THE LAST MEDIAEVAL WAR was fought in Italy in 1943 and 1944. Fortress towns on great promontorieswhich had been battled over since the eighth century had the armies of new kings flung carelessly against them.

Around the outcrops of rocks were the traffic of stretchers, butchered vineyards, where, if you dug deep beneaththe tank ruts, you found blood-axe and spear. Monterchi, Cortona, Urbino, Arezzo, Sanse-polcro, Anghiari. Andthen the coast.

Cats slept in the gun turrets looking south. English and Americans and Indians and Australians and Canadiansad.vanced north, and the shell traces exploded and dissolved in the air. When the armies assembled atSansepolcro, a town whose symbol is the crossbow, some soldiers acquired them and fired them silently at nightover the walls of the untaken city. Field Marshal Kesselring of the retreating German army seriously consideredthe pouring of hot oil from battlements.

Mediaeval scholars were pulled out of Oxford colleges and flown into Umbria. Their average age was sixty.

They were billeted with the troops, and in meetings with strategic com.mand they kept forgetting the inventionof the airplane. They spoke of towns in terms of the art in them. At Monterchi there was the Madonna del Partoby Piero della Francesca, located in the chapel next to the town graveyard. When the thirteenth-century castlewas finally taken during the spring rains, troops were billeted under the high dome of the church and slept by thestone pulpit where Hercules slays the Hydra. There was only bad water. Many died of typhoid and other fevers.

Looking up with service binoculars in the Gothic church at Arezzo soldiers would come upon theircontempo.rary faces in the Piero della Francesca frescoes. The Queen of Sheba conversing with King Solomon.

Nearby a twig from the Tree of Good and Evil inserted into the mouth of the dead Adam. Years later this queenwould realize that the bridge over the Siloam was made from the wood of this sacred tree.

It was always raining and cold, and there was no order but for the great maps of art that showed judgement, pietyand sacrifice. The Eighth Army came upon river after river of destroyed bridges, and their sapper unitsclambered down banks on ladders of rope within enemy gunfire and swam or waded across. Food and tents werewashed away. Men who were tied to equipment disappeared. Once across the river they tried to ascend out of thewater. They sank their hands and wrists into the mud wall of the cliff face and hung there. They wanted the mudto harden and hold them.

The young Sikh sapper put his cheek against the mud and thought of the Queen of Sheba’s face, the texture ofher skin. There was no comfort in this river except for his desire for her, which somehow kept him warm. Hewould pull the veil off her hair. He would put his right hand between her neck and olive blouse. He too was tiredand sad, as the wise king and guilty queen he had seen in Arezzo two weeks earlier.

He hung over the water, his hands locked into the mud-bank. Character, that subtle art, disappeared among themduring those days and nights, existed only in a book or on a painted wall. Who was sadder in that dome’s mural?

He leaned forward to rest on the skin of her frail neck. He fell in love with her downcast eye. This woman whowould someday know the sacredness of bridges.

At night in the camp bed, his arms stretched out into dis.tance like two armies. There was no promise of solutionor victory except for the temporary pact between him and that painted fresco’s royalty who would forget him,never acknowl.edge his existence or be aware of him, a Sikh, halfway up a sapper’s ladder in the rain, erecting aBailey bridge for the army behind him. But he remembered the painting of their story. And when a month laterthe battalions reached the sea, after they had survived everything and entered the coastal town of Cattolica andthe engineers had cleared the beach of mines in a twenty-yard stretch so the men could go down naked into thesea, he approached one of the mediaevalists who had befriended him—who had once simply talked with him andshared some Spam—and promised to show him some.thing in return for his kindness.

The sapper signed out a Triumph motorbike, strapped a crimson emergency light onto his arm, and they rodeback the way they had come—back into and through the now innocent towns like Urbino and Anghiari, along thewinding crest of the mountain ridge that was a spine down Italy, the old man bundled up behind him hugginghim, and down the western slope towards Arezzo. The piazza at night was empty of troops, and the sapperparked in front of the church. He helped the mediaevalist off, collected his equipment and walked into thechurch. A colder darkness. A greater emptiness, the sound of his boots filling the area. Once more he smelled theold stone and wood. He lit three flares. He slung block and tackle across the columns above the nave, then fired arivet already threaded with rope into a high wooden beam. The professor was watch.ing him bemused, now andthen peering up into the high darkness. The young sapper circled him and knotted a sling across his waist andshoulders, taped a small lit flare to the old man’s chest.

He left him there by the communion rail and noisily climbed the stairs to the upper level, where the other end ofthe rope was. Holding onto it, he stepped off the balcony into the dark.ness, and the old man was simultaneouslyswung up, hoisted up fast until, when the sapper touched ground, he swung idly in midair within three feet of thefrescoed walls, the flare brightening a halo around him. Still holding the rope the sap.per walked forward untilthe man swung to the right to hover in front of The Flight of Emperor Maxentius.

Five minutes later he let the man down. He lit a flare for himself and hoisted his body up into the dome withinthe deep blue of the artificial sky. He remembered its gold stars from the time he had gazed on it with binoculars.

Looking down he saw the mediaevalist sitting on a bench, exhausted. He was now aware of the depth of thischurch, not its height. The liquid sense of it. The hollowness and darkness of a well. The flare sprayed out of hishand like a wand. He pulleyed himself across to her face, his Queen of Sadness, and his brown hand reached outsmall against the giant neck.

The Sikh sets up a tent in the far reaches of the garden, where Hana thinks lavender was once grown. She hasfound dry leaves in that area which she has rolled in her fingers and identified. Now and then after a rain sherecognizes the per.fume of it.

At first he will not come into the house at all. He walks past on some duty or other to do with the dismantling ofmines. Always courteous. A little nod of his head. Hana sees him wash at a basin of collected rainwater, placedformally on top of a sundial. The garden tap, used in previous times for the seedbeds, is now dry. She sees hisshirtless brown body as he tosses water over himself like a bird using its wing. During the day she notices mostlyhis arms in the short-sleeved army shirt and the rifle which is always with him, even though battles seem now tobe over for them.

