tray. The edges of the file were blackened by the dirt of many fingers, more soiled, he thought, than the rest of the staff files next to it. He shoved the drawer shut with his foot, took the grubby file to the desk and dropped it with a deep thud.
The first few pages contained Omar Yussef’s application for the job at the UNRWA Girls School and his references from the Freres School. There was a black-and-white passport– sized photo attached to the corner of the application with a rusting paperclip. Omar Yussef noticed that his moustache had not quite been fully white back then. It was only ten years ago. He stroked the moustache in the photograph and then ran his finger through the bristly hair on his upper lip. Perhaps he ought to shave it. It surely made him look older than he really was, particularly as the remaining hair on his head was white, too. Steadman might have had the idea for him to retire simply because he looked old enough to be a pensioner. If he shaved the moustache and dyed his hair, the next director wouldn’t think of him as an old codger who ought to make way for younger blood. With a pencil he filled in the moustache in the photograph to the gray color of the skin. He took a pen and stroked in dark hair. He looked at the man in the photo. With the new hair and clean lip, he could pass for forty-five years of age, just about. Then he remembered that the man in the old photo was, in fact, only forty-five, and he was thankful that he had cleaned up his lifestyle since then. He put a finger beneath his eye and felt the slack skin there, then he leaned close to the photo and decided that his eyes were baggier a decade before, when he was always up late and sometimes couldn’t sleep at all, so charged up had he been with whisky. He would ask Maryam to buy some hair dye and he would get rid of the moustache.
Omar Yussef read the reference from the principal of the Freres School. The headmaster, who had worked with Omar Yussef for twenty years, blamed his departure on budget cuts, for which Omar Yussef quietly thanked him as he sat in the UN director’s chair. Old Brahim hadn’t reported that he was forced to get rid of Omar Yussef by the government schools inspector, Abu Sway.
Then Omar Yussef glanced over the reports written by his first director at the UN school. He was an Irishman named Fergus whom Omar Yussef had liked. They were excellent assessments. But he came to a halt when he read the reports of the next director. This had been a Spanish lady. Pilar had preceded Steadman, and Omar Yussef always remembered her four years at the school fondly. She was a little younger than him and he had enjoyed a flirtatious exchange of humor with her. He remembered how she would laugh like a teenager when he told her how elegant she looked with her Gucci scarves and Fendi sunglasses. She was unmarried and often came to dinner with his family. Yet her annual appraisals of his teaching skills were damning. She wrote that he was too old to learn modern techniques of teaching and that he hadn’t adapted to the new syllabus issued by the president when the government took over the schools system from the Israeli Civil Administration.
Omar Yussef flipped through the other papers. There was another negative assessment by Pilar and then a letter she’d left in the file for Steadman, when he took over a year ago. It said that Omar Yussef was a difficult employee and that she had begun the process of securing an order from the government schools inspector for his dismissal. His dismissal. Perhaps Abu Sway had used the letter to try to force Steadman to fire him and, instead, the American had attempted to offer Omar Yussef an honorable way out. The rest of the file consisted of letters from parents complaining that he spoke negatively about political life in the town and that he kept too many students behind for detention at the end of the day. There was no appraisal from Christopher Steadman.
Omar Yussef closed the file. He was astonished. He had been wrong about Steadman. He immediately regretted the joke about not washing on Ramadan and all the heated words he had spoken to the poor man. Aloud, he asked for the American’s forgiveness. The man was dead, and Omar Yussef knew there would be no opportunity to correct the lack of respect he had shown Steadman while he lived. Every hostile sentence he had growled at the American seemed to come back now to smack him in the mouth from which he uttered them. He considered searching the gray cabinets for a personnel file on Steadman. Perhaps he would call the man’s parents in the United States to inform them of his death, but then he figured the headquarters in Jerusalem would have someone do that.
The sadness Omar Yussef felt at misunderstanding Stead-man fed his anger about the Spanish woman. What had made her treat him with such duplicity? He always thought it was people like Khamis Zeydan and Hussein Tamari who had to be alert to double games. Duplicity and bluff surrounded them, occupied their every thought. But he was a schoolteacher. Why should he be forced to guard against the possibility of betrayal? It disgusted him. It was bad enough that his investigation of the George Saba case led him down dark, dirty paths where there were hidden threats against him. He thought of writing an angry protest to the Spanish woman. But he wasn’t supposed to have seen his personnel file, so how could he respond to its content? If these appraisals were any judge of her true nature, Pilar would use this infraction as a pretext to get him fired. Maybe his flirting had secretly annoyed her. Or perhaps she felt rejected because he never followed up with a genuine sexual advance. It was possible. Though Omar Yussef would have considered it indecent, these European ladies behaved according to a morality that even a broadminded Arab man might find shocking. He acknowledged that, with a wife as good as Maryam, he had never been forced to confront a woman who concealed a deep anger, nor had he needed to understand the desires of an unmarried lady.
Omar Yussef quickly ran through the file and pulled out each of the blue sheets on which the Spanish woman had written her appraisals, as well as the letter she left for Steadman. He ripped each of them into eight pieces, crumpled the shreds into a ball and dropped them in the wastepaper basket. He stared down at the paper, bitterly. He picked it up, pressed it firmly in his fist and hurled it hard into the empty wastepaper basket once more. It rolled around with a tinny sound. He felt a little better.
Omar Yussef took his file to the drawer and knelt unsteadily. He jammed it among the other files and pushed the drawer closed. He stood and shook his head.
The tone of the radio changed. It cut to a static-riddled phone connection, catching Omar Yussef’s attention. A reporter was calling in new information about the Jerusalem suicide bomb. “. . . The Aqsa Martyrs Brigades announces in a leaflet distributed to news media that the martyrdom operation in Mahaneh Yehuda market was carried out by Yunis Abdel Rah-man, who is from the village of Irtas in the Bethlehem district. The martyr was nineteen years old. The Martyrs Brigades sends its congratulations to the family and to the village . . .”
Omar Yussef leaned against the edge of the desk and gasped. The studio host repeated the information. The commentator, who had speculated that the bomber must have come from Ramallah, said the Israeli army would surely now descend on Bethlehem. Certainly, he said, the new policy of destroying the homes of martyrs’ families would bring destruction on the heads of the Abdel Rahmans, but the people would stand steadfast with them. Omar Yussef turned the radio off.
Why did Yunis Abdel Rahman give his life in this way? Omar Yussef ran over his conversation with the boy outside the family house, when Dima’s body was found. Yunis had been angry and hostile. But these Martyrs Brigades people, for whom he had carried out this final mission, were the same men who stole his family’s auto business as soon as his powerful elder brother was murdered. Omar Yussef had felt sure that Yunis knew Tamari was responsible for the deaths of his brother and his sister-in-law. He remembered the way the boy glared at the Martyrs Brigades leaders when they arrived at George Saba’s trial. To kill oneself in one of these bombings was always unfathomable to Omar Yussef, but this seemed stranger than all the others whose cases he knew from around the camp. There were factors common to most of the Dehaisha youths who died like this, as far as Omar Yussef deduced. Usually they had something to prove. Sometimes they were mentally unbalanced after they had witnessed the death of someone close to them in an Israeli attack. But most of the bombers wanted to show everyone that they were not the person people believed them to be, that they were selfless and honorable and brave. Their lives generally were worthless, or had become so, because of some social transgression or indiscretion,
