The English Patient

by Michael Ondaatje

  VIII

  The Holy Forest

  Kip walks out of the field where he has been digging, his left hand raised in front of him as if he has sprained it.

  He passes the scarecrow for Hana’s garden, the crucifix with its hanging sardine cans, and moves uphill towards the villa. He cups the hand held in front of him with the other as if protecting the flame of a candle. Hana meets him on the terrace, and he takes her hand and holds it against his. The ladybird circling the nail on his small finger quickly crosses over onto her wrist.

  She turns back into the house. Now her hand is held out in front of her. She walks through the kitchen and up the stairs.

  The patient turns to face her as she comes in. She touches his foot with the hand that holds the ladybird. It leaves her, moving onto the dark skin. Avoiding the sea of white sheet, it begins to make the long trek towards the distance of the rest of his body, a bright redness against what seems like volcanic flesh.

  In the library the fuze box is in midair, nudged off the counter by Caravaggio when he turned to Hana’s gleeful yell in the hall. Before it reaches the floor Kip’s body slides underneath it, and he catches it in his hand.

  Caravaggio glances down to see the young man’s face blowing out all the air quickly through his cheeks.

  He thinks suddenly he owes him a life.

  Kip begins to laugh, losing his shyness in front of the older man, holding up the box of wires.

  Caravaggio will remember the slide. He could walk away, never see him again, and he would never forget him. Years from now on a Toronto street Caravaggio will get out of a taxi and hold the door open for an East Indian who is about to get into it, and he will think of Kip then.

  Now the sapper just laughs up towards Caravaggio’s face and up past that towards the ceiling.

  ‘I know all about sarongs.’ Caravaggio waved his hand towards Kip and Hana as he spoke. ‘In the east end of Toronto I met these Indians. I was robbing a house and it turned out to belong to an Indian family. They woke from their beds and they were wearing these cloths, sarongs, to sleep in, and it intrigued me. We had lots to talk about and they eventually persuaded me to try it. I removed my clothes and stepped into one, and they immediately set upon me and chased me half naked into the night.’

  ‘Is that a true story?’ She grinned.

  ‘One of many!’

  She knew enough about him to almost believe it. Caravaggio was constantly diverted by the human element during burglaries. Breaking into a house during Christmas, he would become annoyed if he noticed the Advent calendar had not been opened up to the date to which it should have been. He often had conversations with the various pets left alone in houses, rhetorically discussing meals with them, feeding them large helpings, and was often greeted by them with considerable pleasure if he returned to the scene of a crime.

  She walks in front of the shelves in the library, eyes closed, and at random pulls out a book. She finds a clearing between two sections in a book of poetry and begins to write there.

  He says Lahore is an ancient city, London is a recent town compared with Lahore. I say, Well, I come from an even newer country. He says they have always known about gunpowder. As far back as the seventeenth century, court paintings recorded fireworks displays.

  He is small, not much taller than I am. An intimate smile up close that can charm anything when he displays it. A toughness to his nature he doesn’t show. The Englishman says he’s one of those warrior saints. But he has a peculiar sense of humour that is more rambunctious than his manner suggests. Remember ‘I’ll rewire him in the morning.’ Ooh la la!

  He says Lahore has thirteen gates – named for saints and emperors or where they lead to.

  The word bungalow comes from Bengali.

  At four in the afternoon they had lowered Kip into the pit in a harness until he was waist-deep in the muddy water, his body draped around the body of the Esau bomb. The casing from fin to tip ten feet high, its nose sunk into the mud by his feet. Beneath the brown water his thighs braced the metal casing, much the way he had seen soldiers holding women in the corner of NAAFI dance floors. When his arms tired he hung them upon the wooden struts at shoulder level, which were there to stop mud collapsing in around him. The sappers had dug the pit around the Esau and set up the wood-shaft walls before he had arrived on the site. In 1941, Esau bombs with a new Y fuze had started coming in; this was his second one.

