Bech Page 6

  Bech said, “But she seems so healthy.” They stood beside a small church with whitewashed walls. From the outside it looked like a hovel, a shelter for pigs or chickens. For five centuries the Turks had ruled Bulgaria, and the Christian churches, however richly adorned within, had humble exteriors. A peasant woman with wildly snarled hair unlocked the door for them. Though the church could hardly ever have held more than thirty worshippers, it was divided into three parts, and every inch of wall was covered with eighteenth-century frescoes. Those in the narthex depicted a Hell where the devils wielded scimitars. Passing through the tiny nave, Bech peeked through the iconostasis into the screened area that, in the symbolism of Orthodox architecture, represented the next, the hidden world—Paradise. He glimpsed a row of books, an easy chair, a pair of ancient oval spectacles. Outdoors again, he felt released from the unpleasantly tight atmosphere of a children’s book. They were on the side of a hill. Above them was a stand of pines whose trunks were shelled with ice. Below them sprawled the monastery, a citadel of Bulgarian national feeling during the years of the Turkish Yoke. The last monks had been moved out in 1961. An aimless soft rain was falling in these mountains, and there were not many German tourists today. Across the valley, whose little silver river still turned a water wheel, a motionless white horse stood silhouetted against a green meadow, pinned there like a brooch.

  “I am an old friend of hers,” the playwright said. “I worry about her.”

  “Are the poems good?”

  “It is difficult for me to judge. They are very feminine. Perhaps shallow.”

  “Shallowness can be a kind of honesty.”

  “Yes. She is very honest in her work.”

  “And in her life?”

  “As well.”

  “What does her husband do?”

  The other man looked at him with parted lips and touched his arm, a strange Slavic gesture, communicating an underlying racial urgency, which Bech no longer shied from. “But she has no husband. As I say, she is too much for poetry to have married.”

  “But her name ends in ‘-ova.’ ”

  “I see. You are mistaken. It is not a matter of marriage; I am Petrov, my unmarried sister is Petrova. All females.”

  “How stupid of me. But I think it’s such a pity, she’s so charming.”

  “In America, only the uncharming fail to marry?”

  “Yes, you must be very uncharming not to marry.”

  “It is not so here. The government indeed is alarmed; our birth rate is one of the lowest in Europe. It is a problem for economists.”

  Bech gestured at the monastery. “Too many monks?”

  “Not enough, perhaps. With too few of monks, something of the monk enters everybody.”

  The peasant woman, who seemed old to Bech but who was probably younger than he, saw them to the edge of her domain. She huskily chattered in what Petrov said was very amusing rural slang. Behind her, now hiding in her skirts and now darting away, was her child, a boy not more than three. He was faithfully chased, back and forth, by a small white pig, who moved, as pigs do, on tiptoe, with remarkably abrupt changes of direction. Something in the scene, in the open glee of the woman’s parting smile and the unself-conscious way her hair thrust out from her head, something in the mountain mist and spongy rutted turf into which frost had begun to break at night, evoked for Bech a nameless absence to which was attached, like a horse to a meadow, the image of the poetess, with her broad face, her good legs, her Parisian clothes, and her sleekly brushed hair. Petrov, in whom he was beginning to sense, through the wraps of foreignness, a clever and kindred mind, seemed to have overheard his thoughts, for he said, “If you would like, we could have dinner. It would be easy for me to arrange.”

  “With her?”

  “Yes, she is my friend, she would be glad.”

  “But I have nothing to say to her. I’m just curious about such an intense conjunction of good looks and brains. I mean, what does a soul do with it all?”

  “You may ask her. Tomorrow night?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m scheduled to go to the ballet, and the next night the legation is giving a cocktail party for me, and then I fly home.”

  “Home? So soon?”

  “It does not feel soon to me. I must try to work again.”

  “A drink, then. Tomorrow evening before the ballet? It is possible? It is not possible.”

  Petrov looked puzzled, and Bech realized that it was his fault, for he was nodding to say Yes, but in Bulgarian nodding meant No, and a shake of the head meant Yes. “Yes,” he said. “Gladly.”