He has various postures with the gun—half-staff, half a crook for his elbows when it is over his shoulders. Hewill turn, suddenly realizing she is watching him. He is a survivor of his fears, will step around anythingsuspicious, acknowledg.ing her look in this panorama as if claiming he can deal with it all.

He is a relief to her in his self-sufficiency, to all of them in the house, though Caravaggio grumbles at thesapper’s contin.uous humming of Western songs he has learned for himself in the last three years of the war.

The other sapper, who had arrived with him in the rainstorm, Hardy he was called, is billeted elsewhere, nearerthe town, though she has seen them working together, entering a garden with their wands of gad-getry to clearmines.

The dog has stuck by Caravaggio. The young soldier, who will run and leap with the dog along the path, refusesto give it food of any kind, feeling it should survive on its own. If he finds food he eats it himself. His courtesygoes only so far. Some nights he sleeps on the parapet that overlooks the valley, crawling into his tent only if itrains.

He, for his part, witnesses Caravaggio’s wanderings at night. On two occasions the sapper trails Caravaggio at adis.tance. But two days later Caravaggio stops him and says, Don’t follow me again. He begins to deny it, butthe older man puts his hand across his lying face and quiets him. So the soldier knows Caravaggio was aware ofhim two nights before. In any case, the trailing was simply a remnant of a habit he had been taught during thewar. Just as even now he desires to aim his rifle and fire and hit some target precisely. Again and again he aimsat a nose on a statue or one of the brown hawks veering across the sky of the valley.

He is still very much a youth. He wolfs down food, jumps up to clear away his plate, allowing himself half anhour for lunch.

She has watched him at work, careful and timeless as a cat, in the orchard and within the overgrown garden thatrises behind the house. She notices the darker brown skin of his wrist, which slides freely within the bangle thatclinks some.times when he drinks a cup of tea in front of her.

He never speaks about the danger that comes with his kind of searching. Now and then an explosion brings herand Ca-ravaggio quickly out of the house, her heart taut from the muffled blast. She runs out or runs to a windowseeing Cara-vaggio too in the corner of her vision, and they will see the sapper waving lazily towards the house,not even turning around from the herb terrace.

Once Caravaggio entered the library and saw the sapper up by the ceiling, against the trompe 1’oeil—onlyCaravaggio would walk into a room and look up into the high corners to see if he was alone—and the youngsoldier, his eyes not leav.ing their focus, put out his palm and snapped his fingers, halting Caravaggio in hisentrance, a warning to leave the room for safety as he unthreaded and cut a fuze wire he had traced to that corner,hidden above the valance.

He is always humming or whistling. “Who is whistling?” asks the English patient one night, having not met oreven seen the newcomer. Always singing to himself as he lies upon the parapet looking up at a shift of clouds.

When he steps into the seemingly empty villa he is noisy. He is the only one of them who has remained inuniform. Immaculate, buckles shined, the sapper appears out of his tent, his turban symmetrically layered, theboots clean and banging into the wood or stone floors of the house. On a dime he turns from a problem he isworking on and breaks into laughter. He seems unconsciously in love with his body, with his physicalness,bending over to pick up a slice of bread, his knuckles brushing the grass, even twirling the rifle absent-mindedlylike a huge mace as he walks along the path of cy.presses to meet the other sappers in the village.

He seems casually content with this small group in the villa, some kind of loose star on the edge of their system.

This is like a holiday for him after the war of mud and rivers and bridges. He enters the house only when invitedin, just a tentative visitor, the way he had done that first night when he had followed the faltering sound ofHana’s piano and come up the cypress-lined path and stepped into the library.

He had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of adanger to the piano player. The retreating army often left pencil mines within musical instruments. Returningowners opened up pi.anos and lost their hands. People would revive the swing on a grandfather clock, and aglass bomb would blow out half a wall and whoever was nearby.

He followed the noise of the piano, rushing up the hill with Hardy, climbed over the stone wall and entered thevilla As long as there was no pause it meant the player would not lean forward and pull out the thin metal band toset the metronome going. Most pencil bombs were hidden in these—the easiest place to solder the thin layer ofwire upright. Bombs were attached to taps, to the spines of books, they were drilled into fruit trees so an applefalling onto a lower branch would deto.nate the tree, just as a hand gripping that branch would. He was unableto look at a room or field without seeing the possi.bilities of weapons there.

He had paused by the French doors, leaned his head against the frame, then slid into the room and except formoments of lightning remained within the darkness. There was a girl standing, as if waiting for him, lookingdown at the keys she was playing. His eyes took in the room before they took her in, swept across it like a sprayof radar. The metronome was ticking already, swaying innocently back and forth. There was no danger, no tinywire. He stood there in his wet uniform, the young woman at first unaware of his entrance.

Beside his tent the antenna of a crystal set is strung up into the trees. She can see the phosphorus green from theradio dial if she looks over there at night with Caravaggio’s field glasses, the sapper’s shifting body covering itup suddenly if he moves across the path of vision. He wears the portable contraption during the day, just oneearphone attached to his head, the other loose under his chin, so he can hear sounds from the rest of the worldthat might be important to him. He will come into the house to pass on whatever information he has picked upthat he thinks might be interesting to them. Oie afternoon he announces that the bandleader Glenn Miller hasdied, his plane having crashed somewhere between Eng.land and France.

So he moves among them. She sees him in the distance of a defunct garden with the diviner or, if he has foundsomething, unravelling that knot of wires and fuzes someone has left him like a terrible letter.

He is always washing his hands. Caravaggio at first thinks he is too fussy. “How did you get through a war?”

Caravaggio laughs.

“I grew up in India, Uncle. You wash your hands all the time. Before all meals. A habit. I was born in thePunjab.”

“I’m from Upper America,” she says.

He sleeps half in and half out of the tent. She sees his hands remove the earphone and drop it onto his lap.

