Omar Yussef paused, then he put his hand on Dima’s shoulder. She looked down and smiled. He let his hand rest there. “My sister, yours was a short marriage, but you were lucky enough to have that brief time with a man who loved you. You know enough about the way things are for women in our society to understand that this is a blessing.”
“Yes, uncle.” She blew her nose in his handkerchief. “I have to go back to the kitchen now. I’ll come and visit you soon. Please give my greetings to Umm Ramiz. A generous Ramadan.”
“Thank you. Allah lengthen your life.”
Omar Yussef was moved by the girl’s emotion. He would have liked to stay with her longer. He didn’t want to go back to the men in the mourning tent, so he shuffled through the grass to the trees. He leaned against the pine where Louai Abdel Rahman had been illuminated by a small, red light. Omar Yussef looked about him. A strip of grass had been wrenched from the ground in front of the tree. Maybe Louai had slipped and uprooted these blades when he was shot. Omar Yussef stepped a few paces to his right. A patch of grass and underbrush about the size of a man’s prone body had been crushed and flattened behind a tree. This must be where Abu Walid—if he existed—had waited. But why would he lie here? Had he shot Louai Abdel Rahman from this hiding place? There was only space in the flattened spot for one man, so there couldn’t have been an Israeli hit squad there with him, whoever he was.
Omar Yussef looked closely at the spot. He ruffled the flattened grass stems with his foot. Something bright came to the surface. He bent stiffly and picked it up. In his palm he held a spent machine-gun cartridge. He kicked about in the flattened grass to see if there were more. Dima had said that Louai was shot twice. But there was only one cartridge case here. He couldn’t see anything else on the ground.
Someone named Abu Walid had been here, lying in wait long enough to flatten the grass. Louai Abdel Rahman had known him. One spent cartridge case had been left behind. Did that mean Abu Walid had taken one shot at Louai, while someone in another location fired the other? What was the red light that Dima had seen?
Omar Yussef made his way back to the mourning tent. He put the bullet casing in the pocket of his jacket. Hussein Tamari was talking about Louai Abdel Rahman in a loud voice at the edge of the tent. “The martyr,” he called him. It struck Omar Yussef that there was security in the thought that a man died as a martyr. There was no groaning and bleeding and wishing not to die in a case of martyrdom. For those who lived on, it was as though there had been no death.
There were different ways to defend oneself against the fear of death. Omar Yussef thought that only the dead could truly protect you from death. When you realize that someone is gone and always gone, there is no longing for their return. If death is simple and absolute, there is no doubt, no wondering whether the deceased received a good reward or was consigned to the flames—and doubt is a much more protracted torment than any kind of death. When you can look at a headstone and think simply to yourself, “That lump of gray rock is what prevents the dust of my beloved blowing all over the cuffs of my pants, and that dust is all that there is left of him,” then you can truly live until you, too, die.
Omar Yussef ran his fingers over the cartridge casing. That’s what I believe about death, he thought. But murder is different.
Chapter 5
Omar Yussef considered himself a long way from Paradise. No prayers preceded the iftar at his house. He broke each day’s fast during Ramadan simply, with his family around the dining table in the drafty entrance hall of his old stone home. The lights already had been on in the house most of the dismal afternoon since Omar Yussef had returned, chilled through, from his condolence call to Dima Abdel Rahman. He was deeply disturbed by the thought of George alone in a jail cell, facing the possibility of a death sentence for collaboration. The heavy gloom of the overcast afternoon became cold, black evening. The streets, almost empty because of the threat of rain, were cleared utterly by the festive break fasts.
Omar Yussef’s wife, Maryam, sent his grandson, little Omar, into the salon to call him to the table. Omar Yussef put down his tea cup and pressed his hand to the boy’s cheek.
“What’s for dinner?” he asked.
“Grandma’s food,” little Omar said.
“What did she cook? Did she make something sweet for your sweet tooth?”
Little Omar nodded and wriggled away. Omar Yussef called him back and gave him a sugar cube from the china bowl on the coffee table. The boy smiled and ran to the door. Omar Yussef heard his wife bringing a pot to the table. Little Omar popped the sugar into his mouth. Evidently Maryam noticed him crunching it in his small jaw.
“Omar, you’ll spoil the boy’s appetite,” she called.
Omar Yussef came laughing into the hallway. “You know the proverb, ‘The Lord sends almonds to those who have lost their teeth.’ Let the boy enjoy his sweets innocently, before he gets to the age where nothing is fun any more.” He took his seat at the head of the table, as the rest of the family filed in.
Ramiz, Omar’s eldest son, came up the stairs from the basement, where he lived, carrying his youngest daughter. His wife, Sara, ferried a final pot from the kitchen to the table, and Maryam fussed the children into their chairs. When all were seated, Maryam spooned ma’alouba from the wide platter at the center of the table, serving her husband first. Omar scooped some of this rice and chicken into a clammy yellow Ramadan pancake. He loved Maryam’s food and ate at home every night, unless he couldn’t avoid an invitation to a restaurant. He spooned out a helping of fattoush, a Syrian salad of mint, parsley, romaine lettuce and chopped pita bread. He had only to place Maryam’s fattoush in his mouth and the sharpness of her lemon vinaigrette would transport him to a café in the Damascus souk where he had spent many wonderful times in his youth. Maryam hadn’t been there with him, but somehow she seemed to have tasted what he had tasted. It was as though her cooking made a map for him of his life story. It was comforting, like a well-bound, old atlas that took your imagination across mountain ranges without the physical exertion, annoyance, and inconvenience of actual travel. He wondered if Louai Abdel Rahman felt the same way about Dima’s cooking. Perhaps he hadn’t been married to her long enough for the taste of her grape leaves to supplant that of his mother’s in his memories of taste and happiness. Omar Yussef thought that, as the fugitive crept home through the dusk, he would have been struggling to concentrate on the dangers around him. A mother’s cooking and its redolence of home was powerful for any Palestinian. He was comforted that at least the boy had died anticipating pleasure.
Omar Yussef watched his family take their first swallows of the meal. At the Ramadan break fast, he could sense the irritability of a day without food passing in the relief and comfort of the heavy, fatty goat’s meat Maryam boiled in milk and the green chicken broth of her mouloukhiyeh, thick with cilantro and garlic and mallow leaves, poured over rice and beans.
Omar Yussef stopped eating after a few bites. There was something different tonight. It wasn’t the quality of the meal itself, he was quite sure. Rather it was the way his body responded to it. It was the herbs Maryam used that made her cooking so special to him, the black pepper and mint she mixed with garlic and kebab. But tonight he felt revulsion as he bit into the meat. It was as though, for the first time, he considered that the basis of the food and all its nourishment was dead flesh. Did something have to die so that he could live? Did the meat have to be flavored with spices to fool his tongue, to sneak a murder past it? How much killing can we swallow, so long as it goes down easy and doesn’t tax our digestion? He glanced at his grandchildren and watched them push little lumps of animal flesh around their plates. Perhaps they instinctively understood what only now occurred to him. Everywhere there is hearty food, and it gives you a good feeling as it enters deep into your innermost organs. But if you are watching carefully, you will notice that death is gorging its way to the cemetery and you are its main course.