The English Patient

A man with bandaged hands recuperating in a Roman military hospital overhears some doctors talking about Hana and the English patient. Although he has avoided conversation during his four months in the hospital, he immediately asks the doctors about the woman, having recognized her name. When he arrived at the hospital, he refused to provide his own name, but his serial number revealed he was with the Allies. The doctors confirm the woman’s name and tell the man that she refused to leave her final patient after the hospital had been bombed and abandoned. He asks if she is injured and the doctors say she is probably shell-shocked and add that no one can force her to leave, as the war is over in Italy.

The Villa San Girolamo is reported to have a ghost in its garden, they say, but the real ghost is the woman’s patient, who was brought to the Siwa Oasis by the Bedouins and then to Pisa but does not know his own identity. The villa lies in the hills about 20 miles outside Florence, but the surrounding landscape is still dangerous, especially because sappers have not yet cleared the unexploded ordinance. They say the country needs a good snowfall and some ravens to clean all the bodies. The man thanks them, walks outside for the first time in four months, and realizes he needs strong shoes and gelato.

The man takes a train through the countryside. He remembers accompanying a girl and her father to a hospital so the girl could have her tonsils removed, but she refused. He realizes that “they” never touched his head and remembers his deep fear of what “they” would have done to his head (30).

Having arrived at the villa, the man enters silently and crouches down beside Hana, who is reading in the lamplight. He asks her what a tonsil is and then asks if he can see her patient, but she shakes her head. She tells him where the kitchen is and returns to the table, shocked that a man she knew from the past traveled such a long way to see her. The man, whose name is Caravaggio, undresses in his dark room and looks out over the bombed Italian countryside.

The next morning, Hana and Caravaggio talk by the fountain while Hana washes some bedding. He teases her about her childhood infatuation with Giuseppe Verdi. She says she had no reason to stay in Canada after her father and Caravaggio left for the war. He tells her she should leave the villa because the unexploded bombs mean the area is unsafe, but Hana tells him she will not leave. When Caravaggio brings up the English patient, Hana says some part of him is still in Africa, and Caravaggio says the English love Africa because they do not feel like foreigners in the desert. Hana tells Caravaggio they have vegetables and beans but will need his help getting chickens. Caravaggio says he can no longer steal, having lost his nerve after being caught.

At night, Hana and Caravaggio often sit in the garden and talk, looking at the lights of Florence in the distance. On one occasion, she asks if he was a spy, and he answers noncommittally. The Allies, he says, were thrilled to have found someone who was both a thief and an Italian, and he had been caught while infiltrating a party to steal some papers from the host. A German officer’s girlfriend, whose name is Anna, unknowingly took his photograph and he had to steal the film back.

Hana checks on the English patient, whom she imagines is mentally back in the desert, being healed by the Bedouins. She climbs into her hammock, enjoying each memory of the day, which she retells to herself like a story.

In a lengthy flashback, Caravaggio remembers the night of the party. After realizing his picture had been taken, he strips off all his clothes and sneaks into Anna’s room only to find that she and the officer are having sex. He finds her camera, which is dangling from a statue’s hand, but as he does so, the headlights of a car pulling into the driveway shine into the room and illuminate him. Anna sees him, but Caravaggio mimes cutting his own throat, and she makes a noise that indicates her cooperation. However, the woman in the car has seen him too.

Caravaggio watches Hana watch him, knowing she cannot understand him and thinking about how much she reminds him of his wife. Hana sees his Italian heritage for the first time. He knew her and her father in Toronto before the war, during which time he was a professional thief. However, he is no longer interested in that world and is content to spend time only with Hana, despite the fact that she is content to only take care of the English patient.

Six months earlier, during her tenure as a nurse at a military hospital in Pisa, Hana looked out the windows every day at dawn to see a white lion statue, which had survived the bombing. This hospital was also at an abandoned monastery, one whose grounds were full of topiary animals. Many of the nurses experienced shell shock alongside the patients, often breaking down after a final, traumatic occurrence. After receiving news of her father’s death, Hana broke down too, and only found purpose when she encountered the English patient. Six months later, as Allied troops prepare to leave Italy, Hana has vowed to stay with him despite warnings about uncleared mines and the lack of food and clean water. She stole codeine tablets and morphine before the rest of the medical personnel left. One day, the patient touches her hair and asks her how old she is. She says she is 20, and when he asks about her father, Hana says her father is “in the war” (42). The English patient says Hana is also in the war. Despite how little they know about each other, their shyness is fading away.

