Free The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje Page B

as there was no pause it meant the player would not lean forward and pull out the thin metal band to set the metronome going. Most pencil bombs werehidden in these – the easiest place to solder the thin layer of wire upright. Bombs were attached to taps, to the spines of books, they were drilled into fruit trees so an apple falling onto a lower branch would detonate the tree, just as a hand gripping that branch would. He was unable to look at a room or field without seeing the possibilities of weapons there.
    He had paused by the French doors, leaned his head against the frame, then slid into the room and except for moments of lightning remained within the darkness. There was a girl standing, as if waiting for him, looking down at the keys she was playing. His eyes took in the room before they took her in, swept across it like a spray of radar. The metronome was ticking already, swaying innocently back and forth. There was no danger, no tiny wire. He stood there in his wet uniform, the young woman at first unaware of his entrance.
    Beside his tent the antenna of a crystal set is strung up into the trees. She can see the phosphorus green from the radio dial if she looks over there at night with Caravaggio’s field glasses, the sapper’s shifting body covering it up suddenly if he moves across the path of vision. He wears the portable contraption during the day, just one earphone attached to his head, the other loose under his chin, so he can hear sounds from the rest of the world that might be important to him. He will come into the house to pass on whatever information he has picked up that he thinks might be interesting to them. One afternoon he announces that the bandleader Glenn Miller has died, his plane having crashed somewhere between England and France.
    So he moves among them. She sees him in the distance of a defunct garden with the diviner or, if he has foundsomething, unravelling that knot of wires and fuzes someone has left him like a terrible letter.
    He is always washing his hands. Caravaggio at first thinks he is too fussy. ‘How did you get through a war?’ Caravaggio laughs.
    ‘I grew up in India, Uncle. You wash your hands all the time. Before all meals. A habit. I was born in the Punjab.’
    ‘I’m from Upper America,’ she says.
    He sleeps half in and half out of the tent. She sees his hands remove the earphone and drop it onto his lap.
    Then Hana puts down the glasses and turns away.
    They were under the huge vault. The sergeant lit a flare, and the sapper lay on the floor and looked up through the rifle’s telescope, looked at the ochre faces as if he were searching for a brother in the crowd. The cross hairs shook along the biblical figures, the light dousing the coloured vestments and flesh darkened by hundreds of years of oil and candle smoke. And now this yellow gas smoke, which they knew was outrageous in this sanctuary, so the soldiers would be thrown out, would be remembered for abusing the permission they received to see the Great Hall, which they had come to, wading up beachheads and the one thousand skirmishes of small wars and the bombing of Monte Cassino and then walking in hushed politeness through the Raphael Stanze till they were here, finally, seventeen men who had landed in Sicily and fought their way up the ankle of the country to be here – where they were offered just a mostly dark hall. As if being in the presence of the place was enough.
    And one of them had said, ‘Damn. Maybe more light, Sergeant Shand?’ And the sergeant released the catch of the flare and held it up in his outstretched arm, the niagara of its light pouring off his fist, and stood there for the length of its burn like that. The rest of them stood looking up at the figures and faces crowded onto the ceiling that emerged in the light. But the young sapper was already on his back, the rifle aimed, his eye almost brushing the beards of Noah and Abraham and the variety of demonsuntil he reached the great