The Collaborator of Bethlehem (3 page)

Weeks before, a burly man in military fatigues had come into the autoshop when Muhammad and Yunis were out. He sat on Dima’s desk, crumpling her paperwork with his broad backside, and tried to touch her cheek. “I have something I need to buy from your family,” he said to her, “but I’d pay double the price if they’d let
you
deliver it to me.” She moved away and the man laughed. Behind him, she noticed Yunis at the entrance to the garage. The man lifted his hand again, but then followed her eyes to her brother-in-law. He laughed again and left the autoshop. Yunis looked darkly at her and followed the man out, whispering insistently to him. He had barely spoken to her since that day.

When Louai last came home, Dima complained that his father and brother were distant with her. A quiet, calm man, he surprised her with his sudden anger. “You have no right to judge my father and brother,” he shouted. “These are not matters that concern you.”

Dima had no idea what “matters” he meant—she had referred only to their icy manner about the house and office. But Louai quickly calmed himself and apologized. He said he was tense because of his confinement in a safehouse, but Dima knew he was lying. He was defensive, because he, too, was frustrated with his brother. Dima’s suspicions about Yunis somehow were confirmed by Louai’s outburst. Before he had left that last time, Dima had heard Louai and Yunis arguing. They had spoken in whispers. She couldn’t tell what they were saying, but the tone had been heated. She had also noticed her husband stare sternly at his father after he embraced him in farewell.

As Dima Abdel Rahman stood at the window straining to see the source of the steps sounding in the undergrowth, she heard the steady footfalls stop. Then they began again, not so clearly defined, but rather a shuffle through the underbrush, as though the creeping man had suddenly relaxed.

“Oh, it’s you, Abu Walid.”

It was her husband’s voice. He spoke calmly, in a friendly tone. Dima looked toward the voice. For a moment she saw nothing, then at the edge of the pines a small red dot appeared, flitting unsteadily as though describing a circle of a small radius. It quivered to a halt, like a firefly settling onto a leaf. When the red dot was still, instantly there was a shot. Dima gasped, and it was as though the sudden extra oxygen fed her eyes, because she saw Louai. He stumbled from the edge of the trees. Dima couldn’t make out his face, but she knew the denim jacket and the jeans she had bought for him before his last visit. His hand clutched his shoulder.

The red dot, again. Another shot cracked out of the darkness and Louai spun, his arms stretched wide, like a Sufi dancing in the divine trance of the
sema
, whirling, head back, one hand turned toward the earth, the other palm heavenward. He collapsed facedown in the cabbage patch.

Dima stared. Her mother-in-law came wailing into the room, crying out that the Israelis were invading. “They will murder us all,” she called. “Yunis, my son, come and bring your father to protect us. Muhammad, come to protect us, husband.” There were footsteps from the upper floor as the men awoke from their evening naps and hurried to the stairs. Dima felt as if she had been turned to stone. If she moved, she thought she might fall to pieces on the ground, her body dropping noisily in a cloud of dusty chips. With a fearful effort, she turned and ran to the door, knocking over a glass of
kamar al-din
on the way.

The killers could be out here still,
Dima thought,
but I have to reach him and touch him. Don’t let him be badly hurt.

She stumbled through the cabbages and dropped to the ground at Louai’s side. It was then that she realized she was sobbing and, as she turned her husband onto his back, her sobs became a scream. His wide eyes were blank and stared right through her. His tongue protruded palely between his lips. The denim jacket was wet, saturated with blood from the collarbone to the navel. Dima held his hand and touched his face. He was so beautiful. She looked at his hand. His fingers were long and slim, these fingers that touched her delicately when he came to the house. Why was the cause of Palestine worth more to him than their happiness and their love?

Louai’s mother came through the cabbages. She knew the meaning of Dima’s scream. She fell on her knees at her boy’s side and laid her hands on the bloody torso. Dima heard the soft squelching of the wet denim as the old woman gripped it desperately. The mother lifted her hands, covered her cheeks in her son’s blood and called out to God.

“Get away from him.”