From outside, the villa looks like a besieged fortress, and the boundaries between the damaged landscape and the house have become unclear. Hana gardens with enthusiasm, despite the barrenness of the burned earth.

One morning, Caravaggio finds Hana sobbing at the kitchen table, wearing only a skirt. He is unsure whether to approach her, but when he puts his hand on her shoulder, she tells him not to touch her if he is trying to have sex with her. He asks why she loves the English patient so much and tells her she has tied herself to a corpse. She says the English patient is a “despairing saint” and asserts her right to love him (45). Caravaggio says she should not consume other people’s poison, and Hana tells him to leave her alone.

After the rest of Hana’s unit left the villa, she had to burn many of the beds for warmth. She soon found a dead man’s hammock and slept in it, moving it from room to room. Her only other possessions are her shoes and a dress. She, Caravaggio, and the English patient all feel like solitary planets each reliving their own memories. Hana notices how quiet the formerly charming, gregarious Caravaggio has become. During the war, Hana similarly distanced herself from her patients until meeting the burned Englishman.

At the villa, Hana enjoys lying under several blankets at once, feeling their weight and enjoying her isolation. She misses the familiarity of Toronto nights and thinks fondly of everything Caravaggio taught her during her childhood. She was sent to Italy in 1943 with a Canadian infantry division that moved gradually north from Sicily. Hana saw a huge amount of death at the division’s field hospitals, and one day she spontaneously cut her hair short, wanting nothing to link her to the external world. She stopped looking into mirrors. The war raged on, and as she continued receiving reports about the deaths of loved ones, Toronto seemed less real and more dreamlike. She started calling her patients “Buddy” so as not to grow overly familiar. She lost weight, largely from exhaustion, as the division moved north. Finally, she was bivouacked at the Villa San Girolamo with four nurses, two doctors, and 100 patients.

Hana insisted on staying after the rest left, having realized the English patient could not be moved. She was drawn to him, wanted to learn from him, and wanted to save him. Abandoning the celebrations of the other soldiers, she walked upstairs and looked into a small mirror, holding it at arm’s length to look at her whole face and saying, “Hi Buddy” to herself (52).

At night in the garden, Caravaggio tells Hana a story about when she sang a French song in public as a child and her father looked at her with pride. Hana removes the bandages on Caravaggio’s hands and notices that he holds his hands so that they form a bowl shape. He says he had to negotiate with his captors and shows her that they removed his thumbs. She asks if he liked women and says she used the past tense because the war makes things like that seem unimportant. She reminds him of the small gifts he brought her as a child and remembers that he would take her to a café that sold worms. Caravaggio says his captors arranged for a female nurse to remove his thumbs, but the mastermind of the torture was a man named Ranuccio Tommasoni.

As they walk back into the house, they hear the English patient yelling and Hana runs to his room. A dog is standing in front of the English patient and Hana urges the dog toward Caravaggio. The English patient looks at the new arrival in shock, and Caravaggio picks up the dog and leaves.

Late that night, the English patient tells Hana that he thinks their villa was once the Villa Bruscoli, built in the 15th century. It belonged to a man named Poliziano, a protégé of Lorenzo de Medici. He describes the violence of late medieval life and all the well-known artists and scholars, including Michelangelo, who might have passed through the villa.

Meanwhile, in the kitchen, Caravaggio gives the dog some water and pours himself some wine. He has a sudden flashback to his torture, when his captors had handcuffed him to a table leg, and falls over, spilling the wine everywhere. In the middle of the torture, Tommasoni took a phone call, and Caravaggio’s captors let him go. As he walked across a bridge, wondering if he was worthless to the Italians, the bridge exploded, and he was flung into the water. When he tells Hana the story later that evening, she says the Germans were abandoning the city prior to the Allies’ arrival and were blowing up bridges as they left.

Hana opens a copy of The Last of the Mohicans to a blank page at the end and writes a note in which she says she is being cared for by Caravaggio, her father’s friend, and she has always loved him. She leaves the book in the villa library.

