Bech (2 page)

Russia, in those days, like everywhere else, was a slightly more innocent place. Khrushchev, freshly deposed, had left an atmosphere, almost comical, of warmth, of a certain fitful openness, of inscrutable experiment and oblique possibility. There seemed no overweening reason why Russia and America, those lovable paranoid giants, could not happily share a globe so big and blue; there certainly seemed no reason why Henry Bech, the recherché but amiable novelist, artistically blocked but socially fluent, should not be flown into Moscow at the expense of our State Department for a month of that mostly imaginary activity termed “cultural exchange.” Entering the Aeroflot plane at Le Bourget, Bech thought it smelled like his uncles’ backrooms in Williamsburg, of swaddled body heat and proximate potatoes, boiling.
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The impression lingered all month; Russia seemed Jewish to him, and of course he seemed Jewish to Russia. He never knew how much of the tenderness and hospitality he met related to his race. His contact
man at the American Embassy—a prissy, doleful ex-basketball-player from Wisconsin, with the all-star name of “Skip” Reynolds,—assured him that two out of every three Soviet intellectuals had suppressed a Jew in their ancestry; and once Bech did find himself in a Moscow apartment whose bookcases were lined with photographs (of Kafka, Einstein, Freud, Wittgenstein) pointedly evoking the glory of pre-Hitlerian
Judenkultur
. His hosts, both man and wife, were professional translators, and the apartment was bewilderingly full of kin, including a doe-eyed young hydraulics engineer and a grandmother who had been a dentist with the Red Army, and whose dental chair dominated the parlor. For a whole long toasty evening, Jewishness, perhaps also pointedly, was not mentioned. The subject was one Bech was happy to ignore. His own writing had sought to reach out from the ghetto of his heart toward the wider expanses across the Hudson; the artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the Fifties but in the movies of the Thirties, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of a simple immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience. The reservoir of faith, in 1964, was just going dry; through depression and world convulsion the country had been sustained by the
arriviste
patriotism of Louis B. Mayer and the brothers Warner. To Bech, it was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance between Jewish Hollywood and bohunk America, conducted almost entirely in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range; and his favorite Jewish writer was the one who turned his back on his three beautiful Brooklyn novels and went into the desert to write scripts for Doris Day. This may be, except for graduate students,
neither here nor there. There, in Russia five years ago, when Cuba had been taken out of the oven to cool and Vietnam was still coming to a simmer, Bech did find a quality of life—impoverished yet ceremonial, shabby yet ornate, sentimental, embattled, and avuncular—reminiscent of his neglected Jewish past. Virtue, in Russia as in his childhood, seemed something that arose from men, like a comforting body odor, rather than something from above, which impaled the struggling soul like a moth on a pin. He stepped from the Aeroflot plane, with its notably hefty stewardesses, into an atmosphere of generosity. They met him with arms heaped with cold roses. On the first afternoon, the Writers’ Union gave him as expense money a stack of ruble notes, pink and lilac Lenin and powder-blue Spasskaya Tower. In the following month, in the guise of “royalties” (in honor of his coming they had translated
Travel Light
, and several of his
Commentary
essays [“M-G-M and the U.S.A.”; “The Moth on the Pin”; “Daniel Fuchs: An Appreciation”] had appeared in
I Nostrannaya Literatura
, and since no copyright agreements pertained the royalties were arbitrarily calculated, like showers of manna), more rubles were given to him, so that by the week of his departure Bech had accumulated over fourteen hundred rubles—by the official exchange rate, fifteen hundred and forty dollars. There was nothing to spend it on. All his hotels, his plane fares, his meals were paid for. He was a guest of the Soviet state. From morning to night he was never alone. That first afternoon, he had also been given, along with the rubles, a companion, a translator-escort: Ekaterina Alexandrovna Ryleyeva. She was a notably skinny red-headed woman with a flat chest and paper-colored skin and a translucent mole above her left nostril. He grew to call her Kate.

