The Collaborator of Bethlehem

by Matt Rees

  Omar Yussef remembered his one visit to the market where the bomber had died. He had found it unpleasant, dirty and noisy, crowded with people who seemed to have a greater than usual dislike of Arabs. That was years ago, but the people there when the bomber came would have had the same faces, lives identical in their ordinariness. He couldn’t categorize them as occupiers, no matter what their government did to him and his own people. He hated these phrases. They made it so simple for his compatriots to ignore the horror of what one of their own had done to someone’s wife or grandfather. He knew that when the bomber’s name was announced, the dead man’s family would be expected to celebrate. The people who sent the kid to die would mob the family house and shoot their Kalash-nikovs in the air. What was there for the family to cheer? The loss of a son? The imminent destruction of their home in an army reprisal?

  The wall in front of Omar Yussef was obscured by four filing cabinets. Government gray, they were almost as tall as he was. When he had come to see the director in the past, he had always sat with his back to the cabinets and hadn’t much noticed them. Now he thought they must loom uncomfortably over the director. The cabinets seemed to threaten to spit out years of worthless paperwork, deluging the desk.

  Omar Yussef ran his finger down the titles taped to the front of each drawer. The first two were the educational records of the students. The third was filled with the school’s financial accounts. Omar Yussef stopped at the last one. It was marked: “Personnel.” He bent his knees with a small groan and opened the bottom drawer. He flipped his fingers along the top of the files. Typed along the pink edge, he read his name: SIRHAN, OMAR YUSSEF SUBHI. He wondered what he would do if Wafa entered and saw him looking through confidential personnel files. It wouldn’t matter. Wafa didn’t seem so sad to see Steadman out of the picture, and if someone else came in, they wouldn’t know immediately what was in this drawer.

  Omar Yussef lifted his file. It was four inches thick and he needed two hands to wrench it from the crowded tray. The edges of the file were blackened by the dirt of many fingers, more soiled, he thought, than the rest of the staff files next to it. He shoved the drawer shut with his foot, took the grubby file to the desk and dropped it with a deep thud.

  The first few pages contained Omar Yussef’s application for the job at the UNRWA Girls School and his references from the Frères School. There was a black-and-white passport– sized photo attached to the corner of the application with a rusting paperclip. Omar Yussef noticed that his moustache had not quite been fully white back then. It was only ten years ago. He stroked the moustache in the photograph and then ran his finger through the bristly hair on his upper lip. Perhaps he ought to shave it. It surely made him look older than he really was, particularly as the remaining hair on his head was white, too. Steadman might have had the idea for him to retire simply because he looked old enough to be a pensioner. If he shaved the moustache and dyed his hair, the next director wouldn’t think of him as an old codger who ought to make way for younger blood. With a pencil he filled in the moustache in the photograph to the gray color of the skin. He took a pen and stroked in dark hair. He looked at the man in the photo. With the new hair and clean lip, he could pass for forty-five years of age, just about. Then he remembered that the man in the old photo was, in fact, only forty-five, and he was thankful that he had cleaned up his lifestyle since then. He put a finger beneath his eye and felt the slack skin there, then he leaned close to the photo and decided that his eyes were baggier a decade before, when he was always up late and sometimes couldn’t sleep at all, so charged up had he been with whisky. He would ask Maryam to buy some hair dye and he would get rid of the moustache.

  Omar Yussef read the reference from the principal of the Frères School. The headmaster, who had worked with Omar Yussef for twenty years, blamed his departure on budget cuts, for which Omar Yussef quietly thanked him as he sat in the UN director’s chair. Old Brahim hadn’t reported that he was forced to get rid of Omar Yussef by the government schools inspector, Abu Sway.

