Warlight

by Michael Ondaatje

intentional? “Historical studies inevitably omit the place of the accidental in life,” we are told. But Felon

When did you take on that accent you have?” “What on earth do you mean?” “Have you always had that way of speaking? A self-made

“Do you know Denmark Hill? An Oliver Strachey? Long-Flew Knife?”

‘Bloody autumn.’

Felon asks, “What was the name of that first village? Your uncle’s village?”

“It no longer has a name.”

her. She has not lived such a life, of families and community, for a very long time. She has accepted a world of secretiveness, where there is a different power, where there is no generosity.

A woman behind her places her hands gently on her shoulders. “There are always miracles here,” the woman says to her.

her—“Do you see yourself in me at all?”

There was no embrace.

a cold woman

This had continued even during the Blitz, when there was just warlight, the river dark save for one dimmed orange light on bridges to mark the working arch for water traffic, a quiet signal in the midst of the bombing, and the barges ablaze, and shrapnel frapping across the water, while on the blacked-out roads the secret lorries crossed the city three or four times a night.

As if all the questions were insignificant. He appeared to want nothing from me.

He did not wish me in any way to understand what I had done, with my quick and unwarned disappearance those years

???

I used often to lie awake through the whole night, and wish for a large pearl.

There was no reason why The Darter should have known that a piece of embroidered cloth would give it away. “Sophie,” his wife, had made it for herself and the child. It was something

Besides, she would never have assumed I would reappear one afternoon, in her home, and see that wish of hers so evident on the wall.

pregnant seventeen-year-old girl who

Nathan's

The Darter had needed to confess another truth, as to who he really was, and the way he really knew me, and where I might have gone or been taken.

Trouble in Paradise, with the secret transportation of nitroglycerine into the city of London during the war, or seen a girl I knew loosen a ribbon

heat. I took the cardigan and the shirts to her room and hung them in the cupboard and came downstairs. I walked loudly along the nightingale floor, closed the doors, and

why did someone have to kill her so many years later? why do this with her clothes? why didn't she try to have. relationship with him after the war?

unrest in Europe in the aftermath of World War