V. (48 page)

My own nails fastened in reply and we became twinned, symmetric, sharing pain, perhaps all we could ever share: her face began to go distorted, half with the strength it took to hurt me, half with what I was doing to her. The pain mounted, palms and carob trees went mad: her irises rolled towards the sky.

"Missierna li-inti fis-smewwiet, jitqaddes ismek . . ." She was praying. In retreat. Having reached a threshold, slipped back to what was most sure. Raids, the death of a parent, the daily handling of corpses had not been able to do it. It took a park, a siege of children, trees astir, night coming in.

"Elena."

Her eyes returned to me. "I love you," moving on the grass, "love you, Fausto." Pain, nostalgia, want mixed in her eyes: so it seemed. But how could I know: with the same positive comfort in knowing the sun grows colder, the Hagiar Kim ruins progress towards dust, as do we, as does my little Hillman Minx which was sent to a garage for old age in 1939 and is now disintegrating quietly under tons of garage-rubble. How could I infer: the only ghost of an excuse being to reason by analogy that the nerves chafed and stabbed by my fingernails were the same as my own, that her pain was mine and by extension that of the jittering leaves all round us.

Looking past her eyes I saw all white leaves. They had turned their pale sides out and the clouds were storm clouds after all. "The children," I heard her say. "We have lost them."

Lost them. Or they had lost us.

"O," she breathed, "O look," releasing me as I released her and we both stood and watched the gulls filling half the visible sky, gulls that were all in our island now catching the sunlight. Coming in all together, because of a storm somewhere out at sea - terribly silent - drifting slow, up and down and inexorably landward, a thousand drops of fire.

There had been nothing. Whether children, maddened leaves or dream-meteorology were or were not real, there are no epiphanies on Malta this season, no moments of truth. We had used our dead fingernails only to swage quick flesh; to gouge or destroy, not to probe the wards of either soul.

I will limit the inevitable annotating to this request. Observe the predominance of human attributes applied to the inanimate. The entire "day" - if it was a single day, rather than the projection of a mood lasting perhaps longer - reads like a resurgence of humanity in the automaton, health in the decadent.

The passage is important not so much for this apparent contradiction as for the children, who were quite real, whatever their function in Fausto's iconology. They seemed to be the only ones conscious at the time that history had not been suspended after all. That troops were relocated, Spitfires delivered, convoys lying to off St. Elmo. This was, to be sore, in 1943, at the "turn of the tide" when bombers based here had begun to return part of the war to Italy and when the quality of antisubmarine warfare in the Mediterranean had developed to where we could see more than Dr. Johnson's "three meals ahead." But earlier - after the kids had recovered from the first shock - we "adults" looked on them with a kind of superstitious leeriness, as if they were recording angels, keeping the rolls of quick, dead, malingering; noting what Governor Dobbie wore, what churches had been destroyed, what was the volume of turnover at the hospitals.

They also knew about the Bad Priest. There is a certain fondness for the Manichaean common to all children. Here the combination of a siege, a Roman Catholic upbringing and an unconscious identification of one's own mother with the Virgin all sent simple dualism into strange patterns indeed. Preached to they might be about some abstract struggle between good and evil; but even the dogfights were too high above them to be real. They'd brought the Spitfires and ME's down to earth with their R.A.F. game, but it was only simple metaphor, as noted. The Germans to be sure were pure evil and the Allies pure good. The children weren't alone in that feeling. But if their idea of the struggle could be described graphically it would not be as two equal-sized vectors head-to-head - their heads making an X of unknown quantity; rather as a point, dimensionless - good - surrounded by any number of radial arrows - vectors of evil - pointing inward. Good, i.e., at bay. The Virgin assailed. The winged mother protective. The woman passive. Malta in siege.

A wheel, this diagram: Fortune's wheel. Spin as it might the basic arrangement was constant. Stroboscopic effects could change the apparent number of spokes; direction could change; but the hub still held the spokes in place and the meeting-place of the spokes still defined the hub. The old cyclic idea of history had taught only the rim, to which princes and serfs alike were lashed; that wheel was oriented vertical; one rose and fell. But the children's wheel was dead-level, its own rim only that of the sea's horizon - so sensuous, so "visual" a race are we Maltese.

