The Collaborator of Bethlehem

Omar Yussef came to the end of the path. There were two oil drums with the palm fronds and black flags of mourning bending in the wind. The flags were mounted on bamboo poles and their ends clicked and scratched around inside the barrel as the wind whipped them, as though they thought they could escape. Omar Yussef wound through the rows of men sitting on white plastic garden chairs under the fluttery black tarpaulin of the condolence tent. He joined the queue of men who passed along the family receiving line, limply shaking hands and muttering that Allah would be merciful to Louai Abdel Rahman. At the end of the receiving line was a thin young man with a bony resentful face. Omar Yussef assumed this was the dead fighter’s brother. The kid alternated his fierce glare between the edge of the woods beyond the vegetable patch and the entrance to the family’s house. Omar Yussef held the youth’s hand and asked him where to find Dima Abdel Rahman. He detected a flash of hostility before the young man told him she was inside with the women.

“Please go and get her. Tell her it’s her old schoolteacher.”

The young man hesitated, while Omar Yussef kept his hand in his grip. Then he pulled his hand away and went into the house.

Omar Yussef would have liked to accept a small cup of qahweh sa’ada. Any other time of the year there would have been a teenager circulating with a plastic flask of the unsweetened coffee at a funeral. But it was Ramadan now, and there would be neither coffee nor anything else served until darkness fell. Omar Yussef didn’t need Ramadan to remind him that there were things from which he ought to refrain. He remembered that when he was a student an old woman once slapped his face because he smoked a cigarette on a Damascus street during Ramadan. He ought to have kept her around to batter him every time he did something forbidden. How long, he wondered, would it have taken him to quit alcohol if he’d received a sharp jab to the head every time he sank a scotch on the rocks? Instead, he hadn’t sobered up until his late forties. By that time, the spectacular relish of his early drinking days had vanished. Even he could see that he was pathetic. He had stopped because it embarrassed him to notice men twenty years younger look with pity at his bleary eyes and shaky hands.

From behind the mourning tent, there were three sharp, loud shots, but only Omar Yussef ducked. He turned quickly to follow the gaze of the other mourners. Along the path came a troop of Aqsa Martyrs Brigades gunmen. A big man who wore a bandoleer across his chest led them. Omar Yussef pushed his gold-rimmed glasses up along his nose and saw that it was Hussein Tamari, the leader of the Martyrs Brigades in Bethlehem. He carried the big gun everyone talked about. Tamari’s head was widest at the bottom, bulky and jowly. He had a thick, black moustache and trim, black hair that seemed of necessity to be short, as there wasn’t much real estate for it to cover. The top of Tamari’s head narrowed to a third of the width of his neck. The tapering, in-bred head seemed to Omar Yussef to be a declaration that his brain wasn’t the source of his swagger.

Next to Tamari walked a thin, dark man Omar Yussef had seen around town. His name was Jihad Awdeh. There was a gray hat that looked like a furry fez on his head. Omar Yussef struggled to remember the name for this style of hat. No one wore such headgear in Bethlehem. Old men from the villages wore traditional keffiyehs, and kids wore American baseball caps. Most heads were bare. Jihad Awdeh’s hat seemed extravagant and sinister. Omar Yussef thought immediately of Saddam Hussein, who used to wear just such a hat on winter occasions. Astrakhan, that’s what they call it, Omar Yussef thought. He gave a short sardonic laugh and shook his head.

Hussein Tamari fired off a few rounds into the air with his massive machine gun as a mark of respect to the dead man, resting the butt against his hip and holding it in one hand with casually ostentatious power. It was a deep noise, wide and impressive, and Omar Yussef noticed that some in the crowd seemed about to applaud the show. The gun had a wooden stock and a dark metal barrel. It looked to be over four feet long.

The gunmen came under the tarpaulin canopy and, cutting in front of the line of mourners in the cold wind, shook the hands of the family members. Omar Yussef saw that Louai Abdel Rahman’s father seemed particularly cowed and didn’t look directly at the gunmen, though they lingered before him longer than was necessary.

Omar Yussef went to the door of the house. He glanced into the living room. There was a mural painted on the wall, a Swiss alpine landscape. A fawn gamboled in the deep grass at the edge of a cool lake. A wooden house hugged the slopes of a snow-covered mountain, bright as a picture in a children’s book and clumsily cartoonish. Many Palestinians decorated their walls with scenes of the Alps. It was, no doubt, a pleasure to gaze at such a prospect during the stifling summer, he thought. But perhaps it also was calming, as though by looking at the terrain of a peaceful country one could forget the violence all around, dream oneself onto a mountain elevation, breathing cleanly and easily. Omar Yussef noted that there were never any people in these murals.

In front of the alpine tableau there was a crowd of women. They improvised a song of blessings on the mother of the martyr for the bliss that her dead son would now be experiencing. A woman would chant a verse and the others would join in, clapping a rhythm, and another would take over for the next stanza. They did the same thing at weddings. At the back of the room, Omar Yussef noticed Dima Abdel Rahman. He waved for her to come outside. She half-smiled and walked to him. As she reached the steps, Omar Yussef saw the young man who was supposed to bring her to him watching balefully from the door of the kitchen.

“Allah will be merciful upon him, the deceased one,” Omar Yussef said.

“Thank you, uncle,” Dima Abdel Rahman replied. “I’m glad you came.”

“Who’s the kid I sent in to find you?” Omar Yussef gestured discreetly toward the youth.

“That’s my husband’s brother, Yunis.”

“He seems more angry than sad at his brother’s death.”

“He seems more angry than anything,” Dima said.

They stepped away from the house and the mourning tent and came to the cabbage patch. Dima stared at the spot where her husband had died. She began to cry. Omar Yussef took a handkerchief from the pocket of his tweed jacket and gave it to her. She wiped her eyes and smiled, embarrassed. Then she pointed: “This was where Louai died. I found him here.”

Dima cried again. Omar Yussef spoke quietly to her. “It’s appropriate that you should cry, my dear. Firing guns in the air is wrong. But crying is good.”

“Louai’s mother said I should be crying out with joy now that he’s a martyr,” Dima said.

“That’s just a show for all these people. I’m sure she doesn’t feel it deep in her heart,” Omar Yussef said.

“I just can’t rejoice that he’s dead, ustaz. I just can’t.”

“When I was a young man, my dear father passed away. I remember crying, and all the people in the house told me I shouldn’t, because my father lived to be an old man and I ought to behave like a man. But I had an uncle who understood me. He said, ‘Let the boy cry. Can’t you see, he loved his father?’ So don’t worry. You can cry. And you can keep the handkerchief, too.”