by John Updike
“Taxi, non,” Bech exclaimed, struggling to rise. “Marcher, oui. Je pars, maintenant. Vous le regretterez, quand je suis disparu. Au revoir, cher Pierre.”
“You can’t walk it, man. It’s miles.”
“Try me, you post-print punk,” Bech said, putting up his hairy fists.
Glenda escorted him to the stairs and down them, one by one; at the foot, she embraced him, clinging to him as if to be rendered fertile by osmosis. “I thought he was in Winnipeg,” she said. “I want to have your baby.”
“Easy does it,” Bech wanted to say. The best he could do was, “Facile le fait.”
Glenda asked, “Will you ever come back to Toronto?”
“Jamais,” Bech said, “jamais, jamais,” and the magical word, so true of every moment, of every stab at love, of every step on ground you will not walk again, rang in his mind all the way back to the hotel. The walk was generally downhill. The curved lights of the great city hall guided him. There was a forested ravine off to his left, and a muffled river. And stars. And block after block of substantial untroubled emptiness. He expected to be mugged, or at least approached. In his anesthetized state, he would have welcomed violence. But in those miles he met only blinking stop lights and impassive architecture. And they call this a city, Bech thought scornfully. In New York, I would have been killed six times over and my carcass stripped of its hubcaps.
The cries of children playing woke him. The sound of the flute at last had ceased. Last night’s pleasure had become straw in his mouth; the woman beside him seemed a larger sort of dreg. Her eyelids fluttered, as if in response to the motions of his mind. It seemed only polite to reach for her. The children beneath the window cheered.
Next morning, in Toronto, Bech shuffled, footsore, to the Royal Ontario Museum and admired the Chinese urns and the totem poles and sent a postcard of a carved walrus tusk to Bea and her three children.
Downstairs, in Sydney, Moira was up, fiddling with last night’s dishes and whistling to herself. Bech recognized the tune. “Where’s Peter?” he asked.
“He’s gone,” she said. “He doesn’t believe you exist. We waited up hours for you last night and you never came home.”
“We were home,” Hannah said.
“Oh, it dawned on us finally.” She elaborated: “Peter was so moody I told him to leave. I think he still loves you and has been leading this poor lass astray.”
“What do you like for breakfast?” Hannah asked Bech, as wearily as if she and not he had been awake all night. Himself, he felt oddly fit, for being fifty and on the underside of the world. “Tell me about Afghanistan—should I go there?” he said to Moira, and he settled beside her on the carpeted divan while Hannah, in her lumpy blue robe, shuffled in the kitchen, making his breakfast. “Grapefruit if you have it,” he shouted to her, interrupting the start of Moira’s word tour of Kabul. “Otherwise, orange juice.” My God, he thought to himself, she has become my wife. Already I’m flirting with another woman.
Bech boarded the plane (from Australia, from Canada) so light-headed with lack of sleep it alarmed him hardly at all when the machine rose into the air. His stomach hurt as if lined with grit, his face looked gray in the lavatory mirror. His adventures seemed perilous, viewed backward. Mysterious diseases, strange men laughing in the night, loose women. He considered the nation he was returning to: its riots and scandals, its sins and power and gnashing metal. He thought of Bea, his plump suburban softy, her belly striated with fine silver lines, and vowed to marry her, to be safe.
THE HOLY LAND
I NEVER SHOULD have married a Christian, Bech thought, fighting his way up the Via Dolorosa. His bride of some few months, Beatrice Latchett (formerly Cook) Bech, and the Jesuit archaeologist that our Jewish-American author’s hosts at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim had provided as guide to the Christian holy sites—a courtly Virgil to Bech’s disbelieving Dante—kept getting ahead of him, their two heads, one blond and one bald, piously murmuring together as Bech fell behind in the dusty jostle of nuns and Arab boys, of obese Protestant pilgrims made bulkier still by airline tote bags. The incessant procession was watched by bored gaunt merchants with three-day beards as they stood before their souvenir shops. Their dark accusing sorrow plucked at Bech. His artist’s eye, always, was drawn to the irrelevant: the overlay of commercialism upon this ancient sacred way fascinated him—Kodachrome where Christ stumbled, bottled Fanta where He thirsted. Scarves, caftans, olive-wood knickknacks begged to be bought. As a child, Bech had worried that merchants would starve; Union Avenue in Williamsburg, near where his uncles lived on South Second Street, had been lined with disregarded narrow shops, a Kafka world of hunger artists waiting unwatched in their cages. This was worse.
