The Samaritan's Secret

by Matt Beynon Rees

  “What did he say?” Omar Yussef said.

  “He didn’t tell me much. At least, not much that made sense. He wasn’t himself for the last few weeks. He was tense and often became angry, even with me. This wasn’t his usual behavior. He could become very agitated and aggressive, it’s true, but with me he was always gentle. Almost too gentle.”

  “His latest deal was on behalf of the new president?”

  “No, the new president appointed different financial advisers. But Ishaq continued to work with Kanaan.” Roween stroked the acne on one side of her mouth. “A few days ago, he seemed almost crazy with tension. I was worried about him.”

  Omar Yussef leaned forward. “Why was he so tense?”

  “He told me he was dealing with something very dangerous. He said it was so dangerous he wanted to bury it all behind the temple and forget about it.”

  “Bury it behind the temple?”

  Doubt flickered across the woman’s face and her lips became tight. She’s decided to keep something from me, Omar Yussef thought.

  Roween took a sharp breath. “That’s what he said. I asked him what he meant. He looked at me with pity and, I think, with love, then he put his finger to his lips as if to say that I should keep quiet. Then he said: ‘It’s a secret between me and the Old Man and Allah. The Old Man’s dead, and when I’m dead too, it’ll be a secret known only to Allah.’”

  “If no one but Ishaq knew his secret, how could it be dangerous?”

  Roween sobbed. “Ustaz, do you think Ishaq had done something wrong? People always say that the Old Man had secret bank accounts. They say he used them to pay people off. Do you think Ishaq was involved with some of these bad types?”

  Bury it behind the temple. Omar Yussef thought that sounded more like a deal involving Samaritan antiquities than offshore bank accounts. But surely the killing must have something to do with Ishaq’s work. When the old president died, the newspapers printed stories about secret funds hidden around the world. Perhaps someone wanted a piece of that wealth and tried to force Ishaq to lead him to it. “Did Ishaq have business dealings with anyone else? Anyone he might have talked to about his work with the president?”

  “Only yesterday, I heard him tell Jibril the priest that he had an appointment here with an American financial expert from the World Bank. It was something to do with his old job. They were arguing, so Ishaq sent me upstairs where I couldn’t overhear them. Even so, as I brought them coffee, I heard Ishaq refer to ‘her,’ which means the American is a woman. But I don’t know her name.”

  “When she arrives, would you ask her to contact my colleague Sami? She may be able to help us piece things together.”

  Roween nodded.

  Omar Yussef put his hands on his knees and pushed himself to his feet. “I’m sure Sami will find those respon-sible for your husband’s death, my daughter,” he said. “But now perhaps we should leave you to care for your family.”

  Roween flushed. “We have no children, ustaz. Ishaq was so often away—” She sniffled and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

  Omar Yussef and Sami drove out of the village in silence and took the winding descent back to Nablus, spread care-lessly across the valley below.

  “Don’t drop me at the hotel yet. I’ll come with you to the casbah,” Omar Yussef said. “It’ll help me clear my mind. I can’t eat qanafi with Nadia while the image of that poor man’s dead body is still before my eyes.”

  As they rounded a sharp curve, a white Chevrolet Suburban roared past them. The driver was a local, mustachioed and wearing wraparound sunglasses. In the passenger seat, a foreign woman with reddish hair tied in a ponytail was talking on a cell phone.

  “What do those license plates mean?” Sami asked, as the noise of the four-wheel drive receded up the mountain.

  “I didn’t see them.”

  “They said I-B-R-D and then there was a number.”

  “The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development,” Omar Yussef said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The World Bank. That must have been the woman our friend Ishaq expected to meet this morning.”

  “It’s a wasted trip for her all the way up here now,” Sami said.

  That depends what she’s looking for, Omar Yussef thought.

  Chapter 5

  They left the patrol car above the casbah and Omar Yussef descended with Sami into the darkness of the old quarter. In the alleys, vaulted ceilings trapped the moldy scent of murky corners, the drifting clouds of spices from the big grinders in the shops, the gamy sharpness of donkey droppings. He wheezed on the thick air.

