“Yes, please, my darling.” Omar Yussef folded the slip of paper with the web address on it and tucked it into the breast pocket of his shirt.
He pulled back the drapes on his window. The hotel drive rose twenty yards from the lobby doors to the main beach road. The haziness of the dirt-filled air was thickening into twilight. A donkey trotted along the road, pulling a cart piled with boxes of tomatoes. A string of yellow taxis followed, sounding their horns and jockeying to be the first to overtake. A detail of red-bereted soldiers leaned against the guardpost outside the chief of Military Intelligence’s home across the road. The building was a plain apartment block six stories high. Only one floor was illuminated, a sickly fluorescence glowing through the dust.
Maryam came on the line. “Omar, dear, what did you have for lunch?”
He felt the loneliness again, sharply. “Maryam, my life, I love you.”
“Omar?”
“I’ll come home soon, I promise.”
“Omar, is something wrong?”
Omar Yussef’s eyes stung. He thought it might be a good idea to cry out all the dust from the storm. He felt ready for it. His room was cold and he imagined himself imprisoned in it, far from home. You know what it’s like to be shut away, terrified and alone, he thought. He was nauseous and he feared ruining everything that night by nervously throwing up his meal at Professor Maki’s dining table. He breathed deeply and fought to visualize his wife’s face. “I had a good lunch at the home of a friend.”
“Good. Don’t let Magnus take you to a restaurant. They cut corners with their recipes.”
“I’m eating at the home of a-a friend tonight, too.”
“Did Nadia tell you about your homepage?”
“Yes, did you see it?”
“No, she won’t show it to anyone until you’ve approved it.”
“She’s very clever.”
“Are you surprised?”
“No, I’m proud. I should get ready for dinner now, Maryam.”
“Go ahead. Everyone is fine here, may Allah be thanked.”
He hesitated. “You’re my whole life.”
Maryam laughed. “Omar, are you going to start singing me old songs? Allah bless you, darling.”
Omar Yussef hung up. Three jeeps halted at the home of General Moussa Husseini across the street. He assumed they were changing the guard shift, but the men at the gate remained at their posts and the jeeps didn’t leave. Instead, they formed a cordon around the entrance. The soldiers in the jeeps jumped from the rear of their vehicles and jogged through the door of the apartment building. On every floor, the lights came on. Then they all went out at once.
Omar Yussef turned off his lamp and watched Husseini’s house. Nothing happened. He waited. Perhaps it had been only a routine bolstering of the guard. This might have been how they always prepared for the onset of night. Except that tonight there’s a dust storm, he thought. The darkness will be doubled.
Chapter 9
Ataxi dropped Omar Yussef on Emile Zola Street at seven-thirty. He rested his hand against the smooth bark of a tall sycamore and coughed. Dirt gusted through the air. With the falling darkness, the thick dust storm turned Omar Yussef’s vision into a monochrome blur. The branches of the tree danced above him, jousting with the tricolor behind the wall of the French Cultural Center. The metal loopholes in the flag scratched rhythmically against its pole.
The wind came from behind him, caught his white hair and blew his little combover into his eyes. He moved carefully. Even here, in Gaza City’s most expensive district, the sidewalk was uneven. He caught his toe on a protruding brick, forced out of its place in the diamond pattern underfoot by the roots of another old sycamore, and stumbled. With relief, he came to a gate and found a buzzer. Next to it, scribbled on the whitewashed wall, was the name Maki.
Beyond the tall garden wall, the wind abated. Omar Yussef fixed his hair with a plastic comb from his shirt’s breast pocket. He rubbed his shoes on the back of his trousers to clean away the dirt. The garden was lush and tropical. Omar Yussef wondered if Maki might be to blame for Gaza’s water shortage, the grass was so thick and the spiky feet of the date palms were swamped by so many low fern bushes. The path to the house was short, but it wound around a fountain of molded concrete and turquoise tile. A large plastic doe peered from behind a bush next to the bubbling water. Omar Yussef pressed his palm to her snout and stroked her head as he passed.
The plain mahogany door opened as Omar Yussef came up the steps to the porch. A tiny maid in a brown nylon housecoat held it for him and greeted him in deferential, whispered English. She was narrow and straight and bony, almost like a little girl. Omar Yussef assumed from her look and accent that Maki had shipped her in from India or Sri Lanka. Omar Yussef thanked her and looked around. He had never seen such luxury in the home of a Palestinian. The floors were a milky brown marble polished to shine like the surface of a summer lake. At the center of the room, there was a brilliant chandelier so large that the last Shah might have thought it ostentatious, and a dining table and chairs not less sparkling than the floor. For a small girl, the maid put in a lot of elbow work.
“Professor Adnan will be with you soon, sir,” she said. “May I bring you a drink?”
“Thank you. Soda water, please.”
The table was laid with two dinner settings of shimmeringly expensive silverware and crystal. Mentally, Omar Yussef set a place at the table for Eyad Masharawi and reminded himself that he must think carefully over every stage of his conversation tonight. Masharawi’s freedom depended upon it.
The maid brought him his soda water and disappeared. The glass shook in his hand.
The low strains of a Fairuz love song drifted through the room. Amid such opulence, Omar Yussef half expected the Lebanese diva to step from behind a curtain with a string quartet.
Instead, Professor Adnan Maki made his appearance. He came from a corridor whose entrance was disguised by a black cloisonne Chinese screen decorated with blue and red birds. He wore a loose cobalt-blue silk shirt that made him look like a movie pirate and dark linen pants. He reached his arms wide. “My dear ustaz Abu Ramiz,” he said.
Omar Yussef advanced carefully across the marble, in case it was as slippery as it looked.
Maki gave him three kisses on his cheeks. The smell of cologne was once again powerful. “Consider this your family and your home,” he said.
“Your family is with you.”
“Welcome, welcome, welcome, Abu Ramiz. Merciful Allah bless you.”
“Allah bless you.”
Maki held onto Omar Yussef’s hand and led him to the table. He pulled out a chair for him and slid it in under his guest. He glanced at the soda water. “Abu Ramiz, you are not in Hamastan any longer. The interior of this home is not even in Gaza, as far as I am concerned. It’s wherever I want it to be, and it can be a place for any enjoyments I care to arrange.”
I’ll bet, Omar Yussef thought. Maki certainly was right that his salon didn’t look like it was in Gaza. “As I mentioned earlier, I don’t drink alcohol, Abu Nabil.”
“Surely just one glass,” Maki said. “Your namesake, the ancient Persian poet, rhymed divine and wine. Was he not correct? Let’s toast to him.”
“Much as I enjoy the poetry of Omar Khayyam, my health doesn’t allow me to join you in your toast, Abu Nabil,” he said, gesturing vaguely toward the internal organs of his abdomen.
Maki raised a cautious eyebrow.
“But I don’t object to your partaking,” Omar Yussef obliged.
Maki snapped his fingers and the maid appeared, holding a silver tray with two fingers of whisky in a crystal tumbler. Maki took it without a glance and put it away. Even as he swallowed, he spun his finger to signal that he wanted another, and sat. He looked suddenly serious and leaned forward.
“Abu Ramiz, it’s such a pleasure to have cultured company.” He let out the groan of a man who has long suffered ignorant fools. “You can’t imagine how I’m stifled by Gaza and its provincialism. My wife can’t stand to be here longer than a few weeks. As you can see from the place settings, she’s not eating with us. No, she is eating in a far better establishment tonight. She’s in Paris.”