Ann Patchett (34 page)

“If we are to believe there was a Julian at
all.”

“There’s no reason not to. It certainly would
do no harm to believe the story she told you.”

“I’m sure you are right. From now on I will
remember it only as the truth.”

Gen’s head was filled with Carmen again. He
wished that she was waiting for him, still sitting on the black marble sink,
but he knew this wasn’t possible. She was probably on patrol now, walking up
and down the hallways of the second floor with a rifle, conjugating verbs under
her breath.

“As for the love,” Roxane said finally.

“There is nothing to say,” Fyodorov
interrupted. “It is a gift. There.
Something to give to you.
If I had the necklace or a book of paintings I would give you that instead. I would
give you that in addition to my love.”

“Then you are too generous with gifts.”

Fyodorov shrugged. “Perhaps you are right. In
another setting it would be ridiculous, too grand. In another setting it would
not happen because you are a famous woman and at best I would shake your famous
hand for one second while you stepped into your car after a performance. But in
this place I hear you sing every day. In this place I watch you eat your
dinner, and what I feel in my heart is love. There is no point in not telling
you that. These people who detain us so pleasantly may decide to shoot us after
all. It is a possibility. And if that is the case, then why should I carry this
love with me to the other world? Why not give to you what is yours?”

“And what if there is nothing for me to give
you?” She seemed to be interested in Fyodorov’s argument.

He shook his head. “What a thing to say, after
all that you have given to me. But it is never about who has given what. That
is not the way to think of gifts. This is not business we are conducting. Would
I be pleased if you were to say you loved me as well? That what you wanted was
to come to
Russia
and live with the Secretary of Commerce, attend state dinners, drink your
coffee in my bed? A beautiful thought, surely, but my wife would not be
pleased. When you think of love you think as an American. You must think like a
Russian. It is a more expansive view.”

“Americans have a bad habit of thinking like
Americans,” Roxane said kindly. After that she smiled at Fyodorov and everyone
was quiet for a moment. The interview had come to a close and there was nothing
left to say.

Then finally Fyodorov stood up from his chair
and clapped his hands together. “I, for one, feel much better. What a burden
this has been to me! Now I can get some rest. You’ve been very kind to hear
me.” He extended his hand to Roxane, and when she stood and gave him hers he
kissed it and for a moment stretched it up to hold it against his cheek. “I
will remember this day forever, this moment,
your
hand. No man could want for more than this.” He smiled and then he let her go.
“A wonderful day.
A wonderful thing you have given me in
return.” He turned and walked out of the kitchen without a word to Gen. In all
of his excitement he had forgotten Gen was there at all, the way a person can
forget when the translation has gone very smoothly.

Roxane sat down in her chair and Gen sat down
where Fyodorov had been. “Well,” she said. “That was certainly exhausting.”

“I was thinking the same thing.”

“Poor Gen.” Roxane leaned her head to one side.
“All the boring things you have to listen to.”

“This was awkward but it wasn’t boring.”

“Awkward?”

“You don’t find strangers declaring
themselves
to you awkward?” But then she wouldn’t, would
she? People must fall in love with her hourly. She must keep a staff of
translators to interpret the proposals of love and marriage.

“It’s easier to love a woman when you can’t
understand a word she’s saying,” Roxane said.

“I wish they would bring us some rabbits,”
Thibault called over to Gen in French.
Des
lapins.
He was drumming his fingers on the cookbook. “Are you
boys much for rabbit?” he asked the terrorists in Spanish.
Conejo.

The boys looked up from their work. The guns
were mostly reassembled. They had been clean to begin with and now they were
only cleaner. When one got used to guns, when the guns weren’t pointed at you,
one could see them as almost interesting, discreet sculptures for end tables.
“Cabayo,”
said the tall one, Gilbert, who had thought of
shooting Thibault not so very long ago in the confusion over the television
set.

“Cabayo?”
Simon Thibault said. “Gen, what is
cabayo
?”

Gen thought about it for a minute. His mind was
still stuck in Russian. “Those furry things, not hamsters . . .” He snapped his
fingers.
“Guinea pigs!”

“What you want to eat are guinea pigs, not
rabbits,” Gilbert said.
“Very tender.”

“Oh,” said Cesar, folding his hands over his
gun. “What I wouldn’t give for a guinea pig now.” He gently bit his fingertips
at the thought of so much pleasure. Cesar had bad skin that seemed to be
clearing up some during their internment.

Thibault closed the book. In
Paris
, one of his daughters had kept a fat
white guinea pig in a large glass aquarium when she was a girl. Milou, it was
called, a poor substitute for the dog she wanted. Edith wound up feeding the
thing. She felt sorry for it, spending day after day alone, looking out on the
life of their family through glass. Sometimes Edith let the guinea pig sit in
her lap while she read. There was Milou, curled in a ball against the hem of
Edith’s sweater, its nose twitching with pleasure. This guinea pig was
Thibault’s brother, for all he wanted now was the privilege of what this animal
had had, the right to lie with his head in his wife’s lap, his face turned up
to the bottom of her sweater. Must Thibault imagine the animal (who was long
since dead but when and how? He couldn’t remember) skinned and braised?
Milou as dinner.
Once something is named it can never be
eaten. Once you have called it a brother in your mind it should enjoy the
freedoms of a brother. “How do you cook them?”

A conversation ensued about the best way to
cook a guinea pig and how it was possible to tell your fortune from cutting
open the gut while it was still alive. Gen turned away.