  When they came into the souk, a shopkeeper, loitering with a cigarette at the entrance of his tiny store, watched Omar Yussef with insolent, blank eyes. The stare made Omar Yussef duck his head guiltily, as though he had fled from some misdeed through the grimy Turkish passageways. Can he smell the Samaritan’s blood on me? he wondered. Glancing down at the spangly slippers and imitation Tommy Hilfiger sweat shirts laid out on low trestles outside the store, he hurried away.

  At the end of the souk, the street opened to the sky. The high, late-morning sun dazzled off the smooth limestone. Omar Yussef caught the heavy scent of hot goat cheese from a sides treet and noticed the sign outside one of the town’s best-known qanafi vendors. His throat tightened with remorse. Sami dodged through the crowd, eager to reach the mosque as soon as midday prayers finished. Omar Yussef whispered an apology to Nadia for delaying her culinary expedition and followed.

  The Nasser Mosque stood at the corner of a modest, rectangular plaza presently filled with junky German cars and trucks parked in ranks. Omar Yussef estimated the two-story mosque was a century old. Exhaust fumes had mottled its stone arches at ground level, and the winter’s rain had streaked the upper floor black with thick mold. The dome of the mosque was a bright green and its surface was as uneven and pitted as a lime.

  Taped to the metal shutter at the mosque’s entrance, a colorful poster depicted famous faces from the Hamas leadership. The current chiefs smiled broadly and waved. The dead ones, all killed by Israeli helicopter missiles, were washed in sepia tones and looked a little wistful. Like the Christian saints on the walls of the churches in Bethlehem, Omar Yussef thought.

  He tapped his knuckles against the poster. “This is your sheikh’s mosque, Sami? Are you having some kind of a fundamentalist wedding?” he asked.

  “By Allah, if I wasn’t a fundamentalist, I wouldn’t be getting married at all, Abu Ramiz.” Sami winked.

  The last midday worshippers filtered out of the mosque, slipping their shoes on at the door. Omar Yussef removed his mauve loafers, gave them a careful brushing with a tissue from his pocket, and placed them judiciously to the side of the worn sandals and scuffed moccasins at the entrance. Sami led him across a cheap green carpet, woven by machine and detailed with a symmetrical design of ornate gold and blue chevrons. The vinegary smell of foot sweat rose from the carpet. Omar Yussef sniffed the back of his hand, where he dashed cologne every morning to counter just such unpleasant odors.

  Beside a mint green pillar in the corner of the mosque, a broad, bearded man with a casual toughness kissed Sami three times. Omar Yussef noted that a dozen bullets had pitted the pillar, gouging through the paint and thin plaster into the poured concrete beneath. An M-16 was propped against it.

  “Abu Ramiz, this is Nouri Awwadi,” Sami said. “Abu Ramiz is visiting from Bethlehem for my wedding.”

  Awwadi took Omar Yussef’s hand between both of his, a motion which forced the muscles in his shoulders to rise massively. His bottom lip drooped out of the middle of his black beard, a luscious scarlet, and his skin glowed as though it had been oiled. Omar Yussef noted approvingly that Awwadi smelled of sandalwood.

  “Welcome, Abu Ramiz,” the young man said. He kept Omar Yussef’s hand in one of his and, with the other, wagged a finger at Sami. “Why didn’t you come to prayers, my brother?”

  “I have no time to pra
y. The criminals of Nablus keep me too busy.”

  Awwadi laughed loudly and slapped a handshake into Sami’s palm in celebration of the joke.

  “Nouri is Hamas, but he’s a good guy, even so,” Sami said to Omar Yussef. He turned to Awwadi. “I have to see Sheikh Bader. I want to make sure everything’s all set for my wedding, now that the most important guests have managed to get through the Israeli checkpoints.”

  “The sheikh is very busy with arrangements for the joint wedding tomorrow, but I’m sure he can spare you some time.”

  “Joint wedding?” Omar Yussef touched his fingers to his mustache, enjoying the scent of Awwadi’s sandalwood oil on his hand.

  “Hamas is paying for fifteen couples to marry tomorrow,” Awwadi said. “It shows we’re the only party that cares for ordinary people.”

  “What does marriage have to do with caring for people?” Omar Yussef laughed. “You should try funding some divorces, if you really want to help society.”

