The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

“You must guess my moves, you see.”

“Why don’t you guess mine?”

“I will when you know what to do. At present I’m the only one who does.”

“I bet Kip knows.”

“He may know but he won’t do it.”

“I shall have some wine,” the English patient said, and the sapper picked up a glass of water, flung the contents through the window and poured wine for the Englishman.

“This is my first drink in a year.”

There was a muffled noise, and the sapper turned quickly and looked out of the window, into the darkness. The others froze. It could have been a mine. He turned back to the party and said, “It’s all right, it wasn’t a mine. That seemed to come from a cleared area.”

“Turn the record over, Kip. Now I will introduce you to ‘How Long Has This Been Going On,’ written by—” He left an opening for the English patient, who was stymied, shaking his head, grinning with the wine in his mouth.

“This alcohol will probably kill me.”

“Nothing will kill you, my friend. You are pure carbon.”

“Caravaggio!”

“George and Ira Gershwin. Listen.”

He and Hana were gliding to that sadness of the saxophone. He was right. The phrasing so slow, so drawn out, she could sense the musician did not wish to leave the small parlour of the introduction and enter the song, kept wanting to remain there, where the story had not yet begun, as if enamoured by a maid in the prologue. The Englishman murmured that the introductions to such songs were called “burdens.”

Her cheek rested against the muscles of Caravaggio’s shoulder. She could feel those terrible paws on her back against the clean frock, and they moved in the limited space between the bed and the wall, between bed and door, between the bed and the window alcove that Kip sat within. Every now and then as they turned she would see his face. His knees up and his arms resting on them. Or he would be looking out of the window into darkness.

“Do any of you know a dance called the Bosphorus hug?” the Englishman asked.

“No such thing.”

Kip watched the large shadows slide over the ceiling, over the painted wall. He struggled up and walked to the English patient to fill his empty glass, and touched the rim of his glass with the bottle in a toast. West wind coming into the room. And he turned suddenly, angry. A frail scent of cordite reaching him, a percentage of it in the air, and then he slipped out of the room, gesturing weariness, leaving Hana in the arms of Caravaggio.

   There was no light with him as he ran along the dark hall. He scooped up the satchel, was out of the house and racing down the thirty-six chapel steps to the road, just running, cancelling the thought of exhaustion from his body.

Was it a sapper or was it a civilian? The smell of flower and herb along the road wall, the beginning stitch at his side. An accident or wrong choice. The sappers kept to themselves for the most part. They were an odd group as far as character went, somewhat like people who worked with jewels or stone, they had a hardness and clarity within them, their decisions frightening even to others in the same trade. Kip had recognized that quality among gem-cutters but never in himself, though he knew others saw it there. The sappers never became familiar with each other. When they talked they passed only information along, new devices, habits of the enemy. He would step into the town hall, where they were billeted, and his eyes would take in the three faces and be aware of the absence of the fourth. Or there would be four of them and in a field somewhere would be the body of an old man or a girl.

He had learned diagrams of order when he joined the army, blueprints that became more and more complicated, like great knots or musical scores. He found out he had the skill of the three-dimensional gaze, the rogue gaze that could look at an object or page of information and realign it, see all the false descants. He was by nature conservative but able also to imagine the worst devices, the capacity for accident in a room—a plum on a table, a child approaching and eating the pit of poison, a man walking into a dark room and before joining his wife in bed brushing loose a paraffin lamp from its bracket. Any room was full of such choreography. The rogue gaze could see the buried line under the surface, how a knot might weave when out of sight. He turned away from mystery books with irritation, able to pinpoint villains with too much ease. He was most comfortable with men who had the abstract madness of autodidacts, like his mentor, Lord Suffolk, like the English patient.

He did not yet have a faith in books. In recent days, Hana had watched him sitting beside the English patient, and it seemed to her a reversal of Kim. The young student was now Indian, the wise old teacher was English. But it was Hana in the night who stayed with the old man, who guided him over the mountains to the sacred river. They had even read that book together, Hana’s voice slow when wind flattened the candle flame beside her, the page dark for a moment.

