Rich in Russia

by John Updike

Bech recognized in Petrescu, behind the blue jaw and sinister glasses, a man humbly in love with books, a fool for literature. As, that afternoon, they strolled through a dreamlike Bucharest park containing bronze busts of Goethe and Pushkin and Victor Hugo, beside a lake wherein the greenish sunset was coated with silver, the translator talked excitedly of a dozen things, sharing thoughts he had not been able to share while descending, alone at his desk, into the luminous abysses and profound crudities of American literature. ‘With Hemingway, the difficulty of translating – and I speak to an extent of Anderson also – is to prevent the simplicity from seeming simple-minded. For we do not have here such a tradition of belle-lettrist fancifulness against which the style of Hemingway was a rebel. Do you follow the difficulty?’

  ‘Yes. How did you get around it?’

  Petrescu did not seem to understand. ‘Get around, how? Circumvent?’

  ‘How did you translate the simple language without seeming simple-minded?’

  ‘Oh. By being extremely subtle.’

  ‘Oh. I should tell you, some people in my country think Hemingway was simple-minded. It is actively debated.’

  Petrescu absorbed this with a nod, and said, ‘I know for a fact, his Italian is not always correct.’

  When Bech got back to his hotel – situated on a square rimmed with buildings made, it seemed, of dusty pink candy – a message had been left for him to call Phillips at the U.S. Embassy. Phillips was Princeton ’51. He asked, ‘What have they got mapped out for you?’

  Bech’s schedule had hardly been discussed. ‘Petrescu mentioned a production of Desire Under the Elms I might see. And he wants to take me to Braşov. Where is Braşov?’

  ‘In Transylvania, way the hell off. It’s where Dracula hung out. Listen, can we talk frankly?’

  ‘We can try.’

  ‘I know damn well this line is bugged, but here goes. This country is hot. Anti-Socialism is bursting out all over. My inkling is they want to get you out of Bucharest, away from all the liberal writers who are dying to meet you.’

  ‘Are you sure they’re not dying to meet Arthur Miller?’

  ‘Kidding aside, Bech, there’s a lot of ferment in this country, and we want to plug you in. Now, when are you meeting Taru?’

  ‘Knock knock. Taru. Taru Who?’

  ‘Jesus, he’s the head of the Writer’s Union – hasn’t Petrescu even set up an appointment? Boy, they’re putting you right around the old mulberry bush. I gave Petrescu a list of writers for you to latch on to. Suppose I call him and wave the big stick and ring you back. Got it?’

  ‘Got it, tiger.’ Bech hung up sadly; one of the reasons he had accepted the State Department’s invitation was that he thought it would be an escape from agents.

  Within ten minutes his phone rasped, in that dead rattly way it has behind the Iron Curtain, and it was Phillips, breathless, victorious. ‘Congratulate me,’ he said. ‘I’ve been making like a thug and got their thugs to give you an appointment with Taru tonight.’

  ‘This very night?’

  Phillips sounded hurt. ‘You’re only here four nights, you know. Petrescu will pick you up. His excuse was he thought you might want some rest.’

  ‘He’s extremely subtle.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Never mind, pazhalusta.’

  Petrescu came for Bech in a black car driven by a hunched silhouette. The Writers’ Union was housed on the other side of town, in a kind of castle, a turreted mansion with a flaring stone staircase and an oak-vaulted library whose shelves were twenty feet high and solid with leather spines. The stairs and chambers seemed deserted. Petrescu tapped on a tall panelled door of blackish oak, strap-hinged in the sombre Spanish style. The door soundlessly opened, revealing a narrow high room hung with tapestries, pale brown and blue, whose subject involved masses of attenuated soldiery unfathomably engaged. Behind a huge polished desk quite bare of furnishings sat an immaculate miniature man with a pink face and hair as white as a dandelion poll. His rosy hands, perfectly finished down to each fingernail, were folded on the shiny desk, reflected like water flowers; and his face wore a smiling expression that was also, in each neat crease, beyond improvement. This was Taru.

  He spoke with magical suddenness, like a music box. Petrescu translated his words to Bech as, ‘You are a literary man. Do you know the works of our Mihail Sadoveanu, of our noble Mihai Beniuc, or perhaps that most wonderful spokesman for the people, Tudor Arghezi?’

