The English Patient

It was July 1939. They caught a bus from their village into Yeovil. The bus had been slow and so they had been late for the service. At the back of the crowded church, in order to find seats they decided to sit separately. When the sermon began half an hour later, it was jingoistic and without any doubt in its support of the war. The priest intoned blithely about battle, blessing the government and the men about to enter the war. Madox listened as the sermon grew more impassioned. He pulled out the desert pistol, bent over and shot himself in the heart. He was dead immediately. A great silence. Desert silence. Planeless silence. They heard his body collapse against the pew. Nothing else moved. The priest frozen in a gesture. It was like those silences when a glass funnel round a candle in church splits and all faces turn. His wife walked down the centre aisle, stopped at his row, muttered something, and they let her in beside him. She knelt down, her arms enclosing him.

How did Odysseus die? A suicide, wasn’t it? I seem to recall that. Now. Maybe the desert spoiled Madox. That time when we had nothing to do with the world. I keep thinking of the Russian book he always carried. Russia has always been closer to my country than to his. Yes, Madox was a man who died because of nations.

I loved his calmness in all things. I would argue furiously about locations on a map, and his reports would somehow speak of our “debate” in reasonable sentences. He wrote calmly and joyfully about our journeys when there was joy to describe, as if we were Anna and Vronsky at a dance. Still, he was a man who never entered those Cairo dance halls with me. And I was the man who fell in love while dancing.

He moved with a slow gait. I never saw him dance. He was a man who wrote, who interpreted the world. Wisdom grew out of being handed just the smallest sliver of emotion. A glance could lead to paragraphs of theory. If he witnessed a new knot among a desert tribe or found a rare palm, it would charm him for weeks. When we came upon messages on our travels—any wording, contemporary or ancient, Arabic on a mud wall, a note in English written in chalk on the fender of a jeep—he would read it and then press his hand upon it as if to touch its possible deeper meanings, to become as intimate as he could with the words.

He holds out his arm, the bruised veins horizontal, facing up, for the raft of morphine. As it floods him he hears Caravaggio drop the needle into the kidney-shaped enamel tin. He sees the grizzled form turn its back to him and then reappear, also caught, a citizen of morphia with him.

   There are days when I come home from arid writing when all that can save me is “Honeysuckle Rose” by Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelly performing with the Hot Club of France. 1935. 1936. 1937. Great jazz years. The years when it floated out of the Hôtel Claridge on the Champs-Élysées and into the bars of London, southern France, Morocco, and then slid into Egypt, where the rumour of such rhythms was introduced in a hush by an unnamed Cairo dance band. When I went back into the desert, I took with me the evenings of dancing to the 78 of “Souvenirs” in the bars, the women pacing like greyhounds, leaning against you while you muttered into their shoulders during “My Sweet.” Courtesy of the Société Ultraphone Francaise record company. 1938. 1939. There was the whispering of love in a booth. There was war around the corner.

During those final nights in Cairo, months after the affair was over, we had finally persuaded Madox into a zinc bar for his farewell. She and her husband were there. One last night. One last dance. Almásy was drunk and attempting an old dance step he had invented called the Bosphorus hug, lifting Katharine Clifton into his wiry arms and traversing the floor until he fell with her across some Nile-grown aspidistras.

Who is he speaking as now?Caravaggio thinks.