Then Hana puts down the glasses and turns away.

They were under the huge vault. The sergeant lit a flare, and the sapper lay on the floor and looked up throughthe rifle’s telescope, looked at the ochre faces as if he were search.ing for a brother in the crowd. The cross hairsshook along the biblical figures, the light dousing the coloured vestments and flesh darkened by hundreds ofyears of oil and candle smoke. And now this yellow gas smoke, which they knew was outra.geous in thissanctuary, so the soldiers would be thrown out, would be remembered for abusing the permission they re.ceivedto see the Great Hall, which they had come to, wading up beachheads and the one thousand skirmishes of smallwars and the bombing of Monte Cassino and then walking in hushed politeness through the Raphael Stanze tillthey were here, finally, seventeen men who had landed in Sicily and fought their way up the ankle of the countryto be here— where they were offered just a mostly dark hall. As if being in the presence of the place wasenough.

And one of them had said, “Damn. Maybe more light, Sergeant Shand?” And the sergeant released the catch ofthe flare and held it up in his outstretched arm, the niagara of its light pouring off his fist, and stood there for thelength of its burn like that. The rest of them stood looking up at the figures and faces crowded onto the ceilingthat emerged in the light. But the young sapper was already on his back, the rifle aimed, his eye almost brushingthe beards of Noah and Abraham and the variety of demons until he reached the great face and was stilled by it,the face like a spear, wise, unforgiving.

The guards were yelling at the entrance and he could hear the running steps, just another thirty seconds left onthe flare. He rolled over and handed the rifle to the padre. “That one. Who is he? At three o’clock northwest, whois he? Quick, the flare is almost out.”

The padre cradled the rifle and swept it over to the corner, and the flare died.

He returned the rifle to the young Sikh.

“You know we shall all be in serious trouble over this light.ing of weapons in the Sistine Chapel. I should nothave come here. But I also must thank Sergeant Shand, he was heroic to do it. No real damage has been done, Isuppose.”

“Did you see it? The face. Who was it?”

“Ah yes, it is a great face.”

“You saw it.”

“Yes. Isaiah.”

When the Eighth Army got to Gabicce on the east coast, the sapper was head of night patrol. On the second nighthe re.ceived a signal over the shortwave that there was enemy move.ment in the water. The patrol sent out ashell and the water erupted, a rough warning shot. They did not hit anything, but in the white spray of theexplosion he picked up a darker outline of movement. He raised the rifle and held the drifting shadow in hissights for a full minute, deciding not to shoot in order to see if there would be other movement nearby. Theenemy was still camped up north, in Rimini, on the edge of the city. He had the shadow in his sights when thehalo was suddenly illuminated around the head of the Virgin Mary. She was coming out of the sea.

She was standing in a boat. Two men rowed. Two other men held her upright, and as they touched the beach thepeople of the town began to applaud from their dark and opened windows.

The sapper could see the cream-coloured face and the halo of small battery lights. He was lying on the concretepillbox, between the town and the sea, watching her as the four men climbed out of the boat and lifted the five-foot-tall plaster statue into their arms. They walked up the beach, without pausing, no hesitation for the mines.

Perhaps they had watched them being buried and charted them when the Ger.mans had been there. Their feetsank into the sand. This was Gabicce Mare on May 29, 1944. Marine Festival of the Virgin Mary.

Adults and children were on the streets. Men in band uni.forms had also emerged. The band would not play andbreak the rules of curfew, but the instruments were still part of the ceremony, immaculately polished.

He slid from the darkness, the mortar tube strapped to his back, carrying the rifle in his hands. In his turban andwith the weapons he was a shock to them. They had not expected him to emerge too out of the no-man’s-land ofthe beach.

He raised his rifle and picked up her face in the gun sight —ageless, without sexuality, the foreground of themen’s dark hands reaching into her light, the gracious nod of the twenty small light bulbs. The figure wore a paleblue cloak, her left knee raised slightly to suggest drapery.

They were not romantic people. They had survived the Fas.cists, the English, Gauls, Goths and Germans. Theyhad been owned so often it meant nothing. But this blue and cream plaster figure had come out of the sea, wasplaced in a grape truck full of flowers, while the band marched ahead of her in silence. Whatever protection hewas supposed to provide for this town was meaningless. He couldn’t walk among their children in white dresseswith these guns.

He moved one street south of them and walked at the speed of the statue’s movement, so they reached the joiningstreets at the same time. He raised his rifle to pick up her face once again in his sights. It all ended on apromontory overlooking the sea, where they left her and returned to their homes. None of them was aware of hiscontinued presence on the periphery.

Her face was still lit. The four men who had brought her by boat sat in a square around her like sentries. Thebattery attached to her back began to fade; it died at about four-thirty in the morning. He glanced at his watchthen. He picked up the men with the rifle telescope. Two were asleep. He swung the sights up to her face andstudied her again. A different look in the fading light around her. A face which in the dark.ness looked more likesomeone he knew. A sister. Someday a daughter. If he could have parted with it, the sapper would have leftsomething there as his gesture. But he had his own faith after all.

Caravaggio enters the library. He has been spending most afternoons there. As always, books are mysticalcreatures to him. He plucks one out and opens it to the title page. He is in the room about five minutes before hehears a slight groan.

He turns and sees Hana asleep on the sofa. He closes the book and leans back against the thigh-high ledge underthe shelves. She is curled up, her left cheek on the dusty brocade and her right arm up towards her face, a fistagainst her jaw. Her eyebrows shift, the face concentrating within sleep.

When he had first seen her after all this time she had looked taut, boiled down to just body enough to get herthrough this efficiently. Her body had been in a war and, as in love, it had used every part of itself.

He sneezed out loud, and when he looked up from the movement of his tossed-down head she was awake, theeyes open staring ahead at him. “Guess what time it is.”

“About four-oh-five. No, four-oh-seven,” she said. It was an old game between a man and a child. He slipped outof the room to look for the clock, and by his movement and assuredness she could tell he had recently takenmorphine, was refreshed and precise, with his familiar confidence. She sat up and smiled when he came backshaking his head with wonder at her accuracy.

