“Of course.”
“We’ve been in this miserable place nearly two weeks. I’ve never gone a week without singing unless I was sick. I’m going to have to start practicing soon.” She leaned in towards the two of them and they bent towards her reflexively. “I really don’t want to sing here. I don’t want to give them the satisfaction. Do you think it would be worth it to wait another couple of days? Do you think they’ll let us go by then?” She glanced over the room again to see if there was a particularly elegant pair of hands folded across a lap.
“Surely someone here must play,” Gen said, not wanting to address the other issue.
“The piano is very good. I can play a little but not to accompany myself. I somehow doubt they’d go out and kidnap a new accompanist for me.” Then she spoke directly to Mr. Hosokawa. “I don’t know what to do with myself when I’m not singing. I don’t have any talent for vacations.”
“I feel very much the same way,” he said, his voice growing fainter with each word, “when I am not able to listen to opera.”
For this Roxane smiled. Such a dignified man. In the others she could see a look of fear, the occasional brush of panic. Not that there was anything wrong with panic given their circumstances, she had cried herself to sleep most nights. But it never seemed to touch Mr. Hosokawa, or he managed not to show it. And when she stood near him she somehow did not feel the panic herself, though she couldn’t explain it. Near him, it felt like she was stepping out of a harsh light and into someplace quiet and dark, like she was wrapping herself up in the heavy velvet of the stage curtains where no one could see her. “You should help me find an accompanist,” she told him, “and both of our problems will be solved.”
All of her makeup was gone now. For the first few days she bothered to go to the lavatory and put on lipstick from the tube she carried in her evening bag. Then her hair went back in a tight elastic and she was wearing someone else’s clothes that did not exactly fit. Mr. Hosokawa thought that every day she was lovelier. He had wanted so many times to ask her to sing but he never would have since singing for him was the thing that had brought her all the trouble in the first place. He wasn’t able to ask her for a hand of cards or for her thoughts on the garúa. He did not seek her out at all and so Gen did not either. In fact both of them had noticed that （with the exception of the priest, whom she could not understand） all the men in their desire to speak to her had decided to leave her alone as if it was some sort of respect, so alone she sat, hour after hour. Sometimes she cried and other times she thumbed through books or took naps on the sofa. It was a pleasure to watch her sleep. Roxane was the only hostage to have the privilege of a bedroom and her own guard, who slept outside her door, though whether that was to keep her in or to keep other people out no one was entirely sure. Now that they knew the guard was Carmen, they wondered if she was only trying to keep herself safe by staying near such an important person.
“Perhaps the Vice President plays,” Mr. Hosokawa suggested. “He has a fine piano.”
Gen went off to find the Vice President, who was asleep in a chair, his good cheek pressed to his shoulder, his bad cheek turned up, red and blue and still full of Esmeralda’s stitches. The skin was growing up around them. They needed to come out. “Sir?” Gen whispered.
“Hmm?”Ruben said, his eyes closed.
“Do you play the piano?”
“Piano?”
“The one in the living room. Do you know how to play it, sir?”
“They brought it in for the party,” Ruben said, trying not to let himself wake up completely. He had been dreaming of Esmeralda standing over the sink, peeling a potato. “There was one that was here before but they took it away because it wasn’t good enough. It was good, of course, my daughter takes lessons on it, just not good enough for them,” he said, his voice full of sleep. “That piano isn’t mine. Neither piano is mine, really.”
“But do you know how to play it?”
“The piano?” Ruben finally looked at him and then straightened up his neck.
“Yes.”
“No,” he said, and smiled. “Isn’t that a shame?”
Gen agreed that it was. “You should take those stitches out, I think.”
Ruben touched his face. “Do you think they’re ready?”
“I’d say so.”
Ruben smiled as if he had accomplished something by growing his skin back together again. He went off to find Ishmael to ask him to bring the manicure kit from the bathroom upstairs. Hopefully, the cuticle scissors had not been confiscated as a weapon.
