The Collaborator of Bethlehem

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 cafe 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.

His eldest granddaughter, Nadia, filled his glass with water. She was twelve years old, with skin that was pale from passing the summer inside, under curfew, but her eyes were dark, with a light of intelligence gleaming in them. She was Omar Yussef’s favorite grandchild. She loved to hear his stories. Nadia often asked him to tell her the story of how he came to this house.

It was fifty-six years since and Omar Yussef had been only a few months old, but, for the sake of the tale, he claimed to remember the arrival. His father told the servants to pack enough belongings to fill four carts. Others traveled lighter, expecting a short exile until the Arab armies expelled the Jews, but Omar Yussef’s father later told him that he had known they would never return to their village. As the carts joined the refugees on the road to Bethlehem and Hebron, his father looked back at the village where he had expected his son one day to be headman like him and watched a tractor crossing the fields from the kibbutz with a handful of people walking behind it, heading for his village. “It’s gone, you know,” his father had told him, when his growing son first began to talk about politics. “The village, the olive trees, the position of mukhtar. All gone. So forget about it. Don’t listen to the people who think we can return.” Even as a young boy, Omar Yussef knew his father was right. The loss of land and privilege felt like less of a burden to him than it did to his friends, because he knew he always would have the protection and wisdom of his father.

The family came to Dehaisha on the edge of Bethlehem with the rest of their clan, which was called Sirhan. In Dehaisha, the peasants from their village set up in the canvas tents provided by the United Nations. Omar Yussef’s father rented this stone house between Dehaisha and Bethlehem for twelve dinars. He paid the rent until he died, when his son took over the payments. The Sirhan clan spread over the Bethlehem area, until it was a respectable group of about two thousand people, professionals and tradesmen. The clan was strong because its people never caused trouble with other families, and because some of them were influential in the political factions and had the protection of their militias. There were Sirhans who were powerful in the local branch of Hamas and others who climbed to prominence within the biggest faction, Fatah.

It made Omar Yussef happy that Nadia seemed to grasp his meaning when he told her this story, as though it were his dear, omniscient father who sat before her talking, rather than Omar Yussef. He felt he took on the nobility of his father as he spoke to her. Somehow, Nadia led him to the honorable essence of himself. He thanked her for