The English Patient

   And Hana moves possibly in the company that is not her choice. She, at even this age, thirty-four, has not found her own company, the ones she wanted. She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild love leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She still remembers the lines of poems the Englishman read out loud to her from his commonplace book. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.

And so Hana moves and her face turns and in a regret she lowers her hair. Her shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges. Kirpal’s left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.

Acknowledgements

While some of the characters who appear in this book are based on historical figures, and while many of the areas described—such as the Gilf Kebir and its surrounding desert—exist, and were explored in the 1930s, it is important to stress that this story is a fiction and that the portraits of the characters who appear in it are fictional, as are some of the events and journeys.

1 would like to thank the Royal Geographical Society, London, for allowing me to read archival material and to glean from their Geographical Journals the world of explorers and their journeys—often beautifully recorded by their writers. I have quoted a passage from Hassanein Bey’s article “Through Kufra to Darfur” (1924), describing sandstorms, and I have drawn from him and other explorers to evoke the desert of the 1930s. I would like to acknowledge information drawn from Dr. Richard A. Bermann’s “Historical Problems of the Libyan Desert” (1934) and R. A. Bagnold’s review of Almásy’s monograph on his explorations in the desert.

Many books were important to me in my research. Unexploded Bomb by Major A. B. Hartley was especially useful in re-creating the construction of bombs and in describing the British bomb disposal units at the start of World War II. I have quoted directly from his book (the italicized lines in the “In Situ” section) and have based some of Kirpal Singh’s methods of defusing on actual techniques that Hartley records. Information found in the patient’s notebook on the nature of certain winds is drawn from Lyall Watson’s wonderful book Heaven’s Breath, direct quotes appearing in quotation marks. The section from the Candaules-Gyges story in Herodotus’s Histories is from the 1890 translation by G. C. McCauley (Macmillan). Other quotations from Herodotus use the David Grene translation (University of Chicago Press). The line in italics on this page is by Christopher Smart; the lines in italics on this page are from John Milton’s Paradise Lost; the line Hana remembers on this page is by Anne Wilkinson. I would also like to acknowledge Alan Moorehead’s The Villa Diana, which discusses the life of Poliziano in Tuscany. Other important books were Mary McCarthy’s The Stones of Florence; Leonard Mosley’s The Cat and the Mice; G. W. L. Nicholson’s The Canadians in Italy 1943-5 and Canada’s Nursing Sisters; The Marshall Cavendish Encyclopaedia of World War II; F. Yeats-Brown’s Martial India; and three other books on the Indian military: The Tiger Strikes and The Tiger Kills, published in 1942 by the Directorate of Public Relations, New Delhi, India, and A Roll of Honor.

Thanks to the English department at Glendon College, York University, the Villa Serbelloni, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library.

I would like to thank the following for their generous help: Elisabeth Dennys, who let me read her letters written from Egypt during the war; Sister Margaret at the Villa San Girolamo; Michael Williamson at the National Library of Canada, Ottawa; Anna Jardine; Rodney Dennys; Linda Spalding; Ellen Levine. And Lally Marwah, Douglas LePan, David Young and Donya Peroff.

Finally a special thanks to Ellen Seligman, Liz Calder and Sonny Mehta.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Famous Music Corporation: Excerpt from “When I Take My Sugar to Tea” by Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal and Pierre Norman. Copyright 1931 by Famous Music Corporation. Copyright renewed 1958 by Famous Music Corporation. Reprinted by permission.