The English Patient

Caravaggio came into the kitchen to find Hana sitting hunched over the table. He could not see her face or her arms tucked in under her body, only the naked back, the bare shoulders.

She was not still or asleep. With each shudder her head shook over the table.

Caravaggio stood there. Those who weep lose more energy than they lose during any other act. It was not yet dawn. Her face against the darkness of the table wood.

“Hana,” he said, and she stilled herself as if she could be camouflaged by stillness.

“Hana.”

She began to moan so the sound would be a barrier between them, a river across which she could not be reached.

He was uncertain at first about touching her in her nakedness, said “Hana,” and then lay his bandaged hand on her shoulder. She did not stop shaking. The deepest sorrow, he thought. Where the only way to survive is to excavate everything.

She raised herself, her head down still, then stood up against him as if dragging herself away from the magnet of the table.

“Don’t touch me if you’re going to try and fuck me.”

The skin pale above her skirt, which was all she wore in this kitchen, as if she had risen from the bed, dressed partially and come out here, the cool air from the hills entering the kitchen doorway and cloaking her.

Her face was red and wet.

“Hana.”

“Do you understand?”

“Why do you adore him so much?”

“I love him.”

“You don’t love him, you adore him.”

“Go away, Caravaggio. Please.”

“You’ve tied yourself to a corpse for some reason.”

“He is a saint. I think. A despairing saint. Are there such things? Our desire is to protect them.”

“He doesn’t even care!”

“I can love him.”

“A twenty-year-old who throws herself out of the world to love a ghost!”

Caravaggio paused. “You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else’s poison—thinking you can cure them by sharing it—you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.”

“Leave me alone.”

   When she is solitary she will sit, aware of the nerve at her ankle, damp from the long grasses of the orchard. She peels a plum from the orchard that she has found and carried in the dark cotton pocket of her dress. When she is solitary she tries to imagine who might come along the old road under the green hood of the eighteen cypress trees.

As the Englishman wakes she bends over his body and places a third of the plum into his mouth. His open mouth holds it, like water, the jaw not moving. He looks as if he will cry from this pleasure. She can sense the plum being swallowed.

He brings his hand up and wipes from his lip the last dribble, which his tongue cannot reach, and puts his finger in his mouth to suck it. Let me tell you about plums, he says. When I was a boy …

After the first nights, after most of the beds had been burned for fuel against the cold, she had taken a dead man’s hammock and begun to use it. She would bang spikes into whatever walls she desired, whichever room she wanted to wake in, floating above all the filth and cordite and water on the floors, the rats that had started to appear coming down from the third storey. Each night she climbed into the khaki ghostline of hammock she had taken from a dead soldier, someone who had died under her care.

A pair of tennis shoes and a hammock. What she had taken from others in this war. She would wake under the slide of moonlight on the ceiling, wrapped in an old shirt she always slept in, her dress hanging on a nail by the door. There was more heat now, and she could sleep this way. Before, when it had been cold, they had had to burn things.

Her hammock and her shoes and her frock. She was secure in the miniature world she had built; the two other men seemed distant planets, each in his own sphere of memory and solitude. Caravaggio, who had been her father’s gregarious friend in Canada, in those days was capable of standing still and causing havoc within the caravan of women he seemed to give himself over to. He now lay in his darkness. He had been a thief who refused to work with men, because he did not trust them, who talked with men but who preferred talking to women and when he began talking to women was soon caught in the nets of relationship. When she would sneak home in the early hours of the morning she would find him asleep on her father’s armchair, exhausted from professional or personal robberies.

She thought about Caravaggio—some people you just had to embrace, in some way or another, had to bite into the muscle, to remain sane in their company. You needed to grab their hair and clutch it like a drowner so they would pull you into their midst. Otherwise they, walking casually down the street towards you, almost about to wave, would leap over a wall and be gone for months. As an uncle he had been a disappearer.