The English Patient

by Michael Ondaatje

  1933 or 1934. I forget the year. Madox, Casparius, Bermann, myself, two Sudanese drivers and a cook. By now we travel in A-type Ford cars with box bodies and are using for the first time large balloon tyres known as air wheels. They ride better on sand, but the gamble is whether they will stand up to stone fields and splinter rocks.

  We leave Kharga on March 22. Bermann and I have theorized that three wadis written about by Williamson in 1838 make up Zerzura.

  Southwest of the Gilf Kebir are three isolated granite massifs rising out of the plain – Gebel Arkanu, Gebel Uweinat, and Gebel Kissu. The three are fifteen miles apart from each other. Good water in several of the ravines, though the wells at Gebel Arkanu are bitter, not drinkable except in an emergency. Williamson said three wadis formed Zerzura, but he never located them and this is considered fable. Yet even one rain oasis in these crater-shaped hills would solve the riddle of how Cambyses and his army could attempt to cross such a desert, of the Senussi raids during the Great War, when the black giant raiders crossed a desert which supposedly has no water or pasture. This was a world that had been civilised for centuries, had a thousand paths and roads.

  We find jars at Abu Ballas with the classic Greek amphora shape. Herodotus speaks of such jars.

  Bermann and I talk to a snakelike mysterious old man in the fortress of El Jof – in the stone hall that once had been the library of the great Senussi sheik. An old Tebu, a caravan guide by profession, speaking accented Arabic. Later Bermann says ‘like the screeching of bats,’ quoting Herodotus. We talk to him all day, all night, and he gives nothing away. The Senussi creed, their foremost doctrine, is still not to reveal the secrets of the desert to strangers.

  At Wadi el Melik we see birds of an unknown species.

  On May 5, I climb a stone cliff and approach the Uweinat plateau from a new direction. I find myself in a broad wadi full of acacia trees.

  There was a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own. Someone seen bathing in a desert caravan, holding up muslin with one arm in front of her. Some old Arab poet’s woman, whose white-dove shoulders made him describe an oasis with her name. The skin bucket spreads water over her, she wraps herself in the cloth, and the old scribe turns from her to describe Zerzura.

  So a man in the desert can slip into a name as if within a discovered well, and in its shadowed coolness be tempted never to leave such containment. My great desire was to remain there, among those acacias. I was walking not in a place where no one had walked before but in a place where there were sudden, brief populations over the centuries – a fourteenth-century army, a Tebu caravan, the Senussi raiders of 1915. And in between these times – nothing was there. When no rain fell the acacias withered, the wadis dried out … until water suddenly reappeared fifty or a hundred years later. Sporadic appearances and disappearances, like legends and rumours through history.

  In the desert the most loved waters, like a lover’s name, are carried blue in your hands, enter your throat. One swallows absence. A woman in Cairo curves the white length of her body up from the bed and leans out of the window into a rainstorm to allow her nakedness to receive it.

  Hana leans forward, sensing his drifting, watching him, not saying a word. Who is she, this woman?

  The ends of the earth are never the points on a map that colonists push against, enlarging their sphere of influence. On one side servants and slaves and tides of power and correspondence with the Geographical Society. On the other the first step by a white man across a great river, the first sight (by a white eye) of a mountain that has been there forever.

  When we are young we do not look into mirrors. It is when we are old, concerned with our name, our legend, what our lives will mean to the future. We become vain with the names we own, our claims to have been the first eyes, the strongest army, the cleverest merchant. It is when he is old that Narcissus wants a graven image of himself.

  But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past. We were young. We knew power and great finance were temporary things. We all slept with Herodotus. ‘For those cities that were great in earlier times must have now become small, and those that were great in my time were small in the time before … Man’s good fortune never abides in the same place.’

  In 1936 a young man named Geoffrey Clifton had met a friend at Oxford who mentioned what we were doing. He contacted me, got married the next day, and two weeks later flew with his wife to Cairo.

  The couple entered our world – the four of us, Prince Kemal el Din, Bell, Almásy and Madox. The name that still filled our mouths was Gilf Kebir. Somewhere in the Gilf nestled Zerzura, whose name occurs in Arab writings as far back as the thirteenth century. When you travel that far in time you need a plane, and young Clifton was rich and he could fly and he had a plane.

  Clifton met us in El Jof, north of Uweinat. He sat in his two-seater plane and we walked towards him from the base camp. He stood up in the cockpit and poured a drink out of his flask. His new wife sat beside him.

  ‘I name this site the Bir Messaha Country Club,’ he announced.

  I watched the friendly uncertainty scattered across his wife’s face, her lionlike hair when she pulled off the leather helmet.

  They were youth, felt like our children. They climbed out of the plane and shook hands with us.

  That was 1936, the beginning of our story …

  They jumped off the wing of the Moth. Clifton walked towards us holding out the flask, and we all sipped the warm alcohol. He was one for ceremonies. He had named his plane Rupert Bear. I don’t think he loved the desert, but he had an affection for it that grew out of awe at our stark order, into which he wanted to fit himself – like a joyous undergraduate who respects silent behaviour in a library. We had not expected him to bring his wife, but we were I suppose courteous about it. She stood there while the sand collected in her mane of hair.