“I was born with a sundial in my head, right?” “And at night?”

“Do they have moondials? Has anyone invented one? Per.haps every architect preparing a villa hides amoondial for thieves, like a necessary tithe.”

“A good worry for the rich.”

“Meet me at the moondial, David. A place where the weak can enter the strong.”

“Like the English patient and you?”

“I was almost going to have a baby a year ago.”

Now that his mind is light and exact with the drug, she can whip around and he will be with her, thinkingalongside her. And she is being open, not quite realizing she is awake and conversing, as if still speaking in adream, as if his sneeze had been the sneeze in a dream.

Caravaggio is familiar with this state. He has often met people at the moondial. Disturbing them at two a.m. as awhole bedroom cupboard came crashing down by mistake. Such shocks, he discovered, kept them away fromfear and violence. Disturbed by owners of houses he was robbing, he would clap his hands and conversefrantically, flinging an ex.pensive clock into the air and catching it in his hands, quickly asking them questions,about where things were.

“I lost the child. I mean, I had to lose it. The father was already dead. There was a war.”

“Were you in Italy?”

“In Sicily, about the time this happened. All through the time we came up the Adriatic behind the troops Ithought of it. I had continued conversations with the child. I worked very hard in the hospitals and retreated fromeverybody around me. Except the child, who I shared everything with. In my head. I was talking to him while Ibathed and nursed patients. I was a little crazy.”

“And then your father died.”

“Yes. Then Patrick died. I was in Pisa when I heard.”

She was awake. Sitting up.

“You knew, huh?”

“I got a letter from home.”

“Is that why you came here, because you knew?”

“No.”

“Good. I don’t think that he believed in wakes and such things. Patrick used to say he wanted a duet by twowomen on musical instruments when he died. Squeeze-box and violin. That’s all. He was so damn sentimental.”

“Yes. You could really make him do anything. Find him a woman in distress and he was lost.”

The wind rose up out of the valley to their hill so the cypress trees that lined the thirty-six steps outside thechapel wrestled with it. Drops of earlier rain nudged off, falling with a ticking sound upon the two of them sittingon the balustrade by the steps. It was long after midnight. She was lying on the con.crete ledge, and he paced orleaned out looking down into the valley. Only the sound of the dislodged rain.

“When did you stop talking to the baby?”

“It all got too busy, suddenly. Troops were going into battles at the Moro Bridge and then into Urbino. Maybe inUrbino I stopped. You felt you could be shot anytime there, not just if you were a soldier, but a priest or nurse. Itwas a rabbit warren, those narrow tilted streets. Soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling inlove with me for an hour and then dying. It was important to remember their names. But I kept seeing the childwhenever they died. Being washed away. Some would sit up and rip all their dressings off trying to breathebetter. Some would be worried about tiny scratches on their arms when they died. Then the bubble in the mouth.

That little pop. I leaned forward to close a dead soldier’s eyes, and he opened them and sneered, “Can’t wait tohave me dead? You bitchl” He sat up and swept everything on my tray to the floor. So furious. Who would wantto die like that? To die with that kind of anger. You bitchl After that I always waited for the bubble in theirmouths. I know death now, David. I know all the smells, I know how to divert them from agony. When to givethe quick jolt of morphine in a major vein. The saline solution. To make them empty their bowels before theydie. Every damn general should have had my job. Every damn general. It should have been a prerequisite for anyriver crossing. Who the hell were we to be given this responsibility, expected to be wise as old priests, to knowhow to lead people towards something no one wanted and somehow make them feel comfortable. I could neverbelieve in all those services they gave for the dead. Their vulgar rhetoric. How dare they! How dare they talk likethat about a human being dying.”

There was no light, all lamps out, the sky mostly cloud-hidden. It was safer not to draw attention to thecivilisation of existing homes. They were used to walking the grounds of the house in darkness.

“You know why the army didn’t want you to stay here, with the English patient? Do you?”

“An embarrassing marriage? My father complex?” She was smiling at him.

“How’s the old guy?”

“He still hasn’t calmed down about that dog.”

“Tell him he came with me.”

“He’s not really sure you are staying here either. Thinks you might walk off with the china.”

“Do you think he would like some wine? I managed to scrounge a bottle today.”

“From?”

“Do you want it or not?”

“Let’s just have it now. Let’s forget him.”

“Ah, the breakthrough!”

“Not the breakthrough. I badly need a serious drink.”

“Twenty years old. By the time I was twenty ...”

“Yes, yes, why don’t you scrounge a gramophone someday. By the way, I think this is called looting.”

“My country taught me all this. It’s what I did for them during the war.”

He went through the bombed chapel into the house.

Hana sat up, slightly dizzy, off balance. “And look what they did to you,” she said to herself.

Even among those she worked closely with she hardly talked during the war. She needed an uncle, a member ofthe family’ She needed the father of the child, while she waited in this hill town to get drunk for the first time inyears, while a burned man upstairs had fallen into his four hours of sleep and an old friend of her father’s wasnow rifling through her medicine chest, breaking the glass tab, tightening a bootlace round his arm and injectingthe morphine quickly into him.self, in the time it took for him to turn around.

At night, in the mountains around them, even by ten o’clock, only the earth is dark. Clear grey sky and the greenhills.

“I was sick of the hunger. Of just being lusted at. So I stepped away, from the dates, the jeep rides, the courtship’

The last dances before they died—I was considered a snob. I worked harder than others. Double shifts, underfire, did any.thing for them, emptied every bedpan. I became a snob be.cause I wouldn’t go out and spend theirmoney. I wanted to go home and there was no one at home. And I was sick of Europe. Sick of being treated likegold because I was female. I courted one man and he died and the child died. I mean, the child didn’t just die, Iwas the one who destroyed it. After that I stepped so far back no one could get near me. Not with talk of snobs.

