CARAVAGGIO CAME DOWN the stairs through darkness and into the kitchen. Some celery on the table, someturnips whose roots were still muddy. The only light came from a fire Hana had recently started. She had herback to him and had not heard his steps into the room. His days at the villa had loosened his body and freed histenseness, so he seemed big.ger, more sprawled out in his gestures. Only his silence of movement remained.

Otherwise there was an easy inefficiency to him now, a sleepiness to his gestures.

He dragged out the chair so she would turn, realize he was in the room.

“Hello, David.”

He raised his arm. He felt that he had been in deserts for too long.

“How is he?”

“Asleep. Talked himself out.”

“Is he what you thought he was?”

“He’s fine. We can let him be.”

“I thought so. Kip and I are both sure he is English. Kip thinks the best people are eccentrics, he worked withone.”

“I think Kip is the eccentric myself. Where is he, anyway?”

“He’s plotting something on the terrace, doesn’t want me out there. Something for my birthday.” Hana stood upfrom her crouch at the grate, wiping her hand on the opposite forearm.

“For your birthday I’m going to tell you a small story,” he said.

She looked at him.

“Not about Patrick, okay?”

“A little about Patrick, mostly about you.”

“I still can’t listen to those stories, David.”

“Fathers die. You keep on loving them in any way you can. You can’t hide him away in your heart.”

“Talk to me when the morphia wears off.”

She came up to him and put her arms around him, reached up and kissed his cheek. His embrace tightenedaround her, his stubble like sand against her skin. She loved that about him now; in the past he had always beenmeticulous. The parting in his hair like Yonge Street at midnight, Patrick had said. Caravaggio had in the pastmoved like a god in her pres.ence. Now, with his face and his trunk filled out and this greyness in him, he was afriendlier human.

Tonight dinner was being prepared by the sapper. Caravag.gio was not looking forward to it. One meal in threewas a loss as far as he was concerned. Kip found vegetables and pre.sented them barely cooked, just brieflyboiled into a soup. It was to be another purist meal, not what Caravaggio wished for after a day such as this whenhe had been listening to the man upstairs. He opened the cupboard beneath the sink. There, wrapped in dampcloth, was some dried meat, which Caravag.gio cut and put into his pocket.

“I can get you off the morphine, you know. I’m a good nurse.”

“You’re surrounded by madmen...”

“Yes, I think we are all mad.”

When Kip called them, they walked out of the kitchen and onto the terrace, whose border, with its low stonebalustrade, was ringed with light.

It looked to Caravaggio like a string of small electric candles found in dusty churches, and he thought the sapperhad gone too far in removing them from a chapel, even for Hana’s birth.day. Hana walked slowly forward withher hands over her face. There was no wind. Her legs and thighs moved through the skirt of her frock as if itwere thin water. Her tennis shoes silent on the stone.

“I kept finding dead shells wherever I was digging,” the sapper said.

They still didn’t understand. Caravaggio bent over the flut.ter of lights. They were snail shells filled with oil. Helooked along the row of them; there must have been about forty.

“Forty-five,” Kip said, “the years so far of this century. Where I come from, we celebrate the age as well asourselves.”

Hana moved alongside them, her hands in her pockets now, the way Kip loved to see her walk. So relaxed, as ifshe had put her arms away for the night, now in simple armless movement.

Caravaggio was diverted by the startling presence of three bottles of red wine on the table. He walked over andread the labels and shook his head, amazed. He knew the sapper wouldn’t drink any of it. All three had alreadybeen opened. Kip must have picked his way through some etiquette book in the library. Then he saw the cornand the meat and the pota.toes. Hana slid her arm into Kip’s and came with him to the table.

They ate and drank, the unexpected thickness of the wine like meat on their tongues. They were soon turningsilly in their toasts to the sapper—”the great forager”—and to the English patient. They toasted each other, Kipjoining in with his beaker of water. This was when he began to talk about himself. Caravaggio pressing him on,not always listening, sometimes standing up and walking around the table, pacing and pacing with pleasure at allthis. He wanted these two married, longed to force them verbally towards it, but they seemed to have their ownstrange rules about their relation.ship. What was he doing in this role. He sat down again. Now and then henoticed the death of a light. The snail shells held only so much oil. Kip would rise and refill them with pinkparaffin.

