English patient. Ondatja M.

He met with her when she arrived with her husband to North Africa. He fell in love with her when she quoted Herodotus, sitting by the fire in southern night. He lost her when she became everyone in his life.

Now only a mortal body remaining on a hospital bed in a destroyed Italian villa remains. The nurse Khan voluntarily cares for her "English patient." She sees in him the familiar life that the Second World War selected. His condition worsens, memory weakens, slipping away like sand in the desert. But he smiles, because every day he gets closer to his Catherine.