not concerned with shape or length, just cutting it away—the irritation of its presence during the previous days still in her mind— when she had bent forward and her hair had touched blood in a wound. She would have nothing to link her, to lock her, to death. She gripped what was left to make sure there were no more strands and turned again to face the rooms full of the wounded. 

 

 

She never looked at herself in mirrors again. Nothing in her spirit or past had taught her to be a nurse. But cutting her hair was a contract, and it lasted until they were bivouacked in the Villa San Gi-rolamo north of Florence. Here there were four other nurses, two doctors, one hundred patients. The war in Italy moved farther north and they were what had been left behind. 

 

 

Then, during the celebrations of some local victory,she had said she was not going back to Florence or Rome or any other hospital, her war was over. She would remain with the one burned man they called “the English patient,” who, it was now clear to her, should never be moved because of the fragility of his limbs.

Till the nuns reclaimed it she would sit in this villa with the Englishman. There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult. There was some little waltz in the way he spoke to her and the way he thought. She wanted to save him, this nameless, almost faceless man who had been one of the two hundred or so placed in her care during the invasion north.