colleagues. I want them to get a good look at you, and eat their tiny
hearts out.
He laughed. So you aren't ashamed of me, " Morgan, you are too
beautiful for one person, you should have been born twins It was their
last day together, so he indulged her whimsy and wore his uniform to
fetch her at the English Literature Department, and he was surprised to
find how the dress affected the strangers he passed on the street the
girls smiled at him, the old ladies called shalom, even the guard at the
University gates waved him through with a grin and a joke. To them all
he was a guardian angel, one of those that had swept death from the very
sky above them.
Debra hurried to meet and kiss him, and then walked beside him, her hand
tucked proudly and possessively into the crook of his elbow. She took
him to eat an early dinner at the staff dining-room in the rounded glass
Belgium building.
While they ate, a casual question of his revealed the subterfuge she had
used to protect her reputation.
I'll probably not get off the base for the first few weeks but I'll
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