Bech in Czech
The American Ambassador’s Residence in Prague has been called the last palace built in Europe. It was built in the early 1930s by a rich Jewish banker, Otto Petschek, whose family, within a decade of its construction, had to flee Hitler. The Americans had acquired the building and its grounds after the war, before Czechoslovakia went quite so Communist. The whole building gently curves—that is, it was built along the length of an arc, and a walk down its long corridors produces a shifting perspective wherein paintings, silk panels, marble-topped hall tables, great metalicized oaken doors all slowly come into view, much as islands appear above the horizon to a ship at sea and then slowly sink behind it, beyond the majestic, roiling, paleturquoise wake.
Henry Bech, the semi-obscure American author, who had turned sixty-three in this year of 1986, felt majestic and becalmed in the great Residence, where, at one end, he had been given a suite for the week of his cultural visit to this restive outpost of the Soviet empire. As a Jew himself, he was conscious of the former owners, those vanished plutocrats, no doubt very elegant and multilingual, who with such pathetic trust, amid the tremors of the Diaspora’s Middle-European golden age (not to be confused with the golden age in Saracen Spain, or the good times under the Polish princes), had built their palace on the edge of an abyss. For a Jew, to move through post-war Europe is to move through hordes of ghosts, vast animated crowds that, since 1945, are not there, not there at all—up in smoke. The feathery touch of the mysteriously absent is felt on all sides. In the center of old Prague the clock of the Jewish Town Hall—which, with the adjacent synagogues, Hitler intended to preserve as the relic of an exterminated race—still runs backwards, to the amusement of tourists from both sides of the Iron Curtain. The cemetery there, with its four centuries of dead crowded into mounds by the pressures of the ghetto, and the tombstones jumbled together like giant cards in a deck being shuffled, moved Bech less than the newer Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of town, where the Ambassador felt that the visiting author should see Kafka’s grave.
The Ambassador was an exceptionally short and peppy man with sandy thin hair raked across a freckled skull; he was an Akron industrialist and a Republican fund-raiser who had believed in Reagan when most bigwig insiders still laughed at the notion of a movie actor in the White House. For his loyalty and prescience the Ambassador had been rewarded with this post, and there was an additional logic to it, for he was Czech by ancestry; his grandparents had come to Pittsburgh from the coalfields of Moravia, and the language had been spoken in his childhood home. “They love it when I talk,” he told Bech with his disarming urchin grin. “I sound so damn old-fashioned. It would be as if in English somebody talked like the King James Bible.” Bech fancied he saw flit across the Ambassador’s square face the worry that Jews didn’t have much to do with the King James Bible. The little man quickly added, for absolute clarity, “I guess I sound quaint as hell.”
Bech had noticed that the Czechs tended to smile when the Ambassador talked to them in their language. It was all the more noticeable because Czechs, once a wry and humorous race, found rather little to smile about. The Ambassador made Bech smile, too. Having spent most of his life in the narrow precincts of the Manhattan intelligentsia, a site saturated in poisonous envy and reflexive intolerance and basic impotence, he was charmed by the breezy and carefree ways of an authentic power-broker, this cheerful representative of the triumphant right wing. In entrepreneurial style, the Ambassador was a quick study, quick to pounce and quick to move on. He must have skimmed a fact sheet concerning his cultural guest, and it was on the basis of this information that he took Bech—freshly landed that morning, jet throb still ringing in his ears—to Kafka’s grave. “It’s the kind of thing that’ll appeal to you.” He was right.
The official limousine, with its morosely silent and sleepy-eyed chauffeur, wheeled along steep cobblestoned streets, past the old parapets and trolley tracks of Prague, and came, in what had once been outskirts, to a long ornate iron fence. The tall gate was locked and chained. The Ambassador rattled at the chains and called, but there was no answer. “Try the flag, honey,” said the Ambassador’s wife, a leggy blonde considerably younger than he.
