The English Patient

by Michael Ondaatje

  ‘And you still were unable to get back to the Cave of Swimmers and Uweinat?’

  ‘Not till I volunteered to take Eppler across the desert.’

  ‘There is something I must tell you. To do with 1942, when you guided the spy into Cairo …’

  ‘Operation Salaam.’

  ‘Yes. When you were working for Rommel.’

  ‘A brilliant man … What were you going to tell me?’

  ‘I was going to say, when you came through the desert avoiding Allied troops, travelling with Eppler – it was heroic. From Gialo Oasis all the way to Cairo. Only you could have gotten Rommel’s man into Cairo with his copy of Rebecca.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘What I want to say is that they did not just discover Eppler in Cairo. They knew about the whole journey. A German code had been broken long before, but we couldn’t let Rommel know that or our sources would have been discovered. So we had to wait till Cairo to capture Eppler.

  ‘We watched you all the way. All through the desert. And because Intelligence had your name, knew you were involved, they were even more interested. They wanted you as well. You were supposed to be killed … If you don’t believe me, you left Gialo and it took you twenty days. You followed the buried-well route. You couldn’t get near Uweinat because of Allied troops, and you avoided Abu Ballas. There were times when Eppler had desert fever and you had to look after him, care for him, though you say you didn’t like him …

  ‘Planes supposedly “lost” you, but you were being tracked very carefully. You were not the spies, we were the spies. Intelligence thought you had killed Geoffrey Clifton over the woman. They had found his grave in 1939, but there was no sign of his wife. You had become the enemy not when you sided with Germany but when you began your affair with Katharine Clifton.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘After you left Cairo in 1942, we lost you. They were supposed to pick you up and kill you in the desert. But they lost you. Two days out. You must have been haywire, not rational, or we would have found you. We had mined the hidden jeep. We found it exploded later, but there was nothing of you. You were gone. That must have been your great journey, not the one to Cairo. When you must have been mad.’

  ‘Were you there in Cairo with them tracking me?’

  ‘No, I saw the files. I was going into Italy and they thought you might be there.’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The rhomboid of light moved up the wall leaving Caravaggio in shadow. His hair dark again. He leaned back, his shoulder against the foliage.

  ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter,’ Almásy murmured.

  ‘Do you want morphine?’

  ‘No. I’m putting things into place. I was always a private man. It is difficult to realize I was so discussed.’

  ‘You were having an affair with someone connected with Intelligence. There were some people in Intelligence who knew you personally.’

  ‘Bagnold probably.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Very English Englishman.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Caravaggio paused.

  ‘I have to talk to you about one last thing.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘What happened to Katharine Clifton? What happened just before the war to make you all come to the Gilf Kebir again? After Madox left for England.’

  I was supposed to make one more journey to the Gilf Kebir, to pack up the last of the base camp at Uweinat. Our life there was over. I thought nothing more would happen between us. I had not met her as a lover for almost a year. A war was preparing itself somewhere like a hand entering an attic window. And she and I had already retreated behind our own walls of previous habit, into seeming innocence of relationship. We no longer saw each other very much.

  During the summer of 1939 I was to go overland to the Gilf Kebir with Gough, pack up the base camp, and Gough would leave by truck. Clifton would fly in and pick me up. Then we would disperse, out of the triangle that had grown up among us.

  When I heard the plane, saw it, I was already climbing down the rocks of the plateau. Clifton was always prompt.

  There is a way a small cargo plane will come down to land, slipping from the level of horizon. It tips its wings within desert light and then sound stops, it drifts to earth. I have never fully understood how planes work. I have watched them approach me in the desert and I have come out of my tent always with fear. They dip their wings across the light and then they enter that silence.

  The Moth came skimming over the plateau. I was waving the blue tarpaulin. Clifton dropped altitude and roared over me, so low the acacia shrubs lost their leaves. The plane veered to the left and circled, and sighting me again realigned itself and came straight towards me. Fifty yards away from me it suddenly tilted and crashed. I started running towards it.

  I thought he was alone. He was supposed to be alone. But when I got there to pull him out, she was beside him. He was dead. She was trying to move the lower part of her body, looking straight ahead. Sand had come in through the cockpit window and had filled her lap. There didn’t seem to be a mark on her. Her left hand had gone forward to cushion the collapse of their flight. I pulled her out of the plane Clifton had called Rupert and carried her up into the rock caves. Into the Cave of Swimmers, where the paintings were. Latitude 23°30’ on the map, longitude 25°15’. I buried Geoffrey Clifton that night.

  Was I a curse upon them? For her? For Madox? For the desert raped by war, shelled as if it were just sand? The Barbarians versus the Barbarians. Both armies would come through the desert with no sense of what it was. The deserts of Libya. Remove politics, and it is the loveliest phrase I know. Libya. A sexual, drawn-out word, a coaxed well. The b and the y. Madox said it was one of the few words in which you heard the tongue turn a corner. Remember Dido in the deserts of Libya? A man shall be as rivers of water in a dry place …

  I do not believe I entered a cursed land, or that I was ensnared in a situation that was evil. Every place and person was a gift to me. Finding the rock paintings in the Cave of Swimmers. Singing ‘burdens’ with Madox during expeditions. Katharine’s appearance among us in the desert. The way I would walk towards her over the red polished concrete floor and sink to my knees, her belly against my head as if I were a boy. The gun tribe healing me. Even the four of us, Hana and you and the sapper.