  What were we to this young couple? Some of us had written books about dune formation, the disappearance and reappearance of oases, the lost culture of deserts. We seemed to be interested only in things that could not be bought or sold, of no interest to the outside world. We argued about latitudes, or about an event that had happened seven hundred years earlier. The theorems of exploration. That Abd el Melik Ibrahim el Zwaya who lived in Zuck oasis pasturing camels was the first man among those tribes who could understand the concept of photographs.

  The Cliftons were on the last days of their honeymoon. I left them with the others and went to join a man in Kufra and spent many days with him, trying out theories I had kept secret from the rest of the expedition. I returned to the base camp at El Jof three nights later.

  The desert fire was between us. The Cliftons, Madox, Bell and myself. If a man leaned back a few inches he would disappear into darkness. Katharine Clifton began to recite something, and my head was no longer in the halo of the camp’s twig fire.

  There was classical blood in her face. Her parents were famous, apparently, in the world of legal history. I am a man who did not enjoy poetry until I heard a woman recite it to us. And in that desert she dragged her university days into our midst to describe the stars – the way Adam tenderly taught a woman with gracious metaphors.

  These then, though unbeheld in deep of night,

  Shine not in vain, nor think, though men were none,

  That Heav’n would want spectators, God want praise;

  Millions of spiritual Creatures walk the Earth

  Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep:

  All these with ceaseless praise his works behold

  Both day and night: how often from the steep

  Of echoing Hill or Thicket have we heard

  Celestial voices to the midnight air,

  Sole, or responsive each to other’s note

  Singing their great Creator …

  That night I fell in love with a voice. Only a voice. I wanted to hear nothing more. I got u
p and walked away.

  She was a willow. What would she be like in winter, at my age? I see her still, always, with the eye of Adam. She had been these awkward limbs climbing out of a plane, bending down in our midst to prod at a fire, her elbow up and pointed towards me as she drank from a canteen.

  A few months later, she waltzed with me, as we danced as a group in Cairo. Though slightly drunk she wore an unconquerable face. Even now the face I believe that most revealed her was the one she had that time when we were both half drunk, not lovers.

  All these years I have been trying to unearth what she was handing me with that look. It seemed to be contempt. So it appeared to me. Now I think she was studying me. She was an innocent, surprised at something in me. I was behaving the way I usually behave in bars, but this time with the wrong company. I am a man who kept the codes of my behaviour separate. I was forgetting she was younger than I.

  She was studying me. Such a simple thing. And I was watching for one wrong move in her statue-like gaze, something that would give her away.

  Give me a map and I’ll build you a city. Give me a pencil and I will draw you a room in South Cairo, desert charts on the wall. Always the desert was among us. I could wake and raise my eyes to the map of old settlements along the Mediterranean coast – Gazala, Tobruk, Mersa Matruh – and south of that the hand-painted wadis, and surrounding those the shades of yellowness that we invaded, tried to lose ourselves in. ‘My task is to describe briefly the several expeditions which have attacked the GilfKebir. Dr. Bermann will later take us back to the desert as it existed thousands of years ago …’

  That is the way Madox spoke to other geographers at Kensington Gore. But you do not find adultery in the minutes of the Geographical Society. Our room never appears in the detailed reports which chartered every knoll and every incident of history.

  In the street of imported parrots in Cairo one is hectored by almost articulate birds. The birds bark and whistle in rows, like a plumed avenue. I knew which tribe had travelled which silk or camel road carrying them in their petite palanquins across the deserts. Forty-day journeys, after the birds were caught by slaves or picked like flowers in equatorial gardens and then placed in bamboo cages to enter the river that is trade. They appeared like brides in a mediaeval courtship.

  We stood among them. I was showing her a city that was new to her.

  Her hand touched me at the wrist.

  ‘If I gave you my life, you would drop it. Wouldn’t you?’

  I didn’t say anything.

  V

  Katharine

  The first time she dreamed of him she woke up beside her husband screaming.

  In their bedroom she stared down onto the sheet, mouth open. Her husband put his hand on her back.

  ‘Nightmare. Don’t worry.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shall I get you some water?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She wouldn’t move. Wouldn’t lie back into that zone they had been in.

  The dream had taken place in this room – his hand on her neck (she touched it now), his anger towards her that she had sensed the first few times she had met him. No, not anger, a lack of interest, irritation at a married woman being among them. They had been bent over like animals, and he had yoked her neck back so she had been unable to breathe within her arousal.

  Her husband brought her the glass on a saucer but she could not lift her arms, they were shaking, loose. He put the glass awkwardly against her mouth so she could gulp the chlorinated water, some coming down her chin, falling to her stomach. When she lay back she hardly had time to think of what she had witnessed, she fell into a quick deep sleep.

  That had been the first recognition. She remembered it sometime during the next day, but she was busy then and she refused to nestle with its significance for long, dismissed it; it was an accidental collision on a crowded night, nothing more.

