A grave in Gaza oy-2

by Matt Beynon Rees

  Sami ate the second half of his falafel ball. As he swallowed, he lit another cigarette and dropped three five-shekel coins on the table. “Let’s go and ask Abu Jamal,” he said.

  Chapter 25

  When Omar Yussef and Sami returned to the Jeep, a layer of dust an eighth of an inch thick covered the black paint. Omar Yussef pulled the door shut behind him and blinked the dirt from his eyes. “This storm is going to break tonight, Sami. It’s thicker than it has been,” he said.

  Sami glanced at him as he turned the key in the ignition.

  “We might be in Rafah late and you’re only wearing a shirt,” he said. “I’ll stop at the hotel for you to pick up a sweater on the way south.”

  “If you’re so worried about my health, perhaps you ought to get me a bullet-proof vest.”

  “So you don’t want to be a martyr?”

  Omar Yussef gave a choking laugh. “If the food in that restaurant didn’t kill me, nothing can.”

  Sami leaned forward over the wheel, swung the rear end of the car around and propelled the jeep back through the refugee camp.

  Omar Yussef braced himself against the door and closed his eyes. A faceless man appeared behind his eyelids, dressed in the stocking cap and black vest of a gunman, prodding Omar Yussef with a Kalashnikov. The gunman was gone when he opened his eyes. They stung from the dirt in the air. These eyes have no rest, he thought. Open, they fill with the filth that floats around Gaza; when I shut them, they’re prey to deadly nightmares.

  An order was out to kill him. Would it be a gunman in a stocking cap who pulled the trigger on him? Would it be quick? Humiliating, like the death of Moussa Husseini, in the street with his underpants full of crap? Terrifying and long, like Bassam Odwan’s torture? Was he next, or was he only holding a number in a long line of victims? How much time did he have?

  Sami took a right off the Saladin Road and up through the souk to Omar al-Mukhtar Street. He leaned on the horn when a service taxi stopped in the road to pick up a couple of women laden with bags of vegetables.

  “This order to kill me, Sami,” Omar Yussef said. “If it succeeds-”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Abu Ramiz.” Sami hit the horn with three short bursts. “Let’s go,” he shouted, shaking his head.

  “Just if. I would like you to be in touch with my family in Bethlehem.”

  Sami smiled as he lit a cigarette. “You want me to tell your wife you loved her?”

  “Just say that I liked the website very much.”

  Sami frowned. “What website?”

  “They’ll know.”

  The taxi moved off slowly, and Sami edged along less than a yard behind its rear fender, waiting to overtake.

  “Abu Adel says that sometimes it’s a mistake to tell you what’s really going on, because you overreact,” Sami said.

  Omar Yussef wondered what else Khamis Zeydan had told Sami about him. “You said there’s an order out to kill me, so how am I overreacting?”

  “There’s always someone who wants to kill you, whoever you are, Abu Ramiz.”

  “So now you’re like Bassam Odwan, who believed he would die when Allah determined his time had come?”

  “Well, was there anything Bassam Odwan could have done about that moment? Maybe it’s better to accept that death is coming and that it’s in the hands of someone else, whether that’s Allah or General Husseini or those two guys we just met back in the camp. It might be unknown when and how death comes, but in Gaza there should be no surprise that it’s on its way.”

  “Is there someone who wants to kill you, Sami?”

  “Only this fucking taxi driver.” Sami leaned on the horn again. He swung the car into the opposite lane and roared past the long yellow taxi, making a few pedestrians jump onto the sidewalk. “Abu Ramiz, I’m not as old as you and I don’t have your wisdom, but there’re things that I’ve had to learn fast-things which perhaps you’ve never known, working in your classroom at the school.”

  “You’ve had many hardships, my son, I know.”

  “If there’s one thing my life has taught me, it’s that killing is easy and dying is easier. Suffering is hard.” Sami looked at Omar Yussef and, for a moment, his face rearranged itself into that of a much older man, deeply lined and sagging with the weight of troubling experience. Omar Yussef wondered if Sami would live to be that old.

