Bech at Bay (3 page)

Bech asked her, “But who binds them so nicely? Isn’t that illegal?”

“Yes,” was her answer. “But there are brave men.” Her reproachful, inky eyes rolled toward him, as she placed the book in his hands.

The page size was less than that of American typewriter paper; small sheets of onionskin thickness, and an elite typewriter, had been used, and a blue carbon paper. The binding was maroon leather, with silver letters individually punched. The book that resulted was unexpectedly beautiful, its limp pages of blue blurred text falling open easily, with an occasional engraving, of Picassoesque nudes, marking a fresh chapter. It felt lighter, placed in Bech’s hands, than he had expected from the thickness of it. Only the right-hand pages held words; the left-hand held mirrored ghosts of words, the other side showing through. He had been returned to some archetypal sense of what a book was: it was an elemental sheaf, bound together by love and daring, to be passed with excitement from hand to hand. Bech had expected the pathos, the implied pecking of furtive typewriters, but not the defiant beauty of the end result. “How many such books exist?”

“Of each, six at least. More asks more typing. Each book has many readers.”

“It’s like a medieval manuscript,” Bech said.

“We are not monks,” said the young woman solemnly. “We do not enjoy to suffer.”

In the Ford Fiesta, the Ambassador’s wife teased him, saying to her husband, “I think our celebrated author was rather taken with Ila.”

The Ambassador said nothing, merely pointed at the ceiling of the car.

Bech, not understanding the gesture, repeated, “Ila?” Ila, Elli, Kafka’s sister. “Is she Jewish?” The bushy hair, the sallow matte skin, the tension in her slender shoulders, the way she forced meaning through her broken English.

The Ambassador’s wife laughed, with her scratchy light-hearted voice. “Close,” she said. “She’s a gypsy.”

“A gypsy,” Bech said, as if he and she were playing a game, batting words back and forth in the car’s interior. He was sitting in the back seat, and the Ambassador’s wife in the front. Feeble Socialist streetlight intermittently shone through her straw-pale hair, which had been fluffed up by the fun of the dissident party. “They have those here?” he asked.

“They have those here of course,” she said, her tone almost one of rebuke. “The French word for gypsy is ‘
bohémien.
’ Many are assimilated, like your new lady friend. Hitler killed quite a few, but not all.”

Hitler. To come to Europe is somehow to pay him a visit. He was becoming a myth, like the Golem. Bech had been shown the Old-New Synagogue, where the cabalist and alchemist Rabbi Loew had read from the Talmud and concocted a Golem whose giant clay remains still wait in the synagogue attic to be revived. And the Pinkas Synagogue, its walls covered with the names of seventy-seven thousand concentration-camp victims. And the nearby hall filled with the drawings Jewish children drew while interned at the camp at Terezín, houses and cows and flowers such
as children draw everywhere, holding their crayons tight, seizing the world with stubby beginner’s fingers. Communists can always say in their own defense that at least they’re not Hitler. And that
is
something.

In alternation with the light on the filaments of the American woman’s hair, a vague black dread penetrated Bech’s stomach, a sudden feeling he used to get, when six or seven, of being in the wrong place, a disastrously wrong place, even though he was only three blocks from home, hurrying along upper Broadway in a bedlam of indifferent strangers. “Those poor guys,” he abruptly said. “The one with the slicked-down hair had been ten years in jail, and I glanced at a couple of his stories he showed me. They’re like Saki, harmless arch little things. Why would they put him in jail for wanting to write those? I was looking at him, trying to put myself in his shoes, and he kept giving me this sweet smile and modest little shrug. You know the one I mean—old-fashioned suit and vest, one of those names full of zizzes—”

The Ambassador cleared his throat very noisily and pointed again at the low ceiling of the little car. Bech understood at last. The car was bugged. They spoke hardly a word all the rest of the way back to the Residence, through the gabled and steepled profile of midnight Prague. There was never, it seemed to Bech, any moon. Did the moon shine only on capitalism?