Père Gibergue had confirmed what Bea already knew from her guidebooks: the route Jesus took from Pilate’s verdict to Golgotha was highly problematical, and in any case, all the streets of first-century Jerusalem were buried under twelve feet of rubble and subsequent paving. So they and their fellow pilgrims were in effect treading on air. The priest, wearing flared slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, stopped to let Bech catch up, and pointed out to him overhead a half-arch dating, it seemed certain, from the time of Herod. The other half of the arch was buried, lost, behind a gray façade painted with a polyglot array in which Bech could read the word GIFTS. Bea’s face, beside the tanned face of the archaeologist, looked radiantly pale. She was lightly sweating. Her guidebook was clutched to her blouse like a missal. “Isn’t it all wonderful?” she asked her husband.
Bech said, “I never realized what a big shot Herod was. I thought he was just something on the back of a Christmas card.”
Père Gibergue, in his nearly flawless English, pronounced solemnly, “He was a crazy man, but a great builder.” There was something unhappy about the priest’s nostrils, Bech thought; otherwise, his vocation fit him like a smooth silk glove.
“There were several Herods,” Bea interposed. “Herod the Great was the slaughter-of-the-innocents man. His son Herod Antipas was ruling when Jesus was crucified.”
“Wherever we dig now, we find Herod,” Père Gibergue said, and Bech thought, Science has seduced this man. In his archaeological passion, he has made a hero of a godless tyrant. Jerusalem struck Bech as the civic embodiment of conflicted loyalties. At first, deplaning with Bea and being driven at night from the airport to the Holy City through occupied territory, he had been struck by the darkness of the land, an intended wartime dark such as he had not seen since his GI days, in the tense country nightscapes of England and Normandy. Their escort, the son of American Zionists who had emigrated in the Thirties, spoke of the convoys that had been forced along this highway in the ’67 war, and pointed out some hilly places where the Jordanian fire had been especially deadly. Wrecked tanks and trucks, unseeable in the dark, had been left as monuments. Bech remembered, as their car sped vulnerably between the black shoulders of land, the rapt sensation (which for him had been centered in the face, the mouth more than the eyes—had he been more afraid of losing his teeth than his sight?) of being open to bullets, which there was no dodging. Before your brain could register anything, the damage would be done. Teeth shattered, the tongue torn loose, blood gushing through the punctured palate.
Then, as the car entered realms of light—the suburbs of Jerusalem—Bech was reminded of southern California, where he had once gone on a fruitless flirtation with some movie producers, who had been unable to wrap around his old novel Travel Light a package the banks would buy. Here were the same low houses and palm fronds, the same impression of staged lighting, exclusively frontal, as if the backs of these buildings dissolved into unpainted slats and rotting canvas, into weeds and warm air: that stagnant, balmy, expectant air of Hollywood when the sun goes down. The Mishkenot—the official city guesthouse, where this promising fifty-two-year-old writer and his plump Protestant wife were to stay for three weeks—seemed solidly built of the same stuff of cinematic illusion: Jerusalem limestone, artfully pitted by the
mason’s chisel, echoing like the plasterboard corridors of a Cecil B. De Mille temple to the ritual noises of weary guests unpacking. A curved staircase of mock-Biblical masonry led up to an alcove where a desk, a map, a wastebasket, and a sofa awaited his meditations. Bech danced up and down these stairs with an enchantment born in cavernous movie palaces; he was Bojangles, he was Astaire, he was George Sanders, wearing an absurd headdress and a sneer, exulting in the captivity and impending torture of a white-limbed maiden who, though so frightened her jewels chatter, will not forswear her Jahweh. Israel had no other sentimental significance for him; his father, a 47th Street diamond merchant, had lumped the Zionists with all the Luftmenschen who imagined that mollifying exceptions might be stitched into the world’s cruel and necessary patchwork of competition and exploitation. To postwar Bech, busy in Manhattan, events in Palestine had passed as one more mop-up scuffle, though involving a team with whom he identified as effortlessly as with the Yankees.
Bea, an Episcopalian, was enraptured simply at being on Israel’s soil. She kept calling it “the Holy Land.” In the morning, she woke him to share what she saw: through leaded windows, the Mount of Olives, tawny and cypress-strewn, and the silver bulbs of a Russian church gleaming in the Garden of Gethsemane. “I never thought I’d be here, ever,” she told him, and as she turned, her face seemed still to brim with reflected morning light. Bech kissed her and over her shoulder read a multilingual warning not to leave valuables on the window sill.
