III Sometime a Fire

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    THE LAST MEDIAEVAL WAR was fought in Italy in  and

    Fortress towns o promontories which had been battled over sihe eighth tury 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 beh the tank ruts, you found blood-axe and spear. Monterchi, Cortona, Urbino, Arezzo, Sanse-polcro, Anghiari. And then the coast.

    Cats slept in the gun turrets looking south. English and Ameris and Indians and Australians and adians advanorth, and the shell traces exploded and dissolved in the air. When the armies assembled at Sansepolcro, a town whose symbol is the crossbow, some soldiers acquired them and fired them silently at night over the walls of the untaken city. Field Marshal Kesselring of the retreating German army seriously sidered the p of hot oil from battlements.

    Mediaeval scholars were pulled out of Oxford colleges and flown into Umbria. Their average age was sixty. They were billeted with the troops, and iings with strategiand they kept fetting the iion of the airplahey spoke of towns in terms of the art in them. At Monterchi there was the Madonna del Parto by Piero della Francesca, located in the chapel o the town graveyard. Whehirteenth-tury castle was finally taken during the spring rains, troops were billeted uhe high dome of the churd slept by the stone pulpit where Hercules slays the Hydra. There was only bad water. Many died of typhoid and other fevers. Looking up with service binoculars ihic church at Arezzo soldiers would e upon their porary faces in the Piero della Francesca frescoes. The Queen of Sheba versing with King Solomon. Nearby a twig from the Tree of Good and Evil ied into the mouth of the dead Adam. Years later this queen would realize that the bridge over the Siloam was made from the wood of this sacred tree.

    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 as were washed away. Men who were tied to equipment disappeared. Once across the river they tried to asd out of the water. They sank their hands and wrists into the mud wall of the cliff fad hung there. They wahe mud to harden and hold them.

    The young Sikh sapper put his cheek against the mud and thought of the Queen of Sheba’s face, the texture of her skin.

    There was no fort in this river except for his desire for her, whiehow kept him warm. He would pull the veil off her hair. He would put his right haween her ned olive blouse. He too was tired and sad, as the wise king and guilty queen he had seen in Arezzo two weeks earlier.

    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 in a book or on a painted wall. Who was sadder in that dome’s mural? He leaned forward to rest on the skin of her frail neck. He fell in love with her downcast eye. This woman who would someday know the saess es.

    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 fet him, never aowledge his existence or be aware of him, a Sikh, half a sapper’s ladder in the raiing 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 aered the coastal town of Cattolid the engineers had cleared the beaines 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 iurn for his kindness.

    The sapper signed out a Triumph motorbike, strapped a crimson emergency light onto his arm, and they rode back the way they had e—bato and through the now iowns like Urbino and Anghiari, along the winding crest of the mountain ridge that ine 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 blod tackle across the ns above the hen fired a rivet already threaded with rope into a high wooden beam. The professor was watg 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.

    He left him there by the union rail and noisily climbed the stairs to the upper level, where the other end of the ropewas. Holding onto it, he stepped off the baly into the darkness, and the old man was simultaneously swung up, hoisted up fast until, when the sapper touched ground, he swung idly in midair within three feet of the frescoed walls, the flare brightening a halo around him. Still holding the rope the sapper walked forward until the man swung to the right to hover in front of The Flight of Emperor Maxentius.

    Five minutes later he let the man dow 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 churot its height. The liquid sense of it.

    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.

    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 reizes the perfume of it.

    At first he will not e into the house at all. He walks past on some duty or other to do with the dismantling of mines.

    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 has various postures with the gun—half-staff, half a crook for his elbows when it is over his shoulders. He will turn, suddenly realizing she is watg him. He is a survivor of his fears, will step around anything suspicious, aowledging her look in this panorama as if claiming he  deal with it all.

    He is a relief to her in his self-sufficy, to all of them in the house, though Caravaggio grumbles at the sapper’s tin-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, he town, though she has seen them w together, entering a garden with their wands of gad-getry to clear mines.

    The dog has stuck by Caravaggio. The young soldier, who will run and leap with the dog along the path, refuses to give it food of any kind, feeling it should survive on its own. If he finds food he eats it himself. His courtesy goes only so far. Some nights he sleeps on the parapet that overlooks the valley, crawling into his tent only if it rains.

    He, for his part, witnesses Caravaggio’s wanderings at night. On two occasions the sapper trails Caravaggio at a distance.

    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 fad 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.

    He is still very much a youth. He wolfs down food, jumps up to clear away his plate, allowing himself half an hour for lunch.

    She has watched him at work, careful and timeless as a cat, in the orchard and within the rown garden that rises behind the house. She notices the darker brown skin of his wrist, which slides freely within the bahat ks sometimes when he drinks a cup of tea in front of her.

    He never speaks about the dahat es with his kind of searg. Now and then an explosis 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 er of her vision, and they will see the sapper waving lazily towards the house, not even turning around from the herb terrace.

    Once Caravaggio ehe 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 ers 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 er, hidden above the valance.

    He is always humming or whistling. “Who is whistling?” asks the English patient one night, having not met or evehe newer. Always singing to himself as he lies upon the parapet looking up at a shift of clouds.

    Wheeps into the seemingly empty villa he is noisy. He is the only one of them who has remained in uniform.

    Immaculate, buckles shihe sapper appears out of his tent, his turban symmetrically layered, the boots  and banging into the wood or stone floors of the house. On a dime he turns from a problem he is w on and breaks into laughter. He seems unsciously in love with his body, with his physiess, 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.

    He seems casually tent with this small group in the villa, some kind of loose star on the edge of their system. This is like a holiday for him after the war of mud and rivers and bridges. He ehe house only when invited in, just a tentative visitor, the way he had dohat first night when he had followed the faltering sound of Hana’s piano and e up the cypress-lined path and stepped into the library.

    He had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of a dao the piano player. The retreating army ofte 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 followed the noise of the piano, rushing up the hill with Hardy, climbed over the stone wall aered the villa As long as there was no pause it meant the player would not lean forward and pull out the thial band to set the metronome going.

    Most pencil bombs were hidden ihe easiest place to solder the thin layer of wire upright. Bombs were attached to taps, to the spines of books, they were drilled into fruit trees so an apple falling onto a lower branch would detohe tree,just as a hand gripping that branch would. He was uo look at a room or field without seeing the possibilities of ons there.

    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 laying. His eyes took in the room before they took her in, swept across it like a spray of radar. The metronome was tig already, swaying ily bad forth. There was no danger, no tiny wire. He stood there in his wet uniform, the young woman at first unaware of his entrance.

