Ann Patchett (26 page)

Gen nodded to her and then said to Beatriz in
Spanish, “I’ll show you on the clock.”

“I don’t care about the clock,” Beatriz said.

“You ask me every day. You ask me five times.”

“I ask other people, too,” she said sharply. “It’s
not just you.” Her small eyes grew smaller as she puzzled whether or not she
was being insulted.

Gen took off his watch. “Hold out your wrist.”

“You’re going to give it to her?” Mr. Hosokawa
asked.

“Why?” Beatriz said suspiciously.

Gen said in Japanese, “I’m better off without
it.” Then he said to Beatriz, “I’m going to make you a present.”

She liked the idea of presents even though
she’d had almost no experience of them personally. On the program, Maria’s
boyfriend gave her a present, a heart-shaped locket with his own picture inside.
He put it around her neck before she sent him away. But once he had gone she
held it to her lips and cried and cried. A present seemed like a wonderful
gesture. Beatriz held out her wrist and Gen fastened on the watch.

“Look at the big hand,” he said, tapping the
crystal with his nail.
“When it gets to the twelve here at
the top then you know it’s time.”

She studied the watch closely. It was
beautiful, really, the round glass, the soft brown leather band, the hand that
was no bigger than a hair that did a slow and constant sweep across the face. As
presents went, she thought this was the nicest, better even than the locket
because the watch actually did something. “This one?” she said, pointing out
one of the three hands.
Three hands, how queer.

“The minute hand on twelve and the
hour hand, the little one, on one.
That’s easy enough.”

But it wasn’t quite easy enough and Beatriz was
afraid she would forget. She was afraid she would read it wrong and then miss
the show altogether. She was afraid she would get it wrong and have to ask
again, in which case Gen was sure to make fun of her. It was better when he
just told her it was time. That was his job. She had a lot of work to do and
all the hostages were lazy. “I’m not interested in this,” she said, and tried
to undo the strap.

“What is the problem?” Mr. Hosokawa said. “Doesn’t
she like it?”

“She thinks it’s too complicated.”

“Nonsense.”
Mr. Hosokawa put his hand over
Beatriz’s wrist to stop her. “Look at this. It’s very simple.” He held out his
wrist and showed her his own watch, which was dazzling compared to Gen’s, a
bright coin of rose-colored gold. “Two hands,” he said, taking hold of both her
hands. “Just like you.
Very simple.”
Gen translated.

“Three hands,” Beatriz said, pointing out the
only one that seemed to move.

“Those are the seconds.
Sixty
seconds in a minute, one minute, one circle, pushing the big hand forward one
minute.”
Mr. Hosokawa explained time, seconds to minutes to hours. He
could not remember when he had last looked at his watch or wondered about the
hour of the day.

Beatriz nodded. She ran her finger around the
face of Gen’s watch. “It’s almost now,” she said.

“Seven more minutes,” Gen said.

“I’ll go and wait.” She considered thanking him
but she wasn’t sure if it was the right thing to do. She could have taken the
watch from him. She could have demanded it.

“Does Carmen watch the program?” Gen asked.

“Sometimes,” Beatriz said. “But then she
forgets. She isn’t true to it like I am. She has duty outside today, so she
won’t be watching it unless she stands at the window. When I have duty outside
I stand at the window.”

Gen glanced towards the tall French doors at
the end of the room that led out onto the garden. There was nothing there. Only
the
garúa
and the flowers which were starting to
overgrow their beds.

Beatriz knew what he was looking for and she
was angry. She liked Gen a little and he should have liked her because he had
given her a present. “Take your turn,” she said bitterly. “The boys are all
waiting at different windows. They’re all watching for her, too. Maybe you
should go and stand with them.” It wasn’t true, of course. There was no dating
allowed in the ranks and that was a rule that was never broken.

“She had asked me a question,” Gen started, but
his voice didn’t sound natural and so he decided to forget it. It wasn’t as if
he owed Beatriz any sort of explanation.

“I’ll tell her you gave your watch to me.” She
looked at her wrist.
“Four more minutes.”

“You should run,” Gen said. “You’ll lose your
spot on the couch.”

Beatriz left but she didn’t run. She walked
away like a girl who knew exactly how much time she had.

“What did she say?” Mr. Hosokawa asked Gen. “Was
she happy with the watch?”

Gen translated the question into English for
Roxane and then answered them both that there would be no way to tell if she
was happy or not.

“I think you’re smart to give it to her,”
Roxane said. “She’ll be less likely to shoot someone who’s given her such a
nice gift.”

But who’s to say what kept a person from
shooting? “Would you excuse me?”

Mr. Hosokawa let Gen go. It used to be that he
wanted Gen with him all the time in case he thought of something to say, but he
was learning to find some comfort in the quiet. Roxane put her hands on the
piano and picked out the opening lines of “Clair de Lune.” Then she took one of
Mr. Hosokawa’s hands and tapped the notes again, very slow and beautiful and
sad. He followed her again and again until he could do it quite well on his
own.

Gen went to the window and watched. The
drizzling rain had stopped but the air was still heavy and gray as if it were
dusk. Gen glanced at his watch, knowing it was too early to be dark, and found
his watch gone. Why was he waiting for her?
Because he wanted
to teach her to read?
He had plenty to do without taking that on as
well. Every person in the room had a thought that was in need of translation. He
was lucky to find a minute alone, a minute to look out of the window. He didn’t
need another job.

“I have watched out this window for hours,” a
man said to him in Russian. “Nothing ever comes. I can promise you that.”

