Bech Is Back

by John Updike

  “To them,” he felt obliged to press on, “it’s holy because it is land at all; after nineteen hundred years of being pushed around, the Jews have a place where they can say, O.K., this is it, this is our country. I don’t think it’s something a Christian can understand.”

  “I certainly can. Henry, it saddens me that you feel you must explain all this to me. Rodney and I once went to a discussion group on Zionism. Ask me about Herzl. Ask me about the British Mandate.”

  “I explain it only because you’ve surprised me with your own beliefs.”

  “I’ll keep them to myself if they embarrass you.”

  “No, just don’t offer to immigrate. They don’t want you. Me, they wouldn’t mind, but I have enough problems right now.”

  “I’m a problem.”

  “I didn’t say that. My work is a problem.”

  “I think you’d work very well here.”

  “Jesus, no. It’s depressing. To me, it’s just a ghetto with farms. I know these people. I’ve spent my whole life trying to get away from them, trying to think bigger.”

  “Maybe that’s your problem. Why try to get away from being Jewish? All those motorcycles, and Cincinnati, and Saint Bernard—you have to make it all up. Here, it’d be real for you. You could write and I could join a dig, under Father Gibergue.”

  “What about your children?”

  “Aren’t there kibbutz schools?”

  “For Episcopalians?”

  She began to cry, out of a kind of sweet excess, as when angels weep. “I thought you’d like it that I love it here,” she got out, adding, “with you.”

  “I do like it. Don’t you like it that I like it in Ossining, with you?” As their words approached nonsense, some dim sense of what the words “holy land” might mean dawned on him. The holy land was where you accepted being. Middle age was a holy land. Marriage.

  • • •

  Back in their room in the Mishkenot, a calling card had been left on a brass tray. Bech looked at the Hebrew lettering and said, “I can’t read this.”

  “I can,” Bea said, and turned the card over, to the Roman type on the other side.

  “What does it say?”

  Bea palmed the card and looked saucy. “My secret,” she said.

  I never should have married a Christian, Bech told himself, without believing it. He was smiling at the apparition of his plump Wasp wife, holding a calling card shaped like a stone in Herod’s wall.

  Wifely, she took pity. “Actually, it’s somebody from The Jerusalem Post. Probably wanting an interview.”

  “Oh God,” Bech said.

  “I suppose he’ll come again,” Bea offered.

  “Let’s hope not,” Bech said, blasphemously.

  MACBECH

  BEA on her mother’s side was a Sinclair, and a long-held dream of hers had been to visit the land of her ancestors—the counties of Sutherland and Caithness in the eastern Scots Highlands. Bech, now legally established in the business of making her dreams come true, and slightly enriched by the sale of a forgotten Collier’s chestnut to a public-television series promoting Minor Masters of the American Short Story, volunteered to take her there, as a fortieth-birthday present. They parked their crumbling mock-Tudor manse in Ossining and its three juvenile inhabitants with a house-sitting young faculty couple from Mercy College and flew that May to London, entraining north to Edinburgh and thence to Inverness. Bech liked Great Britain, since its decline was as notorious as his, and he liked trains, for the same reason. The farther north they went, the strangely happier he became.

  His happiness first hit him in Edinburgh, as he lugged their suitcases up a mountainous flight of stairs from the sunken glass-and-iron sheds of Waverley Station. As he turned onto North Bridge, at the far end of which their hotel waited, his eyes confronted not metropolitan rectangles but a sweeping green shoulder of high and empty land named, Bea read aloud at his side from out of her blue guidebook, Arthur’s Seat. Burdened by baggage as he was, Bech felt lifted up, into the airy and the epic. Scotland seemed at a glance ancient, raw, grimy, lush, mysterious, and mannerly. Like Bech, it was built solid of disappointments. Lost causes abounded. Defenders of the Castle had been promptly hanged outside the Portcullis Gate, witches were burned in bundles, Covenanters were slaughtered. In Holyrood Palace, the red-haired Queen of Scots, taller than Bech had expected, slipped in her brocaded slippers down a spiral stone staircase to visit the handsome boy Darnley, who, devoid of all common sense, one evening burst into her little supper room and, with others, dragged off her pet secretary David Rizzio and left him in the audience chamber dead of fifty-six stab wounds. The alleged indelible stain of blood, if it exists, is concealed by the floor covering. Jealousy of Rizzio’s political influence, and perhaps a darker suspicion in Darnley’s mind, were the probable motives for the crime. Dried blood and dark suspicions dominated the Caledonian past; nothing in history sinks quicker, Bech thought, than people’s actual motives, unless it be their sexual charm. In this serene, schizophrenic capital—divided by the verdant cleavage of a loch drained in 1816—he admired the biggest monument ever erected to an author, a spiky huge spire sheltering a statue of Sir Walter Scott and his dog. He glanced, along the slanting Royal Mile, down minuscule alleys in the like of which Boswell had caught and clipped his beloved prostitutes. “Heaven,” Bech kept telling Bea, who began to resent it.