Bech, who had travelled in Africa and Latin America and seen the Stars and Stripes attract rocks and spittle, winced as the Ambassador plucked the little American flag from the limousine’s front fender and began to wave it through the gate, shouting incomprehensibly. He noticed Bech’s wince and said in quick aside, “Relax. They love us here. They love our flag.” And indeed, two young men wearing plaster-splattered overalls shyly emerged, at the patriotic commotion, from within a cement-block shed. The Ambassador talked to them in Czech. Smiling at his accent, they came forward a few steps and spoke words that meant the cemetery was closed. The flag was given a few more flutters, but the boys continued, bemusedly, to shake their heads and pronounce the soft word ne. The Ambassador, with a playful and shameless aggressiveness that Bech had to admire even as he blushed for it, wielded a new inspiration; in his next spate of words Bech heard his own name, distinct in the rippling, Stygian flow of the opaque language.
The politely denying smiles on the faces of the young men gave way to open-eyed interest. They looked away from the Ambassador to the American author on the other side of the bars.
“Travel Light,” the taller one said in halting English, naming Bech’s first novel.
“Big Idea,” said the other, trying to name his last.
“Think Big,” Bech corrected, his blush deepening; he wouldn’t have guessed he had left in him so much spare blood as was making his cheeks burn, his palms tingle. This was absolutely, he vowed, his last appearance as a cultural icon.
“Ahhhh!” the two boys uttered in unison, enraptured by the authentic correction, out of the author’s mouth. With cries of jubilation from both sides, the locks and chains were undone and the three Americans were welcomed to the Strašnice cemetery.
It was an eerie, well-kept place. Impressive and stolid black tombstones stood amid tall trees, plane and ash and evergreen, and flourishing ivy. The vistas seemed endless, lit by the filtered sunlight of the woods, and silent with the held breath of many hundreds of ended lives. Most of the inhabitants had been shrewd enough to die before 1939, in their beds or in hospitals, one by one, before the Germans arrived and death became a mass production. The visitors’ party walked along straight weeded paths between grand marble slabs lettered in gold with predominantly Germanic names, the same names—Strauss, Steiner, Loeb, Goldberg—whose live ranks still march through the New York City telephone directories. The Ambassador and the two young workmen led the way, conversing in Czech—rather loudly, Bech thought. To judge from the Ambassador’s expansive gestures, he could be extolling the merits of the free-enterprise system or diagramming the perfidy of Gorbachev’s latest arms-reduction proposal.
“I find this very embarrassing,” Bech told the Ambassador’s wife, who walked beside him in silence along the lightly crunching path.
“I used to too,” she said, in her pleasantly scratchy Midwestern voice. “But, then, after a couple of years with Dick, nothing embarrasses me; he’s just very outgoing. Very frontal. It’s his way, and people here respond to it. It’s how they think Americans ought to act. Free.”
“These young men—mightn’t they lose their jobs for letting us in?”
She shrugged and gave a nervous little toss of her long blond hair. It was an affecting, lustreless shade, as if it had been washed too often. Her lips were dry and thoughtful, with flaking lipstick. “Maybe they don’t even have jobs. This is a strange system.” Her eyes were that translucent blue that Bech thought uncanny, having seen it, through his youth, mostly in toy polar bears and mannequins on display in Fifth Avenue Christmas windows.
“How well,” Bech said, looking around at the elegant and silent black stones, “these people all thought of themselves.”
“There was a lot of money here,” the Ambassador’s wife said. “People forget that about Bohemia. Before the Communists put an end to all that.”
“After the Germans put an end to all this,” Bech said, gesturing toward the Jewish population at rest around them. There were, curiously, a few death dates, in fresh gold, later than 1945—Jews who had escaped the Holocaust, he supposed, and then asked to be brought back here to be buried, beneath the tall straight planes with their mottled trunks, and the shiny green ivy spread everywhere like a tousled bedspread. Lots, records, permits—these things persisted.
“Here he is, your pal,” the Ambassador loudly announced. Bech had seen photographs of this tombstone—a white stone, relatively modest in size, wider at the top than at the bottom, and bearing three names, and inscriptions in Hebrew that Bech could not read. The three names were those of Dr. Franz Kafka; his father, Hermann; and his mother, Julie. In his last, disease-wracked year, Kafka had escaped his parents and lived with Dora Dymant in Berlin, but then had been returned here, and now lay next to his overpowering father forever. A smaller marker at the foot bore the names of his three sisters—Elli, Valli, Ottla—who had vanished into concentration camps. It all struck Bech as dumbfoundingly blunt and enigmatic, banal and moving. Such blankness, such stony and peaceable reification, waits for us at the bottom of things. No more insomnia for poor hypersensitive Dr. Franz.