  It was decided during planning sessions that the only way around the new fuze was to immunize it. It was a huge bomb in ostrich posture. He had come down barefoot and he was already sinking slowly, being caught within the clay, unable to get a firm hold down there in the cold water. He was wearing boots – they would have locked within the clay, and when he was pulleyed up later the jerk out of it could break his ankles.

  He laid his left cheek against the metal casing, trying to think himself into warmth, concentrating on the small touch of sun that reached down into the twenty-foot pit and fell on the back of his neck. What he embraced could explode at any moment, whenever tumblers tremored, whenever the gaine was fired. There was no magic or X ray that would tell anyone when some small capsule broke, when some wire would stop wavering. Those small mechanical semaphores were like a heart murmur or a stroke within the man crossing the street innocently in front of you.

  What town was he in? He couldn’t even remember. He heard a voice and looked up. Hardy passed the equipment down in a satchel at the end of a rope, and it hung there while Kip began to insert the various clips and tools into the many pockets of his tunic. He was humming the song Hardy had been singing in the jeep on the way to the site –

  They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace –

  Christopher Robin went down with Alice.

  He wiped the area of fuze head dry and began moulding a clay cup around it. Then he unstopped the jar and poured the liquid oxygen into the cup. He taped the cup securely onto the metal. Now he had to wait again.

  There was so little space between him and the bomb he could feel the change in temperature already. If he were on dry land he could walk away and be back in ten minutes. Now he had to stand there beside the bomb. They were two suspicious creatures in an enclosed space. Captain Carlyle had been working in a shaft with frozen oxygen and the whole pit had suddenly burst into flames. They hauled him out fast, already unconscious in his harness.

  Where was he? Lisson Grove? Old Kent Road?

  Kip dipped cotton wool into the muddy water and touched it to the casing about twelve inches away from the fuze. It fell away, so it meant he had to wait longer. When the cotton wool stuck, it meant enough of the area around the fuze was frozen and he could go on. He poured more oxygen into the cup.

  The growing circle of frost was a foot in radius now. A few more minutes. He looked at the clipping someone had taped onto the bomb. They had read it with much laughter that morning in the update kit sent to all bomb disposal units.

  When is explosion reasonably permissible?

  If a man’s life could be capitalized as X, the risk at Y, and the estimated damage from explosion at V, then a logician might contend that if V is less than X over Y, the bomb should be blown up; but if V over Y is greater than X, an attempt should be made to avoid explosion in situ.

  Who wrote such things?

  He had by now been in the shaft with the bomb for more than an hour. He continued feeding in the liquid oxygen. At shoulder height, just to his right, was a hose pumping down normal air to prevent him from becoming giddy with oxygen. (He had seen soldiers with hangovers use the oxygen to cure headaches.) He tried the cotton wool again and this time it froze on. He had about twenty minutes. After that the battery temperature within the bomb would rise again. But for now the fuze was iced up and he could begin to remove it.

  He ran his palms up and down the bomb case to detect any rips in the metal. The submerged section would be safe, but oxygen could ignite if it came into contact with exposed explosive. Carlyle’s flaw. X ove
r Y. If there were rips they would have to use liquid nitrogen.

  ‘It’s a two-thousand-pound bomb, sir. Esau.’ Hardy’s voice from the top of the mud pit.

  ‘Type-marked fifty, in a circle, B. Two fuze pockets, most likely. But we think the second one is probably not armed. Okay?’

  They had discussed all this with each other before, but things were being confirmed, remembered for the final time.

  ‘Put me on a microphone now and get back.’

  ‘Okay, sir.’

  Kip smiled. He was ten years younger than Hardy, and no Englishman, but Hardy was happiest in the cocoon of regimental discipline. There was always hesitation by the soldiers to call him ‘sir,’ but Hardy barked it out loud and enthusiastically.

  He was working fast now to prise out the fuze, all the batteries inert.

  ‘Can you hear me? Whistle … Okay, I heard it. A last topping up with oxygen. Will let it bubble for thirty seconds. Then start. Freshen the frost. Okay, I’m going to remove the dam … Okay, dam gone.’

  Hardy was listening to everything and recording it in case something went wrong. One spark and Kip would be in a shaft of flames. Or there could be a joker in the bomb. The next person would have to consider the alternatives.

