The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje [96]
‘We must keep them lit till midnight.’
They talked then about the war, so far away. ‘When the war with Japan is over, everyone will finally go home,’ Kip said. ‘And where will you go?’ Caravaggio asked. The sapper rolled his head, half nodding, half shaking it, his mouth smiling. So Caravaggio began to talk, mostly to Kip.
The dog cautiously approached the table and laid its head on Caravaggio’s lap. The sapper asked for other stories about Toronto as if it were a place of peculiar wonders. Snow that drowned the city, iced up the harbour, ferryboats in the summer where people listened to concerts. But what he was really interested in were the clues to Hana’s nature, though she was evasive, veering Caravaggio away from stories that involved some moment of her life. She wanted Kip to know her only in the present, a person perhaps more flawed or more compassionate or harder or more obsessed than the girl or young woman she had been then. In her life there was her mother Alice her father Patrick her stepmother Clara and Caravaggio. She had already admitted these names to Kip as if they were her credentials, her dowry. They were faultless and needed no discussion. She used them like authorities in a book she could refer to on the right way to boil an egg, or the correct way to slip garlic into a lamb. They were not to be questioned.
And now – because he was quite drunk – Caravaggio told the story of Hana’s singing the ‘Marseillaise,’ which he had told her before. ‘Yes, I have heard the song,’ said Kip, and he attempted a version of it. ‘No, you have to sing it out,’ said Hana, ‘you have to sing it standing up!’
She stood up, pulled her tennis shoes off and climbed onto the table. There were four snail lights flickering, almost dying, on the table beside her bare feet.
‘This is for you. This is how you must learn to sing it, Kip. This is for you.’
She sang up into darkness beyond their snail light, beyond the square of light from the English patient’s room and into the dark sky waving with shadows of cypress. Her hands came out of their pockets.
Kip had heard the song in the camps, sung by groups of men, often during strange moments, such as before an impromptu soccer match. And Caravaggio when he had heard it in the last few years of the war never really liked it, never liked to listen to it. In his heart he had Hana’s version from many years before. Now he listened with a pleasure because she was singing again, but this was quickly altered by the way she sang. Not the passion of her at sixteen but echoing the tentative circle of light around her in the darkness. She was singing it as if it was something scarred, as if one couldn’t ever again bring all the hope of the song together. It had been altered by the five years leading to this night of her twenty-first birthday in the forty-fifth year of the twentieth century. Singing in the voice of a tired traveller, alone against everything. A new testament. There was no certainty to the song anymore, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power. That was the only sureness. The one voice was the single unspoiled thing. A song of snail light. Caravaggio realized she was singing with and echoing the heart of the sapper.
In the tent there have been nights of no talk and nights full of talk. They are never sure what will occur, whose fraction of past will emerge, or whether touch will be anonymous and silent in their darkness. The intimacy of her body or the body of her language in his ear – as