Omar Yussef remembered his mother’s funeral. It was 1965 and he was seventeen. It was a cold day that threatened rain, like this one. Omar Yussef’s father, who never criticized his wife, took his eldest son aside that day. “My son, you’re mourning your mother, and I acknowledge that she was a good mother to you and you are right to be sorry that she passed on. It’s not easy for me to tell you, but I want you to understand: it is better that she should go, because there was no way for any of us to help her. You see, after we left the village, when you were a newborn, she was never the same. You never saw her really happy. I wish you had. I don’t want you to feel that your experience as a son was not a happy one, nor that you didn’t give her the joy a mother derives from a son. But she was different after we left the village. She couldn’t stop thinking about what life was like there, or how much harder it was here. She never spoke about it very much. She thought it would make me ashamed that I was able to provide only a lesser life for her than the one she expected when we married. Of course, I wouldn’t have felt that way, and even now I tell you this without bitterness. Don’t let the way life is for us rob you of your happiness, my son. Remember your mother. When you have children and grandchildren, I hope they will return to our village. But if they don’t, then be sure that they leave it behind for good. Don’t allow them to be pulled in both directions as your mother was, between the village of the past and the camp of today. If so, they truly will live in neither place.” If anyone else had spoken that way to Omar Yussef at that time, he would have rejected him as a pathetic defeatist. How much more did Omar Yussef understand what his father meant now? Now that he saw Nadia before him, tentative and tired, Omar Yussef wanted to banish all thoughts of Khamis Zeydan, of George Saba and Dima Abdel Rahman, and of the Martyrs Brigades. This girl was his responsibility.
“Hello, my darling. Come and sit here.”
Nadia put the coffee on the nightstand and sat at the edge of the bed.
Omar Yussef held her hand. It was cold as a frozen cut of beef. “Are you tired?”
Nadia nodded.
“Life is quite difficult here, my heart. But I want you to know that things are much worse for people elsewhere in the world.”
“Yes, Grandpa.” Nadia stared at her feet.
“No, really. It’s true. Imagine if we lived in Russia. There would have been a century of horrible suffering under Communism, and now there would be enormous criminal mafias, and diseases like AIDS that no one tries to halt. It’s true that things are bad here, but they could be much worse. Even the weather in Russia is worse.”
Nadia giggled.
“Yes, there’d be a foot of snow for six months outside our door, if we lived in Russia,” Omar Yussef said. “So never mind that we had a foot of water in the basement for one day.”
“Snow is fun, Grandpa.”
“When it comes only once a year, as it does here, but not when it snows for months at a time. And anyway it was fun to see all the neighbors come in and help clean up. It shows that we have good neighbors. And it was fun to bail out all the water. You remember how you helped me throw the water out of the back door.”
“Yes.”
“That was fun. And we didn’t even have to go to the beach to play in the water. The beach came to us.”
“It was smelly.” Nadia laughed.
“The beach is smelly too. Haven’t you seen all the sewage they pour into the sea nowadays. Yes, yes, it was much better to stay here and not go to the beach. This way we could enjoy Grandma’s cooking and play on the beach.”
Nadia smiled and hugged her grandfather. His eyes teared up. Her shoulders were narrow and the bones in her back were hard against his hands. She felt so small and brittle. He held her close until he was sure that she wouldn’t see tears in his eyes; then he let her go.
“Thank you for my coffee, my darling.”
The phone rang in the salon.
“Will you answer that, Nadia?”
Nadia ran out of the room. Omar Yussef sat up, slowly, listening to the slap of her sandals on the flagstones of the hallway. The pain in his back made him purse his lips and puff. He drank the coffee Nadia left him. She came back with the cordless phone.
“It’s Abu Adel,” she said.
Omar Yussef put down his coffee. Nadia left the room.
“Greetings, Abu Adel.” Omar Yussef could hear shouting voices near Khamis Zeydan’s phone.
“Double greetings, Abu Ramiz,” Khamis Zeydan said. “How are you?”
“Thank Allah,” Omar Yussef said.
“I’m down by Shepherds Field. An Israeli helicopter missile struck Hussein Tamari’s jeep. He’s dead.”
“Hussein is dead? Are you sure he was in the jeep?”
“I was following him. I know he was in there.”
“Why were you following him?”
“I was pretending to be a policeman, just for a change of pace, you know. The Israelis must have got him in revenge for the bomb in Jerusalem this morning. You heard the Martyrs Brigades sent Yunis Abdel Rahman to blow himself up.”
“Yes. Why did they send him?”
“I don’t know.”
“It doesn’t matter anyway. The important thing is that now George Saba can be freed.”
There was silence from Khamis Zeydan.
“I mean,” said Omar Yussef, “that now the police can acknowledge that Hussein Tamari was the man who either killed Louai Abdel Rahman or who led the Israelis to him, and that he was also the man who killed Dima Abdel Rahman.”
“First, Abu Ramiz, you don’t know that.”
“I know it.”
Khamis Zeydan raised his voice. “You don’t know it for sure, and you certainly don’t know that he killed Dima. Second, Hus-sein Tamari is a martyr now, a big, big, big fucking martyr. Do you think Bethlehem would swap a big martyr for a dirty little collaborator? Does that sound like a good trade to anyone but you, Abu Ramiz?”
Omar Yussef’s forgiving feelings toward Khamis Zeydan for the loss of his hand disappeared. He felt desperate. How could he clear George Saba if the police chief wouldn’t help, particularly now that the real killer was dead and could never be made to confess? His suspicions returned. Khamis Zeydan was following the dead man’s jeep when the missile struck. Perhaps he was a collaborator. The collaborator. Maybe he’d called in the details of Hussein Tamari’s whereabouts to his handler in the Shin Bet and enabled the Israelis to strike, just as he might have done in the case of Louai Abdel Rahman’s death in the pines outside his home. But why would Khamis Zeydan have left a cartridge from a MAG behind at Louai’s murder scene? It wouldn’t benefit him to tag the murder on Hussein Tamari. He would have picked a more powerless fall guy, like George Saba. In any case when Omar Yussef had told Khamis Zeydan that Hussein was Louai’s killer, the police chief had said he should forget about it. He wasn’t eager to pin the murder on Tamari, so clearly he hadn’t tried to frame him, either.
“I called you, Abu Ramiz, to let you know that now there’s nothing more you can do for George Saba,” Khamis Zeydan said. “If it was going to be hard for you to pin the blame on Hussein Tamari when he was alive, it’s impossible now.”
“You can’t just let George die. It’s disgusting. It’s a stain on our entire town.”