“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 the 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?”