Bech: A Book

by John Updike

  “I’ll send you razor blades,” he promised, for in the embrace Petrescu’s beard had scratched.

  “No, no, I already buy the best. Send me books, any books!”

  The plane was roaring to go, and only when safely, or fatally, sealed inside did Bech remember the chauffeur. In the flurry of formalities and baggage handling there had been no goodbye. Worse, there had been no tip. The leu notes Bech had set aside were still folded in his wallet, and his start of guilt gave way, as the runways and dark fields tilted and dwindled under him, to a glad sense of release. Clouds blotted out the country. He realized that for four days there; in that driver’s care, he had been afraid. The man next to him, a portly Slav whose bald brow was beaded with apprehensive sweat, turned and confided something unintelligible, and Bech said, “Pardon, je ne comprends pas. Je suis Américain.”

  THE BULGARIAN POETESS

  “YOUR POEMS. Are they difficult?”

  She smiled and, unaccustomed to speaking English, answered carefully, drawing a line in the air with two delicately pinched fingers holding an imaginary pen. “They are difficult—to write.”

  He laughed, startled and charmed. “But not to read?”

  She seemed puzzled by his laugh, but did not withdraw her smile, though its corners deepened in a defensive, feminine way. “I think,” she said, “not so very.”

  “Good.” Brainlessly he repeated “Good,” disarmed by her unexpected quality of truth. He was, himself, a writer, this fortyish young man, Henry Bech, with his thinning curly hair and melancholy Jewish nose, the author of one good book and three others, the good one having come first. By a kind of oversight, he had never married. His reputation had grown while his powers declined. As he felt himself sink, in his fiction, deeper and deeper into eclectic sexuality and bravura narcissism, as his search for plain truth carried him further and further into treacherous realms of fantasy and, lately, of silence, he was more and more thickly hounded by homage, by flat-footed exegetes, by arrogantly worshipful undergraduates who had hitchhiked a thousand miles to touch his hand, by querulous translators, by election to honorary societies, by invitations to lecture, to “speak,” to “read,” to participate in symposia trumped up by ambitious girlie magazines in shameless conjunction with venerable universities. His very government, in airily unstamped envelopes from Washington, invited him to travel, as an ambassador of the arts, to the other half of the world, the hostile, mysterious half. Rather automatically, but with some faint hope of shaking himself loose from the burden of himself, he consented, and found himself floating, with a passport so stapled with visas it fluttered when pulled from his pocket, down into the dim airports of Communist cities.

  He arrived in Sofia the day after a mixture of Bulgarian and African students had smashed the windows of the American legation and ignited an overturned Chevrolet. The cultural officer, pale from a sleepless night of guard duty, tamping his pipe with trembling fingers, advised Bech to stay out of crowds and escorted him to his hotel. The lobby was swarming with Negroes in black wool fezzes and pointed European shoes. Insecurely disguised, he felt, by an astrakhan hat purchased in Moscow, Bech passed through to the elevator, whose operator addressed him in German. “Ja, vier,” Bech answered, “danke,” and telephoned, in his bad French, for dinner to be brought up to his room. He remained there all night, behind a locked door, reading Hawthorne. He had lifted a paperback collection of short stories from a legation window sill littered with broken glass. A few curved bright crumbs fell from between the pages onto his blanket. The image of Roger Malvin lying alone, dying, in the forest—“Death would come like the slow approach of a corpse, stealing gradually towards him through the forest, and showing its ghastly and motionless features from behind a nearer and yet a nearer tree”—frightened him. Bech fell asleep early and suffered from swollen, homesick dreams. It had been the first day of Hanukkah.