  But Bech’s abrasive happiness grew as, a few days later, the windows of their next train gave on the gorse-blotched slopes of the Grampians, authentic mountains green and gray with heather and turf. In Inverness, they rented a little cherry-red car in which everything normally on the right was on the left; groping for the gear-shift, Bech grabbed air, and, peering into the rearview mirror, saw nothing. Bea, frightened, kept reminding him that she was there, on his left, and that he was driving terribly close to that stone wall. “Do you want to drive?” he asked her. At her expected answer of “Oh, no,” he steered the short distance to Loch Ness; there they stood among the yellow-blooming bushes on the bank, hoping to see a monster. The water, dark even in the scudding moments of sunlight, was chopped into little wavelets each shadow of which might be a fin, or a gliding plesiosaur nose. “It’s possible,” Bech said. “Remember the coelacanth.”

  His fair wife touched his arm and shivered. “Such dark water.”

  “They say the peat, draining into it. Tiny black particles suspended everywhere, so all these expensive cameras they lower down can’t see a thing. There could be whales down there.”

  Bea nodded, still staring. “It’s much bigger than anybody says.”

  Married peace, that elusive fauna swimming in the dark also, stole back upon them at the hotel, a many-gabled brick Guests beside the pretty river Ness. After dinner, in the prolonged northern light, they wandered across a bridge and came by chance upon a stadium where a show for tourists was in progress: Scots children in kilts performed traditional dances to the bagpipes’ keening. The couple loved, when they travelled, all children, having none of their own. Their marriage would always be sterile; Bea had been willing, though nearing the end of her fourth decade, but Bech shied from paternity, with its overwhelming implication of commitment. He aspired to be no more than one of mankind’s uncles, and his becoming at a blow stepfather to Bea’s twin adolescent girls, Ann and Judy, and to little Donald (who had at first called him “Mr. Bech” and then “Uncle Henry”), was bliss and burden enough, in the guardianship line. His books and in his fallow years his travels were his children, and by bringing Bea along he gave her what he could of fresh ties to the earth. Some of the Scots performers were so small they could barely hop across the swords laid flat on the grass, and some had to be tugged back and forth in the ritual patterns by their older sisters. Watching the trite, earnest routines, Bea beside Bech acquired a tranced smile; tears had appeared in her blue eyes without canceling the smile, an unsurprising combination in this climate where sun and shower and rainbow so swiftly alternated. In the sheltered b
leachers where they sat they seemed the only tourists; the rest were mothers and fathers and uncles, with children’s raincoats in their laps. As Bech and Bea returned to their hotel, the still-twilit sky, full of hastening clouds, added some drops of silver to the rippling river that looked as pure as soda water, though it was fed by the black loch.

  Next day they dared drive left-handedly along the crowded coast road north, through Dingwall and Tain, Dornoch and Golspie. At Dunrobin Castle, a downpour forbade that they descend into the famous formal gardens; instead they wandered unattended through room after paneled room, past portraits and stag horns and framed photographs of turn-of-the-century weekends—the Duke of Sutherland and his guests in white flannels, holding tennis rackets like snow-shoes. “Its name,” Bech read to Bea from the guidebook, “may mean ‘Robin’s Castle,’ after Robert, the sixth Earl of Sutherland, whose wife was a daughter of the barbarous Alexander, Earl of Buchan, a younger son of King Robert II and known as ‘The Wolf of Badenoch.’ Now there’s history,” he said. “ ‘The barbarous Alexander.’ The third Duke of Sutherland,” he went on, paraphrasing, “was the largest landowner in Western Europe. Almost the whole county of Sutherland, over a million acres. His father and grandfather were responsible for the Clearances. They pushed all these poor wee potato farmers out so they could graze sheep—the closest thing to genocide in Europe up to Hitler, unless you count the Armenians in Turkey.”

