“You seem to have made a good job of it,” Omar Yussef said. “You would think you had been digging graves all your life.”
“I’m from Gaza, ustaz. It’s in my blood.” Jouda said. “Anyway, I hope I dug this one in the right place.”
Omar Yussef stepped over to the new grave. It lay in line with one of the first headstones: Private James Cree. 4 Battalion Queen’s Edinburgh Rifles. 21 years. 5/11/17. “Yes, Suleiman, you dug this in precisely the right place. Good job.”
“The gentleman from the British consulate will be here soon for the reburial of Private Eynon Price,” Jouda said. “He said there’s no need to delay the funeral until he arrives, as Mister Cree wasn’t a current member of a British organization. He said he’d let Mister Wallender handle it, as the representative of the United Nations.”
The medics brought two caskets from the courtyard of the caretaker’s house. The first was a simple coffin of rough pine. Doctor Najjar instructed them to lay it next to the grave of Eynon Price, until the British consular official arrived. The second was a long plywood crate, which they brought to James Cree’s grave.
“That’s a strange material for a coffin,” Khamis Zeydan said, quietly.
Suleiman Jouda jumped down into Cree’s grave and took the weight of the casket from the ambulancemen. He climbed back out and waited for Magnus to speak.
The Swede didn’t look at the coffin. He stared up into the sky, poked a finger behind his spectacles to wipe a tear from his eye, and read a brief service from a small prayer-book. He closed the book. “The events that James and I were part of this week have taught me that people from the West, like me, have a very simplistic view of what’s right and wrong here in the Middle East. We believe good must triumph over evil, but then we back bad men, when it’s politically convenient. James never accepted that, because he cared deeply about the land and its people. So I will always remember him, here in his grave in Gaza.”
Jouda shoveled the dry earth down onto the plywood box.
Doctor Najjar shook Wallender’s hand. “May Allah be merciful upon him, the departed one,” he said.
“Thank you, doctor,” Wallender said. “Thank you for looking after his body.”
The doctor cleared his throat. “Yes, yes, it’s nothing. Now, I do need you to sign some papers. There’re some official requirements, and you’re the representative of the United Nations.”
“Of course.” Wallender took the papers. He frowned. “These are for transfer of the body.”
“That’s correct.”
“But we’re burying him here.” Wallender flipped over to the second page. “These are for submission to the Israeli authorities. For transfer of the coffin through the checkpoint out of Gaza.”
Omar Yussef took Wallender’s arm. “Doctor Najjar, you had better prepare the second coffin for burial, while Magnus looks over these documents.”
The doctor crossed the lawn with a smile.
“Abu Ramiz, what’s going on?” Wallender said.
“James’s body will be transferred to Israel and from there it will be flown back to Scotland. This has all been arranged by the United Nations people in Jerusalem. They only need you to sign the clearances on this end.”
“I don’t understand.”
“James’s body is still at the morgue.”
“Then who’s in that grave?”
“Not who, but what.”
“I don’t get it, Abu Ramiz?”
“We just buried something that people have been prepared to kill for. Buried it where it will lie for a century, or perhaps forever. At least long enough to make it obsolete.”
Wallender stared at the grave, until it came to him. “The new missile?”
Omar Yussef nodded. “I switched it for an old Qassam missile, which Maki then tried to sell to the colonel.”
“Where did you get the old one, so that you could make the switch?” Wallender asked.
Omar Yussef tapped the side of his nose and thought of the two Saladin Brigades men from Gaza City, Walid and Khaled, who had surrendered a single missile from their stockpile and now counted themselves in the clear with the United Nations for their attack on Cree. The Saladin I had never left the graveyard. “Let’s go and lay this poor soldier to rest,” he said.
Suleiman Jouda packed the small mound of earth over the new grave with the back of his shovel and pushed in a temporary cross marked with the name of James Cree.
A tall, chubby, florid man in a khaki summer suit entered the cemetery. He waved cheerily and made for the grave of Private Eynon Price. It was the man from the British consulate in Jerusalem. He wiped the sweat from his neck and face with a handkerchief. “Bloody hot down here today,” he said. “Still, I gather I just missed the dust storm. Thank Christ for small mercies, eh?” He pulled some printed sheets from his jacket pocket and read the burial service, as the others gathered around the grave with their heads bowed.
The sky was deep blue. Omar Yussef recalled Nadia’s tale of Atum’s tears. If the ancient Egyptian deity had wept and his teardrops had become human beings, he was not, after all, a god in which Omar Yussef could believe. His god had cried dust, a tempest of dust that had denied him his sight and choked him until he was forced to end the weeping himself. As the caretaker shoveled earth into the soldier’s grave, Omar Yussef looked at the blue sky and smiled. The god’s eyes were finally dry from too much crying.