The English Patient: Chapter IX Summary & Analysis

The English patient tells Hana and Caravaggio, that when he first met Katharine, she was a married woman. When Geoffrey Clifton arrived in the desert to join the English patient’s expedition, they were all surprised when he arrived with his new wife. The couple went back to Cairo for a month, and when they returned, Katharine was quiet and kept to herself. She had begun to “discover herself,” which the English patient tells Hana was particularly “painful to watch” because Geoffrey was completely blind to it. 

Katharine became obsessed with the desert and began to read everything she could about it. The English patient was 15 years older than her, and did not “believe in permanence” or in relationships that lasted a lifetime, but Katharine was smarter than him. Once, when Katharine ran out of books to read, she asked the English patient for his copy of The Histories. He had refused, claiming it contained his personal notes, and he needed it when he went into the desert.

One night, Geoffrey asked Katharine to read a poem out loud, but she wanted to read something else. The English patient handed her his book of Herodotus, and she read the story of Candaules, one the English patient has always just skimmed over, in which Candaules falls “passionately” in love with his wife. The English patient had always used The Histories to learn about geography, but Katharine used it “as a window to her life.” As she read, the English patient fell in love with her. “Words,” the English patient says to Caravaggio, interrupting his own story. “They have power.”

When Katharine and Geoffrey were not in the desert, they were in Cairo doing work for the English. Geoffrey had an uncle in the government, although the English patient was not sure of the exact nature of Geoffrey’s job. Katharine and Geoffrey would frequent parties and dinners, and even though the English patient hated such social gatherings, he went just to be near Katharine.

While in Cairo, the English patient worked for the Department of Egyptology and wrote a book about his explorations. It was a short book, only 70 pages, and he had wanted to dedicate it to Katharine, even though he did not end up doing so. He grew cold and distant in Katharine’s company until the day she approached him and propositioned him. Their affair heated up, and the English patient became obsessed with Katharine’s body, calling the little hollow at the base of her throat “the Bosphorus.”

Although the English patient did not know it, Geoffrey Clifton was deeply involved with the English government, and they knew all about the English patient’s affair with Katharine. The English patient had ignored all of Katharine’s remarks about Geoffrey’s relatives, but Madox had tried to warn him about Geoffrey’s connection to the English. Like the English patient’s book of Herodotus, Madox carried Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and used the book to try to explain Geoffrey’s connection to the British government. Half of Moscow and Petersburg were relatives or friends with Oblonsky, a character in Tolstoy’s novel, and Madox said it was the same with Geoffrey. 

Katharine loved words, the English patient says to Caravaggio. In words Katharine found “clarity,” “shape,” and “reason,” but the English patient says that words only bend emotions, “like sticks in water.” Katharine eventually returned to Geoffrey, and the English patient returned to the desert. He had told Madox nothing specific about the woman he was seeing, only that she was a widow in Cairo. “Would’ve like to have met her,” Madox said to him in 1939, before Madox pulled out his desert revolver and shot himself in a church during a sermon honoring the war.

As Madox was leaving for England, he stopped and turned around. “This is called the vascular sizood,” he said to the English patient, laughing and pointing to the hollow near the base of his neck. He left, carrying his book of Tolstoy. Once in England, Madox entered a church near Somerset with his wife, and when the priest began to preach in support of the war and the men who joined the battle, Madox shot himself, dying instantly. “Yes,” the English patient says, “Madox was a man who died because of nations.”

On Madox’s last night in Cairo, the English patient finally talked him into going into a bar, and there they saw Katharine and Geoffrey Clifton. The English patient was drunk and invented a dance called “the Bosphorus hug.” He was devastated by the fact that Madox was leaving Cairo, and he hid his feelings in alcohol, obnoxiously trying to dance with everyone. He grabbed Katharine and “a maniac’s tango ensued.” The English patient spent very little time in Cairo and seemed like a distant man to many; yet there he was, dancing with Katharine Clifton. 