    Beside his tent the antenna of a crystal set is strung up into the trees. She  see the phosphreen from the radio dial if she looks over there at night with Caravaggio’s field glasses, the sapper’s shifting body c it up suddenly if he moves across the path of vision. He wears the portable traption during the day, just one earphoached to his head, the other loose under his , so he  hear sounds from the rest of the world that might be important to him. He will e into the house to pass on whatever information he has picked up that he thinks might be iing to them. Oie afternoon he annouhat the bandleader Glenn Miller has died, his plane having crashed somewhere between England and France.

    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.

    He is always washing his hands. Caravaggio at first thinks he is too fussy. “How did you get through a war?” Caravaggio laughs.

    “I grew up in India, Uncle. You wash your hands all the time. Before all meals. A habit. I was born in the Punjab.” “I’m from Upper America,” she says.

    He sleeps half in and half out of the tent. She sees his hands remove the earphone and drop it onto his lap.

    Then Hana puts down the glasses and turns away.

    They were uhe 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 searg 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 dle smoke. And now this yellow gas smoke, which they knew was eous 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 e to, wading up beachheads and the ohousand skirmishes of small wars and the bombing of Monte Cassino and then walking in hushed politehrough the Raphael Staill they were here, finally, seventeen men who had landed in Sicily and fought their  the ankle of the try to be here— where they were offered just a mostly dark hall. As if being in the presence of the place was enough.

    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 p off his fist, and stood there for the length of its burn like that.

    The rest of them stood looking up at the figures and faces crowded onto the ceiling that emerged in the light. But the young sapper was already on his back, the rifle aimed, his eye almost brushing the beards of Noah and Abraham and the variety of demons until he reached the great fad was stilled by it, the face like a spear, wise, unfiving.

    The guards were yelling at the entrand he could hear the running steps, just ahirty seds left on the flare. He rolled over and hahe rifle to the padre. “That one. Who is he? At three o’cloorthwest, who is he? Quick, the flare is almost out.” The padre cradled the rifle and swept it over to the er, and the flare died.

    He returhe rifle to the young Sikh.

    “You know we shall all be in serious trouble over this lighting of ons in the Sistine Chapel. I should not have e 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 Gabic the east coast, the sapper was head of night patrol. On the sed night he received a signal over the shortwave that there was enemy movement ier. 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 ahe drifting shadow in his sights for a full minute, deg 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 ing out of the sea.

    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 sapper could see the cream-coloured fad the halo of small battery lights. He was lying on the crete pillbox, betweeown and the sea, watg 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, ation 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 ,

    Mariival of the Virgin Mary.

    Adults and children were oreets. 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.

    He slid from the darkness, the mortar tube strapped to his back, carrying the rifle in his hands. In his turban and with the ons he was a shock to them. They had not expected him to emerge too out of the no-man’s-land of the beach.

    He raised his rifle and picked up her fa the gun sight —ageless, without sexuality, the fround of the men’s dark hands reag intht, the gracious nod of the twenty small light bulbs. The figure wore a pale blue cloak, her left knee raised slightly to suggest drapery.

    They were not romantic people. They had survived the Fascists, the English, Gauls, Goths and Germans. They had been owned so often it meant nothing. But this blue and cream plaster figure had e out of the sea, laced in a grape truck full of flowers, while the band marched ahead of her in silence. Whatever prote he was supposed to provide for this town was meaningless. He couldn’t walk among their children in white dresses with these guns.

    He moved oreet south of them and walked at the speed of the statue’s movement, so they reached the joining streets at the same time. He raised his rifle to pick up her face again in his sights. It all ended on a promontory overlooking the sea, where they left her auro their homes. None of them was aware of his tinued presen the periphery.

    Her face was still lit. The four men who had brought her by boat sat in a square around her like sehe battery attached to her back began to fade; it died at about four-thirty in the m. He gla his watch then. He picked up the men with the rifle telescope. Two were asleep. He swung the sights up to her fad studied her again. A different look in the fading light around her. A face whi the darkness looked more like someone he knew. A sister. Someday a daughter. If he could have parted with it, the sapper would have left something there as his gesture. But he had his own faith after all.

    Caravaggio ehe library. He has been spending most afternoons there. As always, books are mystical creatures to him.

    He plucks o and opens it to the title page. He is in the room about five minutes before he hears a slight groan.

    He turns and sees Hana asleep on the sofa. He closes the book and leans back against the thigh-high ledge uhe shelves.

    She is curled up, her left cheek on the dusty brocade and her right arm up towards her face, a fist against her jaw. Her eyebrows shift, the face trating within sleep.

    When he had first seen her after all this time she had looked taut, boiled down to just body enough to get her through this effitly. Her body had been in a war and, as in love, it had used every part of itself.

    He sneezed out loud, and when he looked up from the movement of his tossed-down head she was awake, the eyes open staring ahead at him. “Guess what time it is.” “About four-oh-five. No, four-oh-seven,” she said. It was an old game between a man and a child. He slipped out of the room to look for the clock, and by his movement and assuredness she could tell he had retly taken morphine, was refreshed and precise, with his familiar fidence. She sat up and smiled when he came back shaking his head with wo her accuracy.

    “I was born with a sundial in my head, right?” “And at night?” “Do they have moondials? Has anyone ied 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  ehe strong.” “Like the English patient and you?” “I was almost going to have a baby a year ago.” Now that his mind is light a with the drug, she  whip around and he will be with her, thinking alongside her. And she is being open, not quite realizing she is awake and versing, as if still speaking in a dream, as if his sneeze had been the sneeze in a dream.

    Caravaggio is familiar with this state. He has ofte people at the moondial. Disturbing them at two a.m. as a whole bedroom cupboard came crashing down by mistake. Such shocks, he discovered, kept them away from fear and violence.

    Disturbed by owners of houses he was robbing, he would clap his hands and verse frantically, flinging an expensive cloto the air and catg it in his hands, quickly asking them questions, about where things were.

    “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 tinued versations with the child. I worked very hard in the hospitals areated 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.

    “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 damimental.” “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 lihe thirty-six steps outside the chapel wrestled with it. Drops of earlier rain nudged off, falling with a tig sound upowo of them sitting on the balustrade by the steps. It was long after midnight. She was lying on the crete ledge, and he paced or leaned out looking down into the valley.

    Only the sound of the dislodged rain.

