When The English Patient was voted the best Booker Prize-winner of the last 50 years this Sunday, its author Michael Ondaatje credited the 1995 novel's popularity to the film adaptation, which won nine Oscars and starred Ralph Fiennes as the handsome explorer Count László Almásy, who has a passionate affair with a married woman (Kristin Scott-Thomas).
Anyone left misty-eyed by Fiennes's hero might be startled to learn the real Almásy was once described in an MI5 file as "very ugly and shabbily dressed, with a fat and pendulous nose, drooping shoulders and a nervous tic". An author, pilot and racing driver obsessed with finding a mythical oasis in the desert, Almásy's invented title of "Count" came out of the confusion around a failed Hungarian coup. He served in both World Wars, smuggled Nazi spies into Allied-occupied Cairo and might have worked as a British double-agent.
Ondaatje's novel plucked a little-known, shadowy figure from history and reinvented him as a dashing romantic hero. They share a name, and were both Hungarian-born desert explorers, but besides that their life stories have almost nothing in common. Ondaatje's character sacrifices his principles to rescue the dead body of the woman he loves, is horribly burnt in a plane-crash and dies of a morphine overdoes in an Italian hospital. The real Almásy survived the war, was never burnt and was almost certainly gay.
When Ondaatje was criticised for rewriting history so heavily, he defended his technique, saying that a "historical" account was never his intention. "In reality the facts are still murky and still uncertain – to some historians he was a spy, some others think he was a double agent," he explained. "Whatever 'spying' he did was witnessed and watched by the British Secret Service. The English Patient is not a history lesson but an interpretation of human emotions – love, desire, betrayals in war and betrayals in peace – in a historical time."
In many ways, the real man was more fascinating than the fiction. Born in Hungary in 1895, Almásy was fascinated by flight from an early age. He built – and crashed – his own glider at the age of 14. After studying in England as a teenager, he returned home to fight the Russians in the First World War. Serving in the 11th Hussars, and later in the air force, he won the Austro-Hungarian empire's highest decoration for bravery, the Ritterkreuz.
After the war, he found work as a secretary and driver for Bishop János Mikes, a leading figure in the plot to reinstall Karl I (Franz Ferdinand's nephew) on the Hungarian throne. By one account, Mikes gave a muddled introduction when Almásy met Karl in 1921, leaving the king mistakenly believing the driver was a count. It seems Almásy made no attempt to correct him. Though his title was never officially recognised, he would introduce himself as a count for the rest of his life.
Karl's attempted coup failed amid embarrassing calls for the king's arrest, and Almásy left Hungary for Egypt, where he found work for the Austrian car company Steyr, becoming one of their finest racing drivers. At the same time, as a privately funded explorer, began to map out uncharted sections of the Sahara.
Like Ondaatje's fictional version, the real Almásy spent a great deal of time studying Herodotus's histories. He was intrigued by the Ancient Greek writer's description of a lost "City of Dionysus" somewhere in the Sahara, and believed this might refer to Zerzura, a lost oasis mentioned in the Thousand and One Nights.
In 1930, alongside the British Army Brigadier Ralph Bagnold, Almásy and a group of drinking companions in the Nile-side town of Wadi Haifa founded the Zerzura Club, dedicated to finding it. They never saw any sign of a lost city, but working with them Almásy charted around two million square kilometres of previously unmapped desert, including three oases.
He also found the remarkable stone-age paintings at the "Cave of Swimmers" in the Libyan desert, which features in Ondaatje's novel. In 1934 Almásy published a book about his travels, which used the paintings of swimming figures to support his theory that the desert was once lush and temperate. The idea was completely rejected at the time – even by Almásy's own publisher – but has since been proven to be true. The book's vivid account of an adventurer's life boosted his fame both in Europe and Africa, where the Bedouins are said to have known him as "Abu Ramla", or "Father of the Sand".
In 1939, with war looming, Almásy volunteered to work for the British intelligence services, but was rejected over concerns that he had pro-German sympathies. He then offered to spy for the Italians, and was rebuffed by them too. He left Egypt for Budapest, where he was recruited by the German intelligence service and sent back to the Sahara as part of their Afrika Korps.
