The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

He puts his thin hands up into the loose sleeves of her dress and cups her shoulders with his hands. If she swerves now, his hands go with her. She begins to lean, puts all her weight into her fall backwards, trusting him to come with her, trusting his hands to break the fall. Then he will curl himself up, his feet in the air, just his hands and arms and his mouth on her, the rest of his body the tail of a mantis. The lamp is still strapped against the muscle and sweat of his left arm. Her face slips into the light to kiss and lick and taste. His forehead towelling itself in the wetness of her hair.

Then he is suddenly across the room, the bounce of his sapper lamp all over the place, in this room he has spent a week sweeping of all possible fuzes so it is now cleared. As if the room has now finally emerged from the war, is no longer a zone or territory. He moves with just the lamp, swaying his arm, revealing the ceiling, her laughing face as he passes her standing on the back of the sofa looking down at the glisten of his slim body. The next time he passes her he sees she is leaning down and wiping her arms on the skirt of her dress. “But I got you, I got you,” she chants. “I’m the Mohican of Danforth Avenue.”

Then she is riding on his back and her light swerves into the spines of books in the high shelves, her arms rising up and down as he spins her, and she dead-weights forward, drops and catches his thighs, then pivots off and is free of him, lying back on the old carpet, the smell of the past ancient rain still in it, the dust and grit on her wet arms. He bends down to her, she reaches out and clicks off his light. “I won, right?” He still has said nothing since he came into the room. His head goes into that gesture she loves which is partly a nod, partly a shake of possible disagreement. He cannot see her for the glare. He turns off her light so they are equal in darkness.

There is the one month in their lives when Hana and Kip sleep beside each other. A formal celibacy between them. Discovering that in lovemaking there can be a whole civilisation, a whole country ahead of them. The love of the idea of him or her. I don’t want to be fucked. I don’t want to fuck you. Where he had learned it or she had who knows, in such youth. Perhaps from Caravaggio, who had spoken to her during those evenings about his age, about the tenderness towards every cell in a lover that comes when you discover your mortality. This was, after all, a mortal age. The boy’s desire completed itself only in his deepest sleep while in the arms of Hana, his orgasm something more to do with the pull of the moon, a tug of his body by the night.

All evening his thin face lay against her ribs. She reminded him of the pleasure of being scratched, her fingernails in circles raking his back. It was something an ayah had taught him years earlier. All comfort and peace during childhood, Kip remembered, had come from her, never from the mother he loved or from his brother or father, whom he played with. When he was scared or unable to sleep it was the ayah who recognized his lack, who would ease him into sleep with her hand on his small thin back, this intimate stranger from South India who lived with them, helped run a household, cooked and served them meals, brought up her own children within the shell of the household, having comforted his older brother too in earlier years, probably knowing the character of all of the children better than their real parents did.

It was a mutual affection. If Kip had been asked whom he loved most he would have named his ayah before his mother. Her comforting love greater than any blood love or sexual love for him. All through his life, he would realize later, he was drawn outside the family to find such love. The platonic intimacy, or at times the sexual intimacy, of a stranger. He would be quite old before he recognized that about himself, before he could ask even himself that question of whom he loved most.

Only once did he feel he had given her back any comfort, though she already understood his love for her. When her mother died he had crept into her room and held her suddenly old body. In silence he lay beside her mourning in her small servant’s room where she wept wildly and formally. He watched as she collected her tears in a small glass cup held against her face. She would take this, he knew, to the funeral. He was behind her hunched-over body, his nine-year-old hands on her shoulders, and when she was finally still, just now and then a shudder, he began to scratch her through the sari, then pulled it aside and scratched her skin—as Hana now received this tender art, his nails against the million cells of her skin, in his tent, in 1945, where their continents met in a hill town.

IX

The Cave of Swimmers

I PROMISED to tell you how one falls in love.

A young man named Geoffrey Clifton had met a friend at Oxford who had mentioned what we were doing. He contacted me, got married the next day, and two weeks later flew with his wife to Cairo. They were on the last days of their honeymoon. That was the beginning of our story.

