The English Patient (32 page)

She will, he realizes now, always have a serious face. She has moved from being a young woman into having the angular look of a queen, someone who has made her face with her desire to be a certain kind of person. He still likes that about her. Her smartness, the fact that she did not inherit that look or that beauty, but that it was something searched for and that it will always reflect a present stage of her character. It seems every month or two he witnesses her this way, as if these moments of revelation are a continuation of the letters she wrote to him for a year, getting no reply, until she stopped sending them, turned away by his silence. His character, he supposed.

Now there are these urges to talk with her during a meal and return to that stage they were most intimate at in the tent or in the English patient’s room, both of which contained the turbulent river of space between them. Recalling the time, he is just as fascinated at himself there as he is with her – boyish and earnest, his lithe arm moving across the air towards the girl he has fallen in love with. His wet boots are by the Italian door, the laces tied together, his arm reaches for her shoulder, there is the prone figure on the bed.

During the evening meal he watches his daughter struggling with her cutlery, trying to hold the large weapons in her small hands. At this table all of their hands are brown. They move with ease in their customs and habits. And his wife has taught them all a wild humour, which has been inherited by his son. He loves to see his son’s wit in this house, how it surprises him constantly, going beyond even his and his wife’s knowledge and humour – the way he treats dogs on the streets, imitating their stroll, their look. He loves the fact that this boy can almost guess the wishes of dogs from the variety of expressions at a dog’s disposal.

And Hana moves possibly in the company that is not her choice. She, at even this age, thirty-four, has not found her own company, the ones she wanted. She is a woman of honour and smartness whose wild love leaves out luck, always taking risks, and there is something in her brow now that only she can recognize in a mirror. Ideal and idealistic in that shiny dark hair! People fall in love with her. She still remembers the lines of poems the Englishman read out loud to her from his commonplace book. She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life.

And so Hana moves and her face turns and in a regret she lowers her hair. Her shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges. Kirpal’s left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles.

Acknowledgements

While some of the characters who appear in this book are based on historical figures, and while many of the areas described – such as the Gilf Kebir and its surrounding desert – exist, and were explored in the 1930s, it is important to stress that this story is a fiction and that the portraits of the characters who appear in it are fictional, as are some of the events and journeys.

I would like to thank the Royal Geographical Society, London, for allowing me to read archival material and to glean from their
Geographical Journals
the world of explorers and their journeys – often beautifully recorded by their writers. I have quoted a passage from Hassanein Bey’s article ‘Through Kufra to Darfur’ (1924), describing sandstorms, and I have drawn from him and other explorers to evoke the desert of the 1930s. I would like to acknowledge information drawn from Dr. Richard A. Bermann’s ‘Historical Problems of the Libyan Desert’ (1934) and R. A. Bagnold’s review of Almásy’s monograph on his explorations in the desert.

Many books were important to me in my research.
Unexploded Bomb
by Major A. B. Hartley was especially useful in re-creating the construction of bombs and in describing the British bomb disposal units at the start of World War II. I have quoted directly from his book (the italicized lines in the ‘In Situ’ section) and have based some of Kirpal Singh’s methods of defusing on actual techniques that Hartley records. Information found in the patient’s notebook on the nature of certain winds is drawn from Lyall Watson’s wonderful book
Heaven’s Breath
, direct quotes appearing in quotation marks. The section from the Candaules–Gyges story in Herodotus’s
Histories
is from the 1890 translation by G. C. McCauley (Macmillan). Other quotations from Herodotus use the David Grene translation (University of Chicago Press). The line in italics on page 22 is by Christopher Smart; the lines in italics on page 153 are from John Milton’s
Paradise Lost;
the line Hana remembers on page 306 is by Anne Wilkinson. I would also like to acknowledge Alan Moorehead’s
The Villa Diana
, which discusses the life of Poliziano in Tuscany. Other important books were Mary McCarthy’s
The Stones of Florence;
Leonard Mosley’s
The Cat and the Mice;
G. W. L. Nicholson’s
The Canadians in Italy 1943–5
and
Canada’s Nursing Sisters; The Marshall Cavendish Encyclopaedia of World War II;
F. Yeats-Brown’s
Martial India;
and three other books on the Indian military:
The Tiger Strikes
and
The Tiger Kills
, published in 1942 by the Directorate of Public Relations, New Delhi, India, and
A Roll of Honor
.

Thanks to the English department at Glendon College, York University, the Villa Serbelloni, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library.

I would like to thank the following for their generous help: Elisabeth Dennys, who let me read her letters written from Egypt during the war; Sister Margaret at the Villa San Girolamo; Michael Williamson at the National Library of Canada, Ottawa; Anna Jardine; Rodney Dennys; Linda Spalding; Ellen Levine. And Lally Marwah, Douglas LePan, David Young and Donya Peroff.

Finally a special thanks to Ellen Seligman, Liz Calder and Sonny Mehta.

Grateful acknowledgement is made to
the following for permission to reprint
previously published material:

Famous Music Corporation:
Excerpt from ‘When I Take My Sugar to Tea’ by Sammy Fain, Irving Kahal and Pierre Norman. Copyright 1931 by Famous Music Corporation. Copyright renewed 1958 by Famous Music Corporation. Reprinted by permission.

Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.:
Excerpt from ‘Arrival at the Waldorf by Wallace Stevens from
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
. Copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission.

Macmillan Publishing Company:
Excerpts from
Unexploded Bomb: A History of Bomb Disposal
by Major A. B. Hartley. Copyright © 1958 by Major A. B. Hartley. Copyright renewed. Published in 1958 by Cassell & Co., London, and in 1959 by W. W. Norton & Co., New York. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Company.

Edward B. Marks Music Company:
Excerpt from ‘Manhattan’ by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers. Copyright 1925 by Edward B. Marks Music Company. Copyright renewed. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Penguin USA:
Excerpts from ‘Buckingham Palace’ from
When We Were Very Young
by A. A. Milne. Copyright 1924 by E. P. Dutton. Copyright renewed 1952 by A. A. Milne. Reprinted by permission of Dutton Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

The Royal Geographical Society:
Excerpt from article by John Ball, Director of Desert Surveys in Egypt (1927), from
The Geographical Journal
, Vol. LXX, pp. 21–38, 105–129. Copyright by the Royal Geographical Society. Reprinted by permission.

Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.:
Excerpt from ‘I Can’t Get Started’ by Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin. Copyright 1935 by Chappell & Co. (Copyright renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Williamson Music Co.:
Excerpt from ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal. Copyright 1938 by Williamson Music Co. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

MICHAEL ONDAATJE
is the author of five novels, a memoir, a non-fiction book on film and several books of poetry. His novel
The English Patient
won the Booker Prize; another of his novels,
Anil’s Ghost
, won the
Irish Times
International Fiction Prize and the Prix Medicis. His most recent novel,
Divisadero
, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and was the winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction 2007. Born in Sri Lanka, he now lives in Toronto.

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First published in Great Britain 1992
Copyright © 1992 by Michael Ondaatje

This electronic edition published 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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