‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do! How can I be your lover? He will go mad.’
A list of wounds.
The various colours of the bruise – bright russet leading to brown. The plate she walked across the room with, flinging its contents aside, and broke across his head, the blood rising up into the straw hair. The fork that entered the back of his shoulder, leaving its bite marks the doctor suspected were caused by a fox.
He would step into an embrace with her, glancing first to see what movable objects were around. He would meet her with others in public with bruises or a bandaged head and explain about the taxi jerking to a halt so that he had hit the open side window. Or with iodine on his forearm that covered a welt. Madox worried about his becoming suddenly accident-prone. She sneered quietly at the weakness of his explanation. Maybe it’s his age, maybe he needs glasses, said her husband, nudging Madox. Maybe it’s a woman he met, she said. Look, isn’t that a woman’s scratch or bite?
It was a scorpion, he said. Androctonus australis.
A postcard. Neat handwriting fills the rectangle.
Half my days I cannot bear not to touch you. The rest of the time I feel it doesn’t matter if I ever see you again. It isn’t the morality, it is how much you can bear.
No date, no name attached.
Sometimes when she is able to spend the night with him they are wakened by the three minarets of the city beginning their prayers before dawn. He walks with her through the indigo markets that lie between South Cairo and her home. The beautiful songs of faith enter the air like arrows, one minaret answering another, as if passing on a rumour of the two of them as they walk through the cold morning air, the smell of charcoal and hemp already making the air profound. Sinners in a holy city.
He sweeps his arm across plates and glasses on a restaurant table so she might look up somewhere else in the city hearing this cause of noise. When he is without her. He, who has never felt alone in the miles of longitude between desert towns. A man in a desert can hold absence in his cupped hands knowing it is something that feeds him more than water. There is a plant he knows of near El Taj, whose heart, if one cuts it out, is replaced with a fluid containing herbal goodness. Every morning one can drink the liquid the amount of a missing heart. The plant continues to nourish for a year before it dies from some lack or other.
He lies in his room surrounded by the pale maps. He is without Katharine. His hunger wishes to burn down all social rules, all courtesy.
Her life with others no longer interests him. He wants only her stalking beauty, her theatre of expressions. He wants the minute and secret reflection between them, the depth of field minimal, their foreignness intimate like two pages of a closed book.
He has been disassembled by her.
And if she has brought him to this, what has he brought her to?
When she is within the wall of her class and he is beside her in larger groups he tells jokes he doesn’t laugh at himself. Uncharacteristically manic, he attacks the history of exploration. When he is unhappy he does this. Only Madox recognizes the habit. But she will not even catch his eye. She smiles to everyone, to the objects in the room, praises a flower arrangement, worthless impersonal things. She misinterprets his behaviour, assuming this is what he wants, and doubles the size of the wall to protect herself.
But now he cannot bear this wall in her. You built your walls too, she tells him, so I have my wall. She says it glittering in a beauty he cannot stand. She with her beautiful clothes, with her pale face that laughs at everyone who smiles at her, with the uncertain grin for his angry jokes. He continues his appalling statements about this and that in some expedition they are all familiar with.
The minute she turns away from him in the lobby of Groppi’s bar after he greets her, he is insane. He knows the only way he can accept losing her is if he can continue to hold her or be held by her. If they can somehow nurse each other out of this. Not with a wall.
Sunlight pours into his Cairo room. His hand flabby over the Herodotus journal, all the tension in the rest of his body, so he writes words down wrong, the pen sprawling as if without spine. He can hardly write down the word sunlight. The words in love.
In the apartment there is light only from the river and the desert beyond it. It falls upon her neck her feet the vaccination scar he loves on her right arm. She sits on the bed hugging nakedness. He slides his open palm along the sweat of her shoulder. This is my shoulder, he thinks, not her husband’s, this is my shoulder. As lovers they have offered parts of their bodies to each other, like this. In this room on the periphery of the river.
In the few hours they have, the room has darkened to this pitch of light. Just river and desert light. Only when there is the rare shock of rain do they go towards the window and put their arms out, stretching, to bathe as much as they can of themselves in it. Shouts towards the brief downpour fill the streets.
