The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje [38]
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 upon argument, 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 clung along the bank of the Moro River, his fist plunging into the wet earth to stop himself slipping back into the already crossed torrent.
If he were a hero in 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 innocence of such a remark. The successful defusing of a bomb ended novels. Wise white fatherly men shook hands, were acknowledged, and limped away, having been coaxed out of solitude for this special occasion. But he was a professional. And he remained the foreigner, the Sikh. His only human and personal contact was this enemy who had made the bomb and departed 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 followed a sapper’s entrance into a mined house with binoculars. He had seen him brush a box of matches off the edge of a table and be enveloped by light for the half-second before the crumpling sound of the bomb reached him. What lightning was like in 1944. How could he trust even this circle of elastic on the sleeve of the girl’s frock that gripped her arm? Or the rattle in her intimate breath as deep as stones within a river.
She woke when the caterpillar moved from the collar of her dress onto her cheek, and she opened her eyes, saw him crouched over her. He plucked it from her face, not touching her skin, and placed it in the grass. She noticed he had already packed up his equipment. He moved back and sat against the tree, watching her as she rolled slowly onto her back and then stretched, holding that moment for as long as she could. It must have been afternoon, the sun over there. She leaned her head back and looked at him.
‘You were supposed to hold onto me!’
‘I did. Till you moved away.’
‘How long did you hold me?’
‘Until you moved. Until you needed to move.’
‘I wasn’t taken advantage of, was I?’ Adding, ‘Just joking,’ as she saw him beginning to blush.
‘Do you want to go down to the house?’
‘Yes, I’m hungry.’
She could hardly stand up, the dazzle of sun, her tired legs. How long they had been there she still didn’t know. She could not forget the depth of her sleep, the lightness of the plummet.
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 back on certain dances. But this tune, “How Long Has This Been Going On,” is one of the great songs because the introduction’s melody is purer than the song it introduces. And only great jazzmen have acknowledged that. Now, we can have this party on the terrace, which would allow us to invite the dog, or we can invade the Englishman and have it in the bedroom upstairs. Your young friend who doesn’t drink managed to find bottles of wine yesterday in San Domenico. We have not just music. Give me your arm. No. First we must chalk the floor and practise. Three main steps – one-two-three – now give me your arm. What happened to you today?’
‘He dismantled a large