A grave in Gaza oy-2

by Matt Beynon Rees

  Omar Yussef picked up the briefcase and went to the door. He was in the garden with his hand on the doe’s snout when Maki called to him from the doorstep.

  “How does it feel to hold that money, Abu Ramiz?”

  Omar Yussef shrugged.

  “You don’t feel a bit dirty, even a little excited? You’re accustomed to holding a large amount of cash from an illegal transaction?”

  “No. But I’m used to carrying school books.” Omar Yussef lifted the briefcase and tapped its side. “This is the textbook of Gazan history.”

  Chapter 31

  Omar Yussef struggled up the lane, sand sifting over the tops of his loafers, and leaned his hand against the graffiti of the Dome of the Rock encased in swathes of black barbed wire. He smiled. Even if the wire were real, it couldn’t have cut his palm any worse than the glass along the wall at Salah’s house already had done. Perhaps death had tracked him through Gaza, as he had imagined, but only as a reminder of his mortality, spurring him to better actions. In any case, it hadn’t caught him. He tightened his bandages, pushed open the gate and went slowly through the lemon and olive trees to the Masharawi house, Maki’s briefcase tapping against his knee with every step.

  The sandy yard outside the front door was shaded by a black canvas awning, under which the family would receive mourners. Beneath it, Naji sat on a plastic garden chair with a flask of bitter coffee and some tiny polystyrene cups, ready to greet visitors. The boy didn’t notice Omar Yussef. He was alone, miserably twiddling the ear that, by its odd angle, marked him as his father’s son, the son of a man rubbed out as a collaborator. The boy stared at the tangle of shadow beneath the olive trees. The soft trilling of his doves floated on the hot air. Omar Yussef went quietly into the house.

  In the sitting room at the end of the hall, he found Salwa Masharawi and Umm Rateb. The two women sat hand in hand, Umm Rateb staring at her friend’s fingers with the desperation of a parent tending a sick child. Salwa gazed at the photo of her husband on the bookshelf. With her free hand, she touched a small, lace handkerchief to her eyes. Omar Yussef would have left them in peace, but he needed to speak to Salwa. He stepped through the door.

  “Abu Ramiz, morning of joy,” Salwa said. Her voice was dreamy and slow. She seemed not to notice Omar Yussef’s dirty clothes and bandaged hands.

  “Morning of light, my daughter,” Omar Yussef said. “May Allah be merciful upon your departed husband.”

  “Thank you, Abu Ramiz. Welcome, welcome,” she said.

  Umm Rateb stood. She lifted her palms as though she held Omar Yussef’s bandaged hands in them and looked at him with concern. He shook his head. “You must have some coffee, Abu Ramiz,” she said. “Didn’t you see Naji in the mourning tent?”

  “He’s grieving for his father, Umm Rateb. He’s not a waiter. Leave him be.”

  “I’ll make you coffee, ustaz. Sit down with Salwa.” Umm Rateb went to the kitchen.

  Omar Yussef lowered himself onto the sofa. His thighs ached and he groaned as he came to rest. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to attend the funeral this morning,” he said. “I found my kidnapped Swedish friend and was able to free him. We brought him back from Rafah just now.”

  “May Allah be thanked.”

  “I want to tell you that, with all my heart, I worked to prevent what happened to your husband.”

  “I know, Abu Ramiz.” Salwa dabbed at a tear beneath her eye with the handkerchief. “In Gaza, a man like Eyad can speak his mind and pay a terrible price, or he can ignore the wrongs in the world and his life feels no better than death. Eyad chose his way. That’s why I loved him.”

  “You’re right, my daughter.” Omar Yussef lifted the briefcase and laid it on Salwa’s lap. She glanced at him and he nodded for her to open the case.

  Salwa unclipped the clasps and gasped. “Abu Ramiz, what have you done?”

  “I hope this will help you in difficult times.”

  “Where is this money from?”

  “This is the nearest thing to a life insurance payment the university is likely to make. Of course, our Swedish friend will be in contact with you about a United Nations pension.”

  Salwa caught another tear at the corner of her eye. She opened her mouth to ask another question, but Omar Yussef clicked his tongue. She returned her gaze to the photograph of her husband. “Thank you, Abu Ramiz.” She closed the briefcase and slipped it behind the sofa. Umm Rateb brought in a small cup of coffee.

  “Allah bless your hands,” Omar Yussef said.

  “Blessings,” Umm Rateb said.

  Omar Yussef caught the rosewater scent of the woman’s soap and felt the guilt of his attraction to her once more. And in a house of mourning, too, he thought, shaking his head. But he forgave himself right away. He had no reason to doubt that he was a good man, whatever his less commendable urges.

  Umm Rateb lowered herself onto the armchair opposite him, blowing out her cheeks. She cleared her throat. “Abu Ramiz, I hope it isn’t too late, but you remember the leaflet you left in Professor Maki’s office?”

  “I know what happened to that.”

  “You do? I found it on the floor behind his desk. There was a dirty shoeprint on it. Perhaps he stepped on it without seeing it.”

