The Collaborator of Bethlehem

Chapter 12

Omar Yussef waited among the pines for Khamis Zeydan to complete his interviews with the Abdel Rahmans. A photographer came to document the details of Dima Abdel Rah-man’s death for the forensic record. He flipped the sheet off her, snapped her face in close-up and scuttled around to get a shot of the body in relation to the house twenty yards away. He joked crudely with the policeman guarding the corpse about Dima’s marred backside. Omar Yussef turned away and leaned his face against the bark of a tree trunk.

Omar Yussef had spent his life teaching history, the facts and meanings of real occurrences. But he tried to keep himself free of the corroding effect of the historical events through which he had lived. He had never experienced life as a nomadic fighter, as Khamis Zeydan had. He didn’t become a hateful thinker, a deceitful propagandist, like so many people around him. He wasn’t untouched by his people’s trouble, but he felt as close to pure as it seemed to him a man in control of his senses might be. He lived in the house his father had once rented, and he taught in a classroom that was, for reasonably intelligent pupils, a chamber that transported them to another time, safe from the destruction and prejudice around them. As he leaned against the pine, he wondered if he was sacrificing this purity and sanity to the investigation he had taken upon himself. Perhaps he remained an honorable, proud man entirely because he was insulated from the corrupting world in which his compatriots lived. Already, he could feel his grip on himself weakening, and it was only five days since he had dined with George Saba—days in which death and suspicion and fear were all around him as never before. He sensed that he wanted revenge for Dima’s death. He didn’t care who might suffer or die, so long as someone’s body could pay and he could be reasonably sure that the new victim bore something related to guilt for the girl’s killing. It was this thought that scared him most, that he might be just like everyone else after all, weak and vindictive and murderously righteous.

There seemed to be only one way out. He would stop his investigation. He was a schoolteacher. George Saba required help and Dima needed revenge, but Omar Yussef was not the man to provide either. He had to protect himself from the darkness deep in his soul. He thought of the night he had parted from George at the restaurant in Beit Jala, how he had stumbled home down the hill and how shapes in the dark alleys had taken on the forms of men and animals, nightmarish and insubstantial. This was how he thought of his own mind now, its shadows gathering until they became parasitic phantoms that breathed inside him just as surely as he lived. It occurred to him that the shadowy figures he imagined that night might have been impelling him to return to George. Who knew, if he had turned, he might have prevented the disastrous confrontation with the gunmen on the roof. But Omar Yussef had made his way quickly home that night and, though he hated to think of it that way, it was what he decided to do now.

Khamis Zeydan came out of the house and walked wearily toward the jeep. Omar Yussef came to the side of the vehicle.

“Can you drop me at the school?” he said, quietly.

Khamis Zeydan yawned. “I thought you retired from teaching.”

“You already said that. I don’t know where you heard it.” Omar Yussef said, raising his voice.

“Are you telling me it’s not true?”

“Where did you hear it?”

“It’s going around. Someone I know has kids in your class. He spoke to the American at your school, Steadman, about his kids. He was told you retired.”

“Someone who went to complain about my lack of support for the intifada? My criticism of the martyrs?”

“Why else would anyone take the time to go to see a school director these days? And why else would your name come up?”

Omar Yussef climbed into the back of the jeep. He grunted as he pushed up with his injured ankle. “I’m going back to the school,” he said.

Khamis Zeydan looked at him. There was suspicion and power and knowledge in his eyes, and they made Omar Yussef look away. Khamis Zeydan slammed the back door of the jeep.

As they jogged up the hill and came around toward Dehaisha, Omar Yussef watched the side of Khamis Zeydan’s face. The officer stared out of the front of the jeep. Is he thinking about Dima’s murder? Omar Yussef wondered. Or is he contemplating the role he played in it? Can he really have passed details to Hussein Tamari about what Dima told me? Have I been so blind to the real character of this man I considered my friend? It occurred to Omar Yussef that there might be many more of his friends who were guilty of terrible things, but he couldn’t believe any of them would have taken part in a murder. It surprised him that it was so easy to conceive of Khamis Zeydan’s involvement in a slaying.

Omar Yussef stepped from the jeep in silence outside the UN school. It pulled away down the uneven, puddled road, leaving the scent of gasoline, alluring and poisonous in the damp cold. Omar Yussef held his breath until the wind cleared the air. He stopped outside a classroom window to listen to children reciting a multiplication table. He smiled when they stumbled over nine times eight: that always tripped them. At the entrance he greeted the janitor and noticed that the man, surprised to see him, sat hastily upright, as though a senior military officer or a forbidding uncle had passed.

Or a ghost.

Through the glass in the door of his classroom, Omar Yussef saw a young woman sitting silently at his desk while his students worked in their notebooks. He couldn’t see the woman’s face, because she was bent forward over a book. The substitute teacher wore a white headscarf and a loose mustard robe, but he could tell from the clear skin of her hands that she was probably in her early twenties. He paused and considered entering, but the class was quiet and concentrated. He would not disturb them.

Omar Yussef went to the end of the corridor and smiled at Wafa.

“Morning of joy, Abu Ramiz,” the school secretary said.