  Bech said, ‘No, I’m afraid the only Rumanian writer I know at all is Ionesco.’

  The exquisite white-haired man nodded eagerly and emitted a length of tinkling sounds that was translated to Bech as simply ‘And who is he?’

  Petrescu, who certainly knew all about Ionesco, stared at Bech with blank expectance. Even in this innermost sanctum he had kept his sunglasses on. Bech said, irritated, ‘A playwright. Lives in Paris. Theatre of the Absurd. Wrote Rhinoceros,’ and he crooked a forefinger beside his heavy Jewish nose, to represent a horn.

  Taru emitted a dainty sneeze of laughter. Petrescu translated, listened, and told Bech, ‘He is very sorry he has not heard of this man. Western books are a luxury here, so we are not able to follow each new nihilist movement. Comrade Taru asks what you plan to do while in the People’s Republic of Rumania.’

  ‘I am told,’ Bech said, ‘that there are some writers interested in exchanging ideas with an American colleague. I believe my embassy has suggested a list to you.’

  The musical voice went on and on. Petrescu listened with a cocked ear and relayed, ‘Comrade Taru sincerely wishes that this may be the case and regrets that, because of the lateness of the hour and the haste of this meeting urged by your embassy, no secretaries are present to locate this list. He furthermore regrets that at this time of the year so many of our fine writers are bathing at the Black Sea. However, he points out that there is an excellent production of Desire Under the Elms in Bucharest, and that our Carpathian city of Braşov is indeed worthy of a visit. Comrade Taru himself retains many pleasant youthful memories concerning Braşov.’

  Taru rose to his feet – an intensely dramatic event within the reduced scale he had established around himself. He spoke, thumped his small square chest resoundingly, spoke again, and smiled. Petrescu said, ‘He wishes you to know that in his youth he published many books of poetry, both epic and lyric in manner. He adds, “A fire ignited here”’ – and here Petrescu struck his own chest in flaccid mimicry – ‘“can never be quenched.”’

  Bech stood and responded, ‘In my country we also ignite fires here.’ He touched his head. His remark was not translated and, after an efflorescent display of courtesy from the brilliant-haired little man, Bech and Petrescu made their way through the empty mansion down to the waiting car, which drove them, rather jerkily, back to the hotel.

  ‘And how did you like Mr Taru?’ Petrescu asked on the way.

  ‘He’s a doll,’ Bech said.

  ‘You mean – a puppet?’

  Bech turned curiously but saw nothing in Petrescu’s face that betrayed more than a puzzlement over meaning. Bech said, ‘I’m sure you have a better eye for the strings than I do.’

  Since neither had eaten, they dined together at the hotel; they discussed Faulkner and Hawthorne while waiters brought them soup and veal a continent removed from the cabbagy cuisine of Russia. A lithe young woman on awkwardly high heels stalked among the tables singing popular songs from Italy and France. The trailing microphone wire now and then became entangled in her feet, and Bech admired the sly savagery with which she would, while not altering an iota her enamelled smile, kick herself free. Bech had been a long time without a woman. He looked forward to three more nights sitting at this table, surrounded by travelling salesmen from East Germany and Hungary, feasting on the sight of this lithe chanteuse. Though her motions were angular and her smile was inflexible, her high round bosom looked soft as a soufflé.

  But tomorrow, Petrescu explained, smiling sweetly beneath his sad-eyed
sunglasses, they would go to Braşov.

  Bech knew little about Rumania. From his official briefing he knew it was ‘a Latin island in a Slavic sea’, that during World War II its anti-Semitism had been the most ferocious in Europe, that now it was seeking economic independence of the Soviet bloc. The ferocity especially interested him, since of the many human conditions it was his business to imagine, murderousness was among the more difficult. He was a Jew. Though he could be irritable and even vengeful, obstinate savagery was excluded from his budget of emotions.

  Petrescu met him in the hotel lobby at nine and, taking his suitcase from his hand, led him to the hired car. By daylight, the chauffeur was a short man the colour of ashes – white ash for the face, grey cigarette ash for his close-trimmed smudge of a moustache, and the darker residue of a tougher substance for his eyes and hair. His manner was nervous and remote and fussy; Bech’s impression was of a stupidity so severe that the mind is tensed to sustain the simplest tasks. As they drove from the city, the driver constantly tapped his horn to warn pedestrians and cyclists of his approach. They passed the prewar stucco suburbs, suggestive of southern California; the postwar Moscow-style apartment buildings, rectilinear and airless; the heretical all-glass exposition halls the Rumanians had built to celebrate twenty years of industrial progress under Socialism. It was shaped like a huge sailor’s cap, and before it stood a tall Brancusi column cast in aluminium.

