I lifted her into my arms from the shelf of sleep. Clothing like cobweb. I disturbed all that.
“It took them three weeks to reach Cairo. Almdsy shook hands with Eppler and left him. This is where we lost him. He turned and went back into the desert alone. We think he crossed it again, back towards Tripoli. But that was the last time he was ever seen. The British picked up Eppler eventually and used the Rebecca code to feed false information to Rommel about El Alamein.” “I still don’t believe it, David.” “The man who helped catch Eppler in Cairo was named Sansom.” “Delilah.” “Exactly.” “Maybe he’s Sansom.” “I thought that at first. He was very like Almdsy. A desert lover as well. He had spent his childhood in the Levant and knew the Bedouin. But the thing about Almasy was, he could fly. We are talking about someone who crashed in a plane. Here is this man, burned beyond recognition, who somehow ends up in the arms of the English at Pisa. Also, he can get away with sounding English. Almdsy went to school in England. In Cairo he was referred to as the English spy.” She sat on the hamper watching Caravaggio. She said, “I think we should leave him be. It doesn’t matter what side he was on, does it?”Caravaggio said, “I’d like to talk with him some more. With more morphine in him. Talking it out. Both of us. Do you understand? To see where it will all go. Delilah. Zerzura. You will have to give him the altered shot.” “No, David. You’re too obsessed. It doesn’t matter who he is. The war’s over.” “I will then. I’ll cook up a Brompton cocktail. Morphine and alcohol. They invented it at Brompton Hospital in London for their cancer patients. Don’t worry, it won’t kill him. It absorbs fast into the body. I can put it together with what we’ve got.
The long Cairo evenings. The sea of night sky, hawks in rows until they are released at dusk, arcing towards the last colour of the desert. A unison of performance like a handful of thrown seed.
“One feeds me morphine. One feeds me condensed milk. We may have discovered a balanced diet!” He turns back to Kip.
You will.
He was too curious and generous to be a successful thief. Half the things he stole never came home. He thinks you are not English.”She watched his stillness as she spoke; it appeared that he was not listening carefully to what she was saying. Just his distant thinking. The way Duke Ellington looked and thought when he played “Solitude.” She stopped talking.
I crossed the dry bed of the lake towards Kufra Oasis, carrying nothing but robes against the heat and night cold, my Herodotus left behind with her. And three years later, in , I walked with her towards the buried plane, carrying her body as if it was the armour of a knight.
“Kip and I are both international bastards—born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives. Though Kip doesn’t recognize that yet. That’s why we get on so well together.” In the kitchen Kip stabs two holes into the new can of condensed milk with his bayonet, which, he realizes, is now used more and more for only this purpose, and runs back upstairs to the bedroom.
The truck exploded, probably sabotaged. There were spies among the Bedouin, whose caravans continued to drift like cities, carrying spice, rooms, government advisors wherever they went. At any given moment among the Bedouin in those days of the war, there were Englishmen as well as Germans.
The voice stops. The burned man looks straight ahead in his morphine focus.
“When you crashed in the desert—where were you flying from?” “I was leaving the Gilf Kebir. I had gone there to collect someone. In late August. Nineteen forty-two.” “During the war? Everyone must have left by then.” “Yes. There were just armies.” “The Gilf Kebir.” “Yes.” “Where is it?” “Give me the Kipling book... here.” On the frontispiece of Kirn was a map with a dotted line for the path the boy and the Holy One took. It showed just a portion of India—a darkly cross-hatched Afghanistan, and Kashmir in the lap of the mountains.
None of us thought we would see it again. It was another victim of the desert. Within a few months we would pass the northeast gully and see no contour of it. By now Clifton’s plane, ten years younger, had flown into our story.
She had dragged herself into a corner, had wrapped herself tight in the parachute material. He had promised to return for her.
In the botanical garden she had banged her head against the gatepost in determination and fury. Too proud to be a lover, a secret. There would be no compartments in her world. He had turned back to her, his finger raised, I don’t miss you yet.
When she enters she sees Kip and the English patient passing a can of condensed milk back and forth. The Englishman sucks at the can, then moves the tin away from his face to chew the thick fluid. He beams at Kip, who seems irritated that he does not have possession of it. The sapper glances at Hana and hovers by the bedside, snapping his fingers a couple of times, managing finally to pull the tin away from the dark face.
Baking to death in the sand.
