The Collaborator of Bethlehem

gunmen on the steps by the entrance. To his surprise, the sound of gunfire was louder within the house.

The lights in the living room had been extinguished. From the entrance, Omar Yussef saw that the gunmen had removed the sandbags from the windows. They clustered around the shattered frames, shooting toward the Israelis. The noise was terrifying. It echoed about the high ceilings and off the thick walls. One of the men at the window turned toward the door. His face was manic with the ecstacy of the fight. Omar Yussef recognized him. It was Mahmoud Zubeida, the policeman whose daughter had brought him the news of George’s arrest. His eyes were as dark as his betel-stained teeth, but they radiated a chilling energy. When he saw Omar Yussef, his grin faded. He looked embarrassed and ashamed, but also angry. The presence of the schoolteacher broke the anonymity that allowed him to free the ugliness he would otherwise have hidden deep within himself.

Omar Yussef looked away from Mahmoud Zubeida. He took a step forward and turned to his left. George Saba’s family cowered against the wall. Here was the evidence that George had taken the wrong path, if you wanted to see it that way. George was dead, because he’d tried to defend his family, but here they were, unprotected, because of his death. Then Omar Yussef decided that if his former pupil had acted differently, George Saba too would be shivering with fear on the floor, and maybe he hadn’t been wrong to do as he did. The wrong was done against him, not by him.

Sofia looked up. Tears laid crooked fingers of mascara across her cheeks. She held her two children under her arms. Habib Saba sat next to them. The old man was quiet and motionless. He cradled something black in his lap, perhaps a book. Its square edge jutted from beneath his arms like the tail of a stricken ocean liner going down. Omar Yussef was about to speak to Sofia, when he noticed a movement on the other side of the bedroom.

Jihad Awdeh sat in an old Damascened armchair next to the big vanity by the bed. He uncrossed his legs and stood, flicking his cigarette out of the open window. He smiled at Omar Yussef and lifted his gun.

Omar Yussef thought of jumping back toward the entrance, but he couldn’t do it. Something held him in place there, despite the gun trained on him. He thought it might be the memory of George Saba, who had refused to buckle before wickedness, that now kept his old teacher steady. So he stayed where he was, turning to face Jihad Awdeh.

“We’re taking care of the traitor’s family, as you can see, Abu Ramiz,” Jihad Awdeh said. “But I’m happy to see you here, too.”

“Jihad, you know that if you harm me, you’ll be starting a fight with the biggest clan in Dehaisha. Even you should think twice before taking on all my people,” Omar Yussef said.

“There are bullets flying as wildly here as those accusations of murder and collaboration you made about the martyr Hus-sein. Who knows if one of those bullets might happen to strike you? I believe your clan would agree that an Israeli bullet killed you. Most people are happy with an excuse to avoid trouble.”

“But not you.”

“Nor you, evidently.”

Jihad Awdeh walked across the room with his gun on Omar Yussef.

“You don’t think you’re really protecting the reputation of Hussein Tamari by what you’re doing here,” Omar Yussef said. “This is evil. You shoot from inside this house, because you know the Israelis will destroy it in return.”

Jihad Awdeh lifted a concurring eyebrow. He fed a bullet into the chamber of his Kalashnikov and raised it to his chest.

This is it, Omar Yussef thought. At least I didn’t have to be hung upside down in the square. The image of Nadia, her face sad and eyes lowered, flickered through his mind, but he fought it away. He felt proud that his last moment would be defiant, and he stared into Jihad Awdeh’s black eyes.

The blast came with a whoosh like a jet plane passing low. Jihad Awdeh looked up momentarily. Then Omar Yussef’s ears went dead, as though he was underwater, and the wall of the bedroom came down. Omar Yussef felt himself tumble out of the doorway and down the steps. He hit his head against the railing, then struck something soft.

He found himself upside down on top of two gunmen. The men wriggled frantically as though they thought he might be dead and they wanted no contact with the corpse. They rolled him off them and into a puddle. The cold water roused him and he was already on his knees when Khamis Zeydan and another police officer grabbed his arms and lifted him.

“It must have been a tank shell,” Khamis Zeydan said. “Are you all right?”

“Tank shell?”

“The Martyrs Brigades were shooting from inside the building. The only way for the Israeli soldiers to penetrate these thick, old walls is with a tank shell. It must have gone in through the living room where the firing was coming from and blown you out of the front of the house. Who else was in there?”

“George’s family.”

The dazed gunmen rushed up the steps with the police. In the bedroom, they found Jihad Awdeh. There was blood coming from his head and he was ghostly with the dust of the fallen wall. His men helped him to his feet and took him down the steps. Omar Yussef waited for the Martyrs Brigades chief to look at him, but Jihad could barely keep his eyes open. His gaze was unfocussed and distant, like a troubled man in prayer. He stumbled past amid a crowd of bellowing gunmen, out to the street where the red lights of an ambulance flickered.

The wall between the bedroom and the living room was partially collapsed. Khamis Zeydan and Omar Yussef peered through the gap. George Saba’s antique furniture smoldered. The rack of wedding dresses burned, giving off a poisonous smell from the plastic wrappings. The teak dresser was splintered down to its stubby legs. The French statuette that had stood on it was intact, but cast to the flagstones. Omar Yussef remembered that this naked, twisted woman of Rodin’s was called The Martyr. There were four bodies in the living room, clustered around the three-foot-wide aperture in the outer wall where the shell had entered. Khamis Zeydan peered at one of the bodies.

“Mahmoud Zubeida,” he said.

Omar Yussef looked at the blank face of the dead policeman. The bony face was pale and its lips were drawn back over the brown teeth. It seemed like the skull of a man already years in the ground. The dream of death that he had imagined Mahmoud Zubeida’s daughter enduring every night finally had come true. He wondered if he would be able to tell the girl that her father was happy in the firefight before he died, that he was a martyr. He recalled