  The ballet was entitled Silver Slippers. As Bech watched it, the word “ethnic” kept coming to his mind. He had grown accustomed, during his trip, to this sort of artistic evasion, the retreat from the difficult and disappointing present into folk dance, folk tale, folk song, with always the implication that, beneath the embroidered peasant costume, the folk was really one’s heart’s own darling, the proletariat.

  “Do you like fairy tales?” It was the damp-palmed interpreter who accompanied him to the theatre.

  “I love them,” Bech said, with a fervor and gaiety lingering from the previous hour. The interpreter looked at him anxiously, as when Bech had swallowed the brandy in one swig, and throughout the ballet kept murmuring explanations of self-evident events on the stage. Each night, a princess would put on silver slippers and dance through her mirror to tryst with a wizard, who possessed a magic stick that she coveted, for with it the world could be ruled. The wizard, as a dancer, was inept, and once almost dropped her, so that anger flashed from her eyes. She was, the princess, a little redhead with a high round bottom and a frozen pout and beautiful free arm motions, and Bech found it oddly ecstatic when, preparatory to her leap, she would dance toward the mirror, an empty oval, and another girl, identically dressed in pink, would emerge from the wings and perform as her reflection. And when the princess, haughtily adjusting her cape of invisibility, leaped through the oval of gold wire, Bech’s heart leaped backward into the enchanted hour he had spent with the poetess.

  Though the appointment had been established, she came into the restaurant as if, again, she had been suddenly summoned and had hurried. She sat down between Bech and Petrov slightly breathless and fussed, but exuding, again, that impalpable warmth of intelligence and virtue.

  “Vera, Vera,” Petrov said.

  “You hurry too much,” Bech told her.

  “Not so very much,” she said.

  Petrov ordered her a cognac and continued with Bech their discussion of the newer French novelists. “It is tricks,” Petrov said. “Good tricks, but tricks. It does not have enough to do with life, it is too much verbal nervousness. Is that sense?”

  “It is an epigram,” Bech said.

  “There are just two of their number with whom I do not feel this: Claude Simon and Samuel Beckett. You have no relation, Bech, Beckett?”

  “None.”

  Vera said, “Nathalie Sarraute is a very modest woman. She felt motherly to me.”

  “You have met her?”

  “In Paris I heard her speak. Afterward there was the coffee. I liked her theories, of the, oh, what? Of the little movements within the heart.” She delicately measured a pinch of space and smiled, through Bech, back at herself.

  “Tricks,” Petrov said. “I do not feel this with Beckett; there, in a low form, believe it or not, one has human content.”

  Bech felt duty-bound to pursue this, to ask about the theatre of the absurd in Bulgaria, about abstract painting (these were the touchstones of “progressiveness”; Russia had none, Rumania some, Czechoslovakia plenty), to subvert Petrov. Instead, he asked the poetess, “Motherly?”

  Vera explained, her hands delicately modeling the air, rounding into nuance, as it were, the square corners of her words. “After her talk, we—talked.”

  “In French?”

  “And in Russian.”

  “She knows Russian?”

  “She was born R
ussian.”

  “How is her Russian?”

  “Very pure but—old-fashioned. Like a book. As she talked, I felt in a book, safe.”

  “You do not always feel safe?”

  “Not always.”

  “Do you find it difficult to be a woman poet?”

  “We have a tradition of woman poets. We have Elisaveta Bagriana, who is very great.”

  Petrov leaned toward Bech as if to nibble him. “Your own works? Are they influenced by the nouvelle vague? Do you consider yourself to write anti-romans?”

  Bech kept himself turned toward the woman. “Do you want to hear about how I write? You don’t, do you?”

  “Very much yes,” she said.

