The Collaborator of Bethlehem

by Matt Rees

  “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?”

  “Tha
t’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.

  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.