'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.
But she could not even keep them closed. For the children peeled back one eyelid to reveal a glass eye with the iris in the shape of a clock. This, too, they removed.
I wondered if the disassembly of the Bad Priest might not go on, and on, into evening. Surely her arms and breasts could be detached; the skin of her legs be peeled away to reveal some intricate understructure of silver openwork. Perhaps the trunk itself contained other wonders: intestines of parti-coloured silk, gay balloon-lungs, a rococo heart. But the sirens started up then. The children dispersed bearing away their new-found treasures, and the abdominal wound made by the bayonet was doing its work. I lay prone under a hostile sky looking down for moments more at what the children had left; suffering Christ foreshortened on the bare skull, one eye and one socket, staring up at me: a dark hole for