Bech thought he should try a few words with their young hosts, who had shown some knowledge of English. “Very great Czech,” he said, pointing to the grave.
The broader-shouldered young man, who had wielded the key that let them in, smiled and said, “Not Czech. Žid. Jude.”
It was a simple clarification, nothing unpleasant. “Like me,” Bech said.
“You”—the other boy, more willowy, with plaster even in his hair, pointed straight at him—“wonderful!”
The other, his eyes merry at the thought of talking to an internationally famous writer, made a sound, “R-r-r-r-rum, rrroom,” which Bech recognized as an allusion to the famous rubber-faced motorcyclists of Travel Light, with its backseat rapes and its desolate roadside cafés on their vast gravel parking lots—Bech’s homage, as a young Manhattanite, to the imaginary territory beyond the Hudson. “Very americký, amerikanisch,” the young man said.
“Un peu,” Bech said and shrugged, out of courtesy abandoning English, as his conversational companions had abandoned Czech.
“And Big Thinking,” the shorter boy said, emboldened by all this pidgin language to go for an extended utterance, “we love very much. It makes much to laugh: TV, skyscrapes.” He laughed, for absolute clarity.
“Skyscrapers,” Bech couldn’t help correcting.
“I loved Olive in that novel,” the Ambassador’s wife said huskily at his side.
This, Bech felt, was a very sexy remark: Olive and the entire television crew, under the lights; Olive and her lesbian lover Thelma, in the West Side apartment as the tawny sun from New Jersey entered horizontally, like bars of music.…
“Kafka more Schmerz,” his Czech fan was going on, as if the buried writer, with his dark suit and quizzical smile, were standing right there beside the still-erect one, for comparison. “You more Herz. More—” He broke down into Czech, turning to face the Ambassador.
“More primitive energy,” the Ambassador translated. “More raw love of life.”
Bech in fact had felt quite tired of life ever since completing his last—his final, as he thought of it—and surprisingly successful novel, whose publication coincided with the collapse of his one and only marriage. That was why, he supposed, you travelled to places like this: to encounter fictional selves, the refreshing false ideas of you that strangers hold in their minds.
In Czechoslovakia he felt desperately unworthy; the unlucky country seemed to see in him an emblem of hope. Not only had his first and last novels been translated here (Lekhá cesta, Velká myšlenka) but a selection of essays and short fiction culled from When the Saints (Když svatí). All three volumes carried opposite the title page the same photo of the author, one taken when he was thirty, before his face had bulked to catch up to his nose and before his wiry hair had turned gray; his hair sat on his head then like a tall turban pulled low on his forehead. The rigors of Socialist photogravure made this faded image look as if it came not from the 1950s but from the time before World War I, when Proust was posing in a wing collar and Kafka in a bowler hat. Bech had ample opportunity to examine the photo, for endless lines formed when, at a Prague bookstore and then a few days later at the American Embassy, book-signing sessions were scheduled, and these Czech versions of his books were presented to him over and over again, open to the title page. His presence here had squeezed these tattered volumes—all out of print, since Communist editions are not replenished—up from the private libraries of Prague. Flattered, flustered, Bech tried to focus for a moment on each face, each pair of hands, as it materialized before him, and to inscribe the difficult names, spelled letter by letter. There were many young people, clear-eyed and shy, with a simple smooth glow of youth rather rarely seen in New York. To these fresh-faced innocents, he supposed, he was an American celebrity—not, of course, a rock star, smashing guitars and sobbing out his guts as the violet and magenta strobes pulsed and the stadium hissed and waved like a huge jellyfish, but with a touch of that same diabolic glamour. Or perhaps they were students, American-lit majors, and he something copied from a textbook, and his signature a passing mark. But there were older citizens, too—plump women with shopping bags, and men with pale faces and a pinched, pedantic air. Clerks? Professors? And a few persons virtually infirm, ancient enough to remember the regime of Tomáš Masaryk, hobbled forward with a kindly, faltering expression like that of a childhood sweetheart whom we cannot at first quite recognize. Most of the people said at least “Thank you”; many pressed a number of correctly shaped, highly complimentary English sentences upon him.
