The Collaborator of Bethlehem

that seemed suddenly to have appeared on her face that her husband had never noticed before, as though the bullets were cracking the surface of her skin like a pane of glass. Her hair, a rich deep auburn dye, was a wild frame for her panicked eyes. She held her son and daughter, one on either side of her, their heads grasped protectively beneath her arms. All three were shaking. Next to them, Habib Saba sat silent and angry, below the antique guns mounted decoratively on the wall by his son. His cheekbones were high and his nose long and straight, like an ancient cameo of some impassive noble. Despite the gunfire, he held his head steady as an image carved from stone. George called out to his father above the hammering of the bullets on the walls, but the old man didn’t move.

Most of the Israeli rounds struck the outside wall of the living room with the deep impact of a straight hit. These were no ricochets. Every few moments, a bullet would rip through the shattered remains of the windows, cross the salon and embed itself in the wall behind which George Saba’s family sheltered. Sofia shuddered with each new impact, as though the projectiles might take down the entire wall, picking it away chunk by chunk, until it left her children exposed to the gunfire. The hideous racket of the bullets was punctuated by the sounds of mirrors and furniture falling in the living room and porcelain dropping to the stone floor from shattered shelves.

A bullet rang down the corridor and splintered the wood of the front door through which George Saba had entered. As he had dodged along the road in the darkness, he had been determined that tonight he would act. He had cursed the gunmen under his breath, and when a shot struck particularly close to him he had sworn at the top of his voice. Now he wanted only to crawl deeper into the alcove, to dig himself inside the wall until this nightmare stopped. If he stayed in the niche long enough, perhaps he would awake and find himself in his store in Santiago and this idiotic fantasy of returning to his childhood home would once more be merely a dream, not a reality of red-hot lead, blasting through his home, destructive and deadly. He looked over to the bedroom and caught his wife’s pleading expression, as she struggled to keep the heads of their children hidden beneath her arms. He wasn’t going to wake up in Chile. He couldn’t hide. He had to end this. He got to his feet, sliding up the wall, pushing his back hard against it as though it might wrap his flesh in impenetrable stone. He took the tense, expectant breath of a man dropping into freezing water and dashed across the exposed corridor into the bedroom.

George Saba hugged his wife and children to him. “It’s going to be all right, darlings,” he said. “I’m going to take care of it.” He pulled them close so they wouldn’t see that his jaw shook.

For the first time, his father moved his head. “What are you going to do?”

George looked sadly at the old man. He wasn’t fooled by the stillness with which Habib Saba held himself. It wasn’t calm and resolve that kept the old man frozen in his self-contained posture against the wall. His father cowered in the bedroom because he was accustomed to the corruption and violence of their town. He lived as quietly and invisibly as he could, because Christians were a minority in Bethlehem, and so Habib Saba was careful not to upset the Muslims by standing up to them. George had learned a different way of life during his years away from Palestine. He put his hand on his father’s shoulder and then touched the old man’s rough cheek.

Quickly, George stood and reached for an antique revolver mounted on the wall. It was a British Webley VI from the Second World War that he had bought a few months before from the family of an old man who had once served in the Jordanian Arab Legion and kept the gun as a souvenir of his English officers. The gray metal was dull and there was rust on the hinge, so that the cylinder couldn’t be opened. But in the darkness its six-inch barrel would look deadly enough, unlike the three inlaid Turkish flintlocks that decorated the bedroom wall beside it. George Saba tightened his hand around the square-cut grip and felt the gun’s weight.

Habib reached out for his son’s arm, but couldn’t hold fast. Sofia screamed when she saw the revolver in her husband’s hand. At the sound, her daughter peered from under her mother’s arm. George knew he must act now or the sight of those frightened eyes would break him. He reached down and put his hand over the child’s brow, as though to close her eyes. “Don’t worry, little Miral. Daddy’s going to tell the men to stop playing and making noise.” It sounded stupid and, for the moment, he kept his fingers over the girl’s face so that he wouldn’t see the look of incredulity he felt sure would have registered on her features. Even a child could tell this was no game. Then he dashed through the front door.

Chapter 2

Darkness smothered the valley swiftly, sliding gray down the steep hillsides, blotting out the scanty olive trees and shading the romantic portraits of the martyrs in the cemetery, until it settled over the village of Irtas. In the home of the Abdel Rahmans, no one turned on the lights. To do so would have illuminated the vegetable patch and the glade of pines outside, through which the family expected their eldest son to creep home soon for the iftar, the evening meal to break the Ramadan fast. In the front room of the house, Dima Abdel Rahman set down a tray of kamar al- din. She placed the glasses of apricot juice before the cushions where each member of the family would sit to eat. The glass with the most fruit floating in it, she put by the corner of the low table, where Louai would want to sit so that he could watch the windows for any threat. Then she went to the open window for a moment and, ignoring the excited, fluttery calls of her mother-in-law from the kitchen, strained her eyes into the shadows for a sight of her husband. She adjusted her cream headscarf, which curved to a pin below her chin and emphasized the strong oval of her face. Her eyes were a light, warm brown, like the foliage of Palestine’s brief autumn, and her lashes were long. It was a kindly, confident face, though it was tainted by an undertone of recent loneliness and an anxious tightness about her lips. She shivered and hugged herself as the night’s chill penetrated her bright holiday robe.

The building was well situated for these clandestine visits. Louai Abdel Rahman could move from his hideout in Irtas to this square two-story house a quarter of a mile along the valley without stepping into the open, where Israeli hit squads might see him. The cinderblock homes and winding streets of Irtas billowed across the lowest slopes and into the narrow bottom, looking from this end of the valley like rushing rapids washing through a crevasse, foaming against the precipices and cresting on fingers of easier gradients. At the edge of the village, the valley was a fertile place, the green plots of the fellahins spraying out around the famous gardens of the Roman Catholic convent tended by the Sisters of the Hortus Conclusus. Behind the Abdel Rahman house at the head of the valley were the ancient wells known as Solomon’s Pools, which fed the main aqueduct of Herod’s Jerusalem. With springs across the vale, the people of Irtas allowed themselves a luxury barred to other rural Palestinians, who strained to eke out the fetid contents of their cisterns through the eight dry months of summer: in Irtas there were tall, shady pine trees, as well as the squat, functional olives to which most villages were limited. Dima Abdel Rahman knew her husband could move about, hidden beneath the canopy of leaves, as though nature wished to be complicit in his struggle against the occupation. If the Israelis watched from above, Louai would surely see them, because the thick vegetation thinned and petered out as the hillsides cut up from the narrow floor of the wadi. The soldiers would be exposed on those bare slopes, even in the twilight.

Then Dima Abdel Rahman heard sounds among the trees. It must be him, she thought. She kept quiet, even though her mother-in-law called her to help with the serving once more. There was nothing moving that she could see, but the undergrowth crackled beneath careful footsteps. He was coming, for the first time in weeks. She straightened her headscarf excitedly once more and fiddled with the pin beneath her throat.

No matter how long Louai hid from the Israelis, she would never grow accustomed to the absences between his visits to the house where she lived with his parents, his brother and three sisters. They had been married only a year, but he had been underground most of that time. It was as her parents had feared. Before the wedding, they