“Why didn’t you ask Rodney to bring you,” he asked, “if it meant so much?”
“Oh, Rodney. His idea of a spiritual adventure was to go backpacking in Maine.”
Bech had married this woman in a civil ceremony in lower Manhattan on an April afternoon of unseasonable chill and spitting snow. She was the younger, gentler sister of a mistress he had known for years and with whom he had always fought. He and Bea rarely fought, and at his age this appeared possibly propitious. He had married her to escape his famous former self. He had given up his apartment at 99th and Riverside—an address consecrated by twenty years of Who’s Whos—to live with Bea in Ossining, with her twin girls and only son. These abrupt truths, still strange, raced through his mind as he contemplated the radiant stranger whom the world called his wife. “Why didn’t you tell me,” he asked her now, “you took this kind of thing so much to heart?”
“You knew I went to church.”
“The Episcopal church. I thought it was a social obligation. Rodney wanted the kids brought up in the upper middle class.”
“He thought that would happen anyway. Just by their being his children.”
“Lord, I don’t know if I can hack this: be an adequate stepfather to the kids of a snob and a Christian fanatic.”
“Henry, this is your Holy Land, too. You should be thrilled to be here.”
“It makes me nervous. It reminds me of Samson and Delilah.”
“You are thrilled. I can tell.” Her blue eyes, normally as pale as the sky when the milkiest wisps of strato-cirrus declare a storm coming tomorrow, looked up at him with a new, faintly forced luster. The Holy Land glow. Bech found it distrustworthy, yet, by some twist, in some rarely illumined depth of himself, flattering. While he was decoding the expression of her eyes, her mouth was forming words he now heard, on instant replay, as “Do you want to make love?”
“Because we’re in the Holy Land?”
“I’m so excited,” Bea confessed. She blushed, waiting for his response. Another hunger artist.
“Wouldn’t it be blasphemous?” Bech asked. “Anyway, we’re being picked up to sight-see in twenty minutes. What about breakfast instead?” He kissed her again, feeling estranged. He was too old to be on a honeymoon. His marriage was like this Zionist state they were in: a mistake long deferred, a miscarriage of passé fervor and antiquated tribal righteousness, an attempt to be safe on an earth where, for Jews, there was no safety.
Their quarters in the Mishkenot included a kitchen. Bea called from within it, “There’s two sets of silver. One says Dairy and the other says Meat.”
“Use one or the other,” Bech called back. “Don’t mingle them.”
“What’ll happen if I do?”
“I don’t know. Try it. Maybe it’ll trip the trigger and bring the Messiah.”
“Now who’s being blasphemous? Anyway, the Messiah did come.”
“We can’t all read His calling card.”
Her only answer was the clash of silver.
I’m too old to be married, Bech thought, though he smiled to himself as he thought it. He went to the window and looked at the view that had sexually stimulated his wife. Beyond the near, New Testament hills, the color of unglazed Mexican pottery, were lavender desert mountains like long folds in God’s comfortless lap.
“Is there anything I should know about eggs and butter?” Bea called.
“Keep them away from bacon.”
“There isn’t any bacon. There isn’t any meat in the fridge at all.”
“They didn’t trust you. They knew you’d try to do something crummy.” His Christian wife was thirteen years younger than he. Her belly bore silver stretch marks from carrying twins. She made gentle yipping noises when she fucked. Bech wondered whether he had ever really been a sexy man, or was it just an idea that went with bachelorhood? He had been a satisfactory sprinter, he reflected, but nobody up to now had challenged his distance capacity. At his age, he should be jogging.
The first sight they were taken to, by a Jewish archaeologist in rimless glasses, was the Wailing Wall. It was a Saturday. Sabbath congregations were gathered in the sun of the limestone plaza the Israelis had created by bulldozing away dozens of Arab homes. People were chanting, dancing; photographs were forbidden. Men in sidelocks were leaning their heads against the wall in prayer, the broad-brimmed hats of the Hasidim tipped askew. The archaeologist told Bech and Bea that for a millennium the wall could not be seen from where they stood, and pointed out where the massive, characteristically edged Herodian stones gave way to the smaller stones of Saladin and the Mamelukes. Bea urged Bech to walk up to the wall. The broad area in front of it had been designated a synagogue, with separate male and female sections, so they could not pass in through the fence together. “I won’t go where you can’t go,” he said.
