The English Patient

She pulls down the copy of Kim from the library shelf and, standing against the piano, begins to write into the flyleaf in its last pages.

He says the gun—the Zam-Zammah cannon—is still there outside the museum in Lahore. There were two guns, made up of metal cups and bowls taken from every Hindu household in the city—as jizya, or tax. These were melted down and made into the guns. They were used in many battles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries against Sikhs. The other gun was lost during a battle crossing in the Chenab River—

She closes the book, climbs onto a chair and nestles the book into the high, invisible shelf.

She enters the painted bedroom with a new book and announces the title.

“No books now, Hana.”

She looks at him. He has, even now, she thinks, beautiful eyes. Everything occurs there, in that grey stare out of his darkness. There is a sense of numerous gazes that flicker onto her for a moment, then shift away like a lighthouse.

“No more books. Just give me the Herodotus.”

She puts the thick, soiled book into his hands.

“I have seen editions of The Histories with a sculpted portrait on the cover. Some statue found in a French museum. But I never imagine Herodotus this way. I see him more as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, piecing together a mirage. ‘This history of mine,’ Herodotus says, ‘has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument.’ What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history—how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love.… How old did you say you were?”

“Twenty.”

“I was much older when I fell in love.”

Hana pauses. “Who was she?”

But his eyes are away from her now.