  “He certainly found it, Umm Rateb.”

  “I’m sorry. I tried to reach you at your hotel to tell you I had it, but you were out.” Umm Rateb’s look of concern lifted and she smiled knowingly. “The lady who answered the phone at the reception desk laughed and said you were ‘out on a case’.”

  Meisoun. Agent O. Omar Yussef felt his neck grow hot and cleared his throat. “I wonder what she meant.” His coffee cup rattled in its saucer.

  He said goodbye to the women and went out into the humid shade of the awning. He sat on the plastic chair next to Eyad Masharawi’s lonely, awkward son.

  The boy barely looked up. He reached out for one of Omar Yussef’s bandaged hands and laid his skinny fingers across it. Naji’s shoulders shook. The sobs came with the same rhythm as the call of the doves in their cage upstairs. He rested his forehead on Omar Yussef’s chest. The schoolteacher stroked the boy’s dark hair with the fingertips of his other hand. He sat still and firm for an hour, until the boy’s weeping was done.

  Chapter 32

  Sami stopped the Jeep outside the Sands Hotel to pick up Magnus Wallender and Khamis Zeydan. The Swede was quiet and grave-Omar Yussef had asked Khamis Zeydan to tell him the details of Cree’s death, while he visited Salwa Masharawi. The Bethlehem police chief, however, was positively frothing with excitement, as he handed a clean shirt to Omar Yussef.

  “Professor Adnan Maki’s dead,” he said.

  Omar Yussef twisted in his seat and dropped his jaw.

  Khamis Zeydan slapped his good hand into his gloved prosthesis. “There’s a special meeting of the Revolutionary Council this evening to discuss the situation. After all, this is the second Council member assassinated in two days.”

  “How did it happen?” Omar Yussef slipped awkwardly out of his bloody shirt and put on the fresh one.

  “The official explanation won’t be available until after the Revolutionary Council meets, of course.”

  “Of course.” Omar Yussef lifted his chin in a quick gesture of cynicism.

  “Maki told Colonel al-Fara he could arrange for him to buy the new prototype missile, the one they’re calling the Saladin I. Al-Fara handed over the cash to Maki, who brought him the missile. But it wasn’t a new missile. It was one of the old Qassam missiles. There’re hundreds of them in Gaza and al-Fara recognized it immediately as an old one. He already has a stockpile of his own.”

  “Couldn’t Maki talk his way out of that?”

  “Maybe he could have, but al-Fara had received a call from Abu Jamal down in Rafah. He told the colonel about Yasser Salah and the theft of the new missile.” Khamis Zeydan slapped his thigh with excitement. “Abu Jamal accused the colonel of stealing the missile, because Yasser Salah was his officer, a
fter all. It seems Abu Jamal blamed Yasser Salah-and, therefore, al-Fara-for the deaths of several of his men in the gunfight where you rescued Magnus.”

  When he had left Wallender at the hotel with Khamis Zeydan, Omar Yussef had recounted the night’s events to his friend only as far as the Swede’s rescue. He had told Wallender to keep quiet about their discovery in the graveyard, and the sale of the missile to Maki was between him and Sami only. “So it was either to be all-out war between Abu Jamal and al-Fara,” Omar Yussef said, “or blame someone else.”

  “That’s right. The colonel remembered that Salah was recently promoted after obtaining his law degree. He’d known all along about Maki’s sales of academic degrees- apparently he’d even bought his own law degree. The sales enabled him to connect Salah and Maki. He knew he’d been double-crossed, and he also had his scapegoat.”

  “He killed Maki?” Omar Yussef said.

  Khamis Zeydan nodded. “Maki was found less than half an hour ago in his garden, lying in the fountain. He was shot Mozambique-style.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “A bullet in each breast and another in the forehead. It’s a highly professional assassination technique. The CIA trainers taught it to al-Fara’s agents. No one else does it that way in Gaza. It’ll be clear to Abu Jamal that al-Fara ordered the hit to make amends for the theft of the missile.”

  “Is that what the Revolutionary Council will decide?”

  “Look, al-Fara killed Maki. Maybe he also had something to do with the death of General Husseini. If you were on the Revolutionary Council, would you finger him?” Khamis Zeydan snorted. “We’ll blame it on one of the Islamist groups, and we’ll all be very, very polite to Colonel al-Fara.”

  They drove south on the Saladin Road toward Deir al-Balah. Sami pulled up in the shade of the tall date palm outside the caretaker’s house at the British War Cemetery. An ambulance was parked by the hedge and Doctor Najjar was standing at the gate to the caretaker’s yard, shouting instructions to the medics. The pathologist greeted Omar Yussef with five kisses and led him into the cemetery.

  Omar Yussef looked up at the sky. The dust storm had abated fully as the morning went on. The sun seemed to bore right through the few strands of hair across his scalp and into his brain. It was noon, high noon, like the mysterious price Bassam Odwan had puzzled over in jail.

