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.
The judge called on Marwan Natsha, who stubbed out a cigarette, raised himself from his chair and spoke quickly in a strangled, high voice. “The accused pleads guilty, Your Honor.” The defense attorney then sat, before he had quite yet stood straight, and lit another smoke.
Even the crowd seemed surprised that there was to be no defense. The judge stared at Marwan Natsha for a moment. It was in these few seconds, Omar Yussef decided, that a man’s morality takes a big gulp of air before plunging beneath the surface of the sea of iniquity on which Bethlehem wallowed. The judge said nothing to Natsha. He was holding that breath. Instead he turned to George Saba.
“George Habib Saba, this court finds you guilty on all counts . . .”
Applause began and a cheer.
“. . . and sentences you to death by firing squad at a date to be determined by the president.”
The cheer blasted from the crowd with such force that it seemed to drive it to its feet. Omar Yussef rose with it, to see George Saba pulled limply out of the door by his two guards. The judges waited embarrassedly for him to pass along the narrow space behind their bench, as though he were a cripple or a pensioner who must be allowed to pass along a crowded bus. In the doorway his legs gave way and the head judge stepped backwards to avoid a collision with the condemned man. The judge went as pale as George Saba. Still the judge is holding his breath, Omar Yussef thought. He’ll breathe out when he comes into contact with someone like me at another UN function, someone he thinks is sympathetic enough that he can expel some of the self-disgust he feels at his participation in this charade. He’ll blame the system and take no responsibility for what happened here. I hope he tries it with me. I’ll tell him I was in the courtroom, and I’ll tell him that he has blood on his hands just as surely as the firing squad detailed to pull the trigger on George.
Omar Yussef sat, exhausted. It was 11:15 P.M. The trial had lasted no time at all. Spectators shoved along the rows of chairs to leave, chatting about the scene as though it were a sporting occasion. Most had looked forward to a resolute defense that would draw the prosecutor to reveal more shocking details of George Saba’s collaboration, in order to prove the case beyond all argument. Yet they satisfied themselves that at least the man would die.
When the crowd was gone, Omar Yussef stood and prepared to follow. He looked back toward the door. In the last row of chairs, a man wept on the arm of a priest. It was Habib Saba, whose shaking head rested against the black robe of Elias Bishara. Omar Yussef went slowly through the jumble of chairs and sat beside the old man.
“I had to wait until everyone left, Abu Ramiz,” Habib Saba said. “I had to wait, or they would have noticed who I was.”
“They should have seen you. They should have been forced to acknowledge that George has a father who weeps for him. They treated him like someone who isn’t human, Abu George.”
“It’s all over for him, Abu Ramiz. They’ll kill him now.”
“It takes some time for the president to sign the death warrant. We will clear his name in the meantime. Don’t worry.” Omar Yussef pulled a monogrammed handkerchief from his trouser pocket and gave it to Habib Saba. “Now that we know that we are working on a deadline, it will only make our efforts more forceful.”
“It can’t be done, Abu Ramiz. It just can’t. They don’t need evidence against him. How can you prove that a case is false when they didn’t even need to make a case? He was guilty automatically, because he’s Christian, because he’s not one of them.”
“I refuse to accept this.”
Habib Saba looked up. His red eyes seemed suddenly surprised and fearful. He looked pleadingly back and forth between Omar Yussef and Elias Bishara. “Abu Ramiz, are you going to make more trouble for us?”
“More trouble? I want to aid you in saving your son.” Omar Yussef would have been appalled, if the long years of their friendship hadn’t made him forgiving of Habib Saba’s desperation and helplessness.
“Don’t try. They will kill George, and then they will come and kill me and his family and destroy our house. You’ll see. If you force them to cover their tracks, they’ll obliterate everyone.”
“So you would let George die? He is to be a martyr to save your house?”
“Abu Ramiz.” Elias Bishara raised a cautionary eyebrow at his old schoolteacher. “We are all too emotional.”
