The English Patient

Almásy was drunk and his dancing seemed to the others a brutal series of movements. In those days he and she did not seem to be getting on well. He swung her from side to side as if she were some anonymous doll, and smothered with drink his grief at Madox’s leaving. He was loud at the tables with us. When Almásy was like this we usually dispersed, but this was Madox’s last night in Cairo and we stayed. A bad Egyptian violinist mimicking Stéphane Grappelly, and Almásy like a planet out of control. “To us—the planetary strangers,” he lifted his glass. He wanted to dance with everyone, men and women. He clapped his hands and announced, “Now for the Bosphorus hug. You, Bernhardt? Hetherton?” Most pulled back. He turned to Clifton’s young wife, who was watching him in a courteous rage, and she went forward as he beckoned and then slammed into her, his throat already at her left shoulder on that naked plateau above the sequins. A maniac’s tango ensued till one of them lost the step. She would not back down from her anger, refused to let him win by her walking away and returning to the table. Just staring hard at him when he pulled his head back, not solemn but with an attacking face. His mouth muttering at her when he bent his face down, swearing the lyrics of “Honeysuckle Rose,” perhaps.

In Cairo between expeditions no one ever saw much of Almásy. He seemed either distant or restless. He worked in the museum during the day and frequented the South Cairo market bars at night. Lost in another Egypt. It was only for Madox they had all come here. But now Almásy was dancing with Katharine Clifton. The line of plants brushed against her slimness. He pivoted with her, lifting her up, and then fell. Clifton stayed in his seat, half watching them. Almásy lying across her and then slowly trying to get up, smoothing back his blond hair, kneeling over her in the far corner of the room. He had at one time been a man of delicacy.

It was past midnight. The guests there were not amused, except for the easily amused regulars, accustomed to these ceremonies of the desert European. There were women with long tributaries of silver hanging off their ears, women in sequins, little metal droplets warm from the bar’s heat that Almásy in the past had always been partial towards, women who in their dancing swung the jagged earrings of silver against his face. On other nights he danced with them, carrying their whole frame by the fulcrum of rib cage as he got drunker. Yes, they were amused, laughing at Almásy’s stomach as his shirt loosened, not charmed by his weight, which leaned on their shoulders as he paused during the dance, collapsing at some point later during a schottische onto the floor.

It was important during such evenings to proceed into the plot of the evening, while the human constellations whirled and skidded around you. There was no thought or forethought. The evening’s field notes came later, in the desert, in the landforms between Dakhla and Kufra. Then he would remember that doglike yelp at which he looked around for a dog on the dance floor and realized, now regarding the compass disc floating on oil, that it may have been a woman he had stepped on. Within sight of an oasis he would pride himself on his dancing, waving his arms and his wristwatch up to the sky.

   Cold nights in the desert. He plucked a thread from the horde of nights and put it into his mouth like food. This was during the first two days of a trek out, when he was in the zone of limbo between city and plateau. After six days had passed he would never think about Cairo or the music or the streets or the women; by then he was moving in ancient time, had adapted into the breathing patterns of deep water. His only connection with the world of cities was Herodotus, his guidebook, ancient and modern, of supposed lies. When he discovered the truth to what had seemed a lie, he brought out his glue pot and pasted in a map or news clipping or used a blank space in the book to sketch men in skirts with faded unknown animals alongside them. The early oasis dwellers had not usually depicted cattle, though Herodotus claimed they had. They worshipped a pregnant goddess and their rock portraits were mostly of pregnant women.

Within two weeks even the idea of a city never entered his mind. It was as if he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between land and chart between distances and legend between nature and storyteller. Sandford called it geomorphology. The place they had chosen to come to, to be their best selves, to be unconscious of ancestry. Here, apart from the sun compass and the odometer mileage and the book, he was alone, his own invention. He knew during these times how the mirage worked, the fata morgana, for he was within it.