“You've tied yourself to a corpse for some reason.” 

 

 

“He is a saint. I think. A despairing saint. Are there such things? Our desire is to protect them.” 

 

 

“He doesn't even care!” Caravaggio said.

“I can love him.” 

 

 

“A twenty-year-old who throws herself out of the world to love a ghost!” 

 

 

Caravaggio paused. “You have to protect yourself from sadness. Sadness is very close to hate. Let me tell you this. This is the thing I learned. If you take in someone else's poison— thinking you can cure them by sharing it—you will instead store it within you. Those men in the desert were smarter than you. They assumed he could be useful. So they saved him, but when he was no longer useful they left him.”

 

 

“Leave me alone.” Hana said.

 

 

In her childhood her classroom had been Caravaggio. He had taught her the somersault. Now, with his hands always in his pockets, he just gestures with his shoulders. Who knew what country the war had made him live in. She herself had been trained at Women’s College Hospital and then sent overseas during the Sicilian invasion. That was in 1943. The First Canadian Infantry Division worked its way up Italy, and the destroyed bodies were fed back to the field hospitals like mud passed back by tunnellers in the dark. After the battle of Arezzo, when the first barrage of troops recoiled, she was surrounded day and night by their wounds. After three full days without rest, she finally lay down on the floor beside a mattress where someone lay dead, and slept for twelve hours, closing her eyes against the world around her. 

When she woke, she picked up a pair of scissors out of the porcelain bowl, leaned over and began to cut her hair,