The Collaborator of Bethlehem

Chapter 26

When Omar Yussef came through his front door, Maryam was waiting in the salon, wrapped in a blanket. He went toward her. Nadia was asleep against her grandmother’s chest. The posture gave Omar Yussef an immediate shudder: it reminded him of the position in which George Saba’s wife had died, with her two children huddled against her beneath her arms. The sleepiness of Maryam’s face seemed almost as static as death, and he felt an irrational relief when she looked up and spoke.

“I was telling Nadia a story,” she whispered. “She didn’t want to go to bed until you came home.”

Omar Yussef put George’s Bible on the coffee table. He lifted Nadia’s shoulders, while Maryam took the girl’s legs. He moved gingerly, careful not to wake her and not to strain his back, which throbbed again as the rain worked its chill into his bones and his muscles rebelled against the frantic heaving of the stones that had crushed the Saba family. Omar and Maryam took the girl to their bedroom and laid her in their bed.

“You had a call from the UN office in Jerusalem,” Maryam said. “I wrote down the number for you. It was very late for them to call.”

Omar Yussef nodded. He thought of poor Steadman. The UN people handling that crisis would be working late.

“I’ll sleep in the salon, once I’ve changed out of these wet clothes,” he said.

“I’ll make you some tea to warm you up. Do you want soup?”

“No, thanks. Tea, please.”

After she brought the tea, Omar Yussef sat in his silk pajamas and a woolen dressing gown and put his hand out to hold Maryam’s fingers.

“What happened, Omar?”

“George is dead.”

Omar Yussef realized that he hadn’t said those words before. They seemed so loaded with the grave it felt as though his mouth were full of the dust to which George Saba would now return. It choked him, and he gasped and sobbed.

Maryam reached around his shoulders, stroked his neck, and put her chin against his forehead.

Omar Yussef told her what he had seen, and she cried with him, quietly, deeply. She knows me, he thought. I’ve hidden things from her over the years and I believed we had grown apart, but she has been with me so long that she simply feels what I feel. Our senses are bonded together, even if we might disagree over politics or things that happen in the town. She didn’t want me to investigate George’s case, to risk myself to save him, but she knew all along what he meant to me.

It was a long time before Omar Yussef felt like breaking the tender grip in which Maryam held him. He sat up and looked at the clock on the sideboard. It was 2:30 A.M.

“Why don’t you go to bed now, Maryam?”

“I’ll bring some blankets for you.”

“I don’t think I’ll sleep. I’ll read a little.”

“Let me sit with you a while. I’ll make some more tea.”

Maryam was in the kitchen when Omar heard it. The thudding of the helicopter came through the night and held in place above him. Its rhythm disguised the roaring engines of the tanks and jeeps that came down from the hill above Dehaisha. Omar Yussef went to the window. He wondered if they were coming back to widen the trench in the road, but when they arrived there were no bulldozers. He looked across the street. Two tanks and two APCs took up positions right outside his house. He rushed to turn out the light. The soldiers piled out of the APCs and filed quickly, bent and jogging, up the stairs of the apartment building opposite. Maryam came through the door. In the darkness, her eyes looked haunted.

“They must have come for Jihad Awdeh,” Omar Yussef said. “Go wake Ramiz and the kids. Just in case they come in here, I don’t want anyone waking up with a soldier in their bedroom. But don’t panic them.”

Maryam hurried from the room.

The soldiers set sentries on each corner of the sideroad. Omar Yussef opened the window a little. He could hear the radio crackling Hebrew from inside the nearest APC.

Soldiers came down the stairs of the apartment building. Omar Yussef thought perhaps they hadn’t found Jihad Awdeh and were leaving. Then he saw that there were only three soldiers, followed by a file of people. The residents of the building were being kicked out while the soldiers searched. The little parade headed across the street toward Omar Yussef’s house. He went to meet them at the door.

