Matt Rees - A grave in Gaza

The cries of the crowd were hoarse. Omar Yussef sensed its force, as though he were far down in a body of water or buried by a weight of earth. The screams of the trampled man punctuated the mob’s chant. Dust was thick in the air and his eyes were full of it. Someone’s fist connected with the side of his head and he took a knee in the small of his back. He felt a hand under his right arm, lifting and dragging him. He pushed his glasses into place on his nose and went with the hand that supported him. He blinked the dirt from his eyes and threw his arm around Sami Jaffari.

The young man pulled him across the flow of the crowd, bracing his legs against its momentum, shoving and elbowing those in their way. Omar Yussef saw the limbs of those in the crowd only as blurs, but he noted faces clearly. No one looked directly at him; everyone’s eyes were unnaturally wide, unfocused, cast ahead to where they thought the grave was. They’ve all gone mad, he thought. Even when Sami pushed them hard, they didn’t seem to see the two men in front of them. They ebbed roughly around the obstruction, swirling on toward Husseini’s grave.

Omar Yussef came to an open area, but Sami didn’t halt. He hurried him toward the corner of the building.

“Where’s Abu Adel?” Omar Yussef asked. He looked around for Khamis Zeydan.

“He’s inside.”

“I need to sit down. Let’s go in there with him.”

Sami dragged Omar Yussef. The schoolteacher stumbled as he struggled to keep up with the younger man.

“Sami, I’m exhausted. Where are we going?”

“You’re coming with me.”

“I need to sit down.”

Sami kept going, around the corner and away from the entrance to the presidential building. “Not in there. Not with them.”

In a parking lot at the side of the presidential building, Sami ducked Omar Yussef’s head with a hand on the back of his neck, shoving him into the passenger seat of his Jeep, slamming the door shut. He started the car and pulled around the front of the building so fast that the force pinned Omar Yussef to the leather. The crowd was thin at the gate, since it had mostly pressed into the helicopter pad. People jumped out of Sami’s way as they heard his wheels screech toward them. The Jeep cut left and started north.

“Sami, what’s going on?”

“I told you, you’re coming with me.”

“Evidently. Are you kidnapping me?”

Sami stared at the narrow roads, taking them fast and working the gears on the powerful car. He leaned forward and opened the glove compartment. There were two pistols inside. Omar Yussef pushed himself back into the seat. Sami pulled out a rag that had been wrapped around a third pistol, flipped the compartment shut and tossed the rag in Omar Yussef’s lap. “I’ve noticed you like to look neat and tidy in company,” he said. “Clean yourself up. You’re going to meet someone.”

ami raced to the northern edge of Gaza City and into the sandy sidestreets of Jabalia refugee camp. From the murk of the dust storm, objects seemed to fly toward them as though borne on the air by a whirlwind. Children chased a goat into the road; blue dumpsters donated by the European Union loomed out of the dust; a donkey cart jogged erratically along a narrow lane. Sami negotiated all these obstacles without easing off the gas.

He pulled up at a corner near the northern edge of the camp. “Get out,” he said.

A scrubby dune rose at the end of the block and, beyond its crest, the sands undulated a half mile to the fence marking the end of the Gaza Strip and the beginning of Israel. In the shade of a bare wall, a stocky man in the black T-shirt and dark green baggy pants of the militias rested against the hood of a white jeep. Omar Yussef sensed that he and Sami and their expensive car were being carefully measured.

Sami cut down an alley barely wide enough for his square shoulders. The ground was laid with concrete, set in a shallow V so that water would run down the middle in the rainy months. Now it was dry and the alley was choked with trash-packaging for cheap cookies, empty plastic bottles, the peelings of vegetables and fruit, and a small child’s leather sandal caked in sand and dust.

Omar Yussef followed Sami down the alley, stumbling through the trash. They moved deep into the maze of single-story cinderblock hovels. He was astonished that Sami knew the place so well. At home in Dehaisha, every sad dwelling was familiar to him and he could recognize family resemblances even in children he didn’t know. But here every corner seemed identical and all the children stared at him with silent, blank faces.

The quiet domestic sounds of mothers calling their children and of concrete floors being washed with heavy, wet cloths receded, as Sami edged into a new alley that opened onto the main street of the camp. Sami ducked past the buckets and brooms dangling from the ragged awning of a shop at the corner. He went quickly through the jammed lanes of traffic and into a falafel restaurant. Omar Yussef followed past the blackened fryer in the doorway, bubbling as it received a new batch of green chickpea balls. Sami nodded to a man chopping tomatoes at the counter and went three steps at a time up a makeshift staircase at the back.

The stairs led to a cheaply decorated dining area. The walls and floor were tiled in pink. The tables were black metal frames topped with fake squares of marble, peeling at the corners. The chairs were of chrome tubing with puffy cushions. The plastic packaging hadn’t been removed from the cushions, but in places it was gashed and peeling.

A series of portraits and photographs along both walls depicted a young man in his early twenties with neat hair combed to the left and a thick beard, softly slick because it had never been shaved. Some of the photos showed a montage of the youth backed by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and another had him in front of the Aqsa Mosque. A local artist had copied the photo in childishly clumsy oils. On the opposite wall, the same photo had been weaved into a cheap prayer mat.

Sami sat at a table by the window and studied the busy street below. He lit a cigarette.

Omar Yussef stood by the table and pulled out his handkerchief to mop the sweat and dust from his forehead and neck. Sami pointed to the seat opposite him. Omar Yussef shook his head. “Before I sit down, tell me what’s going on?” he said.

Sami looked at him and exhaled smoke slowly. “I’m sorry I dragged you away from the funeral in such a hurry. But there’s an order out to kill you,” he said.

Omar Yussef wondered fleetingly if Sami would be the one; there was something newly dark about the young man’s eyes. But he doubted he would bring him to a place so public for the execution.

“I had to get you away from there. It’s one of the men in the Revolutionary Council who issued the order,” Sami said. He took another drag and looked at his wristwatch. “We might be here a while. Sit down and we’ll eat something.”

Omar Yussef lowered himself onto the uncomfortable chair. His knees ached. The warm wind rattled the windows of the restaurant. “Who is it? Who wants me killed?”

“I don’t know yet. But it’s dangerous for you to be around any of those party men.” Sami crushed his cigarette into a tinfoil ashtray. “Let’s eat something.”

A thin youth came to their table. His white T-shirt was stained around the belly where he had wiped his hands after chopping peppers. The shirt hung lank from his narrow shoulders and his face was bony and raddled. He reminded Omar Yussef of Husseini’s dead coffee boy.

They ordered falafel, hummus, and a plate of pickles and olives. The youth had turned to go when Omar Yussef asked him the identity of the young man in the portraits on the wall.