The English Patient

The first time Katharine dreamed of the English patient, she woke screaming in bed next to Geoffrey. Her dream is the first time she realized she was in love with him, and this chaotic dream was followed by a series of peaceful ones. During their travels, she wanted to slap him every time he talked about the desert, and upon reflection, realized the desire was sexual.

Outside Cairo, the English patient drove Katharine into the city while Geoffrey checked the fuel lines of their small plane. He was overly polite and she hoped to never see him again. Before leaving, he stepped close and wiped his sweaty forearm across her neck. Later, before they had sex for the first time, they talked about what they hated most: her answer was lies, and his was ownership. Katharine punched him, leaving a bruise below one eye. While examining the bruise, he realized he had not looked into a mirror for years.

Their illicit relationship continued, and they often met in Groppi Park, which had heavily watered plum gardens. Katharine was always happiest near water. The English patient resumed his research into the location of Zerzura. Katharine expressed guilt about their affair, claiming Geoffrey would “go mad” if he found out (153). Madox noticed that the English patient had multiple new bruises and wondered why the latter had suddenly become so clumsy. When the English patient walked through Cairo with Katharine and they heard the minarets calling Muslim residents to prayer, they felt like sinners in a holy city.

When Katharine had to go home to Geoffrey, the English patient felt like he was disintegrating mentally and no longer cared about social mores. Before long, she told him she could no longer see him and he agreed. That night, they walked through Groppi Park and Katharine licked a tear from the English patient’s cheek. As she walked away, he said he did not miss her yet, and she replied, “You will” (158).

After bathing the English patient, Hana injects him with morphine. He begins telling her more about his time in Cairo.

In 1936, the room where he met Katharine overlooked the city. In 1937, he and Madox went on an expedition to Uweinat, a mountain range at the Egyptian-Libyan-Sudanese tripoint. The English patient asked Madox the name for the hollow at the base of a woman’s neck and Madox told him to pull himself together.

Later, Caravaggio tells Hana about a Hungarian man named Almásy, a desert explorer who had extensive knowledge of local North African dialects and landscapes. Almásy guided German spies across the desert during the war. Caravaggio says he does not think the English patient is English. He reminds her what the English patient suggested when they were trying to name the dog, pointing out that one of the suggestions, Cicero, is a code name for a German spy thought by the British to be a triple agent. He concludes that the English patient is actually Almásy. Hana thinks this is ridiculous and maintains that the patient is English.

Caravaggio says that in 1942, the Germans sent a spy named Eppler into Cairo carrying a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca as a code book for transmitting messages. The man who guided Eppler through the desert was Count Ladislaus de Almásy, also known as “the Rebecca spy.” Although Almásy had English friends, also desert explorers, before the war, he ultimately chose to help the Germans. Caravaggio and other Allied intelligence agents had been tracking them, but after Almásy left Eppler in Cairo, he disappeared into the desert. He adds that the man who caught Eppler was named Sansom, which could explain another of Almásy’s name choices for the dog: Delilah.

Hana says it does not matter what side the English patient was on as the war is over. Caravaggio wants to give him a Brompton cocktail, a mixture of alcohol and morphine, to see if he will admit his identity. Hana, upset by the effects of Caravaggio’s morphine use, tells him to leave the English patient alone. Caravaggio promises the cocktail will not hurt the English patient and might actually ease his pain.

Caravaggio administers the cocktail, and the English patient begins describing his activities in Cairo in 1942. He says he had gone to Cairo and was driving back to the desert when his truck exploded. He suspects it had been sabotaged, as there were often spies living among the Bedouin during the war. He began walking toward Uweinat, where he knew Madox had left a plane that the expeditioners no longer used. After years, it had been buried by sandstorms. He walked for four days, and was surrounded by war, as the local Bedouin communities had split into different camps.

Hana interrupts, telling the English patient that Caravaggio thinks he is not English, but she stops when she realizes he is not listening. He continues his story. After four days of walking, he arrived at a shallow well called Ain Dua and entered a cave called the Cave of Swimmers. It was full of prehistoric paintings, some of animals and others of humans in swimming postures. He found Katharine’s body in a corner, where he had left her years earlier. He thought about how much Katharine loved water and imagined that he himself would be happy to die in a cave. He “approached her naked” as he would have done in their Cairo room and wonders to Hana what he did that was so terrible (170). He carried Katharine’s body into the sun.

He explains that she had been injured in 1939, when Geoffrey had attempted to kill himself and Katharine by crashing his own plane, named Rupert. While Geoffrey died, Katharine survived but was too badly injured to be moved. After Katharine ended their secret relationship, the English patient became bitter and distanced himself from her, even suspecting jealously that she took another lover. Just before the war began, he returned to Gil Kebir to clear the expedition group’s base camp. Geoffrey had planned to pick him up in Rupert, but instead, Geoffrey flew the plane directly toward the English patient, killing himself and wounding Katharine.