“Sometimes it’s enough just to look,” Gen said,
keeping his eyes straight ahead. He almost never had the opportunity to speak
in Russian. It was a language he used for reading Pushkin and Turgenev. It
sounded good to hear his own voice managing so many sharp consonants even if he
knew his accent was poor. He should practice. It was an opportunity if one
chose to see it that way, so many native speakers in one room. Victor Fyodorov
was a tall man with large hands and a great wall of a chest. The three
Russians, Fyodorov, Ledbed, and Berezovsky, mostly kept to themselves, playing
cards and smoking from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cigarettes, the
source of which no one was exactly sure. While the French could make out a few
words of Spanish and the Italians remembered some of their school French,
Russian, like Japanese, was an island of a language. Even the simplest phrases
were met with blank expressions.

“You stay so busy,” Fyodorov said. “I envy you
at times. We watch you, up and down, up and down, everyone needing your
attention. No doubt you envy us doing nothing. You would like a little more
time to yourself, yes?
Time to look out the window?”
What the Russian was saying was that he was sorry to be another bother, another
sentence in need of conversion, and that he wouldn’t ask were it not important.

Gen smiled. Fyodorov had given up the
pleasantries of shaving and in a little more than two weeks had come up with an
impressive beard. By the time they were sprung from this place he would look
like Tolstoy. “I have plenty of time even when I’m busy. You know yourself
these are the longest days in history. Look, I gave up my watch. I thought I
was better off not knowing.”

“That I admire,” the Russian said, staring at
Gen’s bare wrist. He tapped the skin with one heavy forefinger. “That shows
real thinking.”

“So don’t think you’re taking up my time.”

Fyodorov took off his own watch and dropped it
into his pocket in a gesture of solidarity. He circled his great hand to enjoy
the new freedom. “Now we can talk.
Now that we have done away
with time.”

“Absolutely,” Gen said, but as soon as he said
it, two figures walked near the wall of the garden holding up guns. Their
jackets and caps were wet from the earlier rain and they kept their heads down
instead of looking around the way Gen imagined they should if they were
supposed to be watching for something. It was hard to tell which one was
Carmen. From so far away in the rain she was a boy again. He hoped that she would
look up and see him, that she might think that he was watching for her even
though he recognized the idiocy of this. Still, he had been waiting to see her
and he felt better somehow, assuming it was her in the first place and not just
another angry teenaged boy.

Fyodorov watched Gen and watched the two
figures outside the window until they had passed. “You keep an eye on them,” he
said in a low voice. “That’s smart thinking. I get lazy. In the beginning, I
kept account of them, but they are everywhere.
Like rabbits.
I think they bring in more of them at night.”

Gen wanted to point and say,
That’s
Carmen, but he didn’t know what he would be explaining. Instead he nodded in
agreement.

“But let’s not waste our time on them. I have
better ways to waste your time. Do you smoke?” he asked, pulling out a small
blue package of French cigarettes. “No? Do you mind?”

It seemed that no sooner had he struck his
match than the Vice President arrived with an ashtray that he placed on a small
table in front of them. “Gen,” he said, nodding politely. “Victor.” He bowed to
them, a pleasantry he had picked up from the Japanese, and then moved on, not
wanting to interrupt the conversation he could not understand.

“A wonderful man, Ruben Iglesias.
It almost makes me wish I was a
citizen of this wretched country so that I could vote for him for President.” Fyodorov
pulled the smoke through the cigarette and then expelled it slowly. He was
trying to find the right way to begin his request. “You can imagine, we have
been thinking a great deal about opera,” he said.

“Of course,” Gen said.

“Who knew that life could be so unexpected? I
thought we would be dead by now, or if not dead then regularly begging for our
lives, but instead I sit and I consider opera.”

“No one could have predicted.” Gen leaned
forward imperceptibly to see if he could catch sight of Carmen before she
passed completely from view, but he was too late.

“I have always been very interested in music. Opera
in
Russia
is very important. You know that. It is virtually a sacred thing.”

“I can imagine.” Now he wished he had his
watch. If he did he would be able to time her, to see how many minutes it took
for her to go past the window again. She could become her own sort of clock. He
thought about asking Fyodorov but clearly Fyodorov had his mind on other
things.

“Opera came to
Russia
late. In
Italy
the
language lent itself to this kind of singing but for us it took longer. It is,
you know, a complicated language. The singers we have now in
Russia
are very
great. I have no complaints about the talent our country possesses, but as I
live now there is only one true genius.
Many great singers,
brilliant voices, but only one genius.
She has never been to
Russia
that I
know of. Wouldn’t you say the chances of finding oneself trapped in a house
with true genius are remarkably small?”

“I would agree,” Gen said.

“To find myself here with her and to be unable
to say anything it is, well, unfortunate. No, honestly, it is frustrating. What
if we were released tomorrow? That is what I pray for and yet, wouldn’t I say
to myself for the rest of my life, you never spoke to her? She was right there
in the room with you and you didn’t bother to make arrangements to say
something? What would it mean to live with such regret? I suppose it didn’t
bother me much before she resumed her singing. I was preoccupied with my own
thoughts, the circumstances at hand, but now with the music coming so regularly
everything has changed. Don’t you find that to be true?”

And Gen had to agree. He hadn’t thought about
it in exactly those terms before but it was true. There was some difference.

“And what are the chances, given that I am a
hostage in a country I do not know with a woman I so sincerely admire that
there would also be a man such as
yourself
who has a
good heart and speaks both my language and hers? Tell me what the chances are?
They are in the millions! This is, of course, why I have come to you. I am
interested in engaging your services of translation.”