“Sorry, Dad,” Ala said. “I haven’t had much to do lately, so I’ve become very good at sheysh-beysh.” He went into the kitchen.
Omar Yussef watched him soaping the plates in the sink. “Did the police finish in the bedroom?”
His son scrubbed hard at the smears of hummus and fava bean foule that had dried on the plates. “I guess so. They took away the body and left the room in a mess.”
Omar Yussef was shocked. “So, inside that room-”
“You’d better be glad it’s not summer, or we’d have a lot of flies, Dad.”
Omar Yussef gasped at his son’s callousness. “How’re you going to live in this apartment with your friend’s blood all over the bedroom?”
Ala reached into a dirty coffee cup and rubbed hard at the grounds. “I’m not staying. I’m going home to Bethlehem, Dad. The woman I loved betrayed me. My friends are dead or destined for jail. New York is too harsh for me. I’m going back to the Middle East.” He snorted a bitter laugh. “At least with the Israeli occupation, you know where you stand.”
Omar Yussef eased his son aside and knelt to open the cupboard beneath the sink. He pulled out a bucket, a pair of rubber gloves, and a bottle of floor cleaner. In the bathroom he filled the bucket with warm water and hauled it to the bedroom.
He pushed the door open and held his breath against the humid, coppery stink in the room. Lunging for the window, he shoved the frame until the old wood squeaked a few inches away from the sill, admitting clean, chilly air. The blood on the cold floor hadn’t decomposed yet, and Omar Yussef was glad he didn’t have to smell that. He remembered the places in Bethlehem where people had been killed in a gunfight or smashed by a tank shell and their blood had remained plastered on the wall or pooled black and sticky in a corner. Even outdoors, the sharp fermented scent of rotten blood was repulsive. In this room, it would have been unbearable.
He went onto his knees and scrubbed hard at the blood- in part to keep himself warm, as the cold air swept through the gap he had forced in the window.
Omar Yussef wrung the cloth. Rashid’s blood spattered into the bucket. In Bethlehem, his nightmares were racked by violent death, stalking his pupils as they walked home from class down streets where the Martyrs Brigades and the Israeli army met. Even in those distressing dreams, I never imagined that it would be one of my little Assassins who’d become a victim, he thought.
He sat on the second bed and stared at the empty space across the room where the corpse had lain. So many difficult nights Nizar must have passed there, unable to sleep, wrestling with his religious beliefs and his desire for Rania.
Peeling off the rubber gloves, Omar Yussef ran his finger along the bookshelf at the foot of the bed. He pulled out the Koran, bound in imitation brown leather, and let it fall open. The spine dropped and the pages settled at the thirtieth sura, al-Rum. Omar Yussef read two sentences that had been underscored with a fingernail on the delicate paper: “He created for you spouses from among yourselves, that you might live in peace with them, and planted love and kindness in your hearts. Surely there are signs in this for thinking men.” He closed the book.
When he left the bedroom, the sudden warmth of the living room made him dizzy. He put his hand to his eyes, and the Koran slipped to the floor. The pages fluttered open to the same verse. Ala came out of the kitchen as Omar Yussef bent to retrieve the book.
“Isn’t that Nizar’s Koran?” Ala asked.
“Do you think I carry a copy around in my back pocket? Of course it’s Nizar’s.” Omar Yussef laughed with a rough choking sound. “He seems to have a penchant for al-Rum.”
Ala smiled wistfully. Omar Yussef was relieved that his son could still visit at least the furthest edges of pleasure. “That’s his favorite verse,” the boy said. “He liked the lines about spouses for us to live in peace with.”
“Rania?”
Ala’s smile took on a brittle edge. “When he was religious, Nizar used to talk about achieving martyrdom. He seemed to think he’d be able to have endless sex with the houris in Paradise if he was killed fighting for Islam.”
“Come on, that’s how village boys think. Nizar was too clever for that.”
“I think he was trying to convince himself of something- of the rightness of religion, perhaps-so he boiled it down to that simplistic concept.”
“Did he change those views when he stopped praying?”
“When he met Rania. They fell in love, Dad. That’s why he liked that verse so much.”
The sheikhs cite that passage as evidence the houris aren’t heavenly beauties at all. They’re our earthly wives, polished up by Allah in Paradise, Omar Yussef thought. Which would’ve made it even more important for Nizar to have Rania now.
“He stopped talking about martyrdom then too,” Ala said. “He didn’t need the seventy-two virgins up in Paradise. All he wanted was the girl next door on Fifth Avenue.”
“And you, my son? What reward do you expect to receive here or in Paradise?”
“I want to taste Mamma’s hummus and see my nephews and nieces,” Ala said. “I’m not speculating about Paradise, but I know it’s not here in Brooklyn.”
Chapter 24
As Omar Yussef stood by the window, the pallid twilight put him in mind of the charcoal skin of a heavy smoker. He wondered if that was why the sky lacked breath to shift the flat clouds. Ala snored on the sofa, overcome by his sleepless nights in the cell at the Detention Facility. His asthma gave each exhalation a coda of wheezing high notes like the cries of a frightened dog.
Omar Yussef blinked as the streetlamps flickered into a purple glow. A bell rattled on the door of a shop below, and he glanced down. A woman hunted in her handbag for her keys, a placard resting against her leg. She wore a black head-scarf edged around with gold. As she locked the cafe, Rania looked up. Omar Yussef stepped behind the curtain. He noticed that she was smiling.
End the criminal Israeli siege of Gaza, her placard read. Omar Yussef was surprised that she cared enough about politics to be on her way to a demonstration. He had thought she detested the Middle East. With the placard under her arm, she cut left onto Bay Ridge Avenue. She’s going to the subway, he thought. At the corner, a red ribbon, pinned at head height, stood out bright against the trunk of a bare gray tree. Omar Yussef stared at the tight bow. Hamza said it was Valentine’s Day today, he recalled. Is Rania on her way to a pro-Palestinian demonstration, or is she meeting her lover?
He limped down the stairs on his aching ankle, struggling into his coat. He turned the corner, heading toward the subway station, and hurried to catch up with Rania. Under the antiseptic light of the Manhattan-bound platform, he pulled his stocking cap low over his brow and affected the slouching, fatigued immobility of the other passengers. On the R train, he ran the zipper on the front of his coat up past his mustache and pretended to doze in his seat. Rania sat a few places over from him, the printed side of the placard pressed to her legs, as though she were embarrassed by its slogan. A lock of black hair fell from under her headscarf and lay across her brow. She rolled it around her forefinger and half-smiled. She was the only person on the train who didn’t appear to be at least partially asleep.
Rania left the train at Pacific Street. Omar Yussef hobbled behind her through the underground passages toward the Atlantic Avenue station. He caught up with her just as she stepped aboard a 4 train. He was perspiring in his coat, but he wasn’t the only one in the crowded subway bundled as though he were still out in the cold, so he kept his hood up. Rania paid him no attention.