  As they rounded the traffic circle on the beach road, the dust storm was thicker than ever. The sea was barely visible beyond the Salaam Fish Restaurant. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, but Sami had the headlights on. He turned onto the beach road and rolled past the Deira Hotel toward the Sands. Omar Yussef stared into the gloom.

  A jeep’s red brake lights punctuated the dust cloud ahead. The back door flew open. A man dropped out of the jeep, stumbled and fell. Omar Yussef strained forward. The jeep was at the entrance to the driveway of the Sands Hotel.

  “Sami?”

  “I see it.”

  Sami accelerated.

  The man struggled to his feet, lifting himself without the use of his arms, which seemed to be cuffed or tied behind him. He took a few quick steps toward the perimeter wall of the Sands Hotel, halted and looked in both directions. Confused, he moved to his left, then to his right, and turned to face the jeep. He crouched, poised to run, but a short, hollow bellow of gunfire dropped him against the wall.

  The jeep sped into the dust, its back door flying open. A man leaned out to pull it shut. He wore a stocking cap.

  Omar Yussef’s mouth was dry when Sami skidded the car to the side of the road. He lifted himself stiffly from the Cherokee.

  The whitewashed perimeter wall of the Sands Hotel was smeared red where the man had been flung against it. Three narrow trails of blood daubed the stucco, where he had slipped to the floor. He sat with his legs out in front of him and his shoulders leaning to the right. Blood seeped into the sand around his thighs.

  Omar Yussef came to the body. He wasn’t sure. He lifted the man’s head. The ear was splayed out at a right angle, just as the son’s was. He felt the neck for a pulse, but Eyad Masharawi was dead.

  Masharawi’s head fell to the right, as though he were still shielding the strangely formed ear from sight the way he had disguised it in the photograph at his house. He had a few days’ growth of beard, gray and black. His feet were bare and his blue shirt was stained with sweat and dirt and soaked with blood. All the buttons were missing, and his torso, punctured with three bullet wounds, was bruised and slack. Omar Yussef closed Masharawi’s eyes with the edge of his palm.

  “Get in the car, Abu Ramiz,” Sami said.

  Omar Yussef felt Sami pulling him to his feet. “What’re you talking about? We have to report what we’ve seen.”

  “To whom? The people who killed this man? Or the people who’re about to kill you?”

  Omar Yussef heard voices approaching on the driveway of the hotel. Khamis Zeydan came to the end of the drive. He held a pistol and there was fear in his face, which dissolved into a hard relief when he saw Omar Yussef. He turned back to the drive and shouted: “Stay where you are, everyone. I’ll handle this.” He came toward Omar Yussef. Dust was thick on his face and shirt; clearly he had been loitering outside the hotel, behind the wall, waiting for Omar Yussef to come back. “You have to get out of here.”

  “It’s Eyad Masharawi,” Omar Yussef said.

  Khamis Zeydan looked at the dead man, briefly, blinking away the dust. “I’ll see to it that his wife is informed.”

  “It was a jeep. They pushed him out and-”

  “Sami, get him out of here, in the name of Allah.”

  “Why? Why do I have to go?”

  “How many dead bodies do you have to see before you develop a better sense of self-preservation? I think Doctor Najjar liked you, but not so much that he wants to see you naked on the dissecting table in his pathology lab.” Khamis Zeydan drew close. “My brother, go now.”

  Omar Yussef climbed back into the jeep. As Sami started
the car, Khamis Zeydan tucked his pistol into the holster in the back of his waistband and watched his old friend. When they reached the junction at the end of the Beach Road, Khamis Zeydan was a vague spot in the cloud of dust and the body of Eyad Masharawi had disappeared from view.

  Sami turned south onto the Saladin Road toward Rafah. Omar Yussef imagined Salwa Masharawi watching the dust swirl through the olive grove in front of her house and listening to her children playing in the other rooms. He wondered if she had sensed her husband’s death and what he would tell her about the way Eyad died.

  He thought guiltily of the Saladin Brigades leaflet he had left in Professor Adnan Maki’s office. If Maki had read the notes on the back, he might have connected it to Omar Yussef’s interest in Masharawi and the selling of university degrees. He might have passed that along to Masharawi’s captors. Omar Yussef slapped a fist into his palm. His own clumsy attempt to investigate may have killed Masharawi. But he couldn’t believe the security agents would murder a man over something as minor as accusations of corruption at the university.