In the morning, after two hours’ sleep, I carried her into the cockpit. I started the motor and it rolled into life. We moved and then slipped, years too late, into the sky.
She was on her back, positioned the way the mediaeval dead lie.
I carried her out into the sun. I dressed. My clothes dry and brittle from the heat in the stones.
She watches Kip lean his head back against the wall and knows the neutral look on his face. She can read it.
Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if they each could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other.
Hana glances back and forth between the two of them.
In the desert the tools of survival are underground—troglodyte caves, water sleeping within a buried plant, weapons, a plane.
At longitude , latitude , I dug down towards the tarpaulin, and Madox’s old plane gradually emerged. It was night and even in the cold air I was sweating. I carried the naphtha lantern over to her and sat for a while, beside the silhouette of her nod. Two lovers and desert—starlight or moonlight, I don’t remember. Everywhere else out there was a war.
Hermann had told him that in Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at a still pool and believe it had the hardness of rock. But she was a woman who had grown up within gardens, among moistness, with words like trellis and hedgehog. Her passion for the desert was temporary. She’d come to love its sternness because of him, wanting to understand his comfort in its solitude. She was always happier in rain, in bathrooms steaming with liquid air, in sleepy wetness, climbing back in from his window that rainy night in Cairo and putting on her clothes while still wet, in order to hold it all. Just as she loved family traditions and courteous ceremony and old memorized poems. She would have hated to die without a name. For her there was a line back to her ancestors that was tactile, whereas he had erased the path he had emerged from. He was amazed she had loved him in spite of such qualities of anonymity in himself.
Above the narrow streets we looked down upon cats on the corrugated tin roofs who also looked down the next ten feet to the street and stalls. Above all this was our room. Windows open to minarets, feluccas, cats, tremendous noise. She spoke to me of her childhood gardens. When she couldn’t sleep she drew her mother’s garden for me, word by word, bed by bed, the December ice over the fish pond, the creak of rose trellises. She would take -my wrist at the confluence of veins and guide it onto the hollow indentation at her neck.
March , Uweinat. Madox is irritable because of the thinness in the air. Fifteen hundred feet above sea level and he is uncomfortable with even this minimal height. He is a desert man after all, having left his family’s village of Marston Magna, Somerset, altered all customs and habits so he can have the proximity to sea level as well as regular dryness.
At Erith.” She looks at the sapper leaning against the wall, one foot up so the sole of his boot is against a painted bush. No expression of sadness, nothing to interpret.
Wait. What do you mean, a buried plane?
“Here. The Gilf Kebir, just north of the Tropic of Cancer. On the Egyptian-Libyan border.” What happened in ?
Now there is no talcum on her arm, no rose water on her thigh.
In that city in you could buy anything—from a dog or a bird that came at one pitch of a whistle, to those terrible leashes that slipped over the smallest finger of a woman so she was tethered to you in a crowded market.
“What happened three years earlier?” “She had been injured. In
In the northeast section of Cairo was the great courtyard of religious students, and beyond it the Khan el Khalili bazaar.
A husband gone mad. Killing all of them. Killing himself and his wife—and him by the fact there was now no way out of the desert.
With the unexploded-bomb units.” “Who was your teacher?” “An Englishman in Woolwich. He was considered eccentric.” “The best kind of teacher. That must have been Lord Suffolk. Did you meet Miss Morden?” “Yes.” At no point does either of them attempt to make Hana comfortable in their conversation. But she wants to know about his teacher, and how he would describe him.
So you were walking towards it?
Hana can hear the voices in the English patient’s room and stands in the hall trying to catch what they are saying.
My linked hands made a saddle for her to rest on. As soon as I reached the sand I jostled her around so her body was facing back, over my shoulder. I was conscious of the airiness of her weight. I was used to her like this in my arms, she had spun around me in my room like a human reflection of the fan —her arms out, fingers like starfish.
When Clifton’s plane—Rupert—flew into our midst, the aging plane of Madox’s was left where it was, covered with a tarpaulin, pegged down in one of the northeast alcoves of Uweinat. Sand collected over it gradually for the next few years.
Only she was not dead. He pulled the body free, carrying it out of the plane’s crumpled grip, this grip of her husband.
The plane is now in his eye. The slow voice carries it with effort above the earth, the engine missing turns as if losing a stitch, her shroud unfurling in the noisy air of the cockpit, noise terrible after his days of walking in silence. He looks down and sees oil pouring onto his knees. A branch breaks free of her shirt. Acacia and bone. How high is he above the land? How low is he in the sky?
