Omar Yussef detected the bitter scent of urine in a dark corner. The sweet smell had finally left him. The funeral must be over, he thought, sniffing the cologne on the back of his hand.
At the Touqan Palace, he weaved through a crowd of older men who had returned to the house of mourning after the funeral, while the youngsters went to throw stones at the Israeli checkpoint. He climbed the steps to the terrace fronting the Awwadi family apartment, overlooking the uneven roofs of the casbah. A row of potted kumquat bushes quivered in the hot breeze. Omar Yussef plucked an orange fruit, inhaled its fragrance and savored the texture of its rind as he rolled it between his fingers.
A black tarpaulin shaded the mourners. A boy offered Omar Yussef a finger of thin, unsweetened coffee in a tiny blue plastic cup. He drank and wiggled the cup from side to side to signify that he didn’t want a refill. He saw Nouri’s father under the awning, made his way through the plastic chairs where the mourners sat, and shook the man’s hand.
“May Allah have mercy upon him, the departed one,” he said.
“May you live a long life,” the man mumbled, letting go of Omar Yussef’s hand quickly. He fiddled with a string of green worry beads like the one his son had used. Omar Yussef wondered if they had been recovered from Nouri’s clothes at the baths. The man’s stumpy fingers fretted the beads in his wrinkled brown hand, like an elephant’s massive feet kicking a row of watermelons.
Omar Yussef lowered himself into the seat beside the bereaved man. “I’m Omar Yussef Sirhan, from Bethlehem,” he said. “I was in the baths when Nouri was killed.”
“Welcome.”
Omar Yussef put his palm over his heart and bowed slightly. “Who would have killed your son, Abu Nouri?”
“I know exactly who is to blame.” The man lifted a thick finger. Omar Yussef remembered the shaven, scented corpse in the baths. The father’s gray chest-hair curled over the top of a soiled white T-shirt and he smelled of grease and sweat. His bottom lip hung heavily and his dead brown eyes reminded Omar Yussef of the dumb goats in the courtyard.
“Who did it?”
“He will pay,” Awwadi’s father hissed.
“Who?”
“My son had a big argument about his wedding with another young man from the casbah.”
“What was the argument about?”
“This other bastard wanted to marry the same girl.”
“The girl Nouri married yesterday, at the big Hamas wedding?”
Awwadi’s father blinked his vapid eyes. “Nouri was killed by this man because he was jealous. We’ll fight his family to get revenge.”
“Who is he?”
“Halim Mareh, that son of a whore.”
Omar Yussef remembered the tall young man in the blue overalls, leaning against the sacks stacked in the doorway of the Mareh family’s spice store, and the harsh stare he had shared with Nouri Awwadi. “How do you know it was him?”
“I saw the murderer and his friends here in the courtyard of my own home.”
The passage, Omar Yussef thought. “But Nouri wasn’t killed here.”
“There’s a tunnel between the baths and this courtyard. They used it to escape from the baths.”
“Does the tunnel go anywhere else?”
“To a halva factory. But that’s a very busy place. They would’ve been noticed. Here they hoped to go unseen. But I saw them come through the courtyard with their weapons. Four of them, including this jealous bastard. I thought nothing of it at first-several families live in this old palace and we all use the courtyard. Then Nouri’s friends came to tell me he had been killed in the baths and I realized imme-diately who was guilty.”
“Didn’t the girl’s father make the decision that she would marry Nouri?”
“Of course he did.” Awwadi’s father opened his clumsy hands wide. “But this jealous bastard didn’t accept it. The girl’s father is a follower of Hamas, and so am I. The jealous one decided he had been refused because he’s a member of Fatah. That’s why he killed my Nouri.”
Omar Yussef tasted bile seeping over the back of his tongue. “When will the fighting begin?”
“We must give them an opportunity to make amends, to pay a blood price for Nouri’s death,” Awwadi’s father said. “But if they don’t, we’ll go after their family in a couple of days. And we’ll destroy them.” A vein pulsed in his temple, and he slapped his thick fist into his palm. The worry beads clicked on the impact. “Even then, my existence will be over. Without Nouri, I’m finished.”
Omar Yussef touched the man’s knee. “I know that revenge is demanded by our tribal traditions, Abu Nouri. But as a Muslim you must also remember what happened when the third caliph, Uthman, put family ties before justice. It led to civil war, to the division of Islam into Sunni and Shia.”
“What are you? A history teacher? You think I’m going to start a civil war here in the casbah?”
“It could be.”
“In this case, there’s no contradiction between family ties and justice. By the will of Allah, the guilt is on the men who killed my son. When they did that, they ceased to be Muslims. Don’t speak to me about caliphs and ancient history.”
“When I talked to Nouri in the baths, he told me he was about to become very rich,” Omar Yussef said. “Did he mention anything to you about finding something? Something valuable?”
Awwadi’s father waved his hand. “Anything Nouri had, he gave to Hamas. Ask Sheikh Bader.”
“Did he give Sheikh Bader the files?”
The heavy neck lifted a suspicious face toward Omar Yussef. “Files?”
“Nouri told me he obtained some files of dirt about Fatah leaders.”
“Those things? They’re in the storeroom behind Nouri’s horse. Sheikh Bader will send someone for them soon enough.”
Not quite soon enough, Omar Yussef thought. He shook the big, limp hand and weaved back through the plastic chairs.
Omar Yussef walked through the casbah, away from the Touqan Palace. Awwadi’s father believes a Fatah man killed his son, he thought. Could it have been revenge for the killing of Ishaq, who worked for Kanaan, the local Fatah boss? But Awwadi was shocked when I told him of Ishaq’s death. He even seemed to have liked him.
The quiet alleys darkened in the twilight. Old Awwadi’s world was at an end with his son’s death. Omar Yussef wondered if anyone would feel that way, were he to die. He imagined Zuheir praying over his body at his funeral, but then he realized that he had it the wrong way around. The older Awwadi and Jibril, the priest, were fathers who had lost their sons. He gasped as he reversed the scene and saw himself weeping over Zuheir’s body, shrouded for burial. His legs shook and he leaned his back against a wall for support. The stone was hot from the day’s sunshine. As darkness fell, Omar Yussef felt the heat ebbing away.
Chapter 20
Jibril Ben-Tabia cradled the tarnished silver case of the Abisha Scroll like a sooty newborn, rocking on his heels as if to lull it to sleep. The old priest wore a thin smock, tight around his bony waist, and a cloth embroidered with a gold floral design twisted around his red fez. He gazed over the crowd of strangers who had come to the summit of Mount Jerizim to observe his people’s Passover celebration.
Ben-Tabia appeared pleasantly bemused, like a grandfa-ther who had expected everyone to forget his birthday, only to find himself among well-wishers whose identity he couldn’t quite recall. Some of the onlookers wore dark suits, marking them out as diplomats. Photographers jostled at the front of the crowd and a handful of foreign journalists chatted together at its edge.
“Where was the body?” Khamis Zeydan lifted his foot a few inches above the chippings in the tourist parking lot and shook it.