The Collaborator of Bethlehem

by Matt Rees

  Marwan Natsha cleared his throat with a rattle like a snare roll. “If you think I’m going to enter the court and tell the bench that the head of the resistance in Bethlehem is an Israeli collaborator, you’d better think again, Abu . . . ?”

  “Ramiz.”

  “Abu Ramiz.”

  Omar Yussef felt himself growing hot. “Then there is the death of Louai’s wife. She was killed after George Saba’s arrest. He couldn’t have been involved.”

  “Who said he was?”

  “No one. I just mean that it’s more likely that Louai and his wife were killed by the same person.”

  “Why is that more likely?”

  “Do you think there are two people out there who’d want to kill someone from the Abdel Rahman family? Two random, unconnected people who decide to murder someone in the same family? The two deaths are connected. If George Saba was part of the first death, he couldn’t have been involved in the second since he was in jail. Therefore, George is not the connection. Someone else is. That makes George innocent of Louai’s death.”

  “As I heard, the lady in question was raped. Clearly there are many men in this town who, to put it bluntly, would have an incentive to do that, particularly to a woman with no husband to protect her. In any event, it’s not my case, and I couldn’t bring it up tonight with the judges. It wouldn’t be admissible.” Marwan Natsha shuffled through the pages before him on the desk. “Do you read Hebrew, Abu Ramiz?”

  “No.”

  Marwan Natsha gave Omar Yussef a pitying look. “This is a report in Yediot Aharonoth. It’s an Israeli newspaper. It’s dated two days after Louai Abdel Rahman’s death. It’s the story of how the Shin Bet used a Palestinian collaborator to guide them to Louai and to identify the victim. There’s a lot of stuff about Louai’s resistance activities in the article. It calls him one of the most dangerous terrorists in the Bethlehem area— that’s the precise wording. Then it goes on to detail the role of the collaborator in making sure that the Israelis killed the right guy. Apparently, it’s absolutely essential to these kinds of assassinations. Without a collaborator on the ground, they can’t assassinate anyone from the resistance. So, the article says, there was a collaborator up close to Louai Abdel Rahman who identified him to the Israeli sniper. You see?”

  “Yes, I understand that.”

  “I don’t think you do. Someone has to be guilty here. There is a collaborator. Even the Israelis admit it in their newspaper. Now, our police don’t seem to be capable of producing such strong detective work as you’ve done on this case. But I’m sure they’d tell you that if the results of an investigation led them to the most dangerous man in town, Hussein Tamari, they’d let the fall guy—take the fall.” Marwan Natsha opened his bony hands wide. “That’s George Saba.”

  “You’re telling me you don’t even believe George Saba is guilty?”

  “There isn’t so much evidence against him. It’s true.”

  “Then your job is simple.”

  “Well, that’s also true. But not in the way you mean. My job would be simple whether the case against George was weak or strong. My job is to keep my head down. In State Security Court, defense attorneys are, by definition, supposed to consider the state and its security first. If a collaborator gets away with it, the Israelis will find it easy to recruit more. If someone is seen to be punished for collaboration, it makes it harder for Israel to get others to betray their comrades.”

  “Even if the man who pays the penalty isn’t really a collaborator? He just dies as a symbol of all the real collaborators who’re out there but can’t be detected by our security forces? You can’t be serious?”

  Marwan Natsha shrugged.

  Omar Yussef pulled off his flat cap and ran a hand across his wisps of hair. “You’re not from Bethlehem, are you, Mister Nat-sha?”

  “No, I’m from Hebron.” Natsha smiled at the mention of his hometown. He seemed relieved, as though the conversation had moved on from the tiresome business of the trial to polite smalltalk.

  “Then imagine how you would feel if some gang took over your town. Would you not do what George Saba did?”

  “My brother Abu Ramiz, they have taken over my hometown. That’s why I don’t care what they do in Bethlehem. It’s the same everywhere in Palestine. It’s too big to fight.”

  “Then we all have the same problem. It should unite us. We have a common cause, all Palestinians against these gunmen.”

  “It’s only in the most superficial way that we Palestinians manage to be united even against the Israelis. Do you think we’re capable of unity at all? People aren’t like that. I ran away from what the gunmen are doing in my hometown of Hebron. Why would I make a stand against them in Bethlehem?”

