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“Um…”

Chapter 36

14:10 Hours
Saturday 4th April 1964
St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, Mdina, Malta

The bodies of the two Soviet paratroopers who had died in the courtyard of the hospital still lay where they had fallen. One had been dead before he crashed onto the unyielding flagstones of the yard, shot through the head and torso while he hung helplessly on his straps hundreds of feet above the Citadel. The second man had been the first — of many — invaders killed by Clara Pullman, at the beginning of her murderous rampage through Mdina the previous afternoon.

There were spent cartridge cases all over the courtyard.

Very little of what the others had told Marija made much sense. They said Clara had shouted something in Russian at the man she had killed in the courtyard before locking the others in the safety of the basement; and departing to roam the streets of the Citadel like an avenging angel before eventually giving herself up, at of all places, the British headquarters.

The women had laid Margo Seiffert in the shade, covering her small, wiry bullet-riddled body with pure white blankets and lighting candles which now flickered all around her on the ground. Somebody had cleaned her face and brushed her hair. But for her deathly grey face she might have been sleeping.

Marija felt numb.

The women said that Admiral Christopher was dead, too.

Frighteningly, the women were convinced that if so many of the Russian invaders had not been drawn away from the hospital to hunt for Clara, they too would all be dead now.

As Marija knelt by her oldest and best friend in Christendom — her second mother in all but name — the tears rolled down her face and dripped onto the cold stones of the yard, splashing now and then on the shroud in which Margo’s grieving nurses had wrapped her overnight.

The God in whom Marija had trusted to be merciful had allowed Margo, Peter’s father and so many others to be consumed by the never-ending war. How had He let such evil walk upon the land? She had prayed to Him for the lives of her husband and their children as yet unborn; He had exacted a terrible price and the horrifying thing was that she had no idea how many others she loved had been sacrificed so that her selfish prayers might be answered.

The others had tried to comfort her as she sobbed.

Briefly, her grief was inconsolable. The hopeless, irreconcilable loss shut her off from all sanity; from all remembrance of joy. Her grief was like a river in flood, a madness that she could not fight until its first overwhelming surge slackened and she again began to recognise that her sorrow was but a tiny drop in a vast ocean of misery.

What right do I have to drown myself in my sorrow when so many others have suffered so greatly that I can hardly begin to imagine their loss?

Marija bowed her head.

That Margo had never believed did not matter. She stilled believed so she would pray for her, wherever Margo’s spirit now walked. Margo’s life force still lived in St Catherine’s Hospital for Women in Mdina where she had lived and worked for nearly two decades, in the hearts and memories of all those people whose lives she had touched and improved and in hundreds, perhaps thousands of cases, saved. Margo lived on in the children she had helped to bring into the World, the scores of nurses she had trained; few of whom would ever have had the chance to practice the scared art of nursing without Margo Seiffert’s indefatigable never say die attitude to the obstacles that hamstrung so many lives less ordinary than the one that she had made for herself on Malta. That Marija knew herself to have been blessed, infused with Margo’s lust for life and her intuitive refusal to be talked out of always trying to do the right thing, she had no doubt. That but for Margo Seiffert she would have been a very different person, possibly never found the love of a good and brave man, and never have amounted to anything but the faithful daughter of an anonymous Maltese family, likewise she had little doubt. But then Margo had been her second mother; and for better or worse mothers inevitably shape the women their daughters subsequently become in maturity.

Presently, because she was Margo Seiffert’s spirit daughter she wiped away her tears, dried her hands on her smock and with the help of two of the other women — both patiently waiting for her to overcome the first rush of her grief — she rose to her feet, and with a final sniff announced:

“I would like everybody who can be spared to come out in front of the hospital in St Paul’s Square. I will address everybody in five minutes time.”

This said she turned back to look down on Margo Seiffert’s face one more time, wondering if she was doing the right thing. Very stiffly, she bent down and drew the edge of the blanket over her spirit mother’s face.

Sleep well, my old fried.

Sleep well…

There were about twenty women waiting for her when she limped painfully out into the sunlight. Not all were pale blue-smocked auxiliary nurses, at least half were local women who helped out at the hospital a day or two a week, two were nuns from a convent in Rabat who devoted time each week to the good cause of St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, another woman was a cleaner. More women and several patients leaned out of glassless first floor windows, literally hanging on Marija’s every word.

“I shall miss Margo forever,” she began, her words nearly lost in the breeze swirling around the square. Her hair threatened to cover her face and she brushed it away.

Speak loudly!

“I shall miss Margo forever,” she repeated, this time in her native Maltese, hoping she was succeeding in projecting her small voice far enough for the women in the windows to hear. She slipped back into English. “Margo often talked to me about what might happen to the hospital when she was no longer with us. I never really took it seriously because Margo seemed so indestructible.” This last word she echoed in Maltese.

The first thing any local girl had to do to gain entrance to Margo’s training regime was to learn to speak and write good English. ‘Without command of English you cannot possibly have a good argument with a British doctor!’ That had been Margo all over; the love of her life had been the most English of Englishmen but the British medical establishment of the archipelago had always been her greatest bugbear.

“Margo did not ever, so far as I know, want me to follow in her footsteps or in any way take over from her when she was gone. I don’t think that was what she dreamed for me and we never talked of such things. Whoever replaces Margo as our Medical Director must be willing and able to commit her life to the hospital. I disqualified myself from that role when I married an English naval officer. Wherever my husband goes, so I go. Even if it means leaving the island of my birth and my family behind. That is the way of things.”

Marija looked around and up at the semi-circle of tired, worried faces.

“But that is for the future. The authorities will soon decide the fate of our hospital. Malta is under martial law and that means that sooner or later the British will appoint a new Director of our Hospital. Until then, for today at least, if it is your wish that I assume the role of acting Director, that is what I shall do!” She took a deep breath. “Is that your wish?”

Marija was almost bowled over with the relieved, smiling chorus of affirmation that greeted her offer.

Fresh tears tracked down her cheeks as the women of the St Catherine’s Hospital protectively ushered her back inside to begin her work.