HE GLARES OUT, each eye a path, down the long bed at the end of which is Hana. After she has bathed himshe breaks the tip off an ampoule and turns to him with the morphine. An effigy. A bed. He rides the boat ofmorphine. 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 thelast 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 thoseterrible 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 Khalilibazaar. Above the narrow streets we looked down upon cats on the corrugated tin roofs who also looked downthe 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’sgarden for me, word by word, bed by bed, the December ice over the fish pond, the creak of rose trellises. Shewould 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 leveland he is uncomfortable with even this minimal height. He is a desert man after all, having left his family’svillage of Marston Magna, Somerset, altered all customs and habits so he can have the proximity to sea level aswell 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 ithave 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 Almasy, who worked for theGermans during the war. He flew a bit with the Afrika Korps, but he was more valuable than that. In the 19305he had been one of the great desert explorers. He knew every water hole and had helped map the Sand Sea. Heknew all about the desert. He knew all about dialects. Does this sound familiar? Between the two wars he wasalways on expeditions out of Cairo. One was to search for Zerzura—the lost oasis. Then when war broke out hejoined the Germans. In 1941 he became a guide for spies, taking them across the desert into Cairo. What I wantto 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 outabout 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-helperAlmasy 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 orconsidering 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—theTripoli 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 ofDaphne 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—fromTripoli all the way to Cairo—was Count Ladislaus de Almasy. This was a stretch of desert that, it was assumed,no one could cross.

“Between the wars Almasy had English friends. Great ex.plorers. But when war broke out he went with theGermans. Rommel asked him to take Eppler across the desert into Cairo because it would have been too obviousby 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. Theyhad to keep digging the trucks out of the sand hills. He aimed them towards Uweinat and its granite plateau sothey could get water, take shelter in the caves. It was a halfway point. In the 19305 he had discovered caves withrock paintings there. But the plateau was crawling with Allies and he couldn’t use the wells there. He struck outinto the sand desert again. They raided British petrol dumps to fill up their tanks. In the Kharga Oasis theyswitched into British uniforms and hung British army number plates on their vehicles. When they were spottedfrom 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. Almdsy shook hands with Eppler and left him. This is where we losthim. He turned and went back into the desert alone. We think he crossed it again, back towards Tripoli. But thatwas the last time he was ever seen. The British picked up Eppler even.tually and used the Rebecca code to feedfalse 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 theLevant and knew the Bedouin. But the thing about Almasy was, he could fly. We are talking about someone whocrashed in a plane. Here is this man, burned beyond recognition, who somehow ends up in the arms of theEnglish at Pisa. Also, he can get away with sounding English. Almdsy went to school in Eng.land. In Cairo hewas 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 whatside 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 inLondon for their cancer patients. Don’t worry, it won’t kill him. It absorbs fast into the body. I can put it togetherwith 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, smil.ing. During the last stages of the war Caravaggio hadbecome one of the numerous morphia thieves. He had sniffed out her medical supplies within hours of hisarrival. The small tubes of morphine were now a source for him. Like toothpaste tubes for dolls, she had thoughtwhen 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 inone of the dark corners of the villa, looking up and hardly recognizing her. She had tried speaking with him andhe had stared back. He had found the metal supply box, torn it open with God knows what strength. Once whenthe sapper cut open the palm of his hand on an iron gate, Caravag.gio 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 Kirn was a map with a dotted line for the path the boy and the Holy One took. It showedjust 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°3o’ latitude. He continues sliding hisfinger 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, rememberingold maps, hitting the pre-war caches of petrol and water, driving towards Uweinat. It was easier now that I wasalone. Miles from the Gilf Kebir, the truck exploded and I capsized, rolling automatically into the sand, notwanting 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 todrift like cities, carrying spice, rooms, government advisors wherever they went. At any given moment amongthe Bedouin in those days of the war, there were Englishmen as well as Germans.

Leaving the truck, I started walking towards Uweinat, where I knew there was a buried plane.

