to avenge her and to preserve his own self-respect. He turned away from the sideboard.
Omar Yussef rubbed his shin and sat down, wincing. He worried about his physical fitness at the best of times. Now he would have a bruise across the bone for a week or two. It would bite into his nerves every time he took a shaky step. Nevertheless he was grateful for the pain, because as long as he suffered he was sure to be alive.
Then the Israelis came. There was a low growl along the hilltop above Dehaisha. Omar Yussef heard it and knew immediately that the soldiers had cut the electricity so they could operate without being seen. He wondered if he should wake Maryam, or Ramiz and his family downstairs in the basement apartment. He moved closer to the window and watched from the shadows.
A tank and an armored personnel carrier came along the road, churning the blacktop with their metal tracks. A massive digger followed. It was the height of two tanks stacked on top of each other. The tank and the APC set themselves on either side of the street at the corner a dozen yards before Omar Yussef’s house. The digger came between the two, lowered its arm to cut into the tarmac and started to slice a trench across the main road. Its impact on the paving and the rocky earth beneath sounded like the noise you hear inside your head when you crunch a handful of peanuts with your mouth closed.
“Omar?” Maryam called to her husband, sleepily, from the bedroom at the back of the house. She came into the salon, wrapping herself in a woolen dressing gown. She pushed her ruffled hair from her face and peered into the darkened room.
“Don’t come near the window,” Omar Yussef said. “There are tanks outside.”
“What are they doing?” She walked toward his voice. He knew that she couldn’t tell exactly where he was.
“I told you not to come to the window. Stay there. Go back to bed.”
“Are you crazy? How can I go to bed when the army is at the front door?”
“Then just stay there.”
“What are they doing?”
Omar Yussef looked back toward the digger. Its trench was halfway across the street already, perhaps six feet deep and two yards wide. “They’re digging a hole across the road.”
“Why?”
“I assume it’s so that people won’t be able to drive between Bethlehem and Dehaisha.”
“But why?”
It would surely be so the army could cut the Martyrs Brigades and Hamas into smaller pieces, making it harder for explosives and weapons to be transported. To move about, the gunmen would have to bring their rifles and explosives and mortars across the trench by hand. If they had to take their weapons into the open, there was a greater chance that they would be spotted and intercepted. In which case, the spotting and intercepting would be done outside Omar Yussef’s front door, perhaps by snipers or helicopter missiles or tank shells, and it might be done when he or his grandchildren happened to be crossing the street. He didn’t want Maryam to think about that. “Just because they can, the bastards,” he said.
Even in the dark, he realized that Maryam didn’t believe him. It was he who always told her that blind hatred of the soldiers led to misunderstanding of the army’s tactics. People saw them as nothing more than cruel animals, and that was the first step to becoming just as vicious oneself.
“You usually don’t talk about them like that, Omar.”
“Fine, then I don’t know. I don’t know why they’re doing it. I just want them to go, so that we can fill in the big, damned hole in the road.”
Maryam moved across the room. Her eyes were accustomed to the dark by now. Anyway, she knew better than Omar Yussef where the furniture would be to obstruct her, because it was her role to clean it every week. She put her hand on her husband’s shoulder and he reached up to hold her fingers.
“I thought they were coming for Jihad Awdeh,” she said.
The sound of that name caused Omar Yussef to shudder. He pictured Jihad Awdeh emerging with his grim, sneering smile from the darkness in the corners of the room. Why did Maryam mention Awdeh, though? It struck him that she might somehow have meant that the Israelis knew her husband was investigating the Martyrs Brigades; that the soldiers came to his house, aware that they would catch Awdeh there, stalking his kill. “Why would they come to our house to look for Jihad Awdeh?”
“Not our house. Across the street. He just moved into the apartment building right there.”
“Which one?”
“The one where Amjad and Leila live.”
Omar Yussef looked out at the building. It was a four-story, square block with a dozen apartments and a tall television antenna in the shape of the Eiffel Tower on the roof. He searched the darkened windows for a malevolent face or a trace of the Saddam Hussein Astrakhan hat. “I haven’t seen him there.”
“He moved in two days ago. Leila told me yesterday. She’s very worried that the soldiers will come and blow the place up or that there’ll be a gunbattle. She already told Jihad not to let his men sit around in the hallway with their guns when her kids are around.”
“What did he say?”
“She said he was very polite and promised to keep the guns inside his apartment.”
“How nice of him.”
“His family moved in, too. Leila says he brought his wife and his two kids.”
Omar Yussef hadn’t thought of Jihad Awdeh as a husband or father before. It seemed strange to imagine him sharing intimacies with a wife or dandling his children. He could even picture Hussein Tamari, burly and boisterous, playfully wrestling his young son. But he couldn’t conceive of Awdeh engaging in such innocent, homely pleasures.