  “It’s expensive to get married. A dowry is at least fifteen hundred Jordanian dinars. Since the intifada, hardly anyone in the casbah has work. Young men would have to save for years to be able to afford marriage.”

  “Hamas will pay the dowry,” Sami said, “because other-wise the young men would be tempted into immorality.”

  Awwadi laughed and slapped Sami’s hand again.

  “Maybe they’d get wise and they wouldn’t marry at all,” Omar Yussef said. He rasped out a scratchy laugh and received a big hand slap, too.

  Awwadi pointed Sami toward the rear of the mosque. “I’ll keep your friend company while you bother our sheikh,” he said.

  “Abu Ramiz is an expert on our history,” Sami said. “Show him around the casbah, Nouri, and I expect he’ll be able to tell you things about your home that even you didn’t know.”

  “May it be the will of Allah.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be me who gets the history lesson,” Omar Yussef said.

  Sami entered an office behind another bullet-scarred pillar. Awwadi picked up the M-16, slung it across his chest, and led Omar Yussef by the hand to the mosque’s entrance.

  Omar Yussef dug his finger into a bullet hole in one of the pillars. A fine dust of stone and plaster sifted to the green carpet. “This isn’t only a place of prayer,” he said.

  Awwadi shook his head and grinned. “Although prayer, too, is a form of jihad,” he said. He took a string of green worry beads from his pocket and fiddled them through his thick fingers.

  “‘Paradise is in the shadow of the swords,’” Omar Yussef said.

  “Abu Ramiz, you’re in the right place to quote that hadith of the Prophet, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. Some of my friends, may Allah be merciful upon them, were martyred in this very mosque when the Israelis came to the casbah recently.”

  “May Allah grant that the lost years of those who are departed should lengthen your life.” Omar Yussef grunted as he bent to slip on his shoes. “Let’s get out of here before I start reciting entire verses of the Koran.”

  “If Allah wills it.” Awwadi took Omar Yussef into the street. He headed away from the small plaza toward the center of the casbah. “It isn’t only in the mosque that I’ve lost friends,” he said.

  “May you live long and in good health,” Omar Yussef mumbled, reciting another formulaic blessing.

  Awwadi responded in kind: “May Allah preserve you.” But he worked the worry beads harder and looked sternly at the limestone slabs of pavement, worn to a shine by age. “Elsewhere in the world, Abu Ramiz, a person may go his whole life without seeing a dead body. Perhaps he will never experience grief, except to weep when his father dies. Here in Nablus we aren’t normal. We’ve finished crying. The shock of death is dead in us.”

  “My shock hasn’t died yet.”

  “You’ve only been in Nablus a short time, I think.” Awwadi smiled. “And you’re not so old. You have time to witness many more deaths. Me, I feel as old as these stones, even though I’m only twenty-four, and I shall soon be martyred, if Allah wills it.” He ran his fingers along the weathered wall beside the entrance to an outmoded barbershop.

  “Don’t you think that what you’re describing is the same for all Palestinians?” Omar Yussef said. “We all face violence and loss.”

  “Nablus is different.” Awwadi gestured to the deep cloudless blue above the confined street. “You may say that it’s the same sky over every Palestinian. But where I’m taking you, deep in the covered lanes of the casbah, there is no sky. There’s no sign that anything exists outside Nablus. It’s only faith in Allah that allows you to believe that your soul might escape this town, even when you die.”

  Awwadi led Omar Yussef north into the heart of the casbah, under vaulted ceilings. Where side alleys made sharp turns, the corners were black as pitch. Omar Yussef caught the toe of his loafer on a drain and reached out to halt his fall, snatching at the wall. It was as clammy as the palm of a virgin on his wedding night and left a damp fur of moss on his fingers.

  They came to an uncovered section of the alley. The sun angled into it with the fierce brightness of a beach at midday. The younger man smiled at Omar Yussef, squinting into the sudden sunlight. “It’s a special thing, this casbah of ours,” he said. “There’s nothing like this in Bethlehem, is there, ustaz?”

  “Not quite. The old part of my city is smaller and fewer people live in it, so it seems a bit less complicated.”