He squatted in a corner of the clanging waiting-room, rapt from all other thoughts; hands folded in lap, and pupils contracted to pin-points. In a minute—in another half second—he felt he would arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle …

And in some way on those long nights of reading and listening, she supposed, they had prepared themselves for the young soldier, the boy grown up, who would join them. But it was Hana who was the young boy in the story. And if Kip was anyone, he was the officer Creighton.

A book, a map of knots, a fuze board, a room of four people in an abandoned villa lit only by candlelight and now and then light from a storm, now and then the possible light from an explosion. The mountains and hills and Florence blinded without electricity. Candlelight travels less than fifty yards. From a greater distance there was nothing here that belonged to the outside world. They had celebrated in this evening’s brief dance in the English patient’s room their own simple adventures—Hana her sleep, Caravaggio his “finding” of the gramophone, and Kip a difficult defusing, though he had almost forgotten such a moment already. He was someone who felt uncomfortable in celebrations, in victories.

Just fifty yards away, there had been no representation of them in the world, no sound or sight of them from the valley’s eye as Hana’s and Caravaggio’s shadows glided across the walls and Kip sat comfortably encased in the alcove and the English patient sipped his wine and felt its spirit percolate through his unused body so it was quickly drunk, his voice bringing forth the whistle of a desert fox bringing forth a flutter of the English wood thrush he said was found only in Essex, for it thrived in the vicinity of lavender and wormwood. All of the burned man’s desire was in the brain, the sapper had been thinking to himself, sitting in the stone alcove. Then he turned his head suddenly, knowing everything as he heard the sound, certain of it. He had looked back at them and for the first time in his life lied—“It’s all right, it wasn’t a mine. That seemed to come from a cleared area”—prepared to wait till the smell of the cordite reached him.

   Now, hours later, Kip sits once again in the window alcove. If he could walk the seven yards across the Englishman’s room and touch her he would be sane. There was so little light in the room, just the candle at the table where she sat, not reading tonight; he thought perhaps she was slightly drunk.

He had returned from the source of the mine explosion to find Caravaggio asleep on the library sofa with the dog in his arms. The hound watched him as he paused at the open door, moving as little of its body as it had to, to acknowledge it was awake and guarding the place. Its quiet growl rising above Caravaggio’s snore.

He took off his boots, tied the laces together and slung them over his shoulder as he went upstairs. It had started to rain and he needed a tarpaulin for his tent. From the hall he saw the light still on in the English patient’s room.

She sat in the chair, one elbow on the table where the low candle sprayed its light, her head leaning back. He lowered his boots to the floor and came silently into the room, where the party had been going on three hours earlier. He could smell alcohol in the air. She put her fingers to her lips as he entered and then pointed to the patient. He wouldn’t hear Kip’s silent walk. The sapper sat in the well of the window again. If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world. And the Englishman woke at any sound, the hearing aid turned to full level when he slept, so he could be secure in his own awareness. The girl’s eyes darted around and then were still when she faced Kip in the rectangle of window.

He had found the location of the death and what was left there and they had buried his second-in-command, Hardy. And afterwards he kept thinking of the girl that afternoon, suddenly terrified for her, angry at her for involving herself. She had tried to damage her life so casually. She stared. Her last communication had been the finger to her lips. He leaned over and wiped the side of his cheek against the lanyard on his shoulder.

He had walked back through the village, rain falling into pollarded trees of the town square untrimmed since the start of the war, past the strange statue of two men shaking hands on horseback. And now he was here, the candlelight swaying, altering her look so he could not tell what she thought. Wisdom or sadness or curiosity.

If she had been reading or if she had been bending over the Englishman, he would have nodded to her and probably left, but he is now watching Hana as someone young and alone. Tonight, gazing at the scene of the mine blast, he had begun to fear her presence during the afternoon dismantling. He had to remove it, or she would be with him each time he approached a fuze. He would be pregnant with her. When he worked, clarity and music filled him, the human world extinguished. Now she was within him or on his shoulder, the way he had once seen a live goat being carried by an officer out of a tunnel they were attempting to flood.