‘We will never love each other again. We can never see each other again.’
‘I know,’ he says.
The night of her insistence on parting.
She sits, enclosed within herself, in the armour of her terrible conscience. He is unable to reach through it. Only his body is close to her.
‘Never again. Whatever happens.’
‘Yes.’
‘I think he will go mad. Do you understand?’
He says nothing, abandoning the attempt to pull her within him.
An hour later they walk into a dry night. They can hear the gramophone songs in the distance from the Music for All cinema, its windows open for the heat. They will have to part before that closes up and people she might know emerge from there.
They are in the botanical garden, near the Cathedral of All Saints. She sees one tear and leans forward and licks it, taking it into her mouth. As she has taken the blood from his hand when he cut himself cooking for her. Blood. Tear. He feels everything is missing from his body, feels he contains smoke. All that is alive is the knowledge of future desire and want. What he would say he cannot say to this woman whose openness is like a wound, whose youth is not mortal yet. He cannot alter what he loves most in her, her lack of compromise, where the romance of the poems she loves still sits with ease in the real world. Outside these qualities he knows there is no order in the world.
This night of her insistence. Twenty-eighth of September. The rain in the trees already dried by hot moonlight. Not one cool drop to fall down upon him like a tear. This parting at Groppi Park. He has not asked if her husband is home in that high square of light, across the street.
He sees the tall row of traveller’s palms above them, their outstretched wrists. The way her head and hair were above him, when she was his lover.
Now there is no kiss. Just one embrace. He untugs himself from her and walks away, then turns. She is still there. He comes back within a few yards of her, one finger raised to make a point.
‘I just want you to know. I don’t miss you yet.’
His face awful to her, trying to smile. Her head sweeps away from him and hits the side of the gatepost. He sees it hurt her, notices the wince. But they have separated already into themselves now, the walls up at her insistence. Her jerk, her pain, is accidental, is intentional. Her hand is near her temple.
‘You will,’ she says.
From this point on in our lives, she had whispered to him earlier, we will either find or lose our souls.
How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.
I was in her arms. I had pushed the sleeve of her shirt up to the shoulder so I could see her vaccination scar. I love this, I said. This pale aureole on her arm. I see the instrument scratch and then punch the serum within her and then release itself, free of her skin, years ago, when she was nine years old, in a school gymnasium.
VI
A Buried Plane
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 t
urns 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.
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.
In that city in 1936 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.
In the northeast section of Cairo was the great courtyard of religious students, and beyond it the Khan el Khalili bazaar. 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 1937, 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.
‘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.
‘Pull yourself together,’ he mutters.
‘Let me tell you a story,’ Caravaggio says to Hana. ‘There was a Hungarian named Almásy, 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 1930s 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 1941 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 Almásy 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.
‘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 1942 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 bedside 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 Almásy. This was a stretch of desert that, it was assumed, no one could cross.
‘Between the wars Almásy had English friends. Great explorers. But when war broke out he went with the Germans. Rommel asked him to take Eppler across the desert into Cairo because it would have been too obvious by plane or parachute. 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 1930s 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. Baking to death in the sand.
‘It took them three weeks to reach Cairo. Almásy 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 Almásy. A desert lover as well. He had spent his childhood in the Levant and knew the Bedouin. But the thing about Almásy 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. Almásy 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. 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 st
rength. 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.
‘Leave him alone. He’s my patient.’
‘I won’t damage him. The morphine and alcohol will take away the pain.’
(3 CC’S BROMPTON COCKTAIL. 3:00 P.M.)
Caravaggio slips the book out of the man’s hands.
‘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 Kim 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.
He traces his black hand along the Numi River till it enters the sea at 23°30’ latitude. He continues sliding his finger seven inches west, off the page, onto his chest; he touches his rib.
‘Here. The Gilf Kebir, just north of the Tropic of Cancer. On the Egyptian–Libyan border.’
What happened in 1942?
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.
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.