Before the War

Carmen watched the specks in the sapphire-blue sky dance. She lay on her back, swishing her arms and legs up and down, up and down like a starfish as tiny grains of sand beneath stung her calves. A light summer wind blew from the harbour below, swirling salty air up the cliff face to the small rock garden where Carmen lay. The garden used to be a pocket sanctuary reserved for bookworms and lovers, who sat amongst the prickly pear trees and imported English roses. Now, it lay abandoned, unloved, and bare of human existence. Except for Carmen.

As the flying dots in the sky edged closer, the vibrations intensified beneath her. She could no longer hear the birds sing or the waves crashing the shoreline of the harbour below. She couldn’t hear anything since the British army detonated an unexploded bomb in the vicinity of her school four months ago. They were unaware she was sitting metres away, absorbed in the pages of Daphne du Maurier.

The midday sun glinted off the metallic surfaces in the sky, lulling her with a memory of her neighbour Jimmy. He had been throwing rocks amongst the blasted remains of St Lucia’s church, a few doors down from where she lived when he had spied her earlier that morning.

‘Hi Carmen!’ He waved as she scurried to the bakery, hiding her flushed face with her mother’s lampuka. The meal of fresh fish and potatoes, worth two weeks of her father’s wages, fed six of them for a week. Without fuel for cooking or heating on the island since the war started, the bakeries that had survived the bombings had fired up their ovens and charged pennies to cook the islanders’ meals. When her father ran out of money, he broke up their heirloom chairs for fuel.

She lay still, humming a love duet from the opera Francesca da Rimini. Nanu had sung it to her when she was a baby and by the age of five, he had deemed her ‘old enough’ to accompany him to the Royal Opera House — the most majestic building on the Maltese Islands. They saw Francesca da Rimini countless times over the years. By the time the Royal Opera House had closed its doors, she had re-enacted the scene of Francesca’s undying love to her forbidden lover Paolo at least three evenings a week for the family, having bribed her older brother Charlie with contraband chocolate in exchange for playing Paolo.

The metallic flying machines moved in closer, their engines grunting and spitting. She should leave now, but the dancing enigma in the sky mesmerised her. Then the belly of the flying metal machine opened and a gigantic bullet dropped. The bomb hit the harbour below, the explosion soaring water and debris high into the sky. She sat up, frozen, as a second plane dived in immediately after, dropping a payload on a building behind her. The force of the explosion had singed her hair and the air clouded with smoke. On the other side of the rock garden, hundreds of pre-schoolers poured out of the building, their mouths open with screams that Carmen could no longer hear. Tears spilling down their faces, the kids scattered in all directions.

Someone reached for her hand in the dense cloud. She recognised the gold ring on the hand closed around hers. Her mother’s.

‘Come.’ Her mother gestured with her hands. She was still in her apron from earlier this morning.

Her mother pulled Carmen through panic, carnage and screams of frightened children in the street. But all Carmen could hear was the hum in her ears. Her small legs struggled to keep up. Pain shot through her arm as her mother’s grip tightened with urgency.

They passed the carcass of a building; its contents, including the nails on the walls, ransacked weeks ago. It was the home of her school tormenter, David Azzopardie. He had once pulled her plaits so hard during maths class she had fallen to the floor and cut her head, bleeding on the pristine floorboards. Half of the class had passed out at the sight of all her blood. The principal had broken three rulers punishing David. Carmen received two weeks of bed rest and bowls of chocolate ice cream, much to the disgust of her brother, Charlie. Now all that remained of the affluent Azzopardie home was pulverised, yellow rock strewn in the street. The Azzopardies were never seen or heard from again.

The men on the corner rooftops hand-cranked competing sirens that wailed down the narrow streets as crowds ran to the air-raid shelters and underground tunnels scattered around Valletta.

Carmen and her mother passed a pile of rubble; its stones neatly placed in a peculiar-shaped pyramid. A young mother sat crumpled, her face like stone, cradling a lifeless child covered in dust. A short distance away, a little boy in tattered shorts, no more than four years of age, cried alone.

Her mother stopped, darkness cloaking her face.

