Ann Patchett (31 page)

“Miss Coss?
In love with Mr.
Hosokawa?”

Carmen nodded, her head making only the
smallest gesture, but he had learned to read her.
Love?

What he had seen, and done his best to
overlook, was that Mr. Hosokawa was in love with Roxane. The notion that the
opposite could be possible had never occurred to him and he asked Carmen what
she saw.

“Everything,” Carmen whispered. “The way she
looks at him, the way she chooses him. She’s always sitting with him and they
can’t even talk. He’s so peaceful. She would want to be with him.”

“Did she tell you?”

“Maybe.”
Carmen smiled. “She talks to me
sometimes in the morning but I don’t know what she says.”

Of course, Gen thought. He watched them walk
away, his employer and the soprano. “I would think that everyone must be in
love with her. How could she even make a choice?”

“Are you in love with her?” Carmen asked. She
met his eyes in a way that would never have been possible a week ago. It was
Gen who had to look away.

“No,” he said. “No.” Gen was in love with
Carmen. And though he met her every night in the china closet and helped her
with her reading and writing, he never revealed as much. They spoke of vowels
and consonants. They spoke of diphthongs and possessives. She copied letters
into a notebook.
As many words as he gave to her, she asked
for more.
She would have gladly kept him up all night, repeating,
practicing, quizzing. He spent his whole life in a confused dream state in
which he was never exactly awake or completely asleep. He wondered sometimes if
it was love or just a lack of rest that had twisted such a longing in his
heart. He stumbled. He drifted off in wing-backed chairs and in the minutes he
slept he dreamed of Carmen. Yes, she was shy, and yes, a terrorist from the
jungle, but she was as smart as any girl he had met at university. You could
tell by the way she picked things up. All she had needed was the smallest
amount of instruction. She ate through information like fire licks up hay and
asked for more. She took off her gun every night and put it in the glass-front
cupboard beside the blue gravy boat. She sat on the floor with her notebook
balanced on top of her knees, her pencil sharp. There had been no girls like
Carmen at university. There had never been a girl like Carmen. What a sense of
humor one would need to believe that the woman you love is not in
Tokyo
or
Paris
or
New York
or
Athens
.
The woman you love is a girl who dresses as a boy and she lives in a village in
a jungle, the name of which you are not allowed to know, not that knowing the
name would be particularly helpful in trying to find it. The woman you love
puts her gun beside a blue gravy boat at night so that you can teach her to
read. She came into your life through an air-conditioner vent and how she will
leave is the question that keeps you awake in the few free moments you have to
sleep.

“Mr. Hosokawa and Miss Coss,” Carmen said. “Out
of all the people in the world, they found each other. What are the chances of
that?”

“What about Mrs. Hosokawa?” Gen said. He did
not know his employer’s wife well, but he saw her often. She was a dignified
woman with cool hands and a calming voice. She called him Mr. Watanabe.

“Mrs. Hosokawa lives in
Japan
,” Carmen
said, looking off towards the kitchen, “which is about a million kilometers
away from here. Besides, he isn’t going home, and while I’m sorry for Mrs.
Hosokawa, I don’t think that means that Mr. Hosokawa should be alone.”

“What do you mean, he isn’t going home?”

Carmen gave Gen a very slight smile. She tilted
back her head so that he could see her face beneath the bill of her cap. “This
is where we live now.”

“Not forever,” Gen said.

“I think,” Carmen said, mouthing the words
without making any sound. She was wondering if she had said too much. She knew
that her loyalties absolutely must be to the Generals, but telling things to
Gen wasn’t like telling things to anyone else. Gen could keep a secret because
everything about them was a secret, the china closet, the reading. She trusted
him absolutely. She plucked at the side of his hand with two fingers and then
walked away from him. He waited a minute before following her. She walked
silently, her movements small and relaxed. No one noticed her as she passed by.
She went into the small lavatory off the hall. All of the pretty rose-scented
soaps were gone now and the towels were dingy, but the gold swan was still
nesting over the sink and when you turned the wing-shaped handles, water still
slid from her long throat. Carmen took off her cap and washed her face. She
tried to comb out her hair with her fingers. Her face in the mirror was too
coarse, too dark. At home some people had called her beautiful but now she had
seen beauty and knew it was something she could never possess. Some mornings,
only a few, when Carmen came into the room to bring Roxane her breakfast, the
singer had still been asleep and Carmen would put down the tray and touch her
shoulder. When Roxane’s great, pale eyes blinked open she would smile at
Carmen, she would pull the covers back and motion for Carmen to lie down next
to her in the warm embroidered sheets. She was careful to dangle her boots over
the edge. They would both close their eyes and take an extra five minutes of
sleep, Roxane pulling the covers up to Carmen’s neck. How quickly Carmen
dreamed of her sisters, her mother! In only a few minutes of sleep they all
came to visit her. They all wanted to see her there, nestled in the pillows of
such a comfortable bed, beside such an unimaginable woman. Yellow hair, blue
eyes, skin like white roses brushed in pink. Who would not be in love with
Roxane Coss?

“Gen!”
Victor Fyodorov said just as he was
approaching the bathroom door. “How can you be so difficult to find when there
is no place for you to go?”

“I didn’t realize—”

“Her voice this morning, didn’t you think?
Perfection!”

Gen agreed.

“So, this is the time to talk to her.”

“Now?”

“Now I know is the perfect time.”

“I’ve asked you every day this week.”

“And I have not been completely prepared, that
is true, but this morning when she went over and over again on the Rossini, I
knew that she would understand my inadequacies. She is a compassionate woman.
Today I was assured of that.” Fyodorov was twisting his big hands one around
the other as if he were washing them beneath some unseen stream of water. Though
his voice was calm, there was a distinct look of panic in his eyes, the sharp
smell of panic on his skin.

