Bech at Bay, Page 2

  Bech said “Děkuji” and “Prosím” at random and grew more and more embarrassed. Across the street, Embassy underlings gleefully whispered into his ear, Czech policemen were photographing the line; so all these people were putting themselves at some risk—were putting a blot on their records by seeking the autograph of an American author. Why? His books were petty and self-indulgent, it seemed to Bech as he repeatedly signed them, like so many checks that would bounce. In third-world countries, he had often been asked what he conceived to be the purpose of the writer, and he had had to find ways around the honest answer, which was that the purpose of the writer is to amuse himself, to indulge himself, to get his books into print with as little editorial smudging as he can, to slide through his society with minimal friction. This annoying question did not arise in a Communist country. Its citizens understood well the heroism of self-indulgence, the political grandeur of irresponsibility. They were voting, in their long lines, for a way out, just as Bech, forty years before, stuck on Manhattan like archy the cockroach, had composed, as a way out, his hommages to an imaginary America.

  The Ambassador and his minions arranged for Bech to attend a party of unofficial writers. “Oh, those sexy female dissidents,” the Ambassador’s wife softly exclaimed, as if Bech were deserting her. But she came along. The party, and the apartment, somewhere off in the unscenic suburbs that visitors to historic Prague never see, and that Bech saw only that one night, by the veering, stabbing, uncertain headlights of the Ambassador’s private little Ford Fiesta, were reminiscent of the Fifties, when Eisenhower presided over a tense global truce and the supreme value of the private life was unquestioned. Bookshelves to the ceiling, jazz murmuring off in a corner, glossy-haired children passing hors d’oeuvres, a shortage of furniture that left people sprawled across beds or hunkered down two to a hassock. The hostess wore a peasant blouse and skirt and had her hair done up in a single thick pigtail; the bald host wore a kind of dashiki or wedding shirt over blue jeans. Bech felt taken back to the days of relative innocence in America, when the young were asking only for a little more freedom, a bit more sex and debourgeoisation, a whiff of pot and a folk concert in a borrowed meadow. These people, however, were not young; they had grown middle-aged in protest, in dissidence, and moved through their level of limbo with a practiced weariness. Bech could see only a little way into the structure of it all. When husbands could not publish, wives worked and paid the bills; his hostess, for instance, was a doctor, an anesthesiologist, and in the daytime must coil her long amber pigtail into an antiseptic cap. And their children, some of them, were young adults, who had studied in Michigan or Iowa or Toronto and talked with easy American accents, as if their student tourism were as natural as that of young Frenchmen or Japanese. There was, beyond this little party flickering like a candle in the dark suburbs of Prague, a vast dim world of exile, Czechs in Paris or London or the New World who had left yet somehow now and then returned, to visit a grandmother or to make a motion picture, and émigré presses whose products circulated underground; the Russians could not quite seal off this old heart of Europe as tightly as they could, say, Latvia or Kazakhstan.

  The wish to be part of Europe: the frustration of this modest desire formed the peculiarly intense Czech agony. To have a few glass skyscrapers among the old cathedrals and castles, to have businessmen come and go on express trains without passing through pompous ranks of barbed wire, to have a currency that wasn’t a sham your own shop owners refused, to be able to buy fresh Sicilian oranges in the market, to hang a few neon signs in the dismal Prague arcades, to enrich the downtown with a little pornography and traffic congestion, to enjoy the harmless luxury of an anti-nuclear protest movement and a nihilist avant-garde—this was surely not too much to ask after centuries of being sat on by the Hapsburgs. But it was denied: having survived Hitler and the anti-Hussites, the Czechs and the Slovaks had become ensnared in the Byzantine clutches of Moscow. Two dates notched the history of dissidence: 1968, the year of “Prague Spring” (referred to so often, so hurriedly, that it became one word: “Pragspring”) and of the subsequent Russian invasion; and 1977, when Charter 77 was promulgated, with the result that many of its signatories went into exile or to jail.

  Jail! One of the guests at the party had spent nearly ten years in prison. He was dapper, like the café habitués in George Grosz drawings, with a scarred, small face and shining black eyes. He spoke so softly Bech could hardly hear him, though he bent his ear close. The man’s hands twisted under Bech’s eyes, as if in the throes of torture. Bech noticed that the fingers were in fact bent, broken. How would he, the American author asked himself, stand up to having his fingernails pulled? He could think of nothing he had ever written that he would not eagerly recant.

  Another guest at the party, wearing tinted aviator glasses and a drooping, nibbled mustache, explained to Bech that the Western media always wanted to interview dissidents and he had become, since released from his two years in prison, the one whom the avid newsmen turned to when needing a statement. He had sacrificed not only his safety but his privacy to this endless giving of interviews, which left him no time for his own work. Perhaps, he said with a sigh, if and when he was returned to jail, he could again resume his poetry. His eyes behind the lavender lenses looked rubbed and tired.

  What kind of poetry did he write, Bech asked.

  “Of the passing small feelings,” was the considered answer. “Like Seifert. To the authorities, these little human feelings are dangerous like an earthquake; but he became too big, too big and old and sick, to touch. Even the Nobel could not hurt him.”

  And meanwhile food was passed around, the jazz was turned up, and in the apartment’s other room the Ambassador and his wife were stretched out on the floor, leaning against a bookcase, her long legs gleaming, in a hubbub of laughter and Czech. To Bech, within his cluster of persecuted writers, the sight of her American legs seemed a glint of reality, something from far outside yet unaccountably proceeding, as birds continue to sing outside barred windows and ivy grows on old graves. The Ambassador had his coat off, his tie loosened, a glass in his hand. His quick eyes noticed the other American peering at his wife’s legs and he shouted out, in noisy English, “Show Bech a book! Let’s show our famous American author some samizdat!”

  Everyone was sweating now, from the wine and pooled body heat, and there was a hilarity somehow centered on Bech’s worried, embarrassed presence. He feared the party would become careless and riotous, and the government police surely posted outside the building would come bursting in. A thin young woman with frizzy black hair—a sexy dissident—stood close to Bech and showed him a book. “We type,” she explained, “six copies maximum; otherwise the bottom ones too blurred. Xeroxing not possible here but for official purposes. Typewriters they can’t yet control. Then bound, sometimes with drawings. This one has drawings. See?” Her loose blouse exposed, as she leaned against Bech to share the book with him, a swath of her shoulders and a scoop of her bosom, lightly sweating. Her glazed skin was a seductive tint, a matte greenish-gray.

  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 e
xcitement 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.