Not with anyone’s death. Then I met him, the man burned black. Who turned out to be, up close, anEnglishman-”It has been a long time, David, since I thought of anything to do with a man.”

After a week of the Sikh sapper’s presence around the villa they adapted to his habits of eating. Wherever he was—on the hill or in the village—he would return around twelve-thirty and join Hana and Caravaggio, pull out thesmall bundle of blue handkerchief from his shoulder bag and spread it onto the table alongside their meal. Hisonions and his herbs— which Caravaggio suspected he was taking from the Francis.cans’ garden during thetime he spent there sweeping the place for mines. He peeled the onions with the same knife he used to striprubber from a fuze wire. This was followed by fruit. Caravaggio suspected he had gone through the wholeinvasion never eating from a mess canteen.

In fact he had always been dutifully in line at the crack of dawn, holding out his cup for the English tea he loved,adding to it his own supply of condensed milk. He would drink slowly, standing in sunlight to watch the slowmovement of troops who, if they were stationary that day, would already be playing canasta by nine a.m.

Now, at dawn, under the scarred trees in the half-bombed gardens of the Villa San Girolamo, he takes a mouthfulof water from his canteen. He pours tooth powder onto the brush and begins a ten-minute session of lackadaisicalbrushing as he wanders around looking down into the valley still buried in the mist, his mind curious rather thanawestruck at the vista he happens now to be living above. The brushing of teeth, since he was a child, has alwaysbeen for him an outdoor activity.

The landscape around him is just a temporary thing, there is no permanence to it. He simply acknowledges thepossibility of rain, a certain odour from a shrub. As if his mind, even when unused, is radar, his eyes locating thechoreography of inanimate objects for the quarter-mile around him, which is the killing radius of small arms. Hestudies the two onions he has pulled out of the earth with care, aware that gardens too have been mined byretreating armies.

At lunch there is Caravaggio’s avuncular glance at the ob.jects on the blue handkerchief. There is probablysome rare animal, Caravaggio thinks, who eats the same foods that this young soldier eats with his right hand, hisfingers carrying it to his mouth. He uses the knife only to peel the skin from the onion, to slice fruit.

The two men take a trip by cart down into the valley to pick up a sack of flour. Also, the soldier has to delivermaps of the cleared areas to headquarters at San Domenico. Finding it difficult to ask questions about each other,they speak about Hana. There are many questions before the older man admits having known her before the war.

“In Canada?”

“Yes, I knew her there.”

They pass numerous bonfires on the sides of the road and Caravaggio diverts the young soldier’s attention tothem. The sapper’s nickname is Kip. “Get Kip.” “Here comes Kip.” The name had attached itself to himcuriously. In his first bomb disposal report in England some butter had marked his paper, and the officer hadexclaimed, “What’s this? Kipper grease?” and laughter surrounded him. He had no idea what a kipper was, butthe young Sikh had been thereby translated into a salty English fish. Within a week his real name, Kirpal Singh,had been forgotten. He hadn’t minded this. Lord Suffolk and his demolition team took to calling him by hisnickname, which he preferred to the English habit of calling people by their surname.

That summer the English patient wore his hearing aid so he was alive to everything in the house. The amber shellhung within his ear with its translations of casual noises—the chair in the hall scraping against the floor, the clickof the dog’s claws outside his room so he would turn up the volume and even hear its damn breathing, or theshout on the terrace from the sapper. The English patient within a few days of the young soldier’s arrival hadthus become aware of his presence around the house, though Hana kept them separate, knowing they wouldprobably not like each other.

But she entered the Englishman’s room one day to find the sapper there. He was standing at the foot of the bed,his arms hung over the rifle that rested across his shoulders. She dis.liked this casual handling of the gun, hislazy spin towards her entrance as if his body were the axle of a wheel, as if the weapon had been sewn along hisshoulders and arms and into his small brown wrists.

The Englishman turned to her and said, “We’re getting along famously!”

She was put out that the sapper had strolled casually into this domain, seemed able to surround her, beeverywhere. Kip, hearing from Caravaggio that the patient knew about guns, had begun to discuss the search forbombs with the Englishman. He had come up to the room and found him a reservoir of information about Alliedand enemy weaponry. The Englishman not only knew about the absurd Italian fuzes but also knew the detailedtopography of this region of Tuscany. Soon they were drawing outlines of bombs for each other and talking outthe theory of each specific circuit.

“The Italian fuzes seem to be put in vertically. And not always at the tail.”

“Well, that depends. The ones made in Naples are that way, but the factories in Rome follow the German system.

Of course, Naples, going back to the fifteenth century ...”

It meant having to listen to the patient talk in his circuitous way, and the young soldier was not used to remainingstill and silent. He would get restless and kept interrupting the pauses and silences the Englishman alwaysallowed himself, trying to energize the train of thought. The soldier rolled his head back and looked at theceiling.

“What we should do is make a sling,” the sapper mused, turning to Hana as she entered, “and carry him aroundthe house.” She looked at both of them, shrugged and walked out of the room.

When Caravaggio passed her in the hall she was smiling. They stood in the hall and listened to the conversationinside the room.

Did I tell you my concept ofVirgilian man, Kip? Let me...

Is your hearing aid on?

What?

Turn it—“I think he’s found a friend,” she said to Caravaggio.

She walks out into the sunlight and the courtyard. At noon the taps deliver water into the villa’s fountain and fortwenty minutes it bursts forth. She removes her shoes, climbs into the dry bowl of the fountain and waits.

At this hour the smell of hay grass is everywhere. Bluebot.tles stumble in the air and bang into humans as ifslamming into a wall, then retreat unconcerned. She notices where water spiders have nested beneath the upperbowl of the foun.tain, her face in the shade of its overhang. She likes to sit in this cradle of stone, the smell ofcool and dark hidden air emerging from the still empty spout near her, like air from a basement opened for thefirst time in late spring so the heat outside hangs in contrast. She brushes her arms and toes free of dust, of thecrimp of shoes, and stretches.

