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 a fan-shaped strawbasket. Although he is a man from Asia who has in these last years of war assumed English fathers, follow.ingtheir codes like a dutiful son.
“Ah, but my brother thinks me a fool for trusting the Eng.lish.” He turns to her, sunlight in his eyes. “One day,he says, I will open my eyes. Asia is still not a free continent, and he is appalled at how we throw ourselves intoEnglish wars. It is a battle of opinion we have always had. ‘One day you will open your eyes,’ my brother keepssaying.”
The sapper says this, his eyes closed tight, mocking the metaphor. “Japan is a part of Asia, I say, and the Sikhshave been brutalized by the Japanese in Malaya. But my brother ignores that. He says the English are nowhanging Sikhs who are fighting for independence.”
She turns away from him, her arms folded. The feuds of the world. The feuds of the world. She walks into thedaylight darkness of the villa and goes in to sit with the Englishman.
At night, when she lets his hair free, he is once more an.other constellation, the arms of a thousand equatorsagainst his pillow, waves of it between them in their embrace and in their turns of sleep. She holds an Indiangoddess in her arms, she holds wheat and ribbons. As he bends over her it pours. She can tie it against her wrist.
As he moves she keeps her eyes open to witness the gnats of electricity in his hair in the darkness of the tent.
He moves always in relation to things, beside walls, raised terrace hedges. He scans the periphery. When helooks at Hana he sees a fragment of her lean cheek in relation to the landscape behind it. The way he watches thearc of a linnet in terms of the space it gathers away from the surface of the earth. He has walked up Italy witheyes that tried to see everything except what was temporary and human.
The one thing he will never consider is himself. Not his twilit shadow or his arm reaching for the back of a chairor the reflection of himself in a window or how they watch him. In the years of war he has learned that the onlything safe is himself.
He spends hours with the Englishman, who reminds him of a fir tree he saw in England, its one sick branch, tooweighted down with age, held up by a crutch made out of another tree. It stood in Lord Suffolk’s garden on theedge of the cliff, overlooking the Bristol Channel like a sentinel. In spite of such infirmity he sensed the creaturewithin it was noble, with a memory whose power rainbowed beyond ailment.
He himself has no mirrors He wraps his turban outside in his garden, looking about at the moss on trees. But henotices the swath scissors have made in Hana’s hair. He is familiar with her breath when he places his faceagainst her body, at the clavicle, where the bone lightens her skin. But if she asked him what colour her eyes are,although he has come to adore her, he will not, she thinks, be able to say. He will laugh and guess, but if she,black-eyed, says with her eyes shut that they are green, he will believe her. He may look intently at eyes but notregister what colour they are, the way food already in his throat or stomach is just texture more than taste orspecific object.
When someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colours, which, it seems to him, will always alterde.pending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any otherpoint on the spec.trum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect effaces. He’s never sure what aneye reveals. But he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge aneye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.
Everything is gathered by him as part of an altering har.mony. He sees her in differing hours and locations thatalter her voice or nature, even her beauty, the way the background power of the sea cradles or governs the fate oflifeboats.
They were in the habit of rising with daybreak and eating dinner in the last available light. Throughout the lateevening there would be only one candle flaring into the darkness beside the English patient, or a lamp half filledwith oil if Caravaggio had managed to forage any. But the corridors and other bed.rooms hung in darkness, as ifin a buried city. They became used to walking in darkness, hands out, touching the walls on either side with theirfingertips.
“No more light. No more colour.” Hana would sing the phrase to herself again and again. Kip’s unnerving habitof leaping down the stairs one hand halfway down the rail had to be stopped. She imagined his feet travellingthrough air and hitting the returning Caravaggio in the stomach.
She had blown out the candle in the Englishman’s room an hour earlier. She had removed her tennis shoes, herfrock was unbuttoned at the neck because of summer heat, the sleeves unbuttoned as well and loose, high up atthe arm. A sweet disorder.
On the main floor of the wing, apart from the kitchen, library and deserted chapel, was a glassed-in indoorcourtyard. Four walls of glass with a glass door that let you into where there was a covered well and shelves ofdead plants that at one time must have flourished in the heated room. This indoor courtyard reminded her moreand more of a book opened to reveal pressed flowers, something to be glanced at during pass.ing, never entered.
It was two a.m.
