The Collaborator of Bethlehem

Chapter 25

Omar Yussef climbed stiffly from the back of Khamis Zey-dan’s jeep. The rain penetrated his coat and seeped through his flat cap. It washed over the tops of his loafers. His bare fingers were icy and swollen. He shook himself to get the blood moving through his arms and legs, as he looked toward George Saba’s home.

The Martyrs Brigades surrounded the house. A half dozen of them kneeled on the roof. With their assault rifles, they aimed at the Israelis across the valley. It was hopeless to expect that they would hit anyone except by the most random of chances at this distance and with their view obscured by low rainclouds. Omar Yussef followed the Israeli tracer as it came toward the gunmen on the roof, striping the stormy valley, slapping into the side of the Saba home or overshooting it and striking the house across the street. Between Omar Yussef and the Saba house there were a dozen Martyrs Brigades men. Some of them watched the arrival of Khamis Zeydan’s police jeep, but most were intent on the doorway and windows of the house. From where they milled about, they must be able to see inside, Omar Yussef figured. Sheltered from the gunfire by the walls of the house, the gunmen seemed to find something highly amusing about whatever was happening in the bedroom that fronted the street.

The policemen advanced toward the house with Khamis Zey-dan at their head. They dashed across the exposed gaps between buildings. When they reached the cordon of gunmen, Khamis Zeydan ordered them to let him through. Someone called out an insult about the police chief’s sister. The police and the gunmen shoved each other. As they jostled, Omar Yussef passed along the edge of the street. In the darkness, he sidled past the gunmen on the steps by the entrance. To his surprise, the sound of gunfire was louder within the house.

The lights in the living room had been extinguished. From the entrance, Omar Yussef saw that the gunmen had removed the sandbags from the windows. They clustered around the shattered frames, shooting toward the Israelis. The noise was terrifying. It echoed about the high ceilings and off the thick walls. One of the men at the window turned toward the door. His face was manic with the ecstacy of the fight. Omar Yussef recognized him. It was Mahmoud Zubeida, the policeman whose daughter had brought him the news of George’s arrest. His eyes were as dark as his betel-stained teeth, but they radiated a chilling energy. When he saw Omar Yussef, his grin faded. He looked embarrassed and ashamed, but also angry. The presence of the schoolteacher broke the anonymity that allowed him to free the ugliness he would otherwise have hidden deep within himself.

Omar Yussef looked away from Mahmoud Zubeida. He took a step forward and turned to his left. George Saba’s family cowered against the wall. Here was the evidence that George had taken the wrong path, if you wanted to see it that way. George was dead, because he’d tried to defend his family, but here they were, unprotected, because of his death. Then Omar Yussef decided that if his former pupil had acted differently, George Saba too would be shivering with fear on the floor, and maybe he hadn’t been wrong to do as he did. The wrong was done against him, not by him.

Sofia looked up. Tears laid crooked fingers of mascara across her cheeks. She held her two children under her arms. Habib Saba sat next to them. The old man was quiet and motionless. He cradled something black in his lap, perhaps a book. Its square edge jutted from beneath his arms like the tail of a stricken ocean liner going down. Omar Yussef was about to speak to Sofia, when he noticed a movement on the other side of the bedroom.

Jihad Awdeh sat in an old Damascened armchair next to the big vanity by the bed. He uncrossed his legs and stood, flicking his cigarette out of the open window. He smiled at Omar Yussef and lifted his gun.

Omar Yussef thought of jumping back toward the entrance, but he couldn’t do it. Something held him in place there, despite the gun trained on him. He thought it might be the memory of George Saba, who had refused to buckle before wickedness, that now kept his old teacher steady. So he stayed where he was, turning to face Jihad Awdeh.

“We’re taking care of the traitor’s family, as you can see, Abu Ramiz,” Jihad Awdeh said. “But I’m happy to see you here, too.”