Too many men in the house. Her mouth leans against the bare arm of her shoulder. She smells her skin, thefamiliarity of it. One’s own taste and flavour. She remembers when she had first grown aware of it, somewherein her teens—it seemed a place rather than a time—kissing her forearm to practise kissing, smelling her wrist orbending down to her thigh. Breathing into her own cupped hands so breath would bounce back towards her nose.

She rubs her bare white feet now against the brindle colour of the fountain. The sapper has told her about statueshe came across during the fighting, how he had slept beside one who was a grieving angel, half male, halffemale, that he had found beautiful. He had lain back, looking at the body, and for the first time during the warfelt at peace.

She sniffs the stone, the cool moth smell of it.

Did her father struggle into his death or die calm? Did he lie the way the English patient reposes grandly on hiscot? Was he nursed by a stranger? A man not of your own blood can break upon your emotions more thansomeone of your own blood. As if falling into the arms of a stranger you discover the mirror of your choice.

Unlike the sapper, her father was never fully comfortable in the world. His conversations lost some of theirsyllables out of shyness. In any of Patrick’s sentences, her mother had complained, you lost two or three crucialwords. But Hana liked that about him, there seemed to be no feudal spirit around him. He had a vagueness, anuncertainty that allowed him tentative charm. He was unlike most men. Even the wounded English patient hadthe familiar purpose of the feudal. But her father was a hungry ghost, liking those around him to be confident,even raucous.

Did he move towards his death with the same casual sense of being there at an accident? Or in fury? He was theleast furious man she knew, hating argument, just walking out of a room if someone spoke badly of Roosevelt orTim Buck or praised certain Toronto mayors. He had never attempted to convert anyone in his life, justbandaging or celebrating events that occurred near him. That was all. A novel is a mirror walking down a road.

She had read that in one of the books the English patient recommended, and that was the way she rememberedher father—whenever she collected the moments of him—stopping his car under one specific bridge in Torontonorth of Pottery Road at midnight and telling her that this was where the starlings and pigeons uncomfortablyand not too happily shared the rafters during the night. So they had paused there on a summer night and leanedtheir heads out into the racket of noise and sleepy chirpings.

I was told Patrick died in a dove-cot, Caravaggio said.

Her father loved a city of his own invention, whose streets and walls and borders he and his friends had painted.

He never truly stepped out of that world. She realizes everything she knew about the real world she learned onher own or from Caravaggio or, during the time they lived together, from her stepmother, Clara. Clara, who hadonce been an actress, the articulate one, who had articulated fury when they all left for the war. All through thelast year in Italy she has carried the letters from Clara. Letters she knows were written on a pink rock on anisland in Georgian Bay, written with the wind coming over the water and curling the paper of her notebookbefore she finally tore the pages out and put them in an envelope for Hana. She carried them in her suitcase, eachcontain.ing a flake of pink rock and that wind. But she has never answered them. She has missed Clara with awoe but is un.able to write to her, now, after all that has happened to her. She cannot bear to talk of or evenacknowledge the death of Patrick.

And now, on this continent, the war having travelled else.where, the nunneries and churches that were turnedbriefly into hospitals are solitary, cut off in the hills of Tuscany and Umbria. They hold the remnants of warsocieties, small mo.raines left by a vast glacier. All around them now is the holy forest.

She tucks her feet under her thin frock and rests her arms along her thighs. Everything is still. She hears thefamiliar hollow churn, restless in the pipe that is buried in the central column of the fountain. Then silence. Thensuddenly there is a crash as the water arrives bursting around her.

The tales Hana had read to the English patient, travelling with the old wanderer in Kim or with Fabrizio in TheChar.terhouse of Parma, had intoxicated them in a swirl of armies and horses and wagons—those running awayfrom or running towards a war. Stacked in one corner of his bedroom were other books she had read to himwhose landscapes they have already walked through.

Many books open with an author’s assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle.

I begin my work at the time when Servius Galba was Consul.... The histories of Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius andNero, while they were a power, were falsified through terror and after their death were written under a freshhatred.

So Tacitus began his Annals.

But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weiropened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat.

When she begins a book she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards. Parma and Paris and Indiaspread their carpets.

He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the oldAjaib-Gher— the Wonder House, as the natives called the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that “firebreathingdragon,” hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot.

“Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you candiscover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe,stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the namesof birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What anappalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise.”

That was the English patient’s first lesson about reading. He did not interrupt again. If he happened to fall asleepshe would continue, never looking up until she herself was fa.tigued. If he had missed the last half-hour of plot,just one room would be dark in a story he probably already knew. He was familiar with the map of the story.

There was Benares to the east and Chilianwallah in the north of the Punjab. (All this occurred before the sapperentered their lives, as if out of this fiction. As if the pages of Kipling had been rubbed in the night like a magiclamp. A drug of wonders.)She had turned from the ending of Kirn, with its delicate and holy sentences—and now clean diction—andpicked up the patient’s notebook, the book he had somehow managed to carry with him out of the fire. The booksplayed open, almost twice its original thickness.

There was thin paper from a Bible, torn out and glued into the text.

King David was old and stricken in years and they covered him with clothes but he received no heat.

Whereupon his servants said, Let there be sought for the King a young virgin: and let her cherish him, and let herlie in this bosom, that our King may have heat.

So they sought for a fair damsel throughout all the coasts of Israel, and found Abishag a Shunammite. And thedamsel cherished the King, and ministered to him: but the King knew her not.

The ———— tribe that had saved the burned pilot brought him into the British base at Siwa in 1944. He wasmoved in the midnight ambulance train from the Western Desert to Tunis, then shipped to Italy. At that time ofthe war there were hundreds of soldiers lost from themselves, more innocent than devious. Those who claimed tobe uncertain of their nationalities were housed in compounds in Tirrenia, where the sea hospital was. The burnedpilot was one more enigma, with no identification, unrecognizable. In the crim.inal compound nearby they keptthe American poet Ezra Pound in a cage, where he hid on his body and pockets, moving it daily for his ownimage of security, the propeller of eucalyptus he had bent down and plucked from his trai.tor’s garden when hewas 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 Marmite, the great Gertrude Jekyll.” He knew whereevery Giotto was in Europe, and most of the places where a person could find convincing trompe 1’oeil.