Each of them entered the villa from a different doorway, Hana at the chapel entrance by the thirty-six steps andhe at the north courtyard. As he stepped into the house he removed his watch and slid it into an alcove at chestlevel where a small saint rested. The patron of this villa hospital. She would not catch a glance of phosphorus. Hehad already removed his shoes and wore just trousers. The lamp strapped to his arm was switched off. He carriednothing else and just stood there for a while in darkness, a lean boy, a dark turban, the kara loose on his wristagainst the skin. He leaned against the corner of the vestibule like a spear.
Then he was gliding through the indoor courtyard. He came into the kitchen and immediately sensed the dog inthe dark, caught it and tied it with a rope to the table. He picked up the condensed milk from the kitchen shelfand returned to the glass room in the indoor courtyard. He ran his hands along the base of the door and found thesmall sticks leaning against it. He entered and closed the door behind him, at the last moment snaking his handout to prop the sticks up against the door again. In case she had seen them. Then he climbed down into the well.
There was a cross-plank three feet down he knew was firm. He closed the lid over himself and crouched there,imagining her searching for him or hiding herself. He began to suck at the can of condensed milk.
She suspected something like this from him. Having made her way to the library, she turned on the light on herarm and walked beside the bookcases that stretched from her ankles to unseen heights above her. The door wasclosed, so no light could reveal itself to anyone in the halls. He would be able to see the glow on the other side ofthe French doors only if he was outside. She paused every few feet, searching once again through thepredominantly Italian books for the odd English one that she could present to the English patient. She had cometo love these books dressed in their Italian spines, the frontispieces, the tipped-in colour illustrations with acovering of tissue, the smell of them, even the sound of the crack if you opened them too fast, as if breakingsome minute unseen series of bones. She paused again. The Charterhouse of Parma.
“If I ever get out of my difficulties,” he said to Clelia, “I shall pay a visit to the beautiful pictures at Parma, andthen will you deign to remember the name: Fabrizio del Dongo.”
Caravaggio lay on the carpet at the far end of the library. From his darkness it seemed that Hana’s left arm wasraw phosphorus, lighting the books, reflecting redness onto her dark hair, burning against the cotton of her frockand its puffed sleeve at her shoulder.
He came out of the well.
The three-foot diameter of light spread from her arm and then was absorbed into blackness, so it felt toCaravaggio that there was a valley of darkness between them. She tucked the book with the brown cover underher right arm. As she moved, new books emerged and others disappeared.
She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he loved her when he had understood her better, whenshe was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become. He knewthat if he had passed Hana on a street in Europe she would have had a familiar air but he wouldn’t haverecognized her. The night he had first come to the villa he had disguised his shock. Her ascetic face, which atfirst seemed cold, had a sharpness. He realized that during the last two months he had grown towards who shenow was. He could hardly believe his pleasure at her transla.tion. Years before, he had tried to imagine her as anadult but had invented someone with qualities moulded out of her community. Not this wonderful stranger hecould love more deeply because she was made up of nothing he had provided.
She was lying on the sofa, had twisted the lamp inward so she could read, and had already fallen deep into thebook. At some point later she looked up, listening, and quickly switched off the light.
Was she conscious of him in the room? Caravaggio was aware of the noisiness of his breath and the difficulty hewas having breathing in an ordered, demure way. The light went on for a moment and then was quickly shut offagain.
Then everything in the room seemed to be in movement but Caravaggio. He could hear it all around him,surprised he wasn’t touched. The boy was in the room. Caravaggio walked over to the sofa and placed his handdown towards Hana. She was not there. As he straightened up, an arm went around his neck and pulled himdown backwards in a grip. A light glared harshly into his face, and there was a gasp from them both as they felltowards the floor. The arm with the light still holding him at the neck. Then a naked foot emerged into the light,moved past Caravaggio’s face and stepped onto the boy’s neck beside him. Another light went on.
“Got you. Got you.”
The two bodies on the floor looked up at the dark outline of Hana above the light. She was singing it, “I got you,1 got you. I used Caravaggio—who really does have a bad wheeze! I knew he would be here. He was the trick.”
Her foot pressed down harder onto the boy’s neck. “Give up. Confess.”
Caravaggio began to shake within the boy’s grip, sweat al.ready all over him, unable to struggle out. The glareof light from both lamps now on him. He somehow had to climb and crawl out of this terror. Confess. The girlwas laughing. He needed to calm his voice before he spoke, but they were hardly listening, excited at theiradventure. He worked his way out of the boy’s loosening grip and, not saying a word, left the room.
