A firmament in the midst of the waters: Dimensions of love in The English Patient

Given that the church with the frescoes seems cavernous even when illuminated, the shared pledge of Hana and Kip, "I will always go back to that church," echoes the farewell of Katharine and Almasy in the Cave of Swimmers. And just as Kip after Hardy's death briefly withdraws from Hana before their reconciliation, "In the cave, after all those months of separation and anger, they had come together and spoken once more as lovers, rolling away the boulder they had placed between themselves for some social law neither had believed in" (171). Almasy returns to the Cave in the film much sooner than the novel's span of three years. Ondaatje writes: "He was among the familiar paintings he had found years earlier.... Several figures in the unmistakable posture of swimmers. Bermann had been right about the presence of an ancient lake. He walked farther into the coldness, into the Cave of Swimmers, where he had left her. She was still there. She had dragged herself into a corner, had wrapped herself tight in the parachute material. He had promised to return for her" (169-70). Whereas the film emphasizes the farewell vows of the lovers, Ondaatje has Almasy paint his love in the colors of history before she dies in a "holy place":

He looked up to the one cave painting and stole the colours from it. The ochre went into her face, he daubed blue around her eyes. He walked across the cave, his hands thick with red, and combed his fingers through her hair. Then all of her skin, so her knee that had poked out of the plane that first day was saffron. The pubis. Hoops of colour around her legs so she would be immune to the human. There were traditions he had discovered in Herodotus in which old warriors celebrated their loved ones by locating and holding them in whatever world made them eternal-a colourful fluid, a song, a rock drawing. (248)

The English Patient allows lovers to transcend time. Minghella responds, "the film is a very ambitious one in the way it tells the story. It isn't a `and then and then' beginning, middle, and end story; it's a puzzle" (Smith 25). Note as well the initial ambiguity of tense in Almasy's statement in the Cave, "Every night I cut out my heart, but in the morning it was full again." The love he shares with Katharine echoes "a time when mapmakers named the places they travelled through with the names of lovers rather than their own" (140), while Hana has been "immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams" (12).

Almasy believes that "When we meet those we fall in love with, there is an aspect of our spirit that is historian, a bit of a pedant, who imagines or remembers a meeting when the other had passed by innocently.... But all parts of the body must be ready for the other, all atoms must jump in one direction for desire to occur" (259). On another level, Hana and Kip spend "one month in their lives when [they] sleep beside each other. A formal celibacy between them. Discovering that in lovemaking there can be a whole civilisation, a whole country ahead of them" (225). Ondaatje then expands the scope of the novel: "Wherever Hana is now, in the future, she is aware of the line of movement Kip's body followed out of her life. Her mind repeats it" (282). And just as Minghella offers a flashback of Almasy flying over the desert with his beloved after he has died by Hana's side, the novel's conclusion touches upon the parabolic dimension lovers may share: "And so Hana moves and her face turns and in a regret she lowers her hair. Her shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges. Kirpal's left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles" (301-02). Finally, Katharine in the film and Almasy in the novel translate their experience as a credo of love: