There was Cesar, shaking, crying. Anyone else who climbed this tree he would have thrown out on his head. He would have kicked him hard under the chin and sent him flying. But the head that pulled itself up to him was Carmen’s and Carmen he liked. He thought she understood him because of how she clearly loved Roxane Coss. She was the luckiest of them all, getting to take up her breakfast, getting to sleep outside her door. （Because Carmen was completely discreet he knew nothing about the rest of it: that she had slept in Roxane’s bed, brushed her hair, that Carmen had smuggled Roxane’s lover to her in the middle of the night and held her confidence. Had he known all of that he might have imploded with jealousy.） And while no one should see him cry like he was still a child, it would be less than terrible if the person who saw him was Carmen. Before he fell in love with Roxane Coss, back before they ever came to the city, he thought constantly about how much he would have liked to kiss Carmen, kissed her and more, but he gave up on the idea after a sharp smack from General Hector. Such business was completely forbidden between soldiers.
“You sing so beautifully,” she said.
Cesar turned his face away from her. A small branch scraped lightly against his cheek. “I’m a fool,” he said into the leaves.
Carmen swung onto a branch across from him and clamped her legs around it. “Not a fool! You had to do it. You didn’t have any choice.” She could see the battered-down portion of grass from where she was now. It was different from this vantage point, larger and almost perfectly round, as if they had spun each other in great circles, which seemed possible. She could smell the grass in her hair. Love was action. It came to you. It was not a choice.
But Cesar would not look back at her. From where she was she could have seen over the wall if she had just stretched up a little bit. She did not.
“Roxane Coss sent me out to get you,” Carmen said. It was close enough to the truth. “She wants to talk to you about your singing. She thinks you’re very good.” She could say this because she knew he was very good and of course Roxane would tell him so. She did not understand anywhere near enough English to have deciphered what had been said in the living room, but she was developing a knack of figuring things out without having to know all the actual words.
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, too. The translator was there.”
“She said, stop. She said, enough. I understood what she said.” A bird swooped once past the tree, hoping to land, and then shot on.
“She wanted to talk to you. What does she know to say? You have to ask Gen for help. He’s the only way to understand anything.”
Cesar sniffed, blotted his eyes with his cuff. In the perfect world it would not be Carmen in this tree. It would be Roxane Coss herself who had followed him up there. She would be touching his cheek, speaking to him in perfect Spanish. They would sing together. The word for that was duet. They would travel all over the world.
“Well, you’re not a squirrel,” Carmen said. “You aren’t going to stay up here forever. You’ll have to come down for guard duty and when you do she’ll tell you herself with the translator. She’ll tell you how good you are and then you will feel like an idiot for sulking up here. Everyone wants to celebrate with you. You’ll miss out on everything.”
Cesar slid his hand over the rough bark. Carmen had never talked like this before. When they were in training together she was almost too shy to speak at all, that was one of the things that had made her so appealing. He had never heard her string two full sentences together. “How do you know all of this?”
“I told you, the translator.”
“And how do you know he tells you the truth?”
Carmen looked at him like he was crazy, but she didn’t say a word. She reached down for the branch beneath her, held on, let her feet fall, and then opened her hands to drop to the ground. She was an expert at jumping. She kept her knees soft and sprang straight up after her feet hit the grass. She did not lose her balance at all. She walked away from Cesar without so much as a glance over her shoulder. Let him rot up there. On her way back into the house she passed one of the windows that looked into the great living room. How strange it was to see it all from that side. She stopped for a while and stood beside a bush that had been so neatly shaped when they first arrived and now was almost as tall as she was. She could see Gen near the piano, talking to Roxane Coss and Mr. Hosokawa. Kato was there. She could see Gen, his straight back and tender mouth, his hands which had helped her out of her clothes and then folded her neatly back inside them again. She wished she could tap on the glass and wave to him, but it was a miraculous thing to be able to watch the person you love undetected, as if you were a stranger seeing them for the first time. She could see his beauty as someone who took nothing for granted. Look at that beautiful man, that brilliant man, he loves me. She said a prayer to Saint Rose of Lima. Safety for Gen. Happiness and a long life. Watch over him and guide him. She looked through the window. He was speaking to Roxane now, Roxane who had been so good to her, and so Carmen included her in the prayer. Then she bowed her head for a minute and quickly crossed herself, thus hurrying the prayer on its way.
“I shouldn’t have told him to stop,” Roxane said. Gen translated it into Japanese.
“There is no place for the boy to go,” Mr. Hosokawa said. “He will have to come back. You mustn’t worry about that.” In Japan, he was often made uneasy by this modern age of affection, young men and women holding hands in public, kissing good-bye on subway trains. There was nothing about these gestures he had understood. He had believed that what a man felt in his heart was a private matter and so should remain with him, but he had never had so much in his heart before. There wasn’t enough room for this much love and it left an aching sensation in his chest. Heartache! Who would have thought it was true? Now all he wanted was to take her hand or curve his arm around her shoulder.
Roxane Coss leaned towards him, dipped her head down to his shoulder just for a second, just long enough for her cheek to touch his shirt.
“Ah,” said Mr. Hosokawa softly. “You are everything in the world to me.”
Gen looked at him. Was that meant to be translated, the tenderness his employer whispered? Mr. Hosokawa took one of Roxane’s hands. He held it up to his chest, touched it to his shirt in the place above his heart. He nodded. Was he nodding to Gen? Was he telling Gen to go ahead? Or was he nodding to her? Gen felt a terrible discomfort. He wanted to turn away. It was a private matter. He knew what that meant now.
“Everything in the world,” Mr. Hosokawa said again, but this time he looked at Gen.
And so Gen told her. He tried to make his voice soft. “Respectfully,” he said to Roxane, “Mr. Hosokawa would like you to know that you are everything in the world to him.” He remembered saying something very similar to her from the Russian.
It was to her credit that Roxane never looked at Gen. She kept her eyes exactly on Mr. Hosokawa’s eyes and took the words from him.
Carmen came back. She was flustered and everyone thought it had to do with Cesar, when she had almost forgotten about Cesar. She wanted to go to Gen but she went first to General Benjamin. “Cesar is up in the tree,” she said. She started to say more but then she remembered herself. It was always wiser to wait.