Thus they assigned the Bad Priest no opposite number: neither Dobbie nor Archbishop Gonzi nor Father Avalanche. The Bad Priest was ubiquitous as night and the children, to sustain their observations, had to be at least as mobile.

It wasn't an organized affair. These recording angels never wrote anything down. It was more, if you will, a "group awareness." They merely watched, passive: you'd see them like sentinels at the top of a rubble pile any sunset; or peering round the corner of the street, squatting on the steps, loping in pairs, arms flung round each other's shoulders, across a vacant lot, going apparently nowhere. But always somewhere in their line-of-sight would be the flicker of a soutane or a shadow darker than the rest.

What was there about this priest to put him Outside; a radius along with leather-winged Lucifer, Hitler, Mussolini? Only part, I think, of what makes us suspect the wolf in the dog, the traitor in the ally. There was little wishful thinking about those children. Priests, like mothers, were to be venerated: but look at Italy, look at the sky. Here had been betrayal and hypocrisy: why not even among the priests? Once the sky had been our most constant and safe friend: a medium or plasma for the sun. A sun which the government is now trying to exploit for reasons of tourism: but formerly - in the days of Fausto I - the watchful eye of God and the sky his clear cheek. Since 3 September 1939 there had appeared pustules, blemishes and marks of pestilence: Messerschmitts. God's face had gone sick and his eye begun to wander, close (wink, insisted the rampant atheist, Dnubietna). But such is the devotion of the people and the sure strength of the Church that the betrayal was not looked on as God's; rather as the sky's - knavery of the skin which could harbour such germs and thus turn so against its divine owner.

The children, being poets in a vacuum, adept at metaphor, had no trouble in transferring a similar infection to any of God's representatives the priests. Not all priests; but one, parishless, an alien - Sliema was like another country - and having already a bad reputation, was fit vehicle for their scepticism.

Reports of him were confused. Fausto would hear - through the children or Father Avalanche - that the Bad Priest "was converting by the shores of Marsamuscetto" or "had been active in Xaghriet Mewwija." Sinister uncertainty surrounded the priest. Elena showed no concern: did not feel that she herself had encountered any evil that day in the street, was not worried about Paola coming under any evil influence, though the Bad Priest had been known to gather about him a small knot of children in the street and give them sermons. He taught no consistent philosophy that anyone could piece together from the fragments borne back to us by the children. The girls he advised to become nuns, avoid the sensual extremes - pleasure of intercourse, pain of childbirth. The bays he told to find strength in - and be like - the rock of their island. He returned, curiously like the Generation of '37, often to the rock: preaching that the object of male existence was to be like a crystal: beautiful and soulless. "God is soulless?" speculated Father Avalanche. "Having created souls, He Himself has none? So that to be like God we must allow to be eroded the soul in ourselves. Seek mineral symmetry, for here is eternal life: the immortality of rock. Plausible. But apostasy."

The children were not, of course, having any. Knowing full well that if every girl became a sister there would be no more Maltese: and that rock, however fine as an object of contemplation, does no work: labours not and thus displeases God, who is favourably disposed towards human labour. So they stayed passive, letting him talk, hanging like shadows at his heels, keeping a watchful eye. Surveillance in various forms continued for three years. With an apparent abating of the Siege - begun perhaps the day of Fausto and Elena's walk - the stalking only intensified because there was more time for it.

Intensified too - beginning, one suspects, the same day - was a friction between Fausto and Elena - the same unceasing, wearying friction of the leaves in the park that afternoon. The smaller arguments were centred, unhappily, around you, Paola. As if the pair had both rediscovered a parental duty. With more time on their hands they belatedly took up providing for their child moral guidance, mother love, comfort in moments of fear. Both were inept at it and each time their energies inevitably turned away from the child and on one another. During such times the child would more often than not slip away quietly to trail the Bad Priest.