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 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 forty-eight. They were still thinking of thirty-eight, when the Germans were the problem. But after sixty-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.”
The Ambassador’s wife was walking behind, with the wife of the Akron couple and the fashionable photographer’s young assistant; their heels on the cobbles were like gunfire. The wife from Akron, named Annie, was also blonde, scratchy-voiced, and sexy with that leggy flip shiksa sexiness which for Bech was the glowing center of his American patriotism. For purple mountain majesties raced through his mind when the two women laughed, displaying their healthy gums, their even teeth, for amber waves of grain.
He was happy—so happy tears crept into his eyes, aided by the humid wind of this Prague spring—to be going out to a restaurant without having to sign books or talk to students about Whitman and Melville, the palefaces and red men, the black-humor movement, imperial fiction, and now the marvellous minimalists, the first wave of writers raised entirely within the global village, away from the malign influences of Gutenbergian literacy. Idolized Bech loved, at the end of a long day impersonating himself, being just folks: the shuffle around the table as he and his fellow Americans pragmatically tried to seat themselves, the inane and melodious gabble, the two American women sinking their white teeth into vodka fizzes, the headwaiter and the Ambassador enjoying their special, murmurous relationship. The husband from Akron, like the Ambassador a stocky businessman, sat nodding off, zombified by jet lag. They had flown from Cleveland to New York, New York to London, London to Frankfurt, rented a Mercedes, driven through the night, and been held six hours at the Czech border because among their papers had been discovered a letter from their hostess that included a sketchy map of downtown Prague. Communists hate maps. Why is that? Why do they so instinctively loathe anything that makes for clarity and would help orient the human individual? Bech wondered if there had ever before been regimes so systematically committed to perpetuating ignorance. Then he thought of another set: the Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe.
The Ambassador announced, “My friend Karel here”—the headwaiter—“informs me that several busloads of Germans have made reservations tonight and suggests we might want to move to the back room.” To Bech he explained, “This is the only country in Europe both West Germans and East Germans have easy access to. They get together in these restaurants and drink pilsner and sing.”
“Sing?”
“Oh boy, do they sing. They crack the rafters.”
“How do the Czechs like that?”
“They hate it,” the square-faced man said with his urchin smile.
The restaurant was in a vast wine cellar once attached to somebody’s castle. They woke up the dozing Akron husband and moved to a far recess, a plastered vault where only the Ambassador could stand upright without bumping his head. Whereas Mr. Akron kept falling asleep, his wife was full of energy; she and the Ambassador’s wife had sat up till dawn catching up on Ohio gossip, and then she had spent the day seeing all the available museums, including those devoted to Smetana and Dvořák and the one, not usually visited by Americans, that displayed the diabolical items of espionage confiscated at the border. Now, exhilarated by being out of Akron, Annie still maintained high animation, goading the Ambassador’s wife into a frenzy of girlish glee. They had gone to the same summer camp and private school, come out at the same country-club cotillion, and dropped out the same year of Oberlin to marry their respective Republican husbands. Bech felt it a failing in himself, one further inroad of death, that he found there being two of them, these perfect Midwestern beauties, somehow dampening to his desire: it halved rather than doubled it. The thought of being in bed with four such cornflower-blue eyes, a quartet of such long scissoring legs, a pair of such grainy triangular tongues, and two such vivacious, game, fun-loving hearts quailed his spirit, like the thought of submitting to the gleaming apparatus in Kafka’s story about the penal colony. Annie, on her second vodka fizz, was being very funny about the confiscated devices displayed in the border museum—radio transmitters disguised as candy bars, poison-dart fountain pens, Playboys from the era when pubic hair was still being airbrushed out—but gradually her lips moved without sound emerging, for the Germans had begun to sing. Though they were out of sight in another part of the subterranean restaurant, their combined voices were strong enough to make the brickwork vibrate as the little low nook cupped the resonating sound. Bech shouted in the Ambassador’s ear, “What are they singing about?”