No.

That wasn’t true. He wanted Hana’s shoulder, wanted to place his palm over it as he had done in the sunlight when she slept and he had lain there as if in someone’s rifle sights, awkward with her. Within the imaginary painter’s landscape. He did not want comfort but he wanted to surround the girl with it, to guide her from this room. He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against. Neither of them was willing to reveal such a possibility to the other. Hana sat so still. She looked at him, and the candle wavered and altered her look. He was unaware that for her he was just a silhouette, his slight body and his skin part of the darkness.

Earlier, when she saw that he had left the window alcove, she had been enraged. Knowing that he was protecting them like children from the mine. She had clung closer to Caravaggio. It had been an insult. And tonight the growing exhilaration of the evening didn’t permit her to read after Caravaggio had gone to bed, stopping to rifle through her medicine box first, and after the English patient had plucked at the air with his bony finger and, when she had bent over, kissed her cheek.

She had blown out the other candles, lit just the night stub at the bedside table and sat there, the Englishman’s body facing her in silence after the wildness of his drunken speeches. “Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound. A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire.” She could hear the spill of the wax into the metal tray beside her. The sapper had gone through town to some reach of the hill where the explosion had taken place, and his unnecessary silence still angered her.

She could not read. She sat in the room with her eternally dying man, the small of her back still feeling bruised from an accidental slam against the wall during her dance with Caravaggio.

   Now if he moves towards her she will stare him out, will treat him to a similar silence. Let him guess, make a move. She has been approached before by soldiers.

But what he does is this. He is halfway across the room, his hand sunk to the wrist in his open satchel which still hangs off his shoulder. His walk silent. He turns and pauses beside the bed. As the English patient completes one of his long exhalations he snips the wire of his hearing aid with the cutters and drops them back into the satchel. He turns and grins towards her.

“I’ll rewire him in the morning.”

He puts his left hand on her shoulder.

David Caravaggio—an absurd name for you, of course …”

“At least I have a name.”

“Yes.”

Caravaggio sits in Hana’s chair. Afternoon sun fills the room, revealing the swimming motes. The Englishman’s dark lean face with its angular nose has the appearance of a still hawk swaddled in sheets. The coffin of a hawk, Caravaggio thinks.

The Englishman turns to him.

“There’s a painting by Caravaggio, done late in his life. David with the Head of Goliath. In it, the young warrior holds at the end of his outstretched arm the head of Goliath, ravaged and old. But that is not the true sadness in the picture. It is assumed that the face of David is a portrait of the youthful Caravaggio and the head of Goliath is a portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did the painting. Youth judging age at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one’s own mortality. I think when I see him at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David.”

   Caravaggio sits there in silence, thoughts lost among the floating motes. War has unbalanced him and he can return to no other world as he is, wearing these false limbs that morphine promises. He is a man in middle age who has never become accustomed to families. All his life he has avoided permanent intimacy. Till this war he has been a better lover than husband. He has been a man who slips away, in the way lovers leave chaos, the way thieves leave reduced houses.

He watches the man in the bed. He needs to know who this Englishman from the desert is, and reveal him for Hana’s sake. Or perhaps invent a skin for him, the way tannic acid camouflages a burned man’s rawness.

Working in Cairo during the early days of the war, he had been trained to invent double agents or phantoms who would take on flesh. He had been in charge of a mythical agent named “Cheese,” and he spent weeks clothing him with facts, giving him qualities of character—such as greed and a weakness for drink when he would spill false rumours to the enemy. Just as some in Cairo he worked for invented whole platoons in the desert. He had lived through a time of war when everything offered up to those around him was a lie. He had felt like a man in the darkness of a room imitating the calls of a bird.

But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others.

She pulls down the copy of Kim from the library shelf and, standing against the piano, begins to write into the flyleaf in its last pages.