  The grave of Private Eynon Price was dug in a neat rectangle, ready for the soldier’s remains to be interred once more. In front of the furthest cluster of graves, Suleiman Jouda threw his spade onto the grass as he climbed out of a second hole. Sweating from the work, he approached Omar Yussef. “When I took this job, the graveyard was eighty years old. I didn’t expect to be digging any more graves,” he said, wiping his forehead on the sleeve of his T-shirt.

  “You seem to have made a good job of it,” Omar Yussef said. “You would think you had been digging graves all your life.”

  “I’m from Gaza, ustaz. It’s in my blood.” Jouda said. “Anyway, I hope I dug this one in the right place.”

  Omar Yussef stepped over to the new grave. It lay in line with one of the first headstones: Private James Cree. 4 Battalion Queen’s Edinburgh Rifles. 21 years. 5/11/17. “Yes, Suleiman, you dug this in precisely the right place. Good job.”

  “The gentleman from the British consulate will be here soon for the reburial of Private Eynon Price,” Jouda said. “He said there’s no need to delay the funeral until he arrives, as Mister Cree wasn’t a current member of a British organization. He said he’d let Mister Wallender handle it, as the representative of the United Nations.”

  The medics brought two caskets from the courtyard of the caretaker’s house. The first was a simple coffin of rough pine. Doctor Najjar instructed them to lay it next to the grave of Eynon Price, until the British consular official arrived. The second was a long plywood crate, which they brought to James Cree’s grave.

  “That’s a strange material for a coffin,” Khamis Zeydan said, quietly.

  Suleiman Jouda jumped down into Cree’s grave and took the weight of the casket from the ambulancemen. He climbed back out and waited for Magnus to speak.

  The Swede didn’t look at the coffin. He stared up into the sky, poked a finger behind his spectacles to wipe a tear from his eye, and read a brief service from a small prayer-book. He closed the book. “The events that James and I were part of this week have taught me that people from the West, like me, have a very simplistic view of what’s right and wrong here in the Middle East. We believe good must triumph over evil, but then we back bad men, when it’s politically convenient. James never accepted that, because he cared deeply about the land and its people. So I will always remember him, here in his grave in Gaza.”

  Jouda shoveled the dry earth down onto the plywood box.

  Doctor Najjar shook Wallender’s hand. “May Allah be merciful upon him, the departed one,” he said.

  “Thank you, doctor,” Wallender said. “Thank you for looking after his body.”

  The doctor cleared his throat. “Yes, yes, it’s nothing. Now, I do need you to sign some papers. There’re some official requirements, and you’re the representative of the United Nations.”

  “Of course.” Wallender took the papers. He frowned. “These are for transfer of the body.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “But we’re burying him here.” Wallender flipped over to the second page. “These are for submission to the Israeli authorities. For transfer of the coffin through the checkpoint out of Gaza.”

  Omar Yussef took Wallender’s arm. “Doctor Najjar, you had better prepare the second coffin for burial, while Magnus looks over these documents.”

  The doctor crossed the lawn with a smile.

  “Abu Ramiz, what’s going on?” Wallender said.

  “James’s body will be transferred to Israel and from there it will be flown back to Scotland. This has all been arranged by the United Nations people in Jerusalem. They only need you to sign the clearances on this end.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “James’s body is still at the morgue.”

  “Then who’s in that grave?”

  “Not who, but what.”

  “I don’t get it, Abu Ramiz?”

  “We just buried something that people have been prepared to kill for. Buried it where it will lie for a century, or perhaps forever. At least long enough to make it obsolete.”

  Wallender stared at the grave, until it came to him. “The new missile?”

  Omar Yussef nodded. “I switched it for an old Qassam missile, which Maki then tried to sell to the colonel.”

  “Where did you get the old one, so that you could make the switch?” Wallender asked.

  Omar Yussef tapped the side of his nose and thought of the two Saladin Brigades men from Gaza City, Walid and Khaled, who had surrendered a single missile from their stockpile and now counted themselves in the clear with the United Nations for their attack on Cree. The Saladin I had never left the graveyard. “Let’s go and lay this poor soldier to rest,” he said.

  Suleiman Jouda packed the small mound of earth over the new grave with the back of his shovel and pushed in a temporary cross marked with the name of James Cree.

  A tall, chubby, florid man in a khaki summer suit entered the cemetery. He waved cheerily and made for the grave of Private Eynon Price. It was the man from the British consulate in Jerusalem. He wiped the sweat from his neck and face with a handkerchief. “Bloody hot down here today,” he said. “Still, I gather I just missed the dust storm. Thank Christ for small mercies, eh?” He pulled some printed sheets from his jacket pocket and read the burial service, as the others gathered around the grave with their heads bowed.

  The sky was deep blue. Omar Yussef recalled Nadia’s tale of Atum’s tears. If the ancient Egyptian deity had wept and his teardrops had become human beings, he was not, after all, a god in which Omar Yussef could believe. His god had cried dust, a tempest of dust that had denied him his si
ght and choked him until he was forced to end the weeping himself. As the caretaker shoveled earth into the soldier’s grave, Omar Yussef looked at the blue sky and smiled. The god’s eyes were finally dry from too much crying.

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