Omar Yussef pitied this man. He wondered what made Nat-sha flee his home. With what outrage might the Martyrs Brigades have sucked the will out of him?
“I’m very sorry, uncle,” Marwan Natsha said, “but I have to lock up and go to an
“Will you pray for George Saba, before you break the fast?”
“No, I’ll be thinking of the food, because I’m hungry, and I’ll be trying to forget that I have to go before this damned court later tonight.
“I’ll be praying for you.”
Marwan Natsha held Omar Yussef’s gaze a moment, as though he were weighing whether he was, after all, a more promising recipient of someone’s devotions than a condemned man. Coughing, he stood and gathered the papers from his desk. He stubbed out his cigarette and picked up his briefcase. He was down the stairs so quickly on his long legs that he left Omar Yussef behind in the dark.
In the corridor, Omar Yussef lifted one of Marwan Natsha’s legal diplomas off the wall. The frame shook in his hand. He flung it down the first flight of stairs. The glass shattered against the wall. Three flights below, Marwan Natsha’s steps halted for a moment, then he moved on.
Omar Yussef listened to Natsha’s cough receding along the empty road. He walked down the stairs and picked up the broken frame with the attorney’s diploma and carried it back to the office door. He leaned it against the window. There was a smear of dirt on the parchment and he was sorry for that. Slowly, he went down the stairs.
Across the street, the hill dropped quickly. Omar Yussef looked beyond the agricultural fringe of Bethlehem and into the Judean Desert. The shallow folds of the sterile hills below rippled down to the Dead Sea. In the first reflected light of the night, the desert was illuminated a bright, milky blue. It looked like the cratered surface of the moon. Omar Yussef felt as though his own existence traveled a more distant orbit than that dead satellite, gliding silent above the impossibly frenetic, cynical reality of the rest of the planet. He wondered if there was any place as barren anywhere on earth.
Chapter 16
In the State Security Court, the crowd murmured with the animated tenor of a theater audience before a first night. As he found himself a seat, Omar Yussef felt that this was, indeed, a staged drama, scripted and contrived, a tragedy that would run forever in his own distressed mind. The hall was large and plainly painted, with a low ceiling. It was lit by fluorescent tubes that stuttered through a floating layer of cigarette smoke to cast a sickly blue flicker over the people crowded into the rows of chairs. Omar Yussef figured there must be about a thousand spectators packed into the plastic seats and jammed along the aisles at the sides of the hall. A dozen policemen guarded the front of the court. Khamis Zeydan paced behind them, murmuring orders. Acquaintances of Omar Yussef smiled and waved to him through a screen of excitable, bobbing heads.
The only people in the room who seemed quiet were Muhammad and Yunis Abdel Rahman. The father and brother of the man in whose death George Saba was accused of collaborating leaned against a square pillar at the side of the room. The father looked sad, but Yunis Abdel Rahman’s bony face was flushed and indignant as he stared at the empty bench where the judges would sit. The father glanced at Yunis, but the boy refused to acknowledge the older man’s presence. Omar Yussef detected something desperate and lost and ashamed in the way Muhammad Abdel Rahman tried to catch his son’s eye.
Though the windows of the courtroom were closed, Omar Yussef felt cold. It was as though all these bodies exuded such animosity toward the accused that they were incapable of generating warmth. He checked his watch. The hearing was due to begin in five minutes and he had been lucky to find a seat. As he settled into his place, the jostling spectators in the aisles argued with the press of new onlookers shoving their way through the door. It was late at night and they were excited and irritable, like children allowed to stay up past their bedtime.
Omar Yussef overheard the stupid rumors of George Saba’s evil passing through the crowd. It was all he could do to keep quiet. There would be no point in defending his friend before these people. It disgusted him that there were, among his neighbors, so many who would gladly see a man condemned to death, for it was not an acquittal that the crowd had come to witness. He felt saddened that his town was so beaten down and full of hate that its highest pleasure would be the punishment of what it perceived as a single, small element in the machine of oppression. He looked about for Habib Saba, but couldn’t find him in the crowd.
The lawyers came to their places at the tables facing the bench. Some of the people in the front rows leaned between the officers in the cordon of policemen to shake hands with the prosecutor. They were handshakes of congratulations, and the prosecutor smiled broadly, as though everything were already finished and the case were settled in his favor. Omar Yussef knew that collaborators received unfair trials in Gaza, but he had thought that in Bethlehem there was more decency than that. Marwan Natsha sat alone at his table. In the fluorescent light, he was grayer than when Omar Yussef visited him that afternoon. His height, which should have made him commanding, only highlighted that he was too thin, unhealthily so. It seemed as though he might easily be snapped in half, like a tall, withered flower that had already shed its few melancholy buds. Natsha brought no documents that Omar Yussef could see, not even the file that had lain upon his desk. The only objects he placed on the table before him were a pack of Rothman’s and a tin ashtray, which he seemed absorbed in filling.
Khamis Zeydan moved behind his policemen and broke up the congratulatory handshaking. He spoke a curt sentence that swiftly replaced the prosecutor’s smile with a look of hurt and slight embarrassment. Omar Yussef watched his old friend, who turned a stern glance on the spectators crowded behind the prosecutor. At least the police chief was ready to remind people that this was not an entertainment, that a man’s life was in the scales of whatever kind of justice might prove to be on display. There was a tension in Khamis Zeydan’s jaw and an intensity about his eyes that suggested he was suffering at this moment. By this time of night, he was usually fairly well drunk and it could merely be the strain of maintaining his sobriety that showed on his rigid visage. Omar Yussef hoped that it was simply because, as a lawman, Khamis Zeydan couldn’t bear to see justice turned into a popular circus. Then it struck him: it was because the police chief knew the truth behind Louai Abdel Rahman’s death, knew the identity of the true collaborator, an identity that Omar Yussef only suspected.
Omar Yussef reconsidered his suspicion that Khamis Zeydan had tipped off Louai’s murderer to the fact that Dima Abdel Rahman knew of “Abu Walid.” No one else outside of Omar Yussef’s immediate family could have known what Dima had told him, except Khamis Zeydan. If he had realized who he should warn about the clue Dima had given Omar Yussef, it was surely because Khamis Zeydan also knew the details of Louai’s murder. Omar Yussef knew better than to expect the police automatically to arrest a killer, the way things were these days, particularly if that murderer were the head of the Martyrs Brigades. But he hadn’t considered that the police chief would protect the guilty man at the cost of endangering another innocent person. Perhaps Khamis Zeydan hadn’t known that Hussein Tamari would kill Dima. Maybe he expected him to warn her to stay quiet, to frighten her, even to beat her. But Zeydan knew with whom he was dealing, and it would surely have occurred to him that, if he passed on damaging information, Hussein Tamari might silence Dima for good.