    “When did you stop talking to the baby?” “It all got too busy, suddenly. Troops were going into battles at the More and then into Urbino. Maybe in Urbino I stopped. You felt you could be shot anytime there, not just if you were a soldier, but a priest or  was a rabbit warren, those narrow tilted streets. Soldiers were ing in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying. It was important to remember their names. But I kept seeing the child whehey died. Being washed away. Some would sit up and rip all their dressings off trying to breathe better. Some would be worried about tiny scratches on their arms when they died. Then the bubble in the mouth. That little pop. I leaned forward to close a dead soldier’s eyes, and he opehem and sneered, “’t wait to have me dead? You bitchl” He sat up and swept everything on my tray to the floor. So furious. Who would want to die like that? To die with that kind of anger. You bitchl After that I always waited for the bubble in their mouths. I know death now, David. I know all the smells, I know how to divert them from agony. When to give the quick jolt of morphine in a major vein. The saline solution. To make them empty their bowels before they die. Every damn general should have had my job. Every damn general. It should have been a prerequisite for any river crossing. Who the hell were we to be given this responsibility, expected to be wise as old priests, to know how to lead people towards something no one wanted and somehow make them feel fortable. I could never believe in all those services they gave for the dead. Their vulgar rhetoric. How dare they! How dare they talk like that about a human being dying.” There was no light, all lamps out, the sky mostly cloud-hidden. It was safer not to draw attention to the civilisation of existing homes. They were used to walking the grounds of the house in darkness.

    “You know why the army didn’t want you to stay here, with the English patient? Do you?” “An embarrassing marriage? My father plex?” She was smiling at him.

    “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 a.” “Do you think he would like some wine? I mae a bottle today.” “From?” “Do you want it or not?” “Let’s just have it now. Let’s fet him.” “Ah, the breakthrough!” “Not the breakthrough. I badly need a serious drink.” “Twenty years old. By the time I was twenty

    ..” “Yes, yes, why don’t you sge a gramophone someday. By the way, I think this is called looting.” “My try taught me all this. It’s what I did for them during the war.” He went through the bombed chapel into the house.

    Hana sat up, slightly dizzy, off balance. “And look what they did to you,” she said to herself.

    Even among those she worked closely with she hardly talked during the war. She needed an uncle, a member of the family’ She he 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 medie chest, breaking the glass tab, tightening a bootlace round his arm and iing the morphine quickly into himself, iime it took for him to turn around.

    At night, in the mountains around them, even by ten o’clock, only the earth is dark. Clear grey sky and the green hills.

    “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 sidered 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 wao go home and there was no o 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 bao 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, sihought 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 Franciss’ garden during the time he spent there sweeping the plaines.

    He peeled the onions with the same knife he used to strip rubber from a fuze wire. This was followed by fruit. Caravaggio suspected he had gohrough the whole invasion never eating from a mess teen.

    In fact he had always been dutifully in li the crack of dawn, holding out his cup for the English tea he loved, adding to it his own supply of densed 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 asta by nine a.m.

    Now, at dawn, uhe scarred trees in the half-bombed gardens of the Villa San Girolamo, he takes a mouthful of water from his teen. 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 tharuck 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.

    The landscape around him is just a temporary thing, there is no permao it. He simply aowledges the possibility of rain, a certain odour from a shrub. As if his mind, even when unused, is radar, his eyes log the chraphy 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.

    At lunch there is Caravaggio’s avuncular gla 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 two men take a trip by cart down into the valley to pick up a sack of flour. Also, the soldier has to deliver maps of the cleared areas to headquarters at San Domenico. Finding it difficult to ask questions about each other, they speak about Hana.

    There are many questions before the older man admits having known her before the war.

    “In ada?” “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 niame is Kip. “Get Kip.” “Here es 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 fotten. He hadn’t mihis. Lord Suffolk and his demolitioook to calling him by his niame, which he preferred to the English habit of calling people by their surname.

    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 he 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 damhing, or the shout oerrace from the sapper.

    The English patient within a few days of the young soldier’s arrival had thus bee aware of his presence around the house, though Hahem separate, knowing they would probably not like each other.

    But she ehe 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 on had been sewn along his shoulders and arms and into his small brown wrists.

    The Englishman turo her and said, “We’re getting along famously!” She ut 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 e up to the room and found him a reservoir of information about Allied and enemy onry. The Englishman not only knew about the absurd Italian fuzes but also khe detailed topography of this region of Tusy. Soon they were drawing outlines of bombs for each other and talking out the theory of each specific circuit.

    “The Italian fuzes seem to be put iically. And not always at the tail.” “Well, that depends. The ones made in Naples are that way, but the factories in Rome follow the German system. Of course, Naples, going back to the fifteenth tury

    ..” It meant having to listen to the patient talk in his circuitous way, and the young soldier was not used to remaining still and silent. He would get restless a interrupting the pauses and silehe Englishman always allowed himself, trying to energize the train of thought. The soldier rolled his head bad looked at the ceiling.

    “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.

    When Caravaggio passed her in the hall she was smiling. They stood in the hall and listeo the versation ihe room.

    Did I tell you my cept ilian man, Kip? Let me...

    Is your hearing aid on?

    What?

    Turn it— “I think he’s found a friend,” she said tgio.

    She walks out into the sunlight and the courtyard. At nooaps deliver water into the villa’s fountain and for twenty mi bursts forth. She removes her shoes, climbs into the dry bowl of the fountain and waits.

    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, thereat uned. She notices where water spiders have ed beh the upper bowl of the fountain, her fa the shade of its . She likes to sit in this cradle of stohe 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 trast. She brushes her arms and toes free of dust, of the crimp of shoes, and stretches.

    Too many men in the house. Her mouth leans against the bare arm of her shoulder. She smells her skin, the familiarity of it.

    One’s own taste and flavour. She remembers when she had first grown aware of it, somewhere ieens—it seemed a place rather than a time—kissing her forearm to practise kissing, smelling her wrist or bending down to her thigh. Breathing into her own cupped hands so breath would bounce back towards her nose. She rubs her bare white feet now against the brindle colour of the fountain. The sapper has told her about statues he came across during the fighting, how he had slept beside one who was a grieving angel, half male, half female, that he had fouiful. He had lain back, looking at the body, and for the first time during the war felt at peace.

    She sniffs the stohe oth smell of it.

    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  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. Uhe sapper, her father was never fully fortable in the world. His versations lost some of their syllables out of shyness. In any of Patrick’s sentences, hermother had plained, 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 uainty 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 fident, even raucous.

