and they tried to redeem themselves and the reputation of their families through martyrdom. What did Yunis Abdel Rahman want to prove? Perhaps he was simply unhinged by the deaths of his brother and sister-in-law in the cabbage patch outside his home. But the boy had seemed to be eaten by revenge, not desperation, when he had spoken so angrily to Omar Yussef two days ago. Then he remembered Yunis’s look of shame. Had the boy murdered Dima and blown himself up to end the guilt? Or was he involved with Tamari in his brother’s death outside the family home?
Omar Yussef needed to think this through. His pants were muddy from the fall he had taken when the bomb exploded in the schoolroom. He considered walking home to change and consider the meaning of this new development in his comfortable salon. Then he thought about the announcement that Yunis Abdel Rahman’s bombing mission was organized by the local Martyrs Brigades. The Israelis might come to Bethlehem to take revenge on the gunmen. When that happened, Jihad Awdeh’s plan was to take refuge in the Church of the Nativity. Before going home to change, he decided he would walk to the church. He would warn Elias Bishara of the gunman’s plan. Elias would have to figure out a way to keep Jihad Awdeh from entering the church.
Omar Yussef put on his jacket and his flat cap. He bent to pick the blue wad of paper from the wastebasket. He squeezed it and felt as though he were grasping the neck of the Spanish UN school director. That woman had touched these pages. Now she was gone, Omar Yussef had destroyed her deceitful traces. Everything could be wiped out somehow. Yunis Abdel Rahman had been full of anger when Omar Yussef had seen him, and now he was empty, a husk, broken, ready to rot, without leaving any sign of himself in the world. He had strapped a belt of explosives to his torso, but the detonation was inside him.
Wafa looked up when Omar Yussef opened the office door. She was on the phone and put her hand over the receiver. “It’s the maintenance director in Jerusalem,” she said. “They’re coming in one hour. Do you need to speak to them?”
Omar Yussef shook his head. He waved to Wafa and went down the corridor, crunching over the broken glass by the blasted classroom. At the entrance, Mahmoud Zubeida sat on a plastic chair, on guard, his Kalashnikov leaning against the wall. He straightened a little when he saw Omar Yussef. “Peace be with you,
“And with you. Allah lengthen your life,” Omar Yussef replied, squinting into the wind and pulling up the collar of his jacket.
The air was cold and blustery after the stuffiness of Stead-man’s office. Omar Yussef crossed the muddy street. The chopping baritone of an Israeli helicopter growled from somewhere up in the clouds. Omar Yussef looked about to find Nayif, but no one was around except a dappled goat with its head in a trash can. Omar Yussef turned his back to the wind. He tossed the blue ball of paper as far as he could. The coming gale took it and dropped it into a pool of dirty water behind a brimming garbage dumpster.
Chapter 21
A Greek Orthodox priest leaned against the smooth edge of the altar, keeping watch over the entrance to the cave where Jesus was born. He stroked his long black beard, gathering its thickness repeatedly in his fist like a girl fixing her ponytail, and stared as Omar Yussef came across the floor of the empty Church of the Nativity. His eyes were hooded, ringed with a black as vivid as his short mitre and long gown, and his face was immobile with a lazy hostility.
“Greetings, Father,” Omar Yussef said, when he reached the corner of the church by the cave.
The priest mumbled something that probably wasn’t loud enough even for him to hear it.
Omar Yussef restrained his irritation. The priest was a Greek. The other denominations allowed locals to rise in the priesthood, but the Greek Orthodox almost always shipped men from Athens to minister to a people about whom they knew nothing. The imports ended up alienated, resentful, and churlish like this one. Omar Yussef figured there were no tourists today for the priest to bully, so he must be in a bad mood.
“I’m looking for Father Elias Bishara.”
The Greek priest looked at Omar Yussef’s muddy, damp pants. He lifted a languid hand and, with a crooked finger, angled his wrist toward a small door in the north transept. The hand went back to stroking his beard and Omar Yussef had been dismissed.
Beyond the door was St. Catherine’s Church. The Franciscans built it onto the side of the Nativity Church in the nineteenth century. Its white marbled interior was quiet, so Omar Yussef went into the cloister. The granite medieval columns had been restored to a grayness that shone unnaturally in the blank light from the cloudy sky. At first the cloister seemed empty. There was a statue of an old man in a monk’s habit at the center of the courtyard. Then, behind the statue, Omar Yussef saw a kneeling priest, his head bowed in prayer. He recognized the thinning, curly black hair as Elias Bishara’s.
The priest rose as Omar Yussef crossed the flagstones and smiled. “Abu Ramiz, welcome.”
“How are you, Father Elias?”
“Don’t call me ‘Father.’ It sounds strange in the mouth of a man who has instructed me since childhood,” Elias said. “Am I supposed to call you ‘my son’?”
“Aren’t you cold out here?”
“Well, that’s the point, really.” He looked around the cloister. “The discomfort concentrates my prayers. So does this old bastard.” He gestured to the statue.
Omar Yussef looked up into the bearded face of the carved figure. He detected nothing spiritual in it. It was as blank as if it were set in a supermarket jello mold. “St. Jerome?”
“Yes, our local saint and martyr,” Elias Bishara said. “I was meditating on our friend George Saba earlier. I realized that I felt hatred toward the Muslims of our town for what they have done to George. I hate them for their unthinking orthodoxy and their crazy compulsion to martyrdom. I came here, to the feet of Jerome, to be reminded that we Christians have had our share of lunatics, fanatically rejecting those who thought and worshipped differently.”
“Not to mention those who worshipped the martyrs almost above God himself,” Omar Yussef said.
“You’re right, Abu Ramiz. This fellow Jerome’s translation of the Bible into Latin was the official version of the Roman Catholic Church for sixteen hundred years. It was a great achievement for a man who lived as a hermit in Bethlehem. But he destroyed the careers and lives of other theologians who dared to challenge his orthodoxy, and he decorated the tombs of martyrs with so many candles that people said he was a pagan worshipping the light,
