Bel Canto(73)

eight

there 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.

Even though it was an enormous house by any standard, there was no privacy for people living in the vice-presidential home, not for anyone except Carmen and Gen, who met in the china closet after two A.M. in order to keep their lessons a secret. Opera and cooking and games of chess were there for public consumption. The guest room was on the same side of the house as the study where the television nattered on hour after hour, so if one of the young terrorists was looking for entertainment he would probably let the chess go. The hostages, when they were allowed down the hallway based on the caprice of whoever happened to be holding the gun at the door, were more likely to stay for ten or fifteen minutes of a game, but in that time they were lucky if they saw a single move. They were used to soccer. They tried to consider chess a kind of sport, certainly it was a game, but they wanted to see something happen. The room had the same effect on the spectators as long liturgical services, algebra lectures, Halcion.

The two observers who managed to stay and never fall asleep were Ishmael and Roxane. Roxane came to watch the performance of Mr. Hosokawa, who, after all, spent so much of his time watching her, and Ishmael stayed because eventually he wanted to play chess with General Benjamin and Mr. Hosokawa, only he wasn’t sure if such a thing was actually allowed. All of the younger terrorists tried to know their limits and not ask for more than they could have. Like all children, they may have pushed on them from time to time, but they were respectful of the Generals and they knew not to ask for too much. They might stay too long watching television, but they never missed their post on guard. They did not tell Messner to bring in gallons of ice cream. Only the Generals could do that and so far they had done it only twice. They did not fight among themselves, though the temptation to do so was overwhelming at times. The Generals punished fighting severely, and General Hector took it upon himself to beat the boys longer and harder than they could ever beat one another to teach them that they had to work together. If there was a terrible need, an argument that could only be settled one way, they met in the basement, took off their shirts, and were careful never to hit each other in the face.