“Between the wars Almasy had English friends. Great explorers. But when war broke out he went with the Germans.
Some men had unwound their last knot of life in her arms. In the town of Anghiari she had lifted live men to discover they were already being consumed by worms. In Ortona she had held cigarettes to the mouth of the boy with no arms. Nothing had stopped her. She had continued her duties while she secretly pulled her personal self back. So manynurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms with bone buttons.
What is terrible in what I did? Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it. You can make love to a woman with a broken arm, or a woman with fever. She once sucked blood from a cut on my hand as I had tasted and swallowed her menstrual blood. There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language. Felhomaly. The dusk of graves. With the connotation of intimacy there between the dead and the living.
Because you didn’t want me as anything else.
I approached her naked as I would have done in our South Cairo room, wanting to undress her, still wanting to love her.
He traces his black hand along the Numi River till it enters the sea at °o’ latitude. He continues sliding his finger seven inches west, off the page, onto his chest; he touches his rib.
Mostly in London.
He bought pale brown cigarette papers and glued them into sections of The Histories that recorded wars that were of no interest to him. He wrote down all her arguments against him. Glued into the book—giving himself only the voice of the watcher, the listener, the “he.” During the last days before the war he had gone for a last time to the Gilf Kebir to clear out the base camp. Her husband was supposed to pick him up. The husband they had both loved until they began to love each other.
Then Italy.
He himself would have been happier to die in a cave, with its privacy, the swimmers caught in the rock around them.
Ahh! Splendid, splendid.
The plane came out of the sand. There had been no food and I was weak. The tarp so heavy I couldn’t dig it out but had simply to cut it away.
Caravaggio reflected in the black lake of his eye. He goes up and down now like a well bucket. There is blood somehow all over his face. He is flying a rotted plane, the canvas sheetings on the wings ripping open in the speed. They are carrion. How far back had the palm tree been? How long ago? He lifts his legs out of the oil, but they are so heavy. There is no way he can lift them again. He is old. Suddenly. Tired of living without her. He cannot lie back in her arms and trust her to stand guard all day all night while he sleeps. He has no one. He is exhausted not from the desert but from solitude. Madox gone. The woman translated into leaves and twigs, the broken glass to the sky like a jaw above him.
I had made the journey to Cairo and was returning from there. I was slipping between the enemy, remembering old maps, hitting the pre-war caches of petrol and water, driving towards Uweinat. It was easier now that I was alone. Miles from the Gilf Kebir, the truck exploded and I capsized, rolling automatically into the sand, not wanting a spark to touch me. In the desert one is always frightened of fire.
He crossed the desert with the guy and delivered him to the Nile delta.” “You know a lot about this.” “I was based in Cairo. We were tracking them. From Gialo he led a company of eight men into the desert. They had to keep digging the trucks out of the sand hills. He aimed them towards Uweinat and its granite plateau so they could get water, take shelter in the caves. It was a halfway point. In the he had discovered caves with rock paintings there. But the plateau was crawling with Allies and he couldn’t use the wells there. He struck out into the sand desert again. They raided British petrol dumps to fill up their tanks. In the Kharga Oasis they switched into British uniforms and hung British army number plates on their vehicles. When they were spotted from the air they hid in the wadis for as long as three days, completely still.
We moved like this towards the northeast gully, where the plane was buried. I did not need a map. With me was the tank of petrol I had carried all the way from the capsized truck. Because three years earlier we had been impotent without it.
How is it?
During their months of separation he had grown bitter and self-sufficient. He avoided her company. He could not stand her calmness when she saw him. He phoned her house and spoke to her husband and heard her laughter in the background. There was a public charm in her that tempted everyone. This was something he had loved in her. Now he began to trust nothing.
Give him a drink of it. Then put him back on straight morphine.” She watched him sitting on the hamper, clear-eyed, smiling. During the last stages of the war Caravaggio had become one of the numerous morphia thieves. He had sniffed out her medical supplies within hours of his arrival. The small tubes of morphine were now a source for him. Like toothpaste tubes for dolls, she had thought when she first saw them, finding them utterly quaint. Caravaggio carried two or three in his pocket all day long, slipping the fluid into his flesh. She had stumbled on him once vomiting from its excess, crouched and shaking in one of the dark corners of the villa, looking up and hardly recognizing her. She had tried speaking with him and he had stared back. He had found the metal supply box, torn it open with God knows what strength. Once when the sapper cut open the palm of his hand on an iron gate, Caravaggio broke the glass tip off with his teeth, sucked and spat the morphine onto the brown hand before Kip even knew what it was. Kip pushing him away, glaring in anger.
