A grave in Gaza oy-2

by Matt Beynon Rees

  Omar Yussef reached the bottom of the ladder. Wallender was on his belly, edging backwards through the tunnel. Unlike the shaft, it had no wooden supports and it was even narrower-about two feet square. Omar Yussef went onto his hands and knees. “Magnus,” he whispered.

  The Swede looked into the half-light that filtered beyond him from the lantern. His bloody face registered recognition. Sweat channeled dirt into Omar Yussef’s eyes as he strained to see past Wallender, but the Swede’s body blocked his view along the tunnel. The earth around them murmured and dust dropped from the roof.

  He had to get them to turn back. “Yasser,” he called into the tunnel.

  “Fuck your mother,” Yasser shouted. “I’ll shoot the foreigner.”

  “Let’s all get out of here, Yasser. It’s going to collapse.”

  The puff of dirt became a trickle, like rain all along the tunnel. Then the earth growled like a man taking a punch and the roof of the tunnel fell. Omar Yussef dived to grab Wallender’s arm. He pulled hard and the Swede shoved himself forward. The shaft around Omar Yussef filled with thick dust. In the darkness, he tried to call Magnus’s name, but he could only cough. He held the man’s arm and sensed the Swede’s desperate scrambling to free his legs and waist, then he felt the resistance lessen. He slipped backward against the planks of the shaft as Magnus came out of the tunnel and up onto his knees. He put his arms around the Swede and they gripped each other. He pushed Magnus up the ladder and scrambled behind him through the thick air. He heard stones clashing against each other above him.

  “I can’t get out, Abu Ramiz,” Wallender said, from the top of the ladder. “It’s blocked.”

  When the garage roof came down, it had covered the head of the tunnel. Coughing, Omar Yussef and Wallender shouted that they were underground. They listened intently to the deep silence, then yelled again.

  As they waited, Omar Yussef sensed a calm in himself. He had found Magnus. Even if they were both to be stuck in this tunnel forever with no one above them aware of their fate, he had shown the Swede the kind of man he was. I might remain here, he thought, buried in Gaza with James Cree’s great-grandfather. He frowned. Something flashed through his mind for a moment, linking the old skeleton in Doctor Najjar’s morgue and the British Military Cemetery. He tried to bring the two images together once more, but he was distracted by Magnus yelling through the timber and stones for rescue.

  Magnus breathed heavily. He put his hand on Omar Yussef’s shoulder. “Abu Ramiz, while I was held captive, I felt very alone,” he murmured. “Though I’m still trapped, at least I have a good friend with me.” Then he raised his voice: “Tell me, did Sweden invade Norway?” He slapped Omar Yussef’s shoulder and rolled his head back, laughing. Omar Yussef saw that his companion was so relieved to be rid of Yasser Salah that even the prospect of being buried alive didn’t spoil his humor. He coughed out the dust and smiled.

  The rubble above them scratched and rumbled as it was lifted away. The head of the shaft cleared and Wallender was pulled from the ladder. Omar Yussef followed him. Sami gripped him under the arms, grimacing from the light wound to his shoulder, and hoisted him onto the broken stone of the garage wall. Omar Yussef lay limp and sweating next to Magnus. The dust storm still smothered Rafah in filth and humidity, but to Omar Yussef it felt crisp and stimulating, like the air of the mountains, after the dirt in the tunnel.

  Sami leaned over into the shaft that led to the tunnel and stared into the darkness. “No one else down there?” he said.

  Omar Yussef lifted his head to speak the name of Yasser Salah, but he choked on it and coughed until his diaphragm bit into the bottom of his lungs.

  Abu Jamal crossed the debris of the fallen garage, holding a flashlight before him. His men were tossing wooden beams and sections of tin roof and cinderblock into the garden, searching through the destruction. The chief of the gunmen stared at the exhausted Swede. Crouching and breathing deeply, Wallender was coated in earth from head to foot. He shielded his eyes from the beam of Abu Jamal’s torch.

  Omar Yussef sat upright and addressed Abu Jamal. “This is Magnus Wallender of the UN, who was kidnapped by Yasser Salah. Yasser is dead, down in the tunnel.”

  Abu Jamal looked at Wallender as though Omar Yussef had introduced him to the filthiest mongrel stray in Gaza. He turned the light on Omar Yussef, pulled his pistol from its holster and leveled it at him. “You bastard, where the fuck is my missile?”

