“Not on a piece of kebab. Remember the lacerations in his mouth,” the doctor said. “I’d have to do an autopsy to be certain. Until I’ve seen if there’s an obstruction further down in the trachea, it’s really hard to say for sure that someone died of choking.”
“When will you have the results of your autopsy?” Omar Yussef asked.
“I remind you that I have been ordered not to perform an autopsy. The verdict of the prison doctor is sufficient for the authorities.”
“A heart attack?”
“It’s something to tell the man’s relatives. The body should be buried today, of course, but I’ve been ordered to keep it here until the authorities decide to tell the family that he has died. Of a heart attack.”
“No one will believe it,” Omar Yussef said.
“No one is asked to believe. They’re asked only to be quiet. As quiet as Odwan’s body, here.”
“Quiet?” Omar Yussef said. “When I look at his body, I feel as though I can hear him screaming.”
“The poor one, may Allah be merciful upon him,” Khamis Zeydan said.
Omar Yussef tapped the end of the second dissecting table and turned to Khamis Zeydan. “Everyone I meet in Gaza is tortured or killed. If I didn’t see you standing before me, I’d assume you were lying under the sheet on this table,” he said.
“Thankfully we met long before you came to Gaza. Otherwise I would be in extreme danger,” Khamis Zeydan said.
Doctor Najjar stroked his beard. “As a history teacher, Abu Ramiz, you will be interested in that body. It’s not really a body; it’s just bones.” He took the sheet away. On the table, a skeleton lay, yellow and dusty. Thick wedges of dry earth were attached to the joints of the shoulder and knee. “This fellow came to me two days ago, all in pieces. The police brought him in a plastic trash bag. I put him back in order. I’m not sure what to do with him really. I’m waiting for the religious clerks at the waqf to decide where to rebury him.”
Omar Yussef recalled the story from the bottom of the newspaper’s front page, below the coverage of Lieutenant Fathi Salah’s funeral. “This is the body that was discovered by a farmer in Deir el-Balah?”
“Yes, in the corner of his field. He reported it to the police and they brought him to me.”
“Him?”
“Yes, him. The pelvis is heavier and thicker than a woman’s. Also the opening of the pubis is triangular, whereas a woman’s has four sides.”
“Are you supposed to identify him?”
“That would be almost impossible. It’s an old skeleton. There’s no soft tissue left, which means he’s been buried at least five years. But the bones aren’t yet crumbly, which is how they get after a hundred years in the grave.”
“So he’s been dead between five years and one hundred years.”
“It’s very difficult to be more accurate than that. I could test to be sure that it wasn’t more than a hundred years by cutting through a bone.” The doctor laid his hand sideways like a saw on the skeleton’s long thigh bone. “Under ultraviolet light, there’d be very little fluorescence in a bone more than a century old. It’s not as pressing, of course, as the cases of Odwan and your friend.”
“Perhaps this one’s old enough to have died a nice peaceful death in his home,” Omar Yussef said.
“The skeleton is old, but I didn’t say that he was an old man when he died. In any case, you forget, Abu Ramiz, this is Gaza. The odds are against a peaceful death.” Doctor Najjar pointed to the ribcage of the skeleton. “Look at the third rib on the right-hand side.”
The rib was snapped jaggedly halfway along its length. “Here’s the end of that rib,” Najjar said, holding up a few inches of bone. “But it doesn’t fit together with the rib from which it was broken.”
“What does that mean?” Omar Yussef said.
“It didn’t just snap. It was shattered. If we had opened up this fellow’s grave, rather than finding him tossed in the corner of a field, we would probably have seen many tiny fragments of this rib. I believe this is a gunshot wound. The bullet struck the rib and shattered it.” The doctor sighed as he put the fragment of rib on the metal table next to the skeleton. “It would have been a terrible injury. Shards of bone from the impact would have created multiple lacerations in the lung behind it.”
“So he died from a shot through the lung?”
“The puncture of a bullet, even right through the lung, wouldn’t kill you. But the massive destruction of tissue by all those tiny fragments of bone would have been impossible to repair. If this was a poor man with no access to proper healthcare, or if he was living in Gaza a long time ago-let’s say, early in our range of five to one hundred years-the infection from those many little wounds would have killed him.”
“And now he suffers the indignity of having his bones strewn in a farmer’s field.”
“No indignity should surprise us in Gaza, Abu Ramiz.”
Omar Yussef took in the three tables with their awful freight. The way death finally took a man seemed always to be a grisly surprise in a place like this. To be alive was to know the constant threat of death and the macabre reality of its arrival. But even beyond that moment there was no peace, not even when your bones were almost crumbled to dust.
“I’m staying at the Sands Hotel,” Omar Yussef said to Najjar. “If you have questions about the deceased one, James Cree, I hope you’ll call me.”
Najjar looked firmly at Omar Yussef. His eyes were frank and his jaw was clenched beneath his beard. He glanced at Odwan’s table. “I’ll be busy all night in this autopsy room. You’ll hear from me.”
In the morgue’s entrance, Khamis Zeydan lit a cigarette. “You’re running out of time,” he said.
“Now that Odwan is dead, will they really kill Magnus?” Omar Yussef leaned against the handrail of the steps.
Khamis Zeydan’s silence was his answer. He smiled grimly. “James Cree and Bassam Odwan, dead in the same room. You certainly came to the right morgue.”
Omar Yussef waved to Sami, who pulled the Cherokee through the deepening darkness to the foot of the steps. “What do you mean?” he said. “Doctor Najjar said it’s the only morgue in Gaza.”
“Then I should rephrase,” Khamis Zeydan said. “You were the right man to come to the morgue.”
Chapter 18
As Sami sped through the twilight, Khamis Zeydan turned in the front seat and looked hard at Omar Yussef in the back of the car.
Omar Yussef frowned and lifted his chin. “What?” he said. “What are you looking at?”
His friend stared. “I have to go to the president’s residence now. The Revolutionary Council is meeting.”
“If you decide to start the revolution, let me know. Otherwise, you can all go to hell.”
“I’ll be sure to put that on the agenda. Look, I don’t want to leave you alone. I’m worried about you. Sami will stay with you.”
“Sami’s your bodyguard, not mine.”
Khamis Zeydan raised his eyes and sighed.
Omar Yussef stared out the window, as they slowed in the heavy traffic around Palestine Square. The more crowded the streets became, the lonelier he felt. He had to acknowledge that he didn’t want to be alone, with his head full of the horror of the bodies in the morgue. “Take me to Salwa Masharawi’s house. I’ll spend a couple of hours there, while you’re starting the revolution. It’s a good family. It’ll help me calm down after all this.”
When they reached the sandy lane to the Masharawi house, Khamis Zeydan grabbed one of the two cellphones from Sami’s belt. “Take this,” he said, tossing it into Omar Yussef’s lap. “If I need to find you, I’ll call you on that.”
“I don’t like cellphones,” Omar Yussef said. “They make you sick.” He tapped the unbruised side of his head and tried to push the phone back into Khamis Zeydan’s hand.
“It can’t give you brain cancer unless you actually have some brains,” Khamis Zeydan said. “By Allah, it’s just for keeping in touch while things are dangerous. Put it in your pocket and forget about it.”