    Did he move towards his death with the same casual sense of being there at an act? Or in fury? He was the least furious man she knew, hating argument, just walking out of a room if someone spoke badly of Roosevelt or Tim Buck or praised certain Toronto mayors. He had tempted to vert anyone in his life, just bandaging or celebratis that occurred near him. That was all. A novel is a mirror walking down a road. She had read that in one of the books the English patient reended, and that was the way she remembered her father—whenever she collected the moments of him—stopping his car under one specific bridge in Toronto north of Pottery Road at midnight and tellihat this was where the starlings and pigeons unfortably and not too happily shared the rafters during the night. So they had paused there on a summer night and leaheir heads out into the racket of noise and sleepy chirpings.

    I was told Patrick died in a dove-cot, Caravaggio said.

    Her father loved a city of his own iion, whose streets and walls and borders he and his friends had painted. He ruly stepped out of that world. She realizes everything she knew about the real world she learned on her own or from Caravaggio or, during the time they lived together, from her stepmother, Clara. Clara, who had once been an actress, the articulate one, who had articulated fury when they all left for the war. All through the last year in Italy she has carried the letters from Clara. Letters she knows were written on a pink ro an island in Geian Bay, written with the wind ing over the water and curling the paper of her notebook before she finally tore the pages out and put them in an envelope for Hana. She carried them in her suitcase, each taining a flake of pink rod that wind. But she has never answered them.

    She has missed Clara with a woe but is uo write to her, now, after all that has happeo her. She ot bear to talk of or even aowledge the death of Patrick.

    And now, on this ti, the war having travelled elsewhere, the nunneries and churches that were turned briefly into hospitals are solitary, cut off in the hills of Tusy and Umbria. They hold the remnants of war societies, small moraines left by a vast glacier. All around them now is the holy forest.

    She tucks her feet under her thin frod rests her arms alohighs. Everything is still. She hears the familiar hollow , restless in the pipe that is buried in the tral n of the fountain. Then silehen suddenly there is a crash as the water arrives bursting around her.

    The tales Hana had read to the English patient, travelling with the old wanderer in Kim or with Fabrizio in The Charterhouse of Parma, had intoxicated them in a swirl of armies and horses and wagons—those running away from or running towards a war. Stacked in one er of his bedroom were other books she had read to him whose landscapes they have already walked through.

    Many books open with an author’s assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle.

    I begin my work at the time when Servius Galba was sul.... 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.

    So Tacitus began his Annals.

    But novels enced 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 guhe other a hat.

    When she begins a book she ehrough stilted doorways inte courtyards. Parma and Paris and India spread their carpets.

    He sat, in defianunicipal 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 Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the queror’s loot.

    “Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the as fall so you  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 listeo birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quid North Ameri. 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 happeo fall asleep she would tinue, 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 Beo the east and Chilianwallah in the north of the Punjab.

    (All this occurred before the sapper eheir lives, as if out of this fi. As if the pages of Kipling had been rubbed in the night like a magic lamp. A drug of wonders.) She had turned from the ending of Kirn, with its delicate and holy sentences—and now  di—and picked up the patient’s notebook, the book he had somehow mao carry with him out of the fire. The book splayed open, almost twice its inal thiess.

    There was thin paper from a Bible, torn out and glued into the text.

    King David was old and stri in years and they covered him with clothes but he received .

    Whereupon his servants said, Let there be sought for the King a young virgin: a her cherish him, a her lie in this bosom, that our King may have heat.

    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.

    The ———— tribe that had saved the burned pilht him into the British base at Siwa in

    He was moved in the midnight ambularain from the Wester to Tunis, then shipped to Italy. At that time of the war there were hundreds of soldiers lost from themselves, more ihan devious. Those who claimed to be uain of their nationalities were housed in pounds in Tirrenia, where the sea hospital was. The burned pilot was one more enigma, with no identification, unreizable. In the criminal pound nearby they kept the Ameri poet Ezra Pound in a cage, where he hid on his body and pockets, moving it daily for his own image of security, the propeller of eucalyptus he had bent dolucked from his traitarden when he was arrested. “Eucalyptus that is for memory.” “You should be trying to trick me,” the burned pilot told his interrogators, “make me speak German, which I , by the way, ask me about Don Bradman. Ask me about Marmite, the great Gertrude Jekyll.” He knew where every Giotto was in Europe, and most of the places where a person could find ving trompe ’oeil.

    The sea hospital was created out of bathing s along the beach that tourists had re the turn of the tury. During the heat the old Campari umbrellas were placed once more into their table sockets, and the bandaged and the wounded and the atose would sit uhem 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.

    He was interrogated again. Everything about him was very English except for the fact that his skin was tarred black, a bogman from history among the interrogating officers.

    They asked him where the Allies stood in Italy, and he said he assumed they had taken Flore were held up by the hill towns north of them. The Gothie. “Your division is stu Florend ot get past bases like Prato and Fiesole for instance because the Germans have barracked themselves into villas and vents and they are brilliantly defended. It’s an old story—the Crusaders made the same mistake against the Saras. And like them you now he 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.

    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 onplace 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 here 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 refereo cave art allery art or journal notes in his own small handwriting. “There are no brues,” the English patient says to Hana as she bends over him, “among Florentine Madonnas.” The book is in his hands.

    She carries it away from his sleeping body and puts it on the side table. Leaving it opeands there, looking down, and reads. She promises herself she will not turn the page.

    May

    I will read you a poem, Clifton’s wife said, in her formal voice, which is how she always seems unless you are very close to her.

    We were all at the southern campsite, within the firelight.

    I walked in a desert.

    And I cried: “Ah, God, take me from this place!” A voice said: “It is .” I cried: “Well, but— The sand, the heat, the vat horizon.” A voice said: “It is .” No one said anything.

    She said, That was by Stephen e, he never came to the desert.

    He came to the desert, Madox said.

    July

    There are betrayals in war that are childlike pared with our humarayals during peace. The new lover ehe habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in new light. This is doh nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an an of fire.

    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  fool no one,  fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit of social graces. It is a ing of oneself and the past.

    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 as. 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.

    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 baland was on his knees. He lifted the wire until it was taut, then followed it, zigzagging among the trees.

    He sat down at the source with the vas bag on his lap. The mine shocked him. They had covered it with crete. They had laid the explosive there and then plastered wet crete over it to disguise its meism and what its strength was. There was a bare tree about four yards away. Aree about ten yards away. Two months’ grass had growhe crete ball.

    He opened his bag and with scissors clipped the grass away. He laced a small hammock of rope around it and after attag a rope and pulley to the tree branch slowly lifted the crete into the air. Two wires led from the crete towards the earth.

