Bech at Bay

by John Updike

  “Begins with ‘K,’ ” Bech helped him out.

  “ ‘X,’ in Russian orthography,” Syzygy politely corrected, hawking. “A guttural sound. But exactly so. Our friends, how can I say—?”

  “I know who your friends are.”

  “Our friends would never permit such an impudent passage to appear in an official publication, even though the statesman in question himself died in not such good official odor. Yet I cannot bring myself to delete even a word of a text that has become to me, so to speak, sacred. I am not religious but now I know how certain simple souls regard the Bible.”

  Bech waved his hand magnanimously. “Oh, take it out. I forget why I popped it in. Probably because Khrushchev struck me as porcine and fitted the theme. Anything for the theme, that’s the way we American writers do it. You understand the word, ‘porcine’?”

  Syzygy stiffened. “But of course.”

  Bech tried to love this man, who loved him, or at least loved a version of him that he had constructed. “You take anything out or put anything in that will make it easier for you,” he said. But this was bad, since it implied (correctly) that how Bech read in Czech couldn’t matter to him less. He asked, apologetically, “But if you are in, as we say, not such good odor yourself with our friends, how do you expect to get your translation published?”

  “I am published!” Syzygy said. “Often, but under fictitious names. Even the present regime needs translations. You see,” he said, sensing Bech’s wish to peer into the structure of it all, “there are layers.” His voice grew more quiet, more precise. “There is inside and outside, and some just this side of outside have friends just on the inside, and so on. Also, it is not as if—” His very white hands again made, above his untouched soup, that curt helpless gesture.

  “As if the present system of government was all your idea,” Bech concluded for him, by “your” meaning “Czechoslovakia’s.”

  The Ambassador, as they walked along cobblestones one night to a restaurant, felt free outdoors to express his opinion on this very subject. “Up until sixty-eight,” he said in his rapid and confident entrepreneurial way, seeing the realities at a glance, “it was interesting to be an intellectual here, because to a degree they had done it to themselves: most of them, and the students, were for Gottwald when he took over for the Communists in forty-eight. They were still thinking of thirty-eight, when the Germans were the problem. But after sixty-eight and the tanks, they became an occupied country once more, as they were under the Hapsburgs, with no responsibility for their own fate. It became just a matter of power, of big countries versus little ones, and there’s nothing intellectually interesting about that, now is there, professor?”

  Addressed thus ironically, Bech hesitated, trying to picture the situation. In his limited experience—and isn’t all American experience intrinsically limited, by something thin in our sunny air?—power was boring, except when you yourself needed it. It was not boring to beat Hitler, but it had become boring to outsmart, or be outsmarted by, the Russians. Reagan was no doubt President because he was the last American who, imbued with the black-and-white morality of the movies, still found it exciting.

  “I mean,” the Ambassador said impatiently, “I’m no intellectual, so tell me if I’m way off base.”

  Bech guessed the little man simply wanted flattery, a human enough need. Bech sopped it up all day in Czechoslovakia while the Ambassador was dealing with the calculated insults of European diplomacy. “You’re right on, Mr. Ambassador, as usual. Without guilt, there is no literature.”

  The Ambassador’s wife was walking behind, with the wife of the Akron couple and the fashionable photographer’s young assistant; their heels on the cobbles were like gunfire. The wife from Akron, named Annie, was also blonde, scratchy-voiced, and sexy with that leggy flip shiksa sexiness which for Bech was the glowing center of his American patriotism. For purple mountain majesties raced through his mind when the two women laughed, displaying their healthy gums, their even teeth, for amber waves of grain.