The sea hospital was created out of bathing cabins along the beach that tourists had rented at the turn of thecentury. During the heat the old Campari umbrellas were placed once more into their table sockets, and thebandaged and the wounded and the comatose would sit under them in the sea air and talk slowly or stare or talkall the time. The burned man noticed the young nurse, separate from the others. He was familiar with such deadglances, 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 tarredblack, 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 upby the hill towns north of them. The Gothic Line. “Your division is stuck in Florence and cannot get past baseslike Prato and Fiesole for instance because the Germans have barracked themselves into villas and convents andthey are brilliantly defended. It’s an old story—the Crusaders made the same mistake against the Saracens. Andlike them you now need the fortress towns. They have never been abandoned except dur.ing times of cholera.”

He had rambled on, driving them mad, traitor or ally, leav.ing 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 hisbed.room, he reposes like the sculpture of the dead knight in Ravenna. He speaks in fragments about oasistowns, the later Medicis, the prose style of Kipling, the woman who bit into his flesh. And in his commonplacebook, his 1890 edition of Herodotus’ Histories, are other fragments—maps, diary en.tries, writings in manylanguages, paragraphs cut out of other books. All that is missing is his own name. There is still no clue to who heactually is, nameless, without rank or battalion or squadron. The references in his book are all pre-war, thedeserts of Egypt and Libya in the 19305, interspersed with references to cave art or gallery art or journal notes inhis own small handwriting. “There are no brunettes,” the English pa.tient 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 itopen 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 arevery 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 with our human betrayals during peace. The new loverenters the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in new light. This is done with nervous or tendersentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.

A love story is not about those who lose their heart but about those who find that sullen inhabitant who, when itis stumbled upon, means the body can fool no one, can fool nothing—not the wisdom of sleep or the habit ofsocial graces. It is a consuming of oneself and the past.

It is almost dark in the green room. Hana turns and realizes her neck is stiff from stillness. She has been focusedand submerged within the crabbed handwriting in his thick-leaved sea-book of maps and texts. There is even asmall fern glued into it. The Histories. She doesn’t close the book, hasn’t touched it since she laid it on the sidetable. She walks away from it.

Kip was in a field north of the villa when he found the large mine, his foot—almost on the green wire as hecrossed the orchard—twisting away, so he lost his balance and was on his knees. He lifted the wire until it wastaut, then followed it, zigzagging among the trees.

He sat down at the source with the canvas bag on his lap. The mine shocked him. They had covered it withconcrete. They had laid the explosive there and then plastered wet con.crete over it to disguise its mechanismand what its strength was. There was a bare tree about four yards away. Another tree about ten yards away. Twomonths’ grass had grown over the concrete ball.

He opened his bag and with scissors clipped the grass away. He laced a small hammock of rope around it andafter attach.ing a rope and pulley to the tree branch slowly lifted the concrete into the air. Two wires led fromthe concrete towards the earth. He sat down, leaned against the tree and looked at it. Speed did not matter now.

He pulled the crystal set out of the bag and placed the earphones to his head. Soon the radio was filling him withAmerican music from the AIF station. Two and a half minutes average for each song or dance num.ber. Hecould work his way back along “A String of Pearls,” “C-Jam Blues” and other tunes to discover how long he hadbeen there, receiving the background music subconsciously.

Noise did not matter. There would be no faint tickings or clickings to signal danger on this kind of bomb. Thedis.traction of music helped him towards clear thought, to the possible forms of structure in the mine, to thepersonality that had laid the city of threads and then poured wet concrete over it.

The tightening of the concrete ball in midair, braced with a second rope, meant the two wires would not pullaway, no matter how hard he attacked it. He stood up and began to chisel the disguised mine gently, blowingaway loose grain with his mouth, using the feather stick, chipping more con.crete off. He stopped his focus onlywhen the music slipped off the wavelength and he had to realign the station, bringing clarity back to the swingtunes. Very slowly he unearthed the series of wires. There were six wires jumbled up, tied to.gether, all paintedblack.

He brushed the dust off the mapboard the wires lay on.

Six black wires. When he was a child his father had bunched up his fingers and, disguising all but the tips ofthem, made him guess which was the long one. His own small finger would touch his choice, and his father’shand would unfold, blossoming, to reveal the boy’s mistake. One could of course make a red wire negative. Butthis opponent had not just concreted the thing but painted all the characters black. Kip was being pulled into apsychological vortex. With the knife he began to scrape the paint free, revealing a red, a blue, a green. Would hisopponent have also switched them? He’d have to set up a detour with black wire of his own like an oxbow riverand then test the loop for positive or negative power. Then he would check it for fading power and know wherethe danger lay.

Hana was carrying a long mirror in front of her down the hall. She would pause because of the weight of it andthen move forward, the mirror reflecting the old dark pink of the passageway.

The Englishman had wanted to see himself. Before she stepped into the room she carefully turned the reflectionupon herself, not wanting the light to bounce indirectly from the window onto his face.

He lay there in his dark skin, the only paleness the hearing aid in his ear and the seeming blaze of light from hispillow. He pushed the sheets down with his hands. Here, do this, pushing as far as he could, and Hana flicked thesheet to the base of the bed.

She stood on a chair at the foot of the bed and slowly tilted the mirror down at him. She was in this position, herhands braced out in front of her, when she heard the faint shouts.

She ignored them at first. The house often picked up noise from the valley. The use of megaphones by theclearance mil.itary had constantly unnerved her when she was living alone with the English patient.

“Keep the mirror still, my dear,” he said.

“I think there is someone shouting. Do you hear it?”

His left hand turned up the hearing aid.

“It’s the boy. You’d better go and find out.”