    He sat down, leaned against the tree and looked at it. Speed did not matter now. He pulled the crystal set out of the bag and placed the earphoo his head. Soon the radio was filling him with Ameri musi the AIF station. Two and a half minutes average for each song or danumber. He could work his way back along “A String of Pearls,” “C-Jam Blues” and other tuo discover how long he had been there, receiving the background music subsciously.

    Noise did not matter. There would be no faint tigs or cligs to signal danger on this kind of bomb. The distra of music helped him towards clear thought, to the possible forms of structure in the mio the personality that had laid the city of threads and then poured wet crete over it.

    The tightening of the crete ball in midair, braced with a sed rope, meant the two wires would not pull away, no matter how hard he attacked it. He stood up and began to chisel the disguised mily, blowing away loose grain with his mouth, using the feather stick, chipping more crete off. He stopped his focus only when the music slipped off the wavelength and he had to realigation, bringing clarity back to the swing tunes. Very slowly he uhed the series of wires. There were six wires jumbled up, tied together, all painted black.

    He brushed the dust off the mapboard the wires lay on.

    Six black wires. When he was a child his father had bunched up his fingers and, disguising all but the tips of them, made him guess which was the long one. His own small finger would touch his choice, and his father’s hand would unfold, blossoming, to reveal the boy’s mistake. One could of course make a red wire ive. But this oppo had not just creted the thing but painted all the characters black. Kip was being pulled into a psychological vortex. With the knife he began to scrape the paint free, revealing a red, a blue, a green. Would his oppo have also switched them? He’d have to set up a detour with black wire of his own like an oxbow river and thehe loop for positive ative power. Then he would check it for fading power and know where the danger lay.

    Hana was carrying a long mirror in front of her down the hall. She would pause because of the weight of it and then move forward, the mirror refleg the old dark pink of the passageway.

    The Englishman had wao see himself. Before she stepped into the room she carefully turhe refle upon herself, not wanting the light to boundirectly from the window onto his face.

    He lay there in his dark skin, the only palehe hearing aid in his ear and the seeming blaze of light from his pillow. He pushed the sheets down with his hands. Here, do this, pushing as far as he could, and Hana flicked the sheet to the base of the bed.

    She stood on a chair at the foot of the bed and slowly tilted the mirror down at him. She was in this position, her hands braced out in front of her, when she heard the faint shouts.

    She ighem at first. The house often picked up noise from the valley. The use of megaphones by the clearance military had stantly unnerved her when she was living aloh the English patient.

    “Keep the mirror still, my dear,” he said.

    “I think there is someone shouting. Do you hear it?” His left hand turned up the hearing aid.

    “It’s the boy. You’d better go and find out.” She leahe mirrainst the wall and rushed down the corridor. She paused outside waiting for the  yell. When it came she took off through the garden and into the fields above the house.

    He stood, his hands raised above him as if he were holding a giant cobweb. He was shaking his head to get free of the earphones. As she ran towards him he yelled at her to circle to the left, there were mine wires all over the place. She stopped. It was a walk she had taken numerous times with no sense of danger. She raised her skirt and moved forward, watg her feet as they ehe long grass.

    His hands were still ></a>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 dest chord. He needed a third hand to e one of them and he o go bace more to the fuze head. He passed the wires carefully to her and dropped his arms, getting blood bato them.

    “I’ll take them ba a minute.” “It’s okay.” “Keep very still.” He opened up his satchel for the Geiger ter and mag. He ran the dial up and along the wires she was holding. No swerve to ive. No clue. Nothing. He stepped backwards, w where the trick could be.

    “Let me tape those to the tree, and you leave.” “No. I’ll hold it. They won’t reach the tree.” “No.” “Kip—I  hold them.” “We have an impasse. There’s a joke. I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know how plete 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 ter alongside it. Then he was crouched about ten yards from her, thinking, now and then looking up, looking right through her, watg 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 ulling the radio earphones on over his head, so thesound came bato him fully, filling him with clarity. He schemed along the different paths of the wire and swerved into the volutions of their knots, the sudden ers, the buried switches that translated them from positive to ive. 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.

    “You’d better go.” “You need another hand to cut it, don’t you?” “I  attach it to the tree.” “I’ll hold it.” He picked the wire like a thin adder from her left hand. Theher. 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 bae of the wires. He was not scious of this at all, her presence erased. He travelled the path of the bomb fuze again, alongside the mind that had chraphed this, toug all the key points, seeing the X ray of it, the band music filling everything else.

    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 touething human. She was saying something he couldn’t hear, and she reached forward and pulled the earphones off so silenvaded. 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.

    She was looking at him, quizzical, waiting for his ao what she had said, but he hadn’t heard her. She shook her head and sat dowarted colleg various objects around himself, putting them into his satchel. She looked up into the tree and then only by ce looked back down and saw his hands shaking, tense and hard like an epileptic’s, his breathing deep and fast, over in a moment. He was crouched over.

    “Did you hear what I said?” “No. What was it?” “I thought I was going to die. I wao 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 wao touch that bo your neck, collarbo’s like a small hard wing under your skin. I wao 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 uhis tree, put my eye against your collarbone I just want to y 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 ’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.

    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. Glang dowiced she still had the wire, she must have picked it up again.

    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, uo 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 differen 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 ess of a captured churd 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 shadoeared so soft. He would place his head on the lap of such creatures and release himself into sleep.

    She suddenly let more weight onto him. And now her breathing stretched deeper, like the voice of a cello. He watched her sleeping face. He was still ahe girl had stayed with him when he defused the bomb, as if by that she had made him owe her something. Making him feel irospect responsible for her, though there was no thought of that at the time. As if that could usefully influence what he chose to do with a mine.

    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’s breath; her eyebrows rode upument, a small fury in her dreaming.

    He turned his eyes away, up towards the tree and the sky of white cloud. Her hand gripped him as mud had g along the bank of the Moro River, his fist plunging into the wet earth to stop himself slipping bato the already crossed torrent.

    If he were a hero in <cite>藏书网</cite>a painting, he could claim a just sleep.

    But as even she had said, he was the brownness of a rock, the brownness of a muddy storm-fed river. And something in him made him step back from even the naive innoce of such a remark. The successful defusing of a bomb ended novels. Wise white fatherly men shook hands, were aowledged, and limped away, having been coaxed out of solitude for this special occasion. But he rofessional. And he remaihe fhe Sikh. His only human and personal tact was this enemy who had made the bomb aed brushing his tracks with a branch behind him.

    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 folloper’s entrao 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-sed before the crumpling sound of the bomb reached him. What lightning was like in

    How could he trust even this circle of elasti the sleeve of the girl’s frock that gripped her arm? Or the rattle in her intimate breath asdeep as stones within a river.