“Der Deutschland!” the answer came back. “Mountains! Drinking!”
When the united German chorus began to thump their beer mugs on the tables, and then thump the tables on the floor, circular vibrations appeared in Bech’s mug of pilsner. The noise was not exactly menacing, Bech decided; it was simply unconsciously, helplessly large. The Germans in Europe were like a fat man who seats himself, with a happy sigh, in the middle of an already crowded sofa. The Czech waiters darted back and forth, wagging their heads and rolling their eyes in silent protest, and a gypsy band, having made a few stabs at roving the tables, retreated to a dark corner with glasses of brandy. Gypsies: Bech looked among them for the curly head, the skinny sallow shoulders of his dissident friend, who had talked so movingly about books, but saw only mustachioed dark men, looking brandy-soaked and defeated.
Next day—there seemed to be endless such days, when Bech awakened at his end of the palatial arc, shuffled in his bare feet across the parquet, through a room in which fresh flowers had always been placed, to the brassy, rumbling bathroom, and then breakfasted in enchanted solitude, like a changeling being fed nectar by invisible fairies, and took his proprietorial stroll along the oval path, bestowing terse nods of approval upon the workmen—he had an appointment to meet some literary officials, the board of the publishing house that dealt with foreign translations. Out of loyalty to the dissidents he had met earlier in his visit, he expected to be scornful of these apparatchiks, who would no doubt be old, with hairy ears and broad Soviet neckties. But in truth they were a young group, younger by a generation than the weary dissidents. The boy who seemed to be chairman of the board had been to UCLA and spoke with an oddly super-American accent, like that of a British actor playing O’Neill, and his associates, mostly female, stared at Bech with brighter eyes and smiles more avidly amused than any that had greeted him among the dissidents—to whom he had been, perhaps, as curious in his insignificant freedom as they to him in their accustomed state of danger and melancholy indignation. These young agents of the establishment, contrariwise, were experts in foreign literature and knew him and his context well. They boasted to him of American writers they had translated and published—Bellow, Kerouac, Styron, Vidal—and showed him glossy copies, with trendy covers.
“Burroughs, too, and John Barth,” a young woman proudly told him; she had a mischievous and long-toothed smile and might, it seemed to Bech, have gypsy blood. “We like very much the experiment, the experimental. William Gaddis, Joan Didion, the abrupt harsh texture. In English can you say that? ‘Abrupt texture?’ ”
“Sure,” said Bech. “In English, almost anything goes.” It embarrassed him that for these young Czechs American writing, its square dance of lame old names, should appear such a lively gavotte, prancing carefree into the future.
“Pray tell us,” another, pudgier, flaxen-haired young woman said, “of whom we should be especially conscious among the newer wave.”
“I’m not sure there is a new wave,” Bech admitted. “Just more and more backwash. The younger writers I meet look pretty old to me. You know about the minimalists?”
“And how,” the chairman of the board said. “Abish, Beattie, Carver—we’re doin’ ’em all.”
“Well,” Bech sighed, “you’re way ahead of me. Newer wave than that, you’ll have to dig right down into the fiction workshops. There are thousands of them, all across the country; it’s the easiest way to get through college.”
“Less Than Zero,” the blonde pronounced, “was evidently composed in one such class of instruction.”
The chairman laughed. “Like, really. He does a fantastic job on that sick scene.”
“Good title,” Bech admitted. “After the minimalists, what can there be but blank paper? It’ll be a relief, won’t it?”
The long-toothed woman laughed, sexily. “You talk the cynic, as Mortimer Zenith in Velká myšlenka. Perhaps, we think here, this novel, with its ironical title Think Big, departs your accustomed method. Is your first attempt at post-literary literature, the literature of exhaustion.”
“It seemed that bad to you?” Bech asked.
“That good, man,” interposed the chairman of the board.
“Whereas Travel Light was your experiment in the Beatnik school,” pursued the mischievous dark woman, “and Brother Pig your magic realism.”