  He was happy—so happy tears crept into his eyes, aided by the humid wind of this Prague spring—to be going out to a restaurant without having to sign books or talk to students about Whitman and Melville, the palefaces and red men, the black-humor movement, imperial fiction, and now the marvellous minimalists, the first wave of writers raised entirely within the global village, away from the malign influences of Gutenbergian literacy. Idolized Bech loved, at the end of a long day impersonating himself, being just folks: the shuffle around the table as he and his fellow Americans pragmatically tried to seat themselves, the inane and melodious gabble, the two American women sinking their white teeth into vodka fizzes, the headwaiter and the Ambassador enjoying their special, murmurous relationship. The husband from Akron, like the Ambassador a stocky businessman, sat nodding off, zombified by jet lag. They had flown from Cleveland to New York, New York to London, London to Frankfurt, rented a Mercedes, driven through the night, and been held six hours at the Czech border because among their papers had been discovered a letter from their hostess that included a sketchy map of downtown Prague. Communists hate maps. Why is that? Why do they so instinctively loathe anything that makes for clarity and would help orient the human individual? Bech wondered if there had ever before been regimes so systematically committed to perpetuating ignorance. Then he thought of another set: the Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe.

  The Ambassador announced, “My friend Karel here”—the headwaiter—“informs me that several busloads of Germans have made reservations tonight and suggests we might want to move to the back room.” To Bech he explained, “This is the only country in Europe both West Germans and East Germans have easy access to. They get together in these restaurants and drink pilsner and sing.”

  “Sing?”

  “Oh boy, do they sing. They crack the rafters.”

  “How do the Czechs like that?”

  “They hate it,” the square-faced man said with his urchin smile.

  The restaurant was in a vast wine cellar once attached to somebody’s castle. They woke up the dozing Akron husband and moved to a far recess, a plastered vault where only the Ambassador could stand upright without bumping his head. Whereas Mr. Akron kept falling asleep, his wife was full of energy; she and the Ambassador’s wife had sat up till dawn catching up on Ohio gossip, and then she had spent the day seeing all the available museums, including those devoted to Smetana and Dvořák and the one, not usually visited by Americans, that displayed the diabolical items of espionage confiscated at the border. Now, exhilarated by being out of Akron, Annie still maintained high animation, goading the Ambassador’s wife into a frenzy of girlish glee. They had gone to the same summer camp and private school, come out at the same country-club cotillion, and dropped out the same year of Oberlin to marry their respective Republican husbands. Bech felt it a failing in himself, one further inroad of death, that he found there being two of them, these perfect Midwestern beauties, somehow dampening to his desire: it halved rather than doubled it. The thought of being in bed with four such cornflower-blue eyes, a quartet of such long scissoring legs, a pair of such grainy triangular tongues, and two such vivacious, game, fun-loving hearts quailed his spirit, like the thought of submitting to the gleaming apparatus in Kafka’s story about the penal colony. Annie, on her second vodka fizz, was being very funny about the confiscated devices displayed in the border museum—radio transmitters disguised as candy bars, poison-dart fountain pens, Playboys from the era when pubic hair was still being airbrushed out—but gradually her lips moved without sound emerging, for the Germans had begun to sing. Though they were out of sight in another part of the subterranean restaurant, their combined voices were strong enough to make the brickwork vibrate as the little low nook cupped the resonating sound. Bech shouted in the Ambassador’s ear, “What are they singing about?”

  “Der Deutschland!” the answer came back. “Mountains! Drinking!”

  When the united German cho
rus began to thump their beer mugs on the tables, and then thump the tables on the floor, circular vibrations appeared in Bech’s mug of pilsner. The noise was not exactly menacing, Bech decided; it was simply unconsciously, helplessly large. The Germans in Europe were like a fat man who seats himself, with a happy sigh, in the middle of an already crowded sofa. The Czech waiters darted back and forth, wagging their heads and rolling their eyes in silent protest, and a gypsy band, having made a few stabs at roving the tables, retreated to a dark corner with glasses of brandy. Gypsies: Bech looked among them for the curly head, the skinny sallow shoulders of his dissident friend, who had talked so movingly about books, but saw only mustachioed dark men, looking brandy-soaked and defeated.

