Ann Patchett (33 page)
Authors: Bel Canto
The translation was slow and there was a good
deal of waiting for all parties involved. “
Roxane said. She dropped the dishtowel in the sink and went to get herself a
chair, as no one seemed to be bringing one over and this was looking like it
might be a long story. When she started to pick one up, the boy called Cesar
leapt from the table where he was cleaning his gun and carried it over for her.
“Gracias,”
she said to him. That much she
knew.
“I’m sorry,” Gen said, still standing himself. “I
don’t know what I was thinking of.”
“I guess you’re thinking of Russian,” Roxane
said. “That would be a headful. Do you have any idea where this story is
going?”
Fyodorov smiled mutely. His cheeks were pink
now.
“I have a vague idea.”
“Well, don’t tell me, I want to be surprised. I
think this is today’s entertainment.” She leaned back and crossed her legs,
then held out her hand as a signal for Fyodorov to continue.
Fyodorov waited for a moment. He was rethinking
his position entirely. After weeks of planning he was realizing now that the
course he had chosen was not at all correct. What he had to tell her did not
begin in school. It did not begin at the opera even if that was the place it
had brought him to. The story he should be telling started much earlier than
this. He began again, putting himself in mind of
switchback staircase that led up to the apartment where his family lived. He
bent his shoulders forward towards Roxane. He wondered what direction
where he sat. “When I was a boy the city was called
time it was
with that. Better the city should have its old name or a new name, but nothing
that tried to be something of both. In those days we all lived together, Mother
and Father, my two brothers, my grandmother, who was my mother’s mother. It was
my grandmother who had the book of paintings. It was a massive thing.” Fyodorov
held up his hands to mark the dimensions of the book in the air. If he was to
be believed, it was an enormous book. “She told us it was given to her by an
admirer from
fifteen, a man she called Julian. If that is true I do not know. My grandmother
was one for telling stories. Even more than how she came by the book, how she
managed to hold on to it through the war remains a great mystery to me. That
she did not try and sell it or burn it for fuel, because there was a time when
people would burn anything, that it was not taken from her as it would have
been a difficult thing to hide, all of these things are remarkable. But when I
was a boy, it was many years past the war and she was an old woman. We did not
go to museums to look at paintings in those days. We would walk past the
a marvelous place, but then we did not go inside. I imagine there was not the
money for such things. But in the evenings, my grandmother brought out her book
and told my brothers and me to go and wash our hands. I was not allowed to even
touch the pages until I was ten, but still I washed my hands just for the
privilege of looking. She kept it wrapped in a quilt under the sofa in the
living room where she slept. She struggled to carry it but would let no one
help her. When she was certain the table was clean we would put the quilt with
the book inside it on the table and slowly unfold the quilt. Then she would sit
down. She was a small woman, and we stood beside her. She was very particular
about the light over the table. It couldn’t be too strong because she was
afraid of fading the colors, and it couldn’t be so weak that she felt the
paintings could not be fully comprehended. She wore white cotton gloves that
were perfectly plain and saved for only this occasion and she turned the pages
while we watched. Can you imagine this? I will not say we were terribly poor
because we were as rich or poor as everyone else. Our apartment was small, my
brothers and I shared a bed. Our family was no different from the other
families in our building except for this book.
So
extraordinary a thing was this book.
Masterworks of
the Impressionist Period
it was called. No one knew we had it. We were
never allowed to speak of it because my grandmother was afraid someone would
come and try and take it away from her. The paintings were by Pissarro,
Bonnard, van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Cézanne, hundreds of paintings. The colors we
saw at night while she turned the pages were miraculous. Every painting we were
to study. Every one she said was something that deserved great consideration. There
were nights that she only turned two pages and I’m sure it was a year before I
had seen the book in its entirety. It was an extremely good book, I think,
expertly done. Certainly, I have not seen the originals of all the paintings,
but the ones I saw years later looked very much the way I had remembered them. My
grandmother told us she spoke French in her youth and she would read to us as
best she could remember the text beneath the plates. Of course she was making
it up because the stories would change. Not that it mattered. They were
beautiful stories. ‘This is the field where van Gogh painted sunflowers,’ she
would say. ‘All day he sat in the hot sun beneath the blue skies. When the
white clouds curled past he would remember them for future paintings and here
on this canvas he placed those clouds.’ This is the way she spoke to us,
pretending she was reading. Sometimes she would read for twenty minutes when
there were only a few lines of text. She would say that was because French was
a much more complicated language than Russian and that every word contained
several sentences’ worth of meaning. There were so many paintings to consider.
It was many, many years before I had memorized them all. Even now I could tell
you the number of haystacks in the field and from which direction the light is
coming.” Fyodorov stopped to give Gen a chance to catch up. He took the
opportunity to look at the people around the table: his grandmother, now dead,
his mother and father, dead, his youngest brother, Dimitri, drowned in a
fishing accident at the age of twenty-one. Only two of them were left now. He
wondered about his brother Mikal, who must be following the story of his
kidnapping in the news at home. If I was to die here, Fyodorov thought, Mikal
would be alone in this world with no other family to comfort him. “Every now
and then she wouldn’t bring out the book at all. She would say she was tired.