They were in darkness again. “Where are you?” she asks. Then moves quickly. He positions himself so shebangs into his chest, and in this way slips her into his arms. She puts her hand to his neck, then her mouth to hismouth. “Condensed milk! During our contest? Condensed milk?” She puts her mouth at his neck, the sweat of it,tasting him where her bare foot had been. “I want to see you.” His light goes on and he sees her, her facestreaked with dirt, her hair spiked up in a swirl from perspiration. Her grin towards him.
He puts his thin hands up into the loose sleeves of her dress and cups her shoulders with his hands. If sheswerves now, his hands go with her. She begins to lean, puts all her weight into her fall backwards, trusting himto come with her, trust.ing his hands to break the fall. Then he will curl himself up, his feet in the air, just hishands and arms and his mouth on her, the rest of his body the tail of a mantis. The lamp is still strapped againstthe muscle and sweat of his left arm. Her face slips into the light to kiss and lick and taste. His foreheadtowelling itself in the wetness of her hair.
Then he is suddenly across the room, the bounce of his sapper lamp all over the place, in this room he has spent aweek sweeping of all possible fuzes so it is now cleared. As if the room has now finally emerged from the war, isno longer a zone or territory. He moves with just the lamp, swaying his arm, revealing the ceiling, her laughingface as he passes her standing on the back of the sofa looking down at the glisten of his slim body. The next timehe passes her he sees she is leaning down and wiping her arms on the skirt of her dress. “But I got you, I gotyou,” she chants. “I’m the Mohican of Danforth Avenue.”
Then she is riding on his back and her light swerves into the spines of books in the high shelves, her arms risingup and down as he spins her, and she dead-weights forward, drops and catches his thighs, then pivots off and isfree of him, lying back on the old carpet, the smell of the past ancient rain still in it, the dust and grit on her wetarms. He bends down to her, she reaches out and clicks off his light. “I won, right?” He still has said nothingsince he came into the room. His head goes into that gesture she loves which is partly a nod, partly a shake ofpossible disagreement. He cannot see her for the glare. He turns off her light so they are equal in darkness.
There is the one month in their lives when Hana and Kip sleep beside each other. A formal celibacy betweenthem. Dis.covering that in lovemaking there can be a whole civilisation, a whole country ahead of them. Thelove of the idea of him or her. I don’t want to be fucked. I don’t want to fuck you. Where he had learned it or shehad who knows, in such youth. Perhaps from Caravaggio, who had spoken to her during those evenings about hisage, about the tenderness towards every cell in a lover that comes when you discover your mortality. This was,after all, a mortal age. The boy’s desire completed itself only in his deepest sleep while in the arms of Hana, hisorgasm something more to do with the pull of the moon, a tug of his body by the night.
All evening his thin face lay against her ribs. She reminded him of the pleasure of being scratched, herfingernails in cir.cles raking his back. It was something an ayah had taught him years earlier. All comfort andpeace during childhood, Kip remembered, had come from her, never from the mother he loved or from hisbrother or father, whom he played with. When he was scared or unable to sleep it was the ayah who recognizedhis lack, who would ease him into sleep with her hand on his small thin back, this intimate stranger from SouthIndia who lived with them, helped run a household, cooked and served them meals, brought up her own childrenwithin the shell of the household, having comforted his older brother too in earlier years, probably knowing thecharacter of all of the children better than their real parents did.
It was a mutual affection. If Kip had been asked whom he loved most he would have named his ayah before hismother. Her comforting love greater than any blood love or sexual love for him. All through his life, he wouldrealize later, he was drawn outside the family to find such love. The platonic inti.macy, or at times the sexualintimacy, of a stranger. He would be quite old before he recognized that about himself, before he could ask evenhimself that question of whom he loved most.
Only once did he feel he had given her back any comfort, though she already understood his love for her. Whenher mother died he had crept into her room and held her suddenly old body. In silence he lay beside hermourning in her small servant’s room where she wept wildly and formally. He watched as she collected her tearsin a small glass cup held against her face. She would take this, he knew, to the funeral. He was behind herhunched-over body, his nine-year-old hands on her shoulders, and when she was finally still, just now and then ashudder, he began to scratch her through the sari, then pulled it aside and scratched her skin—as Hana nowreceived this tender art, his nails against the million cells of her skin, in his tent, in 1945, where their continentsmet in a hill town.
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 a fan-shaped strawbasket. Although he is a man from Asia who has in these last years of war assumed English fathers, follow.ingtheir codes like a dutiful son.
