Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient

Acclaim for MICHAEL ONDAATJE’S

THE ENGLISH PATIENT

“A magically told novel … ravishing … many-layered.”

—Los Angeles Times

“Profound, beautiful and heart-quickening.”

—Toni Morrison

“Lyrical … dreamlike and enigmatic … A Farewell to Arms drenched in spooky ennui. It is also a difficult novel to leave behind, for it has the external grip of a war romance and yet the ineffable pull of poetry … An exquisite ballet that takes place in the dark.”

— Boston Sunday Globe

“A tale of many pleasures—an intensely theatrical tour de force but grounded in Michael Ondaatje’s strong feeling for distant times and places.”

— The New York Times Book Review

“A poetry of smoke and mirrors.”

— Washington Post Book World

“In this masterful novel, Michael Ondaatje weaves a beautiful and light-handed prose through the mingled histories of people caught up in love and war. A rich and compelling work of fiction.”

—Don DeLillo

“It seduces and beguiles us with its many-layered mysteries, its brilliantly taut and lyrical prose, its tender regard for its characters.… On every page The English Patient pulses with intellectual and aesthetic excitement.”

— Newsday

“A narrative of astonishing elegance and power … one of the finest novels of recent years—large, rich, and profoundly wise.”

— Mirahella

“It is an adventure, mystery, romance and philosophical novel in one.… Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet.”

—Chicago Tribune

MICHAEL ONDAATJE

THE ENGLISH PATIENT

Michael Ondaatje is a novelist and poet who lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter , and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid; three collections of poems, The Cinnamon Peeler, Secular Love , and There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do; and a memoir, Running in the Family . He received the Booker Prize for The English Patient .

Also by MICHAEL ONDAATJE

PROSE

In the Skin of a Lion 1987

Running in the Family (memoir) 1982

Coming Through Slaughter 1976

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid 1970

POETRY

The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems 1991

Secular Love 1984

There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do:

Poems 1963–1978 1979

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, DECEMBER 1993

Copyright © 1992 by Michael Ondaatje

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York; McClelland & Stewart Inc., Toronto; and Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd., London, in 1992.

The chapter here called “In Situ” appeared in somewhat different form in The New Yorker .

Owing to limitations of space, all other acknowledgments for permission to reprint previously published material can be found on this page.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ondaatje, Michael, 1943–

The English Patient; a novel / by Michael Ondaatje.

—1st Vintage International ed.

p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-77662-4

I World War II, 1939–1945—Italy—Fiction. 2. Italy—Fiction

I. Title.

[PR9199.3.05E54 1993]

813′.54—dc20 93-10492

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

v3.1

In memory of

Skip and Mary Dickinson

For Quintin and Griffin

And for Louise Dennys ,

with thanks

“Most of you, I am sure, remember the tragic circumstances of the death of Geoffrey Clifton at Gilf Kebir, followed later by the disappearance of his wife, Katharine Clifton, which took place during the 1939 desert expedition in search of Zerzura.

“I cannot begin this meeting tonight without referring very sympathetically to those tragic occurrences.

“The lecture this evening …”

From the minutes of the Geographical Society meeting

of November 194-, London

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

I The Villa

II In Near Ruins

III Sometime a Fire

IV South Cairo 1930–1938

V Katharine

VI A Buried Plane

VII In Situ

VIII The Holy Forest

IX The Cave of Swimmers

X August

Acknowledgements

Reader’s Guide

Also by This Author

I

The Villa

SHE STANDS UP in the garden where she has been working and looks into the distance. She has sensed a shift in the weather. There is another gust of wind, a buckle of noise in the air, and the tall cypresses sway. She turns and moves uphill towards the house, climbing over a low wall, feeling the first drops of rain on her bare arms. She crosses the loggia and quickly enters the house.

In the kitchen she doesn’t pause but goes through it and climbs the stairs which are in darkness and then continues along the long hall, at the end of which is a wedge of light from an open door.

She turns into the room which is another garden—this one made up of trees and bowers painted over its walls and ceiling. The man lies on the bed, his body exposed to the breeze, and he turns his head slowly towards her as she enters.

Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet. She wets a washcloth and holding it above his ankles squeezes the water onto him, looking up as he murmurs, seeing his smile. Above the shins the burns are worst. Beyond purple. Bone.

She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tight hips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his back, no pillow, looking up at the foliage painted onto the ceiling, its canopy of branches, and above that, blue sky.

She pours calamine in stripes across his chest where he is less burned, where she can touch him. She loves the hollow below the lowest rib, its cliff of skin. Reaching his shoulders she blows cool air onto his neck, and he mutters.

What? she asks, coming out of her concentration.

He turns his dark face with its grey eyes towards her. She puts her hand into her pocket. She unskins the plum with her teeth, withdraws the stone and passes the flesh of the fruit into his mouth.

He whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died.

There are stories the man recites quietly into the room which slip from level to level like a hawk. He wakes in the painted arbour that surrounds him with its spilling flowers, arms of great trees. He remembers picnics, a woman who kissed parts of his body that now are burned into the colour of aubergine.