Bech (6 page)

“My God,” Bech said, “isn’t this ever going to be over? Don’t you Communists ever get tired of having fun?”

The writer’s wife told him, “For your money, you really gets.”

Petrescu and she conferred and decided it was time to go. One of the big wristwatches behind Bech said two o’clock. In leaving, they had to pass around the Chinese girls, who, each clad in a snug beige bikini, were concealing and revealing their bodies amid a weave of rippling colored flags. One of the girls glanced sideways at Bech, and he blew her a pert kiss, as if from a train window. Their golden bodies looked fragile to him; he felt that their bones, like the bones of birds, had evolved hollow, to save weight. At the mouth of the cave, the effeminate master of ceremonies, wearing a parrot headdress, was conferring with the hat-check girl. His intent was plainly
heterosexual; Bech’s head reeled at such duplicity. Though they added the weight of his coat to him, he rose like a balloon up the yellow stairs, bumped out through the green door, and stood beneath the street lamp inhaling volumes of the blue Rumanian night.

He felt duty-bound to confront the other writer. They stood, the two of them, on the cobbled pavement, as if on opposite sides of a transparent wall one side of which was lacquered with Scotch and the other with vodka. The other’s rimless glasses were misted and the resemblance to Teddy Roosevelt had been dissipated. Bech asked him, “What do you write about?”

The wife, patting her nose with a handkerchief and struggling not to cough, translated the question, and the answer, which was brief. “Peasants,” she told Bech. “He wants to know, what do
you
write about?”

Bech spoke to him directly. “
La bourgeoisie
,” he said; and that completed the cultural exchange. Gently bumping and rocking, the writer’s car took Bech back to his hotel, where he fell into the deep, unapologetic sleep of the sated.

The plane to Sofia left Bucharest the next morning. Petrescu and the ashen-faced chauffeur came into the tall
fin-de-siècle
dining room for Bech while he was still eating breakfast—
jus d’orange, des croissants avec du beurre
and
une omelette aux fines herbes
. Petrescu explained that the driver had gone back to the theatre, and waited until the ushers and the managers left, after midnight. But the driver did not seem resentful, and gave Bech, in the sallow morning light, a fractional smile, a
risus sardonicus
, in which his eyes did not participate. On the way to the airport, he scattered a flock of
chickens an old woman was coaxing across the road, and forced a military transport truck onto the shoulder, while its load of soldiers gestured and jeered. Bech’s stomach groveled, bathing the fine herbs of his breakfast in acid. The ceaseless tapping of the horn seemed a gnawing on all of his nerve ends. Petrescu made a fastidious mouth and sighed through his nostrils. “I regret,” he said, “that we did not make more occasion to discuss your exciting contemporaries.”

“I never read them. They’re too exciting,” Bech said, as a line of uniformed schoolchildren was narrowly missed, and a fieldworker with a wheelbarrow shuffled to safety, spilling potatoes. The day was overcast above the loamy sunken fields and the roadside trees in their skirts of white paint. “Why,” he asked, not having meant to be rude, “are all these tree trunks painted?”

“So they are,” Petrescu said. “I have not noticed this before, in all my years. Presumably it is a measure to defeat the insects.”

The driver spoke in Rumanian, and Petrescu told Bech, “He says it is for the car headlights, at night. Always he is thinking about his job.”

At the airport, all the Americans were there who had tried to meet Bech four days ago. Petrescu immediately delivered to Phillips, like a bribe, the name of the writer they had met last night, and Phillips said to Bech, “You spent the evening with
him
? That’s fabulous. He’s the top of the list, man. We’ve never laid a finger on him before; he’s been inaccessible.”

“Stocky guy with glasses?” Bech asked, shielding his eyes. Phillips was so pleased it was like a bright light too early in the day.

“That’s the boy. For our money he’s the hottest Red writer
this side of Solzhenitsyn. He’s
waaay
out. Stream of consciousness, no punctuation, everything. There’s even some sex.”

“You might say he’s Red hot,” Bech said.

“Huh? Yeah, that’s good. Seriously, what did he say to you?”