“People love each other for all sorts of
different reasons,” Roxane said, her lack of Spanish keeping her innocent of
the conversation, slow-roasted guinea pigs on a spit. “Most of the time we’re
loved for what we can do rather than for who we are. It’s not such a bad thing,
being loved for what you can do.”

“But the other is better,” Gen said.

Roxane pulled her feet into her chair and
hugged her knees to her chest. “Better. I hate to say better, but it is. If
someone loves you for what you can do then it’s flattering, but why do you love
them? If someone loves you for who you are then they have to know you, which
means
you have to know them.” Roxane smiled at Gen.

Once they had left the kitchen, first the other
boys, and then Gen and Roxane and Thibault, the people Cesar had come to think
of as the grown-ups rather than the
hostages,
Cesar
began to sing the Rossini while he finished up his work. He had the kitchen to
himself for a moment and wanted to make use of this rare time alone. The sun
came through the windows and shone brightly off his clean rifle and oh, how he
loved to hear the words in his mouth. She had sung it so many times this
morning he had had the chance to memorize all the words. It didn’t matter that
he didn’t understand the language, he knew what it
meant
.
The words and music fused together and became a part of him. Again and again he
sang the chorus, almost whispering for fear someone might hear him, mock him,
punish him. He felt this too strongly to think that it was something he could
get away with. Still, he wished he could open himself up the way she did,
bellow it out, dig inside
himself
to see what was
really there. It thrilled him when she sang the loudest, the highest. If he
didn’t have his rifle to hold in front of him he would have embarrassed himself
every time, her singing brought about such a raging, aching passion that his
penis stiffened before she had finished her first line, growing harder and
harder as the song progressed until he was lost in a confusion of pleasure and
terrible pain, the stock of his rifle brushing imperceptibly up and down,
leading him towards relief. He leaned back against the wall, dizzy and
electrified. They were for her, these furious erections. Every boy there
dreamed of crawling on top of her, filling her mouth with their tongues as they
pushed themselves inside her. They loved her, and in these fantasies that came
to them waking and sleeping, she loved them in return. But for Cesar it was
more than that. Cesar knew he was hard for the music. As if music was a
separate thing you could drive yourself into, make love to, fuck.

eight

t
here
was a sitting room off of the guest
bedroom where the Generals held their meetings and in that room Mr. Hosokawa
and General Benjamin played chess for hours at a time. It seemed to be the only
thing that took Benjamin’s mind off the pain of the shingles. Since they had
crept into his eye they had become infected and the infection had led to
conjunctivitis, and now the eye was fiercely red and rimmed with pustules. The
more completely he concentrated on chess, the more he was able to push the pain
aside. He never forgot it, but during the game he did not live exactly in the
center of it.

For a long time the guests were only allowed in
limited areas of the house but now that things were loosening up the access to
other areas was sporadic. Mr. Hosokawa had not even known the room had existed
until he was invited back to play. It was a small room, a gaming table and two
chairs by the window, a small sofa, a secretary with a writing desk and a glass
front filled with leather-bound books. There were yellow draperies on the
window, a blue flowered rug on the floor, a framed picture of a clipper ship. It
was not an exceptional room in any way, but it was small, and a small room,
after three months spent in the vast cavern of the living room, gave Mr.
Hosokawa an enormous sense of relief, that comforting tightness a child
experiences when bundled into sweaters and a coat. He hadn’t thought about it
until the third time they played, that in
Japan
a person was never in such a
large room, unless it was a hotel banquet hall or the opera house. He liked the
fact that in this room, were he to stand on a chair, he could touch the tips of
his fingers to the ceiling. He was especially grateful for anything that made
the world feel close and familiar. Everything that Mr. Hosokawa had ever known
or suspected about the way life worked had been proven to him to be incorrect
these past months. Where before there had been endless hours of work,
negotiations and compromises, there were now chess games with a terrorist for
whom he felt an unaccountable fondness. Where there had been a respectable
family that functioned in the highest order, there were now people he loved and
could not speak to. Where there had been a few minutes of opera on a stereo at
bedtime, there were now hours of music every day, the living warmth of voice in
all its perfection and fallibility, a woman in possession of that voice who sat
beside him laughing, holding his hand. The rest of the world believed that Mr.
Hosokawa suffered and he would never be able to explain to them how that was
not the case.
The rest of the world.
He could never
push it completely from his mind. His understanding that he would eventually
lose
every sweetness
that had come to him only made
him hold those very things closer to his chest.

General Benjamin was a good chess player but he
was no better than Mr. Hosokawa. Neither of them was the type to play with a
speed clock and they took every move as if time had yet to be invented. Because
they were both equally talented and equally slow, neither man ever became
impatient with the other. Once, Mr. Hosokawa had gone to the small sofa and
closed his eyes while he waited for his turn, and when he woke up, General
Benjamin was still moving his rook forward and then back across the same three
squares, careful to never take his fingers off the horse’s head. They had
different strategies. General Benjamin tried to control the center of the
board. Mr. Hosokawa played defensively: a pawn here, later the knight. One
would win, and then the
other,
and neither one made
any comment about it. The game, frankly, was more peaceful without language.
Cunning moves need not be
congratulated,
a danger
overlooked was not bemoaned. They would tap a queen,
then
king, once for check, twice for checkmate, as neither could remember the words
Gen had written down for them. Even the endings of games came as quiet affairs,
a brief nod of acknowledgment, and then the business of setting it all up again
so that when the next day came they would be ready to start over. Neither man
would have dreamed of leaving the room with the pieces scattered across the
table on the wrong sides of the board.