Some excerpts from the co-winner of the Booker Prize for 1992, The English Patient, written by Michael Ondaatje.
[A conversation between Hana and Kip, out in the fields where Kip has accidentally uncovered mine wires and is trying to dismantle a bomb and Hana finds herself too in the fix.]
She was looking at him, quizzical, waiting for his answer to what she had said, but he hadn't heard her. She shook her head and sad down. He started collecting various objects around himself, putting them into his satchel. She looked up into the tree and then only by chance looked back down and saw his hands shaking, tense and hard like an epileptic's, his breathing deep and fast, over in a moment. He was crouched over.
"Did you hear what I said?"
"No. What was it?"
"I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me last year. I didn't feel scared. I certainly wasn't brave just now. I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone, it's like a small wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I've always liked flesh the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Sudan, do you know what flower that is? Have you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against your collarbone I just want to close my eyes without thinking of others, want to find the crook of a tree and climb into it and sleep. What a careful mind! To know which wire to cut. How did you know? You kept saying I don't know I don't know, but you did. Right? Don't shake, you have to be a still bed for me, let me curl up as if you were a good grandfather I could hug, I love the word 'curl', such a slow word, you can't rush it...."
[pg 102-103]
"She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had 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."
[pg 12]
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