Omar Yussef looked back toward the digger. Its trench was halfway across the street already, perhaps six feet deep and two yards wide. “They’re digging a hole across the road.”
“Why?”
“I assume it’s so that people won’t be able to drive between Bethlehem and Dehaisha.”
“But why?”
It would surely be so the army could cut the Martyrs Brigades and Hamas into smaller pieces, making it harder for explosives and weapons to be transported. To move about, the gunmen would have to bring their rifles and explosives and mortars across the trench by hand. If they had to take their weapons into the open, there was a greater chance that they would be spotted and intercepted. In which case, the spotting and intercepting would be done outside Omar Yussef’s front door, perhaps by snipers or helicopter missiles or tank shells, and it might be done when he or his grandchildren happened to be crossing the street. He didn’t want Maryam to think about that. “Just because they can, the bastards,” he said.
Even in the dark, he realized that Maryam didn’t believe him. It was he who always told her that blind hatred of the soldiers led to misunderstanding of the army’s tactics. People saw them as nothing more than cruel animals, and that was the first step to becoming just as vicious oneself.
“You usually don’t talk about them like that, Omar.”
“Fine, then I don’t know. I don’t know why they’re doing it. I just want them to go, so that we can fill in the big, damned hole in the road.”
Maryam moved across the room. Her eyes were accustomed to the dark by now. Anyway, she knew better than Omar Yussef where the furniture would be to obstruct her, because it was her role to clean it every week. She put her hand on her husband’s shoulder and he reached up to hold her fingers.
“I thought they were coming for Jihad Awdeh,” she said.
The sound of that name caused Omar Yussef to shudder. He pictured Jihad Awdeh emerging with his grim, sneering smile from the darkness in the corners of the room. Why did Maryam mention Awdeh, though? It struck him that she might somehow have meant that the Israelis knew her husband was investigating the Martyrs Brigades; that the soldiers came to his house, aware that they would catch Awdeh there, stalking his kill. “Why would they come to our house to look for Jihad Awdeh?”
“Not our house. Across the street. He just moved into the apartment building right there.”
“Which one?”
“The one where Amjad and Leila live.”
Omar Yussef looked out at the building. It was a four-story, square block with a dozen apartments and a tall television antenna in the shape of the Eiffel Tower on the roof. He searched the darkened windows for a malevolent face or a trace of the Saddam Hussein Astrakhan hat. “I haven’t seen him there.”
“He moved in two days ago. Leila told me yesterday. She’s very worried that the soldiers will come and blow the place up or that there’ll be a gunbattle. She already told Jihad not to let his men sit around in the hallway with their guns when her kids are around.”
“What did he say?”
“She said he was very polite and promised to keep the guns inside his apartment.”
“How nice of him.”
“His family moved in, too. Leila says he brought his wife and his two kids.”
Omar Yussef hadn’t thought of Jihad Awdeh as a husband or father before. It seemed strange to imagine him sharing intimacies with a wife or dandling his children. He could even picture Hussein Tamari, burly and boisterous, playfully wrestling his young son. But he couldn’t conceive of Awdeh engaging in such innocent, homely pleasures.
Omar Yussef wondered if Jihad Awdeh knew he lived across the street from the UN schoolteacher who had confronted his boss Tamari only yesterday. Somehow, the thought of such a close proximity to Awdeh made him feel tenser than he would have if Maryam had told him that Hussein Tamari had moved in. There was something more unpredictable about Awdeh and, despite what he knew about Tamari’s part in Louai’s murder, Omar Yussef thought the senior Martyrs Brigades man was bound by codes of tribal honor that Awdeh would scorn. There was something basic and lupine about Awdeh that made Omar Yussef’s mouth dry. When he entered Hussein Tamari’s headquarters, he knew that at least there he was safe. Tamari wouldn’t dishonor himself and his family by killing a guest. Omar Yussef considered what he would have done had Jihad Awdeh been in charge. He concluded that he would have been compelled to take the same action, but he wasn’t sure that he would have left the gunmen’s lair alive.
The digger reached the edge of the road. Omar Yussef moved away from the window a little and wondered if the driver intended to keep digging right through the middle of his house.
“Omar, your gun. The army might come in and find it,” Maryam said.
“It’s not my gun. Anyway they aren’t searching the house. Not with a mechanical digger, at least.”
As the digger pulled its tray up from the trench, there was a gush of water.
“They cut the pipes,” Maryam said.
The water shot into the air a moment, catching the faint, leaden light of the moon that filtered through the cloudy sky, then disappeared into the trench. The digger hovered for another plunge into the dirt, but then it turned and moved away. The APC moved out in its wake. The tank was the last to leave, spinning with a roar toward the hill that would take them over the back of Dehaisha to Beit Sahour and the army camp.
Maryam’s grip on his hand remained tight until the sound of the tanks almost disappeared, then it loosened and Omar Yussef stroked her palm, silently. There was a moment when he almost felt calm, in the dark and the quiet with his wife. Then her strong grip returned and broke his reverie.
“What’s that smell?” she said.
There was a damp rankness in the cold air. At the moment they smelled it, there was noise downstairs. Ramiz’s children began to cry out and Omar Yussef could hear his son speaking urgently to his wife. The door opened at the bottom of the stairs and the children ran up them. Omar Yussef stood and went to the hallway. The smallest girl was crying. Nadia held her arms around her little sister’s neck. Omar Yussef noted that Nadia was calm and quiet. He smiled and touched her cheek. Ramiz came up the stairs with little Omar, who was sniffling and not quite awake. He put the boy down on an armchair and gave a quick look at his parents.
“The basement is flooding,” he said, rushing back down the stairs.
Omar Yussef followed his son. At the foot of the stairs, the last two steps were already submerged. The water was black in the darkness, but Omar Yussef knew from the stink that it was sewage. The pipe the digger broke was spilling its contents into his house. He took off his loafers and socks, rolled the socks into a ball and placed them inside the loafers on the fifth step, and waded into the slimy water. Ramiz and Sara hurried past with the children’s thin, foam mattresses and Ramiz’s laptop.
Omar Yussef went to the back door, opened it and began to bail the sewage out into the night with a saucepan. His back hurt, bending to the water and flipping the pan up the basement steps. The cold swill rose almost to his knees. Its iciness soothed the bruise on his shin, but the smell made him want to puke. It seemed appropriate that he should be throwing filth out of his home with hopelessly insufficient tools. It was what he had been trying to do ever since George Saba’s arrest. His mind had been full of anger and fear, frustration and intense focus since the Zubeida girl came into his classroom with the news of the raid on George’s home. Now the ordure of his own town was right here, physical and disgusting, crawling up his legs and making him nauseous.
He stopped bailing and slowly straightened his back. He looked out into the night. Tomorrow they would mend the pipes. They would clean the basement and his grandchildren would sleep there again soon enough. But that would not be the end of the smell. The reek would remain in his nostrils, and he knew that in his dreams he would feel the ooze rising over his skin.