Matt Rees - A grave in Gaza

“Now you’re happy?” Omar Yussef rose to his knees.

“Now I can continue our resistance. Until my martyrdom.” Abu Jamal kicked the fiberglass rock. Omar Yussef dropped to the ground again. The rock rolled away from them. Abu Jamal laughed, soft and jeering.

Sami sheared a slice of material from his T-shirt and bound his shoulder, where Yasser Salah’s bullet had winged him. He knelt by Omar Yussef with a pan of water and cleaned the dirt from his lacerated hands. “You were nearly buried alive back there, Abu Ramiz,” he said.

“Yes, I thought it might become my eternal tomb.” Omar Yussef remembered the way the images of the skeleton in the pathologist’s surgery and of the British War Cemetery had come to him in the tunnel. It was as though it had all been down there in the same hole in the ground with him and Yasser Salah. He rubbed his forehead.

“I wouldn’t have left you down there. I’d have dug you up and shipped your body back to Bethlehem. Gaza’s a terrible place to stay, even if it’s only your bones.” Sami ripped another piece from his T-shirt and tied it around Omar Yussef’s palm.

Even if it’s only your bones. Omar Yussef thought of Yasser Salah, crushed in the collapsed tunnel. Though Salah was gone, others would die when his stash of weapons was aimed at them. Beyond the grave, the men of Gaza could still wield death. He thought of the skeleton on the pathologist’s dissecting table. Who did you rise from the dead to kill?

Dawn lent a roseate highlight to the dust cloud, as Sami accelerated out of Rafah, north on the Saladin Road toward Gaza City. Wallender had washed the abraded skin around his mouth under a faucet, but his face remained grimy and bloodied. The pine air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror of the Jeep Cherokee battled with the scent of sweat and soil from the car’s passengers. Omar Yussef wondered if his body would ever be cleansed of the dirt constricting his breath and clogging his throat.

In the back of the car, Wallender had been gabbing with the excitement of new freedom ever since they’d left the Saladin Brigades men at the stationery store, their jeeps laden with Yasser Salah’s weapons and the dead bodies of four of their comrades. I’ll let him wash and rest before I tell him about James, Omar Yussef thought. Or about Eyad Masharawi. Perhaps I won’t tell him the rest, ever. Maybe that way I’ll be able to forget it, too.

He gazed across the cabbage fields. The wind had picked up and bent the isolated stands of sycamore. The dust storm was building for its final squall. Perhaps it would at last blow itself out and he would see the sunshine again before he left Gaza, after all.

As they passed Deir al-Balah, the tall palms bowed under the wind. The cabbage fields fluttered like the emerald surface of the sea, stretching to the neat green hedge around the British War Cemetery. The gusts came from the east with the dawn, as though the growing light were blowing into Gaza.

Omar Yussef stared at the hedge as they approached the cemetery. In the tunnel, it was as though this place of tombs was down there with me and Yasser Salah. The old skeleton was there, too. He frowned. “Sami, pull over at the junction,” he said, pointing toward the caretaker’s little farmhouse.

The mysterious skeleton in the morgue was discovered in the corner of a field near here, he thought. He recalled the desecrated graves he’d seen when he visited the cemetery with Cree. The words Khamis Zeydan had spoken to him when he first arrived in Gaza sounded in his head: There is no single, isolated crime in Gaza. Each one is linked to many others.

Omar Yussef stepped out of the car and trotted to the gate of the caretaker’s yard, his head bowed against the wind. The caretaker stared in fright when he saw Omar Yussef, his clothes filthy and bloody and his head covered in dust.

“You remember me, Suleiman? I was here with Mister James Cree from the United Nations.”

Suleiman Jouda nodded, but his expression remained one of shock.

Omar Yussef coughed. “This is Mister Cree’s friend, Mister Wallender. Also from the United Nations.”

Jouda gaped at Wallender’s gory face and his filthy clothes.

Omar Yussef edged past the caretaker. “He’s from Sweden,” he said, with a wink, as though that explained their strange appearance on Jouda’s doorstep at daybreak. Jouda nodded, hesitantly. “We need to inspect the graveyard on a very important issue of United Nations security business, Suleiman.”

Omar Yussef crossed the dirt yard, passing a wheelbarrow and some trenching tools that stood against the wall. Jouda opened the gate to the graveyard and entered. Omar Yussef picked up a long-handled spade and gave it to Sami. He ignored Sami’s quizzical expression and followed Jouda onto the lush lawn of the cemetery.

Wallender stared at the neatness of the graveyard. “This really doesn’t look like Gaza. What’re we doing here, Abu Ramiz?”

“We’re paying our respects,” Omar Yussef said. He turned to Jouda. “Suleiman, show us the graves that were recently desecrated. Was it these, near the end of the path?”

Jouda led them to the corner of the first block of gravestones facing the lawn’s central obelisk monument. “It was these few here, ustaz,” he said. “But can you tell me, please, what’s the matter? I’m sorry to ask, uncle, but the British consulate is sending someone today to inspect the repairs I’ve made to the damaged gravestones. Is your visit connected to that?”

“In a way. Everything will be okay. Don’t worry.”

“Is that my shovel?” Jouda said, nervous and slightly indignant now.

“Trust me, Suleiman.” Omar Yussef stepped off the gravel path onto the grass.

Jouda had bonded the pieces of the broken gravestones and re-laid the disturbed turf around them. The one that had been marked with graffiti stood out. Jouda’s cleanser had erased the vandals’ slogans, but it also had scoured away ninety years of dust from the rock, leaving a chalky diagonal stripe across the crest of the stone.

Omar Yussef approached that grave. He read the inscription. Private Eynon Price. Royal Army Medical Corps, 53rd (Welsh) Casualty Clearing Station. 28 years. 4/5/1917. He read the inscription again. Eynon Price, Eynon Price. How do you pronounce that name? “Eye” or “Ay” or “Ee”? Eynon Price. He was sure he knew that name. Perhaps a foreigner working for the UN had a similar name, but he couldn’t recall who it might be. Then he remembered: he had heard those words, uttered by a tongue unaccustomed to English. In Odwan’s cell. When the doomed man had recounted the nonsensical babbling of Lieutenant Fathi Salah before he was shot. High Noon Price, Odwan thought Salah had said.

Odwan had believed Fathi Salah was negotiating the price of the missile, but the frightened officer was actually telling him where to find the weapon. It was here, its burial disguised as a desecration of the graves.

Omar Yussef felt a surge of strength and excitement. He had discovered the truth and now he was about to uncover the Saladin I. “Sami, start digging right here.”

Jouda protested. Omar Yussef put his hands on the man’s shoulders and spoke soothingly. “Suleiman, there has been a terrible criminal act. You heard about the bones that were found near here and taken to the morgue at Shifa Hospital?”

Jouda nodded. “It was in the newspaper, ustaz, ” he said. He kept his eyes on the grave, where Sami was peeling away the turf the caretaker had only lately re-laid.

“Those are the bones that should be in this grave.”

“Then what’s in the grave now?”

“All the evil of Gaza.”

“Leave it there then.” Jouda didn’t question that evil would reside beneath the earth.