  ‘Brancusi,’ Bech said. ‘I didn’t know you acknowledged him.’

  ‘Oh, much,’ Petrescu said. ‘His village is a shrine. I can show you many early works in our national museum.’

  ‘And Ionesco? Is he really a non-person?’

  Petrescu smiled. ‘The eminent head of our Writers’ Union,’ he said, ‘makes little jokes. He is known here but not much produced as yet. Students in their rooms perhaps read aloud a play like The Singer Devoid of Hair.’

  Bech was distracted from the conversation by the driver’s incessant mutter of tooting. They were in the country now, driving along a straight, slightly rising road lined with trees whose trunks were painted white. On the shoulder of the road walked bundle-shaped old women carrying knotted bundles, little boys tapping donkeys forward, men in French-blue work clothes sauntering empty-handed. At all of them the driver sounded his horn. His stubby, grey-nailed hand fluttered on the contact rim, producing an agitated stammer beginning perhaps a hundred yards in advance and continuing until the person, who usually moved only to turn and scowl, had been passed. Since the road was well travelled, the noise was practically uninterrupted, and after the first half hour nagged Bech like a toothache. He asked Petrescu, ‘Must he do that?’

  ‘Oh, yes. He is a conscientious man.’

  ‘What good does it do?’

  Petrescu, who had been developing an exciting thought on Mark Twain’s infatuation with the apparatus of capitalism, which had undermined his bucolic genius, indulgently explained, ‘The bureau from which we hire cars provides the driver. They have been precisely trained for this profession.’

  Bech realized that Petrescu himself did not drive. He reposed in the oblivious trust of an aeroplane passenger, legs crossed, sunglasses in place, issuing smoother and smoother phrases, while Bech leaned forward anxiously, braking on the empty floor, twitching a wheel that was not there, trying to wrench the car’s control away from this atrociously unrhythmic and brutal driver. When they went through a village, the driver would speed up and intensify the mutter of his honking; clusters of peasants and geese exploded in disbelief, and Bech felt as if gears, the gears that space and engage the mind, were clashing. As they ascended into the mountains, the driver demonstrated his technique with curves: he approached each like an enemy, accelerating, and at the last moment stepped on the brake as if crushing a snake underfoot. In the jerking and swaying, Petrescu grew pale. His blue jaw acquired a moist sheen and issued phrases less smoothly. Bech said to him, ‘This driver should be locked up. He is sick and dangerous.’

  ‘No, no, he is a good man. These roads, they are difficult.’

  ‘At least please ask him to stop twiddling the horn. It’s torture.’

  Petrescu’s eyebrows arched, but he leaned forward and spoke in Rumanian.

  The driver answered; the language clattered in his mouth, though his voice was soft.

  Petrescu told Bech, ‘He says it is a safety precaution.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’

  Petrescu was truly puzzled. He asked, ‘In the States, you drive your own car?’

  ‘Of course, everybody does,’ Bech said, and then worried that he had hurt the feelings of this Socialist, who must submit to the aristocratic discomfort of being driven. For the remainder of the trip, he held silent about the driver. The muddy lowland fields with Mediterranean farmhouses had yielded to fir-dark hills bearing Germanic chalets. At the highest point, the old boundary of Austria-Hungary, fresh snow had fallen, and the car, pressed ruthlessly through the ruts, brushed within inches of some children dragging sleds. It was a short downhill distance from there to Braşov. They stopped before a newly built pistachio hotel. The jarring ride had left Bech with a headache. Petrescu stepped carefully from the car, licking his lips; the tip of his tongue showed purple in his drained face. The chauffeur, as composed as raked ashes no touch of wind has stirred, changed out of his grey driving coat, checked the oil and water, and removed his lunch from the trunk. Bech examined him for some sign of satisfaction, some betraying trace of malice, but there was nothing. His eyes were living smudges, and his mouth was the mouth of the boy in the class who, being neither strong nor intelligent, has developed insignificance into a positive character trait that does him some credit. He glanced at Bech without expression; yet Bech wondered if the man did not understand English a little.

