“Good man.” Simonson put on his cap and left, and the garrison crept back into its shell to take another beating.
Alistair looked out over the harbor. He heard the aircraft before he saw them. They came in as they always did, from the north, and he steadied his field glasses to watch them. They were Heinkels, lined up along the horizon with their fighter escort larking above. The RAF had nothing to put up against them and so there was nothing for the German fighters to do. Alistair imagined they practised aerobatics and scored the others’ maneuvers for aesthetics and technical difficulty, while far beneath them the grubby Heinkels laid their turds of high explosive.
Through the glasses one could sometimes catch a glimpse of a bomber pilot through the frontal glass of his aircraft. They still wore jackets and ties to the fight. Alistair tried to make out the pilots’ faces, but they were too distant. He would have liked to know how the enemy looked as he approached the Maltese coast.
Alistair tracked the bombers until they were almost overhead and the stonework blocked his view. The fort’s Bofors guns and 3.7s opened up. It was not the ceaseless barrage it had been a year ago. Now, having little ammunition, the gunners did their best. The bombs began to fall. Alistair was too weak to go down to the shelters and he sat on an empty ammunition box, took up the brushes with his left hand and worked at the restoration. The explosions made dust. Grit got into the thinners.
He had cleaned every part of the painting now, making good around twenty square inches a day. The Madonna, now that she was freed from her soot, was a catch. She made Alistair forget the hunger and the nausea of his infection. He had long ceased to make any distinction between his own Mary and the one who was restored, inch by inch, as he worked. Bombs hammered down, falling all around the fort, cratering its great courtyard. Alistair ignored them. He hardly worked, simply looked back at Mary. The poison from his arm slowed his mind.
He had started with the hem of her dress, working up the lines of the obscurest folds, perfecting the mix of the thinners and learning the minimum pressure required to shift the grime and soot. Next he had moved on to the dress’s salients, revealing profane shifts of red. Her hair came next, imperfect, tangled here and there, swept back from the face but otherwise scarcely tamed. After two months he had trusted his technique sufficiently to expose her hands, and finally her face.
He looked from Mary to the Christ child, for whom he had developed a fraternal affection. The painter clearly hadn’t liked the boy—Alistair supposed no artist had ever much cared for the child whose presence was only an excuse to frequent the model. So here was Christ the awkward, Christ the inconvenient, Christ the pint-size chaperone. Sooty, pug-faced Jesus, wanting a feed. Alistair had worked on the painting for days before he noticed that while Mary had been provided with a halo, the child had only the benefit of a pot on a table in the background, its rim catching the incidental light. The table was in such deep shade and the pot so very nearly matched to its background that one would have to be the painter, or the painting’s restorer, to see the trick. Alistair’s heart went out to the boy. Maybe that was the point.
The bombing tailed off and Alistair dragged himself back to watch the enemy bombers departing. He was glad when they got away now. He raised his glasses and watched them fleeing above the waves, the tail-enders yawing desperately and trailing long streaks of soot. Well, it had been a long war, and everyone was trailing smoke. He was surprised at how easy it was to excuse the enemy. They had never promised fraternity, only bombs. What Alistair had done to Tom was worse. Mary must have come to feel the same for her part in it. He supposed it was why she didn’t write.
Now that the raid was over the men mustered in the courtyard. Alistair watched them harvest the seedy grasses that grew in the cracks between the flagstones. They chewed, slow-jawed. Gun drills had been abandoned weeks ago, physical training prohibited. When not specifically told to do something, the men had orders to do nothing.
Alistair watched though the glasses while the local children emerged from the rubble beyond the fort’s walls. They kindled tiny fires with splintered furniture, and roasted snails on sticks. In the alleys, men stood between the poles to drag their traps and carts. Their horses were long gone for stewing. Dogs were extinct. This was the worst thing now: the silence in the aftermath of a raid. There had always been the raucous indignation of dogs, but the island no longer barked.
His head throbbed. He retched, but nothing came up.
Later, Simonson brought Alistair’s ration. There was a two-ounce block of a thing they were calling bread, and a half-tin of paste. He watched with indifference as Simonson put the food down, pushing aside the bottles of thinners to make a place. Simonson sat heavily, threw off his cap and rubbed dust from the inside of his collar.