The Collaborator of Bethlehem

Omar Yussef wondered if Jihad Awdeh knew he lived across the street from the UN schoolteacher who had confronted his boss Tamari only yesterday. Somehow, the thought of such a close proximity to Awdeh made him feel tenser than he would have if Maryam had told him that Hussein Tamari had moved in. There was something more unpredictable about Awdeh and, despite what he knew about Tamari’s part in Louai’s murder, Omar Yussef thought the senior Martyrs Brigades man was bound by codes of tribal honor that Awdeh would scorn. There was something basic and lupine about Awdeh that made Omar Yussef’s mouth dry. When he entered Hussein Tamari’s headquarters, he knew that at least there he was safe. Tamari wouldn’t dishonor himself and his family by killing a guest. Omar Yussef considered what he would have done had Jihad Awdeh been in charge. He concluded that he would have been compelled to take the same action, but he wasn’t sure that he would have left the gunmen’s lair alive.

The digger reached the edge of the road. Omar Yussef moved away from the window a little and wondered if the driver intended to keep digging right through the middle of his house.

“Omar, your gun. The army might come in and find it,” Maryam said.

“It’s not my gun. Anyway they aren’t searching the house. Not with a mechanical digger, at least.”

As the digger pulled its tray up from the trench, there was a gush of water.

“They cut the pipes,” Maryam said.

The water shot into the air a moment, catching the faint, leaden light of the moon that filtered through the cloudy sky, then disappeared into the trench. The digger hovered for another plunge into the dirt, but then it turned and moved away. The APC moved out in its wake. The tank was the last to leave, spinning with a roar toward the hill that would take them over the back of Dehaisha to Beit Sahour and the army camp.

Maryam’s grip on his hand remained tight until the sound of the tanks almost disappeared, then it loosened and Omar Yussef stroked her palm, silently. There was a moment when he almost felt calm, in the dark and the quiet with his wife. Then her strong grip returned and broke his reverie.

“What’s that smell?” she said.

There was a damp rankness in the cold air. At the moment they smelled it, there was noise downstairs. Ramiz’s children began to cry out and Omar Yussef could hear his son speaking urgently to his wife. The door opened at the bottom of the stairs and the children ran up them. Omar Yussef stood and went to the hallway. The smallest girl was crying. Nadia held her arms around her little sister’s neck. Omar Yussef noted that Nadia was calm and quiet. He smiled and touched her cheek. Ramiz came up the stairs with little Omar, who was sniffling and not quite awake. He put the boy down on an armchair and gave a quick look at his parents.

“The basement is flooding,” he said, rushing back down the stairs.

Omar Yussef followed his son. At the foot of the stairs, the last two steps were already submerged. The water was black in the darkness, but Omar Yussef knew from the stink that it was sewage. The pipe the digger broke was spilling its contents into his house. He took off his loafers and socks, rolled the socks into a ball and placed them inside the loafers on the fifth step, and waded into the slimy water. Ramiz and Sara hurried past with the children’s thin, foam mattresses and Ramiz’s laptop.

Omar Yussef went to the back door, opened it and began to bail the sewage out into the night with a saucepan. His back hurt, bending to the water and flipping the pan up the basement steps. The cold swill rose almost to his knees. Its iciness soothed the bruise on his shin, but the smell made him want to puke. It seemed appropriate that he should be throwing filth out of his home with hopelessly insufficient tools. It was what he had been trying to do ever since George Saba’s arrest. His mind had been full of anger and fear, frustration and intense focus since the Zubeida girl came into his classroom with the news of the raid on George’s home. Now the ordure of his own town was right here, physical and disgusting, crawling up his legs and making him nauseous.

He stopped bailing and slowly straightened his back. He looked out into the night. Tomorrow they would mend the pipes. They would clean the basement and his grandchildren would sleep there again soon enough. But that would not be the end of the smell. The reek would remain in his nostrils, and he knew that in his dreams he would feel the ooze rising over his skin.

Chapter 18

Omar Yussef came down with a flu. It started in his legs, after the night’s freezing immersion in the sewage downstairs. By the time the municipality cut off the flow of effluent through the pipes and Omar Yussef had tossed the mess out of his back door with a saucepan, his knees were stiff and burned feverishly to the touch. His back ached. His face was clammy. His pulse was fast.

Maryam sent her husband upstairs to rest and called in their neighbors to shovel out the remaining few inches of sewage from the basement and to scour the tiles until the stink of effluent receded. He lay on his bed. His back throbbed as though a small child were kicking it in time with his heartbeat. He would have to take off a day or two from his investigation to organize the repairs to the pipes and to his home. He would need to recuperate from the night’s damp exertions. It was time that he didn’t have to waste, and neither did George Saba. He tried to sit up, but his back rebelled and he fell, feeling very cold, though Maryam had lit the gas heater. Yet it was hot in the room, too, and he undid his shirt down to his belly. There was sweat in the hair about his navel. Still, he felt cold. Cold, when he should have been hot, and weak and feverish when he should have been forceful, standing strongly against the wrong done to George. He imagined his friend in the freezing cell at the police headquarters. He wondered what he would say if he could see Omar Yussef lying on his back with his shirt open over his slack, perspiring stomach and the heater turned on full.

There was a knock at the door. His neighbor Leila Salman looked in. She was a cheerful woman who worked for the head of the local university as a secretary. Omar Yussef enjoyed her company, because she was one of the few people he knew who was less interested in the intifada than in the history of art, recipes for stuffing dumplings with ground meat to make kubbeh, and archeology. She was not yet forty, and she had become quite fat after giving birth to her last child four years ago. She had a fulsome, motherly roundness that made Omar Yussef wonder what it would be like to touch her, to hold her. He often played with what might ensue if she were to enter his bedroom, but those fantasies typically didn’t include his incapacitation through fever and a strained back. She bustled through the door in an old gray sweatsuit and pink dishwashing gloves and held out a small cup of coffee toward him.

“I made it sa’ada for you, Abu Ramiz, as you like it,” Leila said.

Omar Yussef tried to sit and accept the coffee, but his back gripped him and he collapsed. Leila put the coffee on the bedside table and placed her knee on the bed. She clutched Omar Yussef under his arms and pulled him upright. His cry of pain was muffled farcically by her large breasts. Omar Yussef cursed the pathetic figure he must make before a woman to whom he felt attracted. She sat on the edge of the bed and handed him the coffee.