The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

Clifton flew up on Uweinat to collect him on the appointed day, buzzing the lost oasis so low the acacia shrubs dismantled their leaves in the wake of the plane, the Moth slipping into the depressions and cuts—while he stood on the high ridge signalling with blue tarpaulin. Then the plane pivoted down and came straight towards him, then crashed into the earth fifty yards away. A blue line of smoke uncoiling from the undercarriage. There was no fire.

A husband gone mad. Killing all of them. Killing himself and his wife—and him by the fact there was now no way out of the desert.

Only she was not dead. He pulled the body free, carrying it out of the plane’s crumpled grip, this grip of her husband.

   How did you hate me? she whispers in the Cave of Swimmers, talking through her pain of injuries. A broken wrist. Shattered ribs. You were terrible to me. That’s when my husband suspected you. I still hate that about you—disappearing into deserts or bars.

You left me in Groppi Park.

Because you didn’t want me as anything else.

Because you said your husband was going mad. Well, he went mad.

Not for a long time. I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me, will you. Stop defending yourself. Kiss me and call me by my name.

Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other.

Now there is no talcum on her arm, no rose water on her thigh.

You think you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you. How many women did you have? I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, so wordless sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character.

In the Cave of Swimmers we talked. We were only two latitudes away from the safety of Kufra.

   He pauses and holds out his hand. Caravaggio places a morphine tablet into the black palm, and it disappears into the man’s dark mouth.

   I crossed the dry bed of the lake towards Kufra Oasis, carrying nothing but robes against the heat and night cold, my Herodotus left behind with her. And three years later, in 1942, I walked with her towards the buried plane, carrying her body as if it was the armour of a knight.

   In the desert the tools of survival are underground—troglodyte caves, water sleeping within a buried plant, weapons, a plane. At longitude 25, latitude 23, I dug down towards the tarpaulin, and Madox’s old plane gradually emerged. It was night and even in the cold air I was sweating. I carried the naphtha lantern over to her and sat for a while, beside the silhouette of her nod. Two lovers and desert—starlight or moonlight, I don’t remember. Everywhere else out there was a war.

The plane came out of the sand. There had been no food and I was weak. The tarp so heavy I couldn’t dig it out but had simply to cut it away.

In the morning, after two hours’ sleep, I carried her into the cockpit. I started the motor and it rolled into life. We moved and then slipped, years too late, into the sky.

   The voice stops. The burned man looks straight ahead in his morphine focus.

The plane is now in his eye. The slow voice carries it with effort above the earth, the engine missing turns as if losing a stitch, her shroud unfurling in the noisy air of the cockpit, noise terrible after his days of walking in silence. He looks down and sees oil pouring onto his knees. A branch breaks free of her shirt. Acacia and bone. How high is he above the land? How low is he in the sky?

The undercarriage brushes the top of a palm and he pivots up, and the oil slides over the seat, her body slipping down into it. There is a spark from a short, and the twigs at her knee catch fire. He pulls her back into the seat beside him. He thrusts his hands up against the cockpit glass and it will not shift. Begins punching the glass, cracking it, finally breaking it, and the oil and the fire slop and spin everywhere. How low is he in the sky? She collapses—acacia twigs, leaves, the branches that were shaped into arms uncoiling around him. Limbs begin disappearing in the suck of air. The odour of morphine on his tongue. Caravaggio reflected in the black lake of his eye. He goes up and down now like a well bucket. There is blood somehow all over his face. He is flying a rotted plane, the canvas sheetings on the wings ripping open in the speed. They are carrion. How far back had the palm tree been? How long ago? He lifts his legs out of the oil, but they are so heavy. There is no way he can lift them again. He is old. Suddenly. Tired of living without her. He cannot lie back in her arms and trust her to stand guard all day all night while he sleeps. He has no one. He is exhausted not from the desert but from solitude. Madox gone. The woman translated into leaves and twigs, the broken glass to the sky like a jaw above him.

He slips into the harness of the oil-wet parachute and pivots upside down, breaking free of glass, wind flinging his body back. Then his legs are free of everything, and he is in the air, bright, not knowing why he is bright until he realizes he is on fire.