“Kate,” he said, displaying his rubles in two fistfuls, letting
some drift to the floor, “I have robbed the proletariat. What can I do with my filthy loot?” He had developed, in this long time in which she was always with him, a clowning super-American manner that disguised all complaints as “acts.” In response, she had strengthened her original pose—of school-teacherish patience, with ageless peasant roots. Her normal occupation was translating English-language science fiction into Ukrainian, and he imagined this month with him was relatively a holiday. She had a mother, and late at night, after accompanying him to a morning-brandy session with the editors of
Yunost
, to lunch at the Writers’ Union with its shark-mouthed chairman,
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to Dostoevski’s childhood home (next to a madhouse, and enshrining some agonized crosshatched manuscripts and a pair of oval tin spectacles, tiny, as if fashioned for a dormouse), a museum of folk art, an endless restaurant meal, and a night of ballet, Ekaterina would bring Bech to his hotel lobby, put a babushka over her bushy orange hair, and head into a blizzard toward this ailing mother. Bech wondered about Kate’s sex life. Skip Reynolds solemnly told him that personal life in Russia was inscrutable. He also told Bech that Kate was undoubtedly a Party spy. Bech was touched, and wondered what in him would be worth spying out. From infancy on we all are spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. Ekaterina was perhaps as old as forty, which could just give her a betrothed killed in the war. Was this the secret of her vigil, the endless paper-colored hours she spent by his side? She was always translating for him, and this added to her neutrality and transparence. He, too, had never been married, and imagined that this was what marriage was like.

She answered, “Henry”—she usually touched his arm, saying his name, and it never ceased to thrill him a little, the way the “H” became a breathy guttural sound between “G” and “K”—“you must not joke. This is your money. You earned it by the sweat of your brain. All over Soviet Union committees of people sit in discussion over
Travel Light
, its wonderful qualities. The printing of one hundred thousand copies has gone
poof!
in the bookstores.” The comic-strip colors of science fiction tinted her idiom unexpectedly.

“Poof!” Bech said, and scattered the money above his head; before the last bill stopped fluttering, they both stooped to retrieve the rubles from the rich red carpet. They were in his room at the Sovietskaya, the hotel for Party bigwigs and important visitors; all the suites were furnished in high czarist style: chandeliers, wax fruit, and brass bears.

“We have banks here,” Kate said shyly, reaching under the satin sofa, “as in the capitalist countries. They pay interest, you could deposit your money in such a bank. It would be here, enlarged, when you returned. You would have a numbered bankbook.”

“What?” said Bech, “And help support the Socialist state? When you are already years ahead of us in the space race? I would be adding thrust to your rockets.”

They stood up, both a little breathless from exertion, betraying their age. The tip of her nose was pink. She passed the remainder of his fortune into his hands; her silence seemed embarrassed.

“Besides,” Bech said, “when would I ever return?”

She offered, “Perhaps in a space-warp?”

Her shyness, her pink nose and carroty hair, her embarrassment were becoming oppressive. He brusquely waved his arms. “No, Kate, we must spend it! Spend, spend. It’s the
Keynesian way. We will make Mother Russia a consumer society.”

From the very still, slightly tipped way she was standing, Bech, bothered by “space-warp,” received a haunted impression—that she was locked into a colorless other dimension from which only the pink tip of her nose emerged. “Is not so simple,” she ominously pronounced.

For one thing, time was running out. Bobochka and Myshkin, the two Writers’ Union officials in charge of Bech’s itinerary, had crowded the end of his schedule with compulsory cultural events. Fortified by relatively leisured weeks in Kazakhstan and the Caucasus,
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Bech was deemed fit to endure a marathon of war movies (the hero of one of them had lost his Communist Party member’s card, which was worse than losing your driver’s license; and in another a young soldier hitched rides in a maze of trains only to turn around at the end [“See, Henry,” Kate whispered to him, “now he is home, that is his mother, what a good face, so much suffering, now they kiss, now he must leave, oh—” and Kate was crying too much to translate further]) and museums and shrines and brandy with various writers who uniformly adored Gemingway. November was turning bitter, the Christmassy lights celebrating the Revolution had been taken down, Kate as they hurried from appointment to appointment had developed a sniffle. She constantly patted her nose with a handkerchief. Bech felt a guilty pang, sending her off into the cold toward her mother before he ascended to his luxurious hotel room, with its parqueted foyer stacked with gift books and its
alabaster bathroom and its great brocaded double bed. He would drink from a gift bottle of Georgian brandy and stand by the window, looking down on the golden windows of an apartment building where young Russians were Twisting to Voice of America tapes. Chubby Checker’s chicken-plucker’s voice carried distinctly across the crevasse of sub-arctic night. In an adjoining window, a couple courteously granted isolation by the others was making love; he could see knees and hands and then a rhythmically kicking ankle. To relieve the pressure, Bech would sit down with his brandy and write to distant women boozy, reminiscent letters that in the morning would be handed solemnly to the ex-basketball-player, to be sent out of Russia via diplomatic pouch.
^*
Reynolds, himself something of a spy, was with them whenever Bech spoke to a group, whether of translators (when asked who was America’s best living writer, Bech said Nabokov, and there was quite a silence before the next question) or of students (whom he assured that Yevtushenko’s
Precocious Autobiography
was a salubrious and patriotic work that instead of being banned should be distributed free to Soviet schoolchildren). “Did I put my foot in it?” Bech would ask anxiously afterward—another “act.”

