Bel Canto(18)

Even now, after more than a dozen hours spent on the floor of the marble entryway, the cold having permeated into his bone marrow, the voice of Roxane Coss was making large, swooping circles through his head. If he had not been told to lie down, he might have been forced to ask if he might be allowed to. He needed all this time to rest, and better that it was on a marble floor. The floor kept him mindful of God. Had he been stretched out on a soft rug he might have forgotten himself altogether. He was glad to have spent the night in the sea of bullhorns and sirens because it kept him awake and thinking, glad (and for this he asked forgiveness) to have missed the morning’s mass and communion because then he could stay there longer. The longer he stayed where he was, the longer the moment continued, as if her voice were still echoing against these papered walls. She was still there, after all, lying someplace where he could not see her but not so terribly far away. He said a prayer that she had had a comfortable night, that someone would have thought to offer her one of the couches.

In addition to his concern for Roxane Coss, Father Arguedas was worried about the young bandits. Many of them were propped upright against the walls, their feet apart, leaning on their rifles like walking sticks. Then their heads would drop back and they would fall asleep for ten seconds before their knees buckled and they slumped into their guns. Father Arguedas had often gone with the police to collect the bodies of suicides and often they looked like they must have begun in exactly such a position, their toes pressed down on the trigger.

“Son,” he whispered to one of the boys who was guarding the people in the entry hall, mostly waiters and cooks laid on the hard floor, people of the lowest ranking. Being young himself, he often felt uncomfortable calling a parishioner “son,” but this child, he felt, was his own. He looked like his cousins. He looked like every boy who ran from the church as soon as they had taken communion, the host still white and round on their tongues. “Come here.”

The boy squinted towards the ceiling as if he was hearing the voice in his sleep. He pretended not to notice the priest. “Son,” Father Arguedas said again. “Come here.”

Now the boy looked down and a puzzlement crossed his face. How did one not answer a priest? How was it possible not to go if called? “Father?” he whispered.

“Come here,” the priest mouthed, and patted his hand on the floor, nothing more than a little fluttering movement of his fingers beside him. It was not crowded on the marble floor. Unlike the carpeted living room, there was plenty of space to stretch here, and when one had been leaning against a rifle all night, an open expanse of marble floor would seem as inviting as a feather bed.

The boy looked nervously around the corner to the place where the Generals were in conference. “I’m not allowed,” he mouthed. He was an Indian, this boy. He spoke the language from the north that Father Arguedas’s grandmother spoke to his mother and aunts.

“I say you are allowed,” he said, not with authority, but with compassion.

The boy considered this for a moment and then turned his head up as if he was studying the intricate crown molding that ringed the ceiling. His eyes filled up with tears and he had to blink madly to hold them back. He had been awake for such a long time and his fingertips trembled around the cool barrel of his gun. He could no longer exactly tell where his fingers stopped and the green-blue metal began.

Father Arguedas sighed and let it go for now. He would ask the boy again later just to let him know there was a place to rest and forgiveness for any sin.

The crowd on the floor pulsed with needs. Some had to go to the bathroom again. There were murmurings about medications. People wanted to stand up, to be fed, to have a drink of water to wash the taste from their mouths. Their restlessness emboldened them, but there was this as well: nearly eighteen hours had passed and still no one was dead. The hostages had begun to believe that they might not be killed. If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to seem secure, one feels the freedom to complain.

Victor Fyodorov, a Muscovite, finally gave in to himself and lit up a cigarette, even though all lighters and matches were to have been surrendered. He blew his smoke straight up to the ceiling. He was forty-seven years old and had been smoking regularly since he was twelve, even in hard times, even when decisions had to be made between cigarettes and food.

The General Benjamin snapped his fingers and one of the minions rushed forward to take Fyodorov’s cigarette away, but Fyodorov only inhaled. He was a big man, even lying down, even with no weapon save the cigarette itself. He looked like the one who would win the fight. “Just try,” he said to the soldier in Russian.

The boy, having no idea what had been said, was unsure of how to proceed. He tried to steady his hand when he withdrew his gun and pointed it at Fyodorov’s middle in a halfhearted way.

“This is it!” Yegor Ledbed, another Russian and a friend to Fyodorov, said. “You will shoot us for smoking!”

What a dream it was, that cigarette. How much more delightful it was to smoke when one had not smoked in a day. Then one could notice the flavor, the blue tint of the smoke. One could relax into the pleasant light-headedness one remembered from boyhood. It was almost enough to make a man quit, so that he could know the pleasures of starting again. Fyodorov was almost down to the point of burning his fingers. What a pity. He sat up, startling the gunman with his girth, and crushed the cigarette against the sole of his shoe.