   When I met Katharine she was married. A married woman. Clifton climbed out of the plane and then, unexpected, for we had planned the expedition with just him in mind, she emerged. Khaki shorts, bony knees. In those days she was too ardent for the desert. I liked his youth more than the eagerness of his new young wife. He was our pilot, messenger, reconnaissance. He was the New Age, flying over and dropping codes of long coloured ribbon to advise us where we should be. He shared his adoration of her constantly. Here were four men and one woman and her husband in his verbal joy of honeymoon. They went back to Cairo and returned a month later, and it was almost the same. She was quieter this time but he was still the youth. She would squat on some petrol cans, her jaw cupped in her hands, her elbows on her knees, staring at some constantly flapping tarpaulin, and Clifton would be singing her praises. We tried to joke him out of it, but to wish him more modest would have been against him and none of us wanted that.

After that month in Cairo she was muted, read constantly, kept more to herself, as if something had occurred or she realized suddenly that wondrous thing about the human being, it can change. She did not have to remain a socialite who had married an adventurer. She was discovering herself. It was painful to watch, because Clifton could not see it, her self-education. She read everything about the desert. She could talk about Uweinat and the lost oasis, had even hunted down marginal articles.

I was a man fifteen years older than she, you understand. I had reached that stage in life where I identified with cynical villains in a book. I don’t believe in permanence, in relationships that span ages. I was fifteen years older. But she was smarter. She was hungrier to change than I expected.

What altered her during their postponed honeymoon on the Nile estuary outside Cairo? We had seen them for a few days—they had arrived two weeks after their Cheshire wedding. He had brought his bride along, as he couldn’t leave her and he couldn’t break the commitment to us. To Madox and me. We would have devoured him. So her bony knees emerged from the plane that day. That was the burden of our story. Our situation.

   Clifton celebrated the beauty of her arms, the thin lines of her ankles. He described witnessing her swim. He spoke about the new bidets in the hotel suite. Her ravenous hunger at breakfast.

To all that, I didn’t say a word. I would look up sometimes as he spoke and catch her glance, witnessing my unspoken exasperation, and then her demure smile. There was some irony. I was the older man. I was the man of the world, who had walked ten years earlier from Dakhla Oasis to the Gilf Kebir, who charted the Farafra, who knew Cyrenaica and had been lost more than twice in the Sand Sea. She met me when I had all those labels. Or she could twist a few degrees and see the labels on Madox. Yet apart from the Geographical Society we were unknown; we were the thin edge of a cult she had stumbled onto because of this marriage.

The words of her husband in praise of her meant nothing. But I am a man whose life in many ways, even as an explorer, has been governed by words. By rumours and legends. Charted things. Shards written down. The tact of words. In the desert to repeat something would be to fling more water into the earth. Here nuance took you a hundred miles.

Our expedition was about forty miles from Uweinat, and Madox and I were to leave alone on a reconnaissance. The Cliftons and the others were to remain behind. She had consumed all her reading and asked me for books. I had nothing but maps with me. “That book you look at in the evenings?” “Herodotus. Ahh. You want that?” “I don’t presume. If it is private.” “I have my notes within it. And cuttings. I need it with me.” “It was forward of me, excuse me.” “When I return I shall show it to you. It is unusual for me to travel without it.”

All this occurred with much grace and courtesy. I explained it was more a commonplace book, and she bowed to that. I was able to leave without feeling in any way selfish. I acknowledged her graciousness. Clifton was not there. We were alone. I had been packing in my tent when she had approached me. I am a man who has turned my back on much of the social world, but sometimes I appreciate the delicacy of manner.

   We returned a week later. Much had happened in terms of findings and piecings together. We were in good spirits. There was a small celebration at the camp. Clifton was always one to celebrate others. It was catching.

She approached me with a cup of water. “Congratulations, I heard from Geoffrey already—” “Yes!” “Here, drink this.” I put out my hand and she placed the cup in my palm. The water was very cold after the stuff in the canteens we had been drinking. “Geoffrey has planned a party for you. He’s writing a song and wants me to read a poem, but I want to do something else.” “Here, take the book and look through it.” I pulled it from my knapsack and handed it to her.

