Ann Patchett (25 page)

At seven o’clock Kato was waiting for Roxane at
the piano, his fingers running silently up and down the keys. She had learned
to say good morning,
Ohayo Gozaimasu,
in Japanese,
and Kato knew a handful of phrases which included,
good
morning
,
thank you
, and
bye-bye
.
That constituted the extent of their abilities in each other’s language, so
that they said good morning again when it was time to stop for a break or when
they passed each other in the hallways before bedtime. They spoke to one
another by handing leaves of music back and forth. While their relationship was
by no means a democracy, Kato, who read the music the priest’s friend had sent
while lying on the pile of coats he slept on at night, would sometimes pick out
pieces he wanted to hear or pieces that he felt would be well suited to
Roxane’s voice. He made what he felt to be wild presumptions in handing over
his suggestions, but what did it matter? He was a vice president in a giant
corporation, a numbers man, suddenly elevated to be the accompanist. He was not
himself. He was no one he had ever imagined.

At quarter past seven the scales began. On the
first morning there were still people sleeping. Pietro Genovese was sleeping
beneath the piano, and when the chords were struck he thought he was hearing
the bells of St. Peter’s. None of that mattered. It was now time for work. Too
much time had been spent weeping on the sofa or staring out the window. Now
there was music and an accompanist. Roxane Coss had risked her voice on
Gianni Schicchi
and found that her voice was still there. “We’re
rotting,” she had told Mr. Hosokawa through Gen only the day before. “All of
us. I’ve had enough of it. If anyone is going to shoot me they will have to
shoot me while I’m singing.” In this way Mr. Hosokawa knew she would be safe,
as no one could shoot her while she sang. By extension they were all safe, and
so they pressed in close to the piano to listen.

“Step back,” Roxane said, and shooed them away
with her hands. “I’m going to want that air.”

The first thing she sang that morning was the
aria from
Rusalka,
which she remembered was the one
Mr. Hosokawa had requested that she sing for his birthday, before she knew him,
before she knew anything. How she loved that story, the spirit of the water who
longs to be a woman who can hold her lover in real arms instead of cool waves. She
sang this aria at nearly every performance she gave, though she had never
infused it with the compassion and understanding that she gave to it this
morning. Mr. Hosokawa heard the difference in her voice, and it brought tears
to his eyes.

“She sings Czech like she was born to it,” he
whispered to
Gen
.

Gen nodded. He would never refute the beauty of
her singing, the warm and liquid quality of her voice that so well matched the
watery Rusalka, but there was no point in telling Mr. Hosokawa that this woman
did not know a word of Czechoslovakian. She sang the passion of every syllable,
but none of the syllables actually managed to form themselves into recognizable
words of the language. It was quite obvious that she had memorized the work
phonetically, that she sang her love for Dvořák and her love for the translated
story, but that the Czech language itself was a stranger which passed her by
without a moment’s recognition. Not that this was any sort of crime, of course.
Who would even know except for him? There were no Czechs among them.

Roxane Coss sang rigorously for three hours in
the morning and sometimes sang again in the late afternoon before dinner if her
voice felt strong, and for those hours no one gave a single thought to their
death. They thought about her singing and about the song, the sweet radiance of
her upper register. Soon enough the days were divided into three states: the
anticipation of her singing, the pleasure of her singing, and the reflection on
her singing.

If the power had shifted away from them, the
Generals didn’t seem to mind. The utter hopelessness of their mission seemed
less overbearing to them now and many nights they slept almost in peace. General
Benjamin continued to mark off the days on the dining-room wall. They had more
time to concentrate on negotiations. Among themselves they spoke as if the singing
had been part of their plan. It calmed the hostages. It focused the soldiers.
It also had the remarkable effect of quelling the racket that came from the
other side of the wall. They could only assume that with the windows open the
people on the streets could hear her because the constant screech of bullhorned
messages would stop as soon as she opened her mouth to sing, and after a few
days the bullhorn did not come back at all. They imagined the street outside.
It was packed with people, not one of them eating chips or coughing, all of
them straining to listen to the voice they had heard only on records and in
their dreams. It was a daily concert the Generals had arranged, or so they had
come to believe.
A gift to the people, a diversion to the
military.
They had kidnapped her for a reason, after all.

“We will make her sing more,” General Hector
said in the downstairs guest suite that they had taken over as their private
offices. He stretched across the canopied bed, his boots nesting on top of the
embroidered ivory comforter. Benjamin and Alfredo sat in matching chairs
covered in enormous pink peonies. “There is no reason she couldn’t sing a few
more hours a day. And we will rearrange her times to keep them off their
guard.”

“We will tell her what to sing as well,”
Alfredo said. “She should sing in Spanish. All this Italian, it is not what we
stand for. Besides, for all we know she could be singing out messages.”

But General Benjamin, despite his occasional
participation in the delusions at hand, knew that whatever they got from Roxane
Coss was something to be grateful for. “I don’t think we should ask.”

“We won’t be asking,” Hector said, reaching
back to plump the pillows beneath his head. “We will be telling.” His voice was
even and cold.

General Benjamin waited a moment. She was
singing now and he let the sound of her voice wash over him while he sought a
way to explain. Isn’t it obvious?
he
wanted to say to
his friends. Can’t you hear that? “Music, I believe, is different. That’s what
I understand. We have set this up exactly right, but if we were to push . . .” Benjamin
shrugged. He raised a hand to touch his face and then thought better of it. “We
could wind up with nothing.”

“If we put a gun to her head she would sing all
day.”