Gen went off on his own to try and find a new accompanist. It wasn’t a matter of much linguistic finesse, as piano was more or less piano in many languages. Surely Roxane Coss could have gotten the point across herself with a small amount of gesturing, but she stayed with Mr. Hosokawa and together they stared at the nothingness the window offered up to them.
“Do you play?” Gen asked, beginning with the Russians, who were smoking in the dining room. They squinted at him through the blue haze and then shook their heads. “My God,” said Victor Fyodorov, covering his heart with his hands. “What I would not give to know! Tell the Red Cross to send in a teacher and I will learn for her.” The other two Russians laughed and threw down their cards. “Piano?” Gen asked the next group. He made his way through the house asking all of the guests, skipping over their captors on the assumption that piano lessons were an impossibility in the jungle. Gen imagined lizards on the foot pedals, humidity warping the keyboard, persistent vines winding their way up the heavy wooden legs. One Spaniard, Manuel Flores; one Frenchman, ?tienne Boyer; and one Argentinian, Alejandro Rivas, said they could play a little but didn’t read music. Andreas Epictetus said he had played quite well in his youth but hadn’t touched a piano in years. “Every day my mother made me practice,” he said. “The day I moved away from home I piled up all the music in the back of the house and I lit it, right there with her watching. I haven’t laid a finger to a piano since.” The rest of them said no, they didn’t play. People began recounting stories of a couple of lessons or the lessons of their children. Their voices fell over one another and from every corner of the room there came the word, piano, piano, piano. It seemed to Gen （and he included himself in this assessment） that never had a more uncultured group of men been taken hostage. What had they been doing all these years that no one had bothered with such an important instrument? They all wished they could play, if not before then, certainly now. To be able to play for Roxane Coss.
Then Tetsuya Kato, a vice president at Nansei whom Gen had known for years, smiled and walked to the Steinway without a word. He was a slightly built man in his early fifties with graying hair who, in Gen’s memory, rarely spoke. He had a reputation for being very good with numbers. The sleeves to his tuxedo shirt were rolled up above his elbows and his jacket was long gone but he sat down on the bench with great formality. The ones in the living room watched him as he lifted the cover of the keyboard and ran his hands once lightly over the keys, soothing them. Some of the others were still talking about the piano, you could hear the Russians’ voices coming from the dining room. Then, without making a request for anyone’s attention, Tetsuya Kato began to play. He started with Chopin’s Nocturne opus 9 in E Flat major no 2. It was the piece he had most often heard in his head since coming to this country, the one he played silently against the edge of the dining-room table when no one was watching. At home he looked at his sheet music and turned the pages. Now he was certain he had known the music all along. He could see the notes in front of him and he followed them with unerring fidelity. In his heart he had never felt closer to Chopin, whom he loved like a father. How strange his fingers felt after two weeks of not playing, as if the skin he wore now was entirely new. He could hear the softest click of his fingernails, two weeks too long, as he touched the keys. The felt-covered hammers tapped the strings gently at first, and the music, even for those who had never heard the piece before, was like a memory. From all over the house, terrorist and hostage alike turned and listened and felt a great easing in their chests. There was a delicacy about Tetsuya Kato’s hands, as if they were simply resting in one place on the keyboard and then in another. Then suddenly his right hand spun out notes like water, a sound so light and high that there was a temptation to look beneath the lid for bells. Kato closed his eyes so that he could imagine he was home, playing his own piano. His wife was asleep. His children, two unmarried sons still living with them, were asleep. For them the notes of Kato’s playing had become like air, what they depended on and had long since stopped noticing. Playing on this grand piano now Kato could imagine them sleeping and he put that into the nocturne, his sons’ steady breathing, his wife clutching her pillow with one hand. All of the tenderness he felt for them went into the keys. He touched them as if he meant not to wake them. It was the love and loneliness that each of them felt, that no one had brought himself to speak of. Had the accompanist played so well? It would have been impossible to remember, his talent was to be invisible, to lift the soprano up, but now the people in the living room of the vice-presidential mansion listened to Kato with hunger and nothing in their lives had ever fed them so well.