Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient

“I need to know something.”

“What?”

“I need to know if you murdered Katharine Clifton. That is, if you murdered Clifton, and in so doing killed her.”

“No. I never even imagined that.”

“The reason I ask is that Geoffrey Clifton was with British Intelligence. He was not just an innocent Englishman, I’m afraid. Your friendly boy. As far as the English were concerned, he was keeping an eye on your strange group in the Egyptian-Libyan desert. They knew the desert would someday be a theatre of war. He was an aerial photographer. His death perturbed them, still does. They still raise the question. And Intelligence knew about your affair with his wife, from the beginning. Even if Clifton didn’t. They thought his death may have been engineered as protection, hoisting up the drawbridge. They were waiting for you in Cairo, but of course you turned back into the desert. Later, when I was sent to Italy, I lost the last part of your story. I didn’t know what had happened to you.”

“So you have run me to earth.”

“I came because of the girl. I knew her father. The last person I expected to find here in this shelled nunnery was Count Ladislaus de Almásy. Quite honestly, I’ve become more fond of you than most of the people I worked with.”

The rectangle of light that had drifted up Caravaggio’s chair was framing his chest and head so that to the English patient the face seemed a portrait. In muted light his hair appeared dark, but now the wild hair lit up, bright, the bags under his eyes washed out in the pink late daylight.

He had turned the chair around so he could lean forward on its back, facing Almásy. Words did not emerge easily from Caravaggio. He would rub his jaw, his face creasing up, the eyes closed, to think in darkness, and only then would he blurt out something, tearing himself away from his own thoughts. It was this darkness that showed in him as he sat in the rhomboid frame of light, hunched over a chair beside Almásy’s bed. One of the two older men in this story.

“I can talk with you, Caravaggio, because I feel we are both mortal. The girl, the boy, they are not mortal yet. In spite of what they have been through. Hana was greatly distressed when I first met her.”

“Her father was killed in France.”

“I see. She would not talk about it. She was distant from everybody. The only way I could get her to communicate was to ask her to read to me.… Do you realize neither of us has children?”

Then pausing, as if considering a possibility.

“Do you have a wife?” Almasy asked.

Caravaggio sat in the pink light, his hands over his face to erase everything so he could think precisely, as if this was one more gift of youth that did not come so easily to him any longer.

“You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.

“Thieves like us were used a great deal during this war. We were legitimized. We stole. Then some of us began to advise. We could read through the camouflage of deceit more naturally than official intelligence. We created double bluffs. Whole campaigns were being run by this mixture of crooks and intellectuals. I was all over the Middle East, that’s where I first heard about you. You were a mystery, a vacuum on their charts. Turning your knowledge of the desert into German hands.”

“Too much happened at El Taj in 1939, when I was rounded up, imagined to be a spy.”

“So that’s when you went over to the Germans.”

Silence.

“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.