The Collaborator of Bethlehem (13 page)

Omar Yussef was shocked. “I can’t believe you think this way,” he said, quietly.

“Well, I certainly hope you didn’t believe I was operating on high moral principles. I assume you know me better than that.”

“This wasn’t how you used to be.”

“Things have changed. I discovered that our people’s struggle is run like a crappy casino, and after forty years gambling in it the only chip I have left is the one on my shoulder.” He swung his arm with its gloved prosthesis to take in Dima’s dead body under the white sheet, the armed policemen, the hostile glare of Muhammad Abdel Rahman and his son Yunis. “I lost the bet, as you can see. I fucking lost.”

Khamis Zeydan pushed his beret back and rubbed his forehead. His anger seemed to leave him and Omar Yussef thought he looked pained, sad, lonely.

“There’s more to this business with the Abdel Rahmans than you know, Abu Ramiz,” Khamis Zeydan said. “Excuse me.” He walked quickly to the Abdel Rahman family. He beckoned Muhammad to follow him to the salon and told the women to go back into the house and await questioning.

After the family entered the house, no one remained by the cabbage patch except the police cordon and Yunis Abdel Rah-man. Omar Yussef felt his ankle seizing up where he’d twisted it descending from the jeep. He limped over to Yunis.

“May Allah bless her,” Omar Yussef said.

Yunis barely nodded his head.
He’s a handsome man,
Omar Yussef thought.
A handsome boy, really.
His face had a fine, almost feminine jaw and light hazel eyes. His neck was thin, a skinny teenager’s neck. Omar Yussef read an arrogance in him of the kind that the young so often wore these days, full of the sense that their elders had failed to fight hard enough for the freedom of Palestine, convinced that they would be the ones to make the great sacrifices that would liberate their land. It was the pity for their humiliated elders and the anticipation of surpassing them in a hurry that made young men like Yunis Abdel Rahman insufferable to Omar Yussef. How many times had he faced the same aloof, defiant expression he now saw on this boy’s face, in the UN schoolyard or on the streets of Dehaisha? But there was something else here, something more hostile, reckless, guilty. That was it, Omar Yussef thought, as he looked closely at the boy:
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone who looked more ashamed of himself and more desperate to hide it.

“May this sadness end all your sadnesses,” Omar Yussef said, offering another formula of condolence. “Who would have imagined that I would be back here again so soon after your brother’s death?”

Yunis looked over to the corpse and back to the cabbage patch. He seemed to be imagining that other body, his brother’s, clad in denim and splayed across the green leaves on the ground.

Omar Yussef decided to test Yunis. “Where will you work now?”

Yunis looked puzzled.

“Now that the Martyrs Brigades have taken over your family autoshops,” Omar Yussef explained. “Where will you work?”

“It’s not your business.”

“Your employment? No, perhaps it’s just that as an old schoolteacher I always worry about young people.”

“That’s not what I meant. The autoshops are not your business.”

“Neither are they yours anymore.”

“We’ll manage.”

“Why did they take the business away from you?”

Yunis was silent again.

“I thought they were Louai’s friends,” Omar Yussef said. “He was in the same faction as the leaders of the Martyrs Brigades. They should be looking after his family, not stealing its livelihood. And why did they come and kill Dima?”

“Who told you that?”

Omar Yussef feigned surprise. “That’s the conclusion of the police.”

“The police just got here.”

“You know that the police operate on intelligence information, not on things that they find on the crime scene. You see, the crime scene can be tampered with, or even set up, faked. But intelligence, the things their informants tell them, that’s something the police can rely upon.”

Omar Yussef watched the boy very closely. Yunis’s left eye twitched nervously. Omar Yussef decided to press the boy. He spoke more loudly, with almost casual, confiding assuredness. “Look, they came here to kill Dima because they feared that she knew something about Louai’s death—something that they wanted to hide. It was they who killed Louai, not the Israelis. This Christian guy that they’ve arrested had nothing to do with it. You know that.”

“How would I know?”

“What if the Martyrs Brigades killed Louai and blamed the Israelis, so that they could take the family business from your father? You were helpless to prevent it. But the Martyrs Brigades found out that Dima knew something about them. Maybe that she saw something or heard something when she was waiting for Louai to come home that night. So they killed her. They made it look like some kind of sex crime, so that people would assume it’s just a random nasty pervert who took her life.”

“The Martyrs Brigades are fighters, strugglers for our people.”

“Like your brother?”

“Yes. Like my brother.”

“How well did you know him, eh? Did you really know everything that he was into?” Omar Yussef looked over at the white sheet, lumpy with the body beneath. “They have all kinds of tests these days. Genetic tests. You’ve seen where Dima’s backside was scratched? They’ll be able to look under the fingernails of any suspect and check that the fragments of skin they find there came from her buttocks, when the killer scratched her.” He turned and looked at Yunis’s hands. The boy pulled his fingers tight into fists. “They’ll probably check you, too.”

“How could I have done this to my sister-in-law? You’re crazy.”

“Haven’t you heard of honor crime?”

“How had she offended the honor of our family?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything. You aren’t even a policeman. You’re a schoolteacher.” He walked away from Omar Yussef quickly. Then he stopped. “You should have taught Dima better. If you had, she wouldn’t have ended like this. She came out here to meet a man for sex and he killed her.”

“That’s a pretty desperate explanation and I know you don’t believe it.”

“If you taught her better, she would be alive. It’s you that killed her, you son of a whore. They ought to check under
your
fingernails.” The boy went fast around the house and into the garage with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Omar Yussef heard the loud revving of an engine, as though Yunis were pumping the gas to make a racket as ringing as the scream he could not allow himself to emit.

Omar Yussef hobbled toward the white sheet. The policeman guarding the body nodded. Omar Yussef knelt stiffly on the damp grass. He lifted the corner of the sheet and looked at Dima’s face. Her cheeks puffed where the cloth remained balled in her mouth. Her eyes stared blankly into the dirt.

Omar Yussef looked at his hands. What did he have under his fingernails? Who had he scratched during his years as a teacher? Had he taught these children to be discontented, unable to accept the reality of their society? Had he given them principles that would surely be violated by the world around them, dooming them to cynicism and disillusion?
If you looked beneath my nails,
Omar Yussef thought,
Yunis was right about what might be found there. There would be traces of the skin of Dima Abdel Rahman, of George Saba, of how many others?
Gently he put his fingers on Dima’s lids and closed her eyes.

Chapter 12

O
mar 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.