KIP WALKS OUT of the field where he has been digging, his left hand raised in front of him as if he hassprained it.

He passes the scarecrow for Hana’s garden, the crucifix with its hanging sardine cans, and moves uphill towardsthe villa. He cups the hand held in front of him with the other as if protecting the flame of a candle. Hana meetshim on the terrace, and he takes her hand and holds it against his. The ladybird circling the nail on his smallfinger quickly crosses over onto her wrist.

She turns back into the house. Now her hand is held out in front of her. She walks through the kitchen and up thestairs.

The patient turns to face her as she comes in. She touches his foot with the hand that holds the ladybird. It leavesher, moving onto the dark skin. Avoiding the sea of white sheet, it begins to make the long trek towards thedistance of the rest of his body, a bright redness against what seems like volcanic flesh.

In the library the fuze box is in midair, nudged off the counter by Caravaggio when he turned to Hana’s gleefulyell in the hall. Before it reaches the floor Kip’s body slides under.neath it, and he catches it in his hand.

Caravaggio glances down to see the young man’s face blow.ing out all the air quickly through his cheeks.

He thinks suddenly he owes him a life.

Kip begins to laugh, losing his shyness in front of the older man, holding up the box of wires.

Caravaggio will remember the slide. He could walk away, never see him again, and he would never forget him.

Years from now on a Toronto street Caravaggio will get out of a taxi and hold the door open for an East Indianwho is about to get into it, and he will think of Kip then.

Now the sapper just laughs up towards Caravaggio’s face and up past that towards the ceiling.

“I know all about sarongs.” Caravaggio waved his hand towards Kip and Hana as he spoke. “In the east end ofToronto I met these Indians. I was robbing a house and it turned out to belong to an Indian family. They wokefrom their beds and they were wearing these cloths, sarongs, to sleep in, and it intrigued me. We had lots to talkabout and they eventually persuaded me to try it. I removed my clothes and stepped into one, and theyimmediately set upon me and chased me half naked into the night.”

“Is that a true story?” She grinned.

“One of many!”

She knew enough about him to almost believe it. Caravaggio was constantly diverted by the human elementduring burglar.ies. Breaking into a house during Christmas, he would become annoyed if he noticed the Adventcalendar had not been opened up to the date to which it should have been. He often had conversations with thevarious pets left alone in houses, rhetorically discussing meals with them, feeding them large helpings, and wasoften greeted by them with considerable pleasure if he returned to the scene of a crime.

She walks in front of the shelves in the library, eyes closed, and at random pulls out a book. She finds a clearingbetween two sections in a book of poetry and begins to write there.

He says Lahore is an ancient city. London is a recent town compared with Lahore. I say, Well, 1 come from aneven newer country. He says they have always known about gun.powder. As far back as the seventeenthcentury, court paint.ings recorded fireworks displays.

He is small, not much taller than I am. An intimate smile up close that can charm anything when he displays it. Atoughness to his nature he doesn’t show. The Englishman says he’s one of those warrior saints. But he has apeculiar sense of humour that is more rambunctious than his manner suggests. Remember “I’ll rewire him in themorning.” Ooh la la!

He says Lahore has thirteen gates—named for saints and emperors or where they lead to.

The word bungalow comes from Bengali.

At four in the afternoon they had lowered Kip into the pit in a harness until he was waist-deep in the muddywater, his body draped around the body of the Esau bomb. The casing from fin to tip ten feet high, its nose sunkinto the mud by his feet. Beneath the brown water his thighs braced the metal casing, much the way he had seensoldiers holding women in the corner of NAAFI dance floors. When his arms tired he hung them upon thewooden struts at shoulder level, which were there to stop mud collapsing in around him. The sappers had dug thepit around the Esau and set up the wood-shaft walls before he had arrived on the site. In 1941, Esau bombs witha new Y fuze had started coming in; this was his second one.

It was decided during planning sessions that the only way around the new fuze was to immunize it. It was a hugebomb in ostrich posture. He had come down barefoot and he was already sinking slowly, being caught within theclay, unable to get a firm hold down there in the cold water. He wasn’t wearing boots—they would have lockedwithin the clay, and when he was pulleyed up later the jerk out of it could break his ankles.

He laid his left cheek against the metal casing, trying to think himself into warmth, concentrating on the smalltouch of sun that reached down into the twenty-foot pit and fell on the back of his neck. What he embraced couldexplode at any moment, whenever tumblers tremored, whenever the gaine was fired. There was no magic or Xray that would tell anyone when some small capsule broke, when some wire would stop wavering. Those smallmechanical semaphores were like a heart murmur or a stroke within the man crossing the street innocently infront of you.