  Omar Yussef pitied this man. He wondered what made Nat-sha flee his home. With what outrage might the Martyrs Brigades have sucked the will out of him?

  “I’m very sorry, uncle,” Marwan Natsha said, “but I have to lock up and go to an iftar now.”

  “Will you pray for George Saba, before you break the fast?”

  “No, I’ll be thinking of the food, because I’m hungry, and I’ll be trying to forget that I have to go before this damned court later tonight. You can pray for George Saba.”

  “I’ll be praying for you.”

  Marwan Natsha held Omar Yussef’s gaze a moment, as though he were weighing whether he was, after all, a more promising recipient of someone’s devotions than a condemned man. Coughing, he stood and gathered the papers from his desk. He stubbed out his cigarette and picked up his briefcase. He was down the stairs so quickly on his long legs that he left Omar Yussef behind in the dark.

  In the corridor, Omar Yussef lifted one of Marwan Natsha’s legal diplomas off the wall. The frame shook in his hand. He flung it down the first flight of stairs. The glass shattered against the wall. Three flights below, Marwan Natsha’s steps halted for a moment, then he moved on.

  Omar Yussef listened to Natsha’s cough receding along the empty road. He walked down the stairs and picked up the broken frame with the attorney’s diploma and carried it back to the office door. He leaned it against the window. There was a smear of dirt on the parchment and he was sorry for that. Slowly, he went down the stairs.

  Across the street, the hill dropped quickly. Omar Yussef looked beyond the agricultural fringe of Bethlehem and into the Judean Desert. The shallow folds of the sterile hills below rippled down to the Dead Sea. In the first reflected light of the night, the desert was illuminated a bright, milky blue. It looked like the cratered surface of the moon. Omar Yussef felt as though his own existence traveled a more distant orbit than that dead satellite, gliding silent above the impossibly frenetic, cynical reality of the rest of the planet. He wondered if there was any place as barren anywhere on earth.

  Chapter 16

  In the State Security Court, the crowd murmured with the animated tenor of a theater audience before a first night. As he found himself a seat, Omar Yussef felt that this was, indeed, a staged drama, scripted and contrived, a tragedy that would run forever in his own distressed mind. The hall was large and plainly painted, with a low ceiling. It was lit by fluorescent tubes that stuttered through a floating layer of cigarette smoke to cast a sickly blue flicker over the people crowded into the rows of chairs. Omar Yussef figured there must be about a thousand spectators packed into the plastic seats and jammed along the aisles at the sides of the hall. A dozen policemen guarded the front of the court. Khamis Zeydan paced behind them, murmuring orders. Acquaintances of Omar Yussef smiled and waved to him through a screen of excitable, bobbing heads.

  The only people in the room who seemed quiet were Muhammad and Yunis Abdel Rahman. The father and brother of the man in whose death George Saba was accused of collaborating leaned against a square pillar at the side of the room. The father looked sad, but Yunis Abdel Rahman’s bony face was flushed and indignant as he stared at the empty bench where the judges would sit. The father glanced at Yunis, but the boy refused
to acknowledge the older man’s presence. Omar Yussef detected something desperate and lost and ashamed in the way Muhammad Abdel Rahman tried to catch his son’s eye.

  Though the windows of the courtroom were closed, Omar Yussef felt cold. It was as though all these bodies exuded such animosity toward the accused that they were incapable of generating warmth. He checked his watch. The hearing was due to begin in five minutes and he had been lucky to find a seat. As he settled into his place, the jostling spectators in the aisles argued with the press of new onlookers shoving their way through the door. It was late at night and they were excited and irritable, like children allowed to stay up past their bedtime.

  Omar Yussef overheard the stupid rumors of George Saba’s evil passing through the crowd. It was all he could do to keep quiet. There would be no point in defending his friend before these people. It disgusted him that there were, among his neighbors, so many who would gladly see a man condemned to death, for it was not an acquittal that the crowd had come to witness. He felt saddened that his town was so beaten down and full of hate that its highest pleasure would be the punishment of what it perceived as a single, small element in the machine of oppression. He looked about for Habib Saba, but couldn’t find him in the crowd.

