about such things happening to those who were close to a bomb when it went off, as he had been. He put his hand to his breastbone and felt that it was a little bruised from the impact of the shockwave that had knocked him onto his backside that morning at the school. Traumatized he certainly was by the sight of Christopher Stead-man’s body. He hadn’t thought of it while he sat at Steadman’s desk or as he walked home. There had been other things to ponder. Once he was home, though, the American’s lifeless limb came back to him. All afternoon, he had examined his own hand, holding it before his face in the same position in which he’d seen Steadman’s, seeming to scratch itself along the floor tiles, like a scorpion, scuttling to catch up with the director’s charred body. Omar Yussef wondered how often Khamis Zeydan thought about his lost hand. Would that not turn anyone to drink? The loss of the hand, the horrors of soldiering, the loneliness of a man whose closest companionship was with the dead of his old battles. Omar Yussef had barely managed to conquer his own compulsive drinking and smoking, and he struggled against nothing more than the frustrations of life under occupation. How much harder must it be for his friend? Yes, he still thought of Khamis Zeydan as his friend. He felt suddenly very forgiving, as he pictured him lying on his back in Lebanon, fainting, searching desperately about him for his severed hand in the dirt, oblivious to the bullets flying around him, hoping he could simply slot the limb back into place and flee forever from the battlefield. Omar Yussef imagined that might have been the very moment when the idealistic young man he had known at university had turned into the bitter, melancholy, apathetic drunk who now headed Bethlehem’s police force. But he wondered if the darkness that had shrouded Khamis Zeydan’s life for many decades was deep enough that it might also obscure the police chief’s judgement of right and wrong. Could his friend be so contaminated that he would have tipped off Tamari about Dima? Omar Yussef hated to think it, but he couldn’t see how else Tamari would have known that he needed to kill the girl.
Nadia entered her grandfather’s bedroom carrying a cup of coffee. Darkness ringed the twelve-year-old’s eyes and her diaphanous skin was blued by the veins beneath. Omar Yussef understood that she had barely slept since the flood descended on her family’s apartment in the basement. The guest room on the ground floor was crammed with Ramiz’s entire family, and it was fearfully cold at night. Everyone around her, her parents and her grandmother and the relatives and neighbors who came to help clear out the basement, they all spent the day wailing or bitching about the occupation, the destruction, the mess of everything. Nadia was quiet. Omar Yussef looked across at her from where he lay on the bed. If she put on a little weight, it would be almost like looking at his mother, he thought. Her eyes sloped down, giving them a melancholy cast. Her hair was a black frame to the pale, unblemished face. Omar Yussef’s father always said his wife looked and walked like a Turkish princess, the old pure Turks of the Caucasus, from before the Ottoman conquests. Nadia carried herself with the same slender authority as Omar Yussef’s mother had. She had the same sensitive personality. She was withdrawn, as though something made her feel the world couldn’t be trusted. She was knowing, too, as only an unhappy child can be.
Omar Yussef remembered his mother’s funeral. It was 1965 and he was seventeen. It was a cold day that threatened rain, like this one. Omar Yussef’s father, who never criticized his wife, took his eldest son aside that day. “My son, you’re mourning your mother, and I acknowledge that she was a good mother to you and you are right to be sorry that she passed on. It’s not easy for me to tell you, but I want you to understand: it is better that she should go, because there was no way for any of us to help her. You see, after we left the village, when you were a newborn, she was never the same. You never saw her really happy. I wish you had. I don’t want you to feel that your experience as a son was not a happy one, nor that you didn’t give her the joy a mother derives from a son. But she was different after we left the village. She couldn’t stop thinking about what life was like there, or how much harder it was here. She never spoke about it very much. She thought it would make me ashamed that I was able to provide only a lesser life for her than the one she expected when we married. Of course, I wouldn’t have felt that way, and even now I tell you this without bitterness. Don’t let the way life is for us rob you of your happiness, my son. Remember your mother. When you have children and grandchildren, I hope they will return to our village. But if they don’t, then be sure that they leave it behind for good. Don’t allow them to be pulled in both directions as your mother was, between the village of the past and the camp of today. If so, they truly will live in neither place.” If anyone else had spoken that way to Omar Yussef at that time, he would have rejected him as a pathetic defeatist. How much more did Omar Yussef understand what his father meant now? Now that he saw Nadia before him, tentative and tired, Omar Yussef wanted to banish all thoughts of Khamis Zeydan, of George Saba and Dima Abdel Rahman, and of the Martyrs Brigades. This girl was his responsibility.
“Hello, my darling. Come and sit here.”
Nadia put the coffee on the nightstand and sat at the edge of the bed.
Omar Yussef held her hand. It was cold as a frozen cut of beef. “Are you tired?”
Nadia nodded.
“Life is quite difficult here, my heart. But I want you to know that things are much worse for people elsewhere in the world.”
“Yes, Grandpa.” Nadia stared at her feet.
“No, really. It’s true. Imagine if we lived in Russia. There would have been a century of horrible suffering under Communism, and now there would be enormous criminal mafias, and diseases like AIDS that no one tries to halt. It’s true that things are bad here, but they could be much worse. Even the weather in Russia is worse.”
Nadia giggled.
“Yes, there’d be a foot of snow for six months outside our door, if we lived in Russia,” Omar Yussef said. “So never mind that we had a foot of water in the basement for one day.”
“Snow is fun, Grandpa.”
“When it comes only once a year, as it does here, but not when it snows for months at a time. And anyway it was fun to see all the neighbors come in and help clean up. It shows that we have good neighbors. And it was fun to bail out all the water. You remember how you helped me throw the water out of the back door.”
“Yes.”
“That was fun. And we didn’t even have to go to the beach to play in the water. The beach came to us.”
“It was smelly.” Nadia laughed.
“The beach is smelly too. Haven’t you seen all the sewage they pour into the sea nowadays. Yes, yes, it was much better to stay here and not go to the beach. This way we could enjoy Grandma’s cooking
Nadia smiled and hugged her grandfather. His eyes teared up. Her shoulders were narrow and the bones in her back were hard against his hands. She felt so small and brittle. He held her close until he was sure that she wouldn’t see tears in his eyes; then he let her go.
“Thank you for my coffee, my darling.”
The phone rang in the salon.