What town was he in? He couldn’t even remember. He heard a voice and looked up. Hardy passed the equipmentdown in a satchel at the end of a rope, and it hung there while Kip began to insert the various clips and tools intothe many pockets of his tunic. He was humming the song Hardy had been singing in the jeep on the way to thesite—They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace—Christopher Robin went down with Mice.

He wiped the area of fuze head dry and began moulding a clay cup around it. Then he unstopped the jar andpoured the liquid oxygen into the cup. He taped the cup securely onto the metal. Now he had to wait again.

There was so little space between him and the bomb he could feel the change in temperature already. If he wereon dry land he could walk away and be back in ten minutes. Now he had to stand there beside the bomb. Theywere two suspi.cious creatures in an enclosed space. Captain Carlyle had been working in a shaft with frozenoxygen and the whole pit had suddenly burst into flames. They hauled him out fast, already unconscious in hisharness.

Where was he? Lisson Grove? Old Kent Road?

Kip dipped cotton wool into the muddy water and touched it to the casing about twelve inches away from thefuze. It fell away, so it meant he had to wait longer. When the cotton wool stuck, it meant enough of the areaaround the fuze was frozen and he could go on. He poured more oxygen into the cup.

The growing circle of frost was a foot in radius now. A few more minutes. He looked at the clipping someonehad taped onto the bomb. They had read it with much laughter that morning in the update kit sent to all bomb disposal units.

When is explosion reasonably permissible?

If a man’s life could be capitalized as X, the risk at Y, and the estimated damage from explosion at V, then alogician might contend that if V is less than X over Y, the bomb should be blown up; but if V over Y is greaterthan X, an attempt should be made to avoid explosion in situ.

Who wrote such things?

He had by now been in the shaft with the bomb for more than an hour. He continued feeding in the liquidoxygen. At shoulder height, just to his right, was a hose pumping down normal air to prevent him from becominggiddy with oxygen. (He had seen soldiers with hangovers use the oxygen to cure headaches.) He tried the cottonwool again and this time it froze on. He had about twenty minutes. After that the battery temperature within thebomb would rise again. But for now the fuze was iced up and he could begin to remove it.

He ran his palms up and down the bomb case to detect any rips in the metal. The submerged section would besafe, but oxygen could ignite if it came into contact with exposed explo.sive. Carlyle’s flaw. X over Y. If therewere rips they would have to use liquid nitrogen.

“It’s a two-thousand-pound bomb, sir. Esau.” Hardy’s voice from the top of the mud pit.

“Type-marked fifty, in a circle, B. Two fuze pockets, most likely. But we think the second one is probably notarmed. Okay?”

They had discussed all this with each other before, but things were being confirmed, remembered for the finaltime.

“Put me on a microphone now and get back.”

“Okay, sir.”

Kip smiled. He was ten years younger than Hardy, and no Englishman, but Hardy was happiest in the cocoon ofregimental discipline. There was always hesitation by the soldiers to call him “sir,” but Hardy barked it out loudand enthusiastically.

He was working fast now to prise out the fuze, all the batteries inert.

“Can you hear me? Whistle.... Okay, I heard it. A last topping up with oxygen. Will let it bubble for thirtyseconds. Then start. Freshen the frost. Okay, I’m going to remove the dam,... Okay, dam gone.”

Hardy was listening to everything and recording it in case something went wrong. One spark and Kip would bein a shaft of flames. Or there could be a joker in the bomb. The next person would have to consider thealternatives.

“I’m using the quilter key.” He had pulled it out of his breast pocket. It was cold and he had to rub it warm. Hebegan to remove the locking ring. It moved easily and he told Hardy.

“They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace,” Kip whis.tled. He pulled off the locking ring and the locatingring and let them sink into the water. He could feel them roll slowly at his feet. It would all take another fourminutes.

“Alice is marrying one of the guard. ‘A soldier’s life is terri.ble hard,’ says Alice!”

He was singing it out loud, trying to get more warmth into his body, his chest painfully cold. He kept trying tolean back far enough away from the frozen metal in front of him. And he had to keep moving his hands up to theback of his neck, where the sun still was, then rub them to free them of the muck and grease and frost. It wasdifficult to get the collet to grip the head. Then to his horror the fuze head broke away, came off completely.

“Wrong, Hardy. Whole fuze head snapped off. Talk back to me, okay? The main body of the fuze is jammeddown there, I can’t get to it. There’s nothing exposed I can grip.”

