as they left the helicopter pad and stepped into the sand by the fence, where Husseini was to be laid to rest. The imam led them in the funeral prayer. The troopers in the back of the jeep lifted Husseini’s body from the open coffin and brought him, wrapped in two white cloths, to the graveside. Omar Yussef considered the rituals of burial, the traditional washing of the corpse that was omitted for a martyr because the manner of his death purifies him. A martyr would be buried with blood on his face, where it sprayed from his wound, and dirt under his fingernails, where he clawed the ground in agony. He wondered what the men who wrapped Husseini in his shroud had done about the feces in the general’s underpants.
When they handed Husseini down into the grave, his skin was tinted light green against the white sheet that circled his face. The corpse looked small, dropping out of sight, but a soldier inside the grave had to struggle as he maneuvered Husseini’s tubby body onto its right side, so that it would rest facing Mecca. The imam’s prayer urged those present to praise Allah and consider the reward to which the dead man went. Omar Yussef thought that Husseini had already received his reward for a violent, cruel life, and that it had been a machine-gun magazine emptied into his spine and his bowels voided into his underpants. Further weighing of eternal balances was unnecessary.
The prayers were barely done when the Revolutionary Council leaders turned back to the presidential building. Behind them, the two ranks of Military Intelligence men fired volleys over the grave. Maki made a joke and al-Fara gave an exhausted smile. He glanced toward the crowd and his languid slouch tensed. His expression switched to fear and then to anger.
The mob was breaking through the cordon at the side of the building. People rushed across the concrete with their fists raised, heading for the grave. Al-Fara turned to the armed funeral detail for protection, but the soldiers retreated behind the grave and made no move toward the party men.
The delegates of the Revolutionary Council hurried on old legs for the safety of the presidential building. A black Audi roared from the side of the paved lot. The back door opened and al-Fara jumped in. The crowd flowed toward it. A window dropped and one of al-Fara’s guards aimed a pistol into the air. He fired off a few rounds and the car sped around the far side of the building.
The head of the crowd came to the grave and halted, pumping fists in the air and chanting to Allah. To reach the graveside, the mass of people at the back of the crowd looped quickly to the side. Their swing caught Omar Yussef as he fell behind the dignitaries escaping into the president’s building. He saw Khamis Zeydan turn and shout to him, just as the crowd enveloped him.
The force of the swarm took him a few paces sideways, setting him off balance, and he couldn’t counter its momentum. He fell onto his right knee. He put his hand to the ground to keep from falling further. Someone trod on his fingers. He cried out, but he dared not move the hand. If he went down, he’d be trampled to death. A man put his knee in Omar Yussef’s shoulder and tumbled over him. The man came down on his back and rolled a few times as the mob kicked him into the hard surface of the president’s helicopter pad.
The cries of the crowd were hoarse. Omar Yussef sensed its force, as though he were far down in a body of water or buried by a weight of earth. The screams of the trampled man punctuated the mob’s chant. Dust was thick in the air and his eyes were full of it. Someone’s fist connected with the side of his head and he took a knee in the small of his back. He felt a hand under his right arm, lifting and dragging him. He pushed his glasses into place on his nose and went with the hand that supported him. He blinked the dirt from his eyes and threw his arm around Sami Jaffari.
The young man pulled him across the flow of the crowd, bracing his legs against its momentum, shoving and elbowing those in their way. Omar Yussef saw the limbs of those in the crowd only as blurs, but he noted faces clearly. No one looked directly at him; everyone’s eyes were unnaturally wide, unfocused, cast ahead to where they thought the grave was. They’ve all gone mad, he thought. Even when Sami pushed them hard, they didn’t seem to see the two men in front of them. They ebbed roughly around the obstruction, swirling on toward Husseini’s grave.
Omar Yussef came to an open area, but Sami didn’t halt. He hurried him toward the corner of the building.
“Where’s Abu Adel?” Omar Yussef asked. He looked around for Khamis Zeydan.
“He’s inside.”
“I need to sit down. Let’s go in there with him.”
Sami dragged Omar Yussef. The schoolteacher stumbled as he struggled to keep up with the younger man.
“Sami, I’m exhausted. Where are we going?”
“You’re coming with me.”
“I need to sit down.”
Sami kept going, around the corner and away from the entrance to the presidential building. “Not in there. Not with them.”
In a parking lot at the side of the presidential building, Sami ducked Omar Yussef’s head with a hand on the back of his neck, shoving him into the passenger seat of his Jeep, slamming the door shut. He started the car and pulled around the front of the building so fast that the force pinned Omar Yussef to the leather. The crowd was thin at the gate, since it had mostly pressed into the helicopter pad. People jumped out of Sami’s way as they heard his wheels screech toward them. The Jeep cut left and started north.
“Sami, what’s going on?”
“I told you, you’re coming with me.”
“Evidently. Are you kidnapping me?”
Sami stared at the narrow roads, taking them fast and working the gears on the powerful car. He leaned forward and opened the glove compartment. There were two pistols inside. Omar Yussef pushed himself back into the seat. Sami pulled out a rag that had been wrapped around a third pistol, flipped the compartment shut and tossed the rag in Omar Yussef’s lap. “I’ve noticed you like to look neat and tidy in company,” he said. “Clean yourself up. You’re going to meet someone.”
Chapter 24
ami raced to the northern edge of Gaza City and into the sandy sidestreets of Jabalia refugee camp. From the murk of the dust storm, objects seemed to fly toward them as though borne on the air by a whirlwind. Children chased a goat into the road; blue dumpsters donated by the European Union loomed out of the dust; a donkey cart jogged erratically along a narrow lane. Sami negotiated all these obstacles without easing off the gas.
He pulled up at a corner near the northern edge of the camp. “Get out,” he said.
A scrubby dune rose at the end of the block and, beyond its crest, the sands undulated a half mile to the fence marking the end of the Gaza Strip and the beginning of Israel. In the shade of a bare wall, a stocky man in the black T-shirt and dark green baggy pants of the militias rested against the hood of a white jeep. Omar Yussef sensed that he and Sami and their expensive car were being carefully measured.
Sami cut down an alley barely wide enough for his square shoulders. The ground was laid with concrete, set in a shallow V so that water would run down the middle in the rainy months. Now it was dry and the alley was choked with trash-packaging for cheap cookies, empty plastic bottles, the peelings of vegetables and fruit, and a small child’s leather sandal caked in sand and dust.
Omar Yussef followed Sami down the alley, stumbling through the trash. They moved deep into the maze of single-story cinderblock hovels. He was astonished that Sami knew the place so well. At home in Dehaisha, every sad dwelling was familiar to him and he could recognize family resemblances even in children he didn’t know. But here every corner seemed identical and all the children stared at him with silent, blank faces.
The quiet domestic sounds of mothers calling their children and of concrete floors being washed with heavy, wet cloths receded, as Sami edged into a new alley that opened onto the main street of the camp. Sami ducked past the buckets and brooms dangling from the ragged awning of a shop at the corner. He went quickly through the jammed lanes of traffic and into a falafel restaurant. Omar Yussef followed past the blackened fryer in the doorway, bubbling as it received a new batch of green chickpea balls. Sami nodded to a man chopping tomatoes at the counter and went three steps at a time up a makeshift staircase at the back.