Bech’s grandfather, a diamond-cutter and disciple of Spinoza, had come to the United States from the ghetto of Amsterdam in 1880; Bech’s father had been an atheistic socialist; and in Bech socialist piety had dwindled to a stubborn wisp of artistic conscience. So there was little in his background to answer to the unearthly ardor of Bea’s urging. “I want you to, Henry. Please.”
He said, “I don’t have a hat. You have to have a hat.”
“They have paper yarmulkes there. In that basket,” the archaeologist offered, pointing. He was a short bored bearded man, whose attitude expressed no wish, himself, to approach the wall. He stood on the blinding limestone of the plaza as if glued there by his shadow.
“Let’s skip it,” Bech said. “I get the idea from here.”
“No, Henry,” Bea said. “You must go up and touch it. You must. For me. Think. We may never be here again.”
In her plea he found most touching the pronoun “we.” Ever since his honorable discharge from the armed forces, Bech had been an I. He picked a black paper hat from the basket, and the hat was unwilling to adhere to his head; his hair was too woolly, too fashionably full-bodied. Graying had made it frizzier. A little breeze seemed to be blowing outward from the wall and twice threatened to lift his yarmulke away. Amid the stares of congregated Hasidic youth, their side curls as menacing as lions’ manes, he held the cap to the back of his skull with his hand and approached, step by cautious step, all that remained of the Temple.
It was, the wall, a Presence. The great rectangular Herodian stones, each given a shallow border, like a calling card, by the ancient masons, were riddled with paper lice. Into the cracks of erosion, tightly folded prayers had been stuffed�
��the more he looked, the more there were. Bech supposed paper lasted forever in this desert climate. The space around him, the very air, felt tense, like held breath. Numbly he reached out, and, as he touched the surprisingly warm sacred surface, an American voice whined into his ears from a small circle of Hasidim seated on chairs nearby. “Who is this God?” the voice was asking loudly. “If He’s so good, why does He permit all the pain in the world? Look at Cambodia, man.…” The speaker and his audience were undergoing the obligatory exercise of religious debate. The Jewish tongue, divinely appointed to be active. Bech closed his ears and backed away rapidly. The breeze made another grab at his paper yarmulke. He dropped the flimsy thing into the basket, and Bea was waiting on the other side of the fence.
She was beaming, proud; he had been attracted to that in her which so purely encouraged him. Amid many in this last, stalled decade of his who had wished to reshape, to activate him forcefully, she had implied that his perfection lay nowhere but in a deepening of the qualities he already possessed. Since he was Jewish, the more Jewish he became in her Christian care, the better.
“Wasn’t it wonderful?” she asked.
“It was something,” was all he would grant her. Strange diseases, he thought, demand strange remedies: he, her. As they linked arms, after the separation imposed by a sexist orthodoxy, Bech apprehended Bea with refreshed clarity, by this bright, dry light of Israel: as a creature thickening in the middle, the female of a species mostly hairless and with awkward gait, her flesh nearing the end of its reproductive capacity and her brain possessed by a bizarre creed, yet pleasing to him and asking for his loyalty as unquestioningly, as helplessly as she gave him hers.
Their guide led them up a slanted road, past an adolescent soldier with a machine gun, to the top of the wall. On their left, the faithful continued to circle and pray; on their right, a great falling off disclosed the ugly results of archaeology, a rubble of foundations. “The City of David,” the archaeologist said proudly, “just where the Bible said it would be. Everything,” he said, and his gesture seemed to include all of the Holy City, “just as it was written. We read first, then we dig.” At the Gate of the Moors, their guide yielded to a courtly Arab professor—yellow face, brown suit, Oxford accent—who led them in stockinged feet through the two mosques built on the vast platform that before 70 A.D. had supported the Temple. Strict Jewish believers never came here, for fear of accidentally treading upon the site of the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant. Within the Aqsa Mosque, Bech and Bea were informed of recent violence: King Abdullah of Jordan had been assassinated near the entrance in 1951, before the eyes of his grandson the present King Hussein; and in 1969, a crazed Australian had attempted to set the end nearest Mecca afire, with considerable success. Craziness, down through history, has performed impressively, Bech thought.