HE GLARES OUT, each eye a path, down the long bed at the end of which is Hana. After she has bathed him she breaks the tip off an ampoule and turns to him with the morphine. An effigy. A bed. He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper.
Yes. Four nights of walking. I had left the man in Cairo and turned back into the desert. Everywhere there was war.
Her husband had crashed his plane. It had been planned as a suicide-murder by her husband that would involve all three of us. We were not even lovers at the time. I suppose information of the affair trickled down to him somehow.” “So she was too wounded to take with you.” “Yes. The only chance to save her was for me to try and reach help alone.” In the cave, after all those months of separation and anger, they had come together and spoken once more as lovers, rolling away the boulder they had placed between themselves for some social law neither had believed in.
A remarkable find, young man.
Because you said your husband was going mad. Well, he went mad.
Suddenly there were “teams.” The Bermanns, the Bagnolds, the Slatin Pashas—who had at various times saved each other’s lives—had now split up into camps.
He was among the familiar paintings he had found years earlier. Giraffes. Cattle. The man with his arms raised, in a plumed headdress. Several figures in the unmistakable posture of swimmers. Bermann had been right about the presence of an ancient lake. He walked farther into the coldness, into the Cave of Swimmers, where he had left her. She was still there.
Rommel asked him to take Eppler across the desert into Cairo because it would have been too obvious by plane or parachute.
“He says you are not English. He worked with intelligence out of Cairo and Italy for a while. Till he was captured. My family knew Caravaggio before the war. He was a thief. He believed in ‘the movement of things.’ Some thieves are collectors, like some of the explorers you scorn, like some men with women or some women with men. But Caravaggio was not like that.
He pauses and holds out his hand. Caravaggio places a morphine tablet into the black palm, and it disappears into the man’s dark mouth.
He suspected she had replaced him with another lover. He interpreted her every gesture to others as a code of promise. She gripped the front of Roundell’s jacket once in a lobby and shook it, laughing at him as he muttered something, and he followed the innocent government aide for two days to see if there was more between them. He did not trust her last endearments to him anymore. She was with him or against him. She was against him. He couldn’t stand even her tentative smiles at him. If she passed him a drink he would not drink it. If at a dinner she pointed to a bowl with a Nile lily floating in it he would not look at it. Just another fucking flower. She had a new group of intimates that excluded him and her husband. No one goes back to the husband. He knew that much about love and human nature.
: P.M.) Caravaggio slips the book out of the man’s hands.
The man in the bed said nothing.
How did you hate me? she whispers in the Cave of Swimmers, talking through her pain of injuries. A broken wrist. Shattered ribs. You were terrible to me. That’s when my husband suspected you. I still hate that about you—disappearing into deserts or bars.
Madox had an old plane in the early days, which he had shaved down to the essentials—the only “extra” was the closed bubble ofcockpit, crucial for desert flights. During our times in the desert he had taught me to fly, the two of us walking around the guy-roped creature theorizing on how it hung or veered in the wind.
“Leave him alone. He’s my patient.” “I won’t damage him. The morphine and alcohol will take away the pain.” ( CC’s BROMPTON COCKTAIL.
The undercarriage brushes the top of a palm and he pivots up, and the oil slides over the seat, her body slipping down into it.
Kip peers into the can. “I’ll get another one,” he says, and leaves the room.
He slips into the harness of the oil-wet parachute and pivots upside down, breaking free of glass, wind flinging his body back. Then his legs are free of everything, and he is in the air, bright, not knowing why he is bright until he realizes he is on fire.
I walked towards Uweinat. I got there about noon and climbed up into the caves of the plateau. Above the well named Ain Dua.
There is a spark from a short, and the twigs at her knee catch fire. He pulls her back into the seat beside him. He thrusts his hands up against the cockpit glass and it will not shift. Begins punching the glass, cracking it, finally breaking it, and the oil and the fire slop and spin everywhere. How low is he in the sky? She collapses—acacia twigs, leaves, the branches that were shaped into arms uncoiling around him. Limbs begin disappearing in the suck of air. The odour of morphine on his tongue.
You left me in Groppi Park.
