The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje [109]
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