The English Patient_III Sometime a Fire_迈克尔·翁达杰_九九藏书网_手机版
III Sometime a Fire
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“I’ll take them back in a minute.” “It’s okay.” “Keep very still.” He opened up his satchel for the Geiger counter and magnet. He ran the dial up and along the wires she was holding. No swerve to negative. No clue. Nothing. He stepped backwards, wondering where the trick could be.What?But what he does is this. He is halfway across the room, his hand sunk to the wrist in his open satchel which still hangs off his shoulder. His walk silent. He turns and pauses beside the bed. As the English patient completes one of his long exhalations he snips the wire of his hearing aid with the cutters and drops them back into the satchel. He turns and grins towards her.She walks out into the sunlight and the courtyard. At noon the taps deliver water into the villa’s fountain and for twenty minutes it bursts forth. She removes her shoes, climbs into the dry bowl of the fountain and waits.“It’s the boy. You’d better go and find out.” She leaned the mirror against the wall and rushed down the corridor. She paused outside waiting for the next yell. When it came she took off through the garden and into the fields above the house.Or perhaps invent a skin for him, the way tannic acid camouflages a burned man’s rawness.JulyHe took off his boots, tied the laces together and slung them over his shoulder as he went upstairs. It had started to rain and he needed a tarpaulin for his tent. From the hall he saw the light still on in the English patient’s room.She woke when the caterpillar moved from the collar of her dress onto her cheek, and she opened her eyes, saw him crouched over her. He plucked it from her face, not touching her skin, and placed it in the grass. She noticed he had already packed up his equipment. He moved back and sat against the tree, watching her as she rolled slowly onto her back and then stretched, holding that moment for as long as she could. It must have been afternoon, the sun over there. She leaned her head back and looked at him.“I’ll rewire him in the morning.” He puts his left hand on her shoulder.She enters the painted bedroom with a new book and announces the title.If he were a hero in a painting, he could claim a just sleep.I begin my work at the time when Servius Galba was Consul.... The histories of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero, while they were a power, were falsified through terror and after their death were written under a fresh hatred.Earlier, when she saw that he had left the window alcove, she had been enraged. Knowing that he was protecting them like children from the mine. She had clung closer to Caravag-gio. It had been an insult. And tonight the growing exhilaration of the evening didn’t permit her to read after Caravaggio had gone to bed, stopping to rifle through her medicine box first, and after the English patient had plucked at the air with his bony finger and, when she had bent over, kissed her cheek.And I cried: “Ah, God, take me from this place!” A voice said: “It is no desert.” I cried: “Well, but— The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.” A voice said: “It is no desert.” No one said anything.Always happy. Kip? Do you hear me? I’m so happy with you. To be with you like this.”
Most of all she wished for a river they could swim in. There was a formality in swimming which she assumed was like being in a ballroom. But he had a different sense of rivers, had entered the Moro in silence and pulled the harness of cables attached to the folding Bailey bridge, the bolted steel panels of it slipping into the water behind him like a creature, and the sky then had lit up with shell fire and someone was sinking beside him in mid-river. Again and again the sappers dove for the lost pulleys, grappling hooks in the water among them, mud and surface and faces lit up by phosphorus flares in the sky around them.Whereupon his servants said, Let there be sought for the King a young virgin: and let her cherish him, and let her lie in this bosom, that our King may have heat.At this hour the smell of hay grass is everywhere. Bluebottles stumble in the air and bang into humans as if slamming into a wall, then retreat unconcerned. She notices where water spiders have nested beneath the upper bowl of the fountain, her face in the shade of its overhang. She likes to sit in this cradle of stone, the smell of cool and dark hidden air emerging from the still empty spout near her, like air from a basement opened for the first time in late spring so the heat outside hangs in contrast. She brushes her arms and toes free of dust, of the crimp of shoes, and stretches.At two or three in the morning, after leaving the Englishman, she walks through the garden towards the sapper’s hurricane lamp, which hangs off the arm of St. Christopher. Absolute darkness between her and the light, but she knows every shrub and bush in her path, the location of the bonfire she passes, low and pink in its near completion. Sometimes she cups a hand over the glass funnel and blows out the flame, and sometimes she leaves it burning and ducks under it and enters through the open flaps, to crawl in against his body, the arm she wants, her tongue instead of a swab, her tooth instead of a needle, her mouth instead of the mask with the codeine drops to make him sleep, to make his immortal ticking brain slow into sleepiness. She folds her paisley dress and places it on top of her tennis shoes. She knows that for him the world burns around them with only a few crucial rules. You replace TNT with steam, you drain it, you—all this she knows is in his head as she sleeps beside him virtuous as a sister.Stepping up to her, he cut the wire below her left fist before the theorem faded, the sound like something bitten through with a tooth. He saw the dark print of her dress along her shoulder, against her neck. The bomb was dead. He dropped the cutters and put his hand on her shoulder, needing to touch something human. She was saying something he couldn’t hear, and she reached forward and pulled the earphones off so silence invaded. Breeze and a rustle. He realized the click of the wire being cut had not been heard at all, just felt, the snap of it, the break of a small rabbit bone. Not letting go of her, he moved his hand down her arm and pulled the seven inches of wire out of her still tight grip.“I will use it to teach you to dance, Hana. Not what your young friend there knows. I have seen and turned my back on certain dances. But this tune, ‘How Long Has This Been Going On,’ is one of the great songs because the introduction’s melody is purer than the song it introduces. And only great jazzmen have acknowledged that. Now, we can have this party on the terrace, which would allow us to invite the dog, or we can invade the Englishman and have it in the bedroom upstairs. Your young friend who doesn’t drink managed to find bottles of wine yesterday in San Domenico. We have not just music. Give me your arm. No. First we must chalk the floor and practise. Three main steps—one-two-three—now give me your arm. What happened to you today?” “He dismantled a large bomb, a difficult one. Let him tell you about it.” The sapper shrugged, not modestly, but as if it was too complicated to explain. Night fell fast, night filled up the valley and then the mountains and they were left once more with lanterns.He had learned diagrams of order when he joined the army, blueprints that became more and more complicated, like great knots or musical scores. He found out he had the skill of the three-dimensional gaze, the rogue gaze that could look at an object or page of information and realign it, see all the false descants. He was by nature conservative but able also to imagine the worst devices, the capacity for accident in a room—a plum on a table, a child approaching and eating the pit of poison, a man walking into a dark room and before joining his wife in bed brushing loose a paraffin lamp from its bracket. Any room was full of such choreography. The rogue gaze could see the buried line under the surface, how a knot might weave when out of sight.Many books open with an author’s assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle.“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.” That was the English patient’s first lesson about reading. He did not interrupt again. If he happened to fall asleep she would continue, never looking up until she herself was fatigued. If he had missed the last half-hour of plot, just one room would be dark in a story he probably already knew. He was familiar with the map of the story. There was Benares to the east and Chilianwallah in the north of the Punjab.A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when it is stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.When she begins a book she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards. Parma and Paris and India spread their carpets.Now, months later in the Villa San Girolamo, in the hill town north of Florence, in the arbour room that is his bedroom, he reposes like the sculpture of the dead knight in Ravenna. He speaks in fragments about oasis towns, the later Medicis, the prose style of Kipling, the woman who bit into his flesh. And in his commonplace book, his
