The English Patient 精彩片段：
VI A Buried Plane
HE GLARES OUT, each eye a path, down the long bed at the end of which is Hana. After she has bathed him she breaks the tip off an ampoule and turns to him with the morphine. An effigy. A bed. He rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper.
The long Cairo evenings. The sea of night sky, hawks in rows until they are released at dusk, arcing towards the last colour of the desert. A unison of performance like a handful of thrown seed.
In that city in you could buy anything—from a dog or a bird that came at one pitch of a whistle, to those terrible leashes that slipped over the smallest finger of a woman so she was tethered to you in a crowded market.
In the northeast section of Cairo was the great courtyard of religious students, and beyond it the Khan el Khalili bazaar.
Above the narrow streets we looked down upon cats on the corrugated tin roofs who also looked down the next ten feet to the street and stalls. Above all this was our room. Windows open to minarets, feluccas, cats, tremendous noise. She spoke to me of her childhood gardens. When she couldn’t sleep she drew her mother’s garden for me, word by word, bed by bed, the December ice over the fish pond, the creak of rose trellises. She would take -my wrist at the confluence of veins and guide it onto the hollow indentation at her neck.
March , Uweinat. Madox is irritable because of the thinness in the air. Fifteen hundred feet above sea level and he is uncomfortable with even this minimal height. He is a desert man after all, having left his family’s village of Marston Magna, Somerset, altered all customs and habits so he can have the proximity to sea level as well as regular dryness.
“Madox, what is the name of that hollow at the base of a woman’s neck? At the front. Here. What is it, does it have an official name? That hollow about the size of an impress of your thumb?” Madox watches me for a moment through the noon glare.
“Pull yourself together,” he mutters.
Let me tell you a story,” Caravaggio says to Hana. “There was a Hungarian named Almasy, who worked for the Germans during the war. He flew a bit with the Afrika Korps, but he was more valuable than that. In the he had been one of the great desert explorers. He knew every water hole and had helped map the Sand Sea. He knew all about the desert. He knew all about dialects. Does this sound familiar? Between the two wars he was always on expeditions out of Cairo. One was to search for Zerzura—the lost oasis. Then when war broke out he joined the Germans. In he became a guide for spies, taking them across the desert into Cairo. What I want to tell you is, I think the English patient is not English.” “Of course he is, what about all those flower beds in Gloucestershire?” “Precisely. It’s all a perfect background. Two nights ago, when we were trying to name the dog. Remember?” “Yes.” “What were his suggestions?” “He was strange that night.” “He was very strange, because I gave him an extra dose of morphine. Do you remember the names? He put out about eight names. Five of them were obvious jokes. Then three names. Cicero. Zerzura. Delilah.” “So?” “ ‘Cicero’ was a code name for a spy. The British unearthed him. A double then triple agent. He got away. ‘Zerzura’ is more complicated.” “I know about Zerzura. He’s talked about it. He also talks about gardens.” “But it is mostly the desert now. The English garden is wearing thin. He’s dying. I think you have the spy-helper Almasy upstairs.” They sit on the old cane hampers of the linen room looking at each other. Caravaggio shrugs. “It’s possible.” “I think he is an Englishman,” she says, sucking in her cheeks as she always does when she is thinking or considering something about herself.
“I know you love the man, but he’s not an Englishman. In the early part of the war I was working in Cairo—the Tripoli Axis. Rommel’s Rebecca spy—” “What do you mean, ‘Rebecca spy’?” “In the Germans sent a spy called Eppler into Cairo before the battle of El Alamein. He used a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca as a code book to send messages back to Rommel on troop movements. Listen, the book became bed-side reading with British Intelligence. Even I read it.” “You read a book?” “Thank you. The man who guided Eppler through the desert into Cairo on Rommel’s personal orders—from Tripoli all the way to Cairo—was Count Ladislaus de Almasy. This was a stretch of desert that, it was assumed, no one could cross.
“Between the wars Almasy had English friends. Great explorers. But when war broke out he went with the Germans.
Rommel asked him to take Eppler across the desert into Cairo because it would have been too obvious by plane or parachute.
He crossed the desert with the guy and delivered him to the Nile delta.” “You know a lot about this.” “I was based in Cairo. We were tracking them. From Gialo he led a company of eight men into the desert. They had to keep digging the trucks out of the sand hills. He aimed them towards Uweinat and its granite plateau so they could get water, take shelter in the caves. It was a halfway point. In the he had discovered caves with rock paintings there. But the plateau was crawling with Allies and he couldn’t use the wells there. He struck out into the sand desert again. They raided British petrol dumps to fill up their tanks. In the Kharga Oasis they switched into British uniforms and hung British army number plates on their vehicles. When they were spotted from the air they hid in the wadis for as long as three days, completely still.
Baking to death in the sand.