The man in the turban, an Indian sapper named Kip, puts up a tent near the villa’s garden. The room is illuminated, and Hana sees that two soldiers, one of whom is wearing a turban, have entered the room. As she plays, a storm rolls in and lightning streaks the sky. One night, after leaving the English patient, Hana goes downstairs and removes the cover from an old piano and begins to play. As an Italian, the Allied forces had utilized Caravaggio’s skills and sent him to steal important papers and maps however, he had been caught by the Germans, and they nearly cut off his hands. “I’ve lost my nerve,” he says holding up his bandaged hands. Hana knows where they can find some chickens if Caravaggio will offer his skills as a thief.
If Caravaggio is to stay at the villa, Hana says, they must secure more food.
This man-who was a friend of her late father, Patrick, and whom she has known for so long-has come all this way to see her. Arriving at the villa, Caravaggio enters the house quietly and approaches Hana, kneeling down next to her “like an uncle.” Hana is shocked.
The war in Europe is over, the doctors say, and they can no longer force Hana, or anyone else, to do anything. The woman, Hana, is suffering from shell shock and had refused to leave the villa on account of her patient, a badly burned amnesiac presumed to be English. He hears a group of doctors talking about a nurse and her patient in a villa to the north and stops to ask her name. The structure itself has endured countless mortar strikes, and bombs and mines litter the property, making many of the room unsafe to enter.Ī man with bandaged hands named Caravaggio has been at the military hospital in Rome for nearly four months now. The villa has been nearly destroyed by the war. When the other nurses and doctors moved the patients north, Hana insisted on staying behind with the English patient, who is not stable enough to move. The Italian villa had served as a makeshift hospital for the Allies. It is the final days of World War II, and they are the villa’s only residents. Selected from the villa’s library, Hana reads various books to the English patient, including his own copy of Herodotus’s The Histories. He had fallen flaming from the sky, he says, and the Bedouin, a native tribe of desert Arabs, saved his life and carried him out of the desert. As Hana works, the man, known only as the English patient, tells her a story about the desert. She bathes him every four days, dripping water onto his open and weeping wounds. In the bed is a badly burned man, and he turns to look at Hana as she enters the room. She walks through the kitchen and up the dark stairs to a back bedroom that is painted like a garden. Hana stands up in the garden near the orchard of a villa and heads in the direction of the house.
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