  ‘I’m using the quilter key.’ He had pulled it out of his breast pocket. It was cold and he had to rub it warm. He began to remove the locking ring. It moved easily and he told Hardy.

  ‘They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace,’ Kip whistled. He pulled off the locking ring and the locating ring and let them sink into the water. He could feel them roll slowly at his feet. It would all take another four minutes.

  ‘Alice is marrying one of the guard. “A soldier’s life is terrible hard,” says Alice!’

  He was singing it out loud, trying to get more warmth into his body, his chest painfully cold. He kept trying to lean back far enough away from the frozen metal in front of him. And he had to keep moving his hands up to the back of his neck, where the sun still was, then rub them to free them of the muck and grease and frost. It was difficult to get the collet to grip the head. Then to his horror the fuze head broke away, came off completely.

  ‘Wrong, Hardy. Whole fuze head snapped off. Talk back to me, okay? The main body of the fuze is jammed down there, I can’t get to it. There’s nothing exposed I can grip.’

  ‘Where is the frost at?’ Hardy was right above him. It had been a few seconds but he had raced to the shaft.

  ‘Six more minutes of frost.’

  ‘Come up and we’ll blow it up.’

  ‘No, pass me down some more oxygen.’

  He raised his right hand and felt an icy canister being placed in it.

  ‘I’m going to dribble the muck onto the area of exposed fuze – where the head separated – then I’ll cut into the metal. Chip through till I can grip something. Get back now, I’ll talk it through.’

  He could hardly keep his fury back at what had happened. The muck, which was their name for oxygen, was going all over his clothes, hissing as it hit the water. He waited for the frost to appear and then began to shear metal off with a chisel. He poured more on, waited and chiselled deeper. When nothing came off he ripped free a bit of his shirt, placed it between the metal and the chisel, and then banged the chisel dangerously with a mallet, chipping off fragments. The cloth of his shirt his only safety against a spark. What was more of a problem was the coldness on his fingers. They were no longer agile, they were inert as the batteries. He kept cutting sideways into the metal around the lost fuze head. Shaving it off in layers, hoping the freezing would accept this kind of surgery. If he cut down directly there was always a chance he would hit the percussion cap that flashed the gaine.

  It took five more minutes. Hardy had not moved from the top of the pit, instead was giving him the approximate time left in the freezing. But in truth neither of them could be sure. Since the fuze head had broken off, they were freezing a different area, and the water temperature though cold to him was warmer than the metal.

  Then he saw something. He did not dare chip the hole any bigger. The contact of the circuit quivering like a silver tendril. If he could reach it. He tried to rub warmth into his hands.

  He breathed out, was still for a few seconds, and with the needle pliers cut the contact in two before he breathed in again. He gasped as the freeze burned part of his hand when he pulled it back out of the circuits. The bomb was dead.

  ‘Fuze out. Gaine off. Kiss me.’ Hardy was already rolling up the winch and Kip was trying to clip on the halter; he could hardly do it with the burn and the cold, all his muscles cold. He heard the pulleyjerk and just held tight onto the leather straps still half attached around him. He began to feel his brown legs being pulled from the grip of the mud, removed like an ancient corpse out of a bog. His small feet rising out of the water. He emerged, lifted out of the pit into the sunlight, head and then torso.

  He hung there, a slow swivel under the tepee of poles that held the pulley. Hardy was now embracing him and unbuckling him simultaneously, letting him free. Suddenly he saw there was a large crowd watching from about twenty yards away, too close, far too close, for safety; they would have been destroyed. But of course Hardy had not been there to keep them back.

  They watched him silently, the Indian, hanging onto Hardy’s shoulder, scarcely able to walk back to the jeep with all the equipment – tools and canisters and blankets and the recording instruments still wheeling around, listening to the nothingness down in the shaft.

  ‘I can’t walk.’

  ‘Only to the jeep. A few yards more, sir. I’ll pick up the rest.’

