Eagle in the Sky

  Debra suggested a Japanese compact similar to Joe’s, and David told her that he would certainly give that his serious consideration.

  Aaron Cohen’s henchman tracked down a Mercedes Benz. 350 SL belonging to the German Chargé d’Affaires in Tel Aviv. This gentleman was returning to Berlin and wished to dispose of his auto, for a suitable consideration in negotiable cash. A single phone call was sufficient to arrange payment through the Credit Suisse in Zurich.

  It was golden bronze in colour, with a little under twenty thousand kilometres on the clock, and it had clearly been maintained with the loving care of an enthusiast.

  Debra, returning on her motor scooter from the University, found this glorious machine parked at the top end of Malik Street, where a heavy chain denied access by all motor-driven vehicles to the village.

  She took one look at it, and knew beyond all reasonable doubt who it belonged to. She was really quite angry when she stormed on to the terrace, but she pretended to be angrier than that.

  ‘David Morgan, you really are absolutely impossible.’

  ‘You catch on fast,’ David agreed amiably; he was sunbathing on the terrace.

  ‘How much did you pay for it?’

  ‘Ask me another question, doll. That one is becoming monotonous.’

  ‘You are really—’ Debra paused and searched frantically for a word of sufficient force. She found it and delivered it with relish, ‘decadent!’

  ‘You don’t know the meaning of the word,’ David told her gently as he rose from the cushions in the sun and drifted lazily in her direction. Though she had been his lover for only a mere three days she recognized the look in his eye and she began backing away.

  ‘I will teach you the meaning,’ he said. ‘I am about to give you a practical demonstration of decadence in such a sensitive spot that you are likely to remember it for a long time.’

  She ducked behind the olive tree as he lunged, and her books spilled across the terrace.

  ‘Leave me! Hands off, you beast.’

  He feinted right, and caught her as she fell for it. He picked her up easily across his chest.

  ‘David Morgan, I warn you, I shall scream if you don’t put me down this instant.’

  ‘Let’s hear it. Go ahead!’ and she did, but in a ladylike fashion so as not to alarm the neighbours.

  Joe, on the other hand, was delighted with the 350. The four of them took it on a trial run down the twisting road through the Wildemess of Judaea to the shores of the Dead Sea. The road challenged the car’s suspension and David’s driving skill, and they whooped with excitement through the bends. Even Debra was able to overcome her initial disapproval, and finally admitted it was beautiful – but still decadent.

  They swam in the cool green waters of the oasis of Ein Gedi where they formed a deep rock pool before overflowing and running down into the thick saline water of the sea itself.

  Hannah had brought her camera and she photographed Debra and David sitting together on the rocks beside the pool.

  They were in their bathing costumes, Debra’s brief bikini showing off her fine young body as she half-turned to laugh into David’s face. He smiled back at her, his face in profile and the dark sweep of his hair falling on to his forehead. The desert light picked out the pure features and the boldly stated facets of his beauty.

  Hannah had a print of the photograph made for each of them, and later those squares of glossy photographic paper were all they had left of it, all that remained of the joy and the laughter of those days, like a lovely flower taken from the growing tree of life and pressed and dried, flattened and desiccated, deprived of its colour and perfume.

  But the future threw no shadow over their happiness on that bright day, and with Joe driving this time they ran back for Jerusalem. Debra insisted that they stop for a group of tank corp boys hitch-hiking home on leave, and although David protested it was impossible, they squeezed three of them into the small cab. It was Debra’s sop to her feelings of guilt, and she sat in the back seat with her arms around David’s neck and they all sang the song that was that year a favourite with the young people of Israel, ‘Let There be Peace’.

  In the last few days while David waited to enter the air force, he loafed shamelessly, frittering the time away in small chores like having his uniforms tailored. He resisted Debra’s suggestion that if regulation issue were good enough for her father, a general officer, then they might be good enough for David. Aaron Cohen supplied him with an introduction to his own tailor. Aaron was beginning to develop a fine respect for David’s style.

  Debra had arranged membership for David at the University Athletic Club, and he worked out in the first-class modern gym every day, and finished with twenty lengths of the Olympic-size swimming pool to keep himself in shape.

  However, at other times, David merely lay sunbathing on the terrace, or fiddled with electrical plugs or other small tasks Debra had asked him to see to about the house.