  Sami’s cellphone rang. He listened, spoke quietly, and hung up. “That was Khaled. Abu Jamal will see us in Rafah in the next few hours.”

  The wind was hard against the car’s windows. Omar Yussef hadn’t had the chance to pick up a sweater at the hotel, after all. He shivered.

  Chapter 26

  Bent under backpacks twice the size of their torsos, streams of schoolchildren slouched home to the ragged tin farmhouses along the seashore near Rafah. In the dunes, shredded plastic sheeting flapped against the metal frames of greenhouses left behind by the Israelis when they evacuated their settlements. Sami shook his head. “It should be lovely down here. If only things were different.”

  “I prefer the hills around Bethlehem,” Omar Yussef said. “The rocks and the sharp slopes and the sunrise over the mountains beyond the Dead Sea.”

  “The sun rises here, too, Abu Ramiz.”

  Omar Yussef gestured at the pale darkness of the dust storm. “If Allah wills it.”

  The road veered inland away from the palm groves near the Egyptian border and dropped toward Rafah. The town lay like a pile of rocks strewn carelessly across the sand by a wrecking ball. The dark corrugated metal of the border fence slid past the town like a serpent, silent, muscular and venomous. The shot-up buildings on the edge of Rafah looked like the grin of a streetfighter, teeth punched away, broken and blackened.

  They drove along the southern rim of the town to the Saladin Gate. Sami pulled the car into the shade of an awning outside a shuttered grocery. A boy of about three stood on the roof of the store, throwing tiny stones at Omar Yussef as he stepped out of the car. He wagged his finger at the boy. Another stone tapped the hood of the car. The boy’s chubby, tawny face was resentful and fierce and his legs were planted wide. He’s working on his arm for the battles to come, Omar Yussef thought. He breathed slowly and got back in the car to wait for Abu Jamal’s summons.

  Sami toyed with his cellphone. The tapping of stones continued on the roof of the Jeep, a counterpoint to the constant impacts of the sand volleying out of the hot wind. Omar Yussef’s head dipped forward and he closed his eyes. When he opened them, it was to the ringing of Sami’s cell-phone and a sense that the light had dimmed. Sami listened and murmured agreement into the phone as he started the car’s engine. He hung up and took off along the town’s main street.

  “Was I asleep?” Omar Yussef asked, yawning. His mouth was dry.

  “For about three hours.”

  “We’ve been waiting that long? Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “You needed sleep, and I didn’t need company.” Sami peered into the dust. The street was almost empty. The town was hiding from the dirt in the air. The few pedestrians were sinister shadows in the dust storm. Ghostly fluorescent light shivered from the shopfronts.

  Sami spotted a stationery shop on a corner of the main road. “That’s the place,” he said. He pulled into a sidestreet. A blue metal door opened onto a dark stairwell. Omar Yussef saw the vague shape of a man’s head and a hand beckoning to them. Sami leaned over, took the pistol out of his waistband and put it in the glove compartment.

  “Won’t we need that?” Omar Yussef said.

  “By the time we needed it, we’d already be dead.” Sami smiled. “Anyway, these guys would take the gun off me before they’d let me see Abu Jamal.”

  In the stairwell, there was a handshake for each of them, but Omar Yussef’s eyes couldn’t adjust to the deeper darkness. The hand led him up a rough flight of stairs. The leather of his loafers made a sound like sanding wood on the bare concrete and he stumbled twice in the dark.

  At the head of the stairs, they entered a long, narrow room. A pair of hands patted their waists and chests, checking for weapons. Three sofas were crammed in a horseshoe beneath a small window. A single fluorescent strip, lying on the arm of one sofa, provided the only light in the room. Omar Yussef narrowed his eyes and peered into the darkness. A lean, bearded man in his mid-thirties was performing the evening prayers in the corner farthest from the window. On either side of him, a noisy fan rushed air around the room, but it was stiflingly hot and almost as dusty as it had been outside. A rhythmic susuration of wind murmured through the gaps in the window frame.