edition of Herodotus’ Histories, are other fragments—maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books. All that is missing is his own name. There is still no clue to who he actually is, nameless, without rank or battalion or squadron. The references in his book are all pre-war, the deserts of Egypt and Libya in the , interspersed with references to cave art or gallery art or journal notes in his own small handwriting. “There are no brunettes,” the English patient says to Hana as she bends over him, “among Florentine Madonnas.” The book is in his hands.She loves most the wet colours of his neck when he bathes. And his chest with its sweat which her fingers grip when he is over her, and the dark, tough arms in the darkness of his tent, or one time in her room when light from the valley’s city, finally free of curfew, rose among them like twilight and lit the colour of his body.Was it a sapper or was it a civilian? The smell of flower and herb along the road wall, the beginning stitch at his side. An accident or wrong choice. The sappers kept to themselves for the most part. They were an odd group as far as character went, somewhat like people who worked with jewels or stone, they had a hardness and clarity within them, their decisions frightening even to others in the same trade. Kip had recognized that quality among gem-cutters but never in himself, though he knew others saw it there. The sappers never became familiar with each other. When they talked they passed only information along, new devices, habits of the enemy. He would step into the town hall, where they were billeted, and his eyes would take in the three faces and be aware of the absence of the fourth. Or there would be four of them and in a field somewhere would be the body of an old man or a girl.When he steps into the seemingly empty villa he is noisy. He is the only one of them who has remained in uniform.She sniffs the stone, the cool moth smell of it.The young Sikh sapper put his cheek against the mud and thought of the Queen of Sheba’s face, the texture of her skin.“Keep the mirror still, my dear,” he said.At night in the camp bed, his arms stretched out into distance like two armies. There was no promise of solution or victory except for the temporary pact between him and that painted fresco’s royalty who would forget him, never acknowledge his existence or be aware of him, a Sikh, halfway up a sapper’s ladder in the rain, erecting a Bailey bridge for the army behind him. But he remembered the painting of their story. And when a month later the battalions reached the sea, after they had survived everything and entered the coastal town of Cattolica and the engineers had cleared the beach of mines in a twenty-yard stretch so the men could go down naked into the sea, he approached one of the mediaevalists who had befriended him—who had once simply talked with him and shared some Spam—and promised to show him something in return for his kindness.She has missed Clara with a woe but is unable to write to her, now, after all that has happened to her. She cannot bear to talk of or even acknowledge the death of Patrick.He turned from that.She ignored them at first. The house often picked up noise from the valley. The use of megaphones by the clearance military had constantly unnerved her when she was living alone with the English patient.Now, hours later, Kip sits once again in the window alcove. If he could walk the seven yards across the Englishman’s room and touch her he would be sane. There was so little light in the room, just the candle at the table where she sat, he thought perhaps she was slightly drunk.He came to the desert, Madox said.Just fifty yards away, there had been no representation of them in the world, no sound or sight of them from the valley’s eye as Hana’s and Caravaggio’s shadows glided across the walls and Kip sat comfortably encased in the alcove and the English patient sipped his wine and felt its spirit percolate through his unused body so it was quickly drunk, his voice bringing forth the whistle of a desert fox bringing forth a flutter of the English wood thrush he said was found only in Essex, for it thrived in the vicinity of lavender and wormwood. All of the burned man’s desire was in the brain, the sapper had been thinking to himself, sitting in the stone alcove. Then he turned his head suddenly, knowing everything as he heard the sound, certain of it. He had looked back at them and for the first time in his life lied—”It’s all right, it wasn’t a mine. That seemed to come from a cleared area”—prepared to wait till the smell of the cordite reached him.But she entered the Englishman’s room one day to find the sapper there. He was standing at the foot of the bed, his arms hung over the rifle that rested across his shoulders. She disliked this casual handling of the gun, his lazy spin towards her entrance as if his body were the axle of a wheel, as if the weapon had been sewn along his shoulders and arms and into his small brown wrists.No.He had returned from the source of the mine explosion to find Caravaggio asleep on the library sofa with the dog in his arms.They were shuffling together in the corridors towards the English patient’s bedroom, Caravaggio carrying the gramophone, one hand holding its arm and needle.“You’d better go.” “You need another hand to cut it, don’t you?” “I can attach it to the tree.” “I’ll hold it.” He picked the wire like a thin adder from her left hand. Then the other. She didn’t move away. He said nothing more, he now had to think as clearly as he could, as if he were alone. She came up to him and took back one of the wires. He was not conscious of this at all, her presence erased. He travelled the path of the bomb fuze again, alongside the mind that had choreographed this, touching all the key points, seeing the X ray of it, the band music filling everything else.But he felt he was now within something, perhaps a painting he had seen somewhere in the last year. Some secure couple in a field. How many he had seen with their laziness of sleep, with no thought of work or the dangers of the world. Beside him there were the mouselike movements within Hana’ her eyebrows rode upon argument, a small fury in her dreaming.“What we should do is make a sling,” the sapper mused, turning to Hana as she entered, “and carry him around the house.” She looked at both of them, shrugged and walked out of the room.Working in Cairo during the early days of the war, he had been trained to i九*九*藏*书*网nvent double agents or phantoms who would take on flesh. He had been in charge of a mythical agent named “Cheese,” and he spent weeks clothing him with facts, giving him qualities of character—such as greed and a weakness for drink when he would spill false rumours to the enemy. Just as some inCairo he worked for invented whole platoons in the desert. He had lived through a time of war when everything offered up to those around him was a lie. He had felt like a man in the darkness of a room imitating the calls of a bird.“What was his name?” “Sam Hardy.” Kip went to the window and looked out, leaving their conversation.The English patient within a few days of the young soldier’s arrival had thus become aware of his presence around the house, though Hana kept them separate, knowing they would probably not like each other.How could he trust even this circle of elastic on the sleeve of the girl’s frock that gripped her arm? Or the rattle in her intimate breath asdeep as stones within a river.“Did you hear what I said?” “No. What was it?” “I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I certainly wasn’t brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone, it’s like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked flesh the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Have you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against your collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a tree and climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? You kept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, you have to be a still bed for me, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’ such a slow word, you can’t rush it...”
