Scoundrel by Bernard Cornwell

Author:Bernard Cornwell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

Roisin had been lucky in one thing only; she had died swiftly.

I later heard that Brendan Flynn had himself requested the act of mercy. He claimed that Roisin had been given neither the time nor the opportunity to betray the Palestinians, only the Irish, and that the Irish should therefore set the manner of her death and he wanted that death to be quick. I had always wondered if Brendan asked the favor because he too had been one of her lovers. Whatever, Roisin was taken to a dry gully beyond the camp and there shot. She took one bullet in the head and her blood had sprayed against the white heat of the sky and splashed on to the yellow, sulphurous rocks. I remembered her look of outrage and defiance as she had died. Her skin had been very red, burned by the fierce sun. She had very fair skin and burned easily.

I was ordered to bury her on the hillside where she had died. A German called Axel Springer offered to stay with me, though he did precious little to help as I hacked a shallow scrape with the long-helved spade. He talked instead, telling me he was a theology student at Heidelberg, but that his real religion was the Red Army Faction. I wondered why he had volunteered to help me, and only began to understand when he stopped me from rolling Roisin’s thin corpse into the stony grave. “I want to look at her,” Axel said in his heavily accented English, “she was very pretty.”

“She was beautiful,” I corrected him. Roisin had never been pretty, she had been too fierce and too committed and too scornful of weakness to be called pretty.

“It is a sexual thing, you see,” Axel said.

“What is?”

“Why girls like this become involved in terrorism.”

“You’re joking,” I said.

“I have never joked,” he said in all seriousness. “Work has been done by American feminists on the correlations between sexuality and terrorism, and they maintain a direct linkage between sexual desire and terrorist activity. It has to do with the relaxation of inhibitions, both in society and in bed. I can offer you the reading list, if you would like?” He smiled and held out a pack of cigarettes. In those days I had smoked so I took a cigarette, stooped to his light, and gratefully sucked in the comforting smoke. “Of course,” Axel went on, “the camp authorities recognize the sexual linkage. That is why they encourage girls like this one to attend. These girls are hardly good pupils, but they have their uses.”

“Their uses?”

“It is obvious!” Axel blew a plume of smoke that whirled away down the valley. “The Arabs want the white girls. It is their revenge for colonialism. But they would not have enjoyed this one.” He jerked his head at Roisin.

“Why not?”

“Too thin! Look at her!” He leaned down and ripped Roisin’s flimsy shirt open. “See? Just pimples!” He gestured at her breasts, which were very white and very small.

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