    She woke wheerpillar 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 faot toug her skin, and placed it in the grass. She noticed he had already packed up his equipment. He moved bad sat against the tree, watg her as she rolled slowly onto her bad then stretched, holding that moment for as long as she could. It must have been afternoon, the suhere. She leaned her head bad looked at him.

    “You were supposed to hold onto me!” “I did. Till you moved away.” “How long did you hold me?” “Until you moved. Until you o move.” “I wasn’t taken advantage of, was I?” Adding, “Just joking,” as she saw him beginning to blush.

    “Do you want to go down to the house?” “Yes, I’m hungry.” She could hardly stand up, the dazzle of suired legs. How long they had been there she still didn’t know. She could not fet the depth of her sleep, the lightness of the plummet.

    A party began in the English patient’s room when Caravaggio revealed the gramophone he had found somewhere.

    “I will use it to teach you to dance, Hana. Not what your young friend there knows. I have seen and turned my ba certain dances. But this tune, ‘How Long Has This Been Going On,’ is one of the great songs because the introdu’s melody is purer than the song it introduces. And only great jazzmen have aowledged that. Now, we  have this party oerrace, which would allow us to ihe dog, or we  ihe Englishman and have it in the bedroom upstairs. Your young friend who doesn’t drink mao find bottles of wierday in San Domenico. We have not just music. Give me your arm. No. First we must chalk the floor and practise. Three main steps—owo-three—now give me your arm. What happeo 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 plicated to explain. Night fell fast, night filled up the valley and then the mountains and they were left once more with lanterns.

    They were shuffling together in the corridors towards the English patient’s bedroom, Caravaggio carrying the gramophone, one hand holding its arm and needle.

    “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 wao dah the sapper.

    “Not until I’ve taught you, dear worm.” She looked up at Caravaggiely; that was her father’s term of endearment for her. He pulled her into his thick grizzled embrad said “dear worm” again, and began the dang lesson.

    She had put on a  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 lyrianhattan,” he claimed, had been ged and he now broke into those verses  “We’ll bathe at Brighton;  The fish we’ll frighten  When we’re in.

    Your bathing suit so thin  Will make the shellfish grin  Fin to fin.

    “Splendid lines, aic, 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 wihe English patient said, and the sapper picked up a glass of water, flung the tents through the windooured wine for the Englishman. “This is my first drink 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.

    It could have been a mine. He turned back to the party and said, “It’s all right, it wasn’t a mihat seemed to e 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!” “Gee 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 sehe musi did not wish to leave the small parlour of the introdu aer 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 introdus 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  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.

    “Do any of you know a dance called the Bosphorus hug?” the Englishman asked.

    “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 ing into the room. Aurned suddenly, angry. A frail st of cordite reag him, a pertage of it in the air, and then he slipped out of the room, gesturing weariness, leaving Hana in the arms of Caravaggio.

    There was no light with him as he ran along the dark hall. He scooped up the satchel, was out of the house and rag dowhirty-six chapel steps to the road, just running, celling the thought of exhaustion from 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 act  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 stohey had a hardness and clarity withiheir decisions frightening even to others in the same trade. Kip had reized that quality among gem-cutters but never in himself, though he khers saw it there. The sappers never became familiar with each other. Whealked 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 ihree 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 irl.

    He had learned diagrams of order when he joihe army, blueprints that became more and more plicated, 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 e of information and realign it, see all the false dests. He was by nature servative but able also to imagihe worst devices, the capacity for act in a room—a plum on a table, a child approag aing 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 chraphy. The rogue gaze could see the buried line uhe surface, how a knot might weave when out of sight.

    He turned away from mystery books with irritation, able to pinpoint villains with too much ease. He was most fortable with men who had the abstract madness of autodidacts, like his mentor, Lord Suffolk, like the English patient.

    He did not yet have a faith in books. I 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 evehat book together, Hana’s voice slow when wind flattehe dle flame beside her, the page dark for a moment.

    He squatted in a er of the ging -waiting-room, rapt from all other thoughts; hands folded in lap, and pupils -tracted to pin-points. In a minute—in another half sed— he felt he would arrive at the solution of the tremendous puzzle...

    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 iory. And if Kip was anyone, he was the officer Creighton.

    A book, a map of knots, a fuze board, a room of four people in an abandoned villa lit only by dlelight and now and then light from a storm, now and then the possible light from an explosion. The mountains and hills and Florence blinded without electricity. dlelight travels less than fifty yards. From a greater distahere was nothihat beloo the outside world. They had celebrated in this evening’s brief dan the English patient’s room their own simple adventures—Hana her sleep, Caravaggio his “finding” of the gramophone, and Kip a difficult defusing, though he had almost fotten such a moment already. He was someone who felt unfortable in celebrations, in victories.

    Just fifty yards away, there had been no representation of them in the world, no sound ht of them from the valley’s eye as Hana’s and Caravaggio’s shadows glided across the walls and Kip sat fortably encased in the alcove and the English patient sipped his wine a its spirit percolate through his unused body so it was quickly drunk, his voice bringing forth the whistle of a desert fing forth a flutter of the English wood thrush he said was found only in Essex, for it thrived in the viity of lavender and wormwood. All of the burned man’s desire was in the brain, the sapper had been thinking to himself, sitting ione alcove. Theurned 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 mihat seemed to e from a cleared area”—prepared to wait till the smell of the cordite reached him.

    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 sahere was so little light in the room, just the dle at the table where she sat, not reading tonight; he thought perhaps she was slightly drunk.

    He had returned from the source of the mine explosion to find Caravaggio asleep on the library sofa with the dog in his arms.

    The hound watched him as he paused at the open door, moving as little of its body as it had to, to aowledge it was awake and guarding the place. Its quiet growl rising above Caravaggio’s snore.

    He 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 sat in the chair, one elbow oable where the low dle sprayed its light, her head leaning back. He lowered hisboots to the floor and came silently into the room, where the party had been going on three hours earlier. He could smell alcohol in the air. She put her fio her lips as he entered and then poio the patient. He wouldn’t hear Kip’s silent walk. The sapper sat in the well of the window again. If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and plex journey. It was a very wide world. And the Englishman woke at any sound, the hearing aid turo full level when he slept, so he could be secure in his own awareness. The girl’s eyes darted around and then were still when she faced Kip in the regle of window.

