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.Not that it mattered, the game was in the other room.“Why is it our responsibility to make every concession? Are we expected to give up just because we have such a long history of giving things up? I am trying to free the men I know from prison.I am not trying to join them.It is not my intention to put my soldiers down in those caves.I would sooner see them dead and buried.”You might see them dead, Messner thought, but you won’t have the chance to see them buried.He sighed.There was no such place as Switzerland.Truly, time had stopped.He had always been here and he would always be here.“I’m afraid those are your two choices,” he said.“The meeting is over.” General Benjamin stood up.You could chart the course of this story on his skin, which was burning now.The shingles flared with every word he spoke and every word he listened to.“It cannot be over.We have to keep talking until we reach some agreement, that is imperative.I am begging you to think about this.”“Messner, what else do I do all day?” the General said, and then he left the room.Messner and Gen sat alone in the guest bedroom suite, where hostages were not allowed to sit without guards.They listened to the small French enamel clock strike the hour of noon.“I don’t think I can stand this anymore,” Messner said after several minutes had passed.Stand what? Gen knew that everything was getting better and not just for him.People were happier.Look, they were outside right now.He could see them from the windows, running.“It is a standoff,” Gen said.“Maybe a permanent one.If they keep us here forever, we’ll manage.”“Are you insane?” Messner said.“You were the brightest one here once, and now you’re as crazy as the rest of them.What do you think, that they’ll just keep the wall up and pretend this is a zoo, bring in your food, charge money for tickets? ‘See defenseless hostages and vicious terrorists live together in peaceful coexistence.’ It doesn’t just go on.Someone puts a stop to it and there needs to be a decision as to who will be in charge of the stopping.”“Do you think the military has plans?”Messner stared at him.“Just because you’re in here doesn’t mean the rest of the world just shut down.”“So they will arrest them?”“At best.”“The Generals?”“All of them.”But all of them could not possibly include Carmen.It could not include Beatriz or Ishmael or Cesar.When Gen scanned the list he couldn’t think of one he would be willing to give up, even the bullies and the fools.He would marry Carmen.He would have Father Arguedas marry them and it would be legal and binding, so that when they came for them he could say she was his wife.But that would only save one, albeit the most important one.For the others he had no ideas.How had he come to want to save all of them? The people who followed him around with loaded guns.How had he fallen in love with so many people? “What do we do?” Gen said.“You can try to talk them into giving up,” Messner said.“But honestly, I’m not even sure what good it would do them.”All his life, Gen had worked to learn, the deep rolling R in Italian, the clutter of vowels in Danish.As a child in Nagano, he sat in the kitchen on a high stool, repeating his mother’s American accent while she chopped vegetables for dinner.She had gone to school in Boston and spoke French as well as English.His father’s father worked in China as a young man and so his father spoke Chinese and had studied Russian in college.In his childhood, it seemed that language changed on the hour and no one was better at keeping up than Gen.He and his sisters played with words instead of toys.He studied and read, printed nouns onto index cards, listened to language tapes on the subway.He did not stop.Even if he was a natural polyglot, he never relied solely on talent.He learned.Gen was born to learn.But these last months had turned him around and now Gen saw there could be as much virtue in letting go of what you knew as there had ever been in gathering new information.He worked as hard at forgetting as he had ever worked to learn.He managed to forget that Carmen was a soldier in the terrorist organization that had kidnapped him.That was not an easy task.Every day he forced himself to practice until he was able to look at Carmen and only see the woman he loved.He forgot about the future and past.He forgot about his country, his work, and what would become of him when all of this was over.He forgot that the way he lived now would ever be over.And Gen wasn’t the only one.Carmen forgot, too.She did not remember her direct orders to form no emotional bonds to the hostages.When she found it was a struggle to let such important knowledge slip from her memory, the other soldiers helped her forget.Ishmael forgot because he wanted to be the other son of Ruben Iglesias and an employee of Oscar Mendoza.He could picture himself sharing a bedroom with Ruben’s son, Marco, and being a helpful older brother to the boy.Cesar forgot because Roxane Coss had said he could come with her to Milan and learn to sing.How easy it was to imagine himself on a stage with her, a rain of tender blossoms pouring down on their feet [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]