“Jihad, you know that if you harm me, you’ll be starting a fight with the biggest clan in Dehaisha. Even you should think twice before taking on all my people,” Omar Yussef said.

“There are bullets flying as wildly here as those accusations of murder and collaboration you made about the martyr Hus-sein. Who knows if one of those bullets might happen to strike you? I believe your clan would agree that an Israeli bullet killed you. Most people are happy with an excuse to avoid trouble.”

“But not you.”

“Nor you, evidently.”

Jihad Awdeh walked across the room with his gun on Omar Yussef.

“You don’t think you’re really protecting the reputation of Hussein Tamari by what you’re doing here,” Omar Yussef said. “This is evil. You shoot from inside this house, because you know the Israelis will destroy it in return.”

Jihad Awdeh lifted a concurring eyebrow. He fed a bullet into the chamber of his Kalashnikov and raised it to his chest.

This is it, Omar Yussef thought. At least I didn’t have to be hung upside down in the square. The image of Nadia, her face sad and eyes lowered, flickered through his mind, but he fought it away. He felt proud that his last moment would be defiant, and he stared into Jihad Awdeh’s black eyes.

The blast came with a whoosh like a jet plane passing low. Jihad Awdeh looked up momentarily. Then Omar Yussef’s ears went dead, as though he was underwater, and the wall of the bedroom came down. Omar Yussef felt himself tumble out of the doorway and down the steps. He hit his head against the railing, then struck something soft.

He found himself upside down on top of two gunmen. The men wriggled frantically as though they thought he might be dead and they wanted no contact with the corpse. They rolled him off them and into a puddle. The cold water roused him and he was already on his knees when Khamis Zeydan and another police officer grabbed his arms and lifted him.

“It must have been a tank shell,” Khamis Zeydan said. “Are you all right?”

“Tank shell?”

“The Martyrs Brigades were shooting from inside the building. The only way for the Israeli soldiers to penetrate these thick, old walls is with a tank shell. It must have gone in through the living room where the firing was coming from and blown you out of the front of the house. Who else was in there?”

“George’s family.”

The dazed gunmen rushed up the steps with the police. In the bedroom, they found Jihad Awdeh. There was blood coming from his head and he was ghostly with the dust of the fallen wall. His men helped him to his feet and took him down the steps. Omar Yussef waited for the Martyrs Brigades chief to look at him, but Jihad could barely keep his eyes open. His gaze was unfocussed and distant, like a troubled man in prayer. He stumbled past amid a crowd of bellowing gunmen, out to the street where the red lights of an ambulance flickered.

The wall between the bedroom and the living room was partially collapsed. Khamis Zeydan and Omar Yussef peered through the gap. George Saba’s antique furniture smoldered. The rack of wedding dresses burned, giving off a poisonous smell from the plastic wrappings. The teak dresser was splintered down to its stubby legs. The French statuette that had stood on it was intact, but cast to the flagstones. Omar Yussef remembered that this naked, twisted woman of Rodin’s was called The Martyr. There were four bodies in the living room, clustered around the three-foot-wide aperture in the outer wall where the shell had entered. Khamis Zeydan peered at one of the bodies.

“Mahmoud Zubeida,” he said.

Omar Yussef looked at the blank face of the dead policeman. The bony face was pale and its lips were drawn back over the brown teeth. It seemed like the skull of a man already years in the ground. The dream of death that he had imagined Mahmoud Zubeida’s daughter enduring every night finally had come true. He wondered if he would be able to tell the girl that her father was happy in the firefight before he died, that he was a martyr. He recalled the shame and anger on the man’s face when he had recognized the schoolteacher. No, someone else would tell the girl about her father’s heroism. He wouldn’t be able to talk to her about the way the gunman died. He didn’t trust himself not to reveal the ugliness of the corpse and the blood that looked like seeping mud in the dim light.

Or the collapsed wall of the bedroom. What would he tell Khadija Zubeida about that? And the family beneath it.

