The Collaborator of Bethlehem

by Matt Beynon Rees

  “Elias, I must warn you of a danger to the church,” Omar Yussef said. “There was an attack, a suicide bomb, this morning in Jerusalem.”

  “Yes, I heard.”

  “It was carried out by the Martyrs Brigades. The operation was organized from Bethlehem. I fear the Israelis will come tonight to capture or kill the leaders of the group. They will need to exact some kind of revenge for the deaths in their marketplace.”

  “How does this involve the church?”

  “Jihad Awdeh, who is a leader of the Martyrs Brigades, has become a neighbor of mine. He told someone that if the Israelis came to take him, he would flee to the church.”

  Elias gasped.

  “You understand, of course, that if he enters the church, it could draw the Israeli soldiers inside, too. There might be a gunfight in the church. Who knows how it would end? But it would be bad for the town, and bad for the Christians, either way. Your shrine could be damaged, even destroyed, if the gunmen enter. If they are denied sanctuary by the priests, the Muslims of the town will rise up against the Christians for abandoning the so-called resistance heroes to the Israeli army.”

  Elias glanced toward the watching Greek priest, who dodged behind the stone lintel of the door, out of sight. “Abu Ramiz, I can’t believe it has come to this,” he said.

  “Why do you think the Martyrs Brigades has its headquarters right around the corner? They could be out of their hideaway and inside the church in a minute. You must close the doors early tonight.”

  “I can’t, Abu Ramiz. It isn’t my decision. Even if I can persuade the Latin patriarch to shut the church, the Greeks won’t allow it. They’ll be suspicious. They’ll think we’re trying to change the operating arrangements of the church. Nothing has been done differently here for hundreds of years. You’re a history teacher, so you know all about it. Remember how the French empire ended up at war against Russia a hundred and fifty years ago because the priests here argued about a new decorative plaque on the spot where Jesus was born? Even today, a Catholic priest sweeps some steps that are supposed to be cleaned by the Greek Orthodox and he gets a punch in the face. It’s hopeless even to ask about locking up early.”

  “Surely they’ll understand the threat?”

  “It doesn’t matter. There’s such stubbornness in this church, there are priests who’d rather see the place destroyed by Muslims and Jews than concede a point to another Christian denomination.”

  “Then there’s nothing you can do?”

  “Maybe there’s something.” Elias looked down the aisle toward the figure of the crucified Christ on the altar. “I’ll be here. I’ll stop them.”

  “Elias, they’ll just kill you. How will you stand up to them alone?”

  “Abu Ramiz, I’m not a hero, of course. I fear these gunmen. But I hope that I fear them less than I love this church. This building is the history of Christianity in the Holy Land. You always taught me that history was the essence of life, that its study gave us the key to a better future. Even if these stones were to be destroyed, the spirit of their history must be protected. This place represents a past when Muslims and Christians lived together peacefully and the chance that it could be so again, when all of this madness is over. I will be here tonight, and I will pray for the church. I will stay here even when the Martyrs Brigades come, and I will pray for them too.” Elias laid a warm hand on Omar Yussef’s leg. “Thank you for the warning, Abu Ramiz. Now I will be ready for them when they come. But you must go home and change into dry clothes, before you catch your death of a cold.”

  “I’m beginning to think that would be a blessing.”

  “Do you want to be an influenza martyr?” Elias Bishara laughed. “They will give you seventy-two cups of hot cider in Paradise.”

  Omar Yussef laughed, too. But as he left the church, he noticed that Elias Bishara was back on his knees. The priest’s gaze was stern, fixed on the cross.

  Chapter 22

  Omar Yussef lay flat on his bed, waiting for Maryam to call him to the table for the iftar. The throbbing in his back that began when he bailed the floodwater from his basement had returned. The trek from the school to the church and then home had tired him, but the fear that the young priest would put himself in danger truly exhausted him. After sitting down to drink a cup of coffee, the chill crept into his lower spine and his muscles seized up, clenching him like the familiar fist of an awful, recurring nightmare. It seemed curiously appropriate to Omar Yussef that on an evening when he should have been rushing around Bethlehem, unearthing clues and persuading people of George Saba’s innocence, he instead passed a fruitless five hours prone in his bedroom. The silence of the broody, featureless sky outside his window taunted him like the blank stare of a sadist. He would lie here the remaining eighteen hours until George Saba’s execution, gaping hopelessly at the heavy clouds. Then it would rain, and he would know that George was dead.

