The Collaborator of Bethlehem by Matt Beynon Rees

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Omar Yussef turned from the shadows of the church's spartan facade toward George Saba on the lamppost. The dead man looked as though he might be descending from the light, his hands above his head in a dive from the radiance of a star to the hard earth. George had brought that brightness to Omar Yussef, who had watched him transform from a little boy to a grown man to a punctured sack of meat. Omar Yussef spun away, looking back toward the church. The body is like this Church of the Nativity, he thought. It's warmed by some divine breath at first, but sustained by worldly impulses. All the time this breath slowly chills, until death. Every exhalation is an expulsion of some part of our finite store of life, and also a sigh of relief that the grave is closer by one tedious, depressing pulse. The body is abused and renovated and squabbled over, like this church, where they say Jesus was born. But there is only a crypt where that famous birth is supposed to have taken place. There is nothing there, just as we find nothing but an emptiness left to mark where each of its was alive. Here in Bethlehem there was a Messiah who left the job unfinished. In this church, there's no glowing spirit, no redemption. Each time we breathe, we fear that it's our last breath and it will chill us all the way to the void. There was only one reason not to feel overwhelmed by that fear and that was the belief in the legacy we leave, the positive changes we bring to the world. Omar Yussef had hoped George Saba would be his legacy, living after him as proof that the schoolteacher made the world better. He had hoped that Dima Abdel Rahman would be part of that gift, too. As he looked at the body swinging above him, he fought against the urge to feel that all his life's work was just so much destroyed hope and goodness befouled. Instead, he could be George Saba's legacy, giving the dead man life in his every decent, kind, intelligent deed.