  Everything I have loved or valued has been taken away from me.

  I stayed with her. I discovered three of her ribs were broken. I kept waiting for her wavering eye, for her broken wrist to bend, for her still mouth to speak.

  How did you hate me? she whispered. You killed almost everything in me.

  Katharine … you didn’t –

  Hold me. Stop defending yourself. Nothing changes you.

  Her glare was permanent. I could not move out of the target of that gaze. I will be the last image she sees. The jackal in the cave who will guide and protect her, who will never deceive her.

  There are a hundred deities associated with animals, I tell her. There are the ones linked to jackals – Anubis, Duamutef, Wepwawet. These are creatures who guide you into the after-life – as my early ghost accompanied you, those years before we met. All those parties in London and Oxford. Watching you. I sat across from you as you did schoolwork, holding a large pencil. I was there when you met Geoffrey Clifton at two a.m. in the Oxford Union Library. Everybody’s coats were strewn on the floor and you in your bare feet like some heron picking your way among them. He is watching you but I am watching you too, though you miss my presence, ignore me. You are at an age when you see only good-looking men. You are not yet aware of those outside your sphere of grace. The jackal is not used much at Oxford as an escort. Whereas I am the man who fasts until I see what I want. The wall behind you is covered in books. Your left hand holds a long loop of pearls that hangs from your neck. Your bare feet picking their way through. You are looking for something. You were more plump in those days, though aptly beautiful for univers
ity life.

  There are three of us in the Oxford Union Library, but you find only Geoffrey Clifton. It will be a whirlwind romance. He has some job with archaeologists in North Africa, of all places. ‘A strange old coot I’m working with.’ Your mother is quite delighted at your adventure.

  But the spirit of the jackal, who was the ‘opener of the ways,’ whose name was Wepwawet or Almásy, stood in the room with the two of you. My arms folded, watching your attempts at enthusiastic small talk, a problem as you both were drunk. But what was wonderful was that even within the drunkenness of two a.m., each of you somehow recognized the more permanent worth and pleasure of the other. You may have arrived with others, will perhaps cohabit this night with others, but both of you have found your fates.

  At three a.m. you feel you must leave, but you are unable to find one shoe. You hold the other in your hand, a rose-coloured slipper. I see one half buried near me and pick it up. The sheen of it. They are obviously favourite shoes, with the indentation of your toes. Thank you, you say accepting it, as you leave, not even looking at my face.

  I believe this. When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently, just as Clifton might have opened a car door for you a year earlier and ignored the fate of his life. But all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur.

  I have lived in the desert for years and I have come to believe in such things. It is a place of pockets. The trompe l’oeil of time and water. The jackal with one eye that looks back and one that regards the path you consider taking. In his jaws are pieces of the past he delivers to you, and when all of that time is fully discovered it will prove to have been already known.

  Her eyes looked at me, tired of everything. A terrible weariness. When I pulled her from the plane her stare had tried to receive all things around her. Now the eyes were guarded, as if protecting something inside. I moved closer, and sat on my heels. I leaned forward and put my tongue against the right blue eye, a taste of salt. Pollen. I carried that taste to her mouth. Then the other eye. My tongue against the fine porousness of the eyeball, wiping off the blue; when I moved back there was a sweep of white across her gaze. I parted the lips on her mouth; this time I let the fingers go in deeper and prised the teeth apart, the tongue was ‘withdrawn,’ and I had to pull it forward, there was a thread, a breath of death in her. It was almost too late. I leaned forward and with my tongue carried the blue pollen to her tongue. We touched this way once. Nothing happened. I pulled back, took a breath and then went forward again. As I met the tongue there was a twitch within it.

  Then the terrible snarl, violent and intimate, came out of her upon me. A shudder through her whole body like a path of electricity. She was flung from the propped position against the painted wall. The creature had entered her and it leapt and fell against me. There seemed to be less and less light in the cave. Her neck flipping this way and that.

  I know the devices of a demon. I was taught as a child about the demon lover. I was told about a beautiful temptress who came to a young man’s room. And he, if he were wise, would demand that she turn around, because demons and witches have no back, only what they wish to present to you. What had I done? What animal had I delivered into her? I had been speaking to her I think for over an hour. Had I been her demon lover? Had I been Madox’s demon friend? This country – had I charted it and turned it into a place of war?

  It is important to die in holy places. That was one of the secrets of the desert. So Madox walked into a church in Somerset, a place he felt had lost its holiness, and he committed what he believed was a holy act.