She would say that so much beauty hurt her. Sometimes a week or even two could
pass. No Seurat! I remember feeling almost frantic, such a dependency I had
come to feel for those paintings. But it was the rest from it, the
waiting, that
made us love the book so madly. I could have
had one life but instead I had another because of this book my grandmother
protected,” he said, his voice quieter now. “What a miracle is that? I was taught
to love beautiful things. I had a language in which to consider beauty. Later
that extended to the opera, to the ballet, to architecture I saw, and even
later still I came to realize that what I had seen in the paintings I could see
in the fields or a river. I could see it in people. All of that I attribute to
this book. Towards the end of her life she could not pick it up at all and she
sent me to get it. Her hands shook so, she was afraid of tearing the paper and
so she let us turn the page. My hands were too large for her gloves by then but
she showed me how to use them between my fingers like a cloth so I could keep
everything clean.” Fyodorov sighed, as somehow this was the memory that moved
him the most. “My brother has the book now. He is a doctor outside of
we hand it off to the other. Neither of us could do without it completely. I
have tried to find another copy, but I have been unsuccessful. I believe that
there is no other book like this in the world.” Through talking, Fyodorov was
able to relax. Talking was the thing he was best at. He felt his breath come
easily. He had not before this moment made the connection between the book and
the point of his story and now he wondered how he hadn’t seen it all along. “It
was a tragedy to my grandmother that none of us showed a talent for painting. Even
at the end of her life, when I was in school studying business, she was telling
me to try again. But it wasn’t something I was capable of learning. She liked
to say my brother Dimitri would have been a great painter but that was only
because Dimitri was dead. The dead we can imagine to be anything at all. My
brothers and I were all excellent observers. Some people are born to make great
art and others are born to appreciate it. Don’t you think? It is a kind of
talent in itself, to be an audience, whether you are the spectator in the
gallery or you are listening to the voice of the world’s greatest soprano. Not
everyone can be the artist. There have to be those who witness the art, who
love and appreciate what they have been privileged to see.” Fyodorov spoke
slowly. He gave long pauses between his sentences so that Gen would not have to
struggle to keep up, but because of this it was difficult to tell whether he
was finished speaking.
“It’s a lovely story,” Roxane said at last.
“But there is a point to it.”
Roxane settled back in her chair to hear the
point.
“It may not seem immediately evident that I
would be a man who has a deep understanding of art and I want you to know that
I am. The Secretary of Commerce in
yet because of my background I feel I am specifically qualified.”
Again, Roxane waited to see if there was more
of the sentence coming and when there didn’t seem to be she asked him, “Qualified
to what?”
“To love you,” Fyodorov said. “I love you.”
Gen looked at Fyodorov and blinked. He felt the
blood drain away from his face.
“What did he say?” Roxane said.
“Go on,” Fyodorov said. “Tell her.”
Roxane’s hair was pulled up tightly from her face
and caught in
a pink
elastic she had been given from
the room of the Vice President’s oldest daughter. Without makeup or jewelry,
without her hair to frame her face, a person might have thought her plain or
even tired looking if he didn’t know what she was capable of. Gen thought she
was patient to have listened for so long, keeping her eyes on Fyodorov, never
drifting off to stare out the window. He thought it spoke well of her character
that she had chosen Mr. Hosokawa to keep her company when other, lesser men
were available, men who spoke English. Gen greatly admired her
singing, that
went without saying. Every day when she sang
he felt deeply moved, but he did not love her. Not that he was being asked to.
Not that she would have thought that’s what he meant, that he, Gen, loved her,
and yet still he struggled. He had never thought of it before but he was quite
sure now that he did think of it that he had
neither spoken
those words or
written them, either to someone or for someone else. Birthday
cards and letters home were signed
please take good care of
yourself
. He had never said I love you to
either his parents or his sisters. He had not said it to any of the three women
he had slept with in his life or the girls in school with whom he had occasionally
walked to class. It simply had not occurred to him to say it and now on the
first day of his life when it might have been appropriate to speak of love to a
woman, he would be declaring it for another man to another woman.
“Are you going to tell me?” Roxane said. There
was only slightly more interest in her voice the second time she asked. Fyodorov
waited, hands clasped, a look of great relief already spreading over his face. He
had said his piece. He had taken things as far as he could.
Gen swallowed the saliva which had pooled over
his tongue and tried to look at Roxane in a businesslike manner. “He is
qualified to love you.
He says, I love you.”
Gen
framed his translation to make it sound as appropriate as was possible.
“He loves my singing?”
“You,” Gen said pointedly. He did not feel the
need to consult with Fyodorov on this. The Russian smiled.
Now Roxane did look away. She took a deep
breath and stared out the window for a while as if there had been some sort of
offer and she was now weighing it out. When she looked back she smiled at
Fyodorov. The look on her face was so peaceful, so tender, that for a moment
Gen thought perhaps she loved the Russian in return. Was it possible that such
a declaration could achieve the desired effect? That she would love him simply
for having loved her?
“Victor Fyodorov,” she said.
“A
wonderful story.”
“Thank you.” Fyodorov bowed his head.
“I wonder what became of the young man from
speaking to herself. “It’s one thing to give a woman a necklace. It comes in a
small box. Even a very expensive necklace isn’t much trouble. But to give a
woman such a book, to bring it all the way from some other country, I think
that’s quite extraordinary. I can imagine him carrying it on the train all done
up in wrapping paper.”