Chapter 3
Omar Yussef placed his purple leather briefcase carefully on his desk and opened the shiny gold combination locks. He unclipped a Mont Blanc fountain pen from the pocket on the inside of the lid. It was a present from a graduating class of students, who knew that he loved stylish things. He felt the pleasing weight and balance of the Mont Blanc in his hand and glanced at the pile of exercise books on his desk to be graded. He wondered if the class whose books lay before him would ever feel generous or grateful toward their teacher. He began to read through their short essays on the demise of the Ottoman Empire. He spent a great deal of his time, too much of it, angry with these children. He tried not to be, but he couldn’t stand to listen to them when they rolled through the political cliches of the poor, victimized Arab nation, subjugated by everyone from the Crusaders and the Mongols to the Turks and the British, all the way to the intifada. It wasn’t wrong to see the Arabs as victims of a harsh history, but it was a mistake to assume that they bore no responsibility for their own sufferings. In his classroom, Omar Yussef would step in and destroy their hateful, blind slogans. Yet he could see that it only made him angrier and left the students somehow mistrustful of him.
Omar wrote a “C” grade in the margin of the first messy notebook, because he decided to be generous, and opened another. He was getting old. He thought of George Saba and the comforting feeling he experienced as they dined, that this pupil and others like him would be the proud legacy of Omar Yussef. He knew that his recent irritable outbursts in the classroom were caused by a combination of frustration at the ignorant, simple-minded, violent politics of his students and the sense that he was already too old, too distant from their world ever to change them. He knew it would be worse in a boys school, but there was such violence even in his girls that it shocked him. No matter how he tried to liberate the minds of Dehaisha’s children, there were always many others working still more diligently to enslave them.
It was different when he taught at the Freres School. During those years, there were many fine young minds that had opened themselves to him. It wasn’t just the pupils that had changed. Tension and hatred had engulfed Bethlehem, and on their heels came poverty and resentment and propaganda. Even a fine pupil like Dima Abdel Rahman was sucked into the violence. Her father, Omar Yussef’s neighbor, had called the previous night to tell him about the death of the girl’s husband, Louai Abdel Rah-man. The funeral would be in the early morning, when Omar Yussef was at work, but he planned to visit Dima Abdel Rahman in the afternoon. He had thought he might suggest that she return to her studies, but then he remembered that she truly loved her husband and he decided to wait before offering her any such proposals for her future.
It was at times like these, when the first light of the day was crisp in his empty classroom and the essays he graded were sub-par, that Omar Yussef wondered if he ought not to accede to the request of the school’s American director and quit. Omar Yussef was only fifty-six years old, but Christopher Stead-man wanted him to retire. He saw how the American looked at his shaking hands, reminders of the years of alcohol that were now behind him. They made him seem even more fragile than his slow, labored walk. Maybe Steadman only wanted a more vigorous man, but Omar Yussef hated him because he suspected the American really wanted a teacher who wouldn’t talk back. Omar Yussef reflected that he had molded a sufficient number of fine young minds, like those of George Saba, Elias Bishara and Dima Abdel Rahman, enough to satisfy the most conscientious of teachers. Perhaps he shouldn’t be driving himself crazy, putting his heart through the stress of confronting the entire machine of mad martyrdom propaganda and lies every day.
The first of his pupils entered. “Morning of joy,
Omar Yussef returned the greeting, quietly. With the student’s arrival, the comforting thoughts of his old pupils dissolved and he dropped back into the alien present, his senses heightened to the tawdriness of the school. The chairs scraped on the classroom floor as the girls seated themselves. The air filled with the background stink of unwashed armpits and bean farts. Omar Yussef looked down at the exercise book and pretended to be grading it. The pen shook in his fingers, as it always did these days. There was a tiny liver spot on the back of his hand, which presented itself to him as he turned the pages. It was new, appearing almost overnight, as though some genie had stolen into his bedroom while he slept and stamped him ineradicably as prematurely aged. When he thought of it that way, he wondered that the visiting spirit found him in his bed and asleep, for it seemed to Omar Yussef that he spent half the night urinating and the genie could just as easily have impressed its seal of superannuation on his dribbling penis. This was the real him and this was the reality of his life. Maybe he hadn’t been such a prize even back when he was young. To the rosy, wistful picture of a youthful Omar Yussef, he ought to have added that his eyes would be bleary from drink and his mouth would be tight with the bitterness of one who feels he has much for which to apologize—to those he offended while drunk, but to himself most of all. Yes, perhaps he truly didn’t need this in the morning. He would talk about retirement with his wife Maryam.
More students came into the room. Most were silent. They knew enough of Omar Yussef’s strictness not to speak in class unless he appeared to be in a very good mood, which rarely applied to the opening of the morning session at 7:30 A.M. But one girl was too animated to hold herself back. Khadija Zubeida entered quickly and excitedly. She was tall and thin with black hair cut in a bob. There was an early bloom of acne high on both of her pale cheeks. Before she sat, she leaned over the desks of two friends: “My dad called me before I came to school,” she told them. “He arrested a collaborator. The one who helped the Israelis kill the martyr in Irtas. He said they’re going to execute the traitor.” She spoke in a whisper, but in the quiet classroom it was audible to all, as was the snigger that punctuated it.
“Who was it?” one of her friends asked.
“The collaborator? He’s a damned Christian from Beit Jala. Saba, I think. He led the Jews right to the man in Irtas, who was a great fighter, and he delivered the final blow with a big knife that the Jews gave him.”
Omar Yussef put down his pen before the shaking of his hand could propel it across the table. He shoved the exercise book away from him and put his head in his hands to gather his thoughts. They had taken George, he was sure of it. He coughed to steady his voice. “Khadija,” he called to the girl, hoarsely. “Which Saba?”
“I think he’s called George,
The girls clicked their tongues and shook their heads.
“The Christian confessed, too. He said, ‘I know why you came here. You came here because I sold myself to the Jews.’ My dad gave him a good thump after he confessed.”
Omar Yussef stood and leaned against his desk. “Come here,” he said, sharply. As the girl approached him, a little confused, he considered giving her the same blow her father claimed to have aimed at the collaborator. But he knew he must try harder than that: he was a schoolteacher, not a police thug. He wondered what the girl saw from the other side of the desk. He knew that his own eyes were tearing with rage and the slack fold beneath his chin trembled. He must have seemed pitiful, or deeply unnerving. “What do I teach you to do in this classroom?”
The girl looked dumbly at Omar Yussef.
“How do I teach you to look at history?” Omar Yussef waited. He stared closely at the girl. There was no reply,