When he pulled the door back, the first of the soldiers stepped up into the light from the hall. His face was painted in blue and olive camouflage. What use is that in an apartment building? Omar Yussef thought. He wondered if the soldier would speak to him in Arabic. The Arabic speakers were always the worst. The more they learned about Arabs, the more they seemed to disdain them.

The soldier said something curt and guttural in Hebrew.

“Do you speak Arabic or English?” Omar Yussef asked in English.

The soldier answered in English. “You never learned Hebrew?”

“I was always too much of an optimist,” Omar Yussef said.

The soldier smiled a little. His teeth showed white through the camouflage make-up. He pushed past Omar Yussef and scanned the hall. Maryam and Nadia came out of the bedroom. Omar Yussef heard Ramiz behind the half-open door urging his wife to dress. Maryam’s face blanched when she saw the camouflaged soldier. Nadia’s was blank.

“Lower your gun, please,” Omar Yussef said.

The soldier let his M-16 barrel fall. “We’re conducting a search in the neighborhood. Some of the people who live in the building opposite have to stay out of the place while we search it. It’s raining, so we’re going to bring them in here.”

Omar Yussef nodded.

More than a dozen people came through the front door. Omar Yussef greeted them and asked them to come into the salon. Maryam went to make tea, but the soldier stopped her and told her to bring everyone else who was in the house to the salon and to wait with them there. As the people came in, they all bore the same bedraggled, frightened sleepiness. Some of the children whimpered.

The last to enter were Amjad and Leila. Amjad smiled and shook Omar Yussef’s hand, thanking him for letting them shelter in his house. Omar Yussef felt bad about his lust for Amjad’s wife. Amjad was a good fellow. Even so, Leila was beautiful in the jeans and sweatshirt she must have thrown on as the soldiers turfed them out of their apartment. She had brushed her hair, but it looked slept on, nonetheless, the way it would be on the pillow.

The soldier stood in the doorway, watching the crowd, which now included Ramiz and his family. Omar Yussef knew everyone in the room, except for a woman in the corner with her two children. He assumed they must be the newcomers, Jihad Awdeh’s family. He couldn’t recall the woman’s face from his visit to Jihad’s home earlier that night. He stepped carefully through the carpet of children sitting at their parents’ feet and greeted the woman.

“You are Jihad’s wife?” he whispered.

“Yes.”

The woman was young and quiet. Omar Yussef suddenly recognized the boy standing behind her. He had opened the door of his father’s apartment six hours before when Omar Yussef went in to appeal to Jihad to save George Saba.

“Ah, I met you earlier, didn’t I?” Omar Yussef said.

The boy nodded.

“What is your name?”

“Walid Jihad Brahim Awdeh.”

It struck Omar Yussef like a lightning bolt. “You are Jihad’s eldest son?”

“Yes.”

Jihad Awdeh’s eldest son was named Walid. Jihad was the “father of Walid,” Abu Walid. Could he have suspected the wrong man all along? Hussein Tamari’s eldest son was Walid. Tamari was Abu Walid. But perhaps Tamari wasn’t the Abu Walid that Louai Abdel Rahman spoke to just before he died. It could have been Jihad Awdeh. Jihad was Abu Walid, so perhaps he was also the killer, the collaborator.

George had seen Jihad picking something up from the roof of his house and putting it in his vest, when he confronted the Martyrs Brigades gunmen. It could have been cartridges spat out of the breech of Tamari’s big MAG. Louai wasn’t shot with the MAG, but there was a MAG cartridge at the scene of his murder. Could it have fallen out of Jihad’s pocket?

Omar Yussef wanted to lay out this revelation for Khamis Zeydan immediately, but there was no chance of using the phone with the soldier standing guard in the room. He would have to wait until the soldiers completed their search across the street and allowed everyone to leave the salon. He felt a moment of panic. What if the soldiers searched his house, too? They might find the gun, George’s Webley in among the socks in his closet. They would surely take him in, and they might keep him for months without trial. By that time, Jihad Awdeh would be far too powerful for him to persuade Khamis Zeydan to arrest him. Even now, he wasn’t sure that the police chief would bring him in. He must get to Khamis Zeydan tonight, while the guilt about George’s lynching remained heavy upon him.