She leaned the mirror against the wall and rushed down the corridor. She paused outside waiting for the nextyell. When it came she took off through the garden and into the fields above the house.

He stood, his hands raised above him as if he were holding a giant cobweb. He was shaking his head to get freeof the earphones. As she ran towards him he yelled at her to circle to the left, there were mine wires all over theplace. She stopped. It was a walk she had taken numerous times with no sense of danger. She raised her skirt andmoved forward, watching her feet as they entered the long grass.

His hands were still up in the air as she came alongside him. He had been tricked, ending up holding two livewires he could not put down without the safety of a descant chord. He needed a third hand to negate one of themand he needed to go back once more to the fuze head. He passed the wires carefully to her and dropped his arms,getting blood back into them.

“I’ll take them back in a minute.”

“It’s okay.”

“Keep very still.”

He opened up his satchel for the Geiger counter and mag.net. He ran the dial up and along the wires she washolding. No swerve to negative. No clue. Nothing. He stepped back.wards, wondering where the trick could be.

“Let me tape those to the tree, and you leave.”

“No. I’ll hold it. They won’t reach the tree.”

“No.”

“Kip—I can hold them.”

“We have an impasse. There’s a joke. I don’t know where to go from here. I don’t know how complete the trickis.”

Leaving her, he ran back to where he had first sighted the wire. He raised it and followed it all the way this time,the Geiger counter alongside it. Then he was crouched about ten yards from her, thinking, now and then lookingup, looking right through her, watching only the two tributaries of wire she held in her hands. I don’t know, hesaid out loud, slowly, / don’t know. I think I have to cut the wire in your left hand, you must leave. He waspulling the radio earphones on over his head, so the sound came back into him fully, filling him with clarity. Heschemed along the different paths of the wire and swerved into the convolutions of their knots, the suddencorners, the buried switches that translated them from positive to negative. The tinderbox. He remembered thedog, whose eyes were as big as saucers. He raced with the music along the wires, and all the while he was staringat the girl’s hands, which were very still holding onto them.

“You’d better go.”

“You need another hand to cut it, don’t you?”

“I can attach it to the tree.”

“I’ll hold it.”

He picked the wire like a thin adder from her left hand. Then the other. She didn’t move away. He said nothingmore, he now had to think as clearly as he could, as if he were alone. She came up to him and took back one ofthe wires. He was not conscious of this at all, her presence erased. He travelled the path of the bomb fuze again,alongside the mind that had choreographed this, touching all the key points, seeing the X ray of it, the bandmusic filling everything else.

Stepping up to her, he cut the wire below her left fist before the theorem faded, the sound like something bittenthrough with a tooth. He saw the dark print of her dress along her shoulder, against her neck. The bomb wasdead. He dropped the cutters and put his hand on her shoulder, needing to touch something human. She wassaying something he couldn’t hear, and she reached forward and pulled the earphones off so silence invaded.

Breeze and a rustle. He realized the click of the wire being cut had not been heard at all, just felt, the snap of it,the break of a small rabbit bone. Not letting go of her, he moved his hand down her arm and pulled the seveninches of wire out of her still tight grip.

She was looking at him, quizzical, waiting for his answer to what she had said, but he hadn’t heard her. Sheshook her head and sat down. He started collecting various objects around himself, putting them into his satchel.

She looked up into the tree and then only by chance looked back down and saw his hands shaking, tense andhard like an epileptic’s, his breathing deep and fast, over in a moment. He was crouched over.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“No. What was it?”

“I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you. Someonelike you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year. I didn’t feel scared. I certainly wasn’tbrave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain down together, you in myarms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone, it’s like a small hard wing under yourskin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I’ve always liked flesh the colour of rivers and rocks or like thebrown eye of a Susan, do you know what that flower is? Have you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep.

I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against your collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinkingof others, want to find the crook of a tree and climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wireto cut. How did you know? You kept saying I don’t know I don’t know, but you did. Right? Don’t shake, youhave to be a still bed for me, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word ‘curl,’

such a slow word, you can’t rush it...”

Her mouth was against his shirt. He lay with her on the ground as still as he had to, his eyes clear, looking upinto a branch. He could hear her deep breath. When he had put his arm around her shoulder she was alreadyasleep but had gripped it against herself. Glancing down he noticed she still had the wire, she must have picked itup again.

It was her breath that was most alive. Her weight seemed so light she must have balanced most of it away fromhim. How long could he lie like this, unable to move or turn to busyness. It was essential to remain still, the wayhe had relied on statues during those months when they moved up the coast fighting into and beyond eachfortress town until there was no difference in them, the same narrow streets everywhere that became sewers ofblood so he would dream that if he lost balance he would slip down those slopes on the red liquid and be flungoff the cliff into the valley. Every night he had walked into the coldness of a captured church and found a statuefor the night to be his sentinel. He had given his trust only to this race of stones, moving as close as possibleagainst them in the darkness, a grieving angel whose thigh was a woman’s perfect thigh, whose line and shadowappeared so soft. He would place his head on the lap of such creatures and release himself into sleep.

She suddenly let more weight onto him. And now her breathing stretched deeper, like the voice of a cello. Hewatched her sleeping face. He was still annoyed the girl had stayed with him when he defused the bomb, as if bythat she had made him owe her something. Making him feel in retro.spect responsible for her, though there wasno thought of that at the time. As if that could usefully influence what he chose to do with a mine.

But he felt he was now within something, perhaps a paint.ing he had seen somewhere in the last year. Somesecure couple in a field. How many he had seen with their laziness of sleep, with no thought of work or thedangers of the world. Beside him there were the mouselike movements within Hana’s breath; her eyebrows rodeupon argument, a small fury in her dreaming. He turned his eyes away, up towards the tree and the sky of whitecloud. Her hand gripped him as mud had clung along the bank of the Moro River, his fist plunging into the wetearth to stop himself slipping back into the already crossed torrent.

If he were a hero in a painting, he could claim a just sleep.