“We must keep them lit till midnight.”

They talked then about the war, so far away. “When the war with Japan is over, everyone will finally go home,”

Kip said. “And where will you go?” Caravaggio asked. The sapper rolled his head, half nodding, half shaking it,his mouth smil.ing. So Caravaggio began to talk, mostly to Kip.

The dog cautiously approached the table and laid its head on Caravaggio’s lap. The sapper asked for other storiesabout Toronto as if it were a place of peculiar wonders. Snow that drowned the city, iced up the harbour,ferryboats in the sum.mer where people listened to concerts. But what he was really interested in were the cluesto Hana’s nature, though she was evasive, veering Caravaggio away from stories that involved some moment ofher life. She wanted Kip to know her only in the present, a person perhaps more flawed or more compas.sionateor harder or more obsessed than the girl or young woman she had been then. In her life there was her motherAlice her father Patrick her stepmother Clara and Caravaggio. She had already admitted these names to Kip as ifthey were her credentials, her dowry. They were faultless and needed no discussion. She used them likeauthorities in a book she could refer to on the right way to boil an egg, or the correct way to slip garlic into alamb. They were not to be questioned.

And now—because he was quite drunk—Caravaggio told the story of Hana’s singing the “Marseillaise,” whichhe had told her before. “Yes, I have heard the song,” said Kip, and he attempted a version of it. “No, you have tosing it out,” said Hana, “you have to sing it standing up!”

She stood up, pulled her tennis shoes off and climbed onto the table. There were four snail lights flickering,almost dying, on the table beside her bare feet.

“This is for you. This is how you must learn to sing it, Kip. This is for you.”

She sang up into darkness beyond their snail light, beyond the square of light from the English patient’s roomand into the dark sky waving with shadows of cypress. Her hands came out of their pockets.

Kip had heard the song in the camps, sung by groups of men, often during strange moments, such as before anim.promptu soccer match. And Caravaggio when he had heard it in the last few years of the war never reallyliked it, never liked to listen to it. In his heart he had Hana’s version from many years before. Now he listenedwith a pleasure because she was singing again, but this was quickly altered by the way she sang. Not the passionof her at sixteen but echoing the tentative circle of light around her in the darkness. She was singing it as if it wassomething scarred, as if one couldn’t ever again bring all the hope of the song together. It had been altered by thefive years leading to this night of her twenty-first birthday in the forty-fifth year of the twentieth century. Singingin the voice of a tired traveller, alone against every.thing. A new testament. There was no certainty to the songanymore, the singer could only be one voice against all the mountains of power. That was the only sureness. Theone voice was the single unspoiled thing. A song of snail light. Caravaggio realized she was singing with andechoing the heart of the sapper.

In the tent there have been nights of no talk and nights full of talk. They are never sure what will occur, whosefraction of past will emerge, or whether touch will be anonymous and silent in their darkness. The intimacy ofher body or the body of her language in his ear—as they lie upon the air pillow he insists on blowing up andusing each night. He has been charmed by this Western invention. He dutifully releases the air and folds it intothree each morning, as he has done all the way up the landmass of Italy.

In the tent Kip nestles against her neck. He dissolves to her scratching fingernails across his skin. Or he has hismouth against her mouth, his stomach against her wrist.

She sings and hums. She thinks him, in this tent’s dark.ness, to be half bird—a quality of feather within him, thecold iron at his wrist. He moves sleepily whenever he is in such darkness with her, not quite quick as the world,whereas in daylight he glides through all that is random around him, the way colour glides against colour.

But at night he embraces torpor. She cannot see his order and discipline without seeing his eyes. There isn’t akey to him. Everywhere she touches braille doorways. As if organs, the heart, the rows of rib, can be seen underthe skin, saliva across her hand now a colour. He has mapped her sadness more than any other. Just as she knowsthe strange path of love he has for his dangerous brother. “To be a wanderer is in our blood. That is why jailing ismost difficult for his nature and he would kill himself to get free.”