  Chapter 28

  Magnus Wallender rose to his feet, wheezing. The skin around his mouth, where Yasser Salah had ripped away the tape, was bleeding and caked with damp mud. His thick hair stuck up in frightful wisps and his light-blue irises stood out sharply in a face dark with dirt. He rolled his shoulders back, blinked away the grit and stepped in front of Abu Jamal. “Whoever you are,” he said, “put away that gun.”

  Abu Jamal looked Wallender up and down. He glanced behind him, where his men were clearing wreckage, hoping to find the missile. “I know who you are, even if you don’t know me,” he said. “It’s your good fortune that I don’t want trouble with the UN, because otherwise I’d kill you now.”

  Wallender reached out for Abu Jamal’s pistol. Abu Jamal pulled away but slid the gun into its leather holster.

  The gunman scratched the back of his head and gave a surly kick at a broken cinderblock. He stepped to the side of Wallender, so he could direct his complaints at Omar Yussef. “So where’s the Saladin I?” he said.

  “Yasser must have hidden it,” Omar Yussef said. He stood up slowly and stared at his bleeding palms. “I need something to bandage my hands.”

  “Fuck your hands. If you bleed to death, the United Nations can’t blame me for it.” Abu Jamal headed for the house.

  One of the gunmen came out of the back door, shoving the father of Yasser and Fathi Salah down the steps in front of him. Abu Jamal doubled his pace and drew his pistol as he crossed the sandy garden. When he reached Zaki Salah, he put his hand on the old man’s shoulder, shoved him to his knees, forced his head back and thrust the barrel of the gun inside his mouth. “Where’s the missile?” he yelled.

  Zaki shook his head. Abu Jamal yelled again, and then a third time he screamed his question. He pulled the pistol out of the old man’s mouth, slapped the barrel into Salah’s cheek and backhanded it onto his nose. Blood ran down the front of Salah’s long, white jalabiya.

  Abu Jamal grabbed Salah’s beard and pulled him across the sand to where the body of Attiah Odwan lay. He pushed the old man to the ground beside the thick, muscular corpse. Salah looked at the dead gunman’s face and muttered a blessing.

  “Shut up,” Abu Jamal shouted. “Your bastard son killed him. Your bastard son Yasser, who’s dead and buried under the ground beneath your garage.”

  Salah muttered again, closing his eyes and praying for the soul of his son. Abu Jamal kicked the old man in the stomach. He gestured to the gunman who had brought Salah from the house. “Lift him up.”

  Omar Yussef stepped into the sandy garden. He moved toward Abu Jamal. Sami held his wrist and shook his head. Omar Yussef ignored him. “That old fellow doesn’t know where the missile is,” he called.

  Abu Jamal turned and glared at him.

  “Do you think a man like Yasser would trust anyone? Even his own father?” Omar Yussef said.

  Abu Jamal looked at Salah, then back to Omar Yussef. “If he doesn’t know, then how will we find it?”

  “You never will.”

  “Wrong answer.”

  “It wasn’t an answer, it was a wish.” Omar Yussef pushed his chin toward Abu Jamal. He clenched his bloody hands and felt them shaking.

  “If this old man doesn’t know where to find the missile-” Abu Jamal kept his eyes on Omar Yussef, as he lifted his gun to Salah’s head “-I don’t need him alive.” He pulled the trigger and Zaki Salah tumbled backwards over the corpse of Attiah Odwan.

  Omar Yussef gasped. The old man’s legs twisted unnaturally at the knees. The wound on his
forehead was a small black hole, but the blood poured from the back of his skull onto the sand. Omar Yussef reached out and grabbed Abu Jamal’s deformed hand. The smooth skin was cold in his palm. He pointed at Attiah Odwan’s body underneath the dead old man. “At least Attiah died bravely,” he said. “You will never have that honor.”

  Abu Jamal narrowed his eyes and looked over Omar Yussef’s shoulder at Magnus Wallender. Omar Yussef wondered if the gunman was considering a new kidnapping, which might allow him to screw some kind of reward out of the government as recompense for the night’s fruitless operation. But killing Zaki Salah appeared to have calmed him. He spoke quietly. “Like Attiah, I’m ready to be martyred,” he said.

  Omar Yussef smelled the menthol throat lozenges on Abu Jamal’s breath. “If Allah wills it.”

  Abu Jamal put away his gun. His bloodshot eyes were distant. “Is that also a wish?”

  “Get down,” one of the gunmen yelled from inside the ruins of the garage. Abu Jamal and Omar Yussef dropped to the sand. They heard a hollow ringing as something bounced toward them. A rock, a foot in diameter, came to rest against an olive tree a yard away from them. It didn’t sound like a rock and it bounced much too lightly. Omar Yussef tensed his whole body and waited.

  One of the gunmen ambled across the sand from the garage. “Sorry, chief. I was tossing the rubble out of the garage and I threw that stone without realizing what it was. I think it’s a disguised fiberglass cover for a roadside bomb. As I threw it, I realized it was too light to be a rock and I thought perhaps there was already a bomb rigged up inside it. That’s why I shouted.” He knelt close by the rock. “It doesn’t seem to be armed.”

  “What else is in there?” Abu Jamal gestured toward the rubble.

  “A few dozen Kalashikovs and a lot of grenades under the wreckage. Salah’s weapons store. Quite a haul.”

  “Bring the jeeps around and load it up,” Abu Jamal said.

  “Now you’re happy?” Omar Yussef rose to his knees.

  “Now I can continue our resistance. Until my martyrdom.” Abu Jamal kicked the fiberglass rock. Omar Yussef dropped to the ground again. The rock rolled away from them. Abu Jamal laughed, soft and jeering.

  Sami sheared a slice of material from his T-shirt and bound his shoulder, where Yasser Salah’s bullet had winged him. He knelt by Omar Yussef with a pan of water and cleaned the dirt from his lacerated hands. “You were nearly buried alive back there, Abu Ramiz,” he said.

  “Yes, I thought it might become my eternal tomb.” Omar Yussef remembered the way the images of the skeleton in the pathologist’s surgery and of the British War Cemetery had come to him in the tunnel. It was as though it had all been down there in the same hole in the ground with him and Yasser Salah. He rubbed his forehead.

  “I wouldn’t have left you down there. I’d have dug you up and shipped your body back to Bethlehem. Gaza’s a terrible place to stay, even if it’s only your bones.” Sami ripped another piece from his T-shirt and tied it around Omar Yussef’s palm.

  Even if it’s only your bones. Omar Yussef thought of Yasser Salah, crushed in the collapsed tunnel. Though Salah was gone, others would die when his stash of weapons was aimed at them. Beyond the grave, the men of Gaza could still wield death. He thought of the skeleton on the pathologist’s dissecting table. Who did you rise from the dead to kill?

  Chapter 29

  Dawn lent a roseate highlight to the dust cloud, as Sami accelerated out of Rafah, north on the Saladin Road toward Gaza City. Wallender had washed the abraded skin around his mouth under a faucet, but his face remained grimy and bloodied. The pine air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror of the Jeep Cherokee battled with the scent of sweat and soil from the car’s passengers. Omar Yussef wondered if his body would ever be cleansed of the dirt constricting his breath and clogging his throat.

  In the back of the car, Wallender had been gabbing with the excitement of new freedom ever since they’d left the Saladin Brigades men at the stationery store, their jeeps laden with Yasser Salah’s weapons and the dead bodies of four of their comrades. I’ll let him wash and rest before I tell him about James, Omar Yussef thought. Or about Eyad Masharawi. Perhaps I won’t tell him the rest, ever. Maybe that way I’ll be able to forget it, too.

  He gazed across the cabbage fields. The wind had picked up and bent the isolated stands of sycamore. The dust storm was building for its final squall. Perhaps it would at last blow itself out and he would see the sunshine again before he left Gaza, after all.

  As they passed Deir al-Balah, the tall palms bowed under the wind. The cabbage fields fluttered like the emerald surface of the sea, stretching to the neat green hedge around the British War Cemetery. The gusts came from the east with the dawn, as though the growing light were blowing into Gaza.

  Omar Yussef stared at the hedge as they approached the cemetery. In the tunnel, it was as though this place of tombs was down there with me and Yasser Salah. The old skeleton was there, too. He frowned. “Sami, pull over at the junction,” he said, pointing toward the caretaker’s little farmhouse.

  The mysterious skeleton in the morgue was discovered in the corner of a field near here, he thought. He recalled the desecrated graves he’d seen when he visited the cemetery with Cree. The words Khamis Zeydan had spoken to him when he first arrived in Gaza sounded in his head: There is no single, isolated crime in Gaza. Each one is linked to many others.

  Omar Yussef stepped out of the car and trotted to the gate of the caretaker’s yard, his head bowed against the wind. The caretaker stared in fright when he saw Omar Yussef, his clothes filthy and bloody and his head covered in dust.

