“Thankfully we met long before you came to Gaza. Otherwise I would be in extreme danger,” Khamis Zeydan said.
Doctor Najjar stroked his beard. “As a history teacher, Abu Ramiz, you will be interested in that body. It’s not really a body; it’s just bones.” He took the sheet away. On the table, a skeleton lay, yellow and dusty. Thick wedges of dry earth were attached to the joints of the shoulder and knee. “This fellow came to me two days ago, all in pieces. The police brought him in a plastic trash bag. I put him back in order. I’m not sure what to do with him really. I’m waiting for the religious clerks at the waqf to decide where to rebury him.”
Omar Yussef recalled the story from the bottom of the newspaper’s front page, below the coverage of Lieutenant Fathi Salah’s funeral. “This is the body that was discovered by a farmer in Deir el-Balah?”
“Yes, in the corner of his field. He reported it to the police and they brought him to me.”
“Him?”
“Yes, him. The pelvis is heavier and thicker than a woman’s. Also the opening of the pubis is triangular, whereas a woman’s has four sides.”
“Are you supposed to identify him?”
“That would be almost impossible. It’s an old skeleton. There’s no soft tissue left, which means he’s been buried at least five years. But the bones aren’t yet crumbly, which is how they get after a hundred years in the grave.”
“So he’s been dead between five years and one hundred years.”
“It’s very difficult to be more accurate than that. I could test to be sure that it wasn’t more than a hundred years by cutting through a bone.” The doctor laid his hand sideways like a saw on the skeleton’s long thigh bone. “Under ultraviolet light, there’d be very little fluorescence in a bone more than a century old. It’s not as pressing, of course, as the cases of Odwan and your friend.”
“Perhaps this one’s old enough to have died a nice peaceful death in his home,” Omar Yussef said.
“The skeleton is old, but I didn’t say that he was an old man when he died. In any case, you forget, Abu Ramiz, this is Gaza. The odds are against a peaceful death.” Doctor Najjar pointed to the ribcage of the skeleton. “Look at the third rib on the right-hand side.”
The rib was snapped jaggedly halfway along its length. “Here’s the end of that rib,” Najjar said, holding up a few inches of bone. “But it doesn’t fit together with the rib from which it was broken.”
“What does that mean?” Omar Yussef said.
“It didn’t just snap. It was shattered. If we had opened up this fellow’s grave, rather than finding him tossed in the corner of a field, we would probably have seen many tiny fragments of this rib. I believe this is a gunshot wound. The bullet struck the rib and shattered it.” The doctor sighed as he put the fragment of rib on the metal table next to the skeleton. “It would have been a terrible injury. Shards of bone from the impact would have created multiple lacerations in the lung behind it.”
“So he died from a shot through the lung?”
“The puncture of a bullet, even right through the lung, wouldn’t kill you. But the massive destruction of tissue by all those tiny fragments of bone would have been impossible to repair. If this was a poor man with no access to proper healthcare, or if he was living in Gaza a long time ago-let’s say, early in our range of five to one hundred years-the infection from those many little wounds would have killed him.”
“And now he suffers the indignity of having his bones strewn in a farmer’s field.”
“No indignity should surprise us in Gaza, Abu Ramiz.”
Omar Yussef took in the three tables with their awful freight. The way death finally took a man seemed always to be a grisly surprise in a place like this. To be alive was to know the constant threat of death and the macabre reality of its arrival. But even beyond that moment there was no peace, not even when your bones were almost crumbled to dust.
“I’m staying at the Sands Hotel,” Omar Yussef said to Najjar. “If you have questions about the deceased one, James Cree, I hope you’ll call me.”
Najjar looked firmly at Omar Yussef. His eyes were frank and his jaw was clenched beneath his beard. He glanced at Odwan’s table. “I’ll be busy all night in this autopsy room. You’ll hear from me.”
In the morgue’s entrance, Khamis Zeydan lit a cigarette. “You’re running out of time,” he said.
“Now that Odwan is dead, will they really kill Magnus?” Omar Yussef leaned against the handrail of the steps.
Khamis Zeydan’s silence was his answer. He smiled grimly. “James Cree and Bassam Odwan, dead in the same room. You certainly came to the right morgue.”
Omar Yussef waved to Sami, who pulled the Cherokee through the deepening darkness to the foot of the steps. “What do you mean?” he said. “Doctor Najjar said it’s the only morgue in Gaza.”
“Then I should rephrase,” Khamis Zeydan said. “You were the right man to come to the morgue.”
Chapter 18
As Sami sped through the twilight, Khamis Zeydan turned in the front seat and looked hard at Omar Yussef in the back of the car.
Omar Yussef frowned and lifted his chin. “What?” he said. “What are you looking at?”
His friend stared. “I have to go to the president’s residence now. The Revolutionary Council is meeting.”
“If you decide to start the revolution, let me know. Otherwise, you can all go to hell.”
“I’ll be sure to put that on the agenda. Look, I don’t want to leave you alone. I’m worried about you. Sami will stay with you.”
“Sami’s your bodyguard, not mine.”
Khamis Zeydan raised his eyes and sighed.
Omar Yussef stared out the window, as they slowed in the heavy traffic around Palestine Square. The more crowded the streets became, the lonelier he felt. He had to acknowledge that he didn’t want to be alone, with his head full of the horror of the bodies in the morgue. “Take me to Salwa Masharawi’s house. I’ll spend a couple of hours there, while you’re starting the revolution. It’s a good family. It’ll help me calm down after all this.”
When they reached the sandy lane to the Masharawi house, Khamis Zeydan grabbed one of the two cellphones from Sami’s belt. “Take this,” he said, tossing it into Omar Yussef’s lap. “If I need to find you, I’ll call you on that.”
“I don’t like cellphones,” Omar Yussef said. “They make you sick.” He tapped the unbruised side of his head and tried to push the phone back into Khamis Zeydan’s hand.
“It can’t give you brain cancer unless you actually have some brains,” Khamis Zeydan said. “By Allah, it’s just for keeping in touch while things are dangerous. Put it in your pocket and forget about it.”
“What if I get a call for Sami?”
“Tell them he couldn’t afford a prettier secretary and have them call him on his other phone.”
“His other phone? Is that the number I wrote down earlier?” Omar Yussef remembered the digits scribbled across the back of the Saladin Brigades leaflet in his breast pocket.
“No, that’s the number of the phone you’re holding,” Sami said. “My other number is written on the label stuck to the back of that phone, Abu Ramiz.”
Omar Yussef waved as the Jeep reversed out of the lane. He felt exhausted. It was all he could do to lift his arm. He let it flop to his side and watched the taillights turn out of sight.
The alley was dark. A blue fluorescence glimmered from the house beyond the olive grove. Naji’s doves were silent. The spray-painted Dome of the Rock was indistinct on the whitewashed wall. Omar Yussef rested his forehead against the rough cinderblock. He closed his eyes and saw the burned corpse of James Cree, Odwan’s tortured body, the dusty old skeleton in the morgue. He thought of Magnus’s voice, his inquisitive Scandinavian accent, his laughter. Omar Yussef’s breath was heavy. He heard someone whimper and he realized it was him. He reached a finger behind the bent frames of his glasses and wiped away a tear.
At the door of the Masharawi home, Naji greeted him with a shy smile. Salwa came from the salon at the back of the house. She looked expectantly at Omar Yussef. Then as he shambled into the light her face fell.
“Don’t worry, my daughter,” he said. “I’m not here with bad news about your husband.”