During the verbal nights, they travel his country of five rivers. The Sutlej, Jhelum, Ravi, Chenab, Beas. Heguides her into the great gurdwara, removing her shoes, watching as she washes her feet, covers her head. Whatthey enter was built in 1601, desecrated in 1757 and built again immediately. In 1830 gold and marble wereapplied. “If I took you before morning you would see first of all the mist over the water. Then it lifts to reveal thetemple in light. You will already be hearing the hymns of the saints—Ramananda, Nanak and Kabir. Singing isat the centre of worship. You hear the song, you smell the fruit from the temple gardens—pomegranates,oranges. The temple is a haven in the flux of life, accessible to all. It is the ship that crossed the ocean ofignorance.”

They move through the night, they move through the silver door to the shrine where the Holy Book lies under acanopy of brocades. The ragis sing the Book’s verses accompanied by musicians. They sing from four in themorning till eleven at night. The Granth Sahib is opened at random, a quotation selected, and for three hours,before the mist lifts off the lake to reveal the Golden Temple, the verses mingle and sway out with unbrokenreading.

Kip walks her beside a pool to the tree shrine where Baba Gujhaji, the first priest of the temple, is buried. A treeof superstitions, four hundred and fifty years old. “My mother came here to tie a string onto a branch andbeseeched the tree for a son, and when my brother was born returned and asked to be blessed with another. Thereare sacred trees and magic water all over the Punjab.”

Hana is quiet. He knows the depth of darkness in her, her lack of a child and of faith. He is always coaxing herfrom the edge of her fields of sadness. A child lost. A father lost.

“I have lost someone like a father as well,” he has said. But she knows this man beside her is one of the charmed,who has grown up an outsider and so can switch allegiances, can replace loss. There are those destroyed byunfairness and those who are not. If she asks him he will say he has had a good life —his brother in jail, hiscomrades blown up, and he risking himself daily in this war.

In spite of the kindnesses in such people they were a terrible unfairness. He could be all day in a clay pitdismantling a bomb that might kill him at any moment, could come home from the burial of a fellow sapper, hisenergy saddened, but whatever the trials around him there was always solution and light. But she saw none. Forhim there were the various maps of fate, and at Amritsar’s temple all faiths and classes were welcome and atetogether. She herself would be allowed to place money or a flower onto the sheet spread upon the floor and thenjoin in the great permanent singing.

She wished for that. Her inwardness was a sadness of na.ture. He himself would allow her to enter any of histhirteen gates of character, but she knew that if he were in danger he would never turn to face her. He wouldcreate a space around himself and concentrate. This was his craft. Sikhs, he said, were brilliant at technology.

“We have a mystical closeness... what is it?” “Affinity.” “Yes, affinity, with machines.”

He would be lost among them for hours, the beat of music within the crystal set whacking away at his foreheadand into his hair. She did not believe she could turn fully to him and be his lover. He moved at a speed thatallowed him to replace loss. That was his nature. She would not judge it in him. What right did she have. Kipstepping out each morning with his satchel hanging off his left shoulder and walking the path away from theVilla San Girolamo. Each morning she watched him, seeing his freshness towards the world perhaps for the lasttime. After a few minutes he would look up into the shrapnel-torn cypresses, whose middle branches had beenshelled away. Pliny must have walked down a path like this, or Stendahl, because passages in The Charterhouseof Parma had occurred in this part of the world too.

Kip would look up, the arch of the high wounded trees over him, the path in front of him mediaeval, and he ayoung man of the strangest profession his century had invented, a sapper, a military engineer who detected anddisarmed mines. Each morning he emerged from the tent, bathed and dressed in the garden, and stepped awayfrom the villa and its surroundings, not even entering the house—maybe a wave if he saw her— as if language,humanity, would confuse him, get, like blood, into the machine he had to understand. She would see him fortyyards from the house, in a clearing of the path.

It was the moment he left them all behind. The moment the drawbridge closed behind the knight and he wasalone with just the peacefulness of his own strict talent. In Siena there was that mural she had seen. A fresco of acity. A few yards outside the city walls the artist’s paint had crumbled away, so there was not even the securityof art to provide an orchard in the far acres for the traveller leaving the castle. That was where, she felt, Kip wentduring the day. Each morning he would step from the painted scene towards dark bluffs of chaos. The knight.