Omar Yussef immediately regretted his harshness. He thought of Dima Abdel Rahman’s body, face down in the pines with her buttocks scratched. Habib Saba was right. Dima was probably a casualty of his attempt to investigate the truth behind Louai’s murder and to clear George of the charge of collaboration. He felt a flash of fear, as though the Martyrs Brigades might be waiting for him at that moment, to add his name to the list of corpses. He looked about the courtroom, but saw that it was empty, except for a single policeman stationed at the door.
Habib Saba collapsed against Omar Yussef’s sleeve. “I know you love him, Abu Ramiz. You’ve been a better guide to him than his father ever was able to be. I’ve been selfish and weak, and I still am. I don’t deserve a son like him.” He raised his voice and cried out: “I want them to shoot me instead of him. I want them to shoot me.”
Omar Yussef put his arm around Habib Saba’s back and slipped it beneath his arm. He lifted him with difficulty to his feet. Elias Bishara took most of the weight. The three men went slowly to the door.
The policeman at the exit stepped hesitantly forward. “Abu Ramiz,” he said, tentatively, as though he hardly dared speak to Omar Yussef. “I have a girl in your class. Khadija Zubeida.”
Omar Yussef thought a moment. “You are Mahmoud. Khadija told me about you.” He remembered how the girl had come into the classroom with her father’s exaggerated, hateful account of George Saba’s arrest. He wanted to tell the policeman that he was a participant in a disgusting travesty and that he was breeding the ugliest strain of his people’s wickedness into his daughter. Then he felt the heaviness of Habib Saba against his shoulder and heard the old man sob. He thought of how Habib suffered for failing his child. Omar Yussef nodded at the policeman. “Khadija is a bright girl,” he said.
The policeman smiled broadly. “Thank you, ustaz,” he said. As Omar Yussef and the priest took Habib Saba through the door, the policeman turned out the lights.
Chapter 17
The sentence of death on George Saba was five hours old when the bulldozer came to Omar Yussef’s house. He heard its approach, through the most silent hour of the night, as he sat sleepless in his salon, his blank stare fixed on the sideboard where he kept the bottle of Johnny Walker for Khamis Zeydan’s visits. He wanted a taste of the whisky now, raw and scorching in his throat. Because it was forbidden. Because it would damage him and he didn’t care. Because it would make him numb. So he sat through those five hours, alone, choked and stifled by the absolute stillness outside and the chaotic frenzy of his frustration. He looked toward the dark window and wondered why the streets weren’t full of people as angry as him, so that he could join them and cry out that an innocent man was condemned to die.
The electricity went out at 4:00 A.M., but Omar Yussef remained in his seat. He welcomed the darkness, because it let him forget the room, the town, the land in which he lived. He pulled his jacket around him as the deepest time of the night chilled the house. He touched the MAG cartridge casings in his pocket. They had been heated by the pressure of his hip. How could things that were components to an instrument of death be warmed by his body, when he felt so cold? He stood and moved toward the sideboard. He would have that drink.
In the dark, he hit his shin against the coffee table and cursed under his breath. He stepped to th
e sideboard, but the pain in his leg had cleansed him of the desire for the whisky. The shooting tremors from the nerves in his leg told him what was good for him. He must feel everything now, not dull it with alcohol. He had to remain aware, clearly and fully, knowing how important it was that he should not lose heart nor become distracted. He must be the opposite of Habib Saba. He could not be weak, self-centered. If he was lonely and miserable here in his dark, chilly living room, how much more sad and frozen must George Saba be in his cell, huddled in Omar Yussef’s small overcoat against the night winds blustering through the bars in the windows? How much colder still in the ground where Dima lay buried? The thought of her undignified end, her body exposed and violated, filled him with a desire to avenge her and to preserve his own self-respect. He turned away from the sideboard.
Omar Yussef rubbed his shin and sat down, wincing. He worried about his physical fitness at the best of times. Now he would have a bruise across the bone for a week or two. It would bite into his nerves every time he took a shaky step. Nevertheless he was grateful for the pain, because as long as he suffered he was sure to be alive.