Dima heard Yunis behind her. He grabbed her shoulder and shoved her away from her husband’s corpse. He lifted his mother gently, but led her away from the body, too. She sobbed and cried, “
Allahu akbar,”
God is most great. As he passed Dima with his mother, Yunis caught her eye. His look was defensive and hostile. The glance confused her. Yunis looked away. “Don’t disturb anything. Leave the place for the police to investigate,” he said.

“The police?”

“Yes.”

“What is there for the police to investigate? The Israelis assassinated your brother. Are the police going to go and arrest the Israeli soldier who fired the shots?”

“Just do as I say.”

“The police will be useless unless a Palestinian did this. What Palestinian would kill a member of our family? What Palestinian would kill a leader of the resistance?”

Yunis averted his eyes. Dima stepped toward him, but he turned his gaze on her again and it was reproachful and violent.

Dima would have spoken more angrily, if it had not seemed like a desecration of her husband’s body to use harsh words. When Yunis turned on the lights in the house, beams of fluorescent blue filtered outside. Their icy reflections shone in the pool of Louai’s blood.

Chapter 3

O
mar Yussef placed his purple leather briefcase carefully on his desk and opened the shiny gold combination locks. He unclipped a Mont Blanc fountain pen from the pocket on the inside of the lid. It was a present from a graduating class of students, who knew that he loved stylish things. He felt the pleasing weight and balance of the Mont Blanc in his hand and glanced at the pile of exercise books on his desk to be graded. He wondered if the class whose books lay before him would ever feel generous or grateful toward their teacher. He began to read through their short essays on the demise of the Ottoman Empire. He spent a great deal of his time, too much of it, angry with these children. He tried not to be, but he couldn’t stand to listen to them when they rolled through the political clichés of the poor, victimized Arab nation, subjugated by everyone from the Crusaders and the Mongols to the Turks and the British, all the way to the intifada. It wasn’t wrong to see the Arabs as victims of a harsh history, but it was a mistake to assume that they bore no responsibility for their own sufferings. In his classroom, Omar Yussef would step in and destroy their hateful, blind slogans. Yet he could see that it only made him angrier and left the students somehow mistrustful of him.

Omar wrote a “C” grade in the margin of the first messy notebook, because he decided to be generous, and opened another. He was getting old. He thought of George Saba and the comforting feeling he experienced as they dined, that this pupil and others like him would be the proud legacy of Omar Yussef. He knew that his recent irritable outbursts in the classroom were caused by a combination of frustration at the ignorant, simple-minded, violent politics of his students and the sense that he was already too old, too distant from their world ever to change them. He knew it would be worse in a boys school, but there was such violence even in his girls that it shocked him. No matter how he tried to liberate the minds of Dehaisha’s children, there were always many others working still more diligently to enslave them.

It was different when he taught at the Frères School. During those years, there were many fine young minds that had opened themselves to him. It wasn’t just the pupils that had changed. Tension and hatred had engulfed Bethlehem, and on their heels came poverty and resentment and propaganda. Even a fine pupil like Dima Abdel Rahman was sucked into the violence. Her father, Omar Yussef’s neighbor, had called the previous night to tell him about the death of the girl’s husband, Louai Abdel Rah-man. The funeral would be in the early morning, when Omar Yussef was at work, but he planned to visit Dima Abdel Rahman in the afternoon. He had thought he might suggest that she return to her studies, but then he remembered that she truly loved her husband and he decided to wait before offering her any such proposals for her future.

It was at times like these, when the first light of the day was crisp in his empty classroom and the essays he graded were sub-par, that Omar Yussef wondered if he ought not to accede to the request of the school’s American director and quit. Omar Yussef was only fifty-six years old, but Christopher Stead-man wanted him to retire. He saw how the American looked at his shaking hands, reminders of the years of alcohol that were now behind him. They made him seem even more fragile than his slow, labored walk. Maybe Steadman only wanted a more vigorous man, but Omar Yussef hated him because he suspected the American really wanted a teacher who wouldn’t talk back. Omar Yussef reflected that he had molded a sufficient number of fine young minds, like those of George Saba, Elias Bishara and Dima Abdel Rahman, enough to satisfy the most conscientious of teachers. Perhaps he shouldn’t be driving himself crazy, putting his heart through the stress of confronting the entire machine of mad martyrdom propaganda and lies every day.

