Ann Patchett (17 page)

Time could barely pull the second hand forward
on the clock and yet look at all that had been accomplished—could it only have
been a week? To have gone from guns being pushed into backs to most of the guns
being locked up in a broom closet should have taken no less than a year, but
already the captors knew the hostages would not mount an insurrection and in
return the hostages knew, or almost knew, they would not be shot by the
terrorists. Of course there were still guards. Two boys patrolled outside in
the garden and three circled the rooms of the house, their weapons pointed out
like canes for the blind. The Generals continued to give them orders. One of
the boys, from time to time, would take a little poke at one of the guests with
the muzzle of his gun and tell him to go to the other side of the room for no
reason at all other than the pleasure of seeing them move. At night there were
sentries, but by twelve o’clock they had always fallen asleep. They did not
wake when their weapons slipped from their fingers and clattered on the floor.

For the guests of Mr. Hosokawa’s birthday
party, most of the day was spent wandering from window to window, maybe playing
a hand of cards or looking at a magazine, as if the world had become a giant
train station in which everything was delayed until further notice. It was this
absence of time that had everyone confused. General Benjamin had found a heavy
crayon that belonged to Marco, the young son of the Vice President, and every
day he made a thick blue slash on the wall in the dining room, six slashes down
and then one across to indicate a week had passed. He imagined his brother in
solitary confinement, Luis, forced to make scratches against the brick with his
fingernail in order to remember the days. Of course, in a house there were more
traditional ways of keeping track of time. There were several calendars, a date
book and planner in the kitchen by the phone, and many of the men wore watches
which gave the date as well as the time. And if any of those methods were to
fail they could easily turn on the radio or television and hear what day it was
while listening to news of
themselves
. But still
General Benjamin thought that the old-fashioned way was the best. He sharpened
his crayon with a gutting knife and added another slash to his collection on
the wall. It galled Ruben Iglesias no end. He would have punished his children
sharply were they to do such a barbaric thing.

Without exception, these were men who were
largely unfamiliar with the concept of free time. The ones who were very rich
stayed at their offices late into the evening. They sat in the backseats of
cars and dictated letters while their drivers shepherded them home. The ones
who were young and very poor worked just as hard, albeit at a different kind of
work. There was wood to be cut or sweet potatoes to be dug out of the ground. There
were drills to be learned with the guns, how to run, how to hide. Now a great,
unfamiliar idleness had fallen on them and they sat and they stared at one
another, their fingers drumming incessantly on the arms of chairs.

But in this vast ocean of time Mr. Hosokawa
could not seem to startle up any concern for Nansei. While he stared at the
weather he never wondered if his abduction had affected stock prices. He did
not care who was making his decisions, sitting at his desk. The company that
had been his life, his son, had fallen away from him as thoughtlessly as a coin
is dropped. He took a small spiral notebook from the pocket of his tuxedo
jacket and, after inquiring as to the correct spelling from Gen, added the word
garúa
to his list. Incentive was
key
.
No matter how many times Mr. Hosokawa had listened to his Italian tapes in
Japan
he could
remember nothing that was on them. No sooner had he heard the beautiful words,
dimora
,
patrono
, than they
vanished from memory. But after only one week of captivity
look
at all the Spanish he had learned!
Ahora
was now;
sentarse
, sit;
ponerse de pie
,
stand up;
sueño
, sleep, and
requetebueno
was very good, but it was always spoken with a certain coarseness and
condescension that told the listener not that he had done well but that he was
too stupid to merit high expectations. And it wasn’t just the language that had
to be
overcome,
there were all the names to learn as
well, those of the hostages, those of the captors when you could get one of
them to tell you his name. The people were from so many different countries
that there were no easy tricks of association, no familiar toehold from which
to pull
oneself
up. The room was full of men he did
not know and should know, though they all smiled and nodded to one another. He
would have to work harder to introduce himself. At Nansei he had made a point
of learning the names of as many of his employees as was possible. He
remembered the names of the businessmen he entertained and the names of their
wives whom he inquired after and never met.

Mr. Hosokawa had not led a static life. As he
built his company, he learned. But this was a different sort of learning he did
now. This was the learning of childhood. May I sit? May I stand? Thank you.
Please. What was the word for apple, for bread? And he remembered what they
told him because, unlike the Italian tapes, in this case remembering was all. He
could see now the full extent to which he had relied on Gen in the past, how
much he relied on him now, though now he often had to wait with his questions
while Gen translated something for the Generals. Two days ago Vice President
Iglesias had very kindly given Mr. Hosokawa this notebook and a pen from a
drawer in the kitchen. “Here,” he said. “Consider it a late birthday present.”
In that notebook Mr. Hosokawa printed the alphabet and had Gen write out the numbers
from one to ten and every day he planned to add more words in Spanish. He wrote
them over and over, keeping his writing very small because even though paper
was plentiful now, it occurred to him that a time could come when he would have
to be careful with such things. When had he last written something down? His
thoughts were entered, recorded, transmitted. It was in this simple repetition,
the rediscovery of his own penmanship, that Mr. Hosokawa found solace. He began
to think about Italian again, and thought he might ask Gen to include just a
word or two every day from that language as well. There were two Italians in
their group and when he heard them speak he could feel himself straining to
understand as if he were listening to a bad phone connection. Italian was so
close to his heart. And English. He would enjoy being able to speak to Miss
Coss.