  He told them, told them shamelessly, in a voice that surprised him with its steadiness, its limpid urgency, how once he had written, how in Travel Light he had sought to show people skimming the surface of things with their lives, taking tints from things the way that objects in a still life color one another, and how later he had attempted to place beneath the melody of plot a countermelody of imagery, interlocking images which had risen to the top and drowned his story, and how in The Chosen he had sought to make of this confusion the theme itself, an epic theme, by showing a population of characters whose actions were all determined, at the deepest level, by nostalgia, by a desire to get back, to dive, each, into the springs of their private imagery. The book probably failed; at least, it was badly received. Bech apologized for telling all this. His voice tasted flat in his mouth; he felt a secret intoxication and a secret guilt, for he had contrived to give a grand air, as of an impossibly noble and quixotically complex experiment, to his failure when at bottom, he suspected, a certain simple laziness was the cause.

  Petrov said, “Fiction so formally sentimental could not be composed in Bulgaria. We do not have a happy history.”

  It was the first time Petrov had sounded like a Communist. If there was one thing that irked Bech about these people behind the mirror, it was their assumption that, however second-rate elsewhere, in suffering they were supreme. He said, “Believe it or not, neither do we.”

  Vera calmly intruded. “Your personae are not moved by love?”

  “Yes, very much. But as a form of nostalgia. We fall in love, I tried to say in the book, with women who remind us of our first landscape. A silly idea. I used to be interested in love. I once wrote an essay on the orgasm—you know the word?—”

  She shook her head. He remembered that it meant Yes.

  “—on the orgasm as perfect memory. The mystery is, what are we remembering?”

  She shook her head again, and he noticed that her eyes were gray, and that in their depths his image (which he could not see) was searching for the thing remembered. She composed her finger tips around the brandy glass and said, “There is a French poet, a young one, who has written of this. He says that never else do we, do we so gather up, collect into ourselves, oh—” Vexed, she spoke to Petrov in rapid Bulgarian.

  He shrugged and said, “Concentrate our attention.”

  “—concentrate our attention,” she repeated to Bech, as if the words, to be believed, had to come from her. “I say it foolish—foolishly—but in French it is very well put and—correct.”

  Petrov smiled neatly and said, “This is an enjoyable subject for discussion, love.”

  “It remains,” Bech said, picking his words as if the language were not native even to him, “one of the few things that still deserve meditation.”

  “I think it is good,” she said.

  “Love?” he asked, startled.

  She shook her head and tapped the stem of her glass with a fingernail, so that Bech had an inaudible sense of ringing, and she bent as if to study the liquor, so that her entire body borrowed a rosiness from the brandy and burned itself into Bech’s memory—the silver gloss of her nail, the sheen of her hair, the symmetry of her arms relaxed on the white tablecloth, everything except the expression on her face.

  Petrov asked aloud Bech’s opinion of Dürrenmatt.

  Actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility. Though he had looked forward to seeing her again at the cocktail party and had made sure that she was invited, when it occurred, though she came, he could not get to her. He saw her enter, with Petrov, but he was fenced in by an attaché of the Yugoslav Embassy and his burnished Tunisian wife; and, later, when he was worming his way toward her diagonally, a steely hand closed on his arm and a rasping American female told him that her fifteen-year-old nephew had decided to be a writer and desperately needed advice. Not the standard crap, but real brass-knuckles advice. Bech found himself balked. He was surrounded by America: the voices, the narrow suits, the watery drinks, the clatter, the glitter. The mirror had gone opaque and gave him back only himself. He managed, in the end, as the officials were thinning out, to break through and confront her in a corner. Her coat, blond, with a rabbit collar, was already on; from its side pocket she pulled a pale volume of poems in the Cyrillic alphabet. “Please,” she said. On the flyleaf she had written, “to H. Beck, sincerelly, with bad spellings but much”—the last word looked like “leave” but must have been “love.”

  “Wait,” he begged, and went back to where his ravaged pile of presentation books had been and, unable to find the one he wanted, stole the legation library’s jacketless copy of The Chosen. Placing it in her expectant hands, he told her, “Don’t look,” for inside he had written, with a drunk’s stylistic confidence,

  DEAR VERA GLAVANAKOVA—

  It is a matter of earnest regret for me that you and I must live on opposite sides of the world.