  Then Omar Yussef glanced over the reports written by his first director at the UN school. He was an Irishman named Fergus whom Omar Yussef had liked. They were excellent assessments. But he came to a halt when he read the reports of the next director. This had been a Spanish lady. Pilar had preceded Steadman, and Omar Yussef always remembered her four years at the school fondly. She was a little younger than him and he had enjoyed a flirtatious exchange of humor with her. He remembered how she would laugh like a teenager when he told her how elegant she looked with her Gucci scarves and Fendi sunglasses. She was unmarried and often came to dinner with his family. Yet her annual appraisals of his teaching skills were damning. She wrote that he was too old to learn modern techniques of teaching and that he hadn’t adapted to the new syllabus issued by the president when the government took over the schools system from the Israeli Civil Administration.

  Omar Yussef flipped through the other papers. There was another negative assessment by Pilar and then a letter she’d left in the file for Steadman, when he took over a year ago. It said that Omar Yussef was a difficult employee and that she had begun the process of securing an order from the government schools inspector for his dismissal. His dismissal. Perhaps Abu Sway had used the letter to try to force Steadman to fire him and, instead, the American had attempted to offer Omar Yussef an honorable way out. The rest of the file consisted of letters from parents complaining that he spoke negatively about political life in the town and that he kept too many students behind for detention at the end of the day. There was no appraisal from Christopher Steadman.

  Omar Yussef closed the file. He was astonished. He had been wrong about Steadman. He immediately regretted the joke about not washing on Ramadan and all the heated words he had spoken to the poor man. Aloud, he asked for the American’s forgiveness. The man was dead, and Omar Yussef knew there would be no opportunity to correct the lack of respect he had shown Steadman while he lived. Every hostile sentence he had growled at the American seemed to come back now to smack him in the mouth from which he uttered them. He considered searching the gray cabinets for a personnel file on Steadman. Perhaps he would call the man’s parents in the United States to inform them of his death, but then he figured the headquarters in Jerusalem would have someone do that.

  The sadness Omar Yussef felt at misunderstanding Stead-man fed his anger about the Spanish woman. What had made her treat him with such duplicity? He always thought it was people like Khamis Zeydan and Hussein Tamari who had to be alert to double games. Duplicity and bluff surrounded them, occupied their every thought. But he was a schoolteacher. Why should he be forced to guard against the possibility of betrayal? It disgusted him. It was bad enough that his investigation of the George Saba case led him down dark, dirty paths where there were hidden threats against him. He thought of writing an angry protest to the Spanish woman. But he wasn’t supposed to have seen his personnel file, so how could he respond to its content? If these appraisals were any judge of her true nature, Pilar would use this infraction as a pretext to get him fired. Maybe his flirting had secretly annoyed her. Or perhaps she felt rejected because he never followed up with a genuine sexual advance. It was possible. Though Omar Yussef would have considered it indecent, these European ladies behaved according to a morality that even a broadminded Arab man might find shocking. He acknowledged that, with a wife as good as Maryam, he had never been forced to confront a woman who concealed a deep anger, nor had he needed to understand the desires of an unmarried lady.

  Omar Yussef quickly ran through the file and pulled out each of the blue sheets on which the Spanish woman had written her appraisals, as well as the letter she left for Steadman. He ripped each of them into eight pieces, crumpled the shreds into a ball and dropped them in the wastepaper basket. He stared down at the paper, bitterly. He picked it up, pressed it firmly in his fist and hurled it hard into the empty wastepaper basket once more. It rolled around with a tinny sound. He felt a little better.


  Omar Yussef took his file to the drawer and knelt unsteadily. He jammed it among the other files and pushed the drawer closed. He stood and shook his head.

  The tone of the radio changed. It cut to a static-riddled phone connection, catching Omar Yussef’s attention. A reporter was calling in new information about the Jerusalem suicide bomb. “. . . The Aqsa Martyrs Brigades announces in a leaflet distributed to news media that the martyrdom operation in Mahaneh Yehuda market was carried out by Yunis Abdel Rah-man, who is from the village of Irtas in the Bethlehem district. The martyr was nineteen years old. The Martyrs Brigades sends its congratulations to the family and to the village . . .”