He sat down and tapped the tip of his pencil
against his pad.
Too ambitious.
If he took on too many
words he would wind up with nothing. Ten words of Spanish a day, ten nouns
actually learned and then one verb, fully conjugated, was very likely as much
as he could manage if he was to really remember each word and carry them over
from one day to the next.

Garúa.
Often when Mr. Hosokawa sat at the
window he wondered about the people on the other side of the wall, the police
and the military who were at this point more likely to use the phone than the
bullhorn. Were they constantly damp? Did they sit inside their cars drinking
coffee? The Generals sat in the cars, he would guess, while the boys with their
guns, the foot soldiers, would stand at attention, the chilled rain running
freely down the backs of their necks.

Those soldiers, they would not be unlike the
children who patrolled the living room of the vice-presidential estate, though
perhaps there was some minimum age requirement in the military. How young were
these children exactly? The ones who appeared to be the oldest would then step
beneath the bright light of a lamp and it was clear they weren’t older, only
bigger. They loped around the room bumping into things, unaccustomed to the
size they had so recently acquired. At least those boys had Adam’s apples, a
sprinkling of new hairs mixed in with the angry pimples. The ones who were
actually the youngest were terrifying in their youth. Their hair had all the
weight and gloss of children’s hair. They had the smooth skin and small
shoulders of children. They stretched their little hands around the butts of
their rifles and tried to keep their faces blank. The hostages stared at the
terrorists, and the longer they looked, the younger the terrorists became. Could
these be the same men who burst into their party, the same marauding animals? They
fell asleep on the floor in limp piles now, their mouths open, their arms
twisted. They slept like teenagers. They slept with a kind of single-minded
concentration that every adult in the room had forgotten decades before. Some
of them liked being soldiers. They continued to carry their guns. They menaced
the adults with the occasional shove and hateful glower. Then it seemed that
armed children were a much more dangerous breed than armed adults. They were
moody, irrational,
anxious
for confrontation. The
others spent their time staring at the details of the house. They bounced on
the beds and tried on the clothes in the dressers. They flushed the toilets
again and again for the pleasure of watching the water swirl away. At first
there had been a rule that they were not to address their prisoners but even
that was growing slack for some of them. Sometimes now they spoke to the
hostages, especially when the Generals were busy conferring. “Where are you
from?” was the favorite question, though the answers rarely registered. Finally,
Ruben Iglesias went to his study and brought back a large atlas so they could
show them on maps, and when that didn’t seem to make things any clearer he sent
a guard to his son’s room to bring down the globe on a stand, a pretty
blue-and-green planet that spun easily on its stationary axis.

“
Paris
,”
Simon Thibault said, pointing to his city. “
France
.”

Lothar Falken showed them
Germany
and Rasmus Nilson put his finger on
Denmark
. Akira
Yamamoto, who was not interested in playing, turned away, and so Gen showed
them
Japan
.
Roxane Coss covered the whole of the
United
States
beneath her palm and then tapped one nail on the
dot that represented
Chicago
.
The boys took the globe to the next group of people, who, even if they didn’t
understand the question, knew the game. “This is
Russia
,” they said. “This is
Italy
.” “This
is
Argentina
.”
“This is
Greece
.”

“Where are you from?” the boy called Ishmael
asked the Vice President. He thought of the Vice President as his own hostage
because he had been the one to bring the ice from the kitchen when the Vice
President was first injured. He still brought Ruben ice, sometimes three and
four times a day, without ever being asked. It gave the Vice President relief
as his cheek had become infected and persisted in its swelling.

“Here,” the Vice President said, pointing to the
floor.

“Show me.” Ishmael held up the globe.

“Here.” Ruben tapped his foot on the carpet. “This
is my house. I live in this city. I am from the same country you are from.”

Ishmael looked up at his friend. It had been
easier to get the Russians to play. “Show me.”

So Ruben sat down on the floor with the boy and
the globe and identified the host country, which in this case was flat and
pink. “We live here.” Ishmael was the very smallest of all of them, so much a
boy with a boy’s white teeth. Ruben wanted to pull the child into his lap, to
keep him.

“You live there.”

“No, not just me,” Ruben said. Where were
his own
children? Where were they sleeping now?
“Both of us.”

Ishmael sighed and pushed himself up from the
floor, disappointed in his friend’s thickheadedness. “You don’t know how to
play,” he said.

“I don’t know how to play,” Ruben said, looking
at the deplorable condition of the boy’s boots. At any minute the right sole
would fall off completely. “Now listen to me. Go upstairs to the biggest
bedroom you can find and open all the doors until you see a closet full of
lady’s dresses. In that closet there are a hundred pairs of shoes and if you
look you’ll find some tennis shoes that might fit you. There could even be some
boots.”

“I can’t wear lady’s shoes.”

Ruben shook his head. “The tennis shoes and
boots are not for ladies. We only keep them there. I know, it makes no sense,
but trust me.”

“It is ridiculous that we sit here like this,”
Franz von Schuller said. Gen translated into French for Simon Thibault and
Jacques Maitessier and then into Japanese for Mr. Hosokawa. There were two
other Germans there as well. The group of them stood by the empty fireplace,
drinking grapefruit juice.
An enormous treat, the grapefruit
juice.
It was better than a really good Scotch. The sharpness settled
over their tongues, making them feel alive. Today was the first time it had
been brought in. “These people are amateurs.
The ones in here
as well as the ones outside.”