Ann Patchett (32 page)

“I apologize for the delay,” Gen said. The room
before him melted and waved like a horizon line in the desert. He leaned back
against the closed bathroom door. She was in there, not two and a half
centimeters of wood away from him.

“You look unwell,” the Russian said, and now he
was concerned. He had a fondness for the translator. “Your voice sounds weak.”

“I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

“You are pale, I think. Your eyes are very
damp. Perhaps if you are truly ill the Generals will let you go. Since the
accompanist, they claim to be very sympathetic in matters of health.”

Gen blinked in an attempt to still the swaying
furniture, but the bright stripes of an ottoman continued to pulse in the
rhythm of his blood. He stood up straight and shook his head. “Look at me,” he
said uncertainly, “fine now. I have no intention of leaving.” He looked at the
sun pouring in through the tall windows, the shadows of the leaves falling
across the carpet. Finally, standing here with the Russian, Gen could
understand what Carmen was saying. Look at this room!
The
draperies and chandeliers, the soft, deep cushions of the sofas, the colors,
gold and green and blue, every shade a jewel.
Who would not want to be
in this room?

Fyodorov smiled and slapped the translator on
the back. “What a man you are! You are all for the people. Ah, how greatly I
admire you.”

“All for the people,” Gen repeated. The Slavic
language was pear brandy on his tongue.

“Then we will go to speak to Roxane Coss! There
is no time for me to wash again. If I was to stop I would lose my nerve
forever.”

Gen led the way to the kitchen but he might as
well have been walking alone. He had not one thought for Fyodorov, for how he
felt or what he might wish to say. Gen’s head was filled with Carmen.
Carmen up on the sink.
He would always remember her there.
Years from now when he would think of her it would always be as she was on that
day, sitting up on the black marble, her heavy work boots patched with
electrical tape, her hands flat out on the cool sink top. Her hair hung loose
and straight, parted in the middle, tucked behind such delicate ears. He
thought of the kiss, her arms around his back, but the greatest pleasure was
seeing her face, the sweet exact shape of a heart, her dark brown eyes and such
unruly eyebrows, the round mouth he wanted to touch. Mr. Hosokawa was easily
distracted from his studies. Tell him a word one day and he may well have
forgotten it the next. He laughed off his mistakes, put tiny check marks by the
words he had misspelled. Not Carmen. To tell something to Carmen was to have it
sewn forever into the silky folds of her brain. She closed her eyes and said
the word, spelled it aloud and on paper, and then she owned it. He did not need
to ask her again. They went forward, pressing on through the night as if they
were being hunted down by wolves. She wanted more of everything.
More vocabulary, more verbs.
She wanted him to explain the
rules of grammar and punctuation. She wanted gerunds and infinitives and
participles. At the end of the lesson, when they were both too tired for
another word, she would lean back against the cupboards in the china closet and
yawn. “Tell me about commas,” she would say, the plates towering over her head,
a service in gold for twenty-four, a service with a wide cobalt-blue band
around the edge for sixty, each cup hanging still on its own cup hook.

“It’s so late. You don’t need to know about
commas tonight.”

She folded her arms across her narrow chest,
slid her back towards the floor. “Commas end the sentence,” she said, forcing
him to correct her, to explain.

Gen closed his eyes, leaned forward, and put
his head on his knees. Sleep was a country for which he could not obtain a
visa. “Commas,” he said through a yawn, “pause the sentence and separate
ideas.”

“Ah,” said Fyodorov, “she is with your
employer.”

Gen looked up and Carmen was gone and he was in
the kitchen with Fyodorov. The china closet was only five feet away. As far as
he knew, he and Carmen were the only ones who went in there at all. Mr.
Hosokawa and Roxane were standing at the sink. It was odd the way they never
spoke and yet always seemed to be engaged in a conversation. Ignacio,
Guadalupe, and Humberto were at the breakfast table cleaning guns, a puzzle of
disconnected metal spreading out on newspapers before them as they rubbed oil
into each part. Thibault sat at the table with them, reading cookbooks.

“I suppose I should try again later,” Fyodorov
said sadly.
“When she isn’t so busy.”