“He said he’ll defect to the West as soon as his shirts come back from the laundry.”

“And we went,” Petrescu said, “to La Caverne Bleue.”

“Say,” Phillips said, “you really went underground.”

“I think of myself,” Bech said modestly, “as a sort of low-flying U-2.”

“All kidding aside, Henry”—and here Phillips took Bech by the arms and squeezed—“it sounds as if you’ve done a sensational job for us. Sensational. Thanks, friend.”

Bech hugged everyone in parting—Phillips, the chargé d’affaires, the junior chargé d’affaires, the ambassador’s twelve-year-old nephew, who was taking archery lessons near the airport and had to be dropped off. Bech saved Petrescu for last, and walloped his back, for his escort had led him to remember, what he was tempted to forget in America, that reading can be the best part of a man’s life.

“I’ll send you razor blades,” he promised, for in the embrace Petrescu’s beard had scratched.

“No, no, I already buy the best. Send me books, any books!”

The plane was roaring to go, and only when safely, or fatally, sealed inside did Bech remember the chauffeur. In the flurry of formalities and baggage handling there had been no goodbye. Worse, there had been no tip. The leu notes Bech had set aside were still folded in his wallet, and his start of guilt gave way, as the runways and dark fields tilted and dwindled under him, to a glad sense of release. Clouds blotted out
the country. He realized that for four days there; in that driver’s care, he had been afraid. The man next to him, a portly Slav whose bald brow was beaded with apprehensive sweat, turned and confided something unintelligible, and Bech said, “
Pardon, je ne comprends pas. Je suis Américain
.”

THE BULGARIAN POETESS

“Y
OUR POEMS
. Are they difficult?”

She smiled and, unaccustomed to speaking English, answered carefully, drawing a line in the air with two delicately pinched fingers holding an imaginary pen. “They are difficult—to write.”

He laughed, startled and charmed. “But not to read?”

She seemed puzzled by his laugh, but did not withdraw her smile, though its corners deepened in a defensive, feminine way. “I think,” she said, “not so very.”

“Good.” Brainlessly he repeated “Good,” disarmed by her unexpected quality of truth. He was, himself, a writer, this fortyish young man, Henry Bech, with his thinning curly hair and melancholy Jewish nose, the author of one good book and three others, the good one having come first. By a kind of oversight, he had never married. His reputation had grown while his powers declined. As he felt himself sink, in his fiction, deeper and deeper into eclectic sexuality and bravura narcissism, as his search for plain truth carried him further
and further into treacherous realms of fantasy and, lately, of silence, he was more and more thickly hounded by homage, by flat-footed exegetes, by arrogantly worshipful undergraduates who had hitchhiked a thousand miles to touch his hand, by querulous translators, by election to honorary societies, by invitations to lecture, to “speak,” to “read,” to participate in symposia trumped up by ambitious girlie magazines in shameless conjunction with venerable universities. His very government, in airily unstamped envelopes from Washington, invited him to travel, as an ambassador of the arts, to the other half of the world, the hostile, mysterious half. Rather automatically, but with some faint hope of shaking himself loose from the burden of himself, he consented, and found himself floating, with a passport so stapled with visas it fluttered when pulled from his pocket, down into the dim airports of Communist cities.

He arrived in Sofia the day after a mixture of Bulgarian and African students had smashed the windows of the American legation and ignited an overturned Chevrolet. The cultural officer, pale from a sleepless night of guard duty, tamping his pipe with trembling fingers, advised Bech to stay out of crowds and escorted him to his hotel. The lobby was swarming with Negroes in black wool fezzes and pointed European shoes. Insecurely disguised, he felt, by an astrakhan hat purchased in Moscow, Bech passed through to the elevator, whose operator addressed him in German. “
Ja, vier
,” Bech answered, “
danke
,” and telephoned, in his bad French, for dinner to be brought up to his room. He remained there all night, behind a locked door, reading Hawthorne. He had lifted a paperback collection of short stories from a legation window sill littered with broken glass. A few curved bright crumbs fell from between the pages onto his blanket. The
image of Roger Malvin lying alone, dying, in the forest—“Death would come like the slow approach of a corpse, stealing gradually towards him through the forest, and showing its ghastly and motionless features from behind a nearer and yet a nearer tree”—frightened him. Bech fell asleep early and suffered from swollen, homesick dreams. It had been the first day of Hanukkah.