The warrior saint. She would see the khaki uniform flickering through the cypresses. The English.man hadcalled himfato profugus—fate’s fugitive. She guessed that these days began for him with the pleasure of liftinghis eyes up to the trees.

They had flown the sappers into Naples at the beginning of October 1943, selecting the best from the engineeringcorps that were already in southern Italy, Kip among the thirty men who were brought into the booby-trappedcity.

The Germans in the Italian campaign had choreographed one of the most brilliant and terrible retreats in history.

The advance of the Allies, which should have taken a month, took a year. There was fire in their path. Sappersrode the mud.guards of trucks as the armies moved forward, their eyes searching for fresh soil disturbances thatsignalled land mines or glass mines or shoe mines. The advance impossibly slow. Farther north in the mountains,partisan bands of Garibaldi communist groups, who wore identifying red handkerchiefs, were also wiringexplosives over the roads which detonated when German trucks passed over them.

The scale of the laying of mines in Italy and in North Africa cannot be imagined. At the Kismaayo-Afmadu roadjunction, 260 mines were found. There were 300 at the Omo River Bridge area. On June 30, 1941, South Africansappers laid 2,700 Mark 11 mines in Mersa Matruh in one day. Four months later the British cleared MersaMatruh of 7,806 mines and placed them elsewhere.

Mines were made out of everything. Forty-centimetre gal.vanized pipes were filled with explosives and leftalong military paths. Mines in wooden boxes were left in homes. Pipe mines were filled with gelignite, metalscraps and nails. South Afri.can sappers packed iron and gelignite into four-gallon petrol cans that could thendestroy armoured cars.

It was worst in the cities. Bomb disposal units, barely trained, were shipped out from Cairo and Alexandria. TheEighteenth Division became famous. During three weeks in October 1941, they dismantled 1,403 high-explosivebombs.

Italy was worse than Africa, the clockwork fuzes nightmar-ishly eccentric, the spring-activated mechanismsdifferent from the German ones that units had been trained in. As sappers entered cities they walked alongavenues where corpses were strung from trees or the balconies of buildings. The Germans often retaliated bykilling ten Italians for every German killed. Some of the hanging corpses were mined and had to be blown up inmidair.

The Germans evacuated Naples on October i, 1943. Dur.ing an Allied raid the previous September, hundreds ofciti.zens had walked away and begun living in the caves outside the city. The Germans in their retreat bombedthe entrance to the caves, forcing the citizens to stay underground. A ty.phus epidemic broke out. In the harbourscuttled ships were freshly mined underwater.

The thirty sappers walked into a city of booby traps. There were delayed-action bombs sealed into the walls ofpublic buildings. Nearly every vehicle was rigged. The sappers be.came permanently suspicious of any objectplaced casually in a room. They distrusted everything they saw on a table unless it was placed facing “fouro’clock.” Years after the war a sap.per putting a pen on a table would position it with the thicker end facing fouro’clock.

Naples continued as a war zone for six weeks and Kip was there with the unit for the whole period. After twoweeks they discovered the citizens in the caves. Their skin dark with shit and typhus. The procession of themback into the city hospi.tals was one of ghosts.

Four days later the central post office blew up, and seventy-two were killed or wounded. The richest collectionof mediae.val records in Europe had already burned in the city archives.

On the twentieth of October, three days before electricity was to be restored, a German turned himself in. He toldau.thorities that there were thousands of bombs hidden in the harbour section of the city that were wired to thedormant electrical system. When power was turned on, the city would dissolve in flames. He was interrogatedmore than seven times, in differing stages of tact and violence—at the end of which the authorities were stilluncertain about his confession. This time an entire area of the city was evacuated. Children and the old, thosealmost dead, those pregnant, those who had been brought out of the caves, animals, valuable jeeps, woundedsoldiers out of the hospitals, mental patients, priests and monks and nuns out of the abbeys. By dusk on theevening of October 22, 1943, only twelve sappers remained behind.

The electricity was to be turned on at three p.m. the next day. None of the sappers had ever been in an empty citybefore, and these were to be the strangest and most disturbing hours of their lives.

During the evenings thunderstorms roll over Tuscany. Light.ning drops towards any metal or spire that rises upout of the landscape. Kip always returns to the villa along the yellow path between the cypresses around seven inthe evening, which is when the thunder, if there is going to be thunder, begins. The mediaeval experience.