Roxane Coss did not seem to be in the least bit
busy. She was simply standing there, running her finger around the edge of a
glass, her face tilted up towards the light. “We should at least ask,” Gen
said. He wanted to meet his obligation, to not have Fyodorov following him
places, saying he was now able to speak and then two minutes later saying he
was unable.

Fyodorov took a large handkerchief from his
pocket and rubbed at his face as if he were trying to remove a smear of dirt. “There
is no reason to do this now. We aren’t going anywhere. We will never be
released. Is it not enough that I should get to see her every day? That is the
greatest luxury. The rest of this is all selfishness on my part. What do I
think I have to say to her?”

But Gen wasn’t listening. Russian was by no
means his best language, and if his concentration lapsed even for a moment it
all became a blur of consonants, hard Cyrillic letters bouncing like hail off a
tin roof. He smiled at Fyodorov and
nodded,
a kind of
laziness he would never have allowed himself in the real world.

“Isn’t the sunlight remarkable?” Mr. Hosokawa
said to Gen when he noticed him standing there. “Suddenly I am hungry and the
only thing that will feed me is sunlight. All I want to do is stand next to
windows. I wonder if it isn’t a vitamin deficiency.”

“I would think we are all lacking something by
now,” Gen said. “You know Mr. Fyodorov.”

Mr. Hosokawa bowed to him and Fyodorov,
confused, bowed in return and then bowed to Roxane, who bowed, though less
deeply, to him. In a circle they resembled nothing so much as geese dipping
their long necks down to the water. “He wishes to speak to Roxane about the
music.” Gen said it first in Japanese and then again in English. Mr. Hosokawa
and Roxane both smiled at Fyodorov, who then pressed his handkerchief to his
mouth as if he might begin to bite it.

“Then I will go for chess.” Mr. Hosokawa looked
at his watch. “We are to play at eleven. I will not be terribly early.”

“I’m sure there’s no need for you to go,” Gen
said.

“But no need to stay.”
Mr. Hosokawa looked at Roxane and
with a certain tenderness of expression seemed to cover all his points in
silence: he would be going, he would play chess, she could come and sit with
them later if she liked. There was a brief exchange of smiles between the two
of them and then Mr. Hosokawa left through the swinging door. There was
a lightness
in his step Gen did not remember seeing before. He
walked with his head up. He wore his shabby tuxedo pants and graying shirt with
dignity.

“He is a great man, your friend,” she said
quietly, watching the empty place where Mr. Hosokawa had been.

“I have always thought so,” Gen said. He still
felt puzzled, despite what Carmen had explained. The look that passed between
the two was one he recognized. Gen was in love and the feeling was so utterly
foreign to him that he had a hard time believing that others were experiencing
it as well.
Except, of course, for Simon Thibault, who sat
there with his cookbooks, wearing his wife’s blue wrap like a flag.
Everyone
knew Thibault was in love.

Roxane lifted her head to the great height of
Fyodorov. She composed her face in a different way now. She was ready to
listen, ready to receive her professional compliments, ready to make the
speaker feel that what he was saying actually had some meaning for her. “Mr.
Fyodorov, would you be more comfortable sitting in the living room?”

Fyodorov faltered under the weight of a direct
question. He appeared to be confused by the translation, and just when Gen was
ready to repeat himself he answered. “I am comfortable where you are
comfortable. I am very happy to stay in the kitchen. I believe this to be a
fine room in which I personally have not spent enough of my time.” In fact, as
much as he trusted Ledbed and Berezovsky, he would just as soon declare himself
in a room where no one could eavesdrop in Russian or English. The occasional
clunk of the gun barrels hitting the table or Thibault clucking his tongue over
a recipe seemed preferable to being overheard.

“This is certainly fine for me,” Roxane said. She
sipped her glass of water. The sight of it made Fyodorov tremble, the water,
her
lips. He had to look away. What was it he wanted to say?
He could write a letter instead, wouldn’t that be proper? The translator could
translate. A word was a word if you spoke it or wrote it down.

“I believe I need a chair,” Fyodorov said.

