The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje

He left him there by the communion rail and noisily climbed the stairs to the upper level, where the other end of the rope was. Holding onto it, he stepped off the balcony into the darkness, and the old man was simultaneously swung up, hoisted up fast until, when the sapper touched ground, he swung idly in midair within three feet of the frescoed walls, the flare brightening a halo around him. Still holding the rope the sapper walked forward until the man swung to the right to hover in front of The Flight of Emperor Maxentius.

Five minutes later he let the man down. He lit a flare for himself and hoisted his body up into the dome within the deep blue of the artificial sky. He remembered its gold stars from the time he had gazed on it with binoculars. Looking down he saw the mediaevalist sitting on a bench, exhausted. He was now aware of the depth of this church, not its height. The liquid sense of it. The hollowness and darkness of a well. The flare sprayed out of his hand like a wand. He pulleyed himself across to her face, his Queen of Sadness, and his brown hand reached out small against the giant neck.

The Sikh sets up a tent in the far reaches of the garden, where Hana thinks lavender was once grown. She has found dry leaves in that area which she has rolled in her fingers and identified. Now and then after a rain she recognizes the perfume of it.

At first he will not come into the house at all. He walks past on some duty or other to do with the dismantling of mines. Always courteous. A little nod of his head. Hana sees him wash at a basin of collected rainwater, placed formally on top of a sundial. The garden tap, used in previous times for the seedbeds, is now dry. She sees his shirtless brown body as he tosses water over himself like a bird using its wing. During the day she notices mostly his arms in the short-sleeved army shirt and the rifle which is always with him, even though battles seem now to be over for them.

He has various postures with the gun—half-staff, half a crook for his elbows when it is over his shoulders. He will turn, suddenly realizing she is watching him. He is a survivor of his fears, will step around anything suspicious, acknowledging her look in this panorama as if claiming he can deal with it all.

He is a relief to her in his self-sufficiency, to all of them in the house, though Caravaggio grumbles at the sapper’s continuous humming of Western songs he has learned for himself in the last three years of the war. The other sapper, who had arrived with him in the rainstorm, Hardy he was called, is billeted elsewhere, nearer the town, though she has seen them working together, entering a garden with their wands of gadgetry to clear mines.

The dog has stuck by Caravaggio. The young soldier, who will run and leap with the dog along the path, refuses to give it food of any kind, feeling it should survive on its own. If he finds food he eats it himself. His courtesy goes only so far. Some nights he sleeps on the parapet that overlooks the valley, crawling into his tent only if it rains,

He, for his part, witnesses Caravaggio’s wanderings at night. On two occasions the sapper trails Caravaggio at a distance. But two days later Caravaggio stops him and says, Don’t follow me again. He begins to deny it, but the older man puts his hand across his lying face and quiets him. So the soldier knows Caravaggio was aware of him two nights before. In any case, the trailing was simply a remnant of a habit he had been taught during the war. Just as even now he desires to aim his rifle and fire and hit some target precisely. Again and again he aims at a nose on a statue or one of the brown hawks veering across the sky of the valley.

He is still very much a youth. He wolfs down food, jumps up to clear away his plate, allowing himself half an hour for lunch.

She has watched him at work, careful and timeless as a cat, in the orchard and within the overgrown garden that rises behind the house. She notices the darker brown skin of his wrist, which slides freely within the bangle that clinks sometimes when he drinks a cup of tea in front of her.

He never speaks about the danger that comes with his kind of searching. Now and then an explosion brings her and Caravaggio quickly out of the house, her heart taut from the muffled blast. She runs out or runs to a window seeing Caravaggio too in the corner of her vision, and they will see the sapper waving lazily towards the house, not even turning around from the herb terrace.

Once Caravaggio entered the library and saw the sapper up by the ceiling, against the trompe l’oeil—only Caravaggio would walk into a room and look up into the high corners to see if he was alone—and the young soldier, his eyes not leaving their focus, put out his palm and snapped his fingers, halting Caravaggio in his entrance, a warning to leave the room for safety as he unthreaded and cut a fuze wire he had traced to that corner, hidden above the valance.

   He is always humming or whistling. “Who is whistling?” asks the English patient one night, having not met or even seen the newcomer. Always singing to himself as he lies upon the parapet looking up at a shift of clouds.

