"He was a burned man and I was a nurse and I could have nursed him.
Do you understand the sadness of geography?"

-The English Patient, "August"

II

When Hana first saw the English patient, she thought of her father, lying in a dove-cot; alone, with the doves nestling above him. Out of reach, but not sight.

A comforting place, a sacred place, a holy place.

She will now remember how her fingers thoughtfully touched what she thought may have been buttons once; buttons sprouted in a green spring, now growing up the thin expanse of a chest. And she did not recoil. The skin was taught, with an elasticity that did not surprise her; she had seen enough of war. Later, when she wrote to Clara, she drew the dove-cot as the English patient had described it to her, her drawing unsure of itself, without the confidence and boldness of her childhood. And she used the words he had used himself: safe, sacred, comfort. She consumed his voice and his speeches and his abbreviations and quotations the way she did much of everything then. She was in charge, it was she who knew which books still carried her scribbled writing, where the morphine lay. And yet his voice carried more weight, like water in a pitcher of marble; something her father's had never done in life.

Now she is home, sitting on Clara's pink rock, watching the Canadian trees and the Canadian water; the sound they make together-- she can see it, the sound they make, that is. Just as clearly as she can see the end of the war looming behind and before her. The war has been over; the war in Europe ended a year ago. A year ago last week, she knows. It will be a year for her in August, when the distant chimes of an Asian land will remind her of many, many things. She licks her dry fingertips at the thought of Kip; Kip screaming as the crystal set lodged in his ear tells him what he has known all along; that the English are weak, are animals.

"When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you are an Englishman."

... and the cloud was still settling over those distant cherry trees and brightly colored futons. And she had a bottle of wine (where had she found it?), but no one ever finished it.

She thought that day she could smell burning flesh, but it was only the English patient, watching them, wandering, alone; he could retrace his steps through the desert blindfolded. But he knew, and he would have pleaded for Kip to shoot him, if he were born to plead. But he wasn't, and Kip knew it. That is why Kip left, the gun unused; Almásy alone, again. She thinks now of Kim, not Kip, and smiles at the similarity, so much like an accidental rainbow that it keeps her awake at night.

And the English patient was left alone.

Always alone; his thoughts on Herodotus, on the desert, on Katherine. Katherine, with her bony knees and her back sprinkled with desert paint. Hana wonders what kind of love can do that to a man, brand him angry and jubilant and sorrowful; what kind of love can steal from a man his love of the desert? Because she was sure that is what Katherine, the faceless, deathless, almost nameless woman had done to him, to her English patient. Even though he really was not English. But none of them were, nothing was, save the bags of tea they found in the cupboards. East Indian Trading Company, indeed. And maybe he loved the desert more in loving his Katherine, in crossing the border of another man's marriage; into another holy life. He said once he did not believe in nations. What did he than think of marriage and its borders, its many speckled divisions?

Hana sees Clara on the periphery and waves. Clara of the pink rock, Clara of Patrick's love; Clara of Hana's soul.

"I want to tell you how he died, Clara," Hana says to her after watching Kip drive off, the motorbike closer to his body, she realizes now, then she had ever been; after burying the English patient; after saying goodbye to Caravaggio and the Italian villa; after watching a blue moon rise over Canada after having waited too long. "I want you to know how my father, how your husband, died."

"I know how he died," Clara says, throwing her bags down onto the porch (Hana has just come home, has just stepped off the boat). "I know how Patrick died. You wrote to me, remember? You called me maman; a circular word, a comforting word. The dove-cot." Clara does not live in the past anymore, but the strings are still there. Hana will try to use that word more often, or so she tells herself. She does not yet know that it can only be used once.

"I know how he died," Clara repeats, examining a loose plank.

But Hana is not done and is not ready yet; she is no more silent than before. "Europe is called a continent, but it is an island; so small, so tiny that you can throw a pebble from one end and it will reach the other. It will fall, and the ripples will remind you of a stack of dominoes. And each domino touches another, each nation has a fingertip placed on its neighbor's shoulder; here, where it tickles and sometimes can hurt."

Hana's hand is heavy, Clara thinks. Clara sits down on the steps, rubs her knuckles. She does not speak; shifts slowly away.

"And he was so close to me, Clara, I could smell him. I would stand at the back door before the new shipment of men were dropped at my feet, and I could smell him. Do you know that sometimes I would talk to the men, before they died, and we would tell each other things. Mostly I listened, though. Then, when they had died, I would pick them up, and some of them were rotting already. And they did not know it; I did not know it. And I would have no time to clean up after the dead before running to the ones almost ready to die. That's how we thought of them: ready to die, or dead. There was no in-between; there were no survivors. Not there.

"Sometimes I could see you; you and your canoe. Slipping away it would seem. But always him. I could see Patrick because he was so close, Clara. And I was so close to him.

"Do you understand the sadness of geography?"

That phrase again. Clara closes her eyes and leaves Hana only when Hana buckles down, head thrust between her knees, and begins to cry. Clara knows close to nothing about geography, but she knows it matters little here; here in her cabin and on her isand, where the borders are crossed and re-crossed by possums and bears and sometimes, men.

Now Hana watches Clara, and she thinks that there is nothing of the desert in Clara, and knowing this brings about a forgetting that is almost more aware than the remembering (yet she is wrong, for like the desert, Clara has shifted and moved on. For her, Patrick is gone, and she looks beyond Hana's thoughts). Watching Clara and her sure, precise movements reminds Hana of falling and of settling, of fixing oneself to the chime of a clock heard only in the mind. Clara has grown older, she is no longer the darkest beetle; Patrick is dead; Kip gone, clouded over in a cloud of Indian spices. She doesn't think of Caravaggio. She knows he will find her someday, if he hasn't already. He will come back one evening, and all that will be missing will be Kip. Kip, and the English patient.

They buried the English patient behind the villa, beneath a stack of shriveled shrubs. Hana still thinks they should have let him drift into ash; he would have wanted that sense of freedom in death. But Caravaggio said no, it was enough. They left a marker and a note pinned to the chapel door, in case someone came looking for him. Hana thinks there may have been; maybe Katherine would come back, in the form of a ghost, to lay herself down beside her burnt lover. It was she, after all, who burnt him.

She remembers Patrick and his quietness. She thinks she can see his blood; black and lonely; and the retreating steps of his squadron as they leave him there, alone in the dove-coat. He probably did not know that he died in a holy place; people never do. Even the English patient didn't know, and in the end he moaned, not for Katherine, but for his lake of sand and fire. The desert, his rightful home, too far away.

In her hands Hana holds his book, a glue and paste mixture of Herodotus and Almásy. She has opened it, she has read it; she does not see why she cannot.

Death, after all, dissolves all boundaries, all lines of latitude and longitude. Ripples in a field of sand, geography diminishes and finds itself. And the hallowed becomes sacred in memory only. In reality, the boundaries of life have time still to fade.

II