Wait. What do you mean, a buried plane?

Madox had an old plane in the early days, which he had shaved down to the essentials—the only “extra” was theclosed bubble of cockpit, crucial for desert flights. During our times in the desert he had taught me to fly, the twoof us walking around the guy-roped creature theorizing on how it hung or veered in the wind.

When Clifton’s plane—Rupert—flew into our midst, the aging plane of Madox’s was left where it was, coveredwith a tarpaulin, pegged down in one of the northeast alcoves of Uweinat. Sand collected over it gradually for thenext few years. None of us thought we would see it again. It was another victim of the desert. Within a fewmonths 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.

So you were walking towards it?

Yes. Four nights of walking. I had left the man in Cairo and turned back into the desert. Everywhere there waswar. Suddenly there were “teams.” The Bermanns, the Bagnolds, the Slatin Pashas—who had at various timessaved each other’s lives—had now split up into camps.

I walked towards Uweinat. I got there about noon and climbed up into the caves of the plateau. Above the wellnamed Ain Dua.

“Caravaggio thinks he knows who you are,” Hana said.

The man in the bed said nothing.

“He says you are not English. He worked with intelligence out of Cairo and Italy for a while. Till he wascaptured. My family knew Caravaggio before the war. He was a thief. He believed in ‘the movement of things.’

Some thieves are collec.tors, like some of the explorers you scorn, like some men with women or some womenwith men. But Caravaggio was not like that. He was too curious and generous to be a successful thief. Half thethings 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.

He reached the shallow well named Ain Dua. He removed all of his clothes and soaked them in the well, put hishead and then his thin body into the blue water. His limbs ex.hausted from the four nights of walking. He left hisclothes spread on the rocks and climbed up higher into the boulders, climbed out of the desert, which was now,in 1942, a vast battlefield, and went naked into the darkness of the cave.

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 aboutthe presence of an ancient lake. He walked farther into the coldness, into the Cave of Swimmers, where he hadleft her. She was still there.

She had dragged herself into a corner, had wrapped herself tight in the parachute material. He had promised toreturn for her.

He himself would have been happier to die in a cave, with its privacy, the swimmers caught in the rock aroundthem. Hermann had told him that in Asian gardens you could look at rock and imagine water, you could gaze at astill 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 tem.porary. She’d cometo love its sternness because of him, want.ing to understand his comfort in its solitude. She was always happierin rain, in bathrooms steaming with liquid air, in sleepy wetness, climbing back in from his window that rainynight in Cairo and putting on her clothes while still wet, in order to hold it all. Just as she loved family traditionsand courteous ceremony and old memorized poems. She would have hated to die without a name. For her therewas a line back to her ancestors that was tactile, whereas he had erased the path he had emerged from. He wasamazed she had loved him in spite of such qualities of anonymity in himself.

She was on her back, positioned the way the mediaeval dead lie.

I approached her naked as I would have done in our South Cairo room, wanting to undress her, still wanting tolove her.

What is terrible in what I did? Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. Aslong as we are the motive for it. You can make love to a woman with a broken arm, or a woman with fever. Sheonce sucked blood from a cut on my hand as I had tasted and swallowed her menstrual blood. There are someEuropean words you can never translate properly into another language. Felhomaly. The dusk of graves. Withthe connotation of intimacy there between the dead and the living.

I lifted her into my arms from the shelf of sleep. Clothing like cobweb. I disturbed all that.

I carried her out into the sun. I dressed. My clothes dry and brittle from the heat in the stones.

My linked hands made a saddle for her to rest on. As soon as I reached the sand I jostled her around so her bodywas facing back, over my shoulder. I was conscious of the airiness of her weight. I was used to her like this inmy arms, she had spun around me in my room like a human reflection of the fan —her arms out, fingers likestarfish.

We moved like this towards the northeast gully, where the plane was buried. I did not need a map. With me wasthe tank of petrol I had carried all the way from the capsized truck. Because three years earlier we had beenimpotent without it.

