The Bells of Santa Marija

Chapter One: The Grain of the Stone

Marija Bonnici knew a bad roof by the sound it made when she hit it.

She stood in the half-cut gallery under Santa Marija's square with her lamp hooked on a nail of iron and her hammer resting against her hip, and she struck the limestone above her head three times, quick and light, the way her father had taught her before she was tall enough to reach it without a box under her feet. The first two notes came back solid, a dull knock like a fist on a closed door. The third came back hollow.

"There," she said. "Bring the props forward. Two of them, and a head-tree across."

Bruno Coleiro, who was sixty and had cut stone for the Bonnicis since Marija's grandfather ran the quarry, squinted up at the ceiling and saw nothing at all, because there was nothing to see. The rock looked the same as every other foot of rock in the gallery: pale gold, faintly damp, marked with the diagonal grooves of the picks.

"It sounds fine to me," he said.

"It sounds fine to you because you're deaf in the left ear and you've been deaf since Mussolini was in short trousers. There's a joint up there, and water has been getting into it for a hundred years, and it will come down on somebody's grandmother. Two props and a head-tree."

Bruno spat on his palms and went for the timber. He had learned, in eight months, that arguing with Guzepp Bonnici's daughter cost more time than obeying her, and that she was right often enough to make a man superstitious.

Above them, the December afternoon was clear and blue and completely silent, which on Malta in the winter of 1941 was not a comfort but a held breath. Marija had learned to hear that too. She could tell the difference between the silence before the siren and the silence after it, and she could tell, by the pitch of the engines, whether the bombers were going for the airfields at Ta' Qali or for the dockyard in Grand Harbour, and whether they were high or low, and whether they were coming or going.

They were coming. She heard it before the siren did — a low grinding hum from the north, the sound of a great many aircraft flying in a way that no bird ever flew, in straight lines, in patience.

"Bruno," she said. "Set the props after. Get up and shout."

He went, and she heard his boots on the ladder and then his voice in the square, cracked and enormous: "They're coming! They're coming, get down, get down!" — and then the siren caught up with him, wailing from the police station roof, and the square emptied into the mouth of the shelter like water down a drain.

They came past her in the dark of the entrance passage: old women with rosaries and pillowcases of bread; a man carrying a birdcage with a canary in it; three children roped together by their mother's hand; a girl of nineteen with a swollen belly under her coat, moving heavily, one hand on the wall — Lilian Sciberras, who had been at school with Marija and had, until this year, been the prettiest and most respectable girl in the village.

"Marija," Lilian said as she passed. "Are you staying down?"

"I'm working."

"You always say that."

"It's always true."

She went back along the gallery with her lamp, past the benches her gang had cut into the walls, past the chalked numbers that told each family where to sit, past the bucket latrine behind its hessian curtain. A hundred and ninety people would be in here in four minutes. When they were all in, the air would go warm and thick and smell of bodies and paraffin and the sour paste of hunger, and someone would start the rosary, and the rock would carry the sound of the bombs down into their teeth.

She put her hand flat on the pillar at the gallery junction, the great square column of living stone left standing to hold up the roof and the square and the church above it. It was cold and slightly damp and it did not move. It had been there since the sea laid it down, and she had left it four feet thicker than the government schedule required, because the government schedule had been written by a man in an office in Valletta who had never in his life heard the difference between a good knock and a hollow one.

The first bombs fell out towards the dockyard, four miles off, and came through the ground as a shudder rather than a noise. Dust sifted from the roof. A child screamed and was hushed. The rosary began — a woman's voice leading, the crowd answering, that low sea-sound of prayer that Marija had heard every night for eighteen months and had stopped hearing the way one stops hearing rain.

She climbed out into the entrance stair and stood where she could see a wedge of sky.

The sky was full of white scratches and small black flowers. Something bright fell a long way off, turning over, trailing. She watched it all the way down.

"You'll get your head taken off," said Bruno from below her.

"Then I'll stop worrying about the roof," said Marija.

---

The Bonnici quarry lay on the ridge above the village, a great open box cut into the hillside, three floors deep in places, with the sea and the shipping and the smoking harbour laid out below it like something on a table. Marija's grandfather had opened it in 1888 with two men and a mule. Her father had worked it with twelve. Now the quarry itself was quiet — nobody was building houses in Malta in 1941 — but the galleries behind it, the old underground workings where they had chased the best stone in under the hill, went back into the dark for four hundred yards, and those had suddenly become the most valuable thing the family owned.

She came home at dusk with limestone dust in her eyebrows and in the creases of her knuckles, wearing her father's shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and a pair of men's trousers cut down at the hem.

Her mother was at the door.

Carmena Bonnici was a small, dense, upright woman who had been beautiful and was now formidable, and she looked at her daughter's clothes the way a customs officer looks at a suitcase.

"Fr Stefan saw you on the road," she said.

"Then Fr Stefan has good eyes."

"Dressed like that."

"Dressed like a person who has been thirty feet underground since six o'clock this morning." Marija kissed her mother's cheek, which was the fastest way past her, and went into the kitchen.

The house smelled of the soup her mother could still make out of almost nothing — a little oil, an onion, three potatoes, a fistful of pasta, the bones of a rabbit that had died a week ago. Her father sat at the table with a blanket over his knees.

