“Abu Ramiz, remind me not to marry my grandsons to my granddaughters,” Khamis Zeydan said, pointing a finger at the boy.
The teenager’s head jerked to the side. Omar Yussef felt a burst of pity for the kid, playing alone on this quiet mountaintop. It made him angry with Khamis Zeydan. “If what you say about your family relations is true, no one will care to ask your opinion on the matter of marriage,” he said. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, bent close to his face and spoke gently. “Clever boy, the house of Jibril the priest?”
The boy bounced his ball and shuffled toward a white house with pink window frames on the corner of the street. Omar Yussef followed him, smelling urine and stale sweat. At the lacquered cherrywood door, the boy put his ball under one arm and shoved down on the handle. He went inside, leaving the door ajar.
Omar Yussef waited in the shadeless street. He mopped the back of his neck with his handkerchief and glanced at Khamis Zeydan. “I apologize for my temper, Abu Adel,” he said. “If I weren’t a schoolteacher, perhaps I wouldn’t care. But I’ve been around so many children in my time, I hate to see them mocked. I know how much they suffer.”
“I’ve lived in a world of men,” Khamis Zeydan said. “We didn’t have our children with us when we were on operations in Europe or during the war in Lebanon. I never learned the first thing about kids. Maybe that’s why mine hate me.”
“Wasn’t it a world of women, too? Liana was there, after all.”
“No, I never understood women. Least of all Liana.”
The boy loped out of the house onto the pavement, head down. He bounced his ball and grabbed for it, then he ran between Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan and disappeared into the trees beyond the park. Omar Yussef looked up at Roween’s house. A curtain on the second floor fluttered, as though it had just been dropped by someone watching from the window. He kept his eye on it, until the curtain was still.
A sturdy woman in a long red embroidered gown appeared at the door of the priest’s house. The skin of her fat, wrinkled face was the color of wet sand. She lifted her arm for them to enter.
The sun filtered through lightweight pink curtains in the reception room. Along the wall, black-and-white photographs of white-bearded men wearing the tarboosh of the priesthood stared down. The earliest portraits were distinguished by the priests’ lack of spectacles, but all the men looked otherwise alike-high foreheads, long noses, innocent eyes.
Omar Yussef heard Jibril approach, his legs swinging against the loose skirts of his robe.
The priest took Omar Yussef’s hand in both of his own. “Greetings,
“Double greetings.”
“You are with your family and as if in your own home,” Jibril said. The top of the light cotton robe he wore next to his skin was ripped from the neck to the breastbone-a sign of mourning for his son. He smiled restrainedly and extended the same greeting to Khamis Zeydan.
“Are you also a policeman?” he asked.
Khamis Zeydan’s eyes swung toward Omar Yussef, who cleared his throat, uneasily. “I’m the police chief in Bethlehem,” Khamis Zeydan said.
“Welcome.” The priest swept his hand above the couch, as though spreading a silk upon it. He sat in an armchair that commanded the room. “Welcome to our village.”
“I’m sorry for the loss of your son,” Khamis Zeydan said. “May Allah be merciful upon him. If that’s what you say in condolence. You Samaritans, I mean. Pardon me.”
“It’s an acceptable wish. May you be granted a long life.” The priest fingered his robe. “It has been an exhausting week. We must mourn my son Ishaq for seven days, as is our tradition. But we also had to celebrate our Passover festival.”
“We saw the rites,” Omar Yussef said. “It was very interesting.”
The priest pulled his beard. “I admit, this was a difficult festival for our people, because of the murder,” he said, softly. “But I’m pleased you found it of interest.”
The thickset woman entered with two tiny coffee cups, breathing loudly through her wide nostrils like a heavy sleeper. Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan each drank a bitter slug. The woman looked at the priest, who closed his eyes briefly and shook his head. She shut the door behind her.
“Do you have developments to tell me about?” Jibril asked.
Omar Yussef frowned.
“About the investigation into the death of Ishaq?” the priest went on. “Did you not come here to tell me you have found the killer?”
“I’m sorry to say that we’re far from that stage, Your Honor,” Omar Yussef said. “We have some further questions which we believe are important to the progress of the investigation.”
Jibril nodded slowly.
Omar Yussef sat forward. “The scroll that was returned on the same night as Ishaq’s death-”
“The Abisha Scroll.”
“Yes. Tell me exactly how it was returned to you?”
“I found it on the steps of the synagogue.”
“Was there any message attached?”
“Nothing.”
“Isn’t it odd that such a valuable object should be placed there, where anyone could have picked it up?”
“But no one else could have found it. You’ve seen that the doors are set back some distance from the street. No one goes up the steps, unless it’s one of us on our way to the synagogue, and they’d almost always be accompanied by me, because I’m the only one with a key.”
“Even so, it seems a strange way to return the scroll.”
The priest poked his tongue into his cheek and rolled it around.
“Was there any damage to the Abisha?” Omar Yussef asked.
“Thanks to Allah, no. I examined it thoroughly.”
“Where is the scroll now?”
“After the Passover celebration here on Jerizim, I returned it to the safe in our synagogue.”
“When we were together in the synagogue, I believe you told me that most of your people’s important historical documents are kept here in your house.”
“One of the leading priests traditionally safeguards these documents in his home.”
“May we see them?”
The priest gripped the side of his armchair, pushing himself to his feet. Omar Yussef and Khamis Zeydan followed him into a spartan study, darkened by rolling blinds lowered halfway to block the bright morning sun. Against the nearest wall was a desk, its surface covered in brown leather nicked with light scratches. Across the room, a tall wooden cabinet displayed a series of tubular casings behind glass doors.
Omar Yussef put his face close to the glass. His breath misted it. “These are amazing,” he said.
“We keep twenty-six copies of the Books of Moses here,” Jibril said. “This one is the oldest, from the fifteenth century.”
Omar Yussef followed the priest’s gesture. The Torah was encased in a tube of goatskin about eighteen inches in length. The handles at the top were of tarnished silver and the front of the case was decorated with a silver panel molded to its curve. Omar Yussef looked more closely and tapped the glass. “This silver is embossed with the same image of the ancient temple as the Abisha Scroll,” he said.
“The scrolls themselves are from different historical periods, but it’s possible that the cases were made and decorated around the same time,” the priest said.
“Has there ever been an attempt to steal these scrolls?”
Jibril shook his head. “The Abisha is much more valuable. That’s why we keep it in the safe at the synagogue, rather than here in my home.”
Omar Yussef tapped his finger against the glass once more. “Before he died, Ishaq said something to his wife that I think might be important.”
The priest regarded Omar Yussef expectantly.
“He told her he was involved in something very dangerous. So dangerous that he wanted to bury it behind the temple and forget about it.” Omar Yussef looked at the monumental towers of the temple on the weathered panel encasing the scroll. “Those were his precise words, according to his wife.”