After checking on the English patient and removing a candle from his clasped hands, Hana suddenly feels claustrophobic and runs to the library. She removes the boards from the French doors and begins playing the piano, noticing thunder in the distance. She does not initially notice two men enter and place their guns on the piano. When she does see them, she is relieved that one is a Sikh wearing a traditional turban. She begins playing a more elaborate song, one from her childhood, and singing along. Later, Caravaggio walks into the kitchen and finds Hana making sandwiches for the two soldiers.

This chapter opens with a description of the fighting in Italy in 1943 and 1944, focusing in particular on how the fighting affected historical structures. The Allied troops used Italian medieval scholars to help them learn about and conquer medieval towns and castles, but many of them were old and died from disease or exposure to the harsh conditions. The Sikh soldier, Kip, and his compatriot, an Englishman named Hardy, are part of a sapper unit whose job is to find and defuse bombs. Kip loves art and becomes infatuated with the Queen of Sheba as painted on a fresco in a church at Arezzo.

After their battalion reaches the sea, Kip takes one of the historians, a man who was particularly kind to him, to see the Arezzo fresco via motorbike. Using a weighted pulley system, he lifts the old man up until he is dangling in front of the fresco, and then goes up himself one more time, touching the Queen of Sheba’s neck tenderly.

At the villa, Kip sets up a tent at the edge of the garden and spends his days defusing ordinance in the nearby countryside. He is always polite, and Hana watches him bathe from a small basin of rainwater, fascinated by his dark skin. Caravaggio is annoyed by Kip’s constant humming of Western songs. Kip notices that Caravaggio wanders at night and begins tailing him, but after two nights, Caravaggio confronts him. When Kip denies following him, Caravaggio slaps him. One day, Caravaggio enters the library to find Kip near the ceiling. Kip snaps his fingers at Caravaggio, signaling him to stop, before cutting the fuse to a bomb hidden behind a window valence.

Hardy has been relocated to a nearby village, and Hana spends more time watching Kip work, noting his still-immaculate uniform and his confidence in his own physicality. He had approached the villa that night not because of a love for music but because Germans often concealed bombs within musical instruments or metronomes. Kip eventually sets up a radio in his tent, looking for news or music, and Hana watches him from the house using Caravaggio’s field glasses.

Kip remembers lying on the floor of a massive church looking at the vaulted ceiling through his rifle scope. The sergeant with him lights a flare so they can see the painted ceiling better, saying they will get in trouble for having weapons in the Sistine Chapel. Kip recognizes some Biblical faces, including Noah and Abraham, but eventually arrives at a face he does not know. As the guards approach, he asks the sergeant who it is; the flare goes out and the sergeant says it is Isaiah.

Kip’s division arrives at Gabicce, on Italy’s east coast, and Kip is the lead sapper on a patrol guarding the Marine Festival of the Virgin Mary. As Italian men carry a five-foot-tall statue of Mary through the city, Kip watches from a safe distance. After the men put the statue down, Kip considers leaving something for her “as his gesture” (80). However, he has nothing to give, and he has his own religion.

One day, Caravaggio walks into the library and is so fascinated by the books that he does not notice Hana sleeping on the sofa. When he sneezes, she wakes up, and they chat aimlessly, and she suddenly reveals that she had an abortion a year ago. She learned the child’s father had been killed and “had to lose” the baby (82). However, she continued talking to the baby as though it were alive. Caravaggio says Hana must have learned about the death of her father, Patrick, right after her abortion, and she confirms this. Hana asks Caravaggio if he came to the villa because of Patrick’s death, and he says no. Hana says this is good, because Patrick, a sentimental man, would not want them mourning him. Caravaggio asks when she stopped talking to the baby, and she cannot remember. She became so busy because of the war and was surrounded by death. One day, she closed a man’s eyes thinking he had died, but he opened them and screamed at her. She says she knows death much better now.

They talk briefly about the English patient before Caravaggio goes into the house and injects himself with morphine. Later, Hana tells Caravaggio that she became tired of soldiers’ courtship rituals and isolated herself after her abortion until she met the English patient.

After a week, Hana and Caravaggio have grown accustomed to Kip’s unfamiliar eating habits. He brings onions and herbs to their shared meals, which Caravaggio suspects he stole. Kip also waits dutifully for English tea, which he loves and to which he adds condensed milk, as he did every day during the war. Kip acknowledges the impermanence of the landscape and reflects on the fact that the Germans often placed mines in gardens.