During this time, the only connection the English patient had with the cities of the outside world was through Herodotus’s book. Soon, even the idea of a city became foreign to the English patient. In a phenomenon known as “geomorphology,” he had selected a place “unconscious of ancestry” to discover himself.

In the Cave of Swimmers, after Geoffrey had crashed his plane, the English patient placed Katharine, grimacing in pain, on a stretched out parachute. Katharine always wore makeup, so the English patient “stole the colours” from the cave wall, and put it onto Katharine’s face. He combed his hands through her hair and started a fire to keep her warm. He told her that he would not be able to carry her out of the desert but would soon return with help. When he left her, he gave her his Herodotus book. It was September of 1939.

A man can only walk the speed of a camel, which is about two and a half miles per hour, the English patient tells Caravaggio. He walked for three days without food. When he arrived in El Taj, English military jeeps surrounded him immediately, and they refused to listen to his pleas to go get Katharine.

Caravaggio suddenly wants to leave the villa. He is only a thief, and he doesn’t belong here with the English patient, a man he is now convinced is Almásy. Caravaggio is beginning to believe that it really doesn’t matter which side the English patient supported during the war, but Caravaggio still needs to know if he murdered Katharine Clifton, and he asks him as much now. The English patient assures him that he did not, and Caravaggio tells him that he only asks because Geoffrey Clifton was no ordinary Englishman. 

Geoffrey Clifton had been ordered by British Intelligence to keep an eye on Almásy and his expeditions into the desert, Caravaggio says. The English knew that the desert would eventually become a theater of the war, and Geoffrey was an aerial photographer. British Intelligence thought that Geoffrey’s death was suspicious (they still do, Caravaggio says) and they had always known about Almásy’s affair with Katharine. British Intelligence had been waiting for Almásy in Cairo, but he never arrived and instead went back into the desert.  

The English patient asks Caravaggio if he came to the villa to finally apprehend him. No, Caravaggio says. He came to find Hana, since he has known her since before the war. In fact, the truth is that Caravaggio has grown too fond of Almásy to turn him over to the authorities. He sits facing the burned and dying man, but no words come to him. Almásy begs Caravaggio to speak to him and asks if he is “just a book” to be filled with morphine and read. 

Caravaggio tells the English patient that he is just a thief who was “legitimized” during the war. He stole documents and various other things for British Intelligence, and he had first heard about Almásy while in the Middle East. British Intelligence worried that Almásy would use his knowledge of the desert to help the Germans, Caravaggio says. The English patient is quiet for a moment and then tells Caravaggio that he only did it so he could get back to Katharine.

Caravaggio tells the English patient that British Intelligence knew about Eppler long before he got to Cairo. They had broken a German code and were waiting for Eppler when he arrived in Egypt. Caravaggio says that they were waiting for Almásy, too, and planned to kill him, but he disappeared into the desert. British Intelligence was convinced that Almásy had killed Geoffrey Clifton because of his affair with Katharine. Caravaggio says that Almásy became Britain’s enemy not when he agreed to help the Germans, but when he began his affair with Katharine. 

The English patient had to return to the Gilf Kebir, he tells Caravaggio, and Geoffrey was to pick him up in his plane. When Geoffrey arrived, he circled around in his plane and flew directly at the English patient, crashing into the sand nearby. The English patient ran to the plane and found Katharine in the passenger seat. Geoffrey was killed in the crash, and later that night, the English patient buried his body.

Katharine was not killed in the crash, but she was badly injured. The English patient pulled her from the mangled plane and carried her to the Cave of Swimmers. “It is important to die in holy places,” the English patient tells Caravaggio, and that is why Madox killed himself in the church in Somerset. Madox thought the church “had lost its holiness, and he committed what he believed was a holy act.”

The English patient tells Caravaggio that everyone dies “containing a richness of lovers and tribes.” People are “communal histories, communal books,” the English patient says. The night that Geoffrey Clifton crashed his plane, the English patient carried Katharine into the desert, into the “communal book of moonlight.”