At the Residence, in the morning, it was nice to awake to the sound of birds and of gardeners working. One crew was raking up the winter leaves; another crew was getting the tennis court ready for the summer. Bech’s bathroom
lay many steps from his bed, through the sunny parqueted living room of his suite, with its gently curved walls. Mammoth brass fixtures, the latest thing in 1930, gushed water over Art Deco shower tiles or into porcelain basins big enough to contain a fish pond. Otto Petschek had bought only the best. Breakfast appeared at a long table in a dining room next door, where timid women fetched Bech what he had checked off on a printed form the night before. “
Prosím
,” they said, as Italians say “
Prego.
”

“
Děkuji
,” he would say, when he could think of the word, which he found an exceptionally difficult one.
Jakui
is how the Ambassador’s wife pronounced it, very rapidly. She was never at breakfast; Bech always ate alone, though sometimes other place settings hinted at other guests. There were others: a suave plump Alsatian photographer, with a slim male assistant, was photographing the place, room by room, for
Architectural Digest
, and some old friends from Akron had come by on the way to Vienna, and the Ambassador’s wispy daughter by a former marriage was taking school vacation from her Swiss
lycée.
But in the mornings all this cast of characters was invisible, and Bech in lordly solitude took his post-breakfast stroll in the garden, along the oval path whose near end was nestled, like an egg in a cup, into the curve of the palace and its graceful flagstone patio, past the raking gardeners and the empty swimming pool, around to where three men in gray workclothes were rolling and patting flat the red clay of the tennis court, just the other side of the pruned and banked rose garden, from which the warming weather had coaxed a scent of moist humus. He never met another stroller. Nor did he ever see a face—a princess, gazing out—at any of the many windows of the Residence.

It seemed that this was his proper home, that all men were naturally entitled to live in luxury no less, amid parquet and marquetry, marble hall tables and gilded picture frames, with a young wife whose fair hair would flash and chiffon-veiled breasts gleam when, in an instant, she appeared at a window, to call him in. As on a giant curved movie screen the Residence projected the idea of domestic bliss. What a monster I am, he thought—sixty-three and still covetous, still a king in my mind. Europe and not America, he further thought, is the land of dreams, of fairy-tale palaces and clocks that run backwards. Hitler had kissed the princess and made her bad dreams come true. But, then, there have been many holocausts. Bech had been shown the window of Hradčany Castle from which the Defenestration of Prague had occurred; though the emissaries defenestrated had landed unharmed on a pile of manure, the incident had nevertheless commenced the Thirty Years’ War, which had decimated Central Europe. Bech had seen the statue of Jan Žižka, the one-eyed Hussite general who had piously slaughtered the forces of the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor for five years, and the statue in the baroque Church of St. Nicholas that shows a tall pope gracefully, beatifically crushing with the butt of his staff the throat of a pointy-eared infidel. For centuries, conquest and appropriation piled up their palaces and chapels on the crooked climbing streets of Prague. The accumulation remained undisturbed, though the Nazis, ever faithful to their cleansing mission, tried to blow things up as they departed. The mulch of history, on these moist mornings when Bech had the oval park to himself, was deeply peaceful. The dead and wronged in their multitudes are mercifully quiet.

A young citizen of Prague had thrust himself upon the cultural officers of the Embassy and was conceded an appointment to meet Bech. He bravely came to the Embassy, past the U.S. Marine guards and the posters of the dismantled Statue of Liberty, and had lunch with Bech in the cafeteria. He was so nervous he couldn’t eat. His name was unpronounceable, something like Syzygy—Vítěslav Syzygy. He was tall and dignified, however, and less young than Bech had expected, with a dusting of gray in his sideburns and that pedantic strict expression Bech had come to know as characteristically Czech. He could have worn a pince-nez on his high-bridged narrow nose. His English was impeccable but halting, like a well-made but poorly maintained machine. “This is very strange for me,” he began, “physically to meet you. It was twenty years ago, just before Pragspring, that I read your
Travel Light.
For me it was a revelation that language could function in such a manner. It is not too much to say that it transformed the path of my life.”

