The English Patient

by Michael Ondaatje

  ‘Let me tape those to the tree, and you leave.’

  ‘No. I’ll hold it. They won’t reach the tree.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Kip – I can hold them.’

  ‘We have an impasse. There’s a joke. I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know how complete the trick is.’

  Leaving her, he ran back to where he had first sighted the wire. He raised it and followed it all the way this time, the Geiger counter alongside it. Then he was crouched about ten yards from her, thinking, now and then looking up, looking right through her, watching only the two tributaries of wire she held in her hands. I don’t know, he said out loud, slowly, I don’t know. I think I have to cut the wire in your left hand, you must leave. He was pulling the radio earphones on over his head, so the sound came back into him fully, filling him with clarity. He schemed along the different paths of the wire and swerved into the convolutions of their knots, the sudden corners, the buried switches that translated them from positive to negative. The tinderbox. He remembered the dog, whose eyes were as big as saucers. He raced with the music along the wires, and all the while he was staring at the girl’s hands, which were very still holding onto them.

  ‘You’d better go.’

  ‘You need another hand to cut it, don’t you?’

  ‘I can attach it to the tree.’

  ‘I’ll hold it.’

  He picked the wire like a thin adder from her left hand. Then the other. She didn’t move away. He said nothing more, he now had to think as clearly as he could, as if he were alone. She came up to him and took back one of the wires. He was not conscious of this at all, her presence erased. He travelled the path of the bomb fuze again, alongside the mind that had choreographed this, touching all the key points, seeing the X ray of it, the band music filling everything else.

  Stepping up to her, he cut the wire below her left fist before the theorem faded, the sound like something bitten through with a tooth. He saw the dark print of her dress along her shoulder, against her neck. The bomb was dead. He dropped the cutters and put his hand on her shoulder, needing to touch something human. She was saying something he couldn’t hear, and she reached forward and pulled the earphones off so silence invaded. Breeze and a rustle. He realized the click of the wire being cut had not been heard at all, just felt, the snap of it, the break of a small rabbit bone. Not letting go of her, he moved his hand down her arm and pulled the seven inches of wire out of her still tight grip.

  She was looking at him, quizzical, waiting for his answer to what she had said, but he hadn’t heard her. She shook her head and sat down. He started collecting various objects around himself, putting them into his satchel. She looked up into the tree and then only by chance looked back down and saw his hands shaking, tense and hard like an epileptic’s, his breathing deep and fast, over in a moment. He was crouched over.

  ‘Did you hear what I said?’

  ‘No. What was it?’

  ‘I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I certainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone, it’s like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked flesh the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Have you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against your collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a tree and climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? You kept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, you have to be a still bed for me, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word “curl,” such a slow word, you can’t rush it …’

  Her mouth was against his shirt. He lay with her on the ground as still as he had to, his eyes clear, looking up into a branch. He could hear her deep breath. When he had put his arm around her shoulder she was already asleep but had gripped it against herself. Glancing down he noticed she still had the wire, she must have picked it up again.

  It was her breath that was most alive. Her weight seemed so light she must have balanced most of it away from him. How long could he lie like this, unable to move or turn to busyness. It was essential to remain still, the way he had relied on statues during those months when they moved up the coast fighting into and beyond each fortress town until there was no difference in them, the same narrow streets everywhere that became sewers of blood so he would dream that if he lost balance he would slip down those slopes on the red liquid and be flung off the cliff into the valley. Every night he had walked into the coldness of a captured church and found a statue for the night to be his sentinel. He had given his trust only to this race of stones, moving as close as possible against them in the darkness, a grieving angel whose thigh was a woman’s perfect thigh, whose line and shadow appeared so soft. He would place his head on the lap of such creatures and release himself into sleep.

  She suddenly let more weight onto him. And now her breathing stretched deeper, like the voice of a cello. He watched her sleeping face. He was still annoyed the girl had stayed with him when he defused the bomb, as if by that she had made him owe her something. Making him feel in retrospect responsible for her, though there was no thought of that at the time. As if that could usefully influence what he chose to do with a mine.

  But he felt he was now within something, perhaps a painting he had seen somewhere in the last year. Some secure couple in a field. How many he had seen with their laziness of sleep, with no thought of work or the dangers of the world. Beside him there were the mouselike movements within Hana’s breath; her eyebrows rode upon argument, a small fury in her dreaming. He turned his eyes away, up towards the tree and the sky of white cloud. Her hand gripped him as mud had clung along the bank of the Moro River, his fist plunging into the wet earth to stop himself slipping back into the already crossed torrent.

