Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient

“I don’t think so,” said Hana.

“Neither do I. Let me tell you about people my age. The worst thing is others assume you have developed your character by now. The trouble with middle age is they think you are fully formed. Here.”

Here Caravaggio lifted up his hands, so they faced Hana and Kip. She got up and went behind him and put her arm around his neck.

“Don’t do this, okay, David?”

She wrapped her hands softly around his,

“We’ve already got one crazy talker upstairs.”

“Look at us—we sit here like the filthy rich in their filthy villas up in the filthy hills when the city gets too hot. It’s nine in the morning—the old guy upstairs is asleep. Hana’s obsessed with him. I am obsessed with the sanity of Hana, I’m obsessed with my ‘balance,’ and Kip will probably get blown up one of these days. Why? For whose sake? He’s twenty-six years old. The British army teaches him the skills and the Americans teach him further skills and the team of sappers are given lectures, are decorated and sent off into the rich hills. You are being used, boyo, as the Welsh say. I’m not staying here much longer. I want to take you home. Get the hell out of Dodge City.”

“Stop it, David. He’ll survive.”

“The sapper who got blown up the other night, what was his name?”

Nothing from Kip.

“What was his name?”

“Sam Hardy.” Kip went to the window and looked out, leaving their conversation.

“The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn’t be. What are we doing in Africa, in Italy? What is Kip doing dismantling bombs in orchards, for God’s sake? What is he doing fighting English wars? A farmer on the western front cannot prune a tree without ruining his saw. Why? Because of the amount of shrapnel shot into it during the last war. Even the trees are thick with diseases we brought. The armies indoctrinate you and leave you here and they fuck off somewhere else to cause trouble, inky-dinky parlez-vous. We should all move out together.”

“We can’t leave the Englishman.”

“The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he’s with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit. He probably can’t even remember the woman he’s circling around, trying to talk about. He doesn’t know where the fuck he is.

“You think I’m angry at you, don’t you? Because you have fallen in love. Don’t you? A jealous uncle. I’m terrified for you. I want to kill the Englishman, because that is the only thing that will save you, get you out of here. And I am beginning to like him. Desert your post. How can Kip love you if you are not smart enough to make him stop risking his life?”

“Because. Because he believes in a civilised world. He’s a civilised man.”

“First mistake. The correct move is to get on a train, go and have babies together. Shall we go and ask the Englishman, the bird, what he thinks?

“Why are you not smarter? It’s only the rich who can’t afford to be smart. They’re compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can’t leave. But you two. We three. We’re free. How many sappers die? Why aren’t you dead yet? Be irresponsible. Luck runs out.”

Hana was pouring milk into her cup. As she finished she moved the lip of the jug over Kip’s hand and continued pouring the milk over his brown hand and up his arm to his elbow and then stopped. He didn’t move it away.

There are two levels of long, narrow garden to the west of the house. A formal terrace and, higher up, the darker garden, where stone steps and concrete statues almost disappear under the green mildew of the rains. The sapper has his tent pitched here. Rain falls and mist rises out of the valley, and the other rain from the branches of cypress and fir falls upon this half-cleared pocket on the side of the hill.

Only bonfires can dry the permanently wet and shadowed upper garden. The refuse of planks, rafters from prior shellings, dragged branches, weeds pulled up by Hana during the afternoons, scythed grass and nettles—all are brought here and burned by them during the late afternoon’s pivot into dusk. The damp fires steam and burn, and the plant-odoured smoke sidles into the bushes, up into the trees, then withers on the terrace in front of the house. It reaches the window of the English patient, who can hear the drift of voices, now and then a laugh from the smoky garden. He translates the smell, evolving it backwards to what had been burned. Rosemary, he thinks, milkweed, wormwood, something else is also there, scentless, perhaps the dog violet, or the false sunflower, which loves the slightly acidic soil of this hill.

The English patient advises Hana on what to grow. “Get your Italian friend to find seeds for you, he seems capable in that category. What you want are plum leaves. Also fire pink and Indian pink—if you want the Latin name for your Latin friend, it is Silene virginica . Red savory is good. If you want finches get hazel and chokecherries.”

She writes everything down. Then puts the fountain pen into the drawer of the small table where she keeps the book she is reading to him, along with two candles, Vesta matches. There are no medical supplies in this room. She hides them in other rooms. If Caravaggio is to hunt them out, she doesn’t want him disturbing the Englishman. She puts the slip of paper with the names of plants into the pocket of her dress to give to Caravaggio. Now that physical attraction has raised its head, she has begun to feel awkward in the company of the three men.

If it is physical attraction. If all this has to do with love of Kip. She likes to lay her face against the upper reaches of his arm, that dark brown river, and to wake submerged within it, against the pulse of an unseen vein in his flesh beside her. The vein she would have to locate and insert a saline solution into if he were dying.

At two or three in the morning, after leaving the Englishman, she walks through the garden towards the sapper’s hurricane lamp, which hangs off the arm of St. Christopher. Absolute darkness between her and the light, but she knows every shrub and bush in her path, the location of the bonfire she passes, low and pink in its near completion. Sometimes she cups a hand over the glass funnel and blows out the flame, and sometimes she leaves it burning and ducks under it and enters through the open flaps, to crawl in against his body, the arm she wants, her tongue instead of a swab, her tooth instead of a needle, her mouth instead of the mask with the codeine drops to make him sleep, to make his immortal ticking brain slow into sleepiness. She folds her paisley dress and places it on top of her tennis shoes. She knows that for him the world burns around them with only a few crucial rules. You replace TNT with steam, you drain it, you—all this she knows is in his head as she sleeps beside him virtuous as a sister.

The tent and the dark wood surround them.

They are only a step past the comfort she has given others in the temporary hospitals in Ortona or Monterchi. Her body for last warmth, her whisper for comfort, her needle for sleep. But the sapper’s body allows nothing to enter him that comes from another world. A boy in love who will not eat the food she gathers, who does not need or want the drug in a needle she could slide into his arm, as Caravaggio does, or those ointments of desert invention the Englishman craves, ointments and pollen to reassemble himself the way the Bedouin had done for him. Just for the comfort of sleep.

There are ornaments he places around himself. Certain leaves she has given him, a stub of candle, and in his tent the crystal set and the shoulder bag full of the objects of discipline. He has emerged from the fighting with a calm which, even if false, means order for him. He continues his strictness, following the hawk in its float along the valley within the V of his rifle sight, opening up a bomb and never taking his eyes off what he is searching for as he pulls a Thermos towards him and unscrews the top and drinks, never even looking at the metal cup.