Gen heard the weakness in his voice and rushed
forward for a chair. The Russian was slumping down even before it arrived and
Gen was barely able to slip it under him in time. With a great exhalation that
could have signified the end of everything, the big man tilted his head down
towards the floor.

“My God,” Roxane said, leaning over him, “is he
sick?” She pulled a dishtowel off the refrigerator handle and dipped it into
her drinking water. She touched the cool terry cloth to the pink expanse of his
neck. He whimpered slightly when she rested her hand against the cloth.

“Do you know what’s wrong with him?” Roxane
asked Gen. “He looked perfectly fine when he came in here. It’s just like
Christopf, his color, the faintness. Could he be a diabetic? Touch him, he’s
cold!”

“Tell me what she says,” Fyodorov whispered
from between his knees.

“She wants to know what’s wrong with you,” Gen
said.

There was a long silence and Roxane slid her
fingers over to his neck to feel the steady thumping of his pulse. Two of her
delicate fingers lodged beneath a great flap of his ear. “Tell her
it’s
love,” he said.

“Love?”

Fyodorov nodded his head. His hair was thick
and wavy and not entirely clean. It had turned quite gray at the temples, but
the crown of his head, which Gen and Roxane stared at, was still dark, the
crown of a young man.

“You never said anything to me about love,” Gen
said, feeling tricked, feeling he had been put into an awkward position now.

“I’m not in love with you,” Fyodorov said. “Why
should I speak to you of love?”

“This is not what I believed I was here to
translate.”

With real effort, Fyodorov raised himself up. His
skin was not just clammy but the color and consistency of actual clams. “What
are you here to translate then, what you deem proper? Are we to speak only of
the weather? Since when is it for you to decide what it is fitting for people
to say to one another?”

Fyodorov was right. Gen had to admit it. The
personal feelings of the translator were not the question here. It was not
Gen’s business to edit the conversation. It was hardly his business to listen
at all. “All right,” he said. It was easy to sound tired in Russian. “All right
then.”

“What is he saying?” Roxane said. She moved the
cloth to his forehead now that he was sitting up.

“She wants to know what you’re saying,” Gen
told Fyodorov. “I should tell her love?”

Fyodorov gave a weak smile. He would ignore all
of this. No real harm had been done as
yet,
it was
just a little faintness. His only hope was to begin at the beginning, to start
the speech as he had practiced it a hundred times in front of Ledbed and
Berezovsky. He cleared his throat. “In my country, I am the Secretary of
Commerce,” he opened in a thin voice. “An appointed position, I could be gone
just like that.” He snapped his fingers but didn’t succeed in getting much of a
snap out of them. They were sweaty and so slipped by one another without a
sound. “But for now it is a very good job and I am grateful. For a man to know
what he has when he has it, that is what makes him a fortunate man.” He tried
to look into her eyes but it was really too much for him. He could feel a
grinding sensation in his lower intestine.

Gen translated and tried not to think where all
of this was going.

“Ask him if he’s feeling better,” Roxane said. “I
think his color is better.” She took the cloth from his head and he looked
disappointed.

“She wants to know how you’re feeling now.”

“Is she listening to the story?”

“You can tell as well as I can.”

“Tell her I’m fine. Tell her this:
Russia
never
had any intention of investing capital in this poor country.” He kept his eyes
for as long as he could on the eyes of Roxane Coss, but when they began to
exhaust him too greatly he turned them to Gen. “We have a poor country of our
own with many other poor countries to support besides. When the invitation to
attend this party came, my friend Mr. Berezovsky, a great businessman, was here
and he said I should come down. He told me you would be performing. We were in
school together, Berezovsky, Ledbed, and
myself
. We
were dear friends. I am in government now, Berezovsky is in business, and
Ledbed, Ledbed you would say deals in loans. We studied in
St. Petersburg
together a hundred years ago. It
is
St. Petersburg
again. Always we would go to the opera. As young men we would stand in the back
for a few rubles, money we did not have at the time. But then jobs came and we
had seats, and with better jobs came proper seats. You could mark our rise in
the world by our position in the opera house, by what we paid and, later, what
we were given. Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Prokofiev, we saw
everything that was Russian.”