  In the morning, venturing downstairs for breakfast, he was surprised to find the restaurant open, the waiters affable, the eggs actual, the coffee hot, though syrupy. Outside, Sofia was sunny and (except for a few dark glances at his big American shoes) amenable to his passage along the streets. Lozenge-patterns of pansies, looking flat and brittle as pressed flowers, had been set in the public beds. Women with a touch of Western chic walked hatless in the park behind the mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov. There was a mosque, and an assortment of trolley cars salvaged from the remotest corner of Bech’s childhood, and a tree that talked—that is, it was so full of birds that it swayed under their weight and emitted volumes of chirping sound like a great leafy loudspeaker. It was the inverse of his hotel, whose silent walls presumably contained listening microphones. Electricity was somewhat enchanted in the Socialist world. Lights flickered off untouched and radios turned themselves on. Telephones rang in the dead of the night and breathed wordlessly in his ear. Six weeks ago, flying from New York City, Bech had expected Moscow to be a blazing counterpart and instead saw, through the plane window, a skein of hoarded lights no brighter, on that vast black plain, than a girl’s body in a dark room.

  Past the talking tree was the American legation. The sidewalk, heaped with broken glass, was roped off, so that pedestrians had to detour into the gutter. Bech detached himself from the stream, crossed the little barren of pavement, smiled at the Bulgarian militiamen who were sullenly guarding the jewel-bright heaps of shards, and pulled open the bronze door. The cultural officer was crisper after a normal night’s sleep. He clenched his pipe in his teeth and handed Bech a small list. “You’re to meet with the Writers’ Union at eleven. These are writers you might ask to see. As far as we can tell, they’re among the more progressive.”

  Words like “progressive” and “liberal” had a somewhat reversed sense in this world. At times, indeed, Bech felt he had passed through a mirror, a dingy flecked mirror that reflected feebly the capitalist world; in its dim depths everything was similar but left-handed. One of the names ended in “-ova.” Bech said, “A woman.”

  “A poetess,” the cultural officer said, sucking and tamping in a fury of bogus efficiency. “Very popular, apparently. Her books are impossible to buy.”

  “Have you read anything by these people?”

  “I’ll be frank with you. I can just about make my way through a newspaper.”

  “But you always know what a newspaper will say anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t get your meaning.”

  “There isn’t any.” Bech didn’t quite know why the Americans he met behind the mirror irritated him—whether because they garishly refused to blend into this shadow-world or because they were always so solemnly sending him on ridiculous errands.

  At the Writers’ Union, he handed the secretary the list as it had been handed to him, on U.S. legation stationery. The secretary, a large stooped man with the hands of a stonemason, grimaced and shook his head but obligingly reached for the telephone. Bech’s meeting was already waiting in another room. It was the usual one, the one that, with small differences, he had already attended in Moscow and Kiev, Yerevan and Alma-Ata, Bucharest and Prague: the polished oval table, the bowl of fruit, the morning light, the gleaming glasses of brandy and mineral water, the lurking portrait of Lenin, the six or eight patiently sitting men who would leap to their feet with quick blank smiles. These men would include a few literary officials, termed “critics,” high in the Party, loquacious and witty and destined to propose a toast to international understanding; a few selected novelists and poets, mustachioed, smoking, sulking at this invasion of their time; a university professor, the head of the Anglo-American Literature department, speaking in a beautiful withered English of Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis; a young interpreter with a clammy handshake; a shaggy old journalist obsequiously scribbling notes; and, on the rim of the group, in chairs placed to suggest that they had invited themselves, one or two gentlemen of ill-defined status, fidgety and tieless, maverick translators who would turn out to be the only ones present who had ever read a word by Henry Be
ch.

  Here this type was represented by a stout man in a tweed coat leather-patched at the elbows in the British style. The whites of his eyes were distinctly red. He shook Bech’s hand eagerly, made of it almost an embrace of reunion, bending his face so close that Bech could distinguish the smells of tobacco, garlic, cheese, and alcohol. Even as they were seating themselves around the table, and the Writers’ Union chairman, a man elegantly bald, with very pale eyelashes, was touching his brandy glass as if to lift it, this anxious red-eyed interloper blurted at Bech, “Your Travel Light was so marvelous a book! The motels, the highways, the young girls with their lovers who were motorcyclists, so marvelous, so American, the youth, the adoration for space and speed, the barbarity of the advertisements in neon lighting, the very poetry. It takes us truly into another dimension.”

  Travel Light was the first novel, the famous one. Bech disliked discussing it. “At home,” he said, “it was criticized as despairing.”

