Eagle in the Sky - Smith Wilbur - Страница 25

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write to you at Malik Street - No, she said quickly, I won't be staying

there.  It would be too lonely without you in that huge bed.  'Where

then?  At your parents home?  That would be a dead give-away.  Every

time you arrive back in town, I leave home!  No, they think I am staying

at the hostel here at the University.  I told them I wanted to be closer

to the department You've got a room here?  He stared at her.

Of course, Davey.  I have to be a little discreet.  I couldn't tell my

relatives, friends and employers to contact me care of Major David

Morgan.  This may be the twentieth century, and modern Israel, but I am

still a Jewess, with a tradition of chastity and modesty behind me.  For

the first time David began to appreciate the magnitude of Debra's

decision to come to him.  He had taken it lightly compared to her.  I'm

going to miss you, he said.  And I you, she replied.  Let's go home.

Yes, she agreed, laying aside her knife and fork.  .  I can eat any old

time.  However, as they left Belgium House she exclaimed with

exasperation: Damn, I have to have these books back by today.  Can we go

by the library?  I'm sorry, Davey it won't take a minute.  So they

climbed again to the main terrace and passed the brightly-lit

plate-glass windows of the Students Union Restaurant, and went on

towards the solid square tower of the library whose windows were lighted

already against the swiftly falling darkness.  They had climbed the

library steps and reached the glass doors when a party of students came

pouring out, and they were forced to stand aside.

They were -facing back the way they had come, across the plaza with its

terraces and red-bud trees, towards the restaurant.

Suddenly the dusk of evening was lit by the searing white furnace glare

of an explosion, and the glass windows of the restaurant were blown out

in a glittering cloud of flying glass.  It was as though a storm surf

had burst upon a rock cliff, flinging out its shining droplets of spray,

but this was a lethal spray that scythed down two girl students who were

passing the windows at that moment.

Immediately after the flash of the explosion the blast swept across the

terrace, a draught of violence that shook the red-bud trees and sent

David and Debra reeling against the pillars of the library veranda.  The

air was driven in upon them so that their eardrums ached with the blow,

and the breath was sucked from their lungs.

David caught her to him and held her for the moments of dreadful silence

that followed the blast.  As they stared so, a soft white fog of

phosphorus smoke billowed from the gutted windows of the restaurant and

began to roll and drift across the terrace.

Then the sounds reached them through their ringing eardrums, the small

tinkle and crunch of glass, the patter and crack of falling plaster and

shattered furniture.  A woman began to scream, and it broke the spell of

horror.

There were shouts and running feet.  One of the students near them began

in a high hysterical voice, A bomb.  They've bombed the cafe.  One of

the girls who had fallen under the storm of glass fragments staggered up

and began running in small aimless circles, screaming in a thin

passionless tone.

She was white with plaster dust through which the blood poured in dark

rivulets, drenching her skirt.

In David's arms Debra began to tremble.  The swine, she whispered, oh,

the filthy murdering swine.  From the smoking destruction of the

shattered building another figure shambled with slow deliberation.  The

blast had torn his clothing from his body, and it hung from him in

tatters, making him a strange scarecrow figure.  He reached the terrace

and sat down slow, removed from his face the spectacles that were

miraculously still in place and began fumbling to clean them on the rags

of his shirt.  Blood dripped from his chin.

Come on, grated David, we must help.  And they ran down the steps

together.

The explosion had brought down part of the roof, trapping and crushing

twenty-three of the students who had come here to eat and talk over the

evening meal.

Others had been hurled about the large low hall, like the toys of a

child in tantrum, and their blood turned the interior into a reeking

charnel house.  Some of them were crawling, creeping, or moving

spasmodically amongst the tumbled furniture, broken crockery and spilled

food.  Some lay contorted as though in silent laughter at death's crude

joke.

Afterwards they would learn that two young female members of El Fatah

had enrolled in the university under false papers, and they had daily

smuggled small quantities of explosive on to the campus until they had

accumulated sufficient for this outrage.  A suitcase with a timing

device had been left under a table and the two terrorists had walked out

and got clean away.  A week later they were on Damascus television,

gloating over their success.

Now, however, there was no reason nor explanation for this sudden burst

of violence.  It was as undirected, and yet as dreadfully effective as

some natural cataclysm.  Chilling in its insensate enormity, so that

they, the living, worked in a kind of terrified frenzy, to save the

injured and to carry from the shambles the broken bodies of the dead.

They laid them upon the lawns beneath the red-bud trees and covered them

with sheets brought hurriedly from the nearest hostel.  The long white

bundles in a neat row upon the green grass was a memory David knew he

would have for ever.

The ambulances came, with their sirens pulsing and rooflights flashing,

to carry away death's harvest and the police cordoned off the site of

the blast before David and Debra left and walked slowly down to where

the Mercedes was parked in the lot.  Both of them were filthy with dust

and blood, and wearied with the sights and sounds of pain and

mutilation.  They drove in silence to Malik Street and showered off the

smell and the dirt.

Debra soaked Davies uniform in cold water to remove the blood.  Then she

made coffee for them and they drank it, sitting side by side in the

brass bed.

So much that was good and strong died there tonight, Debra said.

Death is not the worst of it.  Death is natural, it's the logical

conclusion to all things.  it was the torn and broken flesh that still

lived which appalled me.  Death has a sort of dignity, but the maimed

are obscene.  She looked at him with almost fear in her eyes.  That's

cruel, David.  In Africa there is a beautiful and fierce animal called

the sable antelope.  They run together in herds of up to a hundred, but

when one of them is hurt, wounded by a hunter or mauled by a lion, the

lead bulls turn upon him and drive him from the herd.  I remember my

father telling me about that, he would say that if you want to be a

winner then you must avoid the company of the losers for their despair

is contagious.  God, David, that's a terribly hard way to look at life.

'Perhaps, David agreed, but then, you see, life is hard.  When they made

love, there was for the first time a quality of desperation in it, for

it was the eve of parting and they had been reminded of their mortality.

In the morning David went to join his squadron and Debra locked the

house on Malik Street.

Each day for seventeen days David flew two, and sometimes three,

sorties.  In the evenings, if they were not flying night interceptions,

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