Her mouth was against his shirt. He lay with her on the ground as still as he had to, his eyes clear, looking up into a branch.In fact he had always been dutifully in line at the crack of dawn, holding out his cup for the English tea he loved, adding to it his own supply of condensed milk. He would drink slowly, standing in sunlight to watch the slow movement of troops who, if they were stationary that day, would already be playing canasta by nine a.m.Did her father struggle into his death or die calm? Did he lie the way the English patient reposes grandly on his cot? Was he nursed by a stranger? A man not of your own blood can break upon your emotions more than someone of your own blood. As if falling into the arms of a stranger you discover the mirror of your choice. Unlike the sapper, her father was never fully comfortable in the world. His conversations lost some of their syllables out of shyness. In any of Patrick’s sentences, hermother had complained, you lost two or three crucial words. But Hana liked that about him, there seemed to be no feudal spirit around him. He had a vagueness, an uncertainty that allowed him tentative charm. He was unlike most men. Even the wounded English patient had the familiar purpose of the feudal. But her father was a hungry ghost, liking those around him to be confident, even raucous.Noise did not matter. There would be no faint tickings or clickings to signal danger on this kind of bomb. The distraction of music helped him towards clear thought, to the possible forms of structure in the mine, to the personality that had laid the city of threads and then poured wet concrete over it.Yes, Caravaggio would explain to her how she could sink into love. Even how to sink into cautious love. “I want to take you to the Skootamatta River, Kip,” she said. “I want to show you Smoke Lake. The woman my father loved lives out on the lakes, slips into canoes more easily than into a car. I miss thunder that blinks out electricity. I want you to meet Clara of the canoes, the last one in my family. There are no others now. My father forsook her for a war.”
She walks towards his night tent without a false step or any hesitation. The trees make a sieve of moonlight, as if she iscaught within the light of a dance hall’s globe. She enters his tent and puts an ear to his sleeping chest and listens to his beating heart, the way he will listen to a clock on a mine. Two a.m. Everyone is asleep but her.“You knew, huh?” “I got a letter from home.” “Is that why you came here, because you knew?” “No.” “Good. I don’t think that he believed in wakes and such things. Patrick used to say he wanted a duet by two women on musical instruments when he died. Squeeze-box and violin. That’s all. He was so damn sentimental.” “Yes. You could really make him do anything. Find him a woman in distress and he was lost.”
The wind rose up out of the valley to their hill so the cypress trees that lined the thirty-six steps outside the chapel wrestled with it. Drops of earlier rain nudged off, falling with a ticking sound upon the two of them sitting on the balustrade by the steps. It was long after midnight. She was lying on the concrete ledge, and he paced or leaned out looking down into the valley.There are two levels of long, narrow garden to the west of the house. A formal terrace and, higher up, the darker garden, where stone steps and concrete statues almost disappear under the green mildew of the rains. The sapper has his tent pitched here. Rain falls and mist rises out of the valley, and the other rain from the branches of cypress and fir falls upon this half-cleared pocket on the side of the hill.“Why are you not smarter? It’s only the rich who can’t afford to be smart. They’re compromised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings.“I was sick of the hunger. Of just being lusted at. So I stepped away, from the dates, the jeep rides, the courtship’ The last dances before they died—I was considered a snob. I worked harder than others. Double shifts, under fire, did anything for them, emptied every bedpan. I became a snob because I wouldn’t go out and spend their money. I wanted to go home and there was no one at home. And I was sick of Europe. Sick of being treated like gold because I was female. I courted one man and he died and the child died. I mean, the child didn’t just die, I was the one who destroyed it. After that I stepped so far back no one could get near me. Not with talk of snobs. Not with anyone’s death. Then I met him, the man burned black. Who turned out to be, up close, an Englishman-”It has been a long time, David, since I thought of anything to do with a man.”