He seems to like such temporal habits. She or Caravaggio will see his figure in the distance, pausing in his walkhome to look back towards the valley to see how far away the rain is from him. Hana and Caravaggio return tothe house. Kip continues his half-mile uphill walk on the path that curls slowly to the right and then slowly to theleft. There is the noise of his boots on the gravel. The wind reaches him in bursts, hitting the cypresses broadsideso they tilt, entering the sleeves of his shirt.

For the next ten minutes he walks, never sure if the rain will overtake him. He will hear the rain before he feelsit, a clicking on the dry grass, on the olive leaves. But for now he is in the great refreshing wind of the hill, in theforeground of the storm.

If the rain reaches him before he gets to the villa, he contin.ues walking at the same pace, snaps the rubber capeover his haversack and walks on within it.

In his tent he hears the pure thunder. Sharp cracks of it overhead, a coach-wheel sound as it disappears into themoun.tains. A sudden sunlight of lightning through the tent wall, always, it seems to him, brighter than sunlight,a flash of contained phosphorus, something machinelike, to do with the new word he has heard in the theoryrooms and through his crystal set, which is “nuclear.” In the tent he unwinds the wet turban, dries his hair andweaves another around his head.

The storm rolls out of Piedmont to the south and to the east. Lightning falls upon the steeples of the small alpinechapels whose tableaux reenact the Stations of the Cross or the Mysteries of the Rosary. In the small towns ofVarese and Varallo, larger-than-life terra-cotta figures carved in the i6oos are revealed briefly, depicting biblicalscenes. The bound arms of the scourged Christ pulled back, the whip coming down, the baying dog, threesoldiers in the next chapel tableau rais.ing the crucifix higher towards the painted clouds.

The Villa San Girolamo, located where it is, also receives such moments of light—the dark halls, the room theEnglishman lies in, the kitchen where Hana is laying a fire, the shelled chapel—all lit suddenly, without shadow.

Kip will walk with no qualms under the trees in his patch of garden during such storms, the dangers of beingkilled by lightning pathetically minimal compared with the danger of his daily life. The naive Catholic imagesfrom those hillside shrines that he has seen are with him in the half-darkness, as he counts the seconds betweenlightning and thunder. Perhaps this villa is a similar tableau, the four of them in private movement, momentarilylit up, flung ironically against this war.

The twelve sappers who remained behind in Naples fanned out into the city. All through the night they havebroken into sealed tunnels, descended into sewers, looking for fuze lines that might be linked with the centralgenerators. They are to drive away at two p.m., an hour before the electricity is to be turned on.

A city of twelve. Each in separate parts of the town. One at the generator, one at the reservoir, still diving—theauthori.ties most certain destruction will be caused by flooding. How to mine a city. It is unnerving mostlybecause of the silence. All they hear of the human world are barking dogs and bird songs that come fromapartment windows above the streets. When the time comes, he will go into one of the rooms with a bird. Somehuman thing in this vacuum. He passes the Museo Archeologico Nazionale, where the remnants of Pompeii andHerculaneum are housed. He has seen the ancient dog frozen in white ash.

The scarlet sapper light strapped to his left arm is turned on as he walks, the only source of light on the StradaCarbonara. He is exhausted from the night search, and now there seems little to do. Each of them has aradiophone, but it is to be used only for an emergency discovery. It is the terrible silence in the empty courtyardsand the dry fountains that makes him most tired.

At one p.m. he traces his way towards the damaged Church of San Giovanni a Carbonara, where he knows thereis a chapel of the Rosary. He had been walking through the church a few evenings earlier when lightning filledthe dark.ness, and he had seen large human figures in the tableau. An angel and a woman in a bedroom.

Darkness replaced the brief scene and he sat in a pew waiting, but there was to be no more revelation.

He enters that corner of the church now, with the terra.cotta figures painted the colour of white humans. Thescene depicts a bedroom where a woman is in conversation with an angel. The woman’s curly brown hair revealsitself under the loose blue cape, the fingers of her left hand touching her breastbone. When he steps forward intothe room he realizes everything is larger than life. His own head is no higher than the shoulder of the woman.