Out of nowhere, a line of British army jeeps skidded to a halt in front of them. A lanky, sinewy man in neat army regalia disembarked from the first jeep.

‘Move along,’ he ordered.

Her mother hesitated. The little boy continued to cry.

‘Go or you’ll die!’ the army man screamed.

Her mother grabbed Carmen’s hand and ran. They arrived at their street, their home. It was still standing. As the seconds ticked by, they gathered their belongings — buckets, blankets, chairs, books — and followed their neighbours into the damp basement-converted air-raid shelter to wait it out.

Carmen sat on a tattered beach chair in the corner of the shelter. The stench of steel buckets filled with sewage permeated the air. Her mother tossed and turned on the slatted bunk bed opposite while her father slept below, muttering in his sleep. Occasionally his sleep-shouting woke him up. Apart from the four elderly men arguing over a stained mattress, the cattle-yard atmosphere had quietened down for the night.

In one corner, she watched her sun-wrinkled neighbour Mr Grech, a mean man rumoured to have collaborated with the enemy Italians, struggle to hold himself up on a steel bucket with his wooden leg, as he strained to do his business.

He pointed his gnarly finger at Carmen, his eyebrows twisted in a furrow.

She turned to the wall, the water running down the crevices like tears. She thought of her ancestors who had chiselled the rock over the centuries as they escaped thousands of years of the island invaders. There were now new invaders. The English had dragged them into a war they wanted no part of.

Charlie appeared from his corner, shuffling a pack of cards. His flimsy belt barely held up his loose pants on his bony hips.

‘Hey, dummy!’ he taunted Carmen, over-emphasising each syllable in her face.

Carmen slapped him, hard.

‘Charlie!’ her father whispered from his bed, his eyes lined with dark circles and half sleep. ‘Go to sleep Charlie or I’ll use my belt on you.’

Charlie sulked, kicking Carmen’s books out of his way as he sauntered back to his friends to resume his poker game.

A hand grabbed Carmen’s ankle from beneath the beach chair, startling her. Jimmy’s face popped out, his finger pressed to his lips. ‘Sssshhh.’

He crawled out on his stomach and plonked himself next to her. ‘This is for you.’

He opened her palm and placed a gold heart locket into it. She recognised the delicate engraving on the front. Her Uncle Manny had made it for his mum. His mum’s body still lay unrecovered under the bombed-out remains of St Lucia’s church.

The ground shook, the force throwing everybody from their chairs and beds to the floor. Dust particles filled the air like sea mist. People began coughing. Jimmy’s arm circled Carmen’s waist as they lay still in the brace position on the floor. ‘I’ll protect you.’

After eternity, the bombardment stopped. Like trapped rats, people wept in silence.

Moments later the door of the shelter flew open and a man stormed down the jagged steps carrying the dead weight of a body, covered in blood. Carmen rose, her intestines gripped in a vice. Her Uncle Manny lay the body down on the floor. A crowd gathered around him, pointing and gasping. Unable to push her tiny frame through the crowd, Carmen dropped to her knees and crawled between their legs, Jimmy following behind. The first thing she saw when she crawled out was blood. Puddles of blood. And the smell like rusted old coins.

Her mother pushed through the crowd and then screamed, falling to her knees. She shook with sorrow, the strangely bent body cradled in her arms. Carmen’s father stood to one side, his arms hanging limply, frozen, the shock taking hold.

Her uncle, covered in blood, filth and fatigue uttered, ‘He was on the roof of the Opera House, looking for planes. They … they bombed it.’

Jimmy stood next to Carmen, his face without expression, staring at Nanu’s eyes. They were still open. The same vacant stare as his dead mother’s.

Carmen’s father turned to the crowd, his hands balled into fists. ‘The Italians killed him. Murderers! MURDERERS!’

Carmen studied the lifeless face of her grandfather, Nanu. She had seen him this morning, humming along with a scratched record. Blood trickled down his cheek into a small pool on the earthen floor. Chaos erupted in the tear-stained faces of the crowd but she couldn’t hear them as she knelt down and touched his hand to wake him up. It was still warm. Her fingers moved to his lips, lips that had sung of love and heartbreak at her kitchen window. Where did the music go?