  Awwadi sighed and smiled. “Complicated, yes. Do you like our town, ustaz?”

  “It has a great history, and it’s quite diverse.”

  Awwadi cocked his head, questioning.

  “You have the community of the casbah, the new neigh-borhoods climbing up the hillsides, the refugees in Balata Camp, who are a world unto themselves.” Omar Yussef watched as the younger man nodded his agreement. “Then there are the Samaritans.”

  He noticed that Awwadi swiveled away quickly.

  “I went to the Samaritan village this morning with Sami,” Omar Yussef said. He kept his eye on Awwadi’s broad back, a few yards ahead of him. “Sami went to investigate the theft of one of their ancient scrolls. He took me with him because I’m a history teacher and he knew I’d be interested in the scroll.”

  “They have many scrolls,” Awwadi said. “Everyone knows that.”

  “This one is more important.”

  “I hope you had an interesting visit. The Samaritans aren’t so bad.”

  “But their religion is false?”

  Awwadi looked wary. “Of course. They should submit to Islam.”

  “Should they be forced to do so?”

  “How can you force a man to believe?”

  “Threaten him with death.”

  “That’s against Islam, unless the man is a pagan.” Awwadi’s slow steps echoed as they passed under a low vault.

  “Did you ever hear of the Abisha Scroll?”

  “No, what is it?” Awwadi’s voice was flat. Omar Yussef sensed it was bursting with tension.

  “The oldest book in the world,” he said. “Do you know a man named Ishaq, son of the priest Jibril?”

  “Why, did he write the Abisha Scroll?” Awwadi turned to Omar Yussef and smiled. “I know Ishaq. He’s the black sheep of the Samaritans. But he’s useful to them because of his association with the old president.”

  “Now that the old president is dead, Ishaq’s not so useful?”

  “Ishaq still has his connections, powerful connections.”

  “You say he’s the black sheep? Because he failed to observe their holy days and had to pay a fine to be accepted back into the community?”

  Nouri Awwadi’s smile was distant. “That’s true, but it isn’t what I meant.” He walked on past the arched doorway of an old halva factory.

  Omar Yussef caught the man’s thick arm. “Ishaq is dead. He was murdered last night. We found him this morning on top of Mount Jerizim, bound and beaten.”

  Awwadi’s sensuous lip dropp
ed and he put a massive hand to his short black beard.

  “I see the shock of death isn’t as dead in you as you claimed,” Omar Yussef said. “What was it that really made him the black sheep of the Samaritans?”

  “His desires. They were unacceptable to the other Samaritans.”

  “What desires?”

  Awwadi’s face was immobile. His eyelids hung drowsily. “He was homosexual. Ishaq was gay.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Awwadi lowered his eyes and slouched along the alley. His sandalwood scent mingled with the smell of sesame paste from a bucket outside the halva factory. Omar Yussef felt lightheaded.

  He thought of the sadness in the voice of Ishaq’s wife when she told him that the couple had no children. She knew her husband was gay, he thought. Would that woman or her family kill a man who failed to be the kind of husband they expected? One who couldn’t give her children? In our tradition, children are important, but to a community that has dwindled to only six hundred, they must be even more so. He had thought the former president’s bank accounts must have been the motivation for Ishaq’s murder, but could it have been the man’s sexual preference instead?

  He wanted to return to the mosque to tell Sami what he had learned, but Awwadi led him further into the casbah. The sesame odor faded, overcome by the raw taint of ill-maintained drains.

  Awwadi grinned. “This is the Yasmina neighborhood, the oldest part of the casbah,” he said. “You always know when you’ve reached this place, because it feels like you’ve stepped into a sewer.”

  They passed a small spice shop. Burlap sacks circled the storefront, standing on end in the street, brims rolled back to display their contents—sandy cumin, garish yellow turmeric, cardamom ground to the color of cement. Above the entrance a dangling hand-painted sign indicated that this was the Mareh family’s establishment. A framed photo of the old president, leering like a lounge lizard beneath his checkered keffiyeh, hung askew on the wall above the sacks. A tall young man in dusty blue overalls came to the door, leaned against a stack of sumac, and sneered at Awwadi.