When he steps into the seemingly empty villa he is noisy. He is the only one of them who has remained in uniform. Immaculate, buckles shined, the sapper appears out of his tent, his turban symmetrically layered, the boots clean and banging into the wood or stone floors of the house. On a dime he turns from a problem he is working on and breaks into laughter. He seems unconsciously in love with his body, with his physicalness, bending over to pick up a slice of bread, his knuckles brushing the grass, even twirling the rifle absent-mindedly like a huge mace as he walks along the path of cypresses to meet the other sappers in the village.

He seems casually content with this small group in the villa, some kind of loose star on the edge of their system. This is like a holiday for him after the war of mud and rivers and bridges. He enters the house only when invited in, just a tentative visitor, the way he had done that first night when he had followed the faltering sound of Hana’s piano and come up the cypress-lined path and stepped into the library.

He had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of a danger to the piano player. The retreating army often left pencil mines within musical instruments. Returning owners opened up pianos and lost their hands. People would revive the swing on a grandfather clock, and a glass bomb would blow out half a wall and whoever was nearby.

He followed the noise of the piano, rushing up the hill with Hardy, climbed over the stone wall and entered the villa. As long as there was no pause it meant the player would not lean forward and pull out the thin metal band to set the metronome going. Most pencil bombs were hidden in these—the easiest place to solder the thin layer of wire upright. Bombs were attached to taps, to the spines of books, they were drilled into fruit trees so an apple falling onto a lower branch would detonate the tree, just as a hand gripping that branch would. He was unable to look at a room or field without seeing the possibilities of weapons there.

He had paused by the French doors, leaned his head against the frame, then slid into the room and except for moments of lightning remained within the darkness. There was a girl standing, as if waiting for him, looking down at the keys she was playing. His eyes took in the room before they took her in, swept across it like a spray of radar. The metronome was ticking already, swaying innocently back and forth. There was no danger, no tiny wire. He stood there in his wet uniform, the young woman at first unaware of his entrance.

   Beside his tent the antenna of a crystal set is strung up into the trees. She can see the phosphorus green from the radio dial if she looks over there at night with Caravaggio’s field glasses, the sapper’s shifting body covering it up suddenly if he moves across the path of vision. He wears the portable contraption during the day, just one earphone attached to his head, the other loose under his chin, so he can hear sounds from the rest of the world that might be important to him. He will come into the house to pass on whatever information he has picked up that he thinks might be interesting to them. One afternoon he announces that the bandleader Glenn Miller has died, his plane having crashed somewhere between England and France.

So he moves among them. She sees him in the distance of a defunct garden with the diviner or, if he has found something, unravelling that knot of wires and fuzes someone has left him like a terrible letter.

He is always washing his hands. Caravaggio at first thinks he is too fussy. “How did you get through a war?” Caravaggio laughs.

“I grew up in India, Uncle. You wash your hands all the time. Before all meals. A habit. I was born in the Punjab.”

“I’m from Upper America,” she says.

   He sleeps half in and half out of the tent. She sees his hands remove the earphone and drop it onto his lap.

Then Hana puts down the glasses and turns away.

They were under the huge vault. The sergeant lit a flare, and the sapper lay on the floor and looked up through the rifle’s telescope, looked at the ochre faces as if he were searching for a brother in the crowd. The cross hairs shook along the biblical figures, the light dousing the coloured vestments and flesh darkened by hundreds of years of oil and candle smoke. And now this yellow gas smoke, which they knew was outrageous in this sanctuary, so the soldiers would be thrown out, would be remembered for abusing the permission they received to see the Great Hall, which they had come to, wading up beachheads and the one thousand skirmishes of small wars and the bombing of Monte Cassino and then walking in hushed politeness through the Raphael Stanze till they were here, finally, seventeen men who had landed in Sicily and fought their way up the ankle of the country to be here—where they were offered just a mostly dark hall. As if being in the presence of the place was enough.

And one of them had said, “Damn. Maybe more light, Sergeant Shand?” And the sergeant released the catch of the flare and held it up in his outstretched arm, the niagara of its light pouring off his fist, and stood there for the length of its burn like that. The rest of them stood looking up at the figures and faces crowded onto the ceiling that emerged in the light. But the young sapper was already on his back, the rifle aimed, his eye almost brushing the beards of Noah and Abraham and the variety of demons until he reached the great face and was stilled by it, the face like a spear, wise, unforgiving.