He reached the shallow well named Ain Dua. He removed all of his clothes and soaked them in the well, put his head and then his thin body into the blue water. His limbs exhausted from the four nights of walking. He left his clothes spread on the rocks and climbed up higher into the boulders, climbed out of the desert, which was now, in , a vast battlefield, and went naked into the darkness of the cave.
“I know you love the man, but he’s not an Englishman. In the early part of the war I was working in Cairo—the Tripoli Axis. Rommel’s Rebecca spy—” “What do you mean, ‘Rebecca spy’?” “In the Germans sent a spy called Eppler into Cairo before the battle of El Alamein. He used a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca as a code book to send messages back to Rommel on troop movements. Listen, the book became bed-side reading with British Intelligence. Even I read it.” “You read a book?” “Thank you. The man who guided Eppler through the desert into Cairo on Rommel’s personal orders—from Tripoli all the way to Cairo—was Count Ladislaus de Almasy. This was a stretch of desert that, it was assumed, no one could cross.
Not for a long time. I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me, will you. Stop defending yourself. Kiss me and call me by my name.
“You must have been raised elsewhere,” the sapper says. “The English don’t suck it out that way.” “For some years I lived in the desert. I learned everything I knew there. Everything that ever happened to me that was important happened in the desert.” He smiles at Hana.
“How long have you been a sapper?” “Five years.
“We have discovered a shared pleasure. The boy and I. For me on my journeys in Egypt, for him in India.” “Have you ever had condensed-milk sandwiches?” xthe sapper asks.
You think you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail at something you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you. How many women did you have? I left you because I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, so wordless sometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character. In the Cave of Swimmers we talked. We were only two latitudes away from the safety of Kufra.
“Caravaggio thinks he knows who you are,” Hana said.
Clifton flew up on Uweinat to collect him on the appointed day, buzzing the lost oasis so low the acacia shrubs dismantled their leaves in the wake of the plane, the Moth slipping into the depressions and cuts—while he stood on the high ridgesignalling with blue tarpaulin. Then the plane pivoted down and came straight towards him, then crashed into the earth fifty yards away. A blue line of smoke uncoiling from the undercarriage. There was no fire.
Wonderful! Now it’s my turn.
Let me tell you a story,” Caravaggio says to Hana. “There was a Hungarian named Almasy, who worked for the Germans during the war. He flew a bit with the Afrika Korps, but he was more valuable than that. In the he had been one of the great desert explorers. He knew every water hole and had helped map the Sand Sea. He knew all about the desert. He knew all about dialects. Does this sound familiar? Between the two wars he was always on expeditions out of Cairo. One was to search for Zerzura—the lost oasis. Then when war broke out he joined the Germans. In he became a guide for spies, taking them across the desert into Cairo. What I want to tell you is, I think the English patient is not English.” “Of course he is, what about all those flower beds in Gloucestershire?” “Precisely. It’s all a perfect background. Two nights ago, when we were trying to name the dog. Remember?” “Yes.” “What were his suggestions?” “He was strange that night.” “He was very strange, because I gave him an extra dose of morphine. Do you remember the names? He put out about eight names. Five of them were obvious jokes. Then three names. Cicero. Zerzura. Delilah.” “So?” “ ‘Cicero’ was a code name for a spy. The British unearthed him. A double then triple agent. He got away. ‘Zerzura’ is more complicated.” “I know about Zerzura. He’s talked about it. He also talks about gardens.” “But it is mostly the desert now. The English garden is wearing thin. He’s dying. I think you have the spy-helper Almasy upstairs.” They sit on the old cane hampers of the linen room looking at each other. Caravaggio shrugs. “It’s possible.” “I think he is an Englishman,” she says, sucking in her cheeks as she always does when she is thinking or considering something about herself.
“What was he like, Kip?” “He worked in Scientific Research. He was head of an experimental unit. Miss Morden, his secretary, was always with him, and his chauffeur, Mr. Fred Harts. Miss Morden would take notes, which he dictated as he worked on a bomb, while Mr. Harts helped with the instruments. He was a brilliant man. They were called the Holy Trinity. They were blown up, all three of them, in
“Madox, what is the name of that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck? At the front. Here. What is it, does it have an official name? That hollow about the size of an impress of your thumb?” Madox watches me for a moment through the noon glare.
This is the greatest of inventions.
Hana looks at the man in the bed.
Leaving the truck, I started walking towards Uweinat, where I knew there was a buried plane.
“Pull yourself together,” he mutters.