  As he moved through the cool and pleasant rooms, he would find an item belonging to Debra, a book or a brooch perhaps, and he would pick it up and fondle it briefly. Once a robe of hers thrown carelessly across the foot of the bed and redolent of her particular perfume gave him a physical pang as it reminded him sharply of her, and he held the silkiness to his face and breathed the scent of her, and grudged the hours until her return.

  However, it was amongst her books that he discovered more about her than years of study would have revealed. She had crates of these piled in the unfurnished second bedroom which they were using as a temporary storeroom until they could find shelves and cupboards. One afternoon David began digging around in the crates. It was a literary mixed grill – Gibbon and Vidal, Shakespeare and Mailer, Solzhenitsyn and Mary Stewart, amongst other strange bedfellows. There was fiction and biography, history and poetry, Hebrew and English, softbacks and leather-bound editions – and a thin green-jacketed volume which he almost discarded before the author’s name caught his attention. It was by D. Mordecai and with a feeling of discovery he turned to the flyleaf. This Year, in Jerusalem, a collection of poems, by Debra Mordecai.

  He carried the book through to the bedroom, remembering to kick off his shoes before lying on the lace cover – she was very strict about that – and he turned to the first page.

  There were five poems. The first was the title piece, the two-thousand-year promise of Jewry. ‘Next year in Jerusalem’ had become reality. It was a patriotic tribute to her land and even David, whose taste in writing ran to Maclean and Robbins, recognized that it had a superior quality. There were lines of startling beauty, evocative phrasing and penetrative glimpses. It was good, really good, and David felt a strange proprietary pride – and a sense of awe. He had not guessed at these depths within her, these hidden areas of the mind.

  When he came to the last poem, he found it was the shortest of the five, and it was a love poem – or rather it was a poem to someone dearly loved who was gone – and suddenly David was aware of the difference between that which was good and that which was magic.

  He found himself shivering to the music of her words, felt the hair on his forearms standing erect with the haunting beauty of it, and then at last he felt himself choking on the sadness of it, the devastation of total loss, and the words swam as his eyes flooded, and he had to blink rapidly as the last terrible cry of the poem pierced him to the heart.

  He lowered the book on to his chest, remembering what Joe had told him about the soldier who had died in the desert. A movement attracted his attention and he made a guilty effort to hide the book as he sat up. It was such a private thing, this poetry, that he felt like a thief.

  Debra stood in the doorway of the bedroom watching him, leaning against the jamb with her hands clasped in front of her, studying him quietly.

  He sat up on the bed and weighed the book in his hands. ‘It’s lovely,’ he said at last, his voice was gruff with the emotions that her words had evoked.

  ‘I’m glad you like it,’ she
said, and he realized that she was shy.

  ‘Why did you not show it to me before?’

  ‘I was afraid you might not like it.’

  ‘You must have loved him very much?’ he asked softly.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ she said, ‘but now I love you.’

  Then, finally, his posting came through and the Brig’s hand was evident in it all, though Joe admitted that he had used his own family connections to influence the orders.

  He was ordered to report to Mirage squadron ‘Lance’ which was a crack interceptor outfit based at the same hidden airfield from which he had first flown. Joe Mordecai was on the same squadron, and when he called at Malik Street to tell David the news, he showed no resentment that David would out-rank him, but instead he was confident that they would be able to fly together as a regular team. He spent the evening briefing David on squadron personnel, from ‘Le Dauphin’ the commanding officer, a French immigrant, down to the lowest mechanic. In the weeks ahead David would find Joe’s advice and help invaluable, as he settled into his niche amongst this tightly-knit team of fliers.

  The following day the tailor delivered his uniforms, and he wore one to surprise Debra when she backed in through the kitchen door, laden with books and groceries, using her bottom as a door buffer, her hair down behind and her dark glasses pushed up on top of her head.

  She dropped her load by the sink, and circled him with her hands on her hips, her head cocked at a critical angle.

  ‘I should like you to wear that, and come to pick me up at the University tomorrow afternoon, please,’ she said at last.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because there are a few little bitches that lurk around the Lauterman Building. Some of them my students and some my 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 café.’

  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 slowly, 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 or 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 lai
d 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 David’s 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.