The American’s careful mouth twitched. “It’s good for them. Shock therapy.”

“You were charming,” Ekaterina Alexandrovna always said loyally, jealously interposing herself, and squeezing Bech’s arm. She could not imagine that Bech did not, like herself, loathe all officials. She would not have believed that Bech approached Reynolds with an intellectual’s reverence for the athlete, and that they exchanged in private not anti-Kremlin
vitriol but literary gossip and pro football scores, love letters and old copies of
Time
. Now, in her campaign to keep them apart, Kate had been given another weapon. She squeezed his arm smugly and said, “We have an hour. We must rush off and
shop
.”

For the other thing, there was not much to buy. To begin, he would need an extra suitcase. He and Ekaterina, in their chauffeured Zil, drove to what seemed to Bech a far suburb, past flickerings of birch forest, to sections of new housing, perforated warehouses the color of wet cement. Here they found a vast store, vast though each salesgirl ruled as a petty tyrant over her domain of shelves. There was a puzzling duplication of suitcase sections; each displayed the same squarish mountain of dark cardboard boxes, and each pouting princess responded with negative insouciance to Ekaterina’s quest for a leather suitcase. “I know there have been some,” she told Bech.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I want a cardboard one. I love the metal studs and the little chocolate handle.”

“You have fun with me,” she said. “I know what you have in the West. I have been to Science-Fiction Writers’ Congress in Vienna. This great store, and not one leather suitcase. It is a disgrace upon the people. But come, I know another store.” They went back into the Zil, which smelled like a cloakroom, and in whose swaying stuffy depths Bech felt squeamish and chastened, having often been sent to the cloakroom as a child at P.S. 87, on West 77th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. A dozen stuffy miles and three more stores failed to produce a leather suitcase; at last Kate permitted him to buy a paper one—the biggest, with gay plaid sides, and as long as an oboe. To console her, he also bought an astrakhan hat. It was not flattering (when he put it on, the haughty salesgirl laughed
aloud) and did not cover his ears, which were cold, but it had the advantage of costing all of fifty-four rubles. “Only a
boyar
,” said Kate, excited to flirtation by his purchase, “would wear such a wow of a hat.”

“I look like an Armenian in it,” Bech said. Humiliations never come singly. On the street, with his suitcase and hat, Bech was stopped by a man who wanted to buy his overcoat. Kate translated and then scolded. During what Bech took to be a lengthy threat to call the police, the offender, a morose bleary-eyed man costumed like a New York chestnut vender, stared stubbornly at the sidewalk by their feet.

As they moved away, he said in soft English to Bech, “Your shoes. I give forty rubles.”

Bech pulled out his wallet and said, “
Nyet, nyet
. For your shoes I give fifty.”

Kate with a squawk flew between them and swept Bech away. She told him in tears, “Had the authorities witnessed that scene we would all be put in jail, biff, bang.”

Bech had never seen her cry in daylight—only in the dark of projection rooms. He climbed into the Zil feeling especially sick and guilty. They were late for their luncheon, with a cherubic museum director and his hatchet-faced staff. In the course of their tour through the museum, Bech tried to cheer her up with praise of Socialist realism. “Look at that turbine. Nobody in America can paint a turbine like that. Not since the thirties. Every part so distinct you could rebuild one from it, yet the whole thing romantic as a sunset. Mimesis—you can’t beat it.” He was honestly fond of these huge posterish oils; they reminded him of magazine illustrations from his adolescence.