Bech: A Book

by John Updike

  “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 gray 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.

  Petrescu said, crossing his legs in the effete and weary way that had begun to exasperate Bech, “No, he is a good man, an extremely kind man, who takes his work too seriously. In that he is like the beautiful Jewess whom you so much admired.”

  “In my country,” Bech said, “ ‘Jewess’ is a kind of fighting word.”

  “Here,” Petrescu said, “it is merely descriptive. Let us talk about Herman Melville. Is it possible to you that Pierre is a yet greater work than The White Whale?”

  “No, I think it is yet not so great, possibly.”

  “You are ironical about my English. Please excuse it. Being prone to motion sickness has discollected my thoughts.”

  “Our driver would discollect anybody’s thoughts. Is it possible that he is the late Adolf Hitler, kept alive by Count Dracula?”

  “I think not. Our people’s uprising in 1944 fortunately exterminated the Fascists.”

  “That is fortunate. Have you ever read, speaking of Melville, Omoo?”

  Melville, it happened, was Bech’s favorite American author, in whom he felt united the strengths that were later to go the separate ways of Dreiser and James. Throughout dinner, back at the hotel, he lectured Petrescu about him. “No one,” Bech said—he had ordered a full bottle of white Rumanian wine, and his tongue felt agile as a butterfly—“more courageously faced our native terror. He went for it right between its wide-set little pig eyes, and it shattered his genius like a lance.” He poured himself more wine. The hotel chanteuse, who Bech now noticed had buck teeth as well as gawky legs, stalked to their table, untangled her feet from the microphone wire, and favored them with a French version of “Some Enchanted Evening.”

  “You do not consider,” Petrescu said, “that Hawthorne also went between the eyes? And the laconic Ambrose Bierce?”

  “Quelque soir enchanté,” the woman sang, her eyes and teeth and earrings glittering like the facets of a chandelier.

  “Hawthorne blinked,” Bech pronounced, “and Bierce squinted.”

  “Vous verrez l’étranger …”

  “I worry about you, Petrescu,” Bech continued. “Don’t you ever have to go home? Isn’t there a Frau Petrescu, Madame, or whatever, a typical Rumanian, never mind.” Abruptly he felt steeply lonely.

  In bed, when his room had stopped the gentle swaying motion with which it had greeted his entrance, he remembered the driver, and the man’s neatly combed death-gray face seemed the face of everything foul, stale, stupid, and uncontrollable in the world. He had seen that tight tic of a smile before. Where? He remembered. West 86th Street, coming back from Riverside Park, Mickey Schwartz, a child with whom he always argued, and was always right, and always lost. Their ugliest quarrel had concerned comic strips, whether or not the artist—Segar, say, who drew Popeye, or Harold Gray of Little Orphan Annie—whether or not the artist, in duplicating the faces from panel to panel, day after day, traced them. Bech had maintained, obviously, not. Mickey had insisted that some mechanical process had to be used. Bech tried to explain that it was not such a difficult feat, that just as a person’s handwriting is always the same—Mickey, his face clouding, said it wasn’t possible. Bech explained, what he saw so clearly, that everything was possible for human beings with a little training and talent, that the ease and variation of each panel proved his point. Just learn to look, you dummy. Mickey’s face had become totally closed, with a pig-eyed density quite inhuman, as it steadily shook “No, no, no,” and Bech, becoming frightened and furious, tried to behead the other boy with his fists, and the boy in turn pinned him and pressed his face into the bitter grit of pebbles and glass that coated the cement passageway between two apartment buildings. These unswept jagged bits, a kind of city topsoil, had enlarged under his eyes, and this experience, the magnification amidst pain of those negligible mineral flecks, had formed, perhaps, a vision. At any rate, it seemed to Bech, as he skidded into sleep, that his artistic gifts had been squandered in the attempt to recapture that moment of stinging precision.

  The next day was his last full day in Rumania. Petrescu took him to an art museum where, amid many ethnic posters posing as paintings, a few sketches and sculpted heads by the young Brancusi smelled like saints’ bones. The two men went on to the twenty years’ industrial exhibit and admired rows of brightly painted machinery—gaudy counters in some large international game. They visited shops, and everywhere Bech felt a desiccated pinkish elegance groping, out of eclipse, through the murky hardware of Sovietism, toward a rebirth of style. Yet there had been a tough and heroic naïveté in Russia that he missed here, where something shrugging and effete seemed to leave room for a vein of energetic evil. In the evening, they went to Patima de Sub Ulmi.

  Their driver, bringing them to the very door of the theatre, pressed his car forward through bodies, up an arc of driveway crowded with pedestrians. The people caught in the headlights were astonished; Bech slammed his foot on a phantom brake and Petrescu grunted and strained backward in his seat. The driver continually tapped his horn—a demented, persistent muttering—and slowly the crowd gave way around the car. Bech and Petrescu stepped, at the door, into the humid atmosphere of a riot. As the chauffeur, his childish small-nosed profile intent, pressed his car back through the crowd to the street, fists thumped on the fenders.

  Safe in the theatre lobby, Petrescu took off his sunglasses to wipe his face. His eyes were a tender bulging blue, with jaundiced whites; a scholar’s tremor pulsed in his left lower lid. “You know,” he confided to Bech, “that man our driver. Not all is well with him.”

  “That’s what I keep telling you,” Bech said.

  O’Neill’s starveling New England farmers were played as Russian muzhiks; they wore broad-belted coats and high black boots and kept walloping each other on the back. Abbie Cabot had become a typical Rumanian beauty, ten years past her prime, with a beauty spot on one cheek and artful bare arms as supple as a swan’s neck. Since their seats were in the center of the second row, Bech had a good if infrequent view down the front of her dress, and thus, ignorant of when the plot would turn her his way, he contentedly manufactured suspense for himself. But Petrescu, his loyalty to American letters affronted beyond endurance, insisted that they leave after the first act. “Wrong, wrong,” he complained. “Even the pitchforks were wrong.”