After a week of the Sikh sapper’s presence around the villa they adapted to his habits of eating. Wherever he was—on the hill or in the village—he would return around twelve-thirty and join Hana and Caravaggio, pull out the small bundle of blue handkerchief from his shoulder bag and spread it onto the table alongside their meal. His onions and his herbs— which Caravaggio suspected he was taking from the Franciscans’ garden during the time he spent there sweeping the place for mines.Be irresponsible. Luck runs out.” Hana was pouring milk into her cup. As she finished she moved the lip of the jug over Kip’s hand and continued pouring the milk over his brown hand and up his arm to his elbow and then stopped. He didn’t move it away.He opened his bag and with scissors clipped the grass away. He laced a small hammock of rope around it and after attaching a rope and pulley to the tree branch slowly lifted the concrete into the air. Two wires led from the concrete towards the earth.The ———— tribe that had saved the burned pilot brought him into the British base at Siwa inAdults and children were on the streets. Men in band uniforms had also emerged. The band would not play and break the rules of curfew, but the instruments were still part of the ceremony, immaculately polished.It was her breath that was most alive. Her weight seemed so light she must have balanced most of it away from him. How long could he lie like this, unable to move or turn to busyness. It was essential to remain still, the way he had relied on statues during those months when they moved up the coast fighting into and beyond each fortress town until there was no difference in them, the same narrow streets everywhere that became sewers of blood so he would dream that if he lost balance he would slip down those slopes on the red liquid and be flung off the cliff into the valley. Every night he had walked into the coldness of a captured church and found a statue for the night to be his sentinel. He had given his trust only to this race of stones, moving as close as possible against them in the darkness, a grieving angel whose thigh was a woman’s perfect thigh, whose line and shadow appeared so soft. He would place his head on the lap of such creatures and release himself into sleep.At first he will not come into the house at all. He walks past on some duty or other to do with the dismantling of mines.He, for his part, witnesses Caravaggio’s wanderings at night. On two occasions the sapper trails Caravaggio at a distance.“I think there is someone shouting. Do you hear it?” His left hand turned up the hearing aid.“Do you want to go down to the house?” “Yes, I’m hungry.” She could hardly stand up, the dazzle of sun, her tired legs. How long they had been there she still didn’t know. She could not forget the depth of her sleep, the lightness of the plummet.He slid from the darkness, the mortar tube strapped to his back, carrying the rifle in his hands. In his turban and with the weapons he was a shock to them. They had not expected him to emerge too out of the no-man’s-land of the beach.His hands were still up in the air as she came alongside him. He had been tricked, ending up holding two live wires he could not put down without the safety of a descant chord. He needed a third hand to negate one of them and he needed to go back once more to the fuze head. He passed the wires carefully to her and dropped his arms, getting blood back into them.Fortress towns on great promontories which had been battled over since the eighth century had the armies of new kings flung carelessly against them. Around the outcrops of rocks were the traffic of stretchers, butchered vineyards, where, if you dug deep beneath the tank ruts, you found blood-axe and spear. Monterchi, Cortona, Urbino, Arezzo, Sanse-polcro, Anghiari. And then the coast.So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag a Shunammite. And the damselcherished the King, and ministered to him: but the King knew her not.She pulls down the copy of Kim from the library shelf and, standing against the piano, begins to write into the flyleaf in its last pages.Once Caravaggio entered the library and saw the sapper up by the ceiling, against the trompe ’oeil—only Caravaggio would walk into a room and look up into the high corners to see if he was alone—and the young soldier, his eyes not leaving their focus, put out his palm and snapped his fingers, halting Caravaggio in his entrance, a warning to leave the room for safety as he unthreaded and cut a fuze wire he had traced to that corner, hidden above the valance.There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lover enters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.The English patient advises Hana on what to grow. “Get your Italian friend to find seeds for you, he seems capable in that category. What you want are plum leaves. Also fire pink and Indian pink—if you want the Latin name for your Latin friend, it is Silene virginica. Red savory is good. If you want finches get hazel and chokecherries.” She writes everything down. Then puts the fountain pen into the drawer of the small table where she keeps the book she is reading to him, along with two candles, Vesta matches. There are no medical supplies in this room. She hides them in other rooms. If Caravaggio is to hunt them out, she doesn’t want him disturbing the Englishman. She puts the slip of paper with the names of plants into the pocket of her dress to give to Caravaggio. Now that physical attraction has raised its head, she has begun to feel awkward in the company of the three men.Now if he moves towards her she will stare him out, will treat him to a similar silence. Let him guess, make a move. She has been approached before by soldiers.King David was old and stricken in years and they covered him with clothes but he received no heat.They talk, the slight singsong of his voice within the canvas smell of their tent, which has been his all through the Italian campaign, which he reaches up to touch with his slight fingers as if it too belonged to his body, a khaki wing he folds over himself during the night. It is his world. She feels displaced out of Canada during these nights. He asks her why she cannot sleep. She lies there irritated at his self-sufficiency, his ability to turn so easily away from the world. She wants a tin roof for the rain, two poplar trees to shiver outside her window, a noise she can sleep against, sleeping trees and sleeping roofs that she grew up with in the east end of Toronto and then for a couple of years with Patrick and Clara along the Skootamatta River and later Georgian Bay. She has not found a sleeping tree, even in the density of this garden.She has watched him at work, careful and timeless as a cat, in the orchard and within the overgrown garden that rises behind the house. She notices the darker brown skin of his wrist, which slides freely within the bangle that clinks sometimes when he drinks a cup of tea in front of her.Caravaggio enters the library. He has been spending most afternoons there. As always, books are mystical creatures to him.He could hear her deep breath. When he had put his arm around her shoulder she was already asleep but had gripped it against herself. Glancing down he noticed she still had the wire, she must have picked it up again.They asked him where the Allies stood in Italy, and he said he assumed they had taken Florence but were held up by the hill towns north of them. The Gothic Line. “Your division is stuck in Florence and cannot get past bases like Prato and Fiesole for instance because the Germans have barracked themselves into villas and convents and they are brilliantly defended. It’s an old story—the Crusaders made the same mistake against the Saracens. And like them you now need the fortress towns. They have never been abandoned except during times of cholera.” He had rambled on, driving them mad, traitor or ally, leaving them never quite sure who he was.And one of them had said, “Damn. Maybe more light, Sergeant Shand?” And the sergeant released the catch of the flare and held it up in his outstretched arm, the niagara of its light pouring off his fist, and stood there for the length of its burn like that.There was no comfort in this river except for his desire for her, which somehow kept him warm. He would pull the veil off her hair. He would put his right hand between her neck and olive blouse. He too was tired and sad, as the wise king and guilty queen he had seen in Arezzo two weeks earlier.He followed the noise of the piano, rushing up the hill with Hardy, climbed over the stone wall and entered the villa As long as there was no pause it meant the player would not lean forward and pull out the thin metal band to set the metronome going.