Then the Israelis came. There was a low growl along the hilltop above Dehaisha. Omar Yussef heard it and knew immediately that the soldiers had cut the electricity so they could operate without being seen. He wondered if he should wake Maryam, or Ramiz and his family downstairs in the basement apartment. He moved closer to the window and watched from the shadows.
A tank and an armored personnel carrier came along the road, churning the blacktop with their metal tracks. A massive digger followed. It was the height of two tanks stacked on top of each other. The tank and the APC set themselves on either side of the street at the corner a dozen yards before Omar Yussef’s house. The digger came between the two, lowered its arm to cut into the tarmac and started to slice a trench across the main road. Its impact on the paving and the rocky earth beneath sounded like the noise you hear inside your head when you crunch a handful of peanuts with your mouth closed.
“Omar?” Maryam called to her husband, sleepily, from the bedroom at the back of the house. She came into the salon, wrapping herself in a woolen dressing gown. She pushed her ruffled hair from her face and peered into the darkened room.
“Don’t come near the window,” Omar Yussef said. “There are tanks outside.”
“What are they doing?” She walked toward his voice. He knew that she couldn’t tell exactly where he was.
“I told you not to come to the window. Stay there. Go back to bed.”
“Are you crazy? How can I go to bed when the army is at the front door?”
“Then just stay there.”
“What are they doing?”
Omar Yussef looked back toward the digger. Its trench was halfway across the street already, perhaps six feet deep and two yards wide. “They’re digging a hole across the road.”
“Why?”
“I assume it’s so that people won’t be able to drive between Bethlehem and Dehaisha.”
“But why?”
It would surely be so the army could cut the Martyrs Brigades and Hamas into smaller pieces, making it harder for explosives and weapons to be transported. To move about, the gunmen would have to bring their rifles and explosives and mortars across the trench by hand. If they had to take their weapons into the open, there was a greater chance that they would be spotted and intercepted. In which case, the spotting and intercepting would be done outside Omar Yussef’s front door, perhaps by snipers or helicopter missiles or tank shells, and it might be done when he or his grandchildren happened to be crossing the street. He didn’t want Maryam to think about that. “Just because they can, the bastards,” he said.
Even in the dark, he realized that Maryam didn’t believe him. It was he who always told her that blind hatred of the soldiers led to misunderstanding of the army’s tactics. People saw them as nothing more than cruel animals, and that was the first step to becoming just as vicious oneself.
“You usually don’t talk about them like that, Omar.”
“Fine, then I don’t know. I don’t know why they’re doing it. I just want them to go, so that we can fill in the big, damned hole in the road.”
Maryam moved across the room. Her eyes were accustomed to the dark by now. Anyway, she knew better than Omar Yussef where the furniture would be to obstruct her, because it was her role to clean it every week. She put her hand on her husband’s shoulder and he reached up to hold her fingers.
“I thought they were coming for Jihad Awdeh,” she said.
The sound of that name caused Omar Yussef to shudder. He pictured Jihad Awdeh emerging with his grim, sneering smile from the darkness in the corners of the room. Why did Maryam mention Awdeh, though? It struck him that she might somehow have meant that the Israelis knew her husband was investigating the Martyrs Brigades; that the soldiers came to his house, aware that they would catch Awdeh there, stalking his kill. “Why would they come to our house to look for Jihad Awdeh?”
“Not our house. Across the street. He just moved into the apartment building right there.”
“Which one?”
“The one where Amjad and Leila live.”
Omar Yussef looked out at the building. It was a four-story, square block with a dozen apartments and a tall television antenna in the shape of the Eiffel Tower on the roof. He searched the darkened windows for a malevolent face or a trace of the Saddam Hussein Astrakhan hat. “I haven’t seen him there.”
“He moved in two days ago. Leila told me yesterday. She’s very worried that the soldiers will come and blow the place up or that there’ll be a gunbattle. She already told Jihad not to let his men sit around in the hallway with their guns when her kids are around.”
“What did he say?”
“She said he was very polite and promised to keep the guns inside his apartment.”
“How nice of him.”