  The man’s hands, stained orange with tobacco, lifted in amazement and plopped noisily to his knees. “No, no, a thousand times. Truth, wonder, terror even, vulgarity, yes. But despair, no, not at all, not one iota. Your critics are dead wrong.”

  “Thank you.”

  The chairman softly cleared his throat and lifted his glass an inch from the table, so that it formed with its reflection a kind of playing card.

  Bech’s admirer excitedly persisted. “You are not a wet writer, no. You are a dry writer, yes? You have the expressions, am I wrong in English, dry, hard?”

  “More or less.”

  “I want to translate you!”

  It was the agonized cry of a condemned man, for the chairman coldly lifted his glass to the height of his eyes, and like a firing squad the others followed suit. Blinking his white lashes, the chairman gazed mistily in the direction of the sudden silence, and spoke in Bulgarian.

  The young interpreter murmured in Bech’s ear. “I wish to propose now, ah, a very brief toast. I know it will seem doubly brief to our honored American guest, who has so recently enjoyed the, ah, hospitality of our Soviet comrades.” There must have been a joke here, for the rest of the table laughed. “But in seriousness permit me to say that in our country we have seen in years past too few Americans, ah, of Mr. Bech’s progressive and sympathetic stripe. We hope in the next hour to learn from him much that is interesting and, ah, socially useful about the literature of his large country, and perhaps we may in turn inform him of our own proud literature, of which perhaps he knows regrettably little. Ah, so let me finally, then, since there is a saying that too long a courtship spoils the marriage, offer to drink, in our native plum brandy slivovica, ah, firstly to the success of his visit and, in the second place, to the mutual increase of international understanding.”

  “Thank you,” Bech said and, as a courtesy, drained his glass. It was wrong; the others, having merely sipped, stared. The purple burning revolved in Bech’s stomach and a severe distaste for himself, for his role, for this entire artificial and futile process, were focused into a small brown spot on a pear in the bowl so shiningly posed before his eyes.

  The red-eyed fool smelling of cheese was ornamenting the toast. “It is a personal honor for me to meet the man who, in Travel Light, truly added a new dimension to American prose.”

  “The book was written,” Bech said, “ten years ago.”

  “And since?” A slumping, mustached man sat up and sprang into English. “Since, you have written what?”

  Bech had been asked that question often in these weeks and his answer had grown curt. “A second novel called Brother Pig, which is St. Bernard’s expression for the body.”

  “Good. Yes, and?”

  “A collection of essays and sketches called When the Saints.”

  “I like the title less well.”

  “It’s the beginning of a famous Negro song.”

  “We know the song,” another man said, a smaller man, with the tense, dented mouth of a hare. He lightly sang, “Lordy, I just want to be in that number.”

  “And the last book,” Bech said, “was a long novel called The Chosen that took five years to write and that nobody liked.”

  “I have read reviews,” the red-eyed man said. “I have not read the book. Copies are difficult here.”

  “I’ll give you one,” Bech said.

  The promise seemed, somehow, to make the recipient unfortunately conspicuous; wringing his stained hands, he appeared to swell in size, to intrude grotesquely upon the inner ring, so that the interpreter took it upon himself to whisper, with the haste of an apology, into Bech’s ear, “This gentleman is well known as the translator into our language of Alice in Wonderland.”

  “A marvelous book,” the translator said, deflating in relief, pulling at his pockets for a cigarette. “It truly takes us into another dimension. Something that must be done. We live in a new cosmos.”

  The chairman spoke in Bulgarian, musically, at length. There was polite laughter. Nobody translated for Bech. The professorial type, his hair like a flaxen toupee, jerked forward. “Tell me, is it true, as I have read”—his phrases whistled slightly, like rusty machinery—“that the stock of Sinclair Lewis has plummeted under the Salinger wave?”

  And so it went, here as in Kiev, Prague, and Alma-Ata, the same questions, more or less predictable, and his own answers, terribly familiar to him by now, mechanical, stale, irrelevant, untrue, claustrophobic. Then the door opened. In came, with the rosy air of a woman fresh from a bath, a little breathless, having hurried, hatless, a woman in a blond coat, her hair also blond. The secretary, entering behind her, seemed to make a cherishing space around her with his large curved hands. He introduced her to Bech as Vera Something-ova, the poetess he had asked to meet. None of the others on the list, he explained, had answered their telephones.