When the English patient carried Katharine to the Cave of Swimmers, she asked him how he could hate her. He pointed out that Geoffrey had indeed gone mad after finding out about the affair, as she said he would. She said Geoffrey only found out about their relationship because of how badly the English patient treated her after she ended it. He pauses, and Caravaggio places another morphine tablet in his mouth. He says that when he left Katharine in the cave, he also left his copy of The Histories.

When he finally returned to the cave in 1942 and carried Katharine’s body to Madox’s plane, he realized quickly after takeoff that parts of the plane were rotten. He felt old and tired, specifically tired of living without Katharine. Oil leaked all over his legs, a spark ignited, and the English patient managed to jump out in a parachute before realizing his body was on fire.

Later, Hana comes into the English patient’s room and sees Kip standing beside the bed. The men pass a can of condensed milk back and forth as they talk. They have bonded over the fact that they both chose to leave the countries of their birth. Kip tells both of them about his work as a sapper, and the English patient guesses correctly that Lord Suffolk, famously the head of an experimental sapper unit, must have been Kip’s teacher. Kip says that Suffolk, along with his chauffeur, Fred Harts, and his secretary, Miss Morden, were killed in 1941 while trying to diffuse a bomb at Erith Marshes in Kent. Hana looks at Kip and the English patient, thinking about what both of them have shared with her.

The narrative rewinds to 1940. Kip was with Lord Suffolk, Mr. Harts, and Miss Morden, in Westbury, England. Kip and Miss Morden got along well, and she was the first Englishwoman he had spoken to in any meaningful way. Kip’s family had suspected that, as the second son, he would become a doctor, but when war broke out, Kip joined a Sikh regiment that was shipped to England. From there, he volunteered for an engineering unit that specialized in bomb disposal. The 25 bomb disposal units lacked advanced technical equipment and were not led by specialists.

Kip soon learned that the deadliest bombs were ones dropped from low altitudes that did not explode until after they landed. After the Blitz began in that year, the English countryside was suddenly full of unexploded German bombs waiting to be tripped by unsuspecting civilians. The average life span of a sapper during that time was 10 weeks.

Lord Suffolk introduced Kip to English customs and culture, including tea, which he came to love. Suffolk had convinced government authorities to let him train a small unit, comprised of 12 men, for bomb disposal in rural Exmoor. Kip tells Hana that Lord Suffolk, affable and handy, was “the best of the English” (185). Suffolk told Kip that he trusted him the same way he did Mr. Harts and Miss Morden, and the two men became close friends.

Kip was 21 years old and was the only Indian applicant to Lord Suffolk’s unit. While waiting with the other applicants to meet Suffolk, Kip caught Miss Morden staring at him and assumed she had never seen a turban before. When Lord Suffolk finally arrived, the exam began, and Kip finished it quickly as he had a thorough understanding of mathematics and mechanics. He was one of three applicants selected by Suffolk. When Miss Morden brought the selected men some sherry to celebrate, she congratulated Kip and drank his sherry, acknowledging that Sikhs do not consume alcohol. Suffolk said the group would be a family.

Kip began traveling around England with Suffolk, Miss Morden, Mr. Harts, and five other sappers. He had been in the unit for about a year when the explosion killed Suffolk, Miss Morden, and Mr. Harts. Kip was in London that day, defusing a 4,000-pound Satan bomb, when two bomb disposal officers told him what happened. The officers needed Kip to diffuse another bomb at Erith, the same kind that had killed his compatriots. Kip drove to Erith with Hardy but insisted on diffusing the bomb alone. Angry and exhausted, he remembered Suffolk’s declaration that a sapper doing a bomb disposal has one enemy, and he has to consider that enemy’s character. After many hours of working, he discovered that the bomb contained a second, separate device to trick anyone attempting to defuse it. He tells Hana he was lucky to have figured it out but still did not entirely understand it. Later, he came to understand that his discovery would change how Allied bomb disposal was done.

He realized he carried all of Suffolk’s knowledge in him and decided to leave the disposal unit, rejoining the army as an enlisted man who was responsible for general engineering work. He was accustomed to invisibility and did not want to be recognized as one of Lord Suffolk’s sappers. By the time he was on a ship heading for Italy, another sapper came up with the solution to the problem of a second device.

Kip tells Hana about his older brother, who refused to fight for the English and was imprisoned. However, he says his brother was not insulted when Kip took his place in the enlistment. Kip has not received a letter from his brother in a long time but believes he is still alive in prison.

He remembers disarming a bomb near the Uffington White Horse, a prehistoric chalk hill figure carved into the Berkshire Downs. He was with Lord Suffolk and Miss Morden, and Miss Morden brought him some tea and Kipling cake. She told him how she met Lord Suffolk, and as she spoke, he became able to focus more clearly on the bomb. She briefly touched his shoulder and left.