“His family moved in, too. Leila says he brought his wife and his two kids.”
Omar Yussef hadn’t thought of Jihad Awdeh as a husband or father before. It seemed strange to imagine him sharing intimacies with a wife or dandling his children. He could even picture Hussein Tamari, burly and boisterous, playfully wrestling his young son. But he couldn’t conceive of Awdeh engaging in such innocent, homely pleasures.
Omar Yussef wondered if Jihad Awdeh knew he lived across the street from the UN schoolteacher who had confronted his boss Tamari only yesterday. Somehow, the thought of such a close proximity to Awdeh made him feel tenser than he would have if Maryam had told him that Hussein Tamari had moved in. There was something more unpredictable about Awdeh and, despite what he knew about Tamari’s part in Louai’s murder, Omar Yussef thought the senior Martyrs Brigades man was bound by codes of tribal honor that Awdeh would scorn. There was something basic and lupine about Awdeh that made Omar Yussef’s mouth dry. When he entered Hussein Tamari’s headquarters, he knew that at least there he was safe. Tamari wouldn’t dishonor himself and his family by killing a guest. Omar Yussef considered what he would have done had Jihad Awdeh been in charge. He concluded that he would have been compelled to take the same action, but he wasn’t sure that he would have left the gunmen’s lair alive.
The digger reached the edge of the road. Omar Yussef moved away from the window a little and wondered if the driver intended to keep digging right through the middle of his house.
“Omar, your gun. The army might come in and find it,” Maryam said.
“It’s not my gun. Anyway they aren’t searching the house. Not with a mechanical digger, at least.”
As the digger pulled its tray up from the trench, there was a gush of water.
“They cut the pipes,” Maryam said.
The water shot into the air a moment, catching the faint, leaden light of the moon that filtered through the cloudy sky, then disappeared into the trench. The digger hovered for another plunge into the dirt, but then it turned and moved away. The APC moved out in its wake. The tank was the las
t to leave, spinning with a roar toward the hill that would take them over the back of Dehaisha to Beit Sahour and the army camp.
Maryam’s grip on his hand remained tight until the sound of the tanks almost disappeared, then it loosened and Omar Yussef stroked her palm, silently. There was a moment when he almost felt calm, in the dark and the quiet with his wife. Then her strong grip returned and broke his reverie.
“What’s that smell?” she said.
There was a damp rankness in the cold air. At the moment they smelled it, there was noise downstairs. Ramiz’s children began to cry out and Omar Yussef could hear his son speaking urgently to his wife. The door opened at the bottom of the stairs and the children ran up them. Omar Yussef stood and went to the hallway. The smallest girl was crying. Nadia held her arms around her little sister’s neck. Omar Yussef noted that Nadia was calm and quiet. He smiled and touched her cheek. Ramiz came up the stairs with little Omar, who was sniffling and not quite awake. He put the boy down on an armchair and gave a quick look at his parents.
“The basement is flooding,” he said, rushing back down the stairs.
Omar Yussef followed his son. At the foot of the stairs, the last two steps were already submerged. The water was black in the darkness, but Omar Yussef knew from the stink that it was sewage. The pipe the digger broke was spilling its contents into his house. He took off his loafers and socks, rolled the socks into a ball and placed them inside the loafers on the fifth step, and waded into the slimy water. Ramiz and Sara hurried past with the children’s thin, foam mattresses and Ramiz’s laptop.
Omar Yussef went to the back door, opened it and began to bail the sewage out into the night with a saucepan. His back hurt, bending to the water and flipping the pan up the basement steps. The cold swill rose almost to his knees. Its iciness soothed the bruise on his shin, but the smell made him want to puke. It seemed appropriate that he should be throwing filth out of his home with hopelessly insufficient tools. It was what he had been trying to do ever since George Saba’s arrest. His mind had been full of anger and fear, frustration and intense focus since the Zubeida girl came into his classroom with the news of the raid on George’s home. Now the ordure of his own town was right here, physical and disgusting, crawling up his legs and making him nauseous.
The Collaborator of Bethlehem Page 14
