He slips into the harness of the oil-wet parachute and pivots upside down, breaking free of glass, wind flinging his body back. Then his legs are free of everything, and he is in the air, bright, not knowing why he is bright until he 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 passing a can of condensed milk back and forth. The Englishman 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?” the sapper 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 get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives. Though Kip 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, is now 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 that was 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 turns back 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 eccentric.”
“The best kind of teacher. That must have been Lord Suffolk. Did you meet Miss Morden?”
“Yes.”
At no point does either of them attempt to make Hana comfortable in their conversation. But she wants to know about his teacher, and how he would describe him.
“What was he like, Kip?”
“He worked in Scientific Research. He was head of an experimental unit. Miss Morden, his secretary, was always with him, and his chauffeur, Mr. Fred Harts. Miss Morden would take notes, which he dictated as he worked on a bomb, while Mr. Harts helped with the instruments. He was a brilliant man. They were called the Holy 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. No expression 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 to discover they were already being consumed by worms. In Ortona she had held cigarettes to the mouth of the boy with no arms. Nothing had stopped her. She had continued her duties while she secretly pulled her personal self back. So many nurses had turned into emotionally disturbed handmaidens of the war, in their yellow-and-crimson uniforms 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.
VII
In Situ
WESTBURY, ENGLAND, 1940
KIRPAL SINGH STOOD where the horse’s saddle would have lain across its back. At first he simply stood on the back of the horse, paused and waved to those he could not see but who he knew would be watching. Lord Suffolk watched him through binoculars, saw the young man wave, both arms up and swaying.
Then he descended, down into the giant white chalk horse of Westbury, into the whiteness of the horse, carved into the hill. Now he was a black figure, the background radicalizing the darkness of his skin and his khaki uniform. If the focus on the binoculars was exact, Lord Suffolk would see the thin line of crimson lanyard on Singh’s shoulder that signalled his sapper unit. To them it would look like he was striding down a paper map cut out in the shape of an animal. But Singh was conscious only of his boots scuffing the rough white chalk as he moved down the slope.
Miss Morden, behind him, was also coming slowly down the hill, a satchel over her shoulder, aiding herself with a rolled umbrella. She stopped ten feet above the horse, unfurled the umbrella and sat within its shade. Then she opened up her notebooks.
“Can you hear me?” he asked.
“Yes, it’s fine.” She rubbed the chalk off her hands onto her skirt and adjusted her glasses. She looked up into the distance and, as Singh had done, waved to those she could not see.
Singh liked her. She was in effect the first Englishwoman he had really spoken with since he arrived in England. Most of his time had been spent in a barracks at Woolwich. In his three months there he had met only other Indians and English officers. A woman would reply to a question in the NAAFI canteen, but conversations with women lasted only two or three sentences.
He was the second son. The oldest son would go into the army, the next brother would be a doctor, a brother after that would become a businessman. An old tradition in his family. But all that had changed with the war. He joined a Sikh regiment and was shipped to England. After the first months in London he had volunteered himself into a unit of engineers that had been set up to deal with delayed-action and unexploded bombs. The word from on high in 1939 was naive: “Unexploded bombs are considered the responsibility of the Home Office, who are agreed that they should be collected by A. R. P. wardens and police and delivered to convenient dumps, where members of the armed forces will in due course detonate them.”
It was not until 1940 that the War Office took over responsibility for bomb disposal, and then, in turn, handed it over to the Royal Engineers. Twenty-five bomb disposal units were set up. They lacked technical equipment and had in their possession only hammers, chisels and road-mending tools. There were no specialists.
A bomb is a combination of the following parts: