Bel Canto(72)

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.