“Ah, but my brother thinks me a fool for trusting the Eng.lish.” He turns to her, sunlight in his eyes. “One day,he says, I will open my eyes. Asia is still not a free continent, and he is appalled at how we throw ourselves intoEnglish wars. It is a battle of opinion we have always had. ‘One day you will open your eyes,’ my brother keepssaying.”
The sapper says this, his eyes closed tight, mocking the metaphor. “Japan is a part of Asia, I say, and the Sikhshave been brutalized by the Japanese in Malaya. But my brother ignores that. He says the English are nowhanging Sikhs who are fighting for independence.”
She turns away from him, her arms folded. The feuds of the world. The feuds of the world. She walks into thedaylight darkness of the villa and goes in to sit with the Englishman.
At night, when she lets his hair free, he is once more an.other constellation, the arms of a thousand equatorsagainst his pillow, waves of it between them in their embrace and in their turns of sleep. She holds an Indiangoddess in her arms, she holds wheat and ribbons. As he bends over her it pours. She can tie it against her wrist.
As he moves she keeps her eyes open to witness the gnats of electricity in his hair in the darkness of the tent.
He moves always in relation to things, beside walls, raised terrace hedges. He scans the periphery. When helooks at Hana he sees a fragment of her lean cheek in relation to the landscape behind it. The way he watches thearc of a linnet in terms of the space it gathers away from the surface of the earth. He has walked up Italy witheyes that tried to see everything except what was temporary and human.
The one thing he will never consider is himself. Not his twilit shadow or his arm reaching for the back of a chairor the reflection of himself in a window or how they watch him. In the years of war he has learned that the onlything safe is himself.
He spends hours with the Englishman, who reminds him of a fir tree he saw in England, its one sick branch, tooweighted down with age, held up by a crutch made out of another tree. It stood in Lord Suffolk’s garden on theedge of the cliff, overlooking the Bristol Channel like a sentinel. In spite of such infirmity he sensed the creaturewithin it was noble, with a memory whose power rainbowed beyond ailment.
He himself has no mirrors He wraps his turban outside in his garden, looking about at the moss on trees. But henotices the swath scissors have made in Hana’s hair. He is familiar with her breath when he places his faceagainst her body, at the clavicle, where the bone lightens her skin. But if she asked him what colour her eyes are,although he has come to adore her, he will not, she thinks, be able to say. He will laugh and guess, but if she,black-eyed, says with her eyes shut that they are green, he will believe her. He may look intently at eyes but notregister what colour they are, the way food already in his throat or stomach is just texture more than taste orspecific object.
When someone speaks he looks at a mouth, not eyes and their colours, which, it seems to him, will always alterde.pending on the light of a room, the minute of the day. Mouths reveal insecurity or smugness or any otherpoint on the spec.trum of character. For him they are the most intricate aspect effaces. He’s never sure what aneye reveals. But he can read how mouths darken into callousness, suggest tenderness. One can often misjudge aneye from its reaction to a simple beam of sunlight.
Everything is gathered by him as part of an altering har.mony. He sees her in differing hours and locations thatalter her voice or nature, even her beauty, the way the background power of the sea cradles or governs the fate oflifeboats.
They were in the habit of rising with daybreak and eating dinner in the last available light. Throughout the lateevening there would be only one candle flaring into the darkness beside the English patient, or a lamp half filledwith oil if Caravaggio had managed to forage any. But the corridors and other bed.rooms hung in darkness, as ifin a buried city. They became used to walking in darkness, hands out, touching the walls on either side with theirfingertips.
“No more light. No more colour.” Hana would sing the phrase to herself again and again. Kip’s unnerving habitof leaping down the stairs one hand halfway down the rail had to be stopped. She imagined his feet travellingthrough air and hitting the returning Caravaggio in the stomach.
She had blown out the candle in the Englishman’s room an hour earlier. She had removed her tennis shoes, herfrock was unbuttoned at the neck because of summer heat, the sleeves unbuttoned as well and loose, high up atthe arm. A sweet disorder.
On the main floor of the wing, apart from the kitchen, library and deserted chapel, was a glassed-in indoorcourtyard. Four walls of glass with a glass door that let you into where there was a covered well and shelves ofdead plants that at one time must have flourished in the heated room. This indoor courtyard reminded her moreand more of a book opened to reveal pressed flowers, something to be glanced at during pass.ing, never entered.
It was two a.m.
