Matt Rees - The Samaritan's secret

“I have three,” Omar Yussef said. He glanced at the Samaritan men. Hands in pockets, they had the uneasy listlessness of teenagers at their first family funeral. But their eyes were alert and trained on the priest’s back.

“What a blessing, pasha. ” Ben-Tabia returned his thick glasses to his nose and his eyes seemed to shrink away behind them.

Omar Yussef recalled his awkward reunion with Zuheir and his son’s new religious dedication. “Thanks to Allah,” he said.

He moved to the priest’s side. His back ached and he would have rested his foot on the rock, but some sense of propriety prevented him. Perhaps it’s the rock’s holiness, he thought. No, it’s the blood.

The priest’s eyebrows twitched. “I don’t know what friction usually passes between a father and his son, pasha. I know only that there was tension between me and Ishaq. I have nothing to compare it to, but I must judge myself harshly, even so.” He hesitated. “It was difficult sometimes, Abu Ramiz. He was not content.”

“Not content with what?”

“The village, Nablus, his wife.” The priest groaned. “Certainly not with me.”

“Why not?”

“I was rigid with him. What else could I do? I have two daughters, but my attention and my hopes focused on my son. You understand that, pasha. It’s the way things are in our society. Women count for less.”

Omar Yussef, who loved Nadia best of all his grandchil-dren, grimaced.

“When Ishaq was a boy, I was only a priest. By the time he was a man, I was a leader of our people.” Ben-Tabia shook his head. “The standards that I demand of all the Samaritans applied to him even more forcefully.”

“He failed to live up to them?”

“Perhaps he only failed because he wanted me to know that I had failed him as a father.”

Omar Yussef realized that he had, after all, rested his foot on the holy rock. He withdrew it to the grass at the edge of the footpath. “Now is not the time for such judgments, Your Honor. A father’s high expectations are natural, and a son’s rebellion yet more so. You must forgive yourself, at least while you mourn.”

Jibril Ben-Tabia drew a hand across his forehead. “He was a good boy, in spite of everything,” he murmured. “He helped everybody. It was as though he couldn’t deny anything to anyone.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are some boys in the village who are, you know, not right.”

“They’re handicapped, you mean?”

“Ishaq always played basketball with them and talked to them. No one else bothers with them, except their immediate families. They’re outsiders.” The priest dropped his mournful eyes to the rock. “He was a good boy, but as his father I was forced to be critical of him.”

Ben-Tabia turned to Omar Yussef and drew himself up straight. He was six feet tall, five inches greater than Omar Yussef, and his fez made him appear even taller. He took a long breath that was loud in the stillness of the hilltop. “I was Ishaq’s father, but I was also his priest. That means I have certain duties now, pasha. His body must be washed and dressed in white. We must carry out the funeral before sunset. Our tradition is for the priest to read from Deuteronomy, chapter thirty-two, as the body is lowered into the grave. Probably you don’t know it, pasha, as a Muslim.”

Omar Yussef glanced down at the blood on the rock. “‘They have corrupted themselves,’” he said. “‘They are a perverse and crooked generation.’”

The priest stared at Omar Yussef, curious and wary.

“I’m Muslim, as you point out,” Omar Yussef said, “but I grew up in Bethlehem back when it was still a town with a Christian majority, and I taught for many years in a Christian school. I know all sorts of things you might expect to be a mystery to a Muslim.”

Sami climbed from where Ishaq’s dead body lay onto the path along the ridge. “Your Honor, was Ishaq married?”

The priest’s eyes were distant. He made a murmur of assent through his pursed lips.

Sami turned toward the Samaritan men. “Has his wife been told of his death?”

The caretaker raised his hand and pointed toward the village. “I called my wife earlier and told her to go and tell Roween. She’ll have done that by now.”

“Roween is Ishaq’s wife?”

The short man lifted his chin to indicate that Sami was correct and turned his attention to the policemen on the slope below.

“I’d better go and see her,” Sami said.

In the village, the boys were gone from the concrete lot. Sami went into a small grocery to buy cigarettes and ask directions to Ishaq’s house.

Omar Yussef looked up toward the hilltop where the corpse lay. He remembered Sami’s question about the Samaritans. Part of Palestinian culture, yes. They’re murdered just like we are, he thought.

The bright morning sun made him squint, but he felt gloomy. He recalled the Samaritan priest’s regrets over his son. He vowed to be as forgiving as he could about Zuheir’s decision to quit his job at a British university for a position at an Islamic school in Beirut.

Sami jogged back from the shop. He lit a cigarette as he ran the car slowly along the street to a small park. The thin grass was studded with deep, rectangular pits, arranged in ranks and lined with concrete.

“This must be where they cook the sheep they slaughter for their Passover,” Omar Yussef said.

Sami took a sharp drag. “Ishaq had a front row seat for the big kill, then. That’s his house, right next door.”

They went to the front entrance and were greeted by a short woman in her late twenties with dry auburn hair cut like a man’s and parted on the left. Her thick eyebrows had been plucked, but as they grew back they met above her upturned nose. Acne mottled red and purple triangles between the corners of her mouth and her jaw.

The woman glanced past Omar Yussef to the police car at the curb and he saw that her eyelashes were wet with tears. “Please come in,” she mumbled. “Feel as if this were your home and you were with your own family.”

The door opened onto a living room furnished with sofas upholstered in velour swirls and an elegant cherry-wood dining set.

“Greetings. We’d like to talk to Ishaq’s wife,” Omar Yussef said.

The woman bowed. “Double greetings. I’m Roween al-Teef, Ishaq’s wife,” she said. “Please wait, ustaz, while I prepare coffee for you.”

On the wall, there was an enlarged photo of a man bowing to receive a kiss on the forehead from the old president. Sami froze in front of the photo. Omar Yussef adjusted his spectacles and squinted: the president, wearing the checkered keffiyeh that was his trademark, puckered his lips before the smiling face of Ishaq, the son of Jibril the priest.

Sami and Omar Yussef sat on one of the stiff sofas in silence. Sami stubbed out his cigarette in a ceramic ashtray painted with a blue symmetrical design in the Armenian style and stared at the photo.

“This may have been a mistake,” he said.

Omar Yussef wished he had told Roween not to bother about the coffee. It couldn’t have been an hour since she had learned of her husband’s death. She ought to be looking after herself, not attending to me, he thought.

A basketball bounced in the backyard of the house, a deep repetitive impact, as though someone were venting his anger on the concrete.

“A mistake?” Omar Yussef said.

Sami cracked his knuckles. “I don’t want anything to do with that guy.” He pointed at the photo of the president.

“Really, a big fucking mistake.”

Omar Yussef squinted at Ishaq’s face on the wall. Sami may be scared of the old president, but that young man wasn’t, he thought. The eyes once again struck Omar Yussef as familiar, just as they had when he had seen the corpse. They were knowing and conspiratorial. Ishaq seemed to be signaling to the famously duplicitous old guerrilla that he was nobody’s fool, even as he accepted the benediction of those moist lips. “This isn’t a condolence call.” Omar Yussef turned to Sami. “You have to question her.”