  “Well, don’t blame me,” Bea said. “I was just a Sinclair.”

  “It was a man called John Sinclair who brought the Cheviot sheep north into Caithness.”

  “My mother’s branch left around 1750.”

  “The Highlanders were looked at the same way the Victorians saw the Africans—savage, lazy, in need of improvement. That’s what they called it, kicking the people out and replacing them with sheep. Improvement.”

  “Oh look, Henry! Queen Victoria slept in this bed. And she left her little lace gloves.”

  The bed had gilded posts but looked hard and small. Bech told Bea, “You really don’t want to face it, do you? The atrocities a castle like this is built on.” He heard his sore-headed father in him speaking, and closed his mouth abruptly.

  Bea’s broad maternal face was flustered, pink, and damp in the humidity as rain slashed at the leaded windows overlooking the North Sea. “Well I hadn’t thought to face it now, just because I’m a little bit Scotch.”

  “Scots,” he corrected.

  “The Sinclairs didn’t order the Clearances, they were victims like everybody else.”

  “They had a castle,” Bech said darkly.

  “Not since the seventeenth century,” Bea said back.

  “I want to see the Strath Naver,” he insisted. “That’s where the worst of the Clearances were.”

  Back in the car, they looked at the map. “We can do it,” Bea said, her wifely composure restored. “Go up through Wick and then around John o’Groats and over through Thurso and then down along the Strath Naver to Lairg. Though there won’t be much to see, just empty land.”

  “That’s the point,” Bech said. “They moved the poor crofters out and then burned their cottages. It was the women, mostly, who resisted. The sheriff’s men got drunk and whacked them on the head with truncheons and kicked them in their breasts.”

  “It was a terrible, terrible thing,” Bea said, gently outflanking him. Her face looked luminous as harsh rain drummed on the roof of their little red English Ford, where everything was reversed. Her country, his patriotism. Her birthday, his treat. How strange, Bech bothered to notice, that his happiness in Scotland should take the form of being mean to her.

  The Sinclairs had farmed, and perhaps a few did still farm, these great treeless fields of Caithness whose emerald sweep came right to the edge of the perilous cliffs. The cliffs, and the freestanding towers the sea had created from a millennial merging of those eroded ravines called gills, were composed of striations of gray sandstones as regular as the pages of a book. Down on the shore, vast, slightly tilted flagstones seemed to commemorate a giant’s footsteps into the sea, or to attest to the ruin of a prodigious library. No fence prevented a tourist or a cow from toppling off and hurtling down the sheer height composed of so many accreted, eroding layers; paths had been beaten raggedly parallel to the cliff edge, leading to cairns whose explanatory legend was obscured by lichen and to, in one spot, an unofficial dump, where newspapers and condensed-milk cans had been deposited upon the edge of the precipice but had not all fallen in. Gulls nested just underneath the lip of the turf and in crannies straight down the cliff face; their white bodies, wings extended in flight, speckled the windy steep spaces between the surface of the twinkling sea and the edge where Bech and Bea stood. The plunging perspectives made her giddy, and she shrieked when, teasing, he took a few steps forward and reached down as if to steal a gull egg. The mother gull tipped her head and peered up at him with an unimpressed pink eye. Bech backed away, breathless. For all his boyish bravado, his knees were trembling. Heights called to him. Fall. Fly.

  The wind so fierce no trees spontaneously grew in this northernmost county of Britain was a bright May breeze today, setting a blush on Bea’s cheeks and flaring Bech’s nostrils with the scent of salt spray. The Vikings had come to this coast, leaving ruin behind, and flaxen-haired infants. The houses of the region were low, with roofs of thatch or slate, and squared slabs of its ubiquitous flagstone had been set upright and aligned into fences along field boundaries. But the primary feel of this land was of unbounded emptiness, half-tamed and sweet, with scarce a car moving along the A9 and not another walking man or woman to be seen this side of the green horizon, beyond which meadows gave way to brown moors where peat was dug in big black bricks out of long straight trenches, and the emptiness began in earnest. Every cemetery they stopped at had its Sinclairs. Bea was excited to be on ancestral territory, though less ecstatic than she had been in Israel. Bech had felt crowded there, and here, in the many-pocketed tweed jacket he had bought along Princes Street and the droop-brimmed plaid bog hat purchased just yesterday in Wick, he felt at home. “This is my kind of place,” he told Bea from the cliff edge, his breath regained and his knees again steady.