Each of them entered the villa from a different doorway, Hana at the chapel entrance by the thirty-six steps andhe at the north courtyard. As he stepped into the house he removed his watch and slid it into an alcove at chestlevel where a small saint rested. The patron of this villa hospital. She would not catch a glance of phosphorus. Hehad already removed his shoes and wore just trousers. The lamp strapped to his arm was switched off. He carriednothing else and just stood there for a while in darkness, a lean boy, a dark turban, the kara loose on his wristagainst the skin. He leaned against the corner of the vestibule like a spear.
Then he was gliding through the indoor courtyard. He came into the kitchen and immediately sensed the dog inthe dark, caught it and tied it with a rope to the table. He picked up the condensed milk from the kitchen shelfand returned to the glass room in the indoor courtyard. He ran his hands along the base of the door and found thesmall sticks leaning against it. He entered and closed the door behind him, at the last moment snaking his handout to prop the sticks up against the door again. In case she had seen them. Then he climbed down into the well.
There was a cross-plank three feet down he knew was firm. He closed the lid over himself and crouched there,imagining her searching for him or hiding herself. He began to suck at the can of condensed milk.
She suspected something like this from him. Having made her way to the library, she turned on the light on herarm and walked beside the bookcases that stretched from her ankles to unseen heights above her. The door wasclosed, so no light could reveal itself to anyone in the halls. He would be able to see the glow on the other side ofthe French doors only if he was outside. She paused every few feet, searching once again through thepredominantly Italian books for the odd English one that she could present to the English patient. She had cometo love these books dressed in their Italian spines, the frontispieces, the tipped-in colour illustrations with acovering of tissue, the smell of them, even the sound of the crack if you opened them too fast, as if breakingsome minute unseen series of bones. She paused again. The Charterhouse of Parma.
“If I ever get out of my difficulties,” he said to Clelia, “I shall pay a visit to the beautiful pictures at Parma, andthen will you deign to remember the name: Fabrizio del Dongo.”
Caravaggio lay on the carpet at the far end of the library. From his darkness it seemed that Hana’s left arm wasraw phosphorus, lighting the books, reflecting redness onto her dark hair, burning against the cotton of her frockand its puffed sleeve at her shoulder.
He came out of the well.
The three-foot diameter of light spread from her arm and then was absorbed into blackness, so it felt toCaravaggio that there was a valley of darkness between them. She tucked the book with the brown cover underher right arm. As she moved, new books emerged and others disappeared.
She had grown older. And he loved her more now than he loved her when he had understood her better, whenshe was the product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become. He knewthat if he had passed Hana on a street in Europe she would have had a familiar air but he wouldn’t haverecognized her. The night he had first come to the villa he had disguised his shock. Her ascetic face, which atfirst seemed cold, had a sharpness. He realized that during the last two months he had grown towards who shenow was. He could hardly believe his pleasure at her transla.tion. Years before, he had tried to imagine her as anadult but had invented someone with qualities moulded out of her community. Not this wonderful stranger hecould love more deeply because she was made up of nothing he had provided.
She was lying on the sofa, had twisted the lamp inward so she could read, and had already fallen deep into thebook. At some point later she looked up, listening, and quickly switched off the light.
Was she conscious of him in the room? Caravaggio was aware of the noisiness of his breath and the difficulty hewas having breathing in an ordered, demure way. The light went on for a moment and then was quickly shut offagain.
Then everything in the room seemed to be in movement but Caravaggio. He could hear it all around him,surprised he wasn’t touched. The boy was in the room. Caravaggio walked over to the sofa and placed his handdown towards Hana. She was not there. As he straightened up, an arm went around his neck and pulled himdown backwards in a grip. A light glared harshly into his face, and there was a gasp from them both as they felltowards the floor. The arm with the light still holding him at the neck. Then a naked foot emerged into the light,moved past Caravaggio’s face and stepped onto the boy’s neck beside him. Another light went on.
“Got you. Got you.”
The two bodies on the floor looked up at the dark outline of Hana above the light. She was singing it, “I got you,1 got you. I used Caravaggio—who really does have a bad wheeze! I knew he would be here. He was the trick.”
Her foot pressed down harder onto the boy’s neck. “Give up. Confess.”
Caravaggio began to shake within the boy’s grip, sweat al.ready all over him, unable to struggle out. The glareof light from both lamps now on him. He somehow had to climb and crawl out of this terror. Confess. The girlwas laughing. He needed to calm his voice before he spoke, but they were hardly listening, excited at theiradventure. He worked his way out of the boy’s loosening grip and, not saying a word, left the room.
They were in darkness again. “Where are you?” she asks. Then moves quickly. He positions himself so shebangs into his chest, and in this way slips her into his arms. She puts her hand to his neck, then her mouth to hismouth. “Condensed milk! During our contest? Condensed milk?” She puts her mouth at his neck, the sweat of it,tasting him where her bare foot had been. “I want to see you.” His light goes on and he sees her, her facestreaked with dirt, her hair spiked up in a swirl from perspiration. Her grin towards him.
He puts his thin hands up into the loose sleeves of her dress and cups her shoulders with his hands. If sheswerves now, his hands go with her. She begins to lean, puts all her weight into her fall backwards, trusting himto come with her, trust.ing his hands to break the fall. Then he will curl himself up, his feet in the air, just hishands and arms and his mouth on her, the rest of his body the tail of a mantis. The lamp is still strapped againstthe muscle and sweat of his left arm. Her face slips into the light to kiss and lick and taste. His foreheadtowelling itself in the wetness of her hair.
Then he is suddenly across the room, the bounce of his sapper lamp all over the place, in this room he has spent aweek sweeping of all possible fuzes so it is now cleared. As if the room has now finally emerged from the war, isno longer a zone or territory. He moves with just the lamp, swaying his arm, revealing the ceiling, her laughingface as he passes her standing on the back of the sofa looking down at the glisten of his slim body. The next timehe passes her he sees she is leaning down and wiping her arms on the skirt of her dress. “But I got you, I gotyou,” she chants. “I’m the Mohican of Danforth Avenue.”
Then she is riding on his back and her light swerves into the spines of books in the high shelves, her arms risingup and down as he spins her, and she dead-weights forward, drops and catches his thighs, then pivots off and isfree of him, lying back on the old carpet, the smell of the past ancient rain still in it, the dust and grit on her wetarms. He bends down to her, she reaches out and clicks off his light. “I won, right?” He still has said nothingsince he came into the room. His head goes into that gesture she loves which is partly a nod, partly a shake ofpossible disagreement. He cannot see her for the glare. He turns off her light so they are equal in darkness.
There is the one month in their lives when Hana and Kip sleep beside each other. A formal celibacy betweenthem. Dis.covering that in lovemaking there can be a whole civilisation, a whole country ahead of them. Thelove of the idea of him or her. I don’t want to be fucked. I don’t want to fuck you. Where he had learned it or shehad who knows, in such youth. Perhaps from Caravaggio, who had spoken to her during those evenings about hisage, about the tenderness towards every cell in a lover that comes when you discover your mortality. This was,after all, a mortal age. The boy’s desire completed itself only in his deepest sleep while in the arms of Hana, hisorgasm something more to do with the pull of the moon, a tug of his body by the night.
All evening his thin face lay against her ribs. She reminded him of the pleasure of being scratched, herfingernails in cir.cles raking his back. It was something an ayah had taught him years earlier. All comfort andpeace during childhood, Kip remembered, had come from her, never from the mother he loved or from hisbrother or father, whom he played with. When he was scared or unable to sleep it was the ayah who recognizedhis lack, who would ease him into sleep with her hand on his small thin back, this intimate stranger from SouthIndia who lived with them, helped run a household, cooked and served them meals, brought up her own childrenwithin the shell of the household, having comforted his older brother too in earlier years, probably knowing thecharacter of all of the children better than their real parents did.
It was a mutual affection. If Kip had been asked whom he loved most he would have named his ayah before hismother. Her comforting love greater than any blood love or sexual love for him. All through his life, he wouldrealize later, he was drawn outside the family to find such love. The platonic inti.macy, or at times the sexualintimacy, of a stranger. He would be quite old before he recognized that about himself, before he could ask evenhimself that question of whom he loved most.
Only once did he feel he had given her back any comfort, though she already understood his love for her. Whenher mother died he had crept into her room and held her suddenly old body. In silence he lay beside hermourning in her small servant’s room where she wept wildly and formally. He watched as she collected her tearsin a small glass cup held against her face. She would take this, he knew, to the funeral. He was behind herhunched-over body, his nine-year-old hands on her shoulders, and when she was finally still, just now and then ashudder, he began to scratch her through the sari, then pulled it aside and scratched her skin—as Hana nowreceived this tender art, his nails against the million cells of her skin, in his tent, in 1945, where their continentsmet in a hill town.