Hana can hear the voices in the English patient’s room and stands in the hall trying to catch what they are saying.

How is it?

Wonderful!

Now it’s my turn.

Ahh! Splendid, splendid.

This is the greatest of inventions.

A remarkable find, young man.

   When she enters she sees Kip and the English patient passing a can of condensed milk back and forth. The Englishman sucks at the can, then moves the tin away from his face to chew the thick fluid. He beams at Kip, who seems irritated that he does not have possession of it. The sapper glances at Hana and hovers by the bedside, snapping his fingers a couple of times, managing finally to pull the tin away from the dark face.

“We have discovered a shared pleasure. The boy and I. For me on my journeys in Egypt, for him in India.”

“Have you ever had condensed-milk sandwiches?” the sapper asks.

Hana glances back and forth between the two of them.

Kip peers into the can. “I’ll get another one,” he says, and leaves the room.

Hana looks at the man in the bed.

“Kip and I are both international bastards—born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives. Though Kip doesn’t recognize that yet. That’s why we get on so well together.”

In the kitchen Kip stabs two holes into the new can of condensed milk with his bayonet, which, he realizes, is now used more and more for only this purpose, and runs back upstairs to the bedroom.

“You must have been raised elsewhere,” the sapper says. “The English don’t suck it out that way.”

“For some years I lived in the desert. I learned everything I knew there. Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.”

He smiles at Hana.

“One feeds me morphine. One feeds me condensed milk. We may have discovered a balanced diet!” He turns back to Kip.

“How long have you been a sapper?”

“Five years. Mostly in London. Then Italy. With the unexploded-bomb units.”

“Who was your teacher?”

“An Englishman in Woolwich. He was considered eccentric.”

“The best kind of teacher. That must have been Lord Suffolk. Did you meet Miss Morden?”

“Yes.”

At no point does either of them attempt to make Hana comfortable in their conversation. But she wants to know about his teacher, and how he would describe him.

“What was he like, Kip?”

“He worked in Scientific Research. He was head of an experimental unit. Miss Morden, his secretary, was always with him, and his chauffeur, Mr. Fred Harts. Miss Morden would take notes, which he dictated as he worked on a bomb, while Mr. Harts helped with the instruments. He was a brilliant man. They were called the Holy Trinity. They were blown up, all three of them, in 1941. At Erith.”

   She looks at the sapper leaning against the wall, one foot up so the sole of his boot is against a painted bush. No expression of sadness, nothing to interpret.

Some men had unwound their last knot of life in her arms. In the town of Anghiari she had lifted live men to discover they were already being consumed by worms. In Ortona she had held cigarettes to the mouth of the boy with no arms. Nothing had stopped her. She had continued her duties while she secretly pulled her personal self back. So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.

She watches Kip lean his head back against the wall and knows the neutral look on his face. She can read it.

VII

In Situ

WESTBURY, ENGLAND, 1940

KIRPAL SINGH STOOD where the horse’s saddle would have lain across its back. At first he simply stood on the back of the horse, paused and waved to those he could not see but who he knew would be watching. Lord Suffolk watched him through binoculars, saw the young man wave, both arms up and swaying.

Then he descended, down into the giant white chalk horse of Westbury, into the whiteness of the horse, carved into the hill. Now he was a black figure, the background radicalizing the darkness of his skin and his khaki uniform. If the focus on the binoculars was exact, Lord Suffolk would see the thin line of crimson lanyard on Singh’s shoulder that signalled his sapper unit. To them it would look like he was striding down a paper map cut out in the shape of an animal. But Singh was conscious only of his boots scuffing the rough white chalk as he moved down the slope.

Miss Morden, behind him, was also coming slowly down the hill, a satchel over her shoulder, aiding herself with a rolled umbrella. She stopped ten feet above the horse, unfurled the umbrella and sat within its shade. Then she opened up her notebooks.

“Can you hear me?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s fine.” She rubbed the chalk off her hands onto her skirt and adjusted her glasses. She looked up into the distance and, as Singh had done, waved to those she could not see.