“What happened three years earlier?”

“She had been injured. In 1939. Her husband had crashed his plane. It had been planned as a suicide-murder byher husband that would involve all three of us. We were not even lovers at the time. I suppose information of theaffair 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 aslovers, rolling away the boulder they had placed between themselves for some social law neither had believed in.

In the botanical garden she had banged her head against the gatepost in determination and fury. Too proud to bea lover, a secret. There would be no compartments in her world. He had turned back to her, his finger raised, Idon’t miss you yet.

You will.

During their months of separation he had grown bitter and self-sufficient. He avoided her company. He could notstand her calmness when she saw him. He phoned her house and spoke to her husband and heard her laughter inthe back.ground. There was a public charm in her that tempted every.one. This was something he had loved inher. Now he began to trust nothing.

He suspected she had replaced him with another lover. He interpreted her every gesture to others as a code ofpromise. She gripped the front of Roundell’s jacket once in a lobby and shook it, laughing at him as he mutteredsomething, and he followed the innocent government aide for two days to see if there was more between them.

He did not trust her last en.dearments 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 dinnershe pointed to a bowl with a Nile lily floating in it he would not look at it. Just another fucking flower. She had anew group of intimates that excluded him and her hus.band. No one goes back to the husband. He knew thatmuch about love and human nature.

He bought pale brown cigarette papers and glued them into sections of The Histories that recorded wars thatwere of no interest to him. He wrote down all her arguments against him. Glued into the book—giving himselfonly 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. Herhusband was supposed to pick him up. The husband they had both loved until they began to love each other.

Clifton flew up on Uweinat to collect him on the appointed day, buzzing the lost oasis so low the acacia shrubsdismantled their leaves in the wake of the plane, the Moth slipping into the depressions and cuts—while he stoodon the high ridge signalling 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 wasno fire.

A husband gone mad. Killing all of them. Killing himself and his wife—and him by the fact there was now noway out of the desert.

Only she was not dead. He pulled the body free, carrying it out of the plane’s crumpled grip, this grip of herhusband.

How did you hate me? she whispers in the Cave of Swim.mers, talking through her pain of injuries. A brokenwrist. Shattered ribs. You were terrible to me. That’s when my hus.band suspected you. I still hate that aboutyou—disappearing into deserts or bars.

You left me in Groppi Park.

Because you didn’t want me as anything else.

Because you said your husband was going mad. Well, he went mad.

Not for a long time. I went mad before he did, you killed everything in me. Kiss me, will you. Stop defendingyourself. Kiss me and call me by my name.

Their bodies had met in perfumes, in sweat, frantic to get under that thin film with a tongue or a tooth, as if theyeach could grip character there and during love pull it right off the body of the other.

Now there is no talcum on her arm, no rose water on her thigh.

You think you are an iconoclast, but you’re not. You just move, or replace what you cannot have. If you fail atsome.thing you retreat into something else. Nothing changes you. How many women did you have? I left youbecause I knew I could never change you. You would stand in the room so still sometimes, so wordlesssometimes, as if the greatest betrayal of yourself would be to reveal one more inch of your character. In the Caveof Swimmers we talked. We were only two latitudes away from the safety of Kufra.

He pauses and holds out his hand. Caravaggio places a mor.phine tablet into the black palm, and it disappearsinto the man’s dark mouth.

I crossed the dry bed of the lake towards Kufra Oasis, carry.ing nothing but robes against the heat and nightcold, my Herodotus left behind with her. And three years later, in 1942, I walked with her towards the buriedplane, carrying her body as if it was the armour of a knight.

In the desert the tools of survival are underground—trog.lodyte caves, water sleeping within a buried plant,weapons, a plane. At longitude 25, latitude 23, I dug down towards the tarpaulin, and Madox’s old planegradually emerged. It was night and even in the cold air I was sweating. I carried the naphtha lantern over to herand sat for a while, beside the silhouette of her nod. Two lovers and desert—starlight or moonlight, I don’tremember. Everywhere else out there was a war.