“The soldiers won’t find your father at home, will they?” Omar Yussef said.

Jihad Awdeh’s eldest boy stared insolently at Omar Yussef. He lifted his chin, signaling that this was not a question he would ever answer. This boy would never believe that his father was anything but a hero, even if Omar Yussef managed to persuade a court to put the Martyrs Brigades leader on trial.

The soldier kept them in the salon more than an hour. The room grew rank. Some of the small children wet themselves on the carpet as they cried. Several of the women wept and rocked back and forth. All the men seemed to be smoking. The tension was dreadful for Omar Yussef. His back hurt from standing for so long, and he wished he had taken a hot shower when he came home to warm himself after the rain. The smoke in the room made him cough. He wanted to get out of there, to nail the bastard who had set up George Saba. He stared with hatred at the soldier. Who is this guy to prevent me from getting to the police so that they can do justice? Finish your damned search and get out of my house with your stupid gun and your ridiculous camouflage make-up. He considered telling the soldier that Jihad Awdeh had fled to the Church of the Nativity, but there was no way to speak privately to him. In any case, knowledge of Jihad’s whereabouts would only make him a suspect in the soldier’s eyes and he’d be arrested. There was something else Omar Yussef acknowledged: he knew he couldn’t bring himself to turn over a Palestinian to the soldiers. He didn’t want Jihad Awdeh killed. He wanted the man arrested, forced to confess. Dead, he would be a hero, a martyr, when he merited only humiliation.

It was almost 4:00 A.M. when the two-way radio clipped to the soldier’s shoulder sparked with a deep, incoherent voice. Immediately and without a word, the soldier left the room and went out of the front door. Omar Yussef followed after a moment. He looked out of the door. The soldier jumped into the back of the APC. Two last men got in beside him and pulled the metal doors shut. With a gush of diesel fumes and a grinding bellow, the Israeli vehicles pulled off toward the base on the other side of Dehaisha.

The soldiers were still in sight when Omar Yussef turned back to the people in the salon. They crowded by the window, watching the soldiers leave.

“They’re gone,” he said.

“Let me make everyone some tea,” Maryam said.

Omar Yussef desperately wanted to dress and go to Khamis Zeydan. “Maryam, our guests are tired. Surely they would like to go home and rest.”

“Nonsense, Omar, don’t be rude. We have to make some tea for our guests.”

Omar Yussef couldn’t argue in front of all those people. He frowned and went to his bedroom. He would dress, so that once the people did leave he would follow them out right away. He put on thick trousers, a shirt and a sweater, because it was the last, coldest part of the night. He dialed Khamis Zey-dan’s home and office numbers from the phone on the bedroom nightstand. There was no answer. He dialed both numbers again and let them ring. Eventually someone picked up at the police station.

“I need to talk to Abu Adel.”

“It’s very late.” The night sergeant clearly had been asleep.

“You weren’t awake? The Israelis are in the town.”

“Do you want me to arrest them?”

Omar Yussef took a breath. “I need to speak to Abu Adel about a murder.”

A pause. “Who is this?”

“Abu Ramiz.”

“Abu Ramiz, the schoolteacher?”

“Yes, I’m a friend of Abu Adel.”

“I know. Look, Abu Ramiz, if you’re his friend, you’ll see him in the morning. He can’t talk just now, if you know what I mean.”

Omar Yussef thought of the bottle of whisky in Khamis Zey-dan’s office. He understood what the sergeant meant. “Thank you. If you see him, tell him I called.”

As he lifted a pair of shoes from the bottom of his closet, Omar Yussef looked in the sock drawer. He took out the Web-ley and stuck it into his belt.

Maryam carried a tray of teacups past the bedroom door. “Omar, why are you dressing?”

He stepped around her and went to the front door. “I’m going to the church.”