    He had found the location of the death and what was left there and they had buried his sed-in-and, Hardy. And afterwards he kept thinking of the girl that afternoon, suddenly terrified for her, angry at her for involving herself. She had tried to damage her life so casually. She stared. Her last unication had been the fio her lips. He leaned over and wiped the side of his cheek against the lanyard on his shoulder.

    He had walked back through the village, rain falling into pollarded trees of the town square untrimmed sihe start of the ast the straatue of two men shaking hands on horseback. And now he was here, the dlelight swaying, altering her look so he could not tell what she thought. Wisdom or sadness or curiosity.

    If she had been reading or if she had been bending over the Englishman, he would have o her and probably left, but he is now watg Hana as someone young and aloonight, gazing at the se of the mine blast, he had begun to fear her presence during the afternoon dismantling. He had to remove it, or she would be with him each time he approached a fuze. He would be pregnant with her. When he worked, clarity and music filled him, the human world extinguished. Now she was within him or on his shoulder, the way he had once seen a live goat being carried by an officer out of a tuhey were attempting to flood.

    No.

    That wasn’t true. He wanted Hana’s shoulder, wao place his palm over it as he had done in the sunlight when she slept and he had lain there as if in someone’s rifle sights, awkward with her. Within the imaginary painter’s landscape. He did not want fort but he wao surround the girl with it, to guide her from this room. He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weako fit himself against. her of them was willing to reveal such a possibility to the other. Hana sat so still. She looked at him, and the dle wavered and altered her look. He was unaware that for her he was just a silhouette, his slight body and his skin part of the darkness.

    Earlier, when she saw that he had left the window alcove, she had been enraged. Knowing that he roteg them like children from the mine. She had g closer t-gio. It had been an insult. And tonight the growing exhilaration of the evening didn’t permit her to read after Caravaggio had goo bed, stopping to rifle through her medie 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.

    She had blown out the other dles, lit just the night stub at the bedside table and sat there, the Englishman’s body fag her in sileer 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 gohrough town to some reach of the hill where the explosion had taken place, and his unnecessary sileill angered her.

    She could not read. She sat in the room with her eternally dying man, the small of her back still feeling bruised from an actal slam against the wall during her dah Caravaggio.

    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.

    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 pletes one of his long exhalations he snips the wire of his hearing aid with the cutters and drops them bato the satchel. He turns and grins towards her.

    “I’ll rewire him in the m.” He puts his left hand on her shoulder.

    David Caravaggio—an absurd name for you, of course

    ..” “At least I have a name.” “Yes.” Caravaggio sits in Hana’s chair. Afternoon sun fills the room, revealing the swimming motes. The Englishman’s dark lean face with its angular nose has the appearance of a still hawk swaddled is. The coffin of a hawk, Caravaggio thinks.

    The Englishman turns to him.

    “There’s a painting by Caravaggio, doe 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.

    I think when I see him at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David.”  Caravaggio sits there in silehoughts lost among the floating motes. War has unba></a>lanced him and he  return to no other world as he is, wearing these false limbs that morphine promises. He is a man in middle age who has never bee aced to families. All his life he has avoided perma intimacy. Till this war he has been a better lover than husband.

    He has been a man who slips away, in the way lovers leave chaos, the way thieves leave reduced houses.

    He watches the man in the bed. He o know who this Englishman from the desert is, and reveal him for Hana’s sake.

    Or perhaps i a skin for him, the way tannic acid camouflages a burned man’s rawness.

    W in Cair the early days of the war, he had been traio i 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 ied whole platoons in the desert. He had lived through a time of war whehing 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.

    But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defe to look for the truth in others.

    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.

    He says the gun—the Zam-Zammah on—is still there outside the museum in Lahore. There were two guns, made up of metal cups and bowls taken from every Hindu household iy—as jizya, or tax. These were melted down and made into the guns. They were used in many battles in the eighteenth and eenth turies against Sikhs. The un was lost during a battle crossing in the ab River—  She closes the book, climbs onto a chair ales the book into the high, invisible shelf.

    She ehe painted bedroom with a new book and annouhe title.

    “No books now, Hana.” She looks at him. He has, even now, she thinks, beautiful eyes. Everything occurs there, in that grey stare out of his darkness. There is a sense of numerous gazes that flicker onto her for a moment, then shift away like a lighthouse.

    “No more books. Just give me the Herodotus.” She puts the thick, soiled book into his hands.

    “I have seeions of The Histories with a sculpted portrait on the cover. Some statue found in a French museum. But I never imagine Herodotus this way. I see him more as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exge of seeds, ing everything without suspi, pieg together a mirage. ‘This history of mine,’ Herodotus says, ‘has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.’ What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history—how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love.... How old did you say you were?” “Twenty.” “I was much older when I fell in love.” Hana pauses. “Who was she?” But his eyes are away from her now.

    Birds prefer trees with dead branches,” said Caravaggio. “They have plete vistas from where they perch. They  take off in any dire.” “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.

    “Tell me, is it possible to love someone who is not as smart as you are?” Caravaggio, in a belligerent morphine rush, wahe mood ument. “This is something that has ed me most of my sexual li<big>..</big>fe—which began late, I must annouo this selepany. In the same way the sexual pleasure of versation came to me only after I was married. I had hought words erotietimes 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  really talk yourself into a er. Whereas you ’t fuck yourself into a er.” “That’s a man talking,” muttered Hana.

    “Well, I haven’t,” Caravaggio tinued, “maybe you have, Kip, when you came down to Bombay from the hills, when you came to England for military training. Has anyone, I wonder, fucked themselves into a er. How old are you, Kip?” “Twenty-six.” “Older than I am.” “Older than Hana. Could you fall in love with her if she wasn’t smarter than you? I mean, she may not be smarter than you.

    But isn’t it important for you to think she is smarter than you in order to fall in love? Think now. She  be obsessed by the Englishman because he knows more. We’re in a huge field whealk to that guy. We don’t even know if he’s English. He’s probably not. You see, I think it is easier to fall in love with him than with you. Why is that? Because we want to know things, how the pieces fit. Talkers seduce, words direct us into ers. We want more than anything to grow and ge. Brave new world.” “I don’t think so,” said Hana.

    “her do I. Let me tell you about people my age. The worst thing is others assume you have developed your character by now. The trouble with middle age is they think you are fully formed. Here.” Here Caravaggio lifted up his hands, so they faced Hana and Kip. She got up a behind him and put her arm around his neck.

    “Don’t do this, okay, David?” She ed her hands softly around his.

    “We’ve already got one crazy talker upstairs.” “Look at us—we sit here like the filthy ri their filthy villas up in the filthy hills whey gets too hot. It’s nine in the m—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.