  BECH TAKES POT LUCK

  THOUGH HENRY BECH’S few persistent admirers among the critics praised his “highly individual and refractory romanticism,” his “stubborn refusal to mount, in this era of artistic coup d’état and herd movement, any bandwagon but that of his own quixotic, excessively tender, strangely anti-Semitic Semitic sensibility,” the author nevertheless had a sneaking fondness for the fashionable. Each August, he deserted his shabby large apartment at 99th and Riverside and rented a cottage on a Massachusetts island whose coves and sandy lanes were crammed with other writers, television producers, museum directors, undersecretaries of State, movie stars whose Forties films were now enjoying a camp revival, old New Masses editors possessively squatting on seaside acreage bought for a song in the Depression, and hordes of those handsome, entertaining, professionless prosperous who fill the chinks between celebrities. It innocently delighted Bech, a child of the urban middle class, to see these luxurious people padding in bare feet along the dirty sidewalks of the island’s one town, or fighting for overpriced groceries in the tiny general store of an up-island hamlet. It gratified him to recognize some literary idol of his youth, shrunken and frail, being tumbled about by the surf; or to be himself recognized by some faunlike bikinied girl who had been assigned Travel Light at the Brearley School, or by a cozy Westchester matron, still plausible in her scoop-back one-piece, who amiably confused Bech’s controversial chef-d’œuvre The Chosen with a contemporary best-seller of the same title. Though often thus accosted, Bech had never before been intercepted by a car. The little scarlet Porsche, the long blond hair of its driver flapping, cut in front of Bech’s old Ford as he was driving to the beach, and forced him to brake within inches of two mailboxes painted with flowers and lettered, respectively, “Sea Shanty” and “Avec du Sel.” The boy—it was a boy’s long blond hair—hopped out and raced back to Bech’s window, extending a soft hand that, as Bech docilely shook it, trembled like a bird’s breast. The boy’s plump face seemed falsified by the uncut mane; it engulfed his ears and gave his mouth, perhaps because it was unmistakably male, an assertive quarrelsome look. His eyebrows were sun-bleached to invisibility; his pallid blue eyes were all wonder and love.

  “Mr. Bech, hey. I couldn’t believe it was you.”

  “Suppose it hadn’t been me. How would you explain forcing me into this ditch?”

  “I bet
you don’t remember who I am.”

  “Let me guess. You’re not Sabu, and you’re not Freddie Bartholomew.”

  “Wendell Morrison, Mr. Bech. English 1020 at Columbia, 1963.” For one spring term Bech, who belonged to the last writing generation that thought teaching a corruption, had been persuaded to oversee—it amounted to little more than that—the remarkably uninhibited conversations of fifteen undergraduates and to read their distressingly untidy manuscripts. Languid and clever, these young people had lacked not only patriotism and faith but even the coarse morality competitiveness imposes. Living off fathers they despised, systematically attracted to the outrageous, they seemed ripe for Fascism. Their politics burlesqued the liberal beliefs dear to Bech; their literary tastes ran to chaotic second-raters like Miller and Tolkien and away from those austere, prim saints—Eliot, Valéry, Joyce—whose humble suppliant Bech had been. Bech even found fault with them physically: though the girls were taller and better endowed than the girls of his youth, with neater teeth and clearer skins, there was something doughy about their beauty; the starved, conflicted girls of Bech’s generation had had distinctly better legs. He slowly remembered Wendell. The boy always sat on Bech’s left, a fair-haired young Wasp from Stamford, crewcut—a Connecticut Yankee, more grave and respectful than the others, indeed so courteous Bech wondered if some kind of irony were intended. He appeared to adore Bech; and Bech’s weakness for Wasps was well known. “You wrote in lower case,” Bech said. “An orgy with some girls in a house full of expensive furniture. Glints of pink flesh in a chandelier. Somebody defecated on a polar-bear rug.”

  “That’s right. What a great memory.”

  “Only for fantasies.”

  “You gave it an A, you said it really shook you up. That meant a hell of a lot to me. I couldn’t tell you then, I was playing it cool, that was my hang-up, but I can tell you now, Mr. Bech, it was real encouragement, it’s really kept me going. You were great.”