“Speaking of Brother Pig—”
“Is ready to print!” she interrupted gaily. “We have fixed the pub date—that is the expression?—for this autumn that is coming.”
Bech continued, “I’ve met a man, a translator—”
The next interruption came from a slightly older man, nearly bald and so thin-skinned as to appear translucent, at the far end of the table. Bech had not hitherto noticed him. “We know and value the work,” he smoothly said, “of your friend Comrade Syzygy.”
Bech took this to mean that they were using Syzygy’s labor-of-love translation, and the Pragspring lambs were lying down with the Husák lions, and the levels of this mysterious fractured society were melding and healing beneath his own beneficent influence. With so pleasant a sensation warming Bech’s veins, he was emboldened to say, “There’s one novel of mine you never mention here. Yet it’s my longest and you could say my most ambitious—The Chosen.”
The members of the board glanced at one another. “Vyvolení,” the sexy long-toothed girl, dropping her smile, explained to the nearly bald, thin-skinned man.
In the face of their collective silence, Bech blushed and said, “Maybe it’s a terrible book. A lot of American critics thought so.”
“Oh, no, sir,” the little blonde said, her own color rising. “Henry Bech does not produce terrible books. It is more a matter—” She could not finish.
The dark one spoke, her smile restored but the sparkle banished from her eyes by a careful dullness. “It is that we are feeling Vyvolení is for the general Czech reader too—”
“Too special,” the chairman of the board supplied, quite pleased at having found the exact shade of prevarication within the English language.
“Too Jewish,” Bech translated.
In chorus, somewhat like the Germans singing, the board reassured him that nothing could be too Jewish, that modern Czechoslovakia paid no attention to such things, that the strain of Jewish-American literary expression was greatly cherished in all progressive countries. Nevertheless, and though the meeting ended with fervent and affectionate handshakes all around, Bech felt he had blundered into that same emptiness he had felt when standing in the crammed Old Jewish Cemetery, near the clock that ran backwards. He knew now why he felt so fond of the Ambassador and his wife, so safe in the Residence, and so subtly reluctant to leave. He was frightened of Europe. The historical fullness of Prague, layer on layer, castles and bridges and that large vaulted hall with splintered floorboards where jousts and knightly elections used to be held; museums holding halls of icons and cases of bluish Bohemian glass and painted panoramas of the saga of the all-enduring Slavs; tilted streets of flaking plasterwork masked by acres of scaffolding; that clock in Old Town Square where with a barely audible whirring a puppet skeleton tolls the hour and the twelve apostles and that ultimate bogeyman Jesus Christ twitchily appear in two little windows above and, one by one, bestow baleful wooden stares upon the assembled tourists; the incredible visual pâtisserie of baroque church interiors, mock-marble pillars of paint-veined gesso melting upward into trompel’oeil ceilings bubbling with cherubs, everything gilded and tipped and twisted and skewed to titillate the eye, huge wedding-cake interiors meant to stun Hussite peasants back into the bosom of Catholicism—all this overstuffed Christian past afflicted Bech like a void, a chasm that he could float across in the dew-fresh mornings as he walked the otherwise untrod oval path but which, over the course of each day, like pain inflicted under anaesthesia, worked terror upon his subconscious. The United States has its rough spots—if the muggers don’t get your wallet, the nursing homes will—but it’s still a country that never had a pogrom.
More fervently than he was a Jew, Bech was a writer, a literary man, and in this dimension, too, he felt cause for unease. He was a creature of the third person, a character. A character suffers from the fear that he will become boring to the author, who will simply let him drop, without so much as a terminal illness or a dramatic tumble down the Reichenbach Falls in the arms of Professor Moriarty. For some years now, Bech had felt his author wanting to set him aside, to get him off the desk forever. Rather frantically hoping still to amuse, Bech had developed a new set of tricks, somewhat out of character—he had married, he had written a best-seller. Nevertheless, and especially as his sixties settled around him, as heavily as an astronaut’s suit, he felt boredom from above dragging at him; he was—as H. G. Wells put it in a grotesquely cheerful acknowledgment of his own mortality that the boy Bech had read back when everything in print impressed him—an experiment whose chemicals were about to be washed down the drain. The bowls in his palace bathroom had voracious drains, gulping black holes with wide brass rims, like greedy bottomless bull’s-eyes. Ne, ne!
