She sat in the chair, one elbow on the table where the low candle sprayed its light, her head leaning back. He lowered his boots to the floor and came silently into the room, where the party had been going on three hours earlier. He could smell alcohol in the air. She put her fingers to her lips as he entered and then pointed to the patient. He wouldn’t hear Kip’s silent walk. The sapper sat in the well of the window again. If he could walk across the room and touch her he would be sane. But between them lay a treacherous and complex journey. It was a very wide world. And the Englishman woke at any sound, the hearing aid turned to full level when he slept, so he could be secure in his own awareness. The girl’s eyes darted around and then were still when she faced Kip in the rectangle of window.
He had found the location of the death and what was left there and they had buried his second-in-command, Hardy. And afterwards he kept thinking of the girl that afternoon, suddenly terrified for her, angry at her for involving herself. She had tried to damage her life so casually. She stared. Her last communication had been the finger to her lips. He leaned over and wiped the side of his cheek against the lanyard on his shoulder.
He had walked back through the village, rain falling into pollarded trees of the town square untrimmed since the start of the war, past the strange statue of two men shaking hands on horseback. And now he was here, the candlelight swaying, altering her look so he could not tell what she thought. Wisdom or sadness or curiosity.
If she had been reading or if she had been bending over the Englishman, he would have nodded to her and probably left, but he is now watching Hana as someone young and alone. Tonight, gazing at the scene of the mine blast, he had begun to fear her presence during the afternoon dismantling. He had to remove it, or she would be with him each time he approached a fuze. He would be pregnant with her. When he worked, clarity and music filled him, the human world extinguished. Now she was within him or on his shoulder, the way he had once seen a live goat being carried by an officer out of a tunnel they were attempting to flood.
No.
That wasn’t true. He wanted Hana’s shoulder, wanted to place his palm over it as he had done in the sunlight when she slept and he had lain there as if in someone’s rifle sights, awkward with her. Within the imaginary painter’s landscape. He did not want comfort but he wanted to surround the girl with it, to guide her from this room. He refused to believe in his own weaknesses, and with her he had not found a weakness to fit himself against. Neither of them was willing to reveal such a possibility to the other. Hana sat so still. She looked at him, and the candle wavered and altered her look. He was unaware that for her he was just a silhouette, his slight body and his skin part of the darkness.
Earlier, when she saw that he had left the window alcove, she had been enraged. Knowing that he was protecting them like children from the mine. She had clung closer to Caravaggio. It had been an insult. And tonight the growing exhilaration of the evening didn’t permit her to read after Caravaggio had gone to bed, stopping to rifle through her medicine box first, and after the English patient had plucked at the air with his bony finger and, when she had bent over, kissed her cheek.
She had blown out the other candles, lit just the night stub at the bedside table and sat there, the Englishman’s body facing her in silence after the wildness of his drunken speeches. “Sometime a horse I’ll be, sometime a hound. A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire.” She could hear the spill of the wax into the metal tray beside her. The sapper had gone through town to some reach of the hill where the explosion had taken place, and his unnecessary silence still angered her.
She could not read. She sat in the room with her eternally dying man, the small of her back still feeling bruised from an accidental slam against the wall during her dance with Caravaggio.
Now if he moves towards her she will stare him out, will treat him to a similar silence. Let him guess, make a move. She has been approached before by soldiers.
But what he does is this. He is halfway across the room, his hand sunk to the wrist in his open satchel which still hangs off his shoulder. His walk silent. He turns and pauses beside the bed. As the English patient completes one of his long exhalations he snips the wire of his hearing aid with the cutters and drops them back into the satchel. He turns and grins towards her.
“I’ll rewire him in the morning.”
He puts his left hand on her shoulder.
David Caravaggio—an absurd name for you, of course …”
“At least I have a name.”
“Yes.”
Caravaggio sits in Hana’s chair. Afternoon sun fills the room, revealing the swimming motes. The Englishman’s dark lean face with its angular nose has the appearance of a still hawk swaddled in sheets. The coffin of a hawk, Caravaggio thinks.
The Englishman turns to him.
“There’s a painting by Caravaggio, done late in his life. David with the Head of Goliath. In it, the young warrior holds at the end of his outstretched arm the head of Goliath, ravaged and old. But that is not the true sadness in the picture. It is assumed that the face of David is a portrait of the youthful Caravaggio and the head of Goliath is a portrait of him as an older man, how he looked when he did the painting. Youth judging age at the end of its outstretched hand. The judging of one’s own mortality. I think when I see him at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David.”
Caravaggio sits there in silence, thoughts lost among the floating motes. War has unbalanced him and he can return to no other world as he is, wearing these false limbs that morphine promises. He is a man in middle age who has never become accustomed to families. All his life he has avoided permanent intimacy. Till this war he has been a better lover than husband. He has been a man who slips away, in the way lovers leave chaos, the way thieves leave reduced houses.
He watches the man in the bed. He needs to know who this Englishman from the desert is, and reveal him for Hana’s sake. Or perhaps invent a skin for him, the way tannic acid camouflages a burned man’s rawness.
Working in Cairo during the early days of the war, he had been trained to invent double agents or phantoms who would take on flesh. He had been in charge of a mythical agent named “Cheese,” and he spent weeks clothing him with facts, giving him qualities of character—such as greed and a weakness for drink when he would spill false rumours to the enemy. Just as some in Cairo he worked for invented whole platoons in the desert. He had lived through a time of war when everything offered up to those around him was a lie. He had felt like a man in the darkness of a room imitating the calls of a bird.
But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others.
She pulls down the copy of Kim from the library shelf and, standing against the piano, begins to write into the flyleaf in its last pages.
He says the gun—the Zam-Zammah cannon—is still there outside the museum in Lahore. There were two guns, made up of metal cups and bowls taken from every Hindu household in the city—as jizya, or tax. These were melted down and made into the guns. They were used in many battles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries against Sikhs. The other gun was lost during a battle crossing in the Chenab River—
She closes the book, climbs onto a chair and nestles the book into the high, invisible shelf.
She enters the painted bedroom with a new book and announces the title.
“No books now, Hana.”
She looks at him. He has, even now, she thinks, beautiful eyes. Everything occurs there, in that grey stare out of his darkness. There is a sense of numerous gazes that flicker onto her for a moment, then shift away like a lighthouse.
“No more books. Just give me the Herodotus.”
She puts the thick, soiled book into his hands.
“I have seen editions of The Histories with a sculpted portrait on the cover. Some statue found in a French museum. But I never imagine Herodotus this way. I see him more as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, piecing together a mirage. ‘This history of mine,’ Herodotus says, ‘has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.’ What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history—how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love.… How old did you say you were?”
“Twenty.”
“I was much older when I fell in love.”
Hana pauses. “Who was she?”
But his eyes are away from her now.