  In Braşov the American writer and his escort passed the time in harmless sightseeing. The local museum contained peasant costumes. The local castle contained armour. The Lutheran cathedral was surprising; Gothic lines and scale had been wedded to clear glass and an austerity of decoration, noble and mournful, that left one, Bech felt, much too alone with God. He felt the Reformation here as a desolating wind, four hundred years ago. From the hotel roof, the view looked sepia, and there was an empty swimming pool, and wet snow on the lacy metal chairs. Petrescu shivered and went down to his room. Bech changed neckties and went down to the bar. Champagne music bubbled from the walls. The bartender understood what a Martini was, though he used equal parts of gin and vermouth. The clientele was young, and many spoke Hungarian, for Transylvania had been taken from Hungary after the war. One plausible youth, working with Bech’s reluctant French, elicited from him that he was un écrivain, and asked for his autograph. But this turned out to be the prelude to a proposed exchange of pens, in which Bech lost a sentimentally cherished Esterbrook and gained a nameless ball-point that wrote red. Bech wrote three and a half postcards (to his mistress, his mother, his publisher, and a half to his editor at Commentary) before the red pen went dry. Petrescu, who neither drank nor smoked, finally appeared. Bech said, ‘My hero, where have you been? I’ve had four Martinis and been swindled in your absence.’

  Petrescu was embarrassed. ‘I’ve been shaving.’

  ‘Shaving!’

  ‘Yes, it is humiliating. I must spend each day one hour shaving, and even yet it does not look as if I have shaved, my beard is so obdurate.’

  ‘Are you putting blades in the razor?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I buy the best and use two upon each occasion.’

  ‘This is the saddest story I’ve ever heard. Let me send you some decent blades when I get home.’

  ‘Please, do not. There are no blades better than the blades I use. It is merely that my beard is phenomenal.’

  ‘When you die,’ Bech said, ‘you can leave it to Rumanian science.’

  ‘You are ironical.’

  In the restaurant, there was dancing – the Tveest, the Hully Gullee, and chain formations that involved a lot of droll hopping.
American dances had become here innocently birdlike. Now and then a young man, slender and with hair combed into a parrot’s peak, would leap into the air and seem to hover, emitting a shrill palatal cry. The men in Rumania appeared lighter and more fanciful than the women, who moved, in their bell-skirted cocktail dresses, with a wooden stateliness perhaps inherited from their peasant grandmothers. Each girl who passed near their table was described by Petrescu, not humorously at first, as a ‘typical Rumanian beauty’.

  ‘And this one, with the orange lips and eyelashes?’

  ‘A typical Rumanian beauty. The cheekbones are very classical.’

  ‘And the blonde behind her? The small plump one?’

  ‘Also typical.’

  ‘But they are so different. Which is more typical?’

  ‘They are equally. We are a perfect democracy.’ Between spates of dancing, a young chanteuse, more talented than the one in the Bucharest hotel, took the floor. She had learned, probably from free-world films, that terrible mannerism of strenuousness whereby every note, no matter how accessibly placed and how flatly attacked, is given a facial aura of immense accomplishment. Her smile, at the close of each number, triumphantly combined a conspiratorial twinkle, a sublime humility, and the dazed self-congratulation of post-coital euphoria. Yet, beneath the artifice, the girl had life. Bech was charmed by a number, in Italian, that involved much animated pouting and finger-scolding and placing of the fists on the hips. Petrescu explained that the song was the plaint of a young wife whose husband was always attending soccer matches and never stayed home with her. Bech asked, ‘Is she also a typical Rumanian beauty?’

  ‘I think,’ Petrescu said, with a purr Bech had not heard before, ‘she is a typical little Jewess.’

  The drive, late the next afternoon, back to Bucharest was worse than the one out, for it took place partly in the dark. The chauffeur met the challenge with increased speed and redoubled honking. In a rare intermittence of danger, a straight road near Ploesti where only the oil rigs relieved the flatness, Bech asked, ‘Seriously, do you not feel the insanity in this man?’ Five minutes before, the driver had turned to the back seat and, showing even grey teeth in a tight tic of a smile, had remarked about a dog lying dead beside the road. Bech suspected that most of the remark had not been translated.