  When I turned her around, her whole body was covered in bright pigment. Herbs and stones and light and the ash of acacia to make her eternal. The body pressed against sacred colour. Only the eye blue removed, made anonymous, a naked map where nothing is depicted, no signature of lake, no dark cluster of mountain as there is north of the Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti, no lime-green fan where the Nile rivers enter the open palm of Alexandria, the edge of Africa.

  And all the names of the tribes, the nomads of faith who walked in the monotone of the desert and saw brightness and faith and colour. The way a stone or found metal box or bone can become loved and turn eternal in a prayer. Such glory of this country she enters now and becomes part of. We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography – to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.

  I carried Katharine Clifton into the desert, where there is the communal book of moonlight. We were among the rumour of wells. In the palace of winds.

  Almásy’s face fell to the left, staring at nothing –Caravaggio’s knees perhaps.

  ‘Do you want some morphine now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can I get you something?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  X

  August

  Caravaggio came down the stairs through darkness and into the kitchen. Some celery on the table, some turnips whose roots were still muddy. The only light came from a fire Hana had recently started. She had her back to him and had not heard his steps into the room. His days at the villa had loosened his body and freed his tenseness, so he seemed bigger, more sprawled out in his gestures. Only his silence of movement remained. Otherwise there was an easy inefficiency to him now, a sleepiness to his gestures.

  He dragged out the chair so she would turn, realize he was in the room.

  ‘Hello, David.’

  He raised his arm. He felt that he had been in deserts for too long.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Asleep. Talked himself out.’

  ‘Is he what you thought he was?’

  ‘He’s fine. We can let him be.’

  ‘I thought so. Kip and I are both sure he is English. Kip thinks the best people are eccentrics, he worked with one.’

  ‘I think Kip is the eccentric myself. Where is he, anyway?’

  ‘He’s plotting something on the terrace, doesn’t want me out there. Something for my birthday.’ Hana stood up from her crouch at the grate, wiping her hand on the opposite forearm.

  ‘For your birthday I’m going to tell you a small story,’ he said.

  She looked at him.

  ‘Not about Patrick, okay?’

  ‘A little about Patrick, mostly about you.’

  ‘I still can’t listen to those stories, David.’

  ‘Fathers die. You keep on loving them in any way you can. You can’t hide him away in your heart.’

  ‘Talk to me when the morphia wears off.’

  She came up to him and put her arms around him, reached up and kissed his cheek. His embrace tightened around her, his stubble like sand against her skin. She loved that about him now; in the past he had always been meticulous. The parting in his hair like Yonge Street at midnight, Patrick had said. Caravaggio had in the past moved like a god in her presence. Now, with his face and his trunk filled out and this greyness in him, he was a friendlier human.

  Tonight dinner was being prepared by the sapper. Caravaggio was not looking forward to it. One meal in three was a loss as far as he was concerned. Kip found vegetables and presented them barely cooked, just briefly boiled into a soup. It was to be another purist meal, not what Caravaggio wished for after a day such as this when he had been listening to the man upstairs. He opened the cupboard beneath the sink. There, wrapped in damp cloth, was some dried meat, which Caravaggio cut and put into his pocket.

  �
��I can get you off the morphine, you know. I’m a good nurse.’

  ‘You’re surrounded by madmen…’

  ‘Yes, I think we are all mad.’

  When Kip called them, they walked out of the kitchen and onto the terrace, whose border, with its low stone balustrade, was ringed with light.

  It looked to Caravaggio like a string of small electric candles found in dusty churches, and he thought the sapper had gone too far in removing them from a chapel, even for Hana’s birthday. Hana walked slowly forward with her hands over her face. There was no wind. Her legs and thighs moved through the skirt of her frock as if it were thin water. Her tennis shoes silent on the stone.

  ‘I kept finding dead shells wherever I was digging,’ the sapper said.

  They still didn’t understand. Caravaggio bent over the nutter of lights. They were snail shells filled with oil. He looked along the row of them; there must have been about forty.

  ‘Forty-five,’ Kip said, ‘the years so far of this century. Where I come from, we celebrate the age as well as ourselves.’

  Hana moved alongside them, her hands in her pockets now, the way Kip loved to see her walk. So relaxed, as if she had put her arms away for the night, now in simple armless movement.

  Caravaggio was diverted by the startling presence of three bottles of red wine on the table. He walked over and read the labels and shook his head, amazed. He knew the sapper wouldn’t drink any of it. All three had already been opened. Kip must have picked his way through some etiquette book in the library. Then he saw the corn and the meat and the potatoes. Hana slid her arm into Kip’s and came with him to the table.

  They ate and drank, the unexpected thickness of the wine like meat on their tongues. They were soon turning silly in their toasts to the sapper – ‘the great forager’ – and to the English patient. They toasted each other, Kip joining in with his beaker of water. This was when he began to talk about himself. Caravaggio pressing him on, not always listening, sometimes standing up and walking around the table, pacing and pacing with pleasure at all this. He wanted these two married, longed to force them verbally towards it, but they seemed to have their own strange rules about their relationship. What was he doing in this role. He sat down again. Now and then he noticed the death of a light. The snail shells held only so much oil. Kip would rise and refill them with pink paraffin.