After the meal and herb teas Clifton brought out a bottle of cognac he had hidden from everyone till this moment. The whole bottle was to be drunk that night during Madox’s account of our journey, Clifton’s funny song. Then she began to read from The Histories—the story of Candaules and his queen. I always skim past that story. It is early in the book and has little to do with the places and period I am interested in. But it is of course a famous story. It was also what she had chosen to talk about.

This Candaules had become passionately in love with his own wife; and having become so, he deemed that his wife was fairer by far than all other women. To Gyges, the son of Daskylus (for he of all his spearmen was the most pleasing to him), he used to describe the beauty of his wife, praising it above all measure.

“Are you listening, Geoffrey?”

“Yes, my darling.”

He said to Gyges: “Gyges, I think that you do not believe me when I tell you of the beauty of my wife, for it happens that men’s ears are less apt of belief than their eyes. Contrive therefore means by which you may look upon her naked.”

There are several things one can say. Knowing that eventually I will become her lover, just as Gyges will be the queen’s lover and murderer of Candaules. I would often open Herodotus for a clue to geography. But Katharine had done that as a window to her life. Her voice was wary as she read. Her eyes only on the page where the story was, as if she were sinking within quicksand while she spoke.

“I believe indeed that she is of all women the fairest and I entreat you not to ask of me that which it is not lawful for me to do.” But the King answered him thus: “Be of good courage, Gyges, and have no fear, either of me, that I am saying these words to try you, or of my wife, lest any harm may happen to you from her. For I will contrive it so from the first that she shall not perceive that she has been seen by you.”

This is a story of how I fell in love with a woman, who read me a specific story from Herodotus. I heard the words she spoke across the fire, never looking up, even when she teased her husband. Perhaps she was just reading it to him. Perhaps there was no ulterior motive in the selection except for themselves. It was simply a story that had jarred her in its familiarity of situation. But a path suddenly revealed itself in real life. Even though she had not conceived it as a first errant step in any way. I am sure.

“I will place you in the room where we sleep, behind the open door; and after I have gone in, my wife will also come to lie, down. Now there is a seat near the entrance of the room and on this she lays her garments as she takes them off one by one; and so you will be able to gaze at her at full leisure.”

But Gyges is witnessed by the queen when he leaves the bedchamber. She understands then what has been done by her husband; and though ashamed, she raises no outcry … she holds her peace.

It is a strange story. Is it not, Caravaggio? The vanity of a man to the point where he wishes to be envied. Or he wishes to be believed, for he thinks he is not believed. This was in no way a portrait of Clifton, but he became a part of this story. There is something very shocking but human in the husband’s act. Something makes us believe it.

The next day the wife calls in Gyges and gives him two choices.

“There are now two ways open to you, and I will give you the choice which of the two you will prefer to take. Either you must slay Candaules and possess both me and the Kingdom of Lydia, or you must yourself here on the spot be slain, so that you mayest not in future, by obeying Candaules in all things, see that which you should not. Either he must die who formed this design, or you who have looked upon me naked.”

So the king is killed. A New Age begins. There are poems written about Gyges in iambic trimeters. He was the first of the barbarians to dedicate objects at Delphi. He reigned as King of Lydia for twenty-eight years, but we still remember him as only a cog in an unusual love story.

She stopped reading and looked up. Out of the quicksand. She was evolving. So power changed hands. Meanwhile, with the help of an anecdote, I fell in love.

Words, Caravaggio. They have a power.

When the Cliftons were not with us they were based in Cairo. Clifton doing other work for the English, God knows what, an uncle in some government office. All this was before the war. But at that time the city had every nation swimming in it, meeting at Groppi’s for the soirée concerts, dancing into the night. They were a popular young couple with honour between them, and I was on the periphery of Cairo society. They lived well. A ceremonial life that I would slip into now and then. Dinners, garden parties. Events I would not normally have been interested in but now went to because she was there. I am a man who fasts until I see what I want.

How do I explain her to you? With the use of my hands? The way I can arc out in the air the shape of a mesa or rock? She had been part of the expedition for almost a year. I saw her, conversed with her. We had each been continually in the presence of the other. Later, when we were aware of mutual desire, these previous moments flooded back into the heart, now suggestive, that nervous grip of an arm on a cliff, looks that had been missed or misinterpreted.