  If he were a hero in a painting, he could claim a just sleep. But as even she had said, he was the brownness of a rock, the brownness of a muddy storm-fed river. And something in him made him step back from even the naive innocence of such a remark. The successful defusing of a bomb ended novels. Wise white fatherly men shook hands, were acknowledged, and limped away, having been coaxed out of solitude for this special occasion. But he was a professional. And he remained the foreigner, the Sikh. His only human and personal contact was this enemy who had made the bomb and departed brushing his tracks with a branch behind him.

  Why couldn’t he sleep? Why couldn’t he turn towards the girl, stop thinking everything was still half lit, hanging fire? In a painting of his imagining the field surrounding this embrace would have been in flames. He had once followed a sapper’s entrance into a mined house with binoculars. He had seen him brush a box of matches off the edge of a table and be enveloped by light for the half-second before the crumpling sound of the bomb reached him. What lightning was like in 1944. How could he trust even this circle of elastic on the sleeve of the girl’s frock that gripped her arm? Or the rattle in her intimate breath as deep as stones within a river.

  She woke when the caterpillar moved from the collar of her dress onto her cheek, and she opened her eyes, saw him crouched over her. He plucked it from her face, not touching her skin, and placed it in the grass. She noticed he had already packed up his equipment. He moved back and sat against the tree, watching her as she rolled slowly onto her back and then stretched, holding that moment for as long as she could. It must have been afternoon, the sun over there. She leaned her head back and looked at him.

  ‘You were supposed to hold onto me!’

  ‘I did. Till you moved away.’

&nb
sp; ‘How long did you hold me?’

  ‘Until you moved. Until you needed to move.’

  ‘I wasn’t taken advantage of, was I?’ Adding, ‘Just joking,’ as she saw him beginning to blush.

  ‘Do you want to go down to the house?’

  ‘Yes, I’m hungry.’

  She could hardly stand up, the dazzle of sun, her tired legs. How long they had been there she still didn’t know. She could not forget the depth of her sleep, the lightness of the plummet.

  A party began in the English patient’s room when Caravaggio revealed the gramophone he had found somewhere.

  ‘I will use it to teach you to dance, Hana. Not what your young friend there knows. I have seen and turned my back on certain dances. But this tune, “How Long Has This Been Going On,” is one of the great songs because the introduction’s melody is purer than the song it introduces. And only great jazzmen have acknowledged that. Now, we can have this party on the terrace, which would allow us to invite the dog, or we can invade the Englishman and have it in the bedroom upstairs. Your young friend who doesn’t drink managed to find bottles of wine yesterday in San Domenico. We have not just music. Give me your arm. No. First we must chalk the floor and practise. Three main steps – one-two-three – now give me your arm. What happened to you today?’

  ‘He dismantled a large bomb, a difficult one. Let him tell you about it.’

  The sapper shrugged, not modestly, but as if it was too complicated to explain. Night fell fast, night filled up the valley and then the mountains and they were left once more with lanterns.

  They were shuffling together in the corridors towards the English patient’s bedroom, Caravaggio carrying the gramophone, one hand holding its arm and needle.

  ‘Now, before you begin on your histories,’ he said to the static figure in the bed, ‘I will present you with “My Romance.”’

  ‘Written in 1935 by Mr. Lorenz Hart, I believe,’ muttered the Englishman. Kip was sitting at the window, and she said she wanted to dance with the sapper.

  ‘Not until I’ve taught you, dear worm.’

  She looked up at Caravaggio strangely; that was her father’s term of endearment for her. He pulled her into his thick grizzled embrace and said ‘dear worm’ again, and began the dancing lesson.

  She had put on a clean but unironed dress. Each time they spun she saw the sapper singing to himself, following the lyrics. If they had had electricity they could have had a radio, they could have had news of the war somewhere. All they had was the crystal set belonging to Kip, but he had courteously left it in his tent. The English patient was discussing the unfortunate life of Lorenz Hart. Some of his best lyrics to ‘Manhattan,’ he claimed, had been changed and he now broke into those verses

  ‘We’ll bathe at Brighton;

  The fish we’ll frighten

  When we’re in.

  Your bathing suit so thin

  Will make the shellfish grin

  Fin to fin.

  ‘Splendid lines, and erotic, but Richard Rodgers, one suspects, wanted more dignity.’

  ‘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 c
langing 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 Creight-on.

  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.