Singh liked her. She was in effect the first Englishwoman he had really spoken with since he arrived in England. Most of his time had been spent in a barracks at Woolwich. In his three months there he had met only other Indians and English officers. A woman would reply to a question in the NAAFI canteen, but conversations with women lasted only two or three sentences.

He was the second son. The oldest son would go into the army, the next brother would be a doctor, a brother after that would become a businessman. An old tradition in his family. But all that had changed with the war. He joined a Sikh regiment and was shipped to England. After the first months in London he had volunteered himself into a unit of engineers that had been set up to deal with delayed-action and unexploded bombs. The word from on high in 1939 was naive: “Unexploded bombs are considered the responsibility of the Home Office, who are agreed that they should be collected by A. R. P. wardens and police and delivered to convenient dumps, where members of the armed forces will in due course detonate them.”

It was not until 1940 that the War Office took over responsibility for bomb disposal, and then, in turn, handed it over to the Royal Engineers. Twenty-five bomb disposal units were set up. They lacked technical equipment and had in their possession only hammers, chisels and road-mending tools. There were no specialists.

   A bomb is a combination of the following parts:

1. A container or bomb case.

2. A fuze.

3. An initiating charge, or gaine.

4. A main charge of high explosive.

5. Superstructional fittings—fins, lifting lugs, kopfrings, etc.

Eighty percent of bombs dropped by airplanes over Britain were thin-walled, general-purpose bombs. They usually ranged from a hundred pounds to a thousand. A 2,000-pound bomb was called a “Hermann” or an “Esau.” A 4,000-pound bomb was called a “Satan.”

   Singh, after long days of training, would fall asleep with diagrams and charts still in his hands. Half dreaming, he entered the maze of a cylinder alongside the picric acid and the gaine and the condensers until he reached the fuze deep within the main body. Then he was suddenly awake.

When a bomb hit a target, the resistance caused a trembler to activate and ignite the flash pellet in the fuze. The minute explosion would leap into the gaine, causing the penthrite wax to detonate. This set off the picric acid, which in turn caused the main filling of TNT, amatol and aluminized powder, to explode. The journey from trembler to explosion lasted a microsecond.

The most dangerous bombs were those dropped from low altitudes, which were not activated until they had landed. These unexploded bombs buried themselves in cities and fields and remained dormant until their trembler contacts were disturbed—by a farmer’s stick, a car wheel’s nudge, the bounce of a tennis ball against the casing—and then they would explode.

Singh was moved by lorry with the other volunteers to the research department in Woolwich. This was a time when the casualty rate in bomb disposal units was appallingly high, considering how few unexploded bombs there were. In 1940, after France had fallen and Britain was in a state of siege, it got worse.

By August the blitz had begun, and in one month there were suddenly 2,500 unexploded bombs to be dealt with. Roads were closed, factories deserted. By September the number of live bombs had reached 3,700. One hundred new bomb squads were set up, but there was still no understanding of how the bombs worked. Life expectancy in these units was ten weeks.

“This was a Heroic Age of bomb disposal, a period of individual prowess, when urgency and a lack of knowledge and equipment led to the taking of fantastic risks.… It was, however, a Heroic Age whose protagonists remained obscure, since their actions were kept from the public for reasons of security. It was obviously undesirable to publish reports that might help the enemy to estimate the ability to deal with weapons.”

   In the car, driving down to Westbury, Singh had sat in front with Mr. Harts while Miss Morden rode in the back with Lord Suffolk. The khaki-painted Humber was famous. The mudguards were painted bright signal red—as all bomb disposal travel units were—and at night there was a blue filter over the left sidelight. Two days earlier a man walking near the famous chalk horse on the Downs had been blown up. When engineers arrived at the site they discovered that another bomb had landed in the middle of the historic location—in the stomach of the giant white horse of Westbury carved into the rolling chalk hills in 1778. Shortly after this event, all the chalk horses on the Downs—there were seven—had camouflage nets pegged down over them, not to protect them so much as stop them being obvious landmarks for bombing raids over England.