The first of his pupils entered. “Morning of joy,
ustaz
.”

Omar Yussef returned the greeting, quietly. With the student’s arrival, the comforting thoughts of his old pupils dissolved and he dropped back into the alien present, his senses heightened to the tawdriness of the school. The chairs scraped on the classroom floor as the girls seated themselves. The air filled with the background stink of unwashed armpits and bean farts. Omar Yussef looked down at the exercise book and pretended to be grading it. The pen shook in his fingers, as it always did these days. There was a tiny liver spot on the back of his hand, which presented itself to him as he turned the pages. It was new, appearing almost overnight, as though some genie had stolen into his bedroom while he slept and stamped him ineradicably as prematurely aged. When he thought of it that way, he wondered that the visiting spirit found him in his bed and asleep, for it seemed to Omar Yussef that he spent half the night urinating and the genie could just as easily have impressed its seal of superannuation on his dribbling penis. This was the real him and this was the reality of his life. Maybe he hadn’t been such a prize even back when he was young. To the rosy, wistful picture of a youthful Omar Yussef, he ought to have added that his eyes would be bleary from drink and his mouth would be tight with the bitterness of one who feels he has much for which to apologize—to those he offended while drunk, but to himself most of all. Yes, perhaps he truly didn’t need this in the morning. He would talk about retirement with his wife Maryam.

More students came into the room. Most were silent. They knew enough of Omar Yussef’s strictness not to speak in class unless he appeared to be in a very good mood, which rarely applied to the opening of the morning session at 7:30 A.M. But one girl was too animated to hold herself back. Khadija Zubeida entered quickly and excitedly. She was tall and thin with black hair cut in a bob. There was an early bloom of acne high on both of her pale cheeks. Before she sat, she leaned over the desks of two friends: “My dad called me before I came to school,” she told them. “He arrested a collaborator. The one who helped the Israelis kill the martyr in Irtas. He said they’re going to execute the traitor.” She spoke in a whisper, but in the quiet classroom it was audible to all, as was the snigger that punctuated it.

“Who was it?” one of her friends asked.

“The collaborator? He’s a damned Christian from Beit Jala. Saba, I think. He led the Jews right to the man in Irtas, who was a great fighter, and he delivered the final blow with a big knife that the Jews gave him.”

Omar Yussef put down his pen before the shaking of his hand could propel it across the table. He shoved the exercise book away from him and put his head in his hands to gather his thoughts. They had taken George, he was sure of it. He coughed to steady his voice. “Khadija,” he called to the girl, hoarsely. “Which Saba?”

“I think he’s called George,
ustaz
. George Saba. My dad says he keeps dirty statues of women in his house and he offered to let the arresting officer take his daughter instead.”

The girls clicked their tongues and shook their heads.

“The Christian confessed, too. He said, ‘I know why you came here. You came here because I sold myself to the Jews.’ My dad gave him a good thump after he confessed.”

Omar Yussef stood and leaned against his desk. “Come here,” he said, sharply. As the girl approached him, a little confused, he considered giving her the same blow her father claimed to have aimed at the collaborator. But he knew he must try harder than that: he was a schoolteacher, not a police thug. He wondered what the girl saw from the other side of the desk. He knew that his own eyes were tearing with rage and the slack fold beneath his chin trembled. He must have seemed pitiful, or deeply unnerving. “What do I teach you to do in this classroom?”

The girl looked dumbly at Omar Yussef.

“How do I teach you to look at history?” Omar Yussef waited. He stared closely at the girl. There was no reply, so he went on. “I teach you to look at the evidence and then to decide what you think about a particular sultan, or about the causes of a war.”

“Yes, that’s right,” the girl said, relieved.

“So how do you know that this man was a collaborator?”

“My dad told me.”

“Who’s your father?”

“Sergeant Mahmoud Zubeida, General Intelligence, Rapid Reaction Force.”