One day, Kip and Caravaggio take the cart to a nearby village to pick up a sack of flour. They talk about Hana to avoid talking about themselves. Kip tells Caravaggio that his real name is Kirpal and he had been nicknamed “Kip” by an Army officer who assumed the butter grease on Kip’s first bomb report was grease from a small, oily fish called a kipper (87).

The English patient starts wearing his hearing aid, made from an amber shell, around the villa. Although Hana tries to keep him and Kip apart, suspecting they will not like each other, she comes into the English patient’s room one day to find Kip standing next to the bed. The English patient says they are getting along well, but Hana is annoyed that Kip went in without permission. The English patient knows about Italian fuses and bombs, and the two men talk enthusiastically about the best ways to defuse them.

Hana goes into the courtyard and sits in the empty fountain, waiting for the water to be turned on as it was for 20 minutes at noon every day. She wonders if her father died alone. He was shy and often uncomfortable in the world but was charming and lacked the “feudal spirit” of most men (90). She remembers a book the English patient recommended that described novels as mirrors walking down the road, and this reminds her of her father. She realizes that everything she knows about her father’s death is information from Caravaggio or from Clara, her stepmother. Clara wrote Hana many letters during the war, and while Hana kept them all, she has never responded.

Later, Hana reads Rudyard Kipling’s Kim to the English patient. He tells her to slow down, pointing out that the commas help demarcate natural pauses. This was his first lesson about reading. She reads until he fall asleep and then picks up the English patient’s notebook. It falls open to a page from the Bible describing the relationship between the aged King David and a young virgin, Abishag, brought to David to warm him.

The Bedouins take the English patient to a British base at Siwa in 1944, and he is then taken to Italy. Since he has no identification and claims not to not know his name or nationality, the British suspect he is a spy. Military officials interrogate him, but he provides no information; he speaks German, but he speaks other languages as well. They cannot determine whether he is ally or enemy and he annoys them deeply by talking incessantly. Months later, Hana is equally unsure who he is, having only fragments of his pre-war life available to her in his notebook.

She turns the page and reads two entries. One describes a woman referred to as “Clifton’s wife” reading aloud a poem by Stephen Crane, and the other, which references a love story, claims that betrayals during war are not as bad as betrayals during peace (97). She leaves the book open and walks away.

In a field north of the villa, Kip finds a large bomb beneath a concrete slab. Grass has grown over the wires, and he cuts it with scissors. While he works, he listens to American music from the AIF station, which helps him concentrate. He eventually uncovers six black wires and begins chipping the paint off each to reveal its true color. Meanwhile, Hana brings a large mirror to the English patient, who wants to see himself. She stands on a chair, holding the mirror, when she hears distant shouting. The English patient tells her to go, and she runs out in the fields.

Hana finds Kip standing next to a tree with his hands raised. He tells her there are mine wires everywhere. She lifts her skirt and approaches him carefully. He accidentally picked up two live wires and needs a second person to hold them while he defuses the bomb. He says the bomb is a trick and he does not know how to disarm it. He also tells her twice that she can leave, but she refuses. As Hana holds the wires, he puts his radio earphones back on, and they help him think clearly. He follows the wires up the tree and cuts just below Hana’s left hand. Knowing he defused the bomb, he drops his tools and leans on Hana’s shoulder, taking deep breaths. Hana says she wanted to die with him in that moment and they should have lain down together. She wants to know which wire he cut but he keeps saying he does not know.

Kip and Hana lie under the tree and she falls asleep with her head on his chest. Kip is annoyed that she did not leave after he told her to, feeling like he now owes her something. He is also bothered by comments she has made about his skin color, although he knows she did not mean to insult him. Unable to sleep, he thinks about how white people will always treat him like “the foreigner, the Sikh,” no matter how professional he is (105). He remembers seeing another sapper killed by an explosion in 1944. Later, Hana is woken by a caterpillar crawling on her face and sees that Kip is crouching over her. She asks him how long he held her and jokingly asks if he “[took] advantage” of her (106).

