima’s backside was scratched? They’ll be able to look under the fingernails of any suspect and check that the fragments of skin they find there came from her buttocks, when the killer scratched her.” He turned and looked at Yunis’s hands. The boy pulled his fingers tight into fists. “They’ll probably check you, too.”

“How could I have done this to my sister-in-law? You’re crazy.”

“Haven’t you heard of honor crime?”

“How had she offended the honor of our family?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything. You aren’t even a policeman. You’re a schoolteacher.” He walked away from Omar Yussef quickly. Then he stopped. “You should have taught Dima better. If you had, she wouldn’t have ended like this. She came out here to meet a man for sex and he killed her.”

“That’s a pretty desperate explanation and I know you don’t believe it.”

“If you taught her better, she would be alive. It’s you that killed her, you son of a whore. They ought to check under your fingernails.” The boy went fast around the house and into the garage with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Omar Yussef heard the loud revving of an engine, as though Yunis were pumping the gas to make a racket as ringing as the scream he could not allow himself to emit.

Omar Yussef hobbled toward the white sheet. The policeman guarding the body nodded. Omar Yussef knelt stiffly on the damp grass. He lifted the corner of the sheet and looked at Dima’s face. Her cheeks puffed where the cloth remained balled in her mouth. Her eyes stared blankly into the dirt.

Omar Yussef looked at his hands. What did he have under his fingernails? Who had he scratched during his years as a teacher? Had he taught these children to be discontented, unable to accept the reality of their society? Had he given them principles that would surely be violated by the world around them, dooming them to cynicism and disillusion? If you looked beneath my nails, Omar Yussef thought, Yunis was right about what might be found there. There would be traces of the skin of Dima Abdel Rahman, of George Saba, of how many others? Gently he put his fingers on Dima’s lids and closed her eyes.