  “Aren’t you kind to come?” As Bech asked it, it was a genuine question, to which he expected some sort of an answer.

  She spoke to the interpreter in Bulgarian. “She says,” the interpreter told Bech, “she is sorry she is so late.”

  “But she was just called!” In the warmth of his confusion and pleasure Bech turned to speak directly to her, forgetting he would not be understood. “I’m terribly sorry to have interrupted your morning.”

  “I am pleased,” she said, “to meet you. I heard of you spoken in France.”

  “You speak English!”

  “No. Very little amount.”

  “But you do.”

  A chair was brought for her from a corner of the room. She yielded her coat, revealing herself in a suit also blond, as if her clothes were an aspect of a total consistency. She sat down opposite Bech, crossing her legs. Her legs were visibly good; her face was perceptibly broad. Lowering her lids, she tugged her skirt to the curve of her knee. It was his sense of her having hurried, hurried to him, and of being, still, graciously flustered, that most touched him.

  He spoke to her very clearly, across the fruit, fearful of abusing and breaking the fragile bridge of her English. “You are a poetess. When I was young, I also wrote poems.”

  She was silent so long he thought she would never answer; but then she smiled and pronounced, “You are not old now.”

  “Your poems. Are they difficult?”

  “They are difficult—to write.”

  “But not to read?”

  “I think—not so very.”

  “Good. Good.”

  Despite the decay of his career, Bech had retained an absolute faith in his instincts; he never doubted that somewhere an ideal course was open to him and that his intuitions were pre-dealt clues to his destiny. He had loved, briefly or long, with or without consummation, perhaps a dozen women; yet all of them, he now saw, shared the trait of approximation, of narrowly missing an undisclosed prototype. The surprise he felt did not have to do with the appearance, at last, of this central woman; he had always expected her to appear. What he had not expected was her appearance here, in this remote and abused nation,
in this room of morning light, where he discovered a small knife in his fingers and on the table before him, golden and moist, a precisely divided pear.

  Men traveling alone develop a romantic vertigo. Bech had already fallen in love with a freckled embassy wife in Russia, a buck-toothed chanteuse in Rumania, a stolid Mongolian sculptress in Kazakhstan. In the Tretyakov Gallery he had fallen in love with a recumbent statue, and at the Moscow Ballet School with an entire roomful of girls. Entering the room, he had been struck by the aroma, tenderly acrid, of young female sweat. Sixteen and seventeen, wearing patchy practice suits, the girls were twirling so strenuously their slippers were unraveling. Demure student faces crowned the unconscious insolence of their bodies. The room was doubled in depth by a floor-to-ceiling mirror. Bech was seated on a bench at its base. Staring above his head, each girl watched herself with frowning eyes frozen, for an instant in the turn, by the imperious delay and snap of her head. Bech tried to remember the lines of Rilke that expressed it, this snap and delay: did not the drawing remain/that the dark stroke of your eyebrow/swiftly wrote on the wall of its own turning? At one point the teacher, a shapeless old Ukrainian lady with gold canines, a prima of the thirties, had arisen and cried something translated to Bech as, “No, no, the arms free, free!” And in demonstration she had executed a rapid series of pirouettes with such proud effortlessness that all the girls, standing this way and that like deer along the wall, had applauded. Bech had loved them for that. In all his loves, there was an urge to rescue—to rescue the girls from the slavery of their exertions, the statue from the cold grip of its own marble, the embassy wife from her boring and unctuous husband, the chanteuse from her nightly humiliation (she could not sing), the Mongolian from her stolid race. But the Bulgarian poetess presented herself to him as needing nothing, as being complete, poised, satisfied, achieved. He was aroused and curious and, the next day, inquired about her of the man with the vaguely contemptuous mouth of a hare—a novelist turned playwright and scenarist, who accompanied him to the Rila Monastery. “She lives to write,” the playwright said. “I do not think it is healthy.”