  Omar Yussef leaned against the edge of the desk and gasped. The studio host repeated the information. The commentator, who had speculated that the bomber must have come from Ramallah, said the Israeli army would surely now descend on Bethlehem. Certainly, he said, the new policy of destroying the homes of martyrs’ families would bring destruction on the heads of the Abdel Rahmans, but the people would stand steadfast with them. Omar Yussef turned the radio off.

  Why did Yunis Abdel Rahman give his life in this way? Omar Yussef ran over his conversation with the boy outside the family house, when Dima’s body was found. Yunis had been angry and hostile. But these Martyrs Brigades people, for whom he had carried out this final mission, were the same men who stole his family’s auto business as soon as his powerful elder brother was murdered. Omar Yussef had felt sure that Yunis knew Tamari was responsible for the deaths of his brother and his sister-in-law. He remembered the way the boy glared at the Martyrs Brigades leaders when they arrived at George Saba’s trial. To kill oneself in one of these bombings was always unfathomable to Omar Yussef, but this seemed stranger than all the others whose cases he knew from around the camp. There were factors common to most of the Dehaisha youths who died like this, as far as Omar Yussef deduced. Usually they had something to prove. Sometimes they were mentally unbalanced after they had witnessed the death of someone close to them in an Israeli attack. But most of the bombers wanted to show everyone that they were not the person people believed them to be, that they were selfless and honorable and brave. Their lives generally were worthless, or had become so, because of some social transgression or indiscretion, and they tried to redeem themselves and the reputation of their families through martyrdom. What did Yunis Abdel Rahman want to prove? Perhaps he was simply unhinged by the deaths of his brother and sister-in-law in the cabbage patch outside his home. But the boy had seemed to be eaten by revenge, not desperation, when he had spoken so angrily to Omar Yussef two days ago. Then he remembered Yunis’s look of shame. Had the boy murdered Dima and blown himself up to end the guilt? Or was he involved with Tamari in his brother’s death outside the family home?

  Omar Yussef needed to think this through. His pants were muddy from the fall he had taken when the bomb exploded in the schoolroom. He considered walking home to change and consider the meaning of this new development in his comfortable salon. Then he thought about the announcement that Yunis Abdel Rahman’s bombing mission was organized by the local Martyrs Brigades. The Israelis might come to Bethlehem to take revenge on the gunmen. When that happened, Jihad Awdeh’s plan was to take refuge in the Church of the Nativity. Before going home to change, he decided he would walk to the church. He would warn Elias Bishara of the gunman’s plan. Elias would have to figure out a way to keep Jihad Awdeh from entering the church.

  Omar Yussef put on his jacket and his flat cap. He bent to pick the blue wad of paper from the wastebasket. He squeezed it and felt as though he were grasping the neck of the Spanish UN school director. That woman had touched these pages. Now she was gone, Omar Yussef had destroyed her deceitful traces. Everything could be wiped out somehow. Yunis Abdel Rahman had been full of anger when Omar Yussef had seen him, and now he was empty, a husk, broken, ready to rot, without leaving any sign of himself in the world. He had strapped a belt of explosives to his torso, but the detonation was inside him.

  Wafa looked up when Omar Yussef opened the office door. She was on the phone and put her hand over the receiver. “It’s the maintenance director in Jerusalem,” she said. “They’re coming in one hour. Do you need to speak to them?”

  Omar Yussef shook his head. He waved to Wafa and went down the corridor, crunching over the broken glass by the blasted classroom. At the entrance, Mahmoud Zubeida sat on a plastic chair, on guard, his Kalashnikov leaning against the wall. He straightened a little when he saw Omar Yussef. “Peace be with you, ustaz.”

  “And with you. Allah lengthen your life,” Omar Yussef replied, squinting into the wind and pulling up the collar of his jacket.

  The air was cold and blustery after the stuffiness of Stead-man’s office. Omar Yussef crossed the muddy street. The chopping baritone of an Israeli helicopter growled from somewhere up in the clouds. Omar Yussef looked about to find Nayif, but no one was around except a dappled goat with its head in a trash can. Omar Yussef turned his back to the wind. He tossed the blue ball of paper as far as he could. The coming gale took it and dropped it into a pool of dirty water behind a brimming garbage dumpster.