“Try it first with a bird,” General Benjamin
said gently to Alfredo. “Like our soprano, they have no capacity to understand
authority. The bird doesn’t know enough to be afraid and the person holding the
gun will only end up looking like a lunatic.”

When Roxanne was finished singing, Mr. Hosokawa
went to get her glass of water himself, cool with no ice, the way she liked it.
Ruben Iglesias had recently mopped the kitchen floor and rubbed it down with a
hard wax by hand so that the whole room shimmered like light on the flat
surface of a lake. Could Mr. Hosokawa say, picking up the pot of water he had
boiled and cooled this morning for this very purpose, that this was the
happiest time in his life? Surely that could not be the case. He was being held
against his will in a country he did not know and every day he found himself
looking down the barrel of some child’s gun. He was living on a diet of tough
meat sandwiches and soda pop, sleeping in a room with more than fifty men, and
although there were irregular privileges at the washing machine, he was
thinking of asking the Vice President if he could kindly extend to him a second
pair of underwear from his own bureau.
Then why this sudden
sense of lightness, this great affection for everyone?
He looked out the
large window over the sink, stared into the mist of bad weather. There had not
been poverty in his childhood but there was a great deal of struggle: his
mother’s death when he was ten; his father holding on, broken, until he joined
her the year Katsumi Hosokawa was nineteen; his two sisters disappearing into
the distant lives of their marriages. No, that family had not been a greater
happiness. The early years he had spent building Nansei were like a hurricane
in his memory, a huge, overbearing wind into which every loose thing was
sucked. He slept with his head on his desk most
nights,
he missed holidays, birthdays, entire seasons of the year. From his endless
work had come a great industry, great personal gain, but happiness? It was a
word he would have puzzled over, unable to understand its importance even while
its meaning was evident.

And so that left
his own
family, his wife and two daughters. They were the question. If he had not drawn
happiness from them then the fault was completely his own. His wife had been
the daughter of his uncle’s friend. The country was past the age of arranged
marriages and yet essentially a wife had been found for him because there was
no time for him to find his own. They sat in her parents’ living room during
their courtship, eating candy, speaking little. He was so tired then, always
working, and even after they married sometimes he would forget he had a wife at
all. He would come home at four in the morning and be startled to see her there
in the bed, her long dark hair spilling over his pillows. So this is my wife,
he would think to himself, and fall asleep beside her. Not
that
things
had stayed that way. They had come to depend on one another. They
were a family. She was an excellent wife, an excellent mother, and surely he
had loved her in his own fashion, but happiness? That was not something he
thought of when he remembered his wife. Even as he could picture her waiting
for him to come home from work, a drink poured, the mail opened and sorted, it
was not happiness for either of them that he saw but a kind of efficiency that
made their lives run smoothly. She was an honorable woman, a dutiful wife. He
had seen her reading mystery novels but she never spoke of them. She wrote
beautiful cards. She was a comfort to their children. He wondered suddenly if
he knew her at all. He wondered if he had ever made her happy. His happiness
was something kept apart, after he had come in from dinner meetings and there
was time to spend with his stereo. Happiness, if he was right to use that word,
was something that until now he had only experienced in music. He was still
experiencing it in music. The difference was that now the music was a person. She
sat beside him on the sofa reading. She asked him to sit beside her at the
piano. On occasion she took his hand, a gesture so startling and wonderful that
he could barely inhale. She asked him, do you like this piece? She asked him,
what would you like me to sing? These were things he never could have imagined:
the warmth of a person and the music together. Yes, her voice, more than
anything her voice, but there were also her fine hands to consider, the bright
rope of her hair lying across her shoulder, the pale, soft skin of her neck. There
was her enormous power. Had he ever known a businessman who commanded such
respect? More than all of it was the mystery of why she had chosen him to sit
next to. Could it be possible that such happiness had existed in the world all
along and he had never once heard mention of it?

Mr. Hosokawa remembered himself. He filled his
glass. When he came back, Roxane was sitting at the piano with Gen. “I’ve kept
you waiting too long,” he said.

She took the glass and listened to the
translation. “That’s because the water is perfect,” she said. “Perfect takes a
longer time.”

Gen exchanged their sentences like a bank
teller pushing stacks of currency back and forth over a smooth marble
countertop. He only half listened to what they were saying. He was still trying
to puzzle out his night. It was not a dream. He didn’t have those kinds of
dreams. The girl he had watched, the girl named Carmen, had asked him a
question and he had agreed, but where was she now? All morning he hadn’t seen
her. He had tried to look discreetly in the halls but the boys with guns kept
corralling him back into the living room. Some days they were open to hostages
wandering around and other days they seemed to think life’s greatest pleasure
was nudging people backwards with a gun. Where was he supposed to meet her and
when? He hadn’t asked any questions. Despite her clear instructions, he hadn’t
been able to go back to sleep after she left last night. He couldn’t stop
wondering how a girl like that had come through the air-conditioner vents with
criminals. But what did he know? Maybe she had killed people before. Perhaps
she robbed banks or threw Molotov cocktails through embassy windows. Maybe
Messner was right, these were modern times.

Beatriz came up and gave Gen two hard taps on
the shoulder, interrupting both Mr. Hosokawa’s conversation with Roxane and his
own private thoughts.
“Is it time for Maria yet?” she said,
not wanting to be late for the soap opera.
As soon as she had spoken,
she slipped the damp end of her braid back into her mouth and began the serious
business of nibbling again. Gen imagined a knotted tumor of hair growing in her
stomach.

“Fifteen minutes,” he said, looking at his
watch. Like so many other things, the beginning of the soap opera had become
his responsibility.

“Come and tell me when.”

“Is this about her program?” Roxane asked.