  “You remember me, Suleiman? I was here with Mister James Cree from the United Nations.”

  Suleiman Jouda nodded, but his expression remained one of shock.

  Omar Yussef coughed. “This is Mister Cree’s friend, Mister Wallender. Also from the United Nations.”

  Jouda gaped at Wallender’s gory face and his filthy clothes.

  Omar Yussef edged past the caretaker. “He’s from Sweden,” he said, with a wink, as though that explained their strange appearance on Jouda’s doorstep at daybreak. Jouda nodded, hesitantly. “We need to inspect the graveyard on a very important issue of United Nations security business, Suleiman.”

  Omar Yussef crossed the dirt yard, passing a wheelbarrow and some trenching tools that stood against the wall. Jouda opened the gate to the graveyard and entered. Omar Yussef picked up a long-handled spade and gave it to Sami. He ignored Sami’s quizzical expression and followed Jouda onto the lush lawn of the cemetery.

  Wallender stared at the neatness of the graveyard. “This really doesn’t look like Gaza. What’re we doing here, Abu Ramiz?”

  “We’re paying our respects,” Omar Yussef said. He turned to Jouda. “Suleiman, show us the graves that were recently desecrated. Was it these, near the end of the path?”

  Jouda led them to the corner of the first block of gravestones facing the lawn’s central obelisk monument. “It was these few here, ustaz,” he said. “But can you tell me, please, what’s the matter? I’m sorry to ask, uncle, but the British consulate is sending someone today to inspect the repairs I’ve made to the damaged gravestones. Is your visit connected to that?”

  “In a way. Everything will be okay. Don’t worry.”

  “Is that my shovel?” Jouda said, nervous and slightly indignant now.

  “Trust me, Suleiman.” Omar Yussef stepped off the gravel path onto the grass.

  Jouda had bonded the pieces of the broken gravestones and re-laid the disturbed turf around them. The one that had been marked with graffiti stood out. Jouda’s cleanser had erased the vandals’ slogans, but it also had scoured away ninety years of dust from the rock, leaving a chalky diagonal stripe across the crest of the stone.

  Omar Yussef approached that grave. He read the inscription. Private Eynon Price. Royal Army Medical Corps, 53rd (Welsh) Casualty Clearing Station. 28 years. 4/5/1917. He read the inscri
ption again. Eynon Price, Eynon Price. How do you pronounce that name? “Eye” or “Ay” or “Ee”? Eynon Price. He was sure he knew that name. Perhaps a foreigner working for the UN had a similar name, but he couldn’t recall who it might be. Then he remembered: he had heard those words, uttered by a tongue unaccustomed to English. In Odwan’s cell. When the doomed man had recounted the nonsensical babbling of Lieutenant Fathi Salah before he was shot. High Noon Price, Odwan thought Salah had said.

  Odwan had believed Fathi Salah was negotiating the price of the missile, but the frightened officer was actually telling him where to find the weapon. It was here, its burial disguised as a desecration of the graves.

  Omar Yussef felt a surge of strength and excitement. He had discovered the truth and now he was about to uncover the Saladin I. “Sami, start digging right here.”

  Jouda protested. Omar Yussef put his hands on the man’s shoulders and spoke soothingly. “Suleiman, there has been a terrible criminal act. You heard about the bones that were found near here and taken to the morgue at Shifa Hospital?”

  Jouda nodded. “It was in the newspaper, ustaz, ” he said. He kept his eyes on the grave, where Sami was peeling away the turf the caretaker had only lately re-laid.

  “Those are the bones that should be in this grave.”

  “Then what’s in the grave now?”

  “All the evil of Gaza.”

  “Leave it there then.” Jouda didn’t question that evil would reside beneath the earth.

  “We can’t do that. Where will the soldier’s bones rest?”

  Sami was working up a sweat, down to his chest in the sandy earth, the bandage on his shoulder bloody. Omar Yussef felt the air growing warm as the sun came up.

  He thought of Lieutenant Fathi Salah, a good student and later a decent officer, but a poor man with a bad brother who pressured him to make the missile deal with the Saladin Brigades. Fathi couldn’t carry out Yasser’s dirty trade and lost his nerve. When Fathi blurted the location of the missile to Odwan, his brother shot him dead. Omar Yussef remembered Professor Adnan Maki’s dinner lecture about the alien invaders who had come to Gaza over the centuries, including these British men in the graves under his feet. But it wasn’t the outsiders who exacted the highest cost in blood from Gaza; it was the men like Yasser Salah who killed their brothers.