  “You’re just paying me back,” she said, “for liking the Holy Land so much.”

  “That was overdeveloped. This is just right. Thousand-acre zoning.”

  “You look ridiculous in that hat,” she told him unkindly, uncharacteristically. The wind, perhaps, had whipped a shine into her eyes. “I’m not sure the jacket suits you, either.”

  “They feel great. ‘Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!’ ”

  “They give you that troll look.”

  “What troll look?”

  “That troll look that—”

  He finished for her. “That Jews get in tweeds. Shit. I’ve really done it. I’ve married an anti-Semite.”

  “I wasn’t going to say that at all.” But she never did supply what she had been going to say, and it was not until they were snuggled in their bed on the musty third floor of the Thurso Arms that the monsters in the deep space between them stopped shifting. The brown brick city fell away beneath the gauze curtains at their windows like a town in one of the drabber fairy tales. They made love dutifully, since they had been given a double bed. There was no doubt, Bea did resent his taking Scotland so readily—so greedily—into himself. The stones and grass of this place, its pinnacles and cobbles and weatherswept grays, its history of constant, though turbulently contested, loss in relation to the cushioned green land to the south … weren’t the Scots one of the ten lost tribes of Israel? Like the Jews, the Celts had been pushed aside from the European mainstream yet not thrown quite free of it: permitted, rather, to witness closely its ruthless forward roar and to harbor in wry hearts and pinched lives the unblinkered knowing of Spinoza and Hume, Maxwell and Einstein. Or so it seemed while Bea slept and Bech lay awake relishing the sensation of being, on the northern edge of this so thoroughly annotated Great Britain,
in a kind of magical margin, the sky still white though the time approached midnight. From beneath his window arose the unexpected sound of raucous teenage horseplay, a hungry scuffling and hooting that further enriched his mystical, global sensations. For surely, if Bech’s own narrow and narcissistic life was miracle enough to write about, an interlocked miracle was the existence, wherever you went on a map, of other people living other lives.

  Except, it seemed, in the Highlands. Often where a place name sprouted on the dotted red line of the road, there seemed to be nothing, not even the ruined walls of a single house. Nothing was left of men but this name on the map, and the patches of brighter green where, over a century ago, potato patches had been fertilized. Otherwise, mile after mile of tummocky brown turf unrolled with no more than an occasional river or lake for punctuation, or one of those purple-green protuberances, neither mountain nor hill, for which the name was “ben.” Bech and Bea had driven west from Thurso above the sea and turned south along the Strath Naver, scene of the most infamous of the Clearances. Atrocity leaves no trace on earth, Bech saw. Nature shrugs, and regroups. Perhaps in Poland there were stretches made vacant like this. There seemed no trace of man but the road itself, which was single-track, with widened spots at intervals where a car could pull over to let another pass. The game did not take long to learn: when two vehicles approached, the drivers accelerated to reach the farthest possible turnout short of collision. Bea maintained that that wasn’t the way the game was played at all; rather, drivers courteously vied for the privilege of pulling over and letting the other driver pass with a wave of cheerful gratitude. “Do you want to drive?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she answered, unexpectedly.

  He stopped the car and stepped out. He inhaled the immaculate Highland air. Small white and pink flowers starred the violet reaches of moor. The clouds leaned in their hurry to get somewhere, losing whole clumps of themselves. There were no sheep. These, too, had been cleared away. As Bea drove along, her chin tipped up with the mental effort of not swerving right, he read to her about the Clearances. “We have no country to fight for. You robbed us of our country and gave it to the sheep. Therefore, since you have preferred sheep to men, let sheep defend you!” he read, a lump in his throat at the thought of an army of sheep. Jewish humor. “That’s what they said to the recruiters when they tried to raise an army in the Highlands to help fight the Crimean War. The lairds were basically war chieftains, and after the Scots were beaten at Culloden and there was no more war, the crofters, who paid their rent mostly with military service, had nothing to offer. The lairds had moved to London and that nice part of Edinburgh we saw and needed money now, and the way to get money was to rent their lands to sheep farmers from the south.”