Later that night, the villa’s residents have a party in the English patient’s room. Caravaggio has found a gramophone, Kip has found two bottles of wine, and Hana wears a clean dress. When Caravaggio asks Hana where she was all day, she tells him about the bomb. He starts playing a record and says it is time to dance; Hana wants to dance with Kip, who is sitting alone in a window alcove, but Caravaggio takes her in his arms, saying he must teach her to dance. He calls her “dear worm,” which unsettles her because it was her father’s nickname for her (108).

Suddenly, the group hears an explosion from the distance. Kip says it was not a mine and sounds like it came from an area that had already been cleared. While the others are preoccupied, he slips quietly out of the room and runs down the chapel stairs to the road, wondering whether a sapper or a civilian had set off the explosion. He thinks about his own unit, in which the sappers are polite to each other but typically only discuss information about bombs or enemy movements. Kip is fine with this, as he is most comfortable with educated men like his mentor, Lord Suffolk, or like the English patient.

Kip does not trust books like Hana does. As Hana watches Kip sit beside the English patient’s bed, she sees their relationship as a reversal of Kipling’s novel Kim, in which the student is Indian and the teacher English. Hana thinks books may have prepared her to meet Kip, but in this case, she is the young boy and Kip is the officer. The narrative flashes back, describing the four villa residents celebrating their own individual victories during the party and revealing that Kip had lied when he told the other three that the explosion was not a mine.

Kip returns hours later and sees Caravaggio asleep in the library, holding the dog. He takes off his boots, goes upstairs, and finds the English patient asleep and Hana sitting next to his bed. He is angry at her for having been so careless with her life that day, particularly because he learned that Hardy, his former second-in-commend, was killed in that night’s explosion. He simultaneously fears her and wants to touch her. For her part, Hana feels angry at Kip for leaving them and has been unable to read. Kip cuts the wire of the English patient’s hearing aid and says he will rewire it in the morning.

The following afternoon, Caravaggio sits with the English patient, who tells him that Caravaggio is an absurd name for him. He tells Caravaggio about the Italian painter by the same name, describing the painting David with the Head of Goliath. He says the painting is about youth judging its own mortality, and adds that when Kip stands at the foot of his bed, he sees his own David. Later, Caravaggio sits in silence, reflecting on the fact that he is middle-aged and has avoided intimacy and permanence. He decides to find out the English patient’s identity, which he will be able to do because of his training as a double agent during the war.

The next day, Hana goes to the English patient’s room and starts reading to him, but he stops her and asks her to read from his copy of The Histories. He tells her that Herodotus reveals how people betray each other for the sake of their countries. He asks how old she is, and when she says she is 20, he says he was much older when he fell in love. Hana asks who he was in love with, but he looks away without answering.

Caravaggio, who is experiencing a “belligerent morphine rush,” asks Hana and Kip if they think it is possible to fall in love with someone who is not smarter than they are (120). The question has bothered him all his life, as he sometimes finds words erotic and sometimes does not. He says Hana has fallen in love with the English patient rather than Kip because of the former’s ability to use words seductively. Hana tells Caravaggio to stop, arguing that they have one talkative resident in the villa already. Caravaggio says that Hana is obsessed with the English patient but Caravaggio is obsessed with Hana’s sanity. He says that Kip is being used by rich Westerners and will probably be blown up someday soon. He asks what Kip is doing fighting in English wars and what all of them are doing in places like Italy and Africa.

He argues that they should all leave the villa, but Hana refuses to leave the English patient. Caravaggio maintains that he is not in love with Hana and actually likes the English patient, but he says he would still kill the latter if it meant Hana would leave. He says that wars only benefit the wealthy and the three of them are not obligated to keep fighting. Hana, pouring milk into a cup, moves the jug so the milk flows over Kip’s arm. He does not move away.

One night, Hana goes to Kip’s tent, walking through the garden, which is full of plants the English patient advised her to grow. She loves that Kip does not need her to take care of him. She is increasingly attracted to the darkness of his skin, especially the way its shade varies in different spots across his body, and she enjoys watching him bathe. Kip finds Hana “remarkable,” appreciates her intelligence, and loves the way she lies against his body (128). Hana tells Kip she in love with his teeth and says they should ask Caravaggio what love is, as he is always in love. She wishes they had a river to swim in and hopes Caravaggio can explain how to fall in love so she can take Kip to Canada and introduce him to Clara.