The English Patient

Kip had heard the song in the camps, sung by groups of men, often during strange moments, such as before an impromptu soccer match. And Caravaggio when he had heard it in the last few years of the war never really liked it, never liked to listen to it. In his heart he had Hana’s version from many years before. Now he listened with a pleasure because she was singing again, but this was quickly altered by the way she sang. Not the passion of her at sixteen but echoing the tentative circle of light around her in the darkness. She was singing it as if it was something scarred, as if one couldn’t ever again bring all the hope of the song together. It had been altered by the five years leading to this night of her twenty-first birthday in the forty-fifth year of the twentieth century. Singing in the voice of a tired traveller, alone against everything. A new testament. There was no certainty to the song anymore, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power. That was the only sureness. The one voice was the single unspoiled thing. A song of snail light. Caravaggio realized she was singing with and echoing the heart of the sapper.

In the tent there have been nights of no talk and nights full of talk. They are never sure what will occur, whose fraction of past will emerge, or whether touch will be anonymous and silent in their darkness. The intimacy of her body or the body of her language in his ear—as they lie upon the air pillow he insists on blowing up and using each night. He has been charmed by this Western invention. He dutifully releases the air and folds it into three each morning, as he has done all the way up the landmass of Italy.

In the tent Kip nestles against her neck. He dissolves to her scratching fingernails across his skin. Or he has his mouth against her mouth, his stomach against her wrist.

She sings and hums. She thinks him, in this tent’s darkness, to be half bird—a quality of feather within him, the cold iron at his wrist. He moves sleepily whenever he is in such darkness with her, not quite quick as the world, whereas in daylight he glides through all that is random around him, the way colour glides against colour.

But at night he embraces torpor. She cannot see his order and discipline without seeing his eyes. There isn’t a key to him. Everywhere she touches braille doorways. As if organs, the heart, the rows of rib, can be seen under the skin, saliva across her hand now a colour. He has mapped her sadness more than any other. Just as she knows the strange path of love he has for his dangerous brother. “To be a wanderer is in our blood. That is why jailing is most difficult for his nature and he would kill himself to get free.”

During the verbal nights, they travel his country of five rivers. The Sutlej, Jhelum, Ravi, Chenab, Beas. He guides her into the great gurdwara, removing her shoes, watching as she washes her feet, covers her head. What they enter was built in 1601, desecrated in 1757 and built again immediately. In 1830 gold and marble were applied. “If I took you before morning you would see first of all the mist over the water. Then it lifts to reveal the temple in light. You will already be hearing the hymns of the saints—Ramananda, Nanak and Kabir. Singing is at the centre of worship. You hear the song, you smell the fruit from the temple gardens—pomegranates, oranges. The temple is a haven in the flux of life, accessible to all. It is the ship that crossed the ocean of ignorance.”

They move through the night, they move through the silver door to the shrine where the Holy Book lies under a canopy of brocades. The ragis sing the Book’s verses accompanied by musicians. They sing from four in the morning till eleven at night. The Granth Sahib is opened at random, a quotation selected, and for three hours, before the mist lifts off the lake to reveal the Golden Temple, the verses mingle and sway out with unbroken reading.

Kip walks her beside a pool to the tree shrine where Baba Gujhaji, the first priest of the temple, is buried. A tree of superstitions, four hundred and fifty years old. “My mother came here to tie a string onto a branch and beseeched the tree for a son, and when my brother was born returned and asked to be blessed with another. There are sacred trees and magic water all over the Punjab.”

Hana is quiet. He knows the depth of darkness in her, her lack of a child and of faith. He is always coaxing her from the edge of her fields of sadness. A child lost. A father lost.

“I have lost someone like a father as well,” he has said. But she knows this man beside her is one of the charmed, who has grown up an outsider and so can switch allegiances, can replace loss. There are those destroyed by unfairness and those who are not. If she asks him he will say he has had a good life—his brother in jail, his comrades blown up, and he risking himself daily in this war.