  Omar Yussef wondered if he were depressed. Perhaps he was in some state of traumatic stress. He had read about such things happening to those who were close to a bomb when it went off, as he had been. He put his hand to his breastbone and felt that it was a little bruised from the impact of the shockwave that had knocked him onto his backside that morning at the school. Traumatized he certainly was by the sight of Christopher Stead-man’s body. He hadn’t thought of it while he sat at Steadman’s desk or as he walked home. There had been other things to ponder. Once he was home, though, the American’s lifeless limb came back to him. All afternoon, he had examined his own hand, holding it before his face in the same position in which he’d seen Steadman’s, seeming to scratch itself along the floor tiles, like a scorpion, scuttling to catch up with the director’s charred body. Omar Yussef wondered how often Khamis Zeydan thought about his lost hand. Would that not turn anyone to drink? The loss of the hand, the horrors of soldiering, the loneliness of a man whose closest companionship was with the dead of his old battles. Omar Yussef had barely managed to conquer his own compulsive drinking and smoking, and he struggled against nothing more than the frustrations of life under occupation. How much harder must it be for his friend? Yes, he still thought of Khamis Zeydan as his friend. He felt suddenly very forgiving, as he pictured him lying on his back in Lebanon, fainting, searching desperately about him for his severed hand in the dirt, oblivious to the bullets flying around him, hoping he could simply slot the limb back into place and flee forever from the battlefield. Omar Yussef imagined that might have been the very moment when the idealistic young man he had known at university had turned into the bitter, melancholy, apathetic drunk who now headed Bethlehem’s police force. But he wondered if the darkness that had shrouded Khamis Zeydan’s life for many decades was deep enough that it might also obscure the police chief’s judgement of right and wrong. Could his friend be so contaminated that he would have tipped off Tamari about Dima? Omar Yussef hated to think it, but he couldn’t see how else Tamari would have known that he needed to kill the girl.

  Nadia entered her grandfather’s bedroom carrying a cup of coffee. Darkness ringed the twelve-year-old’s eyes and her diaphanous skin was blued by the veins beneath. Omar Yussef understood that she had barely slept since the flood descended on her family’s apartment in the basement. The guest room on the ground floor was crammed with Ramiz’s entire family, and it was fearfully cold at night. Everyone around her, her parents and her grandmother and the relatives and neighbors who came to help clear out the basement, they all spent the day wailing or bitching about the occupation, the destruction, the mess of everything. Nadia was quiet. Omar Yussef looked across at her from where he lay on the bed. If she put on a little weight, it would be almost like looking at his mother, he thought. Her eyes sloped down, giving them a melancholy cast. Her hair was a black frame to the pale, unblemished face. Omar Yussef’s father always said his wife looked and walked like a Turkish princess, the old pure Turks of the Caucasus, from before the Ottoman conquests. Nadia carried herself with the same slender authority as Om
ar Yussef’s mother had. She had the same sensitive personality. She was withdrawn, as though something made her feel the world couldn’t be trusted. She was knowing, too, as only an unhappy child can be.

  Omar Yussef remembered his mother’s funeral. It was 1965 and he was seventeen. It was a cold day that threatened rain, like this one. Omar Yussef’s father, who never criticized his wife, took his eldest son aside that day. “My son, you’re mourning your mother, and I acknowledge that she was a good mother to you and you are right to be sorry that she passed on. It’s not easy for me to tell you, but I want you to understand: it is better that she should go, because there was no way for any of us to help her. You see, after we left the village, when you were a newborn, she was never the same. You never saw her really happy. I wish you had. I don’t want you to feel that your experience as a son was not a happy one, nor that you didn’t give her the joy a mother derives from a son. But she was different after we left the village. She couldn’t stop thinking about what life was like there, or how much harder it was here. She never spoke about it very much. She thought it would make me ashamed that I was able to provide only a lesser life for her than the one she expected when we married. Of course, I wouldn’t have felt that way, and even now I tell you this without bitterness. Don’t let the way life is for us rob you of your happiness, my son. Remember your mother. When you have children and grandchildren, I hope they will return to our village. But if they don’t, then be sure that they leave it behind for good. Don’t allow them to be pulled in both directions as your mother was, between the village of the past and the camp of today. If so, they truly will live in neither place.” If anyone else had spoken that way to Omar Yussef at that time, he would have rejected him as a pathetic defeatist. How much more did Omar Yussef understand what his father meant now? Now that he saw Nadia before him, tentative and tired, Omar Yussef wanted to banish all thoughts of Khamis Zeydan, of George Saba and Dima Abdel Rahman, and of the Martyrs Brigades. This girl was his responsibility.

