The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje [29]
‘I lost the child. I mean, I had to lose it. The father was already dead. There was a war.’
‘Were you in Italy?’
‘In Sicily, about the time this happened. All through the time we came up the Adriatic behind the troops I thought of it. I had continued conversations with the child. I worked very hard in the hospitals and retreated from everybody around me. Except the child, who I shared everything with. In my head. I was talking to him while I bathed and nursed patients. I was a little crazy.’
‘And then your father died.’
‘Yes. Then Patrick died. I was in Pisa when I heard.’
She was awake. Sitting up.
‘You knew, huh?’
‘I got a letter from home.’
‘Is that why you came here, because you knew?’
‘No.’
‘Good. I don’t think that he believed in wakes and such things. Patrick used to say he wanted a duet by two women on musical instruments when he died. Squeeze-box and violin. That’s all. He was so damn sentimental.’
‘Yes. You could really make him do anything. Find him a woman in distress and he was lost.’
The wind rose up out of the valley to their hill so the cypress trees that lined the thirty-six steps outside the chapel wrestled with it. Drops of earlier rain nudged off, falling with a ticking sound upon the two of them sitting on the balustrade by the steps. It was long after midnight. She was lying on the concrete ledge, and he paced or leaned out looking down into the valley. 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 Moro Bridge 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 nurse. It was a rabbit warren, those narrow tilted streets. Soldiers were coming 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 whenever they 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 opened them and sneered, “Can’t wait to have me dead? You bitch!” 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 bitch! 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 comfortable. 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 complex?’ 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 china.’
‘Do you think he would like some wine? I managed to scrounge a bottle today.’
‘From?’
‘Do you want it or not?’
‘Let’s just have it now. Let’s forget him.’
‘Ah, the breakthrough!’
‘Not the breakthrough. I badly need a serious drink.