irregular, there being an artillery emplacement almost directly above them. The girls were professional, and tried for a while to proposition Fausto and Dnubietna.
'No use,' Dnubietna said. 'I've never had to pay for mine and this one is married and a priest.' Three laughed: Fausto, getting drunk, was not amused.
'That is long gone,' he said quietly.
'Once a priest always a priest,' Dnubietna retorted. 'Come. Bless this wine. Consecrate it. It's Sunday and you haven't been to Mass.'
Overhead, the Bofors began an intermittent and deafening hack: two explosions every second. The four concentrated on drinking wine. Another bomb fell. 'Bracketed,' Dnubietna shouted above the a/a barrage. A word which no longer meant anything in Valletta. Tifkira woke up.
'Stealing my wine,' the owner cried. He stumbled to the wall and leaned his forehead against it. Thoroughly he began to scratch his hairy stomach and back under their singlet. 'You might give me a drink.'
'It isn't consecrated. Maijstral the apostate is at fault.'
'Now God and I have an agreement,' Fausto began as if to correct a misapprehension. 'He will forget about my not answering His call, if I cease to question. Simply survive, you see.'
When had that come to him? In what street: at what point in these months of impressions? Perhaps he'd thought it up on the spot. He was drunk. So tired it had only taken four glasses of wine.
'How,' one of the girls asked seriously, 'how can there be faith if you don't ask questions? The priest said it's right for us to ask questions.'
Dnubietna looked at his friend's face, saw no answer forthcoming: so turned and patted the girl's shoulder.
'That's the hell of it, love. Drink your wine.'
'No,' screamed Tifkira, propped against the other wall, watching them. 'You'll waste it all.' The gun began its racket again.
'Waste,' Dnubietna laughed above the noise. 'Don't talk of waste, you idiot.' Belligerent, he started across the room. Fausto put his head down on the table to rest for a moment. The girls resumed their card game, using his back for a table. Dnubietna had taken the owner by the shoulders. He began a lengthy denunciation of Tifkira, punctuating it with shakes which sent the fat torso into cyclic shudders.
Above, the all-clear sounded. Soon after there was noise at the door. Dnubietna opened and in rollicked the artillery crew, dirty, exhausted and in search of wine. Fausto awoke and jumped to his feet saluting, scattering the cards in a shower of hearts and spades.
'Away, away!' shouted Dnubietna. Tifkira, giving up his dream of a great wine-hoard, slumped down to a sitting position against the wall and closed his eyes. 'We must get Maijstral to work!'
'Go to, caitiff,' Fausto cried, saluted again and fell over backwards. With much giggling and unsteadiness Dnubietna and one of the girls helped him to his feet. It was apparently Dnubietna's intention to bring Fausto to Ta Kali on foot (usual method was to hitch a ride from a lorry) to sober him up. As they reached the darkening street the sirens began again. Members of the Bofors crew, each holding a glass of wine, came clattering up the steps and collided with them. Dnubietna, irritated, abruptly ducked out from under Fausto's arm and came up with a fist to the stomach of the nearest artilleryman. A brawl developed. Bombs were falling over by the Grand Harbour. The explosions began to approach slow and steady, like the footsteps of a child's ogre. Fausto lay on the ground feeling no particular desire to come to the aid of his friend who was outnumbered and being worked over thoroughly. They finally dropped Dnubietna and headed towards the Bofors. Not so far overhead, an ME-109, pinned by searchlights, suddenly broke out of the cloud-cover and swooped in. Orange tracers followed. 'Get the bugger,' someone at the gun emplacement screamed. The Bofors opened up. Fausto looked on with mild interest. Shadows of the gun crew, lit from above by the exploding projectiles and 'scatter' from the searchlights, flickered in and out of the night. In one flash Fausto saw the red glow of Tifkira's wine in a glass held to an ammo-handler's lips and slowly diminishing. Somewhere over the Harbour a/a shells caught up with the Messerschmitt; its fuel tanks ignited in a great yellow flowering and down it went, slow as a balloon, the black smoke of its passage billowing through the searchlight beams, which lingered a moment at the point of intercept before going on to other business.
Dnubietna hung over him, haggard, one eye beginning to swell. 'Away, away,' he croaked. Fausto got to his feet reluctant and off they went. There is no indication in the journal of how they did it, but the two reached Ta Kali just as the all-clear sounded. They went perhaps a mile on foot. Presumably they dove for cover whenever the bombing got too close. Finally they clambered on the back of a passing lorry.
'It was hardly heroic,' Fausto wrote. 'We were both drunk. But I've not been able to get it out of my mind that we were given a dispensation that night. That God had suspended the laws of chance, by which we should rightly have been killed. Somehow the street - the kingdom of death - was friendly. Perhaps it was because I observed our agreement and did not bless the wine.'
Post hoc. And only part of the over-all 'relationship.' This is what I meant about Fausto's simplicity. He did nothing so complex as drift away from God or reject his church. Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no 'moments of truth.' It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which themselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one's own unanswered. Fausto and his 'Generation' simply hadn't the time for this leisurely intellectual hanky-panky. They'd got out of the habit, had lost a certain sense of themselves, had come further from the University-at-peace and closer to the beleaguered city than any were ready to admit, were more Maltese, i.e., than English.
All else in his life having gone underground; having acquired a trajectory in which the sirens figured as only one parameter, Fausto realized that the old covenants, the old agreements with God would have to change too. For at least a working relevancy to God therefore, Fausto did exactly what he'd been doing for a home, food, marital love: he jury-rigged - 'made do.' But the English part of him was still there, keeping up the journal.
The child - you - grew healthier, more active. By '42 you had fallen in with a roistering crew of children whose chief amusement was a game called R.A.F. Between raids a dozen or so of you would go out in the streets, spread your arms like aeroplanes and run screaming and buzzing in and out of the ruined walls, rubble heaps and holes of the city. The stronger and taller boys were, of course, Spitfires. Others - unpopular boys, girls, and younger children - went to make up the planes of the enemy. You were usually, I believe, an Italian dirigible. The most buoyant
