Matt Rees - The Samaritan's secret

He withdrew his finger and looked at Sami. The policeman raised an eyebrow, glanced at the two gunmen in the corner and dipped his head toward the door of the mosque. Time to go, Omar Yussef thought. “My dear father also taught me to show respect. I hope you don’t mistake my bluntness for disrespect, Our Honored Sheikh.”

“May Allah forbid it,” Sheikh Bader said. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to finish the arrangements for tomorrow’s wedding. We must be sure that Nouri Awwadi isn’t the only one riding a horse. I have to get fourteen more such mounts into the casbah by the end of the day. May Allah grant you grace.”

In the small plaza outside the mosque, Sami gave Omar Yussef a smile. “Are you so opposed to marriage, Abu Ramiz, that you want to insult the sheikh until he refuses to carry out the ceremony for me?”

“As a matter of fact, I think you and Meisoun are a perfect pair. But men like him make me angry.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the mosque. “Many years ago, when I was still a drinker, I once told a particularly self-important sheikh to go screw himself. Evidently he took my advice, because he has given birth to many others like him and now we’re inundated with arrogant, self-righteous religious leaders.”

Sami grinned. They turned toward the shops along the casbah’s main street.

At the entrance to the souk, Omar Yussef detected something savory in the air. He twitched his nostrils, searching beyond the aroma of walnuts and dates from the ma’amoul shortbread pyramided on wide trays outside a sweetshop. Sami pointed into the half-light of the market. “You’ve picked up the scent of Abu Alam’s restaurant,” he said. “Now I’ll prove to you that I’m not marrying Meisoun just so that I’ll have someone to fry my eggs in the morning.”

They weaved between the women in the souk . The presence of the crowd calmed Omar Yussef. In the empty casbah, there always seemed to be some man, menacing and solitary, sloping along close to the wall on the shadowed side of the alley. As the women milled past the small stores, the brush of their shoulders against Omar Yussef felt like a soothing caress. I could almost forget that I saw a dead man today, he thought.

Just past a toy shop selling bright plastic machine guns and tricycles, Sami dodged into a storefront, its door and window the width of a man’s arm span and open to the street. The sizzling of oil in a frying pan drew Omar Yussef inside. He could rarely stomach food that wasn’t prepared by his wife, but his exertions at the summit of Mount Jerizim and his walk around the casbah had made him hungry. He noticed that he was salivating.

Sami reached over the counter to slap hands with the owner, who was making hummus in a bucket-sized mixer. Abu Alam squeezed two large lemons over the chickpeas, tehina and garlic. He wiped the juice from his fingers on his soiled shirt, before reaching out a thick forearm to grasp Sami’s hand. His fat face glistened with perspiration.

“So you’re a pal of Sami’s from Bethlehem?” Abu Alam’s voice was hoarse from shouting orders to his cook over the din of the busy souk. “Welcome, ustaz. Things down there aren’t violent enough for you, so you decided to come and see what life is like in a real war zone?”

“Thanks for your welcome.” Omar Yussef raised a finger and smiled. “How do you know I’m not on the run from the Israelis? Maybe I decided to take refuge here where they can’t get at me.”

“You may see gunmen walking freely around our casbah in the afternoon, it’s true, ustaz. But believe me they’re not out of reach of the Israelis, even here. Only last night, the Israelis came right to the door of my restaurant.” Abu Alam pointed toward a metal concertina shutter folded back from the entrance. The light green paint was smeared a cloudy black. “That’s from a grenade or some other explosive, and it wasn’t like that when I locked up yesterday.”

Omar Yussef touched a finger to the blackness. It came away dirty, with a smell of burnt plastic. “What happened?”

“The Israeli special forces come in every night to arrest some gunmen. We’re not very deep in the casbah here, so the Israelis can enter this far and still know where they stand.” Abu Alam waved a big hand at the door. “But they don’t like to go further. They’re at a disadvantage in the alleys and the old tunnels. The streets are too twisty for their tanks, and our gunmen know their way around much better than they do.”

“In Bethlehem the army comes at night once or twice a week,” Omar Yussef said.

“Nablus isn’t like Bethlehem or the rest of the West Bank. It’s more like Gaza, ustaz, ” Abu Alam said. “We used to run the most prosperous businesses in Palestine and produce its greatest poets. Now our casbah is a factory for gunmen and the only literature is written on posters advertising the latest martyr.”

“Most of the gunmen in Bethlehem have been arrested by now.”

“No matter how many the Israelis kill or capture, Nablus still has a good supply.”

“Maybe if you gave the gunmen free eggs and hummus, they’d be too fat to run away from the Israelis and then your town could get some peace.”

“I’m doing my best. The men of the resistance eat free here, ustaz, and you know that hummus makes you sleepy.” Abu Alam wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his wrist.

“What about the police?” Omar Yussef squeezed Sami’s shoulder. “Do they eat free of charge?”

“The brother Sami will never get fat, and my prices are affordable, even for a man on a police salary.” Abu Alam smiled. “The usual, Sami?”

“Yes, and the same for Abu Ramiz.”

Sami took Omar Yussef’s elbow, led him down the single row of tables, and sat facing the door. Against the opposite wall, a thin youth in baggy jeans took a few eggs from a cardboard pannier and cracked them one-handed into a charred frying pan. He turned up the heat on a row of gas burners, wiping a smear of egg yolk onto his white apron. Behind Sami, another youngster was wedged between a deep stainless steel sink and a waist-high cooking-gas canister in the violet glow of an electric fly trap. He split a baked eggplant, scraped out its pulpy innards, and tossed the skin onto a pile of trash, where it lay, bruise-black and limp, like a gutted crow. Abu Alam shouted to the boy, who went quickly to the counter and ferried a few small plates to Sami and Omar Yussef.

Sami curled a wedge of flatbread around his forefinger and scooped some khilta into his mouth. He wiped a dribble of the yoghurt from his chin. “Try it. It’s good,” he said. “Even your dear wife wouldn’t object to this place.”

“I think she might take issue with their cleanliness,” Omar Yussef said, glancing at the charred gobbets of egg on the gas burners.

The yoghurt was appealing, though, dotted with the brightness of finely chopped tomatoes and red peppers. He ate, enjoying the freshness of the dish. When he tried the soft slices of avocado soaked in olive oil, he sensed himself relaxing. He was supposed to be on vacation and he hadn’t planned for dead bodies in his itinerary, so it was comfort-ing to taste hearty, traditional food prepared simply and to forget about the corpse on the mountain. It’s Sami who has to worry about the dead Samaritan, Omar Yussef thought, and his killer.

The young man who had been working the burners laid an omelette, glistening with oil, on the table and grinned at Omar Yussef with betel-stained teeth. In the kitchen, a jagged crackle and a stutter of violet light marked the sudden demise of a fly.