  Chapter 21

  A Greek Orthodox priest leaned against the smooth edge of the altar, keeping watch over the entrance to the cave where Jesus was born. He stroked his long black beard, gathering its thickness repeatedly in his fist like a girl fixing her ponytail, and stared as Omar Yussef came across the floor of the empty Church of the Nativity. His eyes were hooded, ringed with a black as vivid as his short mitre and long gown, and his face was immobile with a lazy hostility.

  “Greetings, Father,” Omar Yussef said, when he reached the corner of the church by the cave.

  The priest mumbled something that probably wasn’t loud enough even for him to hear it.

  Omar Yussef restrained his irritation. The priest was a Greek. The other denominations allowed locals to rise in the priesthood, but the Greek Orthodox almost always shipped men from Athens to minister to a people about whom they knew nothing. The imports ended up alienated, resentful, and churlish like this one. Omar Yussef figured there were no tourists today for the priest to bully, so he must be in a bad mood.

  “I’m looking for Father Elias Bishara.”

  The Greek priest looked at Omar Yussef’s muddy, damp pants. He lifted a languid hand and, with a crooked finger, angled his wrist toward a small door in the north transept. The hand went back to stroking his beard and Omar Yussef had been dismissed.

  Beyond the door was St. Catherine’s Church. The Franciscans built it onto the side of the Nativity Church in the nineteenth century. Its white marbled interior was quiet, so Omar Yussef went into the cloister. The granite medieval columns had been restored to a grayness that shone unnaturally in the blank light from the cloudy sky. At first the cloister seemed empty. There was a statue of an old man in a monk’s habit at the center of the courtyard. Then, behind the statue, Omar Yussef saw a kneeling priest, his head bowed in prayer. He recognized the thinning, curly black hair as Elias Bishara’s.

  The priest rose as Omar Yussef crossed the flagstones and smiled. “Abu Ramiz, welcome.”

  “How are you, Father Elias?”

  “Don’t call me ‘Father.’ It sounds strange in the mouth of a man who has instructed me since childhood,” Elias said. “Am I supposed to call you ‘my son’?”

  “Aren’t you cold out here?”

  “Well, that’s the point, really.” He looked around the cloister. “The discomfort concentrates my prayers. So does this old bastard.” He gestured to the statue.

  Omar Yussef looked up into the bearded face of the carved figure. He detected nothing spiritual in it. It was as blank as if it were set in a supermarket jello mold. “St. Jerome?”

  “Yes, our local saint and martyr,” Elias Bishara said. “I was meditating on our friend George Saba earlier. I realized that I felt hatred toward the Muslims of our town for what they have done to George. I hate them for their unthinking o
rthodoxy and their crazy compulsion to martyrdom. I came here, to the feet of Jerome, to be reminded that we Christians have had our share of lunatics, fanatically rejecting those who thought and worshipped differently.”

  “Not to mention those who worshipped the martyrs almost above God himself,” Omar Yussef said.

  “You’re right, Abu Ramiz. This fellow Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin was the official version of the Roman Catholic Church for sixteen hundred years. It was a great achievement for a man who lived as a hermit in Bethlehem. But he destroyed the careers and lives of other theologians who dared to challenge his orthodoxy, and he decorated the tombs of martyrs with so many candles that people said he was a pagan worshipping the light, instead of God.”

  Elias Bishara dusted off the front of his robe where his kneeling had soiled it. He looked at Omar Yussef’s muddy trousers. “Did you fall, ustaz?”

  The mud had dried to a dusty cake on the outside of Omar Yussef pants. Underneath, his legs were wet and cold. “It’s nothing,” he said.

  “Let’s go inside, anyway. There’s no need for you to join me in scourging yourself out here.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  The two men went into the quiet, white chapel. From the small door to the Nativity Church, the Greek priest watched them, his fingers still brushing his beard. Elias Bishara took Omar Yussef’s arm and led him to the rear pew.