V.

"Maratt's is pregnant again. Don't you miss the bachelor life?" They were walking down a narrow cobbled street made slick by the rain. To either side were rubble heaps, a few standing walls or porch steps. Streaks of stone-dust, matte against the shiny cobblestones, interrupted at random the pavement's patterning. The sun had almost achieved reality. Their attenuated shadows strung out behind. Rain still fell. "Or having married when you did," Dnubietna went on, "perhaps you equate singleness with peace."

"Peace," said Fausto. "Quaint word." They skipped around and over stray chunks of masonry.

"Sylvana," Dnubietna sang, "in your red petticoat/ Come back, come back/ You may keep my heart/ But bring back my money . . . ."

"You should get married," Fausto said, mournful: "It's not fair otherwise."

"Poetry and engineering have nothing to do with domesticity."

"We haven't," Fausto remembered, "had a good argument for months."

In here. They went down a flight of steps which led under a building still reasonably intact. Clouds of powdered plaster rose as they descended. Sirens began. Inside the room Tifkira lay on a table, asleep. Two girls played cards listlessly in a corner. Dnubietna vanished for a moment behind the bar, reappearing with a small bottle of wine. A bomb fell in the next street, rattling the beams of the ceiling, starting an oil lamp hung there to swinging.

"I ought to be asleep," Fausto said. "I work tonight."

"Remorse of a uxorious half-man," Dnubietna snarled, pouring wine. The girls looked up. "It's the uniform," he confided, which was so ridiculous that Fausto had to laugh. Soon they had moved to the girls' table. Talk was 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!"