  Next day—there seemed to be endless such days, when Bech awakened at his end of the palatial arc, shuffled in his bare feet across the parquet, through a room in which fresh flowers had always been placed, to the brassy, rumbling bathroom, and then breakfasted in enchanted solitude, like a changeling being fed nectar by invisible fairies, and took his proprietorial stroll along the oval path, bestowing terse nods of approval upon the workmen—he had an appointment to meet some literary officials, the board of the publishing house that dealt with foreign translations. Out of loyalty to the dissidents he had met earlier in his visit, he expected to be scornful of these apparatchiks, who would no doubt be old, with hairy ears and broad Soviet neckties. But in truth they were a young group, younger by a generation than the weary dissidents. The boy who seemed to be chairman of the board had been to UCLA and spoke with an oddly super-American accent, like that of a British actor playing O’Neill, and his associates, mostly female, stared at Bech with brighter eyes and smiles more avidly amused than any that had greeted him among the dissidents—to whom he had been, perhaps, as curious in his insignificant freedom as they to him in their accustomed state of danger and melancholy indignation. These young agents of the establishment, contrariwise, were experts in foreign literature and knew him and his context well. They boasted to him of American writers they had translated and published—Bellow, Kerouac, Styron, Vidal—and showed him glossy copies, with trendy covers.

  “Burroughs, too, and John Barth,” a young woman proudly told him; she had a mischievous and long-toothed smile and might, it seemed to Bech, have gypsy blood. “We like very much the experiment, the experimental. William Gaddis, Joan Didion, the abrupt harsh texture. In English can you say that? ‘Abrupt texture?’ ”

  “Sure,” said Bech. “In English, almost anything goes.” It embarrassed him that for these young Czechs American writing, its square dance of lame old names, should appear such a lively gavotte, prancing carefree into the future.

  “Pray tell us,” another, pudgier, flaxen-haired young woman said, “of whom we should be especially conscious among the newer wave.”

  “I’m not sure there is a new wave,” Bech admitted. “Just more and more backwash. The younger writers I meet look pretty old to me. You know about the minimalists?”

  “And how,” the chairman of the board said. “Abish, Beattie, Carver—we’re doin’ ’em all.”

  “Well,” Bech sighed, “you’re way ahead of me. Newer wave than that, you’ll have to dig right down into the fiction workshops. There are thousands of them, all across the country; it’s the easiest way to get through college.”

  “Less Than Zero,” the blonde pronounced, “was evidently composed in one such class of instruction.”

  The chairman laughed. “Like, really. He does a fantastic job on that sick scene.”

  “Good title,” Bech admitted. “After the minimalists, what can there be but blank paper? It’ll be a relief, won’t it?”

  The long-toothed woman laughed, sexily. “You talk the cynic, as Mortimer Zenith in Velká myšlenka. Perhaps, we think here, this novel, with its ironical title Think Big, departs your accustomed method. Is your first attempt at post-literary literature, the literature of exhaustion.”

  “It seemed that bad to you?” Bech asked.

  “That good, man,” interposed the chairman of the board.

  “Whereas Travel Light was your experiment in the Beatnik school,” pursued the mischievous dark woman, “and Brother Pig your magic realism.”

  “Speaking of Brother Pig—”

  “Is ready to print!” she interrupted gaily. “We have fixed the pub date—that is the expression?—for this autumn that is coming.”

  Bech continued, “I’ve met a man, a translator—”

  The next interruption came from a slightly older man, nearly bald and so thin-skinned as to appear translucent, at the far end of the table. Bech had not hitherto noticed him. “We know and value the work,” he smoothly said, “of your friend Comrade Syzygy.”

  Bech took this to mean that they were using Syzygy’s labor-of-love translation, and the Pragspring lambs were lying down with the Husák lions, and the levels of this mysterious fractured society were melding and healing beneath his own beneficent influence. With so pleasant a sensation warming Bech’s veins, he was emboldened to say, “There’s one novel of mine you never mention here. Yet it’s my longest and you could say my most ambitious—The Chosen.”

  The members of the board glanced at one another. “Vyvolení,” the sexy long-toothed girl, dropping her smile, explained to the nearly bald, thin-skinned man.

  In the face of their collective silence, Bech blushed and said, “Maybe it’s a terrible book. A lot of American critics thought so.”

