The English Patient

Her arms down her sides, one bare foot on the bass pedal, continuing with the song her mother had taught her, that she practised on any surface, a kitchen table, a wall while she walked upstairs, her own bed before she fell asleep. They had had no piano. She used to go to the community centre on Saturday mornings and play there, but all week she practised wherever she was, learning the chalked notes that her mother had drawn onto the kitchen table and then wiped off later. This was the first time she had played on the villa’s piano, even though she had been here for three months, her eye catching its shape on her first day there through the French doors. In Canada pianos needed water. You opened up the back and left a full glass of water, and a month later the glass would be empty. Her father had told her about the dwarfs who drank only at pianos, never in bars. She had never believed that but had at first thought it was perhaps mice.

A lightning flash across the valley, the storm had been coming all night, and she saw one of the men was a Sikh. Now she paused and smiled, somewhat amazed, relieved anyway, the cyclorama of light behind them so brief that it was just a quick glimpse of his turban and the bright wet guns. The high flap of the piano had been removed and used as a hospital table several months earlier, so their guns lay on the far side of the ditch of keys. The English patient could have identified the weapons. Hell. She was surrounded by foreign men. Not one pure Italian. A villa romance. What would Poliziano have thought of this 1945 tableau, two men and a woman across a piano and the war almost over and the guns in their wet brightness whenever the lightning slipped itself into the room filling everything with colour and shadow as it was doing now every half-minute thunder crackling all over the valley and the music antiphonal, the press of chords, When I take my sugar to tea …

Do you know the words?

There was no movement from them. She broke free of the chords and released her fingers into intricacy, tumbling into what she had held back, the jazz detail that split open notes and angles from the chestnut of melody.

When I take my sugar to tea

All the boys are jealous of me,

So I never take her where the gang goes

When I take my sugar to tea.

Their clothes wet while they watched her whenever the lightning was in the room among them, her hands playing now against and within the lightning and thunder, counter to it, filling up the darkness between light. Her face so concentrated they knew they were invisible to her, to her brain struggling to remember her mother’s hand ripping newspaper and wetting it under a kitchen tap and using it to wipe the table free of the shaded notes, the hopscotch of keys. After which she went for her weekly lesson at the community hall, where she would play, her feet still unable to reach the pedals if she sat, so she preferred to stand, her summer sandal on the left pedal and the metronome ticking.

She did not want to end this. To give up these words from an old song. She saw the places they went, where the gang never went, crowded with aspidistra. She looked up and nodded towards them, an acknowledgement that she would stop now.

   Caravaggio did not see all this. When he returned he found Hana and the two soldiers from a sapper unit in the kitchen making up sandwiches.

III

Sometime a Fire

THE LAST MEDIAEVAL WAR was fought in Italy in 1943 and 1944. Fortress towns on great promontories which had been battled over since the eighth century had the armies of new kings flung carelessly against them. Around the outcrops of rocks were the traffic of stretchers, butchered vineyards, where, if you dug deep beneath the tank ruts, you found blood-axe and spear. Monterchi, Cortona, Urbino, Arezzo, Sansepolcro, Anghiari. And then the coast.

Cats slept in the gun turrets looking south. English and Americans and Indians and Australians and Canadians advanced north, and the shell traces exploded and dissolved in the air. When the armies assembled at Sansepolcro, a town whose symbol is the crossbow, some soldiers acquired them and fired them silently at night over the walls of the untaken city. Field Marshal Kesselring of the retreating German army seriously considered the pouring of hot oil from battlements.