  “Hello, my darling. Come and sit here.”

  Nadia put the coffee on the nightstand and sat at the edge of the bed.

  Omar Yussef held her hand. It was cold as a frozen cut of beef. “Are you tired?”

  Nadia nodded.

  “Life is quite difficult here, my heart. But I want you to know that things are much worse for people elsewhere in the world.”

  “Yes, Grandpa.” Nadia stared at her feet.

  “No, really. It’s true. Imagine if we lived in Russia. There would have been a century of horrible suffering under Communism, and now there would be enormous criminal mafias, and diseases like AIDS that no one tries to halt. It’s true that things are bad here, but they could be much worse. Even the weather in Russia is worse.”

  Nadia giggled.

  “Yes, there’d be a foot of snow for six months outside our door, if we lived in Russia,” Omar Yussef said. “So never mind that we had a foot of water in the basement for one day.”

  “Snow is fun, Grandpa.”

  “When it comes only once a year, as it does here, but not when it snows for months at a time. And anyway it was fun to see all the neighbors come in and help clean up. It shows that we have good neighbors. And it was fun to bail out all the water. You remember how you helped me throw the water out of the back door.”

  “Yes.”

  “That was fun. And we didn’t even have to go to the beach to play in the water. The beach came to us.”

  “It was smelly.” Nadia laughed.

  “The beach is smelly too. Haven’t you seen all the sewage they pour into the sea nowadays. Yes, yes, it was much better to stay here and not go to the beach. This way we could enjoy Grandma’s cooking and play on the beach.”

  Nadia smiled and hugged her grandfather. His eyes teared up. Her shoulders were narrow and the bones in her back were hard against his hands. She felt so small and brittle. He held her close until he was sure that she wouldn’t see tears in his eyes; then he let her go.

  “Thank you for my coffee, my darling.”

  The phone rang in the salon.

  “Will you answer that, Nadia?”

  Nadia ran out of the room. Omar Yussef sat up, slowly, listening to the slap of her sandals on the flagstones of the hallway. The pain in his back made him purse his lips and puff. He drank the coffee Nadia left him. She came back with the cordless phone.

  “It’s Abu Adel,” she said.

  Omar Yussef put down his coffee. Nadia left the room.

  “Greetings, Abu Adel.” Omar Yussef could hear shouting voices near Khamis Zeydan’s phone.

  “Double greetings, Abu Ramiz,” Khamis Zeydan said. “How are you?”

  “Thank Allah,” Omar Yussef said.

  “I’m down by Shepherds Field. An Israeli helicopter missile struck Hussein Tamari’s jeep. He’s dead.”

  “Hussein is dead? Are you sure he was in the jeep?”

  “I was following him. I know he was in there.”

  “Why were you following him?”

  “I was pretending to be a policeman, just for a change of pace, you know. The Israelis must have got him in revenge for the bomb in Jerusalem this morning. You heard the Martyrs Brigades sent Yunis Abdel Rahman to blow himself up.”

  “Yes. Why did they send him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t matter anyway. The important thing is that now George Saba can be freed.”

  There was silence from Khamis Zeydan.

  “I mean,” said Omar Yussef, “that now the police can acknowledge that Hussein Tamari was the man who either killed Louai Abdel Rahman or who led the Israelis to him, and that he was also the man who killed Dima Abdel Rahman.”

  “First, Abu Ramiz, you don’t know that.”

  “I know it.”

  Khamis Zeydan raised his voice. “You don’t know it for sure, and you certainly don’t know that he killed Dima. Second, Hus-sein Tamari is a martyr now, a big, big, big fucking martyr. Do you think Bethlehem would swap a big martyr for a dirty little collaborator? Does that sound like a good trade to anyone but you, Abu Ramiz?”

