Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient

She stood on a chair at the foot of the bed and slowly tilted the mirror down at him. She was in this position, her hands braced out in front of her, when she heard the faint shouts.

She ignored them at first. The house often picked up noise from the valley. The use of megaphones by the clearance military had constantly unnerved her when she was living alone with the English patient.

“Keep the mirror still, my dear,” he said.

“I think there is someone shouting. Do you hear it?”

His left hand turned up the hearing aid.

“It’s the boy. You’d better go and find out.”

She leaned the mirror against the wall and rushed down the corridor. She paused outside waiting for the next yell. When it came she took off through the garden and into the fields above the house.

He stood, his hands raised above him as if he were holding a giant cobweb. He was shaking his head to get free of the earphones. As she ran towards him he yelled at her to circle to the left, there were mine wires all over the place. She stopped. It was a walk she had taken numerous times with no sense of danger. She raised her skirt and moved forward, watching her feet as they entered the long grass.

His hands were still up in the air as she came alongside him. He had been tricked, ending up holding two live wires he could not put down without the safety of a descant chord. He needed a third hand to negate one of them and he needed to go back once more to the fuze head. He passed the wires carefully to her and dropped his arms, getting blood back into them.

“I’ll take them back in a minute.”

“It’s okay.”

“Keep very still.”

He opened up his satchel for the Geiger counter and magnet. He ran the dial up and along the wires she was holding. No swerve to negative. No clue. Nothing. He stepped backwards, wondering where the trick could be.

“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 Jooked 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.