Sculptor of Malta

Moses Zahra arrived in Malta with the Knights on a sunshine day in September 1531. He brings his mother's ashes and sprinkled them as the galleys entered the Grand Harbour. Moses keeps journals. Malta a fiefdom handed over to the Knights. Moses talks of the frivolity of power, the fear, the uncertainty of institutions that melt. Moses writes of the Great Siege. Some seven thousand Maltese perish. The Knights do not erect memorials for the Maltese the names of Knights carved at the cathedral of St John. Knights and Turk stripped of their gold their armour.

The Knights, failed Malta. After 250 years of the Knights the Maltese still not able read or write. The Knights made Malta a fossil trapped in aristocratic rule.

There is Ursula Zahra, her husband James Henry dies at Passchendaele. She loses her home in a bombing raid in Hamrun left to deal with rubble and dust. Frederick Zahra a hero. He is there when Illustrious and the Ohio come to Malta. He works in the drydocks, he brings food to the victory kitchens of Valetta.

Vincent Zahra brought up by grandmother Ursula. He writes by candlelight and a kerosene lamp. Learns imagination he learns how to be alone. Now he has the fragments he needs to write a narrative from the scribbles and fragments that is the story of Malta.

The parrot a symbol of resistance in Rhodes. There is a Zerafa who cries for his community. Rachel tells Moses that all Empires are like iron, they will eventually rust but communities will to endure, will build on the remnants and fragments.