TE23 Double Feature

Loranne Vella

Rocket

voices. During my journey, however, I heard other voices that were advising me to change my mind. I heard them say, “Where are you going? That’s crazy! Forget about Malta.” However, I turned my head and put my passport inside my pocket.

didn’t know the language that well, Petrel told him his story in a broken Italian. He told him about the recent death of Rika, the only relative he knew. He explained that his reason to travel to Malta was to discover something about her from the traces she had left behind, before leaving the island for good. He didn’t go into personal details. He didn’t tell him that he felt overloaded with guilt for having somehow conducted Rika to her death. They had planned to go together, but it never happened. The reason he wanted to visit her homeland was, in fact, to compensate for his wrongdoing and be absolved from his sin. He wasn’t going to tell him that he had always been eager to visit Malta, to witness with his own eyes – if only for once – the stories Rika used to tell him about the island, and to see the village she used to show him in pictures, the village in which she was born and raised by her family. He wanted to see all this with his own eyes, as if he was going to find everything precisely the way it was when 41

***

The last air vehicles for passengers had already completed their last trip. Petrel had no other option than travelling on a ship of the Italian naval army that had a number of cabins allocated to travellers like him. The marine watch guard in charge of passengers who had a permit to board the ship, interrogated him for three quarters of an hour. He wanted to know in detail the reasons why, unlike the rest of the people, Petrel wanted to travel to Malta. In fact, according to the decree that had been issued few months before, the orders were to leave the island and to stay, as far as possible, away from it. Since he 40