The English Patient

When Kip called them, they walked out of the kitchen and onto the terrace, whose border, with its low stone balustrade, was ringed with light.

It looked to Caravaggio like a string of small electric candles found in dusty churches, and he thought the sapper had gone too far in removing them from a chapel, even for Hana’s birthday. Hana walked slowly forward with her hands over her face. There was no wind. Her legs and thighs moved through the skirt of her frock as if it were thin water. Her tennis shoes silent on the stone.

“I kept finding dead shells wherever I was digging,” the sapper said.

They still didn’t understand. Caravaggio bent over the flutter of lights. They were snail shells filled with oil. He looked along the row of them; there must have been about forty.

“Forty-five,” Kip said, “the years so far of this century. Where I come from, we celebrate the age as well as ourselves.”

Hana moved alongside them, her hands in her pockets now, the way Kip loved to see her walk. So relaxed, as if she had put her arms away for the night, now in simple armless movement.

Caravaggio was diverted by the startling presence of three bottles of red wine on the table. He walked over and read the labels and shook his head, amazed. He knew the sapper wouldn’t drink any of it. All three had already been opened. Kip must have picked his way through some etiquette book in the library. Then he saw the corn and the meat and the potatoes. Hana slid her arm into Kip’s and came with him to the table.

They ate and drank, the unexpected thickness of the wine like meat on their tongues. They were soon turning silly in their toasts to the sapper—“the great forager”—and to the English patient. They toasted each other, Kip joining in with his beaker of water. This was when he began to talk about himself. Caravaggio pressing him on, not always listening, sometimes standing up and walking around the table, pacing and pacing with pleasure at all this. He wanted these two married, longed to force them verbally towards it, but they seemed to have their own strange rules about their relationship. What was he doing in this role. He sat down again. Now and then he noticed the death of a light. The snail shells held only so much oil. Kip would rise and refill them with pink paraffin.

“We must keep them lit till midnight.”

They talked then about the war, so far away. “When the war with Japan is over, everyone will finally go home,” Kip said. “And where will you go?” Caravaggio asked. The sapper rolled his head, half nodding, half shaking it, his mouth smiling. So Caravaggio began to talk, mostly to Kip.

The dog cautiously approached the table and laid its head on Caravaggio’s lap. The sapper asked for other stories about Toronto as if it were a place of peculiar wonders. Snow that drowned the city, iced up the harbour, ferryboats in the summer where people listened to concerts. But what he was really interested in were the clues to Hana’s nature, though she was evasive, veering Caravaggio away from stories that involved some moment of her life. She wanted Kip to know her only in the present, a person perhaps more flawed or more compassionate or harder or more obsessed than the girl or young woman she had been then. In her life there was her mother Alice her father Patrick her stepmother Clara and Caravaggio. She had already admitted these names to Kip as if they were her credentials, her dowry. They were faultless and needed no discussion. She used them like authorities in a book she could refer to on the right way to boil an egg, or the correct way to slip garlic into a lamb. They were not to be questioned.

And now—because he was quite drunk—Caravaggio told the story of Hana’s singing the “Marseillaise,” which he had told her before. “Yes, I have heard the song,” said Kip, and he attempted a version of it. “No, you have to sing it out“ said Hana, “you have to sing it standing up!”

She stood up, pulled her tennis shoes off and climbed onto the table. There were four snail lights flickering, almost dying, on the table beside her bare feet.

“This is for you. This is how you must learn to sing it, Kip. This is for you.”

She sang up into darkness beyond their snail light, beyond the square of light from the English patient’s room and into the dark sky waving with shadows of cypress. Her hands came out of their pockets.