The guards were yelling at the entrance and he could hear the running steps, just another thirty seconds left on the flare. He rolled over and handed the rifle to the padre. “That one. Who is he? At three o’clock northwest, who is he? Quick, the flare is almost out.”

The padre cradled the rifle and swept it over to the corner, and the flare died.

He returned the rifle to the young Sikh.

“You know we shall all be in serious trouble over this lighting of weapons in the Sistine Chapel. I should not have come here. But I also must thank Sergeant Shand, he was heroic to do it. No real damage has been done, I suppose.”

“Did you see it? The face. Who was it?”

“Ah yes, it is a great face.”

“You saw it.”

“Yes. Isaiah.”

When the Eighth Army got to Gabicce on the east coast, the sapper was head of night patrol. On the second night he received a signal over the shortwave that there was enemy movement in the water. The patrol sent out a shell and the water erupted, a rough warning shot. They did not hit anything, but in the white spray of the explosion he picked up a darker outline of movement. He raised the rifle and held the drifting shadow in his sights for a full minute, deciding not to shoot in order to see if there would be other movement nearby. The enemy was still camped up north, in Rimini, on the edge of the city. He had the shadow in his sights when the halo was suddenly illuminated around the head of the Virgin Mary. She was coming out of the sea.

She was standing in a boat. Two men rowed. Two other men held her upright, and as they touched the beach the people of the town began to applaud from their dark and opened windows.

The sapper could see the cream-coloured face and the halo of small battery lights. He was lying on the concrete pillbox, between the town and the sea, watching her as the four men climbed out of the boat and lifted the five-foot-tall plaster statue into their arms. They walked up the beach, without pausing, no hesitation for the mines. Perhaps they had watched them being buried and charted them when the Germans had been there. Their feet sank into the sand. This was Gabicce Mare on May 29, 1944. Marine Festival of the Virgin Mary.

Adults and children were on the streets. Men in band uniforms had also emerged. The band would not play and break the rules of curfew, but the instruments were still part of the ceremony, immaculately polished.

He slid from the darkness, the mortar tube strapped to his back, carrying the rifle in his hands. In his turban and with the weapons he was a shock to them. They had not expected him to emerge too out of the no-man’s-land of the beach.

He raised his rifle and picked up her face in the gun sight—ageless, without sexuality, the foreground of the men’s dark hands reaching into her light, the gracious nod of the twenty small light bulbs. The figure wore a pale blue cloak, her left knee raised slightly to suggest drapery.

They were not romantic people. They had survived the Fascists, the English, Gauls, Goths and Germans. They had been owned so often it meant nothing. But this blue and cream plaster figure had come out of the sea, was placed in a grape truck full of flowers, while the band marched ahead of her in silence. Whatever protection he was supposed to provide for this town was meaningless. He couldn’t walk among their children in white dresses with these guns.

He moved one street south of them and walked at the speed of the statue’s movement, so they reached the joining streets at the same time. He raised his rifle to pick up her face once again in his sights. It all ended on a promontory overlooking the sea, where they left her and returned to their homes. None of them was aware of his continued presence on the periphery.

Her face was still lit. The four men who had brought her by boat sat in a square around her like sentries. The battery attached to her back began to fade; it died at about four-thirty in the morning. He glanced at his watch then. He picked up the men with the rifle telescope. Two were asleep. He swung the sights up to her face and studied her again. A different look in the fading light around her. A face which in the darkness looked more like someone he knew. A sister. Someday a daughter. If he could have parted with it, the sapper would have left something there as his gesture. But he had his own faith after all.

Caravaggio enters the library. He has been spending most afternoons there. As always, books are mystical creatures to him. He plucks one out and opens it to the title page. He is in the room about five minutes before he hears a slight groan.

He turns and sees Hana asleep on the sofa. He closes the book and leans back against the thigh-high ledge under the shelves. She is curled up, her left cheek on the dusty brocade and her right arm up towards her face, a fist against her jaw. Her eyebrows shift, the face concentrating within sleep.