The English Patient

Just fifty yards away, there had been no representation of them in the world, no sound or sight of them from the valley’s eye as Hana’s and Caravaggio’s shadows glided across the walls and Kip sat comfortably encased in the alcove and the English patient sipped his wine and felt its spirit percolate through his unused body so it was quickly drunk, his voice bringing forth the whistle of a desert fox bringing forth a flutter of the English wood thrush he said was found only in Essex, for it thrived in the vicinity of lavender and wormwood. All of the burned man’s desire was in the brain, the sapper had been thinking to himself, sitting in the stone alcove. Then he turned his head suddenly, knowing everything as he heard the sound, certain of it. He had looked back at them and for the first time in his life lied—“It’s all right, it wasn’t a mine. That seemed to come from a cleared area”—prepared to wait till the smell of the cordite reached him.

   Now, hours later, Kip sits once again in the window alcove. If he could walk the seven yards across the Englishman’s room and touch her he would be sane. There was so little light in the room, just the candle at the table where she sat, not reading tonight; he thought perhaps she was slightly drunk.

He had returned from the source of the mine explosion to find Caravaggio asleep on the library sofa with the dog in his arms. The hound watched him as he paused at the open door, moving as little of its body as it had to, to acknowledge it was awake and guarding the place. Its quiet growl rising above Caravaggio’s snore.

He took off his boots, tied the laces together and slung them over his shoulder as he went upstairs. It had started to rain and he needed a tarpaulin for his tent. From the hall he saw the light still on in the English patient’s room.

She sat in the chair, one elbow on the table where the low candle sprayed its light, her head leaning back. He lowered his boots to the floor and came silently into the room, where the party had been going on three hours earlier. He could smell alcohol in the air. She put her fingers to her lips as he entered and then pointed to the patient. He wouldn’t hear Kip’s silent walk. The sapper sat in the well of the window again. If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world. And the Englishman woke at any sound, the hearing aid turned to full level when he slept, so he could be secure in his own awareness. The girl’s eyes darted around and then were still when she faced Kip in the rectangle of window.

He had found the location of the death and what was left there and they had buried his second-in-command, Hardy. And afterwards he kept thinking of the girl that afternoon, suddenly terrified for her, angry at her for involving herself. She had tried to damage her life so casually. She stared. Her last communication had been the finger to her lips. He leaned over and wiped the side of his cheek against the lanyard on his shoulder.

He had walked back through the village, rain falling into pollarded trees of the town square untrimmed since the start of the war, past the strange statue of two men shaking hands on horseback. And now he was here, the candlelight swaying, altering her look so he could not tell what she thought. Wisdom or sadness or curiosity.

If she had been reading or if she had been bending over the Englishman, he would have nodded to her and probably left, but he is now watching Hana as someone young and alone. Tonight, gazing at the scene of the mine blast, he had begun to fear her presence during the afternoon dismantling. He had to remove it, or she would be with him each time he approached a fuze. He would be pregnant with her. When he worked, clarity and music filled him, the human world extinguished. Now she was within him or on his shoulder, the way he had once seen a live goat being carried by an officer out of a tunnel they were attempting to flood.

No.

That wasn’t true. He wanted Hana’s shoulder, wanted to place his palm over it as he had done in the sunlight when she slept and he had lain there as if in someone’s rifle sights, awkward with her. Within the imaginary painter’s landscape. He did not want comfort but he wanted to surround the girl with it, to guide her from this room. He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against. Neither of them was willing to reveal such a possibility to the other. Hana sat so still. She looked at him, and the candle wavered and altered her look. He was unaware that for her he was just a silhouette, his slight body and his skin part of the darkness.