“Splendid lines, and erotic, but Richard Rodgers, one suspects, wanted more dignity.” “You must guess my moves, you see.” “Why don’t you guess mine?” “I will when you know what to do. At present I’m the only one who does.” “I bet Kip knows.” “He may know but he won’t do it.” “I shall have some wine,” the English patient said, and the sapper picked up a glass of water, flung the contents through the window and poured wine for the Englishman. “This is my first 9９lｉｂ.ｎｅtdrink in a year.” There was a muffled noise, and the sapper turned quickly and looked out of the window, into the darkness. The others froze.He had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of a danger to the piano player. The retreating army often left pencil mines within musical instruments. Returning owners opened up pianos and lost their hands. People would revive the swing on a grandfather clock, and a glass bomb would blow out half a wall and whoever was nearby.He squatted in a corner of the clanging -waiting-room, rapt fro hands folded in lap, and pupils con-tracted to pin-points. In a minute—in another half second— he felt he would arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle...It is almost dark in the green room. Hana turns and realizes her neck is stiff from stillness. She has been focused and submerged within the crabbed handwriting in his thick-leaved sea-book of maps and texts. There is even a small fern glued into it. The Histories. She doesn’t close the book, hasn’t touched it since she laid it on the side table. She walks away from it.“Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are?” Caravaggio, in a belligerent morphine rush, wanted the mood of argument. “This is something that has concerned me most of my sexual life—which began late, I must announce to this select company. In the same way the sexual pleasure of conversation came to me only after I was married. I had never thought words erotic. Sometimes I really do like to talk more than fuck. Sentences. Buckets of this buckets of that and then buckets of this again. The trouble with words is that you can really talk yourself into a corner. Whereas you can’t fuck yourself into a corner.” “That’s a man talking,” muttered Hana.Birds prefer trees with dead branches,” said Caravaggio. “They have complete vistas from where they perch. They can take off in any direction.” “If you are talking about me,” Hana said, “I’m not a bird. The real bird is the man upstairs.” Kip tried to imagine her as a bird.Later she will realize he never allowed himself to be beholden to her, or her to him. She will stare at the word in a novel, lift it off the book and carry it to a dictionary. Beholden. To be under obligation. And he, she knows, never allowed that. If she crosses the two hundred yards of dark garden to him it is her choice, and she might find him asleep, not from a lack of love but from necessity, to be clear-minded towards the next day’s treacherous objects.He returned the rifle to the young Sikh.Even among those she worked closely with she hardly talked during the war. She needed an uncle, a member of the family’ She needed the father of the child, while she waited in this hill town to get drunk for the first time in years, while a burned man upstairs had fallen into his four hours of sleep and an old friend of her father’s was now rifling through her medicine chest, breaking the glass tab, tightening a bootlace round his arm and injecting the morphine quickly into himself, in the time it took for him to turn around.He thinks her remarkable. He wakes and sees her in the spray of the lamp. He loves most her face’s smart look. Or in the evenings he loves her voice as she argues Caravaggio out of a foolishness. And the way she crawls in against his body like a saint.“There’s a painting by Caravaggio, done late in his life. David with the Head of Goliath. In it, the young warrior holds at the end of his outstretched arm the head of Goliath, ravaged and old. But that is not the true sadness in the picture. It is assumed that the face of David is a portrait of the youthful Caravaggio and the head of Goliath is a portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did the painting. Youth judging age at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one’s own mortality.How much she is in love with him or he with her we don’t know. Or how much it is a game of secrets. As they grow intimate the space between them during the day grows larger. She likes the distance he leaves her, the space he assumes is their right. It gives each of them a private energy, a code of air between them when he passes below her window without a word, walking the half-mile to assemble with the other sappers in the town. He passes a plate or some food into her hands. She places a leaf across his brown wrist. Or they work with Caravaggio between them mortaring up a collapsing wall. The sapper sings his Western songs, which Caravaggio enjoys but pretends not to.The Sikh sets up a tent in the far reaches of the garden, where Hana thinks lavender was once grown. She has found dry leaves in that area which she has rolled in her fingers and identified. Now and then after a rain she recognizes the perfume of it.He did not yet have a faith in books. In recent days, Hana had watched him sitting beside the English patient, and it seemed to her a reversal of Kim. The young student was now Indian, the wise old teacher was English. But it was Hana in the night who stayed with the old man, who guided him over the mountains to the sacred river. They had even read that book together, Hana’s voice slow when wind flattened the candle flame beside her, the page dark for a moment.“Now, before you begin on your histories,” he said to the static figure in the bed, “I will present you with ‘My Romance.’ “Written in
by Mr. Lorenz Hart, I believe,” muttered the Englishman. Kip was sitting at the window, and she said she wanted to dance with the sapper.Hana sat up, slightly dizzy, off balance. “And look what they did to you,” she said to herself.When Caravaggio passed her in the hall she was smiling. They stood in the hall and listened to the conversation inside the room.Too many men in the house. Her mouth leans against the bare arm of her shoulder. She smells her skin, the familiarity of it.“Let me tape those to the tree, and you leave.” “No. I’ll hold it. They won’t reach the tree.” “No.” “Kip—I can hold them.” “We have an impasse. There’s a joke. I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know how complete the trick is.” Leaving her, he ran back to where he had first sighted the wire. He raised it and followed it all the way this time, the Geiger counter alongside it. Then he was crouched about ten yards from her, thinking, now and then looking up, looking right through her, watching only the two tributaries of wire she held in her hands. I don’t know, he said out loud, slowly, / don’t know. I think I have to cut the wire in your left hand, you must leave. He was pulling the radio earphones on over his head, so thesound came back into him fully, filling him with clarity. He schemed along the different paths of the wire and swerved into the convolutions of their knots, the sudden corners, the buried switches that translated them from positive to negative. The tinderbox. He remembered the dog, whose eyes were as big as saucers. He raced with the music along the wires, and all the while he was staring at the girl’s hands, which were very still holding onto them.He never speaks about the danger that comes with his kind of searching. Now and then an explosion brings her and Ca-ravaggio quickly out of the house, her heart taut from the muffled blast. She runs out or runs to a window seeing Cara-vaggio too in the corner of her vision, and they will see the sapper waving lazily towards the house, not even turning around from the herb terrace.He has been a man who slips away, in the way lovers leave chaos, the way thieves leave reduced houses.We were all at the southern campsite, within the firelight.He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher— the Wonder House, as the natives called the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that “fire-breathing dragon,” hold the P for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.