The Collaborator of Bethlehem

the glass of water and squeezed her cheek.

The family finished their food in their accustomed quiet. The kids milled about the table absently as Sara went to prepare tea. Ramiz peeled an orange and dealt out segments to his children.

“I went to Dima Abdel Rahman today, for a condolence call,” Omar Yussef said as he sliced an apple.

“Ah, the poor one,” Maryam said. “To be without a husband.”

“Is it so bad to be without a husband?” Omar Yussef laughed, brief and guttural. “Sometimes you have been known to suggest that husbands are lazy and messy and a nuisance about the house.”

“Omar, you know what I mean.”

Maryam wagged her finger at him, jokingly. Lines stroked downward from her eyes and mouth, giving her face a sad cast, even as she smiled. She wore her hair in a soft wave, parted at the side and falling a few inches below her ears. She dyed it a stark raven color and always dressed in comfortable black clothing. As she aged, her skin had turned a deep gray, so that she sometimes stood out in a room like a single figure from an old movie inadvertently omitted from the colorization process.

The feelings of a man for his wife are very complex, Omar Yussef thought. It’s a shame our women can’t acknowledge that their relationships to their men are not so simple, either. It would be a better thing.

Omar Yussef needed the companionship he found with Maryam. She was born at the same time as he was, but in the north of Palestine, in Nazareth. Her family fled first to Jenin and then to Bethlehem. He had met her when they shared a taxi south from Jenin, where she still had relatives. He was beginning the final stage of his journey home from university in Damascus. They were bound together at first by their political views, their Arab nationalism. Defiantly, Maryam never covered her head as Muslim women do, though motherhood and the responsibility of the home eventually made her politics more simplistic, more average. She gave birth to three sons. Ramiz lived in the apartment downstairs, but the other two had emigrated, to the United States and to Britain. Instead of the politics of her people, Maryam fretted now about when she might see her faraway boys, a concern that could have applied to any mother anywhere in the world. Perhaps it isn’t Maryam who’s become less smart. Maybe everyone was deeper back in my student days, when they didn’t see the threat of a Zionist conspiracy everywhere, Omar Yussef thought. It quietly infuriated him to hear Maryam talk about politics these days, but at least she never spoke of the dead as martyrs.

In any case, Omar Yussef wanted to talk to his son about George Saba and the thoughts about the case that had come to him after his visit to Dima Abdel Rahman. Ramiz ran a mobile phone business and his customers kept him informed about new developments in the town. Omar Yussef hoped his son might know something that would clear George’s name.

“I can’t help feeling that George is being set up somehow,” he said. “I just don’t believe that he would collaborate with the Israelis.”

“People will do very desperate things,” Ramiz said. “George’s business was selling antiques to Israelis on the bypass road. He can’t do that any more, because there’s a siege here, and his Israeli customers are afraid to come. So his business is suffering. Maybe he got desperate. Maybe the Shin Bet got to him and told him they could solve all his problems if he did something for them.”

“It’s because he’s a Christian that he has been accused. That’s all. It isn’t because he actually collaborated.”

“Maybe it’s because he’s a Christian that he’s willing to help the other side.”

Omar Yussef was shocked. “I remind you that you were educated by the Freres. You studied at the very same Christian school as George Saba, the Christian school where I used to teach.”

“Dad, I’m just saying that people will do things under circumstances like these that we would never expect from them in normal times.”

“Like accusing all Christians of being traitors?” Omar Yussef leaned forward angrily.

“That isn’t what I meant. But, look, Christians are already on the outside of our society, these days. Maybe they feel they owe less loyalty than a Muslim does.”

Omar Yussef put down the paring knife and ate some of the apple. “I saw some of your loyal Muslims firing guns into the air at the mourning tent for Louai Abdel Rahman this afternoon.”

“I gave that a miss, because I went to the funeral earlier this morning,” Ramiz said. “It was the usual show from the gunmen then. So they turned up at the mourning tent, too?”

“Yes. But something is strange about what happened at the Abdel Rahman’s place,” Omar Yussef said. He looked around him to be sure the children were out of the room. “You remember that Dima is a former pupil of mine. She told me that she heard Louai talking to someone outside the house just before he was shot. And she saw a red spot of light that seemed to be trying to settle on him.”

“He spoke to someone?”

“Yes. He said, ‘Oh, it’s you, Abu Walid.’”

Ramiz sucked on a segment of orange, slowly. “Dad, let me say two things. First, when the Israelis use collaborators, they get the collaborators to go really close in, just to be completely sure that they’ve got the right man. When the collaborator gives a signal, they know the identification is made and they hit their target.”

“How do you know this?”

“Uncle Khamis told me when I visited him at the police station. He was reading an intelligence report on one of the Israeli assassinations in Gaza.”

“So Abu Walid is the name of the collaborator? The one the Israelis needed to lead them to Louai?”

“Yes, that sounds like it. Someone who knew Louai would have to make the identification, obviously. He would need to be close enough to recognize Louai, even in the dark.”

“Well, George Saba wouldn’t recognize Louai. And George is Abu Dahoud, not Abu Walid. So there’s the proof of his innocence.” Omar Yussef put down his food and threw his hands wide in excitement.

Ramiz hesitated. “That brings me to my second point. Dad, please don’t get involved in this. If you try to tell