In the morning, venturing downstairs for breakfast, he was surprised to find the restaurant open, the waiters affable, the eggs actual, the coffee hot, though syrupy. Outside, Sofia was sunny and (except for a few dark glances at his big American shoes) amenable to his passage along the streets. Lozenge-patterns of pansies, looking flat and brittle as pressed flowers, had been set in the public beds. Women with a touch of Western
chic
walked hatless in the park behind the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov. There was a mosque, and an assortment of trolley cars salvaged from the remotest corner of Bech’s childhood, and a tree that talked—that is, it was so full of birds that it swayed under their weight and emitted volumes of chirping sound like a great leafy loudspeaker. It was the inverse of his hotel, whose silent walls presumably contained listening microphones. Electricity was somewhat enchanted in the Socialist world. Lights flickered off untouched and radios turned themselves on. Telephones rang in the dead of the night and breathed wordlessly in his ear. Six weeks ago, flying from New York City, Bech had expected Moscow to be a blazing counterpart and instead saw, through the plane window, a skein of hoarded lights no brighter, on that vast black plain, than a girl’s body in a dark room.

Past the talking tree was the American legation. The sidewalk, heaped with broken glass, was roped off, so that pedestrians had to detour into the gutter. Bech detached himself
from the stream, crossed the little barren of pavement, smiled at the Bulgarian militiamen who were sullenly guarding the jewel-bright heaps of shards, and pulled open the bronze door. The cultural officer was crisper after a normal night’s sleep. He clenched his pipe in his teeth and handed Bech a small list. “You’re to meet with the Writers’ Union at eleven. These are writers you might ask to see. As far as we can tell, they’re among the more progressive.”

Words like “progressive” and “liberal” had a somewhat reversed sense in this world. At times, indeed, Bech felt he had passed through a mirror, a dingy flecked mirror that reflected feebly the capitalist world; in its dim depths everything was similar but left-handed. One of the names ended in “-ova.” Bech said, “A woman.”

“A poetess,” the cultural officer said, sucking and tamping in a fury of bogus efficiency. “Very popular, apparently. Her books are impossible to buy.”

“Have you read anything by these people?”

“I’ll be frank with you. I can just about make my way through a newspaper.”

“But you always know what a newspaper will say anyway.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t get your meaning.”

“There isn’t any.” Bech didn’t quite know why the Americans he met behind the mirror irritated him—whether because they garishly refused to blend into this shadow-world or because they were always so solemnly sending him on ridiculous errands.

At the Writers’ Union, he handed the secretary the list as it had been handed to him, on U.S. legation stationery. The secretary, a large stooped man with the hands of a stonemason,
grimaced and shook his head but obligingly reached for the telephone. Bech’s meeting was already waiting in another room. It was the usual one, the one that, with small differences, he had already attended in Moscow and Kiev, Yerevan and Alma-Ata, Bucharest and Prague: the polished oval table, the bowl of fruit, the morning light, the gleaming glasses of brandy and mineral water, the lurking portrait of Lenin, the six or eight patiently sitting men who would leap to their feet with quick blank smiles. These men would include a few literary officials, termed “critics,” high in the Party, loquacious and witty and destined to propose a toast to international understanding; a few selected novelists and poets, mustachioed, smoking, sulking at this invasion of their time; a university professor, the head of the Anglo-American Literature department, speaking in a beautiful withered English of Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis; a young interpreter with a clammy handshake; a shaggy old journalist obsequiously scribbling notes; and, on the rim of the group, in chairs placed to suggest that they had invited themselves, one or two gentlemen of ill-defined status, fidgety and tieless, maverick translators who would turn out to be the only ones present who had ever read a word by Henry Bech.