  The lawyers came to their places at the tables facing the bench. Some of the people in the front rows leaned between the officers in the cordon of policemen to shake hands with the prosecutor. They were handshakes of congratulations, and the prosecutor smiled broadly, as though everything were already finished and the case were settled in his favor. Omar Yussef knew that collaborators received unfair trials in Gaza, but he had thought that in Bethlehem there was more decency than that. Marwan Natsha sat alone at his table. In the fluorescent light, he was grayer than when Omar Yussef visited him that afternoon. His height, which should have made him commanding, only highlighted that he was too thin, unhealthily so. It seemed as though he might easily be snapped in half, like a tall, withered flower that had already shed its few melancholy buds. Natsha brought no documents that Omar Yussef could see, not even the file that had lain upon his desk. The only objects he placed on the table before him were a pack of Rothman’s and a tin ashtray, which he seemed absorbed in filling.

  Khamis Zeydan moved behind his policemen and broke up the congratulatory handshaking. He spoke a curt sentence that swiftly replaced the prosecutor’s smile with a look of hurt and slight embarrassment. Omar Yussef watched his old friend, who turned a stern glance on the spectators crowded behind the prosecutor. At least the police chief was ready to remind people that this was not an entertainment, that a man’s life was in the scales of whatever kind of justice might prove to be on display. There was a tension in Khamis Zeydan’s jaw and an intensity about his eyes that suggested he was suffering at this moment. By this time of night, he was usually fairly well drunk and it could merely be the strain of maintaining his sobriety that showed on his rigid visage. Omar Yussef hoped that it was simply because, as a lawman, Khamis Zeydan couldn’t bear to see justice turned into a popular circus. Then it struck him: it was because the police chief knew the truth behind Louai Abdel Rahman’s death, knew the identity of the true collaborator, an identity that Omar Yussef only suspected.

  Omar Yussef reconsidered his suspicion that Khamis Zeydan had tipped off Louai’s murderer to the fact that Dima Abdel Rahman knew of “Abu Walid.” No one else outside of Omar Yussef’s immediate family could have known what Dima had told him, except Khamis Zeydan. If he had realized who he should warn about the clue Dima had given Omar Yussef, it was surely because Khamis Zeydan also knew the details of Louai’s murder. Omar Yussef knew better than to expect the police automatically to arrest a killer, the way things were these days, particularly if that murderer were the head of the Martyrs Brigades. But he hadn’t considered that the police chief would protect the guilty man at the cost of endangering another innocent person. Perhaps Khamis Zeydan hadn’t known that Hussein Tamari would kill Dima. Maybe he expected him to warn her to stay quiet, to frighten her, even to beat her. But Zeydan knew with whom he was dealing, and it would surely have occurred to him that, if he passed on damaging information, Hussein Tamari might silence Dima for good.

  Omar Yussef wondered how much Khamis Zeydan had told Hussein Tamari. The Martyrs Brigades chief had issued his warning to Omar Yussef earlier that day through his son Ramiz, because the gunman feared angering Omar Yussef’s entire clan. A direct approach or a physical attack would prompt a small war. But maybe Tamari didn’t know that Omar Yussef was the one to receive Dima’s tip about “Abu Walid.” If Tamari thought only that Omar Yussef was agitating for George Saba’s freedom without any real information, he might feel less threatened. Omar Yussef figured Khamis Zeydan would’ve told Tamari what Dima revealed, but the policeman might not have given away his old friend’s identity. Perhaps it was because Khamis hadn’t said who Dima told that Tamari had made do with the mild warning through Ramiz. In that case, he wouldn’t feel threatened enough by Omar Yussef to kill him. Not yet.

  Omar Yussef didn’t want to believe that Khamis Zeydan had fingered Dima, and anyway, he had to consider that someone might have killed her for some other reason. It might not even have been Abu Walid. She could have gone outside to meet someone, a secret lover, for all Omar Yussef knew. Or, as Khamis Zeydan suggested, her in-laws may have decided that she was carrying on an affair and murdered her to preserve the family honor. But maybe he was just making excuses for his old friend. Whatever decency he believed he detected in Khamis Zeydan’s comportment at the front of the courtroom had to be balanced by the fact that the police chief was presiding over a terrible distortion of a legal proceeding. If he would stand by, organizing his troops, as the court prepared to legitimize the murder of an innocent man, what would he not do?

