The English Patient

They are in the botanical garden, near the Cathedral of All Saints. She sees one tear and leans forward and licks it, taking it into her mouth. As she has taken the blood from his hand when he cut himself cooking for her. Blood. Tear. He feels everything is missing from his body, feels he contains smoke. All that is alive is the knowledge of future desire and want. What he would say he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.

This night of her insistence. Twenty-eighth of September. The rain in the trees already dried by hot moonlight. Not one cool drop to fall down upon him like a tear. This parting at Groppi Park. He has not asked if her husband is home in that high square of light, across the street.

He sees the tall row of traveller’s palms above them, their outstretched wrists. The way her head and hair were above him, when she was his lover.

Now there is no kiss. Just one embrace. He untugs himself from her and walks away, then turns. She is still there. He comes back within a few yards of her, one finger raised to make a point.

“I just want you to know. I don’t miss you yet.”

His face awful to her, trying to smile. Her head sweeps away from him and hits the side of the gatepost. He sees it hurt her, notices the wince. But they have separated already into themselves now, the walls up at her insistence. Her jerk, her pain, is accidental, is intentional. Her hand is near her temple.

“You will,” she says.

   From this point on in our lives, she had whispered to him earlier, we will either find or lose our souls.

   How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.

I was in her arms. I had pushed the sleeve of her shirt up to the shoulder so I could see her vaccination scar. I love this, I said. This pale aureole on her arm. I see the instrument scratch and then punch the serum within her and then release itself, free of her skin, years ago, when she was nine years old, in a school gymnasium.

VI

A Buried Plane

HE GLARES OUT, each eye a path, down the long bed at the end of which is Hana. After she has bathed him she breaks the tip off an ampoule and turns to him with the morphine. An effigy. A bed. He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper.

   The long Cairo evenings. The sea of night sky, hawks in rows until they are released at dusk, arcing towards the last colour of the desert. A unison of performance like a handful of thrown seed.

In that city in 1936 you could buy anything—from a dog or a bird that came at one pitch of a whistle, to those terrible leashes that slipped over the smallest finger of a woman so she was tethered to you in a crowded market.

In the northeast section of Cairo was the great courtyard of religious students, and beyond it the Khan el Khalili bazaar. Above the narrow streets we looked down upon cats on the corrugated tin roofs who also looked down the next ten feet to the street and stalls. Above all this was our room. Windows open to minarets, feluccas, cats, tremendous noise. She spoke to me of her childhood gardens. When she couldn’t sleep she drew her mother’s garden for me, word by word, bed by bed, the December ice over the fish pond, the creak of rose trellises. She would take my wrist at the confluence of veins and guide it onto the hollow indentation at her neck.

   March 1937, Uweinat. Madox is irritable because of the thinness in the air. Fifteen hundred feet above sea level and he is uncomfortable with even this minimal height. He is a desert man after all, having left his family’s village of Marston Magna, Somerset, altered all customs and habits so he can have the proximity to sea level as well as regular dryness.

“Madox, what is the name of that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck? At the front. Here. What is it, does it have an official name? That hollow about the size of an impress of your thumb?”

Madox watches me for a moment through the noon glare.

“Pull yourself together,” he mutters.

Let me tell you a story,” Caravaggio says to Hana. “There was a Hungarian named Almásy, who worked for the Germans during the war. He flew a bit with the Afrika Korps, but he was more valuable than that. In the 1930s he had been one of the great desert explorers. He knew every water hole and had helped map the Sand Sea. He knew all about the desert. He knew all about dialects. Does this sound familiar? Between the two wars he was always on expeditions out of Cairo. One was to search for Zerzura—the lost oasis. Then when war broke out he joined the Germans. In 1941 he became a guide for spies, taking them across the desert into Cairo. What I want to tell you is, I think the English patient is not English.”