“Where is the frost at?” Hardy was right above him. It had been a few seconds but he had raced to the shaft.

“Six more minutes of frost.”

“Come up and we’ll blow it up.”

“No, pass me down some more oxygen.”

He raised his right hand and felt an icy canister being placed in it.

“I’m going to dribble the muck onto the area of exposed fuze —where the head separated—then I’ll cut into themetal. Chip through till I can grip something. Get back now, I’ll talk it through.”

He could hardly keep his fury back at what had happened. The muck, which was their name for oxygen, wasgoing all over his clothes, hissing as it hit the water. He waited for the frost to appear and then began to shearmetal off with a chisel. He poured more on, waited and chiselled deeper. When nothing came off he ripped free abit of his shirt, placed it between the metal and the chisel, and then banged the chisel dangerously with a mallet,chipping off fragments. The cloth of his shirt his only safety against a spark. What was more of a problem wasthe coldness on his fingers. They were no longer agile, they were inert as the batteries. He kept cutting sidewaysinto the metal around the lost fuze head. Shaving it off in layers, hoping the freezing would accept this kind ofsurgery. If he cut down directly there was always a chance he would hit the percussion cap that flashed the gaine.

It took five more minutes. Hardy had not moved from the top of the pit, instead was giving him the approximatetime left in the freezing. But in truth neither of them could be sure. Since the fuze head had broken off, they werefreezing a different area, and the water temperature though cold to him was warmer than the metal.

Then he saw something. He did not dare chip the hole any bigger. The contact of the circuit quivering like asilver ten.dril. If he could reach it. He tried to rub warmth into his hands.

He breathed out, was still for a few seconds, and with the needle pliers cut the contact in two before he breathedin again. He gasped as the freeze burned part of his hand when he pulled it back out of the circuits. The bombwas dead.

“Fuze out. Gaine off. Kiss me.” Hardy was already rolling up the winch and Kip was trying to clip on the halter;he could hardly do it with the burn and the cold, all his muscles cold. He heard the pulley jerk and just held tightonto the leather straps still half attached around him. He began to feel his brown legs being pulled from the gripof the mud, removed like an ancient corpse out of a bog. His small feet rising out of the water. He emerged,lifted out of the pit into the sunlight, head and then torso.

He hung there, a slow swivel under the tepee of poles that held the pulley. Hardy was now embracing him andunbuck.ling him simultaneously, letting him free. Suddenly he saw there was a large crowd watching fromabout twenty yards away, too close, far too close, for safety; they would have been destroyed. But of courseHardy had not been there to keep them back.

They watched him silently, the Indian, hanging onto Har.dy’s shoulder, scarcely able to walk back to the jeepwith all the equipment—tools and canisters and blankets and the re.cording instruments still wheeling around,listening to the nothingness down in the shaft.

“I can’t walk.”

“Only to the jeep. A few yards more, sir. I’ll pick up the rest.”

They kept pausing, then walking on slowly. They had to go past the staring faces who were watching the slightbrown man, shoeless, in the wet tunic, watching the drawn face that didn’t recognize or acknowledge anything,any of them. All of them silent. Just stepping back to give him and Hardy room. At the jeep he started shaking.

His eyes couldn’t stand the glare off the windshield. Hardy had to lift him, in stages, into the passenger seat.

When Hardy left, Kip slowly pulled off his wet trousers and wrapped himself in the blanket. Then he sat there.

Too cold and tired even to unscrew the Thermos of hot tea on the seat beside him. He thought: I wasn’t evenfrightened down there. I was just angry—with my mistake, or the possibility that there was a joker. An animalreacting just to protect myself.

Only Hardy, he realized, keeps me human now.

When there is a hot day at the Villa San Girolamo they all wash their hair, first with kerosene to remove thepossibility of lice, and then with water. Lying back, his hair spread out, eyes closed against the sun, Kip seemssuddenly vulnerable. There is a shyness within him when he assumes this fragile posture, looking more like acorpse from a myth than anything living or human. Hana sits beside him, her dark brown hair already dry. Theseare the times he will talk about his family and his brother in jail.

He will sit up and flip his hair forward, and begin to rub the length of it with a towel. She imagines all of Asiathrough the gestures of this one man. The way he lazily moves, his quiet civilisation. He speaks of warrior saintsand she now feels he is one, stern and visionary, pausing only in these rare times of sunlight to be godless,informal, his head back again on the table so the sun can dry his spread hair like grain in............