His eldest granddaughter, Nadia, filled his glass with water. She was twelve years old, with skin that was pale from passing the summer inside, under curfew, but her eyes were dark, with a light of intelligence gleaming in them. She was Omar Yussef’s favorite grandchild. She loved to hear his stories. Nadia often asked him to tell her the story of how he came to this house.
It was fifty-six years since and Omar Yussef had been only a few months old, but, for the sake of the tale, he claimed to remember the arrival. His father told the servants to pack enough belongings to fill four carts. Others traveled lighter, expecting a short exile until the Arab armies expelled the Jews, but Omar Yussef’s father later told him that he had known they would never return to their village. As the carts joined the refugees on the road to Bethlehem and Hebron, his father looked back at the village where he had expected his son one day to be headman like him and watched a tractor crossing the fields from the kibbutz with a handful of people walking behind it, heading for his village. “It’s gone, you know,” his father had told him, when his growing son first began to talk about politics. “The village, the olive trees, the position of mukhtar. All gone. So forget about it. Don’t listen to the people who think we can return.” Even as a young boy, Omar Yussef knew his father was right. The loss of land and privilege felt like less of a burden to him than it did to his friends, because he knew he always would have the protection and wisdom of his father.
The family came to Dehaisha on the edge of Bethlehem with the rest of their clan, which was called Sirhan. In Dehaisha, the peasants from their village set up in the canvas tents provided by the United Nations. Omar Yussef’s father rented this stone house between Dehaisha and Bethlehem for twelve dinars. He paid the rent until he died, when his son took over the payments. The Sirhan clan spread over the Bethlehem area, until it was a respectable group of about two thousand people, professionals and tradesmen. The clan was strong because its people never caused trouble with other families, and because some of them were influential in the political factions and had the protection of their militias. There were Sirhans who were powerful in the local branch of Hamas and others who climbed to prominence within the biggest faction, Fatah.
It made Omar Yussef happy that Nadia seemed to grasp his meaning when he told her this story, as though it were his dear, omniscient father who sat before her talking, rather than Omar Yussef. He felt he took on the nobility of his father as he spoke to her. Somehow, Nadia led him to the honorable essence of himself. He thanked her for the glass of water and squeezed her cheek.
The family finished their food in their accustomed quiet. The kids milled about the table absently as Sara went to prepare tea. Ramiz peeled an orange and dealt out segments to his children.
“I went to Dima Abdel Rahman today, for a condolence call,” Omar Yussef said as he sliced an apple.
“Ah, the poor one,” Maryam said. “To be without a husband.”
“Is it so bad to be without a husband?” Omar Yussef laughed, brief and guttural. “Sometimes you have been known to suggest that husbands are lazy and messy and a nuisance about the house.”
“Omar, you know what I mean.”
Maryam wagged her finger at him, jokingly. Lines stroked downward from her eyes and mouth, giving her face a sad cast, even as she smiled. She wore her hair in a soft wave, parted at the side and falling a few inches below her ears. She dyed it a stark raven color and always dressed in comfortable black clothing. As she aged, her skin had turned a deep gray, so that she sometimes stood out in a room like a single figure from an old movie inadvertently omitted from the colorization process.
The feelings of a man for his wife are very complex, Omar Yussef thought. It’s a shame our women can’t acknowledge that their relationships to their men are not so simple, either. It would be a better thing.
Omar Yussef needed the companionship he found with Maryam. She was born at the same time as he was, but in the north of Palestine, in Nazareth. Her family fled first to Jenin and then to Bethlehem. He had met her when they shared a taxi south from Jenin, where she still had relatives. He was beginning the final stage of his journey home from university in Damascus. They were bound together at first by their political views, their Arab nationalism. Defiantly, Maryam never covered her head as Muslim women do, though motherhood and the responsibility of the home eventually made her politics more simplistic, more average. She gave birth to three sons. Ramiz lived in the apartment downstairs, but the other two had emigrated, to the United States and to Britain. Instead of the politics of her people, Maryam fretted now about when she might see her faraway boys, a concern that could have applied to any mother anywhere in the world. Perhaps it isn’t Maryam who’s become less smart. Maybe everyone was deeper back in my student days, when they didn’t see the threat of a Zionist conspiracy everywhere, Omar Yussef thought. It quietly infuriated him to hear Maryam talk about politics these days, but at least she never spoke of the dead as martyrs.
In any case, Omar Yussef wanted to talk to his son about George Saba and the thoughts about the case that had come to him after his visit to Dima Abdel Rahman. Ramiz ran a mobile phone business and his customers kept him informed about new developments in the town. Omar Yussef hoped his son might know something that would clear George’s name.
“I can’t help feeling that George is being set up somehow,” he said. “I just don’t believe that he would collaborate with the Israelis.”
“People will do very desperate things,” Ramiz said. “George’s business was selling antiques to Israelis on the bypass road. He can’t do that any more, because there’s a siege here, and his Israeli customers are afraid to come. So his business is suffering. Maybe he got desperate. Maybe the Shin Bet got to him and told him they could solve all his problems if he did something for them.”
“It’s because he’s a Christian that he has been accused. That’s all. It isn’t because he actually collaborated.”
“Maybe it’s because he’s a Christian that he’s willing to help the other side.”
Omar Yussef was shocked. “I remind you that you were educated by the Frères. You studied at the very same Christian school as George Saba, the Christian school where I used to teach.”
“Dad, I’m just saying that people will do things under circumstances like these that we would never expect from them in normal times.”
“Like accusing all Christians of being traitors?” Omar Yussef leaned forward angrily.
“That isn’t what I meant. But, look, Christians are already on the outside of our society, these days. Maybe they feel they owe less loyalty than a Muslim does.”
Omar Yussef put down the paring knife and ate some of the apple. “I saw some of your loyal Muslims firing guns into the air at the mourning tent for Louai Abdel Rahman this afternoon.”
“I gave that a miss, because I went to the funeral earlier this morning,” Ramiz said. “It was the usual show from the gunmen then. So they turned up at the mourning tent, too?”
“Yes. But something is strange about what happened at the Abdel Rahman’s place,” Omar Yussef said. He looked around him to be sure the children were out of the room. “You remember that Dima is a former pupil of mine. She told me that she heard Louai talking to someone outside the house just before he was shot. And she saw a red spot of light that seemed to be trying to settle on him.”