Omar Yussef began heaving stones from the mound where the bedroom wall had been. Khamis Zeydan and his policemen lifted segments of plaster and stone. When they came to Sofia and the children, the officer closest to the bodies stepped back and puked. The police chief grabbed another of his shocked men and orchestrated the lifting of the last slab from Sofia’s legs. George Saba’s wife was dead. Her bloodied head lay horribly smashed across her collarbone, her neck broken and shoulders caved in. Under her arms, the children were unconscious, but Khamis Zeydan found a pulse in both. He laid them on the bed. They seemed tiny and battered, though the medic who checked their vital signs gave a brief nod to indicate that they would survive.

Omar Yussef pulled Khamis Zeydan back to the rubble. He was short of breath. “Habib Saba,” he gasped.

Khamis Zeydan looked at the deep pile of stone. His eyes widened. The policemen began to lift the debris. Sweating, they came to George Saba’s father. Habib sat amid the rubble in the same posture Omar Yussef saw him in during the gunfight. His legs were pulled up to his chest and his hands held his ankles. His bald head was gashed along the crown. The deep wound, filled with dust and blood, was a ribbon of black. Omar Yussef thought that Habib Saba had wanted this, so resigned did he seem in death. It was as though he believed there was no reason to save his grandchildren or his daughter-in-law, just as he gave up hope for his son. Perhaps he had been right in his son’s case. If Omar Yussef hadn’t tried to save him, hadn’t gone to Jihad Awdeh and told him what he knew, at least George might have faced a firing squad, not a lynch mob. Yet he couldn’t understand the tranquility of Habib Saba. He thought that the old man’s body ought to look more crushed than it did. His perfect stillness made him seem immutable, as if the collapsing wall had found his body as unchangeable as stone and failed to break it. Habib Saba’s corpse emerged from the rubble neat and self-contained and serene, as though the policemen heaving aside the debris were archeologists unearthing the statue of an ancient monarch.

The policemen lifted Habib Saba. A thick black book dropped from his grasp into the dust and stone. Omar Yussef brushed the powdered cement from the worn leather cover and opened it. On the flyleaf, there was an inscription in an educated, old-fashioned hand: “To Abu Omar, God willing there always will be such harmony between those of our two faiths as there has been between you and I. Your dear friend, Issa.” These were the words written by the Jerusalem priest to Omar Yussef’s father in the days before there was hatred between Christians and Muslims in Palestine. This was the Bible Omar Yussef gave George when he was a student, the solace of his exile and the reminder of his love for his hometown. George’s father had clutched it as he died, protecting it with his body as Sofia protected the bodies of her children, as though he could keep intact that better world it represented, even as his bones shattered.

Omar Yussef took his handkerchief from his jacket. He wiped the sweat from his forehead to moisten the edge of the cloth and rubbed the dust from the Bible. The black leather came up as lustrous as the feathers of a raven.

The rain fell more heavily. An ambulance quickly took George Saba’s children away, before the shooting started again. Jihad Awdeh climbed unsteadily out of another ambulance. The medics grabbed at him, but he shook them off, angrily. His men, shouting at the police to clear the way, took him to his jeep and sped away.

Khamis Zeydan looked up at George Saba’s smoldering home. He issued a few orders to his men to begin the clean-up. Then he put his hand on Omar Yussef’s elbow. “I think I’d better take you to the hospital,” he said.

“I’m fine.”

“Better to be safe. The doctors ought to have a look at you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me.”

“This is the second time in two days you’ve been knocked off your feet by an explosion. Come on, these things can damage your internal organs, even if you seem fine on the outside. Let’s go.”

“No, take me home. I need to change out of these clothes. I’m wet through.”