“The time for me is not exactly—”

“The time for
me,
”
Fyodorov said. Then he added in a low voice, “I will lose my nerve to speak.” Fyodorov
had shaved off his heavy growth of beard, a process that had been both painful
and time-consuming, given the poor quality of the razor blades, and left behind
a vast expanse of his own raw, pink face. He had had the Vice President wash
and
iron
his clothes while he stood beside the washing
machine, shivering with a towel around his waist. He had bathed and trimmed the
hairs from his nose and ears with a pair of cuticle scissors that he had bribed
off of Gilbert with a pack of cigarettes. While he had the chance, he cut his
nails and tried to do something about his hair, but that proved to be too great
a task for cuticle scissors. He had made every effort he knew to make. This was
most certainly the day.

Gen nodded towards the bathroom door. “I was on
my way.”

Fyodorov looked over his shoulder and then held
out his hand as if to lead Gen in. “Of course. Of course that is nothing. That
long I can wait.
However long.
You take your time. I
will be outside the door. I will make sure that I am first in line for our
translator when he is finished.” Sweat was creeping down the sides of
Fyodorov’s shirt, leaving a new dark stain inside a history of much paler
stains. Gen wondered if that was what he meant by being unable to wait much
longer.

“One minute,” he said quietly, and then let
himself inside without knocking.

“I wish I knew what you were saying.” Carmen
laughed. She tried to mimic the words, spoke a Russian nonsense which sounded
something close to, “I never cracker table.”

Gen put a finger to his lips. The room was
small and very dark, black marble walls,
black
marble
floors. One of the lights had burned out next to the mirror. Gen would have to
remember to ask Ruben about a new bulb.

She sat up on the sink. “It sounded very
important. It was Ledbed, the Russian?” She was whispering.

Gen told her it was Fyodorov.

“Oh, the big one.
How do you know Russian, too? How
do you know so many languages?”

“It’s my job.”

“No, no. It’s because you understand something
and I want to know it, too.”

“I only have a minute,” he whispered. He was so
close to her hair, which was darker, deeper even than the marble. “I have to
translate for him. He’s waiting right outside the door.”

“We can talk tonight.”

Gen shook his head. “I want to talk about what
you said. What do you
mean,
this is where we live
now?”

Carmen sighed. “You know I can’t say. But ask
yourself,
would it be so awful if we all stayed here in this
beautiful house?” This room was a third of the size of the china closet. Her
knees touched his legs. If he took even a half step back he would be on the
commode. She wished she could take his hand. Why would he want to leave her,
leave this place?

“This has to end sooner or later,” he said. “
These sorts of things never just go on indefinitely, somebody stops
them.”

“Only if people do terrible things.
We haven’t hurt anyone. No one is
unhappy here.”

“
Everyone
is unhappy
here.” But even as he was saying it Gen was not entirely sure it was true. Carmen’s
face turned down and she studied her hands in her lap.

“Go on and translate,” she said.

“If there’s something you should tell me.”

Carmen’s eyes were watery and she blinked them
hard. How ridiculous it would be for her to cry. Would it be such a terrible
thing to stay? Be together long enough to speak perfect Spanish, to read it and
write, to learn English and then maybe some Japanese? But that was
her own
selfishness. She knew that. Gen was right to want to
get away from her. She offered nothing. She only took his time. “I don’t know a
thing.”

Fyodorov knocked on the door. His mounting
nervousness would not allow him to do otherwise.
“Trans-laaa-tor?”
He sang the word.

“A minute,” Gen called through the door.

Time was up and now Carmen had lost a couple of
tears. There needed to be whole days together. There needed to be weeks and
months of uninterrupted time to say all the things that needed to be said. “Maybe
you’re right,” he told her finally. The way she was sitting on the black marble
sink in front of the mirror, he could see both her face and her narrow back at
the same time. He could see in the large oval mirror with the frame of gilded
gold leaves, his own face over her shoulder, looking at her. He could see in
his face a love that was so obviously displayed that she must already know
everything there was to know about it. He was so close to her then that they
owned every molecule of air in the tiny room and the air grew heavy with their
desire and worked to move them together. It was with the smallest step forward
that his face was in her hair and then her arms were around his back and they
were holding each other. It seemed so simple to get to this place, such a
magnificent relief, that he couldn’t imagine why he had not been holding her
every minute since they first met.

“Translator?”
Fyodorov said
,
his voice a little worried this time.

Carmen leaned forward and kissed him. There was
no time for kissing but she wanted him to know that in the future there would
be. A kiss in so much loneliness was like a hand pulling you up out of the
water, scooping you up from a place of drowning and into the reckless abundance
of air.
A kiss, another kiss.
“Go,” she whispered.

And Gen, who wanted no more in the world than
this girl and the walls of this bathroom, kissed her again. He was breathless
and dizzy and had to lean a moment against her shoulder before he could step
away. Carmen got off the sink and stood behind the door, opened the door, and
sent him back out into the world.

“Are you unwell?” Fyodorov asked, more in
irritation than concern. Now the back of his shirt was clinging damply to his
shoulders. Didn’t the translator know this would not be easy for him? All of
the time he had spent, first considering whether or not he should speak and
then deciding to speak, then after that decision was made there was the
decision as to what should be said. In his heart the feelings were clear, but
to translate such feelings into words was another matter entirely. Ledbed and
Berezovsky were sympathetic, but then they were Russians. They understood the
pain of Fyodorov’s love. Frankly, they experienced similar pains themselves. It
was not impossible that they would eventually find their own nerve and approach
the translator to approach the soprano. The more Fyodorov spoke of his heart’s
desire, the more they were sure it was a malady with which they had all been
infected.