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 outbut had simply to cut it away.

In the morning, after two hours’ sleep, I carried her into the cockpit. I started the motor and it rolled into life. Wemoved and then slipped, years too late, into the sky.

The voice stops. The burned man looks straight ahead in his morphine focus.

The plane is now in his eye. The slow voice carries it with effort above the earth, the engine missing turns as iflosing a stitch, her shroud unfurling in the noisy air of the cockpit, noise terrible after his days of walking insilence. 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?

The undercarriage brushes the top of a palm and he pivots up, and the oil slides over the seat, her body slippingdown into it. There is a spark from a short, and the twigs at her knee catch fire. He pulls her back into the seatbeside him. He thrusts his hands up against the cockpit glass and it will not shift. Begins punching the glass,cracking it, finally break.ing it, and the oil and the fire slop and spin everywhere. How low is he in the sky? Shecollapses—acacia twigs, leaves, the branches that were shaped into arms uncoiling around him. Limbs begindisappearing in the suck of air. The odour of morphine on his tongue. Caravaggio reflected in the black lake ofhis eye. He goes up and down now like a well bucket. There is blood somehow all over his face. He is flying arotted plane, the canvas sheetings on the wings ripping open in the speed. They are carrion. How far back had thepalm tree been? How long ago? He lifts his legs out of the oil, but they are so heavy. There is no way he can liftthem again. He is old. Suddenly. Tired of living without her. He cannot lie back in her arms and trust her to standguard 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.

He slips into the harness of the oil-wet parachute and pivots upside down, breaking free of glass, wind flinginghis body back. Then his legs are free of everything, and he is in the air, bright, not knowing why he is bright untilhe realizes he is on fire.

Hana can hear the voices in the English patient’s room and stands in the hall trying to catch what they are saying.

How is it?

Wonderful!

Now it’s my turn.

Ahh! Splendid, splendid.

This is the greatest of inventions.

A remarkable find, young man.

When she enters she sees Kip and the English patient pass.ing a can of condensed milk back and forth. TheEnglishman 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.

“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 sap.per asks.

Hana glances back and forth between the two of them.

Kip peers into the can. “I’ll get another one,” he says, and leaves the room.

Hana looks at the man in the bed.

“Kip and I are both international bastards—born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to getback to or get away from our homelands all our lives. ThoughKip 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, isnow used more and more for only this purpose, and runs back upstairs to the bedroom.

“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 thatwas important happened in the desert.”

He smiles at Hana.

“One feeds me morphine. One feeds me condensed milk. We may have discovered a balanced diet!” He turnsback to Kip.

“How long have you been a sapper?”

“Five years. Mostly in London. Then Italy. With the unexploded-bomb units.” “Who was your teacher?”

“An Englishman in Woolwich. He was considered eccen.tric.”

“The best kind of teacher. That must have been Lord Suf.folk. Did you meet Miss Morden?”

“Yes.”

At no point does either of them attempt to make Hana com.fortable in their conversation. But she wants to knowabout his teacher, and how he would describe him.

“What was he like, Kip?”

“He worked in Scientific Research. He was head of an ex.perimental unit. Miss Morden, his secretary, wasalways with him, and his chauffeur, Mr. Fred Harts. Miss Morden would take notes, which he dictated as heworked on a bomb, while Mr. Harts helped with the instruments. He was a brilliant man. They were called theHoly Trinity. They were blown up, all three of them, in 1941. 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. Noexpression of sadness, nothing to interpret.

Some men had unwound their last knot of life in her arms. In the town of Anghiari she had lifted live men todiscover they were already being consumed by worms. In Ortona she had held cigarettes to the mouth of the boywith no arms. Nothing had stopped her. She had continued her duties while she secretly pulled her personal selfback. So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-andcrimsonuniforms with bone buttons.

She watches Kip lean his head back against the wall and knows the neutral look on his face. She can read it.