Shivering, he climbed into the passenger seat of Khamis Zey-dan’s jeep. They drove slowly out of the street and down the winding hill from Beit Jala. Omar Yussef was silent and angry. Here he was, taking a ride from the police chief, the very man who surely should have prevented all this killing. He had thought Khamis Zeydan was not the one to blame, that it was the corruption all around him that made him ineffectual. But now he believed that his friend was, at best, a passive participant in murder and, at worst, the one who led the killers to their prey.

Khamis Zeydan seemed to sense the meaning of his friend’s silence. He looked across at Omar Yussef repeatedly, but the schoolteacher deliberately kept his eyes ahead on the empty road as they passed Aida refugee camp. Eventually the police chief blurted out, “You blame me for this, don’t you. I can tell. You’re angry with me. You blame me.”

Omar Yussef was quiet. He wanted to speak, but he still didn’t want to hurt his friend and he didn’t have the energy for a debate.

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Khamis Zeydan yelled. “You think it’s my fault.”

Omar Yussef couldn’t restrain himself. “Of course I do. You’re the police chief. Are you telling me it’s not the police chief’s fault when a man is taken from his jail cell and lynched yards from the police station? It’s not the police chief’s fault when a bunch of armed thugs draw the Israelis into firing a tank shell at a family’s house?”

“You don’t know the pressure I’m under.”

“To do what?”

“That’s just it. Not to do anything. To allow all this to go on.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“You think that just because I wear a uniform I’m more powerful than Hussein Tamari and Jihad Awdeh? Don’t believe it. They’re the ones with the backing from the top, the very top.” Khamis Zeydan lowered his voice, but it remained bitter, resentful. “The lynching was too much, even for me. But how could I have known they would do that? I tried to stop them. You saw me, didn’t you? I tried to stop them.”

Omar Yussef felt a stirring of sympathy for this man, who had sacrificed his comforts and private life for decades. Now he was betrayed by the men for whom he had fought. If that made him behave like the worthless colleagues around him, it didn’t mean he was one of them at his core.

“Why didn’t you believe me when I said that Hussein Tamari was the one who led the Israelis to the house in Irtas? The collaborator who helped them kill Louai Abdel Rahman? That he was the one who killed Dima Abdel Rahman to cover his tracks?” Omar Yussef said.

“Don’t start on that again.”

“Listen, it makes no difference now. The Israeli helicopter killed Hussein, so the murderer is dead. George Saba is dead, so there’s no innocent man awaiting execution anymore. The story is over. My so-called investigation is finished. There’s just you and me. Why didn’t you believe me? I showed you the MAG cartridge from Hussein’s machine gun. I showed you the evidence.”

“The bullets that killed Louai came from an Israeli sniper rifle. But you found a MAG cartridge. That’s not evidence against Hussein, because Louai wasn’t killed with a MAG. Dima was killed by having her throat slit, also not by a MAG. Your theory is good, but not necessarily correct.”

“So maybe Hussein didn’t shoot Louai, but he guided the Israelis to their target and he left a clue when he accidentally dropped the cartridge casing from his own gun. He must have been the one who identified Louai to the Israeli snipers with the laser sight, the red dot Dima said she saw flicking across his body right before the shots that killed him.”

Khamis Zeydan pulled the jeep over at the side of the road by Omar Yussef’s house. “All right, if it makes you happy, then I’ll say that I’m sorry I didn’t believe you. But you ought to know that there isn’t anything I could have done. You don’t have real evidence and, in any case, proof isn’t what decides criminal cases here anymore. Belief, influence, and evil—that’s what you need on your side.”

Omar Yussef wondered if he should tell Khamis Zeydan just how much more he suspected him than he’d already let on. He felt very weary. He decided to allow the policeman to go. He nodded and, silently, got out of the jeep. He waved goodbye with George’s black Bible and watched Khamis Zey-dan turn around, slowly jolting over the median strip into the other lane. He felt the rain coming down inside the back of his collar. He put the Bible inside his jacket.

The ditch the Israelis had dug across the street two days before blocked the sidewalk. Omar Yussef climbed over the low wall in front of his house and hurried inside.