A bullet rang down the corridor and splintered the wood of
the front door through which George Saba had entered. As he
had dodged along the road in the darkness, he had been
determined that tonight he would act. He had cursed the gunmen
under his breath, and when a shot struck particularly
close to him he had sworn at the top of his voice. Now he
wanted only to crawl deeper into the alcove, to dig himself
inside the wall until this nightmare stopped. If he stayed in the
niche long enough, perhaps he would awake and find himself
in his store in Santiago and this idiotic fantasy of returning to
his childhood home would once more be merely a dream, not
a reality of red-hot lead, blasting through his home, destructive
and deadly. He looked over to the bedroom and caught his
wife’s pleading expression, as she struggled to keep the heads
of their children hidden beneath her arms. He wasn’t going to
wake up in Chile. He couldn’t hide. He had to end this. He got
to his feet, sliding up the wall, pushing his back hard against it
as though it might wrap his flesh in impenetrable stone. He
took the tense, expectant breath of a man dropping into freezing
water and dashed across the exposed corridor into the
bedroom.
George Saba hugged his wife and children to him. “It’s
going to be all right, darlings,” he said. “I’m going to take care
of it.” He pulled them close so they wouldn’t see that his jaw
shook.
For the first time, his father moved his head. “What are you
going to do?”
George looked sadly at the old man. He wasn’t fooled by the
stillness with which Habib Saba held himself. It wasn’t calm and
resolve that kept the old man frozen in his self-contained posture
against the wall. His father cowered in the bedroom
because he was accustomed to the corruption and violence of
their town. He lived as quietly and invisibly as he could,
because Christians were a minority in Bethlehem, and so
Habib Saba was careful not to upset the Muslims by standing
up to them. George had learned a different way of life during
his years away from Palestine. He put his hand on his father’s
shoulder and then touched the old man’s rough cheek.
Quickly, George stood and reached for an antique revolver
mounted on the wall. It was a British Webley VI from the Second
World War that he had bought a few months before from
the family of an old man who had once served in the Jordanian
Arab Legion and kept the gun as a souvenir of his English
officers. The gray metal was dull and there was rust on the
hinge, so that the cylinder couldn’t be opened. But in the
darkness its six-inch barrel would look deadly enough, unlike
the three inlaid Turkish flintlocks that decorated the bedroom
wall beside it. George Saba tightened his hand around
the square-cut grip and felt the gun’s weight.
Habib reached out for his son’s arm, but couldn’t hold fast.
Sofia screamed when she saw the revolver in her husband’s
hand. At the sound, her daughter peered from under her
mother’s arm. George knew he must act now or the sight of
those frightened eyes would break him. He reached down
and put his hand over the child’s brow, as though to close her
eyes. “Don’t worry, little Miral. Daddy’s going to tell the men to
stop playing and making noise.” It sounded stupid and, for the
moment, he kept his fingers over the girl’s face so that he
wouldn’t see the look of incredulity he felt sure would have registered
on her features. Even a child could tell this was no
game. Then he dashed through the front door.
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