  A year later the other, more dangerous, peaceful dreams came. And even within the first one of these she recalled the hands at her neck and waited for the mood of calmness between them to swerve to violence.

  Who lays the crumbs of food that tempt you? Towards a person you never considered. A dream. Then later another series of dreams.

  He said later it was propinquity. Propinquity in the desert. It does that here, he said. He loved the word – the propinquity of water, the propinquity of two or three bodies in a car driving the Sand Sea for six hours. Her sweating knee beside the gearbox of the truck, the knee swerving, rising with the bumps. In the desert you have time to look everywhere, to theorize on the choreography of all things around you.

  When he talked like that she hated him, her eyes remaining polite, her mind wanting to slap him. She always had the desire to slap him, and she realized even that was sexual. For him all relationships fell into patterns. You fell into propinquity or distance. Just as, for him, the histories in Herodotus clarified all societies. He assumed he was experienced in the ways of the world he had essentially left years earlier, struggling ever since to explore a half-invented world of the desert.

  At Cairo aerodrome they loaded the equipment into the vehicles, her husband staying on to check the petrol lines of the Moth before the three men left the next morning. Madox went off to one of the embassies to send a wire. And he was going into town to get drunk, the usual final evening in Cairo, first at Madame Badin’s Opera Casino, and later to disappear into the streets behind the Pasha Hotel. He would pack before the evening began, which would allow him to just climb into the truck the next morning, hung over.

  So he drove her into town, the air humid, the traffic bad and slow because of the hour.

  ‘It’s so hot. I need a beer. Do you want one?’

  ‘No, I have to arrange for a lot of things in the next couple of hours. You’ll have to excuse me.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to interfere.’

  ‘I’ll have one with you when I come back.’

  ‘In three weeks, right?’

  ‘About that.’

  ‘I wish I were going too.’

  He said nothing in answer to that. They crossed the Bulaq Bridge and the traffic got worse. Too many carts, too many pedestrians who owned the streets. He cut south along the Nile towards the Semiramis Hotel, where she was staying, just beyond the barracks.

  ‘You’re going to find Zerzura this time, aren’t you.’

  ‘I’m going to find it this time.’

  He was like his old self. He hardly looked at her on the drive, even when they were stalled for more than five minutes in one spot.

  At the hotel he was excessively polite. When he behaved this way she liked him even less; they all had to pretend this pose was courtesy, graciousness. It reminded her of a dog in clothes. To hell with him. If her husband didn’t have to work with him she would prefer not to see him again.

  He pulled her pack out of the rear and was about to carry it into the lobby.

  ‘Here, I can take that.’ Her shirt was damp at the back when she got out of the passenger seat.

  The doorman offered to take the pack, but he said, ‘No, she wants to carry it,’ and she was angry again at his assumption. The doorman left them. She turned to him and he passed her the bag so she was facing him, both hands awkwardly carrying the heavy case in front of her.

  ‘So. Good-bye. Good luck.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll look after them all. They’ll be safe.’

  She nodded. She was in shadow, and he, as if unaware of the harsh sunlight, stood in it.

  Then he came up to her, closer, and she thought for a moment he was going to embrace her. Instead he put his right arm forward and drew it in a gesture across her bare neck so her skin was touched by the whole length of his damp forearm.

  ‘Good-bye.’

  He walked back to the truck. She could feel his sweat now, like blood left by a blade which the gesture of his arm seemed to have imitated.

  She picks up a cushion and places it onto her lap as a shield
against him. ‘If you make love to me I won’t lie about it. If I make love to you I won’t lie about it.’

  She moves the cushion against her heart, as if she would suffocate that part of herself which has broken free.

  ‘What do you hate most?’ he asks.

  ‘A lie. And you?’

  ‘Ownership,’ he says. ‘When you leave me, forget me.’

  Her fist swings towards him and hits hard into the bone just below his eye. She dresses and leaves.

  Each day he would return home and look at the black bruise in the mirror. He became curious, not so much about the bruise, but about the shape of his face. The long eyebrows he had never really noticed before, the beginning of grey in his sandy hair. He had not looked at himself like this in a mirror for years. That was a long eyebrow.

  Nothing can keep him from her.

  When he is not in the desert with Madox or with Bermann in the Arab libraries, he meets her in Groppi Park – beside the heavily watered plum gardens. She is happiest here. She is a woman who misses moisture, who has always loved low green hedges and ferns. While for him this much greenery feels like a carnival.

  From Groppi Park they arc out into the old city, South Cairo, markets where few Europeans go. In his rooms maps cover the walls. And in spite of his attempts at furnishing there is still a sense of base camp to his quarters.

  They lie in each other’s arms, the pulse and shadow of the fan on them. All morning he and Bermann have worked in the archaeological museum placing Arabic texts and European histories beside each other in an attempt to recognize echo, coincidence, name changes – back past Herodotus to the Kitab al Kanuz, where Zerzura is named after the bathing woman in a desert caravan. And there too the slow blink of a fan’s shadow. And here too the intimate exchange and echo of childhood history, of scar, of manner of kiss.