Hana

Hana

Hana is the nurse that cares for the English Patient, Almásy. She is twenty when the book begins. She is from Toronto, Canada. After her father joins the war she trains to be a nurse.
In 1943 she is sent to Italy with the First Canadian Infantry Division. She moves from hospital to hospital, following the far. She and the English patient are moved to Villa San Girolamo, that acts as a hospital. When the doctors and nurses and patients move again, to follow the war North, Hana refuses to leave.
She remains with the English patient, who she considers "her despairing saint". She has nursed him for months, but still knows little about him. She reads books to him, that she finds in the Villa's library.
Later in the book, when Kirpal Singh arrives to the villa, Hana begins an affair with him.

Hana is also a character in Ondaatje's novel In The Skin Of A Lion.

"Nurses too became shell-shocked from the dying around them. Or from something as small as a letter. They would carry a severed arm down a hall, or swab at blood that never stopped, as if the wound were a well, and they began to believe in nothing, trusted nothing. They broke the way a man dismantling a mine broke the second his geography exploded. The way Hana broke in Santa Chiara Hospital when an officail walked down the space between a hundred beds and gave her a letter that told her of the death of her father"