  Omar Yussef’s forgiving feelings toward Khamis Zeydan for the loss of his hand disappeared. He felt desperate. How could he clear George Saba if the police chief wouldn’t help, particularly now that the real killer was dead and could never be made to confess? His suspicions returned. Khamis Zeydan was following the dead man’s jeep when the missile struck. Perhaps he was a collaborator. The collaborator. Maybe he’d called in the details of Hussein Tamari’s whereabouts to his handler in the Shin Bet and enabled the Israelis to strike, just as he might have done in the case of Louai Abdel Rahman’s death in the pines outside his home. But why would Khamis Zeydan have left a cartridge from a MAG behind at Louai’s murder scene? It wouldn’t benefit him to tag the murder on Hussein Tamari. He would have picked a more powerless fall guy, like George Saba. In any case when Omar Yussef had told Khamis Zeydan that Hussein was Louai’s killer, the police chief had said he should forget about it. He wasn’t eager to pin the murder on Tamari, so clearly he hadn’t tried to frame him, either.

  “I called you, Abu Ramiz, to let you know that now there’s nothing more you can do for George Saba,” Khamis Zeydan said. “If it was going to be hard for you to pin the blame on Hussein Tamari when he was alive, it’s impossible now.”

  “You can’t just let George die. It’s disgusting. It’s a stain on our entire town.”

  “Every house has its sewers, Abu Ramiz.”

  “Don’t quote proverbs at me. You have to help me.”

  “I’m telling you: Hussein Tamari is untouchable. By you, and by me. The only thing that’s going to happen if you speak up now is that you’ll get yourself lynched. There’s already a crowd here that you can probably hear in the background and they’re very angry. If they find someone they want to accuse of collaboration, they’ll beat him to death on the spot. So I don’t advise you to speak ill of the dead tonight.”

&nbs
p; “We only have until tomorrow at noon to prove Tamari’s guilt and to save George.”

  Khamis Zeydan waited a moment, took a breath. “No, George Saba only has until tomorrow at noon. We don’t have such a deadline.”

  “You’re right. Your time was up a long time ago.” Omar Yussef punched the button on the phone that terminated the call.

  In the quiet of the night, Omar Yussef strained to hear the sound of the army helicopter. He recalled the noise of its engine, reverberating above him all week. It rained a deafening rotor thump onto the handicapped boy Nayif. It mirrored the beating of Omar Yussef’s anxious heart when he came out of the school to toss his old personnel reports into the puddle. It must be there now again, the blaze of Hussein Tamari’s destroyed vehicle a flickering spot below it in the blackness of the earth. It hovered above Bethlehem like the famous star that announced the birth of Jesus. It doomed each man it tracked, just as surely as that ancient messianic sign destined the child born in the manger to crucifixion. The sky was silent, but Omar Yussef knew the chopper was up there. Not even if George Saba could fly like a bird would he find escape and safety.

  Omar Yussef couldn’t give up now. He must find someone who would refuse to let an innocent man die just for the sake of preserving the memory of this scum Tamari. No one in the police or the judiciary or the government would take that risk. He had to think of someone who might be even more powerful than the memory of Tamari. There was only one person who could possibly chance slurring the martyr’s image. It was risky. Khamis Zeydan was right: they might lynch him. Well, then he would die before George Saba’s execution and his worries would be over. He would go to Jihad Awdeh.

  Chapter 23

  At the door of Jihad Awdeh’s apartment building, there were two guards. One of them tucked his cigarette into the corner of his mouth to free his hands and, with his eye squinting against the smoke, patted down Omar Yussef. As he was searched, Omar Yussef glanced back across the street at his own house. Silhouetted in the window of the living room he recognized his granddaughter Nadia. It was the stillness of the outline that told him it was her, watchful and tense as her grandfather went into danger. A few moments before, it had seemed to him that he had nothing to lose by this desperate attempt to influence the new head of the town’s most wicked gang of killers. That silent, unmoving shadow in the window of his home gave him a pang of doubt. Perhaps he ought to make an excuse, tell the gunman searching him that he had forgotten something and head home. The search concluded. The guard took a long drag on the cigarette and told him to go up the stairs. If he turned to leave now, they would be suspicious.