“The trouble with all of us is we are where we shouldn’t be. What are we doing in Africa, in Italy? What is Kip doing dismantling bombs in orchards, for God’s sake? What is he doing fighting English wars? A farmer on the western front cannot prune a tree without ruining his saw. Why? Because of the amount of shrapnel shot into it during the last war. Even the trees are thick with diseases we brought. The armies indoctrinate you and leave you here and they fuck off somewhere else to cause trouble, inky-dinky parlez-vous. We should all move out together.” “We can’t leave the Englishman.” “The Englishman left months ago, Hana, he’s with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit. He probably can’t even remember the woman he’s circling around, trying to talk about. He doesn’t know where the fuck he is.Disturbed by owners of houses he was robbing, he would clap his hands and converse frantically, flinging an expensive clock into the air and catching it in his hands, quickly asking them questions, about where things were.Only bonfires can dry the permanently wet and shadowed upper garden. The refuse of planks, rafters from prior shell-ings, dragged branches, weeds pulled up by Hana during the afternoons, scythed grass and nettles—all are brought here and burned by them during the late afternoon’s pivot into dusk. The damp fires steam and burn, and the plant-odoured smoke sidles into the bushes, up into the trees, then withers on the terrace in front of the house. It reaches the window of the English patient, who can hear the drift of voices, now and then a laugh from the smoky garden. He translates the smell, evolving it backwards to what had been burned. Rosemary, he thinks, milkweed, wormwood, something else is also there, scentless, perhaps the dog violet, or the false sunflower, which loves the slightly acidic soil of this hill.She carries it away from his sleeping body and puts it on the side table. Leaving it open she stands there, looking down, and reads. She promises herself she will not turn the page.She had blown out the other candles, lit just the night stub at the bedside table and sat there, the Englishman’s body facing her in silence after the wildness of his drunken speeches. “Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound. A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire.” She could hear the spill of the wax into the metal tray beside her. The sapper had gone through town to some reach of the hill where the explosion had taken place, and his unnecessary silence still angered her.That summer the English patient wore his hearing aid so he was alive to everything in the house. The amber shell hung within his ear with its translations of casual noises—the chair in the hall scraping against the floor, the click of the dog’s claws outside his room so he would turn up the volume and even hear its damn breathing, or the shout on the terrace from the sapper.The Englishman turns to him.He is always humming or whistling. “Who is whistling?” asks the English patient one night, having not met or even seen the newcomer. Always singing to himself as he lies upon the parapet looking up at a shift of clouds.He brushed the dust off the mapboard the wires lay on.“We’ve already got one crazy talker upstairs.” “Look at us—we sit here like the filthy rich in their filthy villas up in the filthy hills when the city gets too hot. It’s nine in the morning—the old guy upstairs is asleep. Hana’s obsessed with him. I am obsessed with the sanity of Hana, I’m obsessed with my ‘balance,’ and Kip will probably get blown up one of these days. Why? For whose sake? He’s twenty-six years old.So Tacitus began his Annals.“Don’t do this, okay, David?” She wrapped her hands softly around his.The hollowness and darkness of a well. The flare sprayed out of his hand like a wand. He pulleyed himself across to her face, his Queen of Sadness, and his brown hand reached out small against the giant neck.“I was born with a sundial in my head, right?” “And at night?” “Do they have moondials? Has anyone invented one? Perhaps every architect preparing a villa hides a moondial for thieves, like a necessary tithe.” “A good worry for the rich.” “Meet me at the moondial, David. A place where the weak can enter the strong.” “Like the English patient and you?” “I was almost going to have a baby a year ago.” Now that his mind is light and exact with the drug, she can whip around and he will be with her, thinking alongside her. And she is being open, not quite realizing she is awake and conversing, as if still speaking in a dream, as if his sneeze had been the sneeze in a dream.Only the sound of the dislodged rain.But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat.So he moves among them. She sees him in the distance of a defunct garden with the diviner or, if he has found something, unravelling that knot of wires and fuzes someone has left him like a terrible letter.She said, That was by Stephen Crane, he never came to the desert.She tucks her feet under her thin frock and rests her arms along her thighs. Everything is still. She hears the familiar hollow churn, restless in the pipe that is buried in the central column of the fountain. Then silence. Then suddenly there is a crash as the water arrives bursting around her.Why couldn’t he sleep? Why couldn’t he turn towards the girl, stop thinking everything was still half lit, hanging fire? In a painting of his imagining the field surrounding this embrace would have been in flames. He had once followed a sapper’s entrance into a mined house with binoculars. He had seen him brush a box of matches off the edge of a table and be enveloped by light for the half-second before the crumpling sound of the bomb reached him. What lightning was like inThey are only a step past the comfort she has given others in the temporary hospitals in Ortona or Monterchi. Her body for last warmth, her whisper for comfort, her needle for sleep. But the sapper’s body allows nothing to enter him that comes from another world. A boy in love who will not eat the food she gathers, who does not need or want the drug in a needle she could slide into his arm, as Caravaggio does, or those ointments of desert invention the Englishman craves, ointments and pollen to reassemble himself the way the Bedouin had done for him. Just for the comfort of sleep.And in some way on those long nights of reading and listening, she supposed, they had prepared themselves for the young soldier, the boy grown up, who would join them. But it was Hana who was the young boy in the story. And if Kip was anyone, he was the officer Creighton...” “Yes, yes, why don’t you scrounge a gramophone someday. By the way, I think this is called looting.” “My country taught me all this. It’s what I did for them during the war.” He went through the bombed chapel into the house.It could have been a mine. He turned back to the party and said, “It’s all right, it wasn’t a mine. That seemed to come from a cleared area.” “Turn the record over, Kip. Now I will introduce you to ‘How Long Has This Been Going On,’ written by—” He left an opening for the English patient, who was stymied, shaking his head, grinning with the wine in his mouth. “This alcohol will probably kill me.” “Nothing will kill you, my friend. You are pure carbon.” “Caravaggio!” “George and Ira Gershwin. Listen.” He and Hana were gliding to that sadness of the saxophone. He was right. The phrasing so slow, so drawn out, she could sense the musician did not wish to leave the small parlour of the introduction and