  They kept pausing, then walking on slowly. They had to go past the staring faces who were watching the slight brown man, shoeless, in the wet tunic, watching the drawn face that didn’t recognize or acknowledge anything, any of them. All of them silent. Just stepping back to give him and Hardy room. At the jeep he started shaking. His eyes couldn’t stand the glare off the windshield. Hardy had to lift him, in stages, into the passenger seat.

  When Hardy left, Kip slowly pulled off his wet trousers and wrapped himself in the blanket. Then he sat there. Too cold and tired even to unscrew the Thermos of hot tea on the seat beside him. He thought: I wasn’t even frightened down there. I was just angry – with my mistake, or the possibility that there was a joker. An animal reacting just to protect myself.

  Only Hardy, he realized, keeps me human now.

  When there is a hot day at the Villa San Girolamo they all wash their hair, first with kerosene to remove the possibility of lice, and then with water. Lying back, his hair spread out, eyes closed against the sun, Kip seems suddenly vulnerable. There is a shyness within him when he assumes this fragile posture, looking more like a corpse from a myth than anything living or human. Hana sits beside him, her dark brown hair already dry. These are the times he will talk about his family and his brother in jail.

  He will sit up and flip his hair forward, and begin to rub the length of it with a towel. She imagines all of Asia through the gestures of this one man. The way he lazily moves, his quiet civilisation. He speaks of warrior saints and she now feels he is one, stern and visionary, pausing only in these rare times of sunlight to be godless, informal, his head back again on the table so the sun can dry his spread hair like grain in a fan-shaped straw basket. Although he is a man from Asia who has in these last years of war assumed English fathers, following their codes like a dutiful son.

  ‘Ah, but my brother thinks me a fool for trusting the English.’ He turns to her, sunlight in his eyes. ‘One day, he says, I will open my eyes. Asia is still not a free continent, and he is appalled at how we throw ourselves into English wars. It is a battle of opinion we have always had. “One day you will open your eyes,” my brother keeps saying.’

  The sapper says this, his eyes closed tight, mocking the metaphor. ‘Japan is a part of Asia, I say, and the Sikhs have been brutalized by the Japanese in Malaya. But my brother ignores that. He says the
English are now hanging Sikhs who are fighting for independence.’

  She turns away from him, her arms folded. The feuds of the world. The feuds of the world. She walks into the daylight darkness of the villa and goes in to sit with the Englishman.

  At night, when she lets his hair free, he is once more another constellation, the arms of a thousand equators against his pillow, waves of it between them in their embrace and in their turns of sleep. She holds an Indian goddess in her arms, she holds wheat and ribbons. As he bends over her it pours. She can tie it against her wrist. As he moves she keeps her eyes open to witness the gnats of electricity in his hair in the darkness of the tent.

  He moves always in relation to things, beside walls, raised terrace hedges. He scans the periphery. When he looks at Hana he sees a fragment of her lean cheek in relation to the landscape behind it. The way he watches the arc of a linnet in terms of the space it gathers away from the surface of the earth. He has walked up Italy with eyes that tried to see everything except what was temporary and human.

  The one thing he will never consider is himself. Not his twilit shadow or his arm reaching for the back of a chair or the reflection of himself in a window or how they watch him. In the years of war he has learned that the only thing safe is himself.

  He spends hours with the Englishman, who reminds him of a fir tree he saw in England, its one sick branch, too weighted down with age, held up by a crutch made out of another tree. It stood in Lord Suffolk’s garden on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the Bristol Channel like a sentinel. In spite of such infirmity he sensed the creature within it was noble, with a memory whose power rain-bowed beyond ailment.

  He himself has no mirrors. He wraps his turban outside in his garden, looking about at the moss on trees. But he notices the swath scissors have made in Hana’s hair. He is familiar with her breath when he places his face against her body, at the clavicle, where the bone lightens her skin. But if she asked him what colour her eyes are, although he has come to adore her, he will not, she thinks, be able to say. He will laugh and guess, but if she, black-eyed, says with her eyes shut that they are green, he will believe her. He may look intently at eyes but not register what colour they are, the way food already in his throat or stomach is just texture more than taste or specific object.