Until one evening Elena told the rest of her meeting with the Bad Priest. The argument itself isn't recorded in any detail; only:

Our words became more and more agitated, higher in pitch, more bitter until finally she cried, "Oh the child. I should have done what he told me . . ." Then realizing what she'd said, silence. She moved away, I caught her.

"Told you." I shook her until she spoke. I would have killed her, I think.

"The Bad Priest," finally, "told me not to have the child. Told me he knew of a way. I would have. But I met Father Avalanche. By accident."

And as she had begun to pray in the park had then apparently let the old habits reassert themselves. By accident.

I would never be telling you this had you been brought up under any illusion you were "wanted." But having been abandoned so early to a common underworld, questions of want or possession never occurred to you. So at least I assume; not, I hope, falsely.

The day after Elena's revelation the Luftwaffe came in thirteen times. Elena was killed early in the morning, the ambulance in which she was riding having apparently suffered a direct hit.

Word got to me at Ta Kali in the afternoon, during a lull. I don't remember the messenger's face. I do remember sliding the shovel into a pile of dirt and walking away. And then a blank space.

The next I knew I was in the street, in a part of the city I did not recognise. The all-clear had sounded so I must have walked through a raid. I stood at the top of a slope of debris. I heard cries: hostile shouting. Children. A hundred yards away they swarmed among the ruins, closing in on a broken structure I recognized as the cellar of a house. Curious, I lurched down the slope after them. For some reason, I felt like a spy. Circling the ruin I went up another small bank to the roof. There were holes: I could look through. The children inside were clustered round a figure in black. The Bad Priest. Wedged under a fallen beam. Face - what could be seen - impassive.

"Is he dead," one asked. Others were picking already at the black rags.

"Speak to us, Father," they called, mocking. "What is your sermon for today?"

"Funny hat," giggled a little girl. She reached out and tugged off the hat. A long coil of white hair came loose and fell into the plaster-dust. One beam of sunlight cut across the space and the dust now turned it white.

"It's a lady," said the girl.

"Ladies can't be priests," replied a boy scornfully. He began to examine the hair. Soon he had pulled out an ivory comb and handed it to the little girl. She smiled. Other girls gathered round her to look at the prize. "It's not real hair," the boy announced. "See." He removed the long white wig from the priest's head.

"That's Jesus," cried a tall boy. Tattooed on the bare scalp was a two-colour Crucifixion. It was to be only the first of many surprises.

Two children had been busy at the victim's feet, unlacing the shoes. Shoes were a welcome windfall in Malta at this time.

"Please," the priest said suddenly.

"He's alive."

"She's alive, stupid."

"Please what, Father."

"Sister. May sisters dress up as priests, sister?"

"Please lift this beam," said the sister/priest.

"Look, look," came cries at the woman's feet. They held up one of the black shoes. It was high-topped and impossible to wear. The cavity of the shoe was the exact imprint of a woman's high-heeled slipper. I could now see one of the slippers, dull gold, protruding from under the black robes. Girls whispered excitedly about how pretty the slippers were. One began to undo the buckles.

"If you can't lift the beam," the woman said (with perhaps a hint of panic), "please get help."

"Ah." From the other end. Up came one of the slippers and a foot - an artificial foot - the two sliding out as a unit, lug-and-slot.

"She comes apart."

The woman did not seem to notice. Perhaps she could no longer feel. But when they brought the feet to her head to show her, I saw two tears grow and slip from the outside corners of her eyes. She remained quiet while the children removed her robes and the shirt; and the gold cufflinks in the shape of a claw, and the black trousers which fit close to her skin. One of the boys had stolen a Commando's bayonet. There were rust-spots. They had to use it twice to get the trousers off.

The nude body was surprisingly young. The skin healthy-looking. Somehow we'd all thought of the Bad Priest as an older person. At her navel was a star sapphire. The boy with the knife picked at the stone. It would not come away. He dug in with the point of the bayonet, working for a few minutes before he was able to bring out the sapphire. Blood had begun to well in its place.

Other children crowded round her head. One pried her jaws apart while another removed a set of false teeth. She did not struggle: only closed her eyes and waited.