Ishmael’s knife was heavy and long. Which of them wielded a paring knife for self-defense? Who had taken the grapefruit knife? When he tried to remove the skin he wound up cutting three inches into the spongy yellow flesh. Thibault watched him for a while and then held out his hands. “Not like that,” he said. “There will be nothing to eat. Here, give them here.”
Ishmael stopped, examined his work, then he held out the butchered vegetable and the knife. He held the blade out to Thibault. What did he know about kitchen manners? Then Thibault had them both, the knife and the eggplant, one in each hand. Deftly, quickly, he began to peel back the skin.
“Drop it!” Beatriz shouted. On calling out she dropped her own knife, the blade slick with onions, a shower of minced onions scattering onto the floor like a wet, heavy snow. She pulled her gun from her belt and raised it up to the Ambassador.
“Jesus!” Ruben said.
Thibault did not understand what he had done. He thought at first she was angry that he had corrected the boy on his peeling. He thought the problem was with the eggplant and so he laid the eggplant down first and then the knife.
“Keep your voice down,” Carmen said to Beatriz in Quechua. “You’re going to get us all in trouble.”
“He took the knife.”
Thibault raised up his empty hands, showed his smooth palms to the gun.
“I handed him the knife,” Ishmael said. “I gave it to him.”
“He was only going to peel,” Gen said. He could not recognize a word of this language they spoke to one another.
“He isn’t supposed to hold the knife,” Beatriz said in Spanish. “The General told us that. Doesn’t anyone listen?” She kept her gun aimed, her heavy eyebrows pointed down. Her eyes were starting to water from the fumes of the onions, and soon there were tears washing over her cheeks, which everyone misunderstood.
“What about this?” Thibault began quietly, keeping his hands up. “Everyone can stand away from me and I can show Ishmael how to peel an eggplant. You keep your gun right on me and if it looks like I’m about to do something funny you may shoot me. You may shoot Gen, too, if I do something terrible.”
Carmen put down her knife.
“I don’t think—” Gen started, but no one was paying attention to him. He felt a small, cold hardness in his chest, like the pit of a cherry had slipped into his heart. He did not want to be shot and he did not want to be offered up to be shot.
“I can shoot you?” Beatriz said. It wasn’t his place to give permission, was it? It had not been her intention to shoot anyone anyway.
“Go ahead,” Ishmael said, taking out his own gun and pointing it at the Ambassador. He was trying to keep his face serious but he wasn’t having much luck. “I’ll shoot you, too, if I have to. Show me how to peel the eggplant. I’ve shot men over less than an eggplant.” Berenjena, that was the word in Spanish. A beautiful word. It could be a woman’s name.
So Thibault picked up the knife and set about his work. His hands stayed remarkably steady as he peeled with two guns pointed on him. Carmen did not participate. She went back to mincing the garlic, hitting her knife against the board in brisk, angry strokes. Thibault kept his eyes on the deep luster of the purple-black skin. “It’s difficult to do with a knife this large. You want to slide it just under the surface. Pretend that you’re skinning a fish. See that. Very fluid. It’s delicate work.” All that was lovely about the eggplant fell into ribbons on the floor.
There was something soothing about it, the way it all came out so neatly. “Okay,” Ishmael said. “I understand. Give it to me now.” He put down his gun and held out his hands. Thibault turned the knife, gave him the smooth wooden handle and another eggplant. What would Edith say when she heard he had been shot over an eggplant or turning on the television? If he was going to die he had hoped for a little bit of honor in his death.
“Well,” Ruben said, wiping his face with a dishtowel. “Nothing around here is a small event.”
Beatriz mopped up her tears against the dark green sleeve of her jacket. “Onions,” she said, pushing the newly oiled gun back into her belt.
“I’d be happy to do them for you if at any point you deem me capable,” Thibault said, and went to wash his hands.
Gen stood next to the sink trying to decide the best way to phrase his question. Any way it was put it seemed impolite. He spoke to Thibault in French. He whispered, “Why did you tell her she could shoot me?”
“Because they wouldn’t shoot you. They all like you too much. It was a harmless gesture on my part. I thought it gave me more credibility. Telling her she could shoot me, now that was a risk. They care nothing for me and they think the world of you. It’s not like I told them they could shoot poor Ruben. That girl might want to shoot Ruben.”
“Still,” Gen said. He wanted to be firm on this point but he felt it slipping away from him. Sometimes he suspected he was the weakest person in captivity.
“I hear you gave her your wristwatch.”
“Who told you that?”
“Everybody knows. She flashes it around every chance she gets. Would she shoot the man who gave her his watch?”
“Well, that’s what we don’t know.”
Thibault dried his hands and looped a careless arm around Gen’s neck. “I would never let them shoot you, no more than I’d let them shoot my own brother. I’ll tell you what, Gen, when this is over, you’ll come and visit us in Paris. The second this is over I’m resigning my post and Edith and I are moving back to Paris. When you feel like traveling again, you will bring Mr. Hosokawa and Roxane. You can marry one of my daughters if you want to, then you would be my son rather than my brother.” He leaned forward and whispered in Gen’s ear, “This will all seem very funny to us then.”
Gen inhaled Thibault’s breath. He tried to take in some of the courage, some of the carelessness. He tried to believe that one day they would all be in Paris in the Thibaults’ apartment, but he couldn’t picture it. Thibault kissed Gen beside his left eye and then let him go. He went off in search of a roasting pan.
“Speaking in French,” Ruben said to Gen. “That’s very impolite.”
“How is French impolite?”
“Because everyone here speaks Spanish. I can’t remember the last time I was in a room where everyone spoke the same language and then you go off speaking some language I failed in high school.” And it was true, when they spoke in Spanish no one in the kitchen waited for anything to be explained, no one was forced to stare vacantly while the others tore through unintelligible sentences. No one wondered suspiciously if what was being said was in fact something horrible about them. Of the six people in the room, Spanish was a first language only for Ruben. Gen spoke Japanese, Thibault French, and the three with the knives had first learned Quechua in their village and then a hybrid of Spanish and Quechua together from which they could comb out the Spanish with varying degrees of success.
“You could take the day off,” Ishmael said to the translator, a tough rubber spiral of eggplant skin dangling from his knife. “You don’t have to stay.”