The English Patient

She watched him sitting on the hamper, clear-eyed, smiling. During the last stages of the war Caravaggio had become one of the numerous morphia thieves. He had sniffed out her medical supplies within hours of his arrival. The small tubes of morphine were now a source for him. Like toothpaste tubes for dolls, she had thought when she first saw them, finding them utterly quaint. Caravaggio carried two or three in his pocket all day long, slipping the fluid into his flesh. She had stumbled on him once vomiting from its excess, crouched and shaking in one of the dark corners of the villa, looking up and hardly recognizing her. She had tried speaking with him and he had stared back. He had found the metal supply box, torn it open with God knows what strength. Once when the sapper cut open the palm of his hand on an iron gate, Caravaggio broke the glass tip off with his teeth, sucked and spat the morphine onto the brown hand before Kip even knew what it was. Kip pushing him away, glaring in anger.

“Leave him alone. He’s my patient.”

“I won’t damage him. The morphine and alcohol will take away the pain.”

(3 CC’S BROMPTON COCKTAIL. 3:00 P.M.)

Caravaggio slips the book out of the man’s hands.

“When you crashed in the desert—where were you flying from?”

“I was leaving the Gilf Kebir. I had gone there to collect someone. In late August. Nineteen forty-two.”

“During the war? Everyone must have left by then.”

“Yes. There were just armies.”

“The Gilf Kebir.”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“Give me the Kipling book … here.”

On the frontispiece of Kim was a map with a dotted line for the path the boy and the Holy One took. It showed just a portion of India—a darkly cross-hatched Afghanistan, and Kashmir in the lap of the mountains.

He traces his black hand along the Numi River till it enters the sea at 23°30’ latitude. He continues sliding his finger seven inches west, off the page, onto his chest; he touches his rib.

“Here. The Gilf Kebir, just north of the Tropic of Cancer. On the Egyptian-Libyan border.”

   What happened in 1942?

I had made the journey to Cairo and was returning from there. I was slipping between the enemy, remembering old maps, hitting the pre-war caches of petrol and water, driving towards Uweinat. It was easier now that I was alone. Miles from the Gilf Kebir, the truck exploded and I capsized, rolling automatically into the sand, not wanting a spark to touch me. In the desert one is always frightened of fire.

The truck exploded, probably sabotaged. There were spies among the Bedouin, whose caravans continued to drift like cities, carrying spice, rooms, government advisors wherever they went. At any given moment among the Bedouin in those days of the war, there were Englishmen as well as Germans.

Leaving the truck, I started walking towards Uweinat, where I knew there was a buried plane.

Wait. What do you mean, a buried plane?

Madox had an old plane in the early days, which he had shaved down to the essentials—the only “extra” was the closed bubble of cockpit, crucial for desert flights. During our times in the desert he had taught me to fly, the two of us walking around the guy-roped creature theorizing on how it hung or veered in the wind.

When Clifton’s plane—Rupert—flew into our midst, the aging plane of Madox’s was left where it was, covered with a tarpaulin, pegged down in one of the northeast alcoves of Uweinat. Sand collected over it gradually for the next few years. None of us thought we would see it again. It was another victim of the desert. Within a few months we would pass the northeast gully and see no contour of it. By now Clifton’s plane, ten years younger, had flown into our story.

So you were walking towards it?

Yes. Four nights of walking. I had left the man in Cairo and turned back into the desert. Everywhere there was war. Suddenly there were “teams.” The Bermanns, the Bagnolds, the Slatin Pashas—who had at various times saved each other’s lives—had now split up into camps.

I walked towards Uweinat. I got there about noon and climbed up into the caves of the plateau. Above the well named Ain Dua.

“Caravaggio thinks he knows who you are,” Hana said.

The man in the bed said nothing.

“He says you are not English. He worked with intelligence out of Cairo and Italy for a while. Till he was captured. My family knew Caravaggio before the war. He was a thief. He believed in ‘the movement of things.’ Some thieves are collectors, like some of the explorers you scorn, like some men with women or some women with men. But Caravaggio was not like that. He was too curious and generous to be a successful thief. Half the things he stole never came home. He thinks you are not English.”

She watched his stillness as she spoke; it appeared that he was not listening carefully to what she was saying. Just his distant thinking. The way Duke Ellington looked and thought when he played “Solitude.”

She stopped talking.