    The British army teaches him the skills and the Ameris teach him further skills and the team of sappers are giveures, are decorated a 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 ht, what was his name?” Nothing from Kip.

    “What was his name?” “Sam Hardy.” Kip went to the window and looked out, leaving their versation.

    “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, fod’s sake? What is he doing fighting English wars? A farmer on the western front ot pruree without ruining his saw. Why? Because of the amount of shrapnel shot into it during the last war. Everees are thick with diseases we brought. The armies indoate 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 ’t leave the Englishman.” “The Englishma months ago, Hana, he’s with the Bedouin or in some English garden with its phlox and shit. He probably ’t even remember the woman he’s cirg around, trying to talk about. He doesn’t know where the fuck he is.

    “You think I’m angry at you, don’t you? Because you have fallen in love. Don’t you? A jealous uncle. I’m terrified for you. I want to kill the Englishman, because that is the only thing that will save you, get you out of here. And I am beginning to like him. Desert your post. How  Kip love you if you are not smart enough to make him stop risking his life?” “Because. Because he believes in a civilised world. He’s a civilised man.” “First mistake. The correct move is to get on a train, go and have babies together. Shall we go and ask the Englishman, the bird, what he thinks?

    “Why are you not smarter? It’s only the rich who ’t afford to be smart. They’re promised. They got locked years ago into privilege. They have to protect their belongings.

    No one is meahan the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world. They declare war, they have honour, and they ’t leave. But you two. We three. We’re free. How many sappers die? Why aren’t you dead yet?

    Be irresponsible. Luck runs out.” Hana  milk into her cup. As she finished she moved the lip of the jug over Kip’s hand and tinued p the milk over his brown hand and up his arm to his elbow and then stopped. He didn’t move it away.

    There are two levels of long, narrow garden to the west of the house. A formal terrad, higher up, the darker garden, where stoeps and crete statues almost disappear uhe 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.

    Only bonfires  dry the permaly 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 ales—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 oerra front of the house. It reaches the window of the English patient, who  hear the drift of voices, now and then a laugh from the smoky garderanslates the smell, evolving it backwards to what had been burned. Rosemary, he thinks, milkweed, wormwood, something else is also there, stless, perhaps the dog violet, or the false sunflower, which loves the slightly acidic soil of this hill.

    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 dles, 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 tgio. Nohysical attra has raised its head, she has begun to feel awkward in the pany of the three men.

    If it is physical attra. If all this has to do with love of Kip. She likes to lay her face against the upper reaches of his arm, that dark brown river, and to wake submerged within it, against the pulse of an unseen vein in his flesh beside her. The vein she would have to locate and i a saline solution into if he were dying.

    At two or three in the m, after leaving the Englishman, she walks through the garden towards the sapper’s hurrie 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, loink in its near pletion. Sometimes she cups a hand over the glass funnel and blows out the flame, and sometimes she leaves it burning and ducks u aers 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 tig 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 replaT with steam, you drain it, you—all this she knows is in his head as she sleeps beside him virtuous as a sister.

    The tent and the dark wood surround them.

    They are only a step past the fort she has given others iemporary hospitals in Ortona or Monterchi. Her body for last warmth, her whisper for fort, her needle for sleep. But the sapper’s body allows nothing to enter him that es from another world. A boy in love who will he 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 ois of desert iion the Englishman craves, ois and pollen to reassemble himself the way the Bedouin had done for him. Just for the fort of sleep.

    There are ors he places around himself. Certain leaves she has given him, a stub of dle, and in his tent the crystal set and the shoulder bag full of the objects of discipline. He has emerged from the fighting with a calm which, even if false, means order for him. He tinues his striess, following the hawk in its float along the valley within the V of his rifle sight, opening up a bomb and aking his eyes off what he is searg for as he pulls a Thermos towards him and uhe top and drinks, never even looking at the metal cup.

    The rest of us are just periphery, she thinks, his eyes are only on what is dangerous, his listening ear on whatever is happening in Helsinki or Berlin that es over the shortwave. Even when he is a tender lover<u></u>, and her left hand holds him above the kara, where the muscles of his forearm tense, she feels invisible to that lost look till his groan when his head falls against her neck. Everything else, apart from danger, is periphery. She has taught him to make a noise, desired it of him, and if he is relaxed at all sihe fighting it is only in this, as if finally willing to admit his whereabouts in the darkness, to signal out his pleasure with a human sound.

    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 iown. 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 m up a collapsing wall. The sapper sings his Western songs, which Caravaggio enjoys but pretends not to.

    “Pennsylvania six-five-oh-oh-oh,” the young soldier gasps.

    She learns all the varieties of his darkness. The colour of his fainst the colour of his neck. The colour of his palms, his cheek, the skin uhe turban. The darkness of fingers separating red and black wires, ainst bread he picks off the gual plate he still uses for food. Theands up. His self-sufficy seems rude to them, though no doubt he feels it is excessive politeness.

    She loves most the wet colours of his neck whehes. 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 oime 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.

    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 diary. 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 y, to be clear-miowards the  day’s treacherous objects.

    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.

    They talk, the slight singsong of his voice within the vas 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 beloo his body, a khaki wing he folds over himself during the night. It is his world. She feels displaced out of ada during these nights. He asks her why she ot sleep. She lies there irritated at his self-sufficy, 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  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 Patrid Clara along the Skootamatta River and later Geian Bay. She has not found a sleeping tree, even in the density of this garden.

    “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 ohat Caravaggio was a man always in love. Not just in love but always sinking within it. Always fused.

    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 ehe Moro in silend 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 ier among them, mud and surfad faces lit up by phosphorus flares in the sky around them.

    All through the night, weeping and shouting, they had to stop each oing crazy. Their clothes full of winter river, the bridge slowly eased into a road above their heads. And two days later another river. Every river they came to was bridge-less, as if its name had been erased, as if the sky were starless, homes doorless. The sapper units slid in with ropes, carried cables over their shoulders and spahe bolts, oil-covered to silehe metals, and then the army marched over. Drove over the prefabricated bridge with the sappers still ier below.

    So often they were caught in midstream when the shells came, flaring into mudbanks breaking apart the steel and iron into stones. Nothing would protect them then, the brown river thin as silk against metals that ripped through it.

    He turned from that.

    He khe trick of quick sleep against this one who had her own rivers and was lost from them.

    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 ore easily than into a car. I miss thuhat blinks out electricity. I want you to meet Clara of the oes, 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 aation. 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 ao his sleeping chest and listens to his beati, the way he will listen to a clo a miwo a.m. Everyone is asleep but her.

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