V.

"I looked at his eyes. I thought at first he was drunk, or marid b'mohhu. I was afraid.

"'Come then.' We entered the confessional. At the time I thought: don't priests have the right? But I did tell him things I have never told Father Avalanche. I didn't know then who this priest was, you see."'

Now sin for Elena Xemxi had been heretofore as natural a function as breathing, eating, or gossiping. Under the agile instruction of the Bad Priest, however, it began to take on the shape of an evil spirit: alien, parasitic, attached like a black slug to her soul.

'How could she marry anyone? She was fit, said the Bad Priest, not for the world but for the convent. Christ was her proper husband. No human male could coexist with the sin which fed on her girl-soul. Only Christ was mighty enough, loving enough, forgiving enough. Had He not cured the lepers and exorcised malignant fevers? Only He could welcome disease, clasp it to His bosom, rub against it, kiss it. It had been His mission on earth as now, a spiritual husband in heaven, to know sickness intimately, love it, cure it. This was parable, the Bad Priest told her, metaphor for spirit's cancer. But the Maltese mind, conditioned by its language, is unreceptive to such talk. All my Elena saw was the disease, the literal sickness. Afraid I, or our children, would reap its ravages.

She stayed away from me and from Father A.'s confessional. Stayed in her own house, searched her body each morning and examined her conscience each night for progressive symptoms of the metastasis she feared was in her. Another vocation: whose words were garbled and somehow sinister, as Fausto's own had been.'

These, poor child, are the sad events surrounding your given name. It is a different name now that you've been carried off by the U. S. Navy. But beneath that accident you are still Maijstral-Xemxi - a terrible misalliance. May you survive it. I fear not so much a reappearance in you of Elena's mythical "disease" as a fracturing of personality such as your father has undergone. May you be only Paola, one girl: a single given heart, a whole mind at peace. That is a prayer, if you wish.

Later, after the marriage, after your birth, well into the reign of Fausto II when the bombs were falling, the relationship with Elena must have come under some kind of moratorium. There being, perhaps, enough else to do. Fausto enlisted in the home defence; Elena had taken to nursing: feeding and keeping sheltered the bombed-out, comforting the wounded, bandaging, burying. At this time - assuming his theory of the "dual man" to be so - Fausto II was becoming more Maltese and less British.

'German bombers over today: ME-109's. No more need to look. We have grown used to the sound. Five times. Concentrated, as luck would have it, on Ta Kali. These grand chaps in the "Hurries" and Spitfires! What would we not do for them!'

Moving towards that island-wide sense of communion. And at the same time towards the lowest form of consciousness. His work at the Ta Kali airfield was a sapper's drudgery; keeping the runways in condition for the British fighter planes; repairing the barracks, mess hall and hangars. At first he was able to look on it all over his shoulder, as it were: in retreat.

'Not a night since Italy declared war have we known raidless. How was it in the years of peace? Somewhere - what centuries ago? - one could sleep a night through. That's all gone. Routed out by sirens at three in the morning - at 3:30 out to the airfield past the Bofors emplacements, the wardens, the fire-fighting crews. With death - its smell, slow after-trickling of powdered plaster, stubborn smoke and name, still fresh in the air. The R.A.F. are magnificent, all magnificent: ground artillery, the few merchant seamen who do get through, my own comrades-in-arms. I speak of them that way: our home defence, though little more than common labourers, are military in the highest sense. Surely, if war has any nobility, it is in the rebuilding not the destruction. A few portable searchlights (they are at a premium) for us to see by. So with pick, shovel and rake we reshape our Maltese earth for those game little Spitfires.

But isn't it a way of glorifying God? Hard-labour surely. But as if somewhere once without our knowledge we'd been condemned for a term to prison. With the next raid all our filling and levelling is blasted away into pits and rubble piles which must then be refilled and relevelled only to be destroyed again. Day and night it never eases off. I have let pass my nightly prayers on more than one occasion. I say them now on my feet, on the job, often in rhythm to the shovelling. To kneel is a luxury these days.