The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje Page A

more innocent than devious. Those who claimed to be uncertain of their nationalities were housed in compounds in Tirrenia, where the sea hospital was. The burned pilot was one more enigma, with no identification, unrecognizable. In the criminal compound nearby they kept the American poet Ezra Pound in a cage, where he hid on his body and pockets, moving it daily for his own image of security, the propeller of eucalyptus he had bent down and plucked from his traitor’s garden when he was arrested. ‘
Eucalyptus that is for memory
.’
    ‘You should be trying to trick me,’ the burned pilot told his interrogators, ‘make me speak German, which I can, by the way, ask me about Don Bradman. Ask me about Marrmite, the great Gertrude Jekyll.’ He knew where every Giotto was in Europe, and most of the places where a person could find convincing trompe l’oeil.
    The sea hospital was created out of bathing cabins along the beach that tourists had rented at the turn ofthe century. During the heat the old Campari umbrellas were placed once more into their table sockets, and the bandaged and the wounded and the comatose would sit under them in the sea air and talk slowly or stare or talk all the time. The burned man noticed the young nurse, separate from the others. He was familiar with such dead glances, knew she was more patient than nurse. He spoke only to her when he needed something.
    He was interrogated again. Everything about him was very English except for the fact that his skin was tarred black, a bogman from history among the interrogating officers.
    They asked him where the Allies stood in Italy, and he said he assumed they had taken Florence but were held up by the hill towns north of them. The Gothic Line. ‘Your division is stuck in Florence and cannot get past bases like Prato and Fiesole for instance because the Germans have barracked themselves into villas and convents and they are brilliantly defended. It’s an old story – the Crusaders made the same mistake against the Saracens. And like them you now need the fortress towns. They have never been abandoned except during times of cholera.’
    He had rambled on, driving them mad, traitor or ally, leaving them never quite sure who he was.
    Now, months later in the Villa San Girolamo, in the hill town north of Florence, in the arbour room that is his bedroom, he reposes like the sculpture of the dead knight in Ravenna. He speaks in fragments about oasis towns, the later Medicis, the prose style of Kipling, the woman who bit into his flesh. And in his commonplace book, his 1890 edition of Herodotus’
Histories
, are other fragments – maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books. All that is missing is his own name. There is still no clue to who he actually is,nameless, without rank or battalion or squadron. The references in his book are all pre-war, the deserts of Egypt and Libya in the 1930s, interspersed with references to cave art or gallery art or journal notes in his own small handwriting. ‘There are no brunettes,’ the English patient says to Hana as she bends over him, ‘among Florentine Madonnas.’
    The book is in his hands. She carries it away from his sleeping body and puts it on the side table. Leaving it open she stands there, looking down, and reads. She promises herself she will not turn the page.
    May 1936.
I will read you a poem, clifton’s wife said, in her formal voice, which is how she always seems unless you are very close to her. We were all at the southern campsite, within the firelight
.
    I walked in a desert.
And I cried:
‘Ah, God, take me from this place!’
A voice said: ‘It is no desert.’
‘I cried: ‘Well, but -
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.’
A voice said: ‘It is no desert
.’
    No one said anything
.
    She said, That was by Stephen Crane, he never came to the desert
.
    He came to the desert, Madox said
.
    July 1936.
There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared