The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

care during the invasion north.
    In her print dress she walked away from the celebration. She went into the room she shared with the other nurses and sat down. Something flickered in her eye as she sat, and she caught the eye of a small round mirror. She got up slowly and went towards it. It was very small but even so seemed a luxury. She had refused to look at herself for more than a year, now and then just her shadow on walls. The mirror revealed only her cheek, she had to move it back to arm’s length, her hand wavering. She watched the little portrait of herself as ifwithin a clasped brooch. She. Through the window there was the sound of the patients being brought out into the sunlight in their chairs, laughing and cheering with the staff. Only those who were seriously ill were still indoors. She smiled at that. Hi Buddy, she said. She peered into her look, trying to recognize herself.
    Darkness between Hana and Caravaggio as they walk in the garden. Now he begins to talk in his familiar slow drawl.
    ‘It was someone’s birthday party late at night on Danforth Avenue. The Night Crawler restaurant. Do you remember, Hana? Everyone had to stand and sing a song. Your father, me, Giannetta, friends, and you said you wanted to as well – for the first time. You were still at school then, and you had learned the song in a French class.
    ‘You did it formally, stood on the bench and then one more step up onto the wooden table between the plates and the candles burning.
    ‘“ Alonson fon! ”
    ‘You sang out, your left hand to your heart. Alonson fon! Half the people there didn’t know what the hell you were singing, and maybe you didn’t know what the exact words meant, but you knew what the song was about.
    ‘The breeze from the window was swaying your skirt over so it almost touched a candle, and your ankles seemed fire-white in the bar. Your father’s eyes looking up at you, miraculous with this new language, the cause pouring out so distinct, flawless, no hesitations, and the candles swerving away, not touching your dress but almost touching. We stood up at the end and you walked off the table into his arms.’
    ‘I would remove those bandages on your hands. I am a nurse, you know.’
    ‘They’re comfortable. Like gloves.’
    ‘How did this happen.’
    ‘I was caught jumping from a woman’s window. That woman I told you about, who took the photograph. Not her fault.’
    She grips his arm, kneading the muscle. ‘Let me do it.’ She pulls the bandaged hands out of his coat pockets. She has seen them grey in daylight, but in this light they are almost luminous.
    As she loosens the bandages he steps backwards, the white coming out of his arms as if he were a magician, till he is free of them. She walks towards the uncle from childhood, sees his eyes hoping to catch hers to postpone this, so she looks at nothing but his eyes.
    His hands held together like a human bowl. She reaches for them while her face goes up to his cheek, then nestles in his neck. What she holds seems firm, healed.
    ‘I tell you I had to negotiate for what they left me.’
    ‘How did you do that?’
    ‘All those skills I used to have.’
    ‘Oh, I remember. No, don’t move. Don’t drift away from me.’
    ‘It is a strange time, the end of a war.’
    ‘Yes. A period of adjustment.’
    ‘Yes.’
    He raises his hands up as if to cup the quarter-moon.
    ‘They removed both thumbs, Hana. See.’
    He holds his hands in front of her. Showing her directly what she has glimpsed. He turns one hand over as if to reveal that it is no trick, that what looks like a gill is where the thumb has been cut away. He moves the hand towards her blouse.
    She feels the cloth lift in the area below her shoulder ashe holds it with two fingers and tugs it softly towards him.
    ‘I touch cotton like this.’
    ‘When I was a child I thought of you always as the Scarlet Pimpernel, and in my dreams I stepped onto the night roofs with you. You came home with cold