Omar Yussef noticed that Wafa’s lips showed a mischievious pleasure at his arrival. “Morning of light, Umm Khaled,” he said. He nodded at Christopher Steadman’s office and Wafa gave him a be-my-guest shrug. He entered.

The heat felt stifling in Steadman’s room, even though Omar Yussef had frozen once again without his coat on the ride back from Irtas. The air seemed thick with dust. The American looked up from his papers. His face flushed, but he said nothing. He tilted his head quizzically to the left, as though he had trouble remembering the identity of this man with the gray moustache and flat, beige cap.

“I have changed my mind,” Omar Yussef said. He pronounced each word crisply and precisely in English.

Christopher Steadman merely increased the inclination of his head. He pursed his lips and looked angry.

“I no longer wish to retire.”

“You have until the end of the month to decide,” Stead-man said.

“I don’t need that long. I already decided.”

“I would prefer that you take until the end of the month. In any case, I’ve taken on a replacement. She has been paid until the end of the month, so you have nowhere to come.” Stead-man lifted his head so that it was straight and jutted forward on his neck. “Until then, at least.”

Omar Yussef could see that he would have to wait a few weeks before he could take over his classroom once more. He decided on a delaying tactic. “I must insist that you do not tell people that I have retired. It is damaging to my reputation.”

“I haven’t told anyone.”

“I believe you have.”

“I have not.”

“Perhaps you forgot.” Omar Yussef paused and looked very hard at Steadman. He forced himself to approach the American constructively, with the kind of argument that might overcome Steadman’s apparent dislike of his history teacher. “You have to understand something about Arab culture, Christopher. If you allow me to retire on my own terms, it’s quite possible that I will decide to go. If, through no intention of your own, you make it appear as though I have been forced out, I shall have to remain in my job to counter that impression.”

Steadman looked thoughtful, rolling his tongue about his mouth. Omar Yussef saw that the director understood he had made a tactical error.

“It’s a cultural matter, Christopher. You see, it would reflect badly upon me. But I don’t expect that to concern you. No, the important thing from your point of view is that it would make you look very culturally insensitive and other people would find it hard to trust you. You know, I have many friends and my clan is one of the most prominent in Dehaisha camp.”

“Are you saying that you want to retire, after all?”

“I am tending toward that course.” Omar Yussef enjoyed the sound of the English words. It made him happy to talk his way around Steadman in the American’s own language. “I can’t say anything definitive. I only ask that you consider the cultural implications of my position. I know that you are sensitive to these things. Your reputation in the camp is for exactly this kind of sensitivity. I wish to help you protect that good name.”

Steadman took off his glasses. Omar Yussef had him confused but not yet beaten. Now was the time for his ace.

“To appear to force me out of the school during the holy month of Ramadan . . . Well, this would be a great insult to all the Muslims of the camp.”

Steadman looked up with the hint of a frown. Got him, Omar Yussef thought.

“Very well, Abu Ramiz. I shall wait until the end of the month,” Steadman said. “Until then, I shall tell everyone that you continue to teach here.”

“Actually, it would be wiser to wait for the end of Ramadan itself.”

“That’s three more weeks.”

“Then there’s the Eid. The Eid al-Fitr.”

“The holiday after Ramadan?”

“Yes, it marks the new moon.”

“I know that.” Steadman flipped his eyeballs upward in irritation. “So you won’t decide until the new moon?” His voice was sarcastic.

“It would not be appropriate for a Muslim to make such a decision during the holy month. It is a time for communing with the Master of the Universe, not for trivial, earthly matters like employment or retirement decisions.”

You can look that up in the hadith of the Prophet titled Fuck You, Steadman.

Wafa gave him a knowing nod as he passed her desk on his way out. Omar Yussef left the school. He had arrived only a few moments earlier and experienced a nostalgia for the sound of children reciting in unison. He had been determined to take up his old job and abandon his investigation, but the hiring of a replacement teacher forced him to reconsider. Now there were three weeks before he would have to tell Steadman what he wanted to do about retirement.

Omar Yussef came out onto the muddy street and turned past the black granite statue of the map of Palestine toward his home. He wasn’t sure that he could just sit around the house brooding on his decision. To retire or to continue in his work? He would know the answer when the moment came. Until that time, there was something else that he must decide. He remembered the murdered body of Dima Abdel Rahman. He still couldn’t tell if his overwhelming feeling was of determination to expose her killer or fear that by investigating he had already exposed himself to too much of the reality of life in his town, too much danger.

The wind came colder along the empty street. Nayif skipped toward Omar Yussef, wearing a filthy white T-shirt. He hugged himself with his bare arms, but smiled at Omar Yussef. “It’s still raining, uncle,” he called out, as he jumped into a puddle.

Omar Yussef listened. There was the sound of the helicopter, resonating through the clouds still. He wondered if it were the only noise the boy could hear, ringing inside his misshapen head. Omar Yussef smiled back and looked up at the blustery sky. He lifted the collar of his jacket to keep the chill from his neck and wondered if his herringbone coat would be enough to keep George Saba from dying of the cold in his cell.