He found himself upside down on top of two gunmen. The men wriggled frantically as though they thought he might be dead and they wanted no contact with the corpse. They rolled him off them and into a puddle. The cold water roused him and he was already on his knees when Khamis Zeydan and another police officer grabbed his arms and lifted him.
“It must have been a tank shell,” Khamis Zeydan said. “Are you all right?”
“Tank shell?”
“The Martyrs Brigades were shooting from inside the building. The only way for the Israeli soldiers to penetrate these thick, old walls is with a tank shell. It must have gone in through the living room where the firing was coming from and blown you out of the front of the house. Who else was in there?”
“George’s family.”
The dazed gunmen rushed up the steps with the police. In the bedroom, they found Jihad Awdeh. There was blood coming from his head and he was ghostly with the dust of the fallen wall. His men helped him to his feet and took him down the steps. Omar Yussef waited for the Martyrs Brigades chief to look at him, but Jihad could barely keep his eyes open. His gaze was unfocussed and distant, like a troubled man in prayer. He stumbled past amid a crowd of bellowing gunmen, out to the street where the red lights of an ambulance flickered.
The wall between the bedroom and the living room was partially collapsed. Khamis Zeydan and Omar Yussef peered through the gap. George Saba’s antique furniture smoldered. The rack of wedding dresses burned, giving off a poisonous smell from the plastic wrappings. The teak dresser was splintered down to its stubby legs. The French statuette that had stood on it was intact, but cast to the flagstones. Omar Yussef remembered that this naked, twisted woman of Rodin’s was called The Martyr. There were four bodies in the living room, clustered around the three-foot-wide aperture in the outer wall where the shell had entered. Khamis Zeydan peered at one of the bodies.
“Mahmoud Zubeida,” he said.
Omar Yussef looked at the blank face of the dead policeman. The bony face was pale and its lips were drawn back over the brown teeth. It seemed like the skull of a man already years in the ground. The dream of death that he had imagined Mahmoud Zubeida’s daughter enduring every night finally had come true. He wondered if he would be able to tell the girl that her father was happy in the firefight before he died, that he was a martyr. He recalled the shame and anger on the man’s face when he had recognized the schoolteacher. No, someone else would tell the girl about her father’s heroism. He wouldn’t be able to talk to her about the way the gunman died. He didn’t trust himself not to reveal the ugliness of the corpse and the blood that looked like seeping mud in the dim light.
Or the collapsed wall of the bedroom. What would he tell Khadija Zubeida about that? And the family beneath it.
Omar Yussef began heaving stones from the mound where the bedroom wall had been. Khamis Zeydan and his policemen lifted segments of plaster and stone. When they came to Sofia and the children, the officer closest to the bodies stepped back and puked. The police chief grabbed another of his shocked men and orchestrated the lifting of the last slab from Sofia’s legs. George Saba’s wife was dead. Her bloodied head lay horribly smashed across her collarbone, her neck broken and shoulders caved in. Under her arms, the children were unconscious, but Khamis Zeydan found a pulse in both. He laid them on the bed. They seemed tiny and battered, though the medic who checked their vital signs gave a brief nod to indicate that they would survive.
Omar Yussef pulled Khamis Zeydan back to the rubble. He was short of breath. “Habib Saba,” he gasped.
Khamis Zeydan looked at the deep pile of stone. His eyes widened. The policemen began to lift the debris. Sweating, they came to George Saba’s father. Habib sat amid the rubble in the same posture Omar Yussef saw him in during the gunfight. His legs were pulled up to his chest and his hands held his ankles. His bald head was gashed along the crown. The deep wound, filled with dust and blood, was a ribbon of black. Omar Yussef thought that Habib Saba had wanted this, so resigned did he seem in death. It was as though he believed there was no reason to save his grandchildren or his daughter-in-law, just as he gave up hope for his son. Perhaps he had been right in his son’s case. If Omar Yussef hadn’t tried to save him, hadn’t gone to Jihad Awdeh and told him what he knew, at least George might have faced a firing squad, not a lynch mob. Yet he couldn’t understand the tranquility of Habib Saba. He thought that the old man’s body ought to look more crushed than it did. His perfect stillness made him seem immutable, as if the collapsing wall had found his body as unchangeable as stone and failed to break it. Habib Saba’s corpse emerged from the rubble neat and self-contained and serene, as though the policemen heaving aside the debris were archeologists unearthing the statue of an ancient monarch.
The policemen lifted Habib Saba. A thick black book dropped from his grasp into the dust and stone. Omar Yussef brushed the powdered cement from the worn leather cover and opened it. On the flyleaf, there was an inscription in an educated, old-fashioned hand: “To Abu Omar, God willing there always will be such harmony between those of our two faiths as there has been between you and I. Your dear friend, Issa.” These were the words written by the Jerusalem priest to Omar Yussef’s father in the days before there was hatred between Christians and Muslims in Palestine. This was the Bible Omar Yussef gave George when he was a student, the solace of his exile and the reminder of his love for his hometown. George’s father had clutched it as he died, protecting it with his body as Sofia protected the bodies of her children, as though he could keep intact that better world it represented, even as his bones shattered.
Omar Yussef took his handkerchief from his jacket. He wiped the sweat from his forehead to moisten the edge of the cloth and rubbed the dust from the Bible. The black leather came up as lustrous as the feathers of a raven.
The rain fell more heavily. An ambulance quickly took George Saba’s children away, before the shooting started again. Jihad Awdeh climbed unsteadily out of another ambulance. The medics grabbed at him, but he shook them off, angrily. His men, shouting at the police to clear the way, took him to his jeep and sped away.
Khamis Zeydan looked up at George Saba’s smoldering home. He issued a few orders to his men to begin the clean-up. Then he put his hand on Omar Yussef’s elbow. “I think I’d better take you to the hospital,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“Better to be safe. The doctors ought to have a look at you.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“This is the second time in two days you’ve been knocked off your feet by an explosion. Come on, these things can damage your internal organs, even if you seem fine on the outside. Let’s go.”
“No, take me home. I need to change out of these clothes. I’m wet through.”
Shivering, he climbed into the passenger seat of Khamis Zey-dan’s jeep. They drove slowly out of the street and down the winding hill from Beit Jala. Omar Yussef was silent and angry. Here he was, taking a ride from the police chief, the very man who surely should have prevented all this killing. He had thought Khamis Zeydan was not the one to blame, that it was the corruption all around him that made him ineffectual. But now he believed that his friend was, at best, a passive participant in murder and, at worst, the one who led the killers to their prey.
Khamis Zeydan seemed to sense the meaning of his friend’s silence. He looked across at Omar Yussef repeatedly, but the schoolteacher deliberately kept his eyes ahead on the empty road as they passed Aida refugee camp. Eventually the police chief blurted out, “You blame me for this, don’t you. I can tell. You’re angry with me. You blame me.”