The English Patient

In spite of the kindnesses in such people they were a terrible unfairness. He could be all day in a clay pit dismantling a bomb that might kill him at any moment, could come home from the burial of a fellow sapper, his energy saddened, but whatever the trials around him there was always solution and light. But she saw none. For him there were the various maps of fate, and at Amritsar’s temple all faiths and classes were welcome and ate together. She herself would be allowed to place money or a flower onto the sheet spread upon the floor and then join in the great permanent singing.

She wished for that. Her inwardness was a sadness of nature. He himself would allow her to enter any of his thirteen gates of character, but she knew that if he were in danger he would never turn to face her. He would create a space around himself and concentrate. This was his craft. Sikhs, he said, were brilliant at technology. “We have a mystical closeness … what is it?” “Affinity.” “Yes, affinity, with machines.”

He would be lost among them for hours, the beat of music within the crystal set whacking away at his forehead and into his hair. She did not believe she could turn fully to him and be his lover. He moved at a speed that allowed him to replace loss. That was his nature. She would not judge it in him. What right did she have. Kip stepping out each morning with his satchel hanging off his left shoulder and walking the path away from the Villa San Girolamo. Each morning she watched him, seeing his freshness towards the world perhaps for the last time. After a few minutes he would look up into the shrapnel-torn cypresses, whose middle branches had been shelled away. Pliny must have walked down a path like this, or Stendahl, because passages in The Charterhouse of Parma had occurred in this part of the world too.

Kip would look up, the arch of the high wounded trees over him, the path in front of him mediaeval, and he a young man of the strangest profession his century had invented, a sapper, a military engineer who detected and disarmed mines. Each morning he emerged from the tent, bathed and dressed in the garden, and stepped away from the villa and its surroundings, not even entering the house—maybe a wave if he saw her—as if language, humanity, would confuse him, get, like blood, into the machine he had to understand. She would see him forty yards from the house, in a clearing of the path.

It was the moment he left them all behind. The moment the drawbridge closed behind the knight and he was alone with just the peacefulness of his own strict talent. In Siena there was that mural she had seen. A fresco of a city. A few yards outside the city walls the artist’s paint had crumbled away, so there was not even the security of art to provide an orchard in the far acres for the traveller leaving the castle. That was where, she felt, Kip went during the day. Each morning he would step from the painted scene towards dark bluffs of chaos. The knight. The warrior saint. She would see the khaki uniform flickering through the cypresses. The Englishman had called him fato profugus—fate’s fugitive. She guessed that these days began for him with the pleasure of lifting his eyes up to the trees.

They had flown the sappers into Naples at the beginning of October 1943, selecting the best from the engineering corps that were already in southern Italy, Kip among the thirty men who were brought into the booby-trapped city.

The Germans in the Italian campaign had choreographed one of the most brilliant and terrible retreats in history. The advance of the Allies, which should have taken a month, took a year. There was fire in their path. Sappers rode the mudguards of trucks as the armies moved forward, their eyes searching for fresh soil disturbances that signalled land mines or glass mines or shoe mines. The advance impossibly slow. Farther north in the mountains, partisan bands of Garibaldi communist groups, who wore identifying red handkerchiefs, were also wiring explosives over the roads which detonated when German trucks passed over them.

The scale of the laying of mines in Italy and in North Africa cannot be imagined. At the Kismaayo-Afmadu road junction, 260 mines were found. There were 300 at the Omo River Bridge area. On June 30, 1941, South African sappers laid 2,700 Mark 11 mines in Mersa Matruh in one day. Four months later the British cleared Mersa Matruh of 7,806 mines and placed them elsewhere.

Mines were made out of everything. Forty-centimetre galvanized pipes were filled with explosives and left along military paths. Mines in wooden boxes were left in homes. Pipe mines were filled with gelignite, metal scraps and nails. South African sappers packed iron and gelignite into four-gallon petrol cans that could then destroy armoured cars.