His recruiting officer, Franz Seubert, found Almásy was reluctant to fight against the British. After all, many of his Zerzura Club friends were now working with the Allied Forces, in Bagnold's newly formed Long Range Desert Group. It was only after an order from Hungary's Regent, Miklós Horthy, that he agreed to join Rommel's staff.
"He was an anti-communist, and body and soul a Hungarian patriot," Seubert wrote in a letter. "His sense of honour as a sportsman, aviator and driver went beyond frontiers. He had an overwhelming love of the desert."
He also fell in love with a German officer called Hans Entholt, who was killed by a landmine during the Second World War. "Egyptian princes were among Almásy's lovers," according to one researcher at The Heinrich Barth Institute for African Studies in Cologne, which holds many of Almásy's still unpublished letters. However, Jean Howard, who monitored Almásy while working at Bletchley Park, and spent many years researching his life after the war, asserted that he was loyal to Entholt. "He was not promiscuous," she told the Telegraph in 1997. "I trawled the old queers of Cairo and none of them had ever come across him."
The fictional Almásy's only interaction with the Germans was to offer them his maps in exchange for the use of a plane, but the real Almásy had a key role in one of the war's most unusual secret missions: Operation Salam. In May 1942, he was tasked with driving two German spies through 2,000 miles of desert into Cairo.
After their heavy-duty trucks were caught in quicksand, Almásy was forced to make the journey in a stolen British Ford car ill-suited to desert contitions. Nonetheless, he managed it, stopping off midway at a secret cave in the desert which he had stocked with food and supplies. (The cave was only discovered by archeologists in 2010, where they found his old tins of corned beef and condensed milk.)
On Almásy's return he won an Iron Cross, but it turned out to be an utter waste of effort; the young German spies achieved nothing. Both still in their twenties, Heinrich Sandestede (codenamed "Max") and Hans Eppler ("Moritz") set up their base in a houseboat on the Nile, where they squandered the £3,600 they had been given on champagne and prostitutes.
Their few transmissions were all intercepted by British code-breakers at Bletchley Park – until, within a few days, they had broken their own transmitter. A young pro-German officer was sent out to repair it; Anwar Sadat, who would later become President of Egypt. The unimpressed Sadat described the pair as "bungling" and "debauched".
The pair's MI5 file was just as damning. "They were too intoxicated with the possession of so much money and too intent on enjoying the fleshpots of Egypt in the form of women and wine," it reads. Less than six weeks after arriving in Cairo, the spies were captured. The hunt for them inspired a 1960 film, Foxhole in Cairo, in which a then-unknown Michael Caine played one of the German spies.
It was the closest Almásy came to active combat. In 1943 he was sent back to Budapest as an invalid – possibly due to genuine illness, or perhaps because the "Desert Fox" had taken pity on him. According to Bagnold, when Rommell realised the tide of the war was turning against the Axis forces, he took Almásy aside and told him: "This is not your war... go home to Budapest... we are going to lose it."
Once the Communists took over in Hungary, Almásy was tried for alleged war crimes, but acquitted. One report claims the prosecutor tried to use one of Almásy's published memoirs about his wartime exploits as evidence against him – but hadn't actually read any of it, as it had been placed on a list of banned books. When he recounted some of the colourful anecdotes from it, the story goes, applause broke out in court. Another account claims work he had done to protect Jews during the pogroms came to light during the trial, while it has also been claimed that he was working as a British double-agent by that point, and that powerful foreign connections helped to secure his acquittal.
Whatever the truth, Almásy returned to Egypt as soon as he could once the trial was over, and in 1950 was appointed president of Cairo's Desert Institute – a job which reunited him with Bagnold, when they were both invited to speak at a conference together. But his health, always poor, was failing, and, in 1951, he died of amoebic dysentery. He was buried in Salzburg, where his body lay in an unmarked grave until 1995, when his admirers marked his centenary by erecting a gravestone with the epitaph he would have wanted: "Pilot, Sahara Explorer, and Discoverer of the Zerzura Oasis".
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