Abu Qais stretched out his arm and tapped a child on the head. The child raised his eyes to him as he was eavesdropping by the window.
“What’s going on?”
The child laughed and replied in a whisper:
“Idiot!”
He drew back, got down off the stone and went on his way, still followed by the voice of Ustaz Selim repeating: “When the two great rivers, Tigris and Euphrates, meet …”
That night he saw Ustaz Selim sitting in the headman’s reception room, smoking his gurgling water pipe. Ustaz Selim had been sent to their village from Jaffa to teach the boys, and he had spent so much of his life teaching that the title “Ustaz” had become an inseparable part of his name. That night in the reception room someone asked him:
“… and you will lead the prayers on Friday, won’t you?”
“No, I’m a teacher, not an imam. I can’t lead the prayers.”
The headman said to him:
“What’s the difference? Our teacher was an imam.”
“He was a teacher in a Quran school, but I teach in a secular school.”
The headman repeated his question, insistently:
“What’s the difference?”
Ustaz Selim did not answer, but behind his spectacles his eyes ran over the faces as though he was imploring the help of one of those sitting there. However, everyone was confused about this, like the headman.
After a long period of silence, Ustaz Selim cleared his throat and said quietly:
“Well, I don’t know how to perform the prayers.”
“You don’t know?”
There were growls from everyone, but Ustaz Selim reaffirmed what he had said:
“I don’t know.”
The seated men exchanged looks of surprise, and then fixed their eyes on the face of the headman, who felt that it was for him to say something. He burst out without thinking:
“And what do you know, then?”
Ustaz Selim seemed to be expecting a question like that, for he answered quickly, as he was rising:
“Many things. I’m a good shot, for instance.”
He reached the door and turned, and his thin face was trembling.
“If they attack you, wake me; I may be of some use.”
This, then, was the Shatt that Ustaz Selim had spoken of ten years before. Here he was lying thousands of miles and days away from his village and Ustaz Selim’s school. The mercy of God be upon you, Ustaz Selim, the mercy of God be upon you. God was certainly good to you when he made you die one night before the wretched village fell into the hands of the Jews. One night only. O God, is there any divine favor greater than that? It is true that the men were too busy to bury you and honor you in your death. But all the same you stayed there. You stayed there. You saved yourself humiliation and wretchedness, and you preserved your old age from shame. The mercy of God be upon you, Ustaz Selim. If you had lived, if you had been drowned by poverty as I have, I wonder if you would have done what I am doing now.