Bech wanted to say to him, “Stop sweating. Stop trembling.” Instead he dipped his spoon into the cafeteria
bramborovka
and listened. Syzygy, officially silenced as translator and critic since his involvement nearly two decades ago in “Pragspring,” had spent these past years laboring upon an impossibly good, dizzyingly faithful yet inventive translation into Czech of a Bech masterwork,
Brother Pig
, not yet favored by a version into his language.
Bratr vepř
was at last completed to his satisfaction. Never, in his severely, precisely stated opinion, has there been such a translation—not even Pasternak’s of Shakespeare, not Baudelaire’s of Poe, constituted such scrupulous and loving
hommage.
The difficulty …

“Ah,” Bech said, wiping his lips and, still hungry, wondering if it would be gross etiquette to dip his spoon into Syzygy’s untouched bowl of milky, spicy
bramborovka
, “so there is a difficulty.”

“As you say,” Syzygy said. Bech now knew the code: the lowered voice, the eyes darting toward the ubiquitous hidden bugs—as great an investment of intramural wiring here as of burglar alarms in the United States. “Perhaps you remember, in the middle chapter, with the amusing title ‘Paradoxes and Paroxysms,’ how the characters Lucy and Marvin in the midst of the mutual seduction of Genevieve make passing allusions to the then-new head of the Soviet state, a certain Mr.—” Syzygy’s eyes, the gentle dull color of the non-inked side of carbon paper, slid back and forth helplessly.

“Begins with ‘K,’ ” Bech helped him out.

“ ‘X,’ in Russian orthography,” Syzygy politely corrected, hawking. “A guttural sound. But exactly so. Our friends, how can I say—?”

“I know who your friends are.”

“Our friends would never permit such an impudent passage to appear in an official publication, even though the statesman in question himself died in not such good official odor. Yet I cannot bring myself to delete even a word of a text that has become to me, so to speak, sacred. I am not religious but now I know how certain simple souls regard the Bible.”

Bech waved his hand magnanimously. “Oh, take it out. I forget why I popped it in. Probably because Khrushchev struck me as porcine and fitted the theme. Anything for the theme, that’s the way we American writers do it. You understand the word, ‘porcine’?”

Syzygy stiffened. “But of course.”

Bech tried to love this man, who loved him, or at least loved a version of him that he had constructed. “You take anything out or put anything in that will make it easier for you,” he said. But this was bad, since it implied (correctly) that how Bech read in Czech couldn’t matter to him less. He asked, apologetically, “But if you are in, as we say, not such good odor yourself with our friends, how do you expect to get your translation published?”

“I
am
published!” Syzygy said. “Often, but under fictitious names. Even the present regime needs translations. You see,” he said, sensing Bech’s wish to peer into the structure of it all, “there are layers.” His voice grew more quiet, more precise. “There is inside and outside, and some just this side of outside have friends just on the inside, and so on. Also, it is not as if—” His very white hands again made, above his untouched soup, that curt helpless gesture.

“As if the present system of government was all your idea,” Bech concluded for him, by “your” meaning “Czechoslovakia’s.”

The Ambassador, as they walked along cobblestones one night to a restaurant, felt free outdoors to express his opinion on this very subject. “Up until
sixty
-eight,” he said in his rapid and confident entrepreneurial way, seeing the realities at a glance, “it was interesting to be an intellectual here, because to a degree they had done it to themselves: most of them, and the students, were for Gottwald when he took over for the Communists in
for
ty-eight. They were still thinking of
thir
ty-eight, when the Germans were the problem. But after
six
ty-eight and the tanks, they became
an occupied country once more, as they were under the Hapsburgs, with no responsibility for their own fate. It became just a matter of power, of big countries versus little ones, and there’s nothing intellectually interesting about that, now is there, professor?”

Addressed thus ironically, Bech hesitated, trying to picture the situation. In his limited experience—and isn’t all American experience intrinsically limited, by something thin in our sunny air?—power was boring, except when you yourself needed it. It was not boring to beat Hitler, but it had become boring to outsmart, or be outsmarted by, the Russians. Reagan was no doubt President because he was the last American who, imbued with the black-and-white morality of the movies, still found it exciting.

“I mean,” the Ambassador said impatiently, “I’m no intellectual, so tell me if I’m way off base.”

Bech guessed the little man simply wanted flattery, a human enough need. Bech sopped it up all day in Czechoslovakia while the Ambassador was dealing with the calculated insults of European diplomacy. “You’re right on, Mr. Ambassador, as usual. Without guilt, there is no literature.”