enter the song, kept wanting to remain there,where the story had not yet begun, as if enamoured by a maid in the prologue. The Englishman murmured that the introductions to such songs were called “burdens.” Her cheek rested against the muscles of Caravaggio’s shoulder. She could feel those terrible paws on her back against the clean frock, and they moved in the limited space between the bed and the wall, between bed and door, between the bed and the window alcove that Kip sat within. Every now and then as they turned she would see his face. His knees up and his arms resting on them. Or he would be looking out of the window into darkness.The Englishman turned to her and said, “We’re getting along famously!” She was put藏书网 out that the sapper had strolled casually into this domain, seemed able to surround her, be everywhere. Kip, hearing from Caravaggio that the patient knew about guns, had begun to discuss the search for bombs with the Englishman. He had come up to the room and found him a reservoir of information about Allied and enemy weaponry. The Englishman not only knew about the absurd Italian fuzes but also knew the detailed topography of this region of Tuscany. Soon they were drawing outlines of bombs for each other and talking out the theory of each specific circuit.Always courteous. A little nod of his head. Hana sees him wash at a basin of collected rainwater, placed formally on top of a sundial. The garden tap, used in previous times for the seedbeds, is now dry. She sees his shirtless brown body as he tosses water over himself like a bird using its wing. During the day she notices mostly his arms in the short-sleeved army shirt and the rifle which is always with him, even though battles seem now to be over for them.He is a relief to her in his self-sufficiency, to all of them in the house, though Caravaggio grumbles at the sapper’s contin-uous humming of Western songs he has learned for himself in the last three years of the war. The other sapper, who had arrived with him in the rainstorm, Hardy he was called, is billeted elsewhere, nearer the town, though she has seen them working together, entering a garden with their wands of gad-getry to clear mines.He watches the man in the bed. He needs to know who this Englishman from the desert is, and reveal him for Hana’s sake.The landscape around him is just a temporary thing, there is no permanence to it. He simply acknowledges the possibility of rain, a certain odour from a shrub. As if his mind, even when unused, is radar, his eyes locating the choreography of inanimate objects for the quarter-mile around him, which is the killing radius of small arms. He studies the two onions he has pulled out of the earth with care, aware that gardens too have been mined by retreating armies.She had put on a clean but unironed dress. Each time they spun she saw the sapper singing to himself, following the lyrics. If they had had electricity they could have had a radio, they could have had news of the war somewhere. All they had was the crystal set belonging to Kip, but he had courteously left it in his tent. The English patient was discussing the unfortunate life of Lorenz Hart. Some of his best lyrics to “Manhattan,” he claimed, had been changed and he now broke into those verses
“We’ll bathe at B
The fish we’ll frighten
When we’re in.“Kiss me. It’s your mouth I’m most purely in love with. Your teeth.” And later, when his head has fallen to one side, towards the air by the tent’s opening, she has whispered aloud, heard only by herself, “Perhaps we should ask Caravaggio. My father told me once that Caravaggio was a man always in love. Not just in love but always sinking within it. Always confused.They were under the huge vault. The sergeant lit a flare, and the sapper lay on the floor and looked up through the rifle’s telescope, looked at the ochre faces as if he were searching for a brother in the crowd. The cross hairs shook along the biblical figures, the light dousing the coloured vestments and flesh darkened by hundreds of years of oil and candle smoke. And now this yellow gas smoke, which they knew was outrageous in this sanctuary, so the soldiers would be thrown out, would be remembered for abusing the permission they received to see the Great Hall, which they had come to, wading up beachheads and the one thousand skirmishes of small wars and the bombing of Monte Cassino and then walking in hushed politeness through the Raphael Stanze till they were here, finally, seventeen men who had landed in Sicily and fought their way up the ankle of the country to be here— where they were offered just a mostly dark hall. As if being in the presence of the place was enough.Immaculate, buckles shined, the sapper appears out of his tent, his turban symmetrically layered, the boots clean and banging into the wood or stone floors of the house. On a dime he turns from a problem he is working on and breaks into laughter. He seems unconsciously in love with his body, with his physicalness, bending over to pick up a slice of bread, his knuckles brushing the grass, even twirling the rifle absent-mindedly like a huge mace as he walks along the path of cypresses to meet the other sappers in the village.“How’s the old guy?” “He still hasn’t calmed down about that dog.” “Tell him he came with me.” “He’s not really sure you are staying here either. Thinks you might walk off with the china.” “Do you think he would like some wine? I managed to scrounge a bottle today.” “From?” “Do you want it or not?” “Let’s just have it now. Let’s forget him.” “Ah, the breakthrough!” “Not the breakthrough. I badly need a serious drink.” “Twenty years old. By the time I was twentyDavid Caravaggio—an absurd name for you, of courseHe is still very much a youth. He wolfs down food, jumps up to clear away his plate, allowing himself half an hour for lunch.But two days later Caravaggio stops him and says, Don’t follow me again. He begins to deny it, but the older man puts his hand across his lying face and quiets him. So the soldier knows Caravaggio was aware of him two nights before. In any case, the trailing was simply a remnant of a habit he had been taught during the war. Just as even now he desires to aim his rifle and fire and hit some target precisely. Again and again he aims at a nose on a statue or one of the brown hawks veering across the sky of the valley.The hound watched him as he paused at the open door, moving as little of its body as it had to, to acknowledge it was awake and guarding the place. Its quiet growl rising above Caravaggio’s snore.She was standing in a boat. Two men rowed. Two other men held her upright, and as they touched the beach the people of the town began to applaud from their dark and opened windows.The Englishman had wanted to see himself. Before she stepped into the room she carefully turned the reflection upon herself, not wanting the light to bounce indirectly from the window onto his face.He had walked back through the village, rain falling into pollarded trees of the town square untrimmed since the start of the war, past the strange statue of two men shaking hands on horseback. And now he was here, the candlelight swaying, altering her look so he could not tell what she thought. Wisdom or sadness or curiosity.“I lost the child. I mean, I had to lose it. The father was already dead. There was a war.” “Were you in Italy?” “In Sicily, about the time this happened. All through the time we came up the Adriatic behind the troops I thought of it. I had continued conversations with the child. I worked very hard in the hospitals and retreated from everybody around me. Except the child, who I shared everything with. In my head. I was talking to him while I bathed and nursed patients. I was a little crazy.” “And then your father died.” “Yes. Then Patrick died. I was in Pisa when I heard.” She was awake. Sitting up.Five minutes later he let the man down. He lit a flare for himself and hoisted his body up into the dome within the deep blue of the artificial sky. He remembered its gold stars from the time he had gazed on it with binoculars. Looking down he saw the mediaevalist sitting on a bench, exhausted. He was now aware of the depth of this church, not its height. The liquid sense of it.He is always washing his hands. Caravaggio at first thinks he is too fussy. “How did you get through a war?” Caravaggio laughs.He had paused by the French doors, leaned his head against the frame, then slid into the room and except for moments of lightning remained within the darkness. There was a girl standing, as if waiting for him, looking down at the keys she was playing. His eyes took in the room before they took her in, swept across it like a spray of radar. The metronome was ticking already, swaying innocently back and forth. There was no danger, no tiny wire. He stood there in his wet uniform, the young woman at first unaware of his entrance.