The angel’s raised arm reaches fifteen feet in height. Still, for Kip, they are company. It is an inhabited room,and he walks within the discussion of these creatures that represent some fable about mankind and heaven.

He slips his satchel from his shoulder and faces the bed. He wants to lie on it, hesitating only because of thepresence of the angel. He has already walked around the ethereal body and noticed the dusty light bulbs attachedto its back beneath the dark coloured wings, and he knows in spite of his desire that he could not sleep easily inthe presence of such a thing. There are three pairs of stage slippers, a set designer’s subtlety, peek.ing out fromunder the bed. It is about one-forty.

He spreads his cape on the floor, flattens the satchel into a pillow and lies down on the stone. Most of hischildhood in Lahore he slept on a mat on the floor of his bedroom. And in truth he has never gotten accustomedto the beds of the West. A pallet and an air pillow are all he uses in his tent, whereas in England when stayingwith Lord Suffolk he sank claustro-phobically into the dough of a mattress, and lay there captive and awake untilhe crawled out to sleep on the carpet.

He stretches out beside the bed. The shoes too, he notices, are larger than life. The feet of Amazonians slip intothem. Above his head the tentative right arm of the woman. Beyond his feet the angel. Soon one of the sapperswill turn on the city’s electricity, and if he is going to explode he will do so in the company of these two. Theywill die or be secure. There is nothing more he can do, anyway. He has been up all night on a final search forcaches of dynamite and time cartridges. Walls will crumble around him or he will walk through a city of light. Atleast he has found these parental figures. He can relax in the midst of this mime of conversation.

He has his hands under his head, interpreting a new tough.ness in the face of the angel he didn’t notice before.

The white flower it holds has fooled him. The angel too is a warrior. In the midst of this series of thoughts hiseyes close and he gives in to tiredness.

He is sprawled out with a smile on his face, as if relieved finally to be sleeping, the luxuriousness of such a thing.

The palm of his left hand facedown on the concrete. The colour of his turban echoes that of the lace collar at theneck of Mary.

At her feet the small Indian sapper, in uniform, beside the six slippers. There seems to be no time here. Each ofthem has selected the most comfortable of positions to forget time. So we will be remembered by others. In suchsmiling comfort when we trust our surroundings. The tableau now, with Kip at the feet of the two figures,suggests a debate over his fate. The raised terra-cotta arm a stay of execution, a promise of some great future forthis sleeper, childlike, foreign-born. The three of them almost at the point of decision, agreement.

Under the thin layer of dust the angel’s face has a powerful joy. Attached to its back are the six light bulbs, twoof which are defunct. But in spite of that the wonder of electricity suddenly lights its wings from underneath, sothat their blood-red and blue and goldness the colour of mustard fields shine animated in the late afternoon.

Wherever Hana is now, in the future, she is aware of the line of movement Kip’s body followed out of her life.

Her mind repeats it. The path he slammed through among them. When he turned into a stone of silence in theirmidst. She recalls everything of that August day—what the sky was like, the objects on the table in front of hergoing dark under the thunder.

She sees him in the field, his hands clasped over his head, then realizes this is a gesture not of pain but of hisneed to hold the earphones tight against his brain. He is a hundred yards away from her in the lower field whenshe hears a scream emerge from his body which had never raised its voice among them. He sinks to his knees, asif unbuckled. Stays like that and then slowly gets up and moves in a diagonal towards his tent, enters it, andcloses the flaps behind him. There is the dry crackle of thunder and she sees her arms darken.

Kip emerges from the tent with the rifle. He comes into the Villa San Girolamo and sweeps past her, moving likea steel ball in an arcade game, through the doorway and up the stairs three steps at a time, his breathmetronomed, the hit of his boots against the vertical sections of stairs. She hears his feet along the hallway as shecontinues to sit at the table in the kitchen, the book in front of her, the pencil, these objects frozen and shadowedin the pre-storm light.

He enters the bedroom. He stands at the foot of the bed where the English patient lies. Hello, sapper.

The rifle stock is against his chest, its sling braced against his triangled arm.

What was going on outside?

Kip looks condemned, separate from the world, his brown face weeping. The body turns and fires into the oldfountain, and the plaster explodes dust onto the bed. He pivots back so the rifle p............