  “Oh, no, sir,” the little blonde said, her own color rising. “Henry Bech does not produce terrible books. It is more a matter—” She could not finish.

  The dark one spoke, her smile restored but the sparkle banished from her eyes by a careful dullness. “It is that we are feeling Vyvolení is for the general Czech reader too—”

  “Too special,” the chairman of the board supplied, quite pleased at having found the exact shade of prevarication within the English language.

  “Too Jewish,” Bech translated.

  In chorus, somewhat like the Germans singing, the board reassured him that nothing could be too Jewish, that modern Czechoslovakia paid no attention to such things, that the strain of Jewish-American literary expression was greatly cherished in all progressive countries. Nevertheless, and though the meeting ended with fervent and affectionate handshakes all around, Bech felt he had blundered into that same emptiness he had felt when standing in the crammed Old Jewish Cemetery, near the clock that ran backwards. He knew now why he felt so fond of the Ambassador and his wife, so safe in the Residence, and so subtly reluctant to leave. He was frightened of Europe. The historical fullness of Prague, layer on layer, castles and bridges and that large vaulted hall with splintered floorboards where jousts and knightly elections used to be held; museums holding halls of icons and cases of bluish Bohemian glass and painted panoramas of the saga of the all-enduring Slavs; tilted streets of flaking plasterwork masked by acres of scaffolding; that clock in Old Town Square where with a barely audible whirring a puppet skeleton tolls the hour and the twelve apostles and that ultimate bogeyman Jesus Christ twitchily appear in two little windows above and, one by one, bestow baleful wooden stares upon the assembled tourists; the incredible visual pâtisserie of baroque church interiors, mock-marble pillars of paint-veined gesso melting upward into trompel’oeil ceilings bubbling with cherubs, everything gilded and tipped and twisted and skewed to titillate the eye, huge wedding-cake interiors meant to stun Hussite peasants back into the bosom of Catholicism—all this overstuffed Christian past afflicted Bech like a void, a chasm that he could float across in the dew-fresh mornings as he walked the otherwise untrod oval path but which, over the course of each day, like pain inflicted under anaesthesia, worked terror upon his subconscious. The United States has its rough spots—if the muggers don’t get your wallet, the nursing homes will—but it’s still a country that never had a pogrom.

  More fervently than he was a Jew, Bech was a writer, a literary man, and in this dimension, too, h
e felt cause for unease. He was a creature of the third person, a character. A character suffers from the fear that he will become boring to the author, who will simply let him drop, without so much as a terminal illness or a dramatic tumble down the Reichenbach Falls in the arms of Professor Moriarty. For some years now, Bech had felt his author wanting to set him aside, to get him off the desk forever. Rather frantically hoping still to amuse, Bech had developed a new set of tricks, somewhat out of character—he had married, he had written a best-seller. Nevertheless, and especially as his sixties settled around him, as heavily as an astronaut’s suit, he felt boredom from above dragging at him; he was—as H. G. Wells put it in a grotesquely cheerful acknowledgment of his own mortality that the boy Bech had read back when everything in print impressed him—an experiment whose chemicals were about to be washed down the drain. The bowls in his palace bathroom had voracious drains, gulping black holes with wide brass rims, like greedy bottomless bull’s-eyes. Ne, ne!

  Around him in Czechoslovakia things kept happening. Little Akron Annie returned from a shopping expedition in the countryside with an old-fashioned sled, of bright-yellow wood, with the fronts of the runners curved up like a ram’s horns. Her children back in Ohio would love it. The photographer and his assistant had a fearful spat in French and German, and the boy disappeared for a night and came creeping back to the Residence with a black eye. The Ambassador, taking his wispy daughter with him, had to drive to Vienna for a conference with all the American ambassadors of Central Europe for a briefing on our official stance in case Kurt Waldheim, a former assistant killer of Jews, was elected President of Austria. There was, in his unavoidable absence, a reception at the Residence; Bech gave a talk, long scheduled and advertised, on “American Optimism as Evinced in the Works of Melville, Bierce, and Nathanael West,” and the Ambassador’s wife introduced him.