“You were supposed to hold onto me!” “I did. Till you moved away.” “How long did you hold me?” “Until you moved. Until you needed to move.” “I wasn’t taken advantage of, was I?” Adding, “Just joking,” as she saw him beginning to blush.The sapper signed out a Triumph motorbike, strapped a crimson emergency light onto his arm, and they rode back the way they had come—back into and through the now innocent towns like Urbino and Anghiari, along the winding crest of the mountain ridge that was a spine down Italy, the old man bundled up behind him hugging him, and down the western slope towards Arezzo. The piazza at night was empty of troops, and the sapper parked in front of the church. He helped the mediaevalist off, collected his equipment and walked into the church. A colder darkness. A greater emptiness, the sound of his boots filling the area. Once more he smelled the old stone and wood. He lit three flares. He slung block and tackle across the columns above the nave, then fired a rivet already threaded with rope into a high wooden beam. The professor was watching him bemused, now and then peering up into the high darkness. The young sapper circled him and knotted a sling across his waist and shoulders, taped a small lit flare to the old man’s chest.“Do any of you know a dance called the Bosphorus hug?” the Englishman asked.At lunch there is Caravaggio’s avuncular glance at the objects on the blue handkerchief. There is probably some rare animal,Caravaggio thinks, who eats the same foods that this young soldier eats with his right hand, his fingers carrying it to his mouth. He uses the knife only to peel the skin from the onion, to slice fruit.The British army teaches him the skills and the Americans teach him further skills and the team of sappers are given lectures, are decorated and sent off into the rich hills. You are being used, boyo, as the Welsh say. I’m not staying here much longer. Iwant to take you home. Get the hell out of Dodge City.” “Stop it, David. He’ll survive.” “The sapper who got blown up the other night, what was his name?” Nothing from Kip.“In Canada?” “Yes, I knew her there.” They pass numerous bonfires on the sides of the road and Caravaggio diverts the young soldier’s attention to them. The sapper’s nickname is Kip. “Get Kip.” “Here comes Kip.” The name had attached itself to him curiously. In his first bomb disposal report in England some butter had marked his paper, and the officer had exclaimed, “What’s this? Kipper grease?” and laughter surrounded him. He had no idea what a kipper was, but the young Sikh had been thereby translated into a salty English fish. Within a week his real name, Kirpal Singh, had been forgotten. He hadn’t minded this. Lord Suffolk and his demolition team took to calling him by his nickname, which he preferred to the English habit of calling people by their surname.Kip was in a field north of the villa when he found the large mine, his foot—almost on the green wire as he crossed the orchard—twisting away, so he lost his balance and was on his knees. He lifted the wire until it was taut, then followed it, zigzagging among the trees.“You know we shall all be in serious trouble over this lighting of weapons in the Sistine Chapel. I should not have come here. But I also must thank Sergeant Shand, he was heroic to do it. No real damage has been done, I suppose.” “Did you see it? The face. Who was it?” “Ah yes, it is a great face.” “You saw it.” “Yes. Isaiah.”
When the Eighth Army got to Gabicce on the east coast, the sapper was head of night patrol. On the second night he received a signal over the shortwave that there was enemy movement in the water. The patrol sent out a shell and the water erupted, a rough warning shot. They did not hit anything, but in the white spray of the explosion he picked up a darker outline of movement. He raised the rifle and held the drifting shadow in his sights for a full minute, deciding not to shoot in order to see if there would be other movement nearby. The enemy was still camped up north, in Rimini, on the edge of the city. He had the shadow in his sights when the halo was suddenly illuminated around the head of the Virgin Mary. She was coming out of the sea.“You know why the army didn’t want you to stay here, with the English patient? Do you?” “An embarrassing marriage? My father complex?” She was smiling at him.Now, at dawn, under the scarred trees in the half-bombed gardens of the Villa San Girolamo, he takes a mouthful of water from his canteen. He pours tooth powder onto the brush and begins a ten-minute session of lackadaisical brushing as he wanders around looking down into the valley still buried in the mist, his mind curious rather than awestruck at the vista he happens now to be living above. The brushing of teeth, since he was a child, has always been for him an outdoor activity.I was told Patrick died in a dove-cot, Caravaggio said.Turn it— “I think he’s found a friend,” she said to Caravaggio.The sea hospital was created out of bathing cabins along the beach that tourists had rented at the turn of the century. During the heat the old Campari umbrellas were placed once more into their table sockets, and the bandaged and the wounded and the comatose would sit under them in the sea air and talk slowly or stare or talk all the time. The burned man noticed the young nurse, separate from the others. He was familiar with such dead glances, knew she was more patient than nurse. He spoke only to her when he needed something.It was always raining and cold, and there was no order but for the great maps of art that showed judgement, piety and sacrifice. The Eighth Army came upon river after river of destroyed bridges, and their sapper units clambered down banks on ladders of rope within enemy gunfire and swam or waded across. Food and tents were washed away. Men who were tied to equipment disappeared. Once across the river they tried to ascend out of the water. They sank their hands and wrists into the mud wall of the cliff face and hung there. They wanted the mud to harden and hold them.The sapper could see the cream-coloured face and the halo of small battery lights. He was lying on the concrete pillbox, between the town and the sea, watching her as the four men climbed out of the boat and lifted the five-foot-tall plaster statue into their arms. They walked up the beach, without pausing, no hesitation for the mines. Perhaps they had watched them being buried and charted them when the Germans had been there. Their feet sank into the sand. This was Gabicce Mare on May ,She could not read. She sat in the room with her eternally dying man, the small of her back still feeling bruised from an accidental slam against the wall during her dance with Caravaggio.“No such thing.” Kip watched the large shadows slide over the ceiling, over the painted wall. He struggled up and walked to the English patient to fill his empty glass, and touched the rim of his glass with the bottle in a toast. West wind coming into the room. And he turned suddenly, angry. A frail scent of cordite reaching him, a percentage of it in the air, and then he slipped out of the room, gesturing weariness, leaving Hana in the arms of Caravaggio.No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they can’t leave. But you two. We three. We’re free. How many sappers die? Why aren’t you dead yet?He hung over the water, his hands locked into the mud-bank. Character, that subtle art, disappeared among them during those days and nights, existed only