  “I’ll have the State Department send them an authentic American pitchfork,” Bech promised.

  “And the girl—the girl is not like that, not a coquette. She is a religious innocent, under economic stress.”

  “Well, scratch an innocent, find a coquette. Scratch a coquette, you find economic stress.”

  “It is your good nature to joke, but I am ashamed you saw such a travesty. Now our driver is not here. We are undone.”

  The street outside the theatre, so recently jammed, was empty and dark. A solitary couple walked slowly toward them. With surrealistic suddenness, Petrescu fell into the arms of the man, walloping his back, and then kissed the calmly proffered hand of the woman. The couple was introduced to Bech as “a most brilliant young writer and his notably ravishing wife.” The man, stolid and forbidding, wore rimless glasses and a bulky checked topcoat. The woman was scrawny; her face, potentially handsome, had been worn to its bones by the nervous activity of her intelligence. She had a cold and a command, quick but limited, of Eng
lish. “Are you having a liking for this?” she asked.

  Bech understood her gesture to include all Rumania. “Very much,” he answered. “After Russia, it seems very civilized.”

  “And who isn’t?” she snapped. “What are you liking most?”

  Petrescu roguishly interposed, “He has a passion for nightclub singers.”

  The wife translated this for her husband; he took his hands from his overcoat pockets and clapped them. He was wearing leather gloves, so the noise was loud on the deserted street. He spoke, and Petrescu translated: “He says we should therefore, as hosts, escort you to the most celebrated night club in Bucharest, where you will see many singers, each more glorious than the preceding.”

  “But,” Bech said, “weren’t they going somewhere? Shouldn’t they go home?” It worried him that Communists never seemed to go home.

  “For why?” the wife cried.

  “You have a cold,” Bech told her. Her eyes didn’t comprehend. He touched his own nose, so much larger than hers. “Un rhume.”

  “Poh!” she said. “Itself takes care of tomorrow.”

  The writer owned a car, and he drove them, with the gentleness of a pedal boat, through a maze of alleys overhung by cornices suggestive of cake frosting, of waves breaking, of seashells, lion paws, unicorn horns, and cumulus clouds. They parked across the street from a blue sign, and went into a green doorway, and down a yellow set of stairs. Music approached them from one direction and a coat-check girl in net tights from the other. It was to Bech as if he were dreaming of an American night club, giving it the strange spaciousness of dreams. The main room had been conjured out of several basements—a cave hollowed from the underside of jeweler’s shops and vegetable marts. Tables were set in shadowy tiers arranged around a central square floor. Here a man with a red wig and mascaraed eyes was talking into a microphone, mincingly. Then he sang, in the voice of a choirboy castrated too late. A waiter materialized. Bech ordered Scotch, the other writer ordered vodka. The wife asked for cognac and Petrescu for mineral water. Three girls dressed as rather naked bicyclists appeared with a dwarf on a unicycle and did some unsmiling gyrations to music while he pedalled among them, tugging bows and displacing straps. “Typical Polish beauties,” Petrescu explained in Bech’s ear. He and the writer’s wife were seated on the tier behind Bech. Two women, one a girl in her teens and the other a heavy old blonde, perhaps her mother, both dressed identically in sequined silver, did a hypnotic, languorous act with tinted pigeons, throwing them up in the air, watching them wheel through the shadows of the night club, and holding out their wrists for their return. They juggled with the pigeons, passed them between their legs, and for a climax the elderly blonde fed an aquamarine pigeon with seeds held in her mouth and fetched, one by one, onto her lips. “Czechs,” Petrescu explained. The master of ceremonies reappeared in a blue wig and a toreador’s jacket, and did a comic act with the dwarf, who had been fitted with papier-mâché horns. An East German girl, flaxen-haired and apple-cheeked, with the smooth columnar legs of the very young, came to the microphone dressed in a minimal parody of a cowgirl outfit and sang, in English, “Dip in the Hot of Texas” and “Allo Cindy Lou, Gootbye Hot.” She pulled guns from her hips and received much pro-American applause, but Bech was on his third Scotch and needed his hands to hold cigarettes. The Rumanian writer sat at the table beside him, a carafe of vodka at his elbow, staring stolidly at the floor show. He looked like the young Theodore Roosevelt, or perhaps McGeorge Bundy. His wife leaned forward and said in Bech’s ear, “Is just like home, hey? Texas is ringing bells?” He decided she was being sarcastic. A fat man in a baggy maroon tuxedo set up a long table and kept eight tin plates twirling on the ends of flexible sticks. Bech thought it was miraculous, but the man was booed. A touching black-haired girl from Bulgaria hesitantly sang three atonal folk songs into a chastened silence. Three women behind Bech began to chatter hissingly. Bech turned to rebuke them and was stunned by the size of their wristwatches, which were man-sized, as in Russia. Also, in turning he had surprised Petrescu and the writer’s wife holding hands. Though it was after midnight, the customers were still coming in, and the floor show refused to stop. The Polish girls returned dressed as ponies and jumped through hoops the dwarf held for them. The master of ceremonies reappeared in a striped bathing suit and black wig and did an act with the dwarf involving a stepladder and a bucket of water. A black dancer from Ghana twirled firebrands in the dark while slapping the floor with her bare feet. Four Latvian tumblers performed on a trampoline and a seesaw. The Czech mother and daughter came back in different costumes, spangled gold, but performed the identical act, the pigeons whirring, circling, returning, eating from the mother’s lips. Then five Chinese girls from Outer Mongolia—

  “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.