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An Omar Yussef Mystery
by Matt Beynon Rees
Book Reviewed by:
Chapter 1
Omar Yussef, a teacher of history to the unhappy children
of Dehaisha refugee camp, shuffled stiffly up the meandering
road, past the gray, stone homes built in the time of the
Turks on the edge of Beit Jala. He paused in the strong evening
wind, took a comb from the top pocket of his tweed jacket, and
tried to tame the strands of white hair with which he covered
his baldness. He glanced down at his maroon loafers in the
orange flicker of the buzzing street lamp and tutted at the dust
that clung to them as he tripped along the uneven roadside,
away from Bethlehem.
In the darkness at the corner of the next alley, a gunman
coughed and expectorated. The gob of sputum landed at the
border of the light and the gloom, as though the man
intended for Omar Yussef to see it. He resisted the urge to
scold the sentry for his vulgarity, as he would have one of his
pupils at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency Girls
School. The young thug, though obscured by the night,
formed an outline clear as the sun to Omar Yussef, who knew
that obscenities were this shadow’s trade. Omar Yussef gave his
windblown hair a last hopeless stroke with a slightly shaky
hand. Another regretful look at his shoes, and he stepped
into the dark.
Where the road reached a small square, Omar Yussef
stopped to catch his breath. Across the street was the Greek
Orthodox Club. Windows pierced the deep stone walls, tall and
mullioned, capped with an arch and carved around with concentric
rings receding into the thickness of the wall, just high
enough to be impossible to look through, as though the building
should double as a fortress. The arch above the door was
filled with a tympanum stone. Inside, the restaurant was silent
and dim. The scattered wall-lamps diffused their egg-yolk radiance
into the high vaults of the ceiling and washed the red
checkered tablecloths in a pale honey yellow. There was only
one diner, at a corner table below an old portrait of the village’s
long-dead dignitaries wearing their fezes and staring with the
empty eyes of early photography. Omar Yussef nodded to
the listless waiter—who half rose from his seat—gesturing that
he should stay where he was, and headed to the table occupied
by George Saba.
“Did you have any trouble with the Martyrs Brigades sentries
on the way up here, Abu Ramiz?” Saba asked. He used the
unique mixture of respect and familiarity connoted by calling
a man Abu—father of—and joining it to the name of his eldest
son.
“Just one bastard who nearly spat on my shoe,” said Omar
Yussef. He smiled, grimly. “But no one played the big hero with
me tonight. In fact, there didn’t seem to be many of them
around.”
“That’s bad. It means they expect trouble.” George laughed.
“You know that those great fighters for the freedom of the
Palestinian people are always the first to get out of here when
the Israelis come.”
George Saba was in his mid-thirties. He was as big, unkempt
and clumsy as Omar Yussef was small, neat and precise. His
thick hair was striped white around the temples and it sprayed
above his strong, broad brow like the crest of a stormy wave
crashing against a rock. It was cold in the restaurant and he
wore a thick plaid shirt and an old blue anorak with its zipper
pulled down to his full belly. Omar Yussef took pride in this former
pupil, one of the first he had ever taught. Not because
George was particularly successful in life, but rather for his
honesty and his choice of a career that utilized what he had
learned in Omar Yussef’s history class: George Saba dealt in
antiques. He bought the detritus of a better time, as he saw it,
and coaxed Arab and Persian wood back to its original warm
gleam, replaced the missing tesserae in Syrian mother-of-pearl
designs, and sold them mostly to Israelis passing his shop near
the bypass road to the settlements.
Excerpted from The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees © 2007 by Matt Beynon Rees. Excerpted by permission of Soho Crime. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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