The Collaborator of Bethlehem

“That’s not what I meant. The autoshops are not your business.”

“Neither are they yours anymore.”

“We’ll manage.”

“Why did they take the business away from you?”

Yunis was silent again.

“I thought they were Louai’s friends,” Omar Yussef said. “He was in the same faction as the leaders of the Martyrs Brigades. They should be looking after his family, not stealing its livelihood. And why did they come and kill Dima?”

“Who told you that?”

Omar Yussef feigned surprise. “That’s the conclusion of the police.”

“The police just got here.”

“You know that the police operate on intelligence information, not on things that they find on the crime scene. You see, the crime scene can be tampered with, or even set up, faked. But intelligence, the things their informants tell them, that’s something the police can rely upon.”

Omar Yussef watched the boy very closely. Yunis’s left eye twitched nervously. Omar Yussef decided to press the boy. He spoke more loudly, with almost casual, confiding assuredness. “Look, they came here to kill Dima because they feared that she knew something about Louai’s death—something that they wanted to hide. It was they who killed Louai, not the Israelis. This Christian guy that they’ve arrested had nothing to do with it. You know that.”

“How would I know?”

“What if the Martyrs Brigades killed Louai and blamed the Israelis, so that they could take the family business from your father? You were helpless to prevent it. But the Martyrs Brigades found out that Dima knew something about them. Maybe that she saw something or heard something when she was waiting for Louai to come home that night. So they killed her. They made it look like some kind of sex crime, so that people would assume it’s just a random nasty pervert who took her life.”

“The Martyrs Brigades are fighters, strugglers for our people.”

“Like your brother?”

“Yes. Like my brother.”

“How well did you know him, eh? Did you really know everything that he was into?” Omar Yussef looked over at the white sheet, lumpy with the body beneath. “They have all kinds of tests these days. Genetic tests. You’ve seen where Dima’s backside was scratched? They’ll be able to look under the fingernails of any suspect and check that the fragments of skin they find there came from her buttocks, when the killer scratched her.” He turned and looked at Yunis’s hands. The boy pulled his fingers tight into fists. “They’ll probably check you, too.”

“How could I have done this to my sister-in-law? You’re crazy.”

“Haven’t you heard of honor crime?”

“How had she offended the honor of our family?”

“You tell me.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything. You aren’t even a policeman. You’re a schoolteacher.” He walked away from Omar Yussef quickly. Then he stopped. “You should have taught Dima better. If you had, she wouldn’t have ended like this. She came out here to meet a man for sex and he killed her.”

“That’s a pretty desperate explanation and I know you don’t believe it.”

“If you taught her better, she would be alive. It’s you that killed her, you son of a whore. They ought to check under your fingernails.” The boy went fast around the house and into the garage with his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Omar Yussef heard the loud revving of an engine, as though Yunis were pumping the gas to make a racket as ringing as the scream he could not allow himself to emit.

Omar Yussef hobbled toward the white sheet. The policeman guarding the body nodded. Omar Yussef knelt stiffly on the damp grass. He lifted the corner of the sheet and looked at Dima’s face. Her cheeks puffed where the cloth remained balled in her mouth. Her eyes stared blankly into the dirt.

Omar Yussef looked at his hands. What did he have under his fingernails? Who had he scratched during his years as a teacher? Had he taught these children to be discontented, unable to accept the reality of their society? Had he given them principles that would surely be violated by the world around them, dooming them to cynicism and disillusion? If you looked beneath my nails, Omar Yussef thought, Yunis was right about what might be found there. There would be traces of the skin of Dima Abdel Rahman, of George Saba, of how many others? Gently he put his fingers on Dima’s lids and closed her eyes.

Chapter 12

Omar Yussef waited among the pines for Khamis Zeydan to complete his interviews with the Abdel Rahmans. A photographer came to document the details of Dima Abdel Rah-man’s death for the forensic record. He flipped the sheet off her, snapped her face in close-up and scuttled around to get a shot of the body in relation to the house twenty yards away. He joked crudely with the policeman guarding the corpse about Dima’s marred backside. Omar Yussef turned away and leaned his face against the bark of a tree trunk.

Omar Yussef had spent his life teaching history, the facts and meanings of real occurrences. But he tried to keep himself free of the corroding effect of the historical events through which he had lived. He had never experienced life as a nomadic fighter, as Khamis Zeydan had. He didn’t become a hateful thinker, a deceitful propagandist, like so many people around him. He wasn’t untouched by his people’s trouble, but he felt as close to pure as it seemed to him a man in control of his senses might be. He lived in the house his father had once rented, and he taught in a classroom that was, for reasonably intelligent pupils, a chamber that transported them to another time, safe from the destruction and prejudice around them. As he leaned against the pine, he wondered if he was sacrificing this purity and sanity to the investigation he had taken upon himself. Perhaps he remained an