  They sat on the sofa opposite the fluorescent strip. The man who had greeted them at the door placed the light on a mahogany coffee table between the sofas. When he moved it, the icy glow illuminated his hands and face. They were the same broad farmer’s features Omar Yussef had noted in Bassam Odwan. The man’s high brow was alert, stiff with concentration. His eyes were black and watchful.

  “You’re related to Bassam Odwan?” Omar Yussef asked.

  “My brother,” he said, in a hoarse, dark voice.

  “May Allah be merciful upon him. I met him briefly in the jail. I think he was calm in the face of death.”

  “I don’t think calm is the right word.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Attiah Odwan.”

  “What would be the right word, Attiah?”

  “Prepared. That would be the right word.”

  The man in the corner completed the five prostrations of the Maghrib prayers, but didn’t stop. Omar Yussef counted two more repetitions of the motions-the standing and the kneeling, the moment of restful consideration and the bowing to the floor-that constituted a single prostration. The extra prayers signaled preparation for an imminent mission and, perhaps, death.

  When the prayers were done, a woman, compelled to remain out of the visitors’ sight, passed a tray of coffee through the door and Attiah set it on the table. The man in the corner greeted them. His hand, when Omar Yussef shook it, was deformed, the bones broken and barely knitted together, the skin unnaturally smooth and hairless where it had been burned. Omar Yussef flinched.

  “The work of an Israeli tank shell,” the man said. His voice was low and rasping. His deep, dark eyes were dry and bloodshot. Below them were thick rings the color and texture of cinnamon bark. His beard was smooth and shone black. He pulled a tissue from a box on the table and expectorated into it. He took a packet of throat lozenges from his pocket, slipped one into his mouth, and picked up his coffee cup.

  “As you were with your parents and in your home,” he said.

  “You’re Abu Jamal?” Omar Yussef asked.

  The man nodded and retreated into the darkness.

  Omar Yussef attempted to lighten the tension in the room. “Did we come to the right place?” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t expect to find you praying here. Perhaps we arrived at the headquarters of the Islamists by mistake.”

  Abu Jamal smiled thinly. “Among the resistance, those who never used to pray are connected to Allah now, because death seems so close. We’re all ready to be martyrs before Allah at any moment. We put our souls in the hands of Allah.”

  “I’m Omar Yussef Sirhan, from Dehaisha Camp. I work for UNRWA. One of my colleagues, a Swede, has be
en kidnapped by the Saladin Brigades and another has been killed, also by the Saladin Brigades.”

  “That was the Gaza City people who did that,” Abu Jamal said, coughing and reaching for another tissue.

  “The killing? Yes, well, sort of.”

  “What do you mean?” Abu Jamal’s head dipped, menacingly.

  “The Gaza City people acted on paid orders from someone in Rafah.”

  “I’d know about that, if it was true.” Abu Jamal crunched the throat lozenge between his back teeth.

  Omar Yussef smelled the menthol across the room. “Perhaps it was someone from Rafah, but not someone from the Saladin Brigades.”

  Abu Jamal was silent. He drank his coffee and wiped his mustache with the back of his deformed hand.

  “My colleague, the Swede, came to inspect the schools and found that one of our teachers had been arrested,” Omar Yussef said. “It should have been a simple matter, but in some way that we don’t fully understand it touched on other issues far beyond the case of the imprisoned teacher. Dangerous issues.”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “I’d like you to free the Swede.”

  “How can I do that?”

  “There’s no need for you to hold him anymore, now that the brother Bassam Odwan is dead.”

  “That’s not what I mean. I don’t have him.”

  Omar Yussef tilted his head and gave his words a taunting, sarcastic bite. “Do you mean that the Gaza City wing of the Saladin Brigades killed the UN man and carried out the kidnapping, too?”

  Abu Jamal found another piece of the throat lozenge to crunch. “Perhaps.”

  “That’s not what they told us.”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “That the Swede was taken by someone from Rafah.”

  “By the Saladin Brigades in Rafah?”

  Omar Yussef thought hard. “They just said that it was someone from Rafah.”

  “There are one hundred and sixty thousand people in Rafah. I’m only one of these.” Abu Jamal shared a scornful smile with Attiah, whose bulk was shrouded by the darkness at the other end of his sofa.