  At 11:05 P.M., Hussein Tamari entered with a phalanx of armed men. The crowd gave way and the people in the front row rose in haste to give up their seats. Tamari’s guards shoved those who were slow in moving. Tamari smiled, acknowledging greetings benignly, like a monarch. When Tamari was already seated, Jihad Awdeh slipped along the side of the room. He wore the Saddam Hussein–style hat again and didn’t respond to any of the salutations from the crowd. He allowed himself one sneering smile as he passed Muhammad Abdel Rahman. The dead man’s father looked down at his feet, but his son glared back at Awdeh, who only seemed yet more amused by the boy’s defiance. As though he had been waiting for Tamari’s contingent to arrive before he began, one of the policemen called out for the crowd to rise, and three judges entered from the door behind the bench.

  A thin silence came over the thousand men in the hall, as the head judge slammed down his gavel. He was a portly man with skin the color and softness of coffee cake and gray hair that puffed high and back like a French crooner. His mouth was set and angry, but his eyes shifted with fear. He was a man Omar Yussef knew to be upset with the workings of the government. They had met at a UN function only a few months previously. The judge had enjoyed spilling scandalous details of the legal system’s powerlessness in the face of the Martyrs Brigades gangsters and their cohorts in the government. It occurred to Omar Yussef that perhaps this would be the time for the judge to declare that he would no longer be pushed around. But, when he saw the way the judge averted his eyes from the Martyrs Brigades people in the front row, he sensed that this was a vain hope.

  The judge announced that the State Security Court for the Bethlehem District was in session. He called for the accused to be brought into the court. George Saba came through the same door by which the judges entered. The crowd immediately called out its own sentence, demanding the death of the man they saw before them and doing so in Allah’s name. Indeed, George Saba seemed a little dead already and made no sign that he heard the eruption of hatred accompanying his entrance. He wore Omar Yussef’s herringbone coat, which appeared much smaller than it had in the cell that morning. His hands were cuffed in front of his belly and his hair stood wildly. It astonished Omar
Yussef that it was only fifteen hours ago that he had sat in conversation with George. Even from halfway back in the big room, he could see that his friend had a black eye and a bruise on his cheek. George stood against a table with a policeman on either arm. He hunched his shoulders and let his head flop onto his chest.

  Omar Yussef felt his vision clouded by tears. He wiped them away with his fingers. He tried not to listen to the specific words of those around him as they cried out against George Saba. He heard nothing but their animal, bloodthirsty tone. He sat and leaned his forehead on his hand, while the spectators shouted.

  The judge quieted the crowd with repeated slaps of his gavel that seemed to vibrate through his smooth, chubby face. He read the docket, which pitted the government against the lonely, battered man in Omar Yussef’s coat. He asked the prosecutor to outline his case.

  The prosecutor stood and turned sideways, so that his voice would carry through the still crowd. He flipped his black court robe dramatically along his arm so that it seemed to Omar Yussef to rise like the looming cape of some terrible, dark sorcerer. When he lowered it, perhaps George Saba’s swaying carcass would have disappeared magically from the dock.

  “Your Honors, the case is simple. The accused guided an Occupation Forces special unit to Police Officer Louai Abdel Rahman, whom the accused knew to be wanted by the Occupation Forces. Callously he pointed out Officer Abdel Rahman, who was immediately martyred by the Occupation Forces. The accused has confessed repeatedly to the charges. The State demands the death penalty, which must be imposed upon all those who collaborate with the Occupation Forces and participate in the assassinations of the martyrs who struggle for the freedom of Palestine. Thank you, Your Honors.”

  The prosecutor lowered his arm. George Saba had not been spirited away by magic. He remained standing, but it would have been better for him had he disappeared through a showman’s trapdoor. The crowd resumed its shouting once more, mingling it with applause for the statement of the prosecutor, who turned to nod gravely in acknowledgement.