The Samaritan's secret

to me.”

Omar Yussef stood. “I’ve had enough of this stupidity. Pull yourself together.” He heard the words, angry and harsh, and paused. It seemed as though another man had entered the room to yell at the sot on the bed. Yet no one else was there, only the bottle and his feeling of how much he hated to want it as he did, and then he recognized the voice as his own.

Khamis Zeydan waved his scotch at the schoolteacher. “He’s like a son to me. The son I should’ve had instead of those milquetoast little shits in Jordan. Fucking mama’s boys. How dare they. . they called me a. . I’m not a. .” He lost the thread of his anger, took another swig of scotch and came back at full volume: “How dare they?”

“My brother, don’t blame your children for resenting you. You were always away from home while they were growing up.”

“Fighting for our people.”

“And they’re fighting for their mother, who was the only person who seemed to care for them.”

“It’s easy for you to say that. You’re a good man and everyone tells you so.”

Omar Yussef sighed. He sensed tears coming and he blinked hard. “You’re a good man, too, Abu Adel.”

“People always seem to like me better than I like myself,” Khamis Zeydan said.

“Is that because they don’t have as much information as you do?”

Khamis Zeydan paused with the bottle halfway to his lips, examining the schoolteacher.

Omar Yussef thought of the file of dirt about his friend that Awwadi had hidden somewhere. He looked at the police chief’s pale eyes. He knows what’d be in his file, he thought. He can’t imagine anyone could love a man who’s done such terrible things, no matter in what cause he was fighting.

Khamis Zeydan took a slow swig of the scotch, as though he had suddenly lost his taste for it. “I’ve been betrayed all my life,” he said. “Maybe I overreact to my family’s complaints about me. Whenever I’m criticized I feel like it’s the prelude to some greater betrayal. That’s how it was in exile with the Old Man. People like Kanaan would scheme behind my back, smear me, create rumors to discredit me. I had to be at headquarters all the time to cut off the plots before they went too far. That’s why I could never be with my family, never experience the love everyone else gets from their children.”

“That’s finished now. You’re not in exile anymore.” Omar Yussef lowered himself once more into the uncomfortable chair.

“It’s not over. I saw that much in Kanaan’s face when I bumped into him yesterday at the police headquarters.” Khamis Zeydan put the bottle on the nightstand. “I’ll never be free of it. Now it’s happening to Sami, too. People suspect he must’ve done something for the Israelis. They think that otherwise he wouldn’t have been given a permit to return to the West Bank from Gaza.”

Omar Yussef remembered the Samaritan priest’s ques-tions and the angry embarrassment in the young man’s response. If Sami’s story had made its way to the Samaritan village on the peak of Mount Jerizim, how much more suspicion must surround him down in the casbah? “It won’t be the same for Sami,” he said. “He’s in love with Meisoun. They’ll have a good marriage. He’ll be happy.”

Khamis Zeydan shook his head. “He needs me to be a father to him.”

“He has a father. In Bethlehem. Hassan’s my neighbor, and I can tell you that he’s a good man.”

“Then Sami needs me to be his godfather. So that he doesn’t end up like me.”

“You’re drunk, my brother.”

“His hand.” Khamis Zeydan stared at his prosthesis. “Even Sami’s hand is the same as mine. Broken, useless.”

“He only has a broken arm. It’ll heal. And, believe me, you’re an admirable man. Sami would be proud to be like you.”

Khamis Zeydan dabbed away a tear with his fingertip. He tried to hide the motion by wiping his nose with the back of his hand, but Omar Yussef saw it.

“Sami shouldn’t take any risks,” the police chief said. “You know what I mean, don’t you? This dead Samaritan. Forget about him.”

Khamis Zeydan’s voice was suddenly firm and intense. Omar Yussef wondered if his friend had faked his drunken self-pity to soften him up for this. He straightened in his creaking chair. “If you’d seen the Samaritan’s corpse, beaten and bloodied, could you forget it?” he said.

“Sami has a chance to live a secure life here in Nablus with his new wife-to have the kind of family I never had. Don’t try to make him investigate this case. It’ll force him to confront powerful people. They’ll finish him. At best they’ll destroy his career and send him to swelter in a crappy one-room village police station chasing goat thieves for the ignorant Bedouin down south. But they might even kill him or Meisoun.”

“Sami isn’t involved. Don’t worry about him.”

“Should I worry about you?”

“I’m not involved either.” Omar Yussef stood and stretched his back. “Tomorrow morning I’m going to the Turkish baths in the casbah. Does that sound like the action of someone obsessed with tracking down a murderer? Why don’t you come?”

“Sweat out the hangover?”

Omar Yussef squeezed Khamis Zeydan’s shoulder. “More than just the hangover. You can purge yourself of all the suspicion and loneliness.”

“I might flood the entire casbah, if I start to sweat that out.”

“Why not? I need to cleanse myself, too. I just hope our pores are big enough for the job.”

The two men smiled as Omar Yussef left. He went along the corridor to his room and found Maryam in a pale blue nightdress, spreading cold cream over her cheeks and fore-head. “Is he all right?” she asked.

Omar Yussef hung his blazer on the back of the door and went to the window. “He’ll never be all right.”

His wife layered a final smear of cream around her lips and raised her eyebrows, questioningly. “What is it?”

“Why did you stay with me, Maryam?”

“Omar?”

“It isn’t so many years ago that I was like our dear friend Abu Adel.”

“You were never quite like that.”

“I was a drunk. I was easily angered. I couldn’t believe that anyone really liked me and I suspected everyone of mocking me behind my back.”

“But I never allowed you to be lonely, as he is.” Maryam linked her hands behind Omar Yussef’s neck.

He smelled the rosewater in her lotion and kissed her. When he came away from her, there was cold cream in his mustache. She smoothed it into the white hairs and twisted the ends upwards.

“I would never leave you, Omar,” she giggled. “Not even if you oiled your mustache like a stuffy old Turkish pasha.”

Chapter 17

In the alley outside the baths, Khamis Zeydan blew loudly through pursed lips, rubbed his bloodless gray forehead and swallowed hard. “I don’t know if I’m up for this,” he rasped. “If I go into the steam room, I might pass out.”

“What about all the sweating you need to do?” Omar Yussef followed his friend up the steps.

“If I sweat those things out, they’ll leave traces of my dirty history all over the tiles in the baths for people to read.”

Someone has already unearthed those secrets, my friend, Omar Yussef thought. He wondered if he ought to tell Khamis Zeydan that they were about to meet Awwadi in the bathhouse. By introducing them, he hoped to persuade Awwadi that Khamis Zeydan was a good man and to prevent him using his dossier of dirt against the police chief. With his friend irritable and hungover, though, he wasn’t sure Awwadi would take to him.