The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje [7]
When I was lost among them, unsure of where I was, all I needed was the name of a small ridge, a local custom, a cell of this historical animal, and the map of the world would slide into place.
What did most of us know of such parts of Africa? The armies of the Nile moved back and forth – a battlefield eight hundred miles deep into the desert. Whippet tanks, Blenheim medium-range bombers. Gladiator biplane fighters. Eight thousand men. But who was the enemy? Who were the allies of this place – the fertile lands of Cyrenaica, the salt marshes of El Agheila? All of Europe were fighting their wars in North Africa, in Sidi Rezegh, in Baguoh.
He travelled on a skid behind the Bedouin for five days in darkness, the hood over his body. He lay within this oil-doused cloth. Then suddenly the temperature fell. They had reached the valley within the red high canyon walls, joining the rest of the desert’s water tribe that spilled and slid over sand and stones, their blue robes shifting like a spray of milk or a wing. They lifted the soft cloth off him, off the suck of his body. He was within the larger womb of the canyon. The buzzards high above them slipping down a thousand years into this crack of stone where they camped.
In the morning they took him to the far reach of the siq. They were talking loudly around him now. The dialect suddenly clarifying. He was here because of the buried guns.
He was carried towards something, his blindfolded face looking straight ahead, and his hand made to reach out a yard or so. After days of travel, to move this one yard. To lean towards and touch something with a purpose, his arm still held, his palm facing down and open. He touched the Sten barrel and the hand let go of him. A pause among the voices. He was there to translate the guns.
‘Twelve-millimetre Breda machine gun. From Italy.’
He pulled back the bolt, inserted his finger to find no bullet, pushed it back and pulled the trigger. Puht. ‘Famous gun,’ he muttered. He was moved forward again.
‘French seven-point-five-millimetre Châttelerault. Light machine gun. Nineteen twenty-four.’
‘German seven-point-nine-millimetre MG-Fifteen air service.’
He was brought to each of the guns. The weapons seemed to be from different time periods and from many countries, a museum in the desert. He brushed the contours of the stock and magazine or fingered the sight. He spoke out the gun’s name, then was carried to another gun. Eight weapons formally handed to him. He called the names out loud, speaking in French and then the tribe’s own language. But what did that matter to them? Perhaps they needed not the name but to know that he knew what the gun was.
He was held by the wrist again and his hand sunk into a box of cartridges. In another box to the right were more shells, seven-millimetre shells this time. Then others.
When he was a child he had grown up with an aunt, and on the grass of her lawn she had scattered a deck of cards face down and taught him the game of Pelmanism. Each player allowed to turn up two cards and, eventually, through memory pairing them off. This had been in another landscape, of trout streams, birdcalls that he could recognize from a halting fragment. A fully named world. Now, with his face blindfolded in a mask of grass fibres, he picked up a shell and moved with his carriers, guiding them towards a gun, inserted the bullet, bolted it, and holding it up in the air fired. The noise cracking crazily down the canyon walls. ‘For echo is the soul of the voice exciting itself in hollow places.’ A man thought to be sullen and mad had written that sentence down in an English hospital. And he, now in this desert, was sane, with clear thought, picking up the cards, bringing them together with ease, his grin flung out to his aunt, and firing each successful combination into the air, and gradually the unseen men around