The English Patient

“The breeze from the window was swaying your skirt over so it almost touched a candle, and your ankles seemed fire-white in the bar. Your father’s eyes looking up at you, miraculous with this new language, the cause pouring out so distinct, flawless, no hesitations, and the candles swerving away, not touching your dress but almost touching. We stood up at the end and you walked off the table into his arms.”

   “I would remove those bandages on your hands. I am a nurse, you know.”

“They’re comfortable. Like gloves.”

“How did this happen.”

“I was caught jumping from a woman’s window. That woman I told you about, who took the photograph. Not her fault.”

She grips his arm, kneading the muscle. “Let me do it.” She pulls the bandaged hands out of his coat pockets. She has seen them grey in daylight, but in this light they are almost luminous.

As she loosens the bandages he steps backwards, the white coming out of his arms as if he were a magician, till he is free of them. She walks towards the uncle from childhood, sees his eyes hoping to catch hers to postpone this, so she looks at nothing but his eyes.

His hands held together like a human bowl. She reaches for them while her face goes up to his cheek, then nestles in his neck. What she holds seems firm, healed.

“I tell you I had to negotiate for what they left me.”

“How did you do that?”

“All those skills I used to have.”

“Oh, I remember. No, don’t move. Don’t drift away from me.”

“It is a strange time, the end of a war.”

“Yes. A period of adjustment.”

“Yes.”

He raises his hands up as if to cup the quarter-moon.

“They removed both thumbs, Hana. See.”

He holds his hands in front of her. Showing her directly what she has glimpsed. He turns one hand over as if to reveal that it is no trick, that what looks like a gill is where the thumb has been cut away. He moves the hand towards her blouse.

She feels the cloth lift in the area below her shoulder as he holds it with two fingers and tugs it softly towards him.

“I touch cotton like this.”

“When I was a child I thought of you always as the Scarlet Pimpernel, and in my dreams I stepped onto the night roofs with you. You came home with cold meals in your pockets, pencil cases, sheet music off some Forest Hill piano for me.”

She speaks into the darkness of his face, a shadow of leaves washing over his mouth like a rich woman’s lace. “You like women, don’t you? You liked them.”

“I like them. Why the past tense?”

“It seems unimportant now, with the war and such things.”

He nods and the pattern of leaves rolls off him.

“You used to be like those artists who painted only at night, a single light on in their street. Like the worm-pickers with their old coffee cans strapped to their ankles and the helmet of light shooting down into the grass. All over the city parks. You took me to that place, that café where they sold them. It was like the stock exchange, you said, where the price of worms kept dropping and rising, five cents, ten cents. People were ruined or made fortunes. Do you remember?”

“Yes.”

“Walk back with me, it’s getting cold.”

“The great pickpockets are born with the second and third fingers almost the same length. They do not need to go as deep into a pocket. The great distance of half an inch!”

They move towards the house, under the trees.

“Who did that to you?”

“They found a woman to do it. They thought it was more trenchant. They brought in one of their nurses. My wrists handcuffed to the table legs. When they cut off my thumbs my hands slipped out of them without any power. Like a wish in a dream. But the man who called her in, he was really in charge—he was the one. Ranuccio Tommasoni. She was an innocent, knew nothing about me, my name or nationality or what I may have done.”

When they came into the house the English patient was shouting. Hana let go of Caravaggio and he watched her run up the stairs, her tennis shoes flashing as she ascended and wheeled around with the banister.

The voice filled the halls. Caravaggio walked into the kitchen, tore off a section of bread and followed Hana up the stairs. As he walked towards the room the shouts became more frantic. When he stepped into the bedroom the Englishman was staring at a dog—the dog’s head angled back as if stunned by the screaming. Hana looked over to Caravaggio and grinned.

“I haven’t seen a dog for years. All through the war I saw no dog.”

She crouched and hugged the animal, smelling its hair and the odour of hill grasses within it. She steered the dog towards Caravaggio, who was offering it the heel of bread. The Englishman saw Caravaggio then and his jaw dropped. It must have seemed to him that the dog—now blocked by Hana’s back—had turned into a man. Caravaggio collected the dog in his arms and left the room.

   I have been thinking, the English patient said, that this must be Poliziano’s room. This must have been his villa we are in. It is the water coming out of that wall, that ancient fountain. It is a famous room. They all met here.