The English Patient

by Michael Ondaatje

  Leaving the truck, I started walking towards Uweinat, where I knew there was a buried plane.

  Wait. What do you mean, a buried plane?

  Madox had an old plane in the early days, which he had shaved down to the essentials – the only ‘extra’ was the closed bubble of cockpit, crucial for desert flights. During our times in the desert he had taught me to fly, the two of us walking around the guy-roped creature theorizing on how it hung or veered in the wind.

  When Clifton’s plane – Rupert - flew into our midst, the aging plane of Madox’s was left where it was, covered with a tarpaulin, pegged down in one of the northeast alcoves of Uweinat. Sand collected over it gradually for the next few years. None of us thought we would see it again. It was another victim of the desert. Within a few months we would pass the northeast gully and see no contour of it. By now Clifton’s plane, ten years younger, had flown into our story.

  So you were walking towards it?

  Yes. Four nights of walking. I had left the man in Cairo and turned back into the desert. Everywhere there was war. Suddenly there were ‘teams.’ The Bermanns, the Bagnolds, the Slatin Pashas – who had at various times saved each other’s lives – had now split up into camps.

  I walked towards Uweinat. I got there about noon and climbed up into the caves of the plateau. Above the well named Ain Dua.

  ‘Caravaggio thinks he knows who you are,’ Hana said.

  The man in the bed said nothing.

  ‘He says you are not English. He worked with intelligence out of Cairo and Italy for a while. Till he was captured. My family knew Caravaggio before the war. He was a thief. He believed in “the movement of things.” Some thieves are collectors, like some of the explorers you scorn, like some men with women or some women with men. But Caravaggio was not like that. He was too curious and generous to be a successful thief. Half the things he stole never came home. He thinks you are not English.’

  She watched his stillness as she spoke; it appeared that he was not listening carefully to what she was saying. Just his distant thinking. The way Duke Ellington looked and thought when he played ‘Solitude.’

  She stopped talking.

  He reached the shallow well named Ain Dua. He removed all of his clothes and soaked them in the well, put his head and then his thin body into the blue water. His limbs exhausted from the four nights of walking. He left his clothes spread on the rocks and climbed up higher into the boulders, climbed out of the desert, which was now, in 1942, a vast battlefield, and went naked into the darkness of the cave.

  He was among the familiar paintings he had found years earlier. Giraffes. Cattle. The man with his arms raised, in a plumed headdress. Several figures in the unmistakable posture of swimmers. Bermann had been right about the presence of an ancient lake. He walked farther into the coldness, into the Cave of Swimmers, where he had left her. She was still there. She had dragged herself into a corner, had wrapped herself tight in the parachute material. He had promised to return for her.

  He himself would have been happier to die in a cave, with its privacy, the swimmers caught in the rock around them. Bermann had told him that in Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock. But she was a woman who had grown up within gardens, among moistness, with words like trellis and hedgehog. Her passion for the desert was temporary. She’d come to love its sternness because of him, wanting to understand his comfort in its solitude. She was always happier in rain, in bathrooms steaming with liquid air, in sleepy wetness, climbing back in from his window that rainy night in Cairo and putting on her clothes while still wet, in order to hold it all. Just as she loved family traditions and courteous ceremony and old memorized poems. She would have hated to die without a name. For her there was a line back to her ancestors that was tactile, whereas he had erased the path he had emerged from. He was amazed she had loved him in spite of such qualities of anonymity in himself.

  She was on her back, positioned the way the mediaeval dead lie.

  I approached her naked as I would have done in our South Cairo room, wanting to undress her, still wanting to love her.

  What is terrible in what I did? Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it. You can make love to a woman with a broken arm, or a woman with fever. She once sucked blood from a cut on my hand as I had tasted and swallowed her menstrual blood. There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language. Félhomály. The dusk of graves. With the connotation of intimacy there between the dead and the living.

  I lifted her into my arms from the shelf of sleep. Clothing like cobweb. I disturbed all that.

  I carried her out into the sun. I dressed. My clothes dry and brittle from the heat in the stones.

  My linked hands made a saddle for her to rest on. As soon as I reached the sand I jostled her around so her body was facing back, over my shoulder. I was conscious of the airiness of her weight. I was used to her like this in my arms, she had spun around me in my room like a human reflection of the fan – her arms out, fingers like starfish.

  We moved like this towards the northeast gully, where the plane was buried. I did not need a map. With me was the tank of petrol I had carried all the way from the capsized truck. Because three years earlier we had been impotent without it.

  ‘What happened three years earlier?’

  ‘She had been injured. In 1939. Her husband had crashed his plane. It had been planned as a suicide-murder by her husband that would involve all three of us. We were not even lovers at the time. I suppose information of the affair trickled down to him somehow.’

  ‘So she was too wounded to take with you.’

  ‘Yes. The only chance to save her was for me to try and reach help alone.’

  In the cave, after all those months of separation and anger, they had come together and spoken once more as lovers, rolling away the boulder they had placed between themselves for some social law neither had believed in.

  In the botanical garden she had banged her head against the gatepost in determination and fury. Too proud to be a lover, a secret. There would be no compartments in her world. He had turned back to her, his finger raised, I don’t miss you yet.

  You will.

  During their months of separation he had grown bitter and self-sufficient. He avoided her company. He could not stand her calmness when she saw him. He phoned her house and spoke to her husband and heard her laughter in the background. There was a public charm in her that tempted everyone. This was something he had loved in her. Now he began to trust nothing.

  He suspected she had replaced him with another lover. He interpreted her every gesture to others as a code of promise. She gripped the front of Roundell’s jacket once in a lobby and shook it, laughing at him as he muttered something, and he followed the innocent government aide for two days to see if there was more between them. He did not trust her last endearments to him anymore. She was with him or against him. She was against him. He couldn’t stand even her tentative smiles at him. If she passed him a drink he would not drink it. If at a dinner she pointed to a bowl with a Nile lily floating in it he would not look at it. Just another fucking flower. She had a new group of intimates that excluded him and her husband. No one goes back to the husband. He knew that much about love and human nature.

  He bought pale brown cigarette papers and glued them into sections of The Histories that recorded wars that were of no interest to him. He wrote down all her arguments against him. Glued into the book – giving himself only the voice of the watcher, the listener, the ‘he.’

  During the last days before the war he had gone for a last time to the Gilf Kebir to clear out the base camp. Her husband was supposed to pick him up. The husband they had both loved until they began to love each other.

  Clifton flew up on Uweinat to collect him on the appointed day, buzzing the lost oasis so low the acacia shrubs dism
antled 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 Enth.’

  She looks at the sapper leaning against the wal
l, 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.