Angelo Bonnici had been a big man. There was still the frame of him: the wide flat shoulders, the wrists like door handles, the hands with their broken nails and their permanent grey seam of stone dust under the skin. But forty years of breathing rock had filled his lungs with something that scraped, and he sat now the way old men sit, leaning forward slightly, elbows on the table, saving his breath for the next thing.

"Well?" he said.

"Church square is at ninety yards. We opened the second gallery today."

"Roof?"

"There's a joint at the junction. Water's been in it. I've propped it and I've written it in the book."

He nodded slowly. "Write it twice."

"I wrote it twice."

"Write it three times." He coughed — a long, folding, patient cough that took most of a minute, and that Marija and her mother had learned to sit through without looking at each other. When he came out of it his eyes were wet and his voice was thin. "The book is the only friend you have when it falls down. Nobody remembers what you said. They remember what's written."

"Yes, Pa."

"How much cubic?"

"Four hundred and ten this week. That's eleven pounds if they pay us."

"They'll pay," said Angelo. "They'll pay in paper that buys nothing, but they'll pay."

Toni came in then, banging the door, fifteen years old, all elbows and appetite, with his shirt hanging out and his hair standing up. He had grown four inches that year on rations that would not have kept a cat, and the growing had eaten him hollow: you could see the shape of his skull, and the ridge of his collarbone, and the way his eyes went first, always, to the pot on the stove.

"There's soup," said Carmena.

"I ate."

"Where did you eat?"

"Camilleri's yard. Salvu gave me bread and oil for taking the notes up to Paola."

The room changed temperature.

"You take money from that man?" said Angelo.

"Bread," said Toni. "Not money. Bread."

"It's the same thing with a crust on it."

"Angelo," said Carmena.

"He has been trying to buy this quarry since 1936 and now he buys my son with a piece of bread —"

The cough took him again. Toni looked at the floor, sixteen kinds of shame and defiance moving across his thin face, and Marija watched her brother and thought, with a clarity that frightened her, that hunger would take him long before a bomb did.

"Sit down," she said to Toni. "Eat again. You'll eat again if I have to hold your nose."

He sat. He ate. He was still hungry afterwards, and so was everyone, and they all pretended otherwise, which was the great national accomplishment of that year.

---

Salvu Camilleri came on Sunday, as he often did, with a small parcel wrapped in newspaper.

He was a heavy, well-kept man in his early forties with a soft voice and very clean shoes, remarkable in a place where everything was covered in dust. He owned four lorries, which was four more than anyone else in the district still had running, and a haulage yard, and a share of a mill, and — nobody said this out loud — a great deal of flour that had never appeared on any government sheet. He had been born in the village. He had gone to school in the same room as Angelo Bonnici's older brother. He had never once raised his voice in public.

"Sur Angelo," he said from the doorway, hat in hand. "Sinjura Carmena. I brought a little sugar."

Sugar. Carmena's hands took the parcel before her pride could stop them, and Marija saw her mother's face do the awful thing that hunger did to faces in that year: gratitude, and then hatred of the gratitude.

"Sit," said Angelo.

Camilleri sat. He talked pleasantly for ten minutes about the weather and the price of paraffin and the poor Cassar family at Senglea who had lost the house and the grandmother in the same night. Then he said, easily, as though it had only just occurred to him:

"They tell me the Navy has men measuring the galleries."

"Do they," said Angelo.

"They'll requisition. They'll pay you a shilling a month and they'll leave the place full of holes." Camilleri turned his hat on his knee. "You know what I'd give you for it. I've said it before and I don't change my mind. A fair price, in cash, today, and you keep the house, and Toni comes into the yard with me and learns a trade that doesn't drown a man's lungs."

"My lungs are my own business."

"They are." Camilleri let that sit, gentle as a hand on a coffin lid. Then he looked up at Marija, who was standing by the stove with her arms folded. "And they tell me you're cutting the shelter at the church square yourself."

"I am."

"With your father's gang."

"With my gang."

"Under contract to the Protection Office, at ninepence the cubic foot." He smiled at her, and there was nothing in the smile you could take offence at, which was the worst thing about it. "You're a better contractor than half the men in this district, and I say that where anybody can hear me. It's a waste. A woman with that head should be running a house and an account book, not standing in the wet with a hammer."

"You're very kind."

"I'm never kind," said Camilleri comfortably. "I'm accurate."

When he had gone, Carmena unwrapped the sugar and stood looking down at it for a long moment.

"He'll ask for you," she said. "You know that."

"He's been asking for the quarry for five years. I'm just the part of it that talks back."

"Marija." Her mother's voice cracked in a way it rarely did. "He has flour. He has lorries. He has a brother-in-law in the police. When there is nothing left in this island but stones and salt, that man will still have bread, and you will be twenty-four years old with a hammer in your hand and no husband and no children and everybody in the village saying that Angelo Bonnici's daughter went underground and never came up."

"Then let them say it."

"You have no idea," said Carmena, "how long a village can talk."

Outside, over the harbour, the guns began again, and the room shook very slightly, and the sugar shivered in its paper on the table.