Around him in Czechoslovakia things kept happening. Little Akron Annie returned from a shopping expedition in the countryside with an old-fashioned sled, of bright-yellow wood, with the fronts of the runners curved up like a ram’s horns. Her children back in Ohio would love it. The photographer and his assistant had a fearful spat in French and German, and the boy disappeared for a night and came creeping back to the Residence with a black eye. The Ambassador, taking his wispy daughter with him, had to drive to Vienna for a conference with all the American ambassadors of Central Europe for a briefing on our official stance in case Kurt Waldheim, a former assistant killer of Jews, was elected President of Austria. There was, in his unavoidable absence, a reception at the Residence; Bech gave a talk, long scheduled and advertised, on “American Optimism as Evinced in the Works of Melville, Bierce, and Nathanael West,” and the Ambassador’s wife introduced him.
“To live a week with Henry Bech,” she began, “is to fall in love with him.”
Really? he thought. Why tell me now?
She went on quite brightly, leaning her scratchy voice into the mike and tripping into spurts of Czech that drew oohs and ahs from the attentive audience; but to Bech, as he sat beside her watching her elegant high-heeled legs nervously kick in the shadow behind the lectern, came the heavy, dreary thought that she was doing her job, that being attractive and vivacious and irrepressibly American was one of the chores of being an American ambassador’s wife. He stood blearily erect in the warm wash of applause that followed her gracious introduction. The audience, lit by chandeliers here in the palace ballroom, was all white faces and shirtfronts. He recognized, in a row, the young board of the publishing house for translations, and most of the crowd had a well-groomed, establishment air. Communists, opportunists, quislings.
But afterwards it was the dissidents, in checked shirts and slouchy thrift-shop dresses, who came up to him like favored children. The scarred man, his shiny black eyes mounted upon the curve of his face like insect eyes, shook Bech’s hand, clinging, and said, apropos of the speech, “You are naughty. There is no optimism.”
“Oh, but there is, there is!” Bech protested. “Underneath the pessimism.”
The gypsy was there, too, in another loose blouse, with her hair freshly kinked, so her sallow triangular face was nested as in a wide pillow, and only half-circles of her great gold earrings showed. “I like you,” she said, “when you talk about books.”
“And I you,” he answered. “That was such a lovely book you showed me the other night. The delicate thin paper, the hand-done binding. It nearly made me cry.”
“It makes many to cry,” she said, much as she had solemnly said, “We are not monks. We do not enjoy to suffer.”
And a blond dissident, with plump lips and round cheeks, who looked much like the blonde at the publishing house except that she was older, and wiser, with little creased comet’s tails of wisdom trailing from the corners of her eyes, explained, “Václav sends the regrets he could not come hear your excellent talk. He must be giving at this same hour an interview, to very sympathetic West German newspaperman.”
Syzygy, dark-suited and sweating as profusely as a voodoo priest possessed by his deity, could not bear to look at Bech. “Not since the premiere of Don Giovanni has there been such a performance in Prague,” he began but, unable out of sheer wonder to continue, shudderingly closed his eyes behind the phantom pince-nez.
At last Bech was alone in his room, feeling bloated by the white wine and extravagant compliments. This was his last night in the last palace built in Europe. Tomorrow, Brno, and then the free world. The moon was out, drenching in silver, like the back of a mirror, the great oval park—its pale path, its bushes with their shadows like heaps of ash, the rectilinear unused tennis courts, as ominous as a De Chirico. Where had the moon been all week? Behind the castle. Behind Hradčany. Bech moved back from the window and got into his king-size bed. From afar he heard doors slam, and a woman’s voice cry out in ecstasy: the Ambassador returning to his bride, having settled Waldheim’s hash. Bech read a little in Hašek’s Good Soldier Schweik, but even this very tedious national classic did not soothe him or allay his creeping terror.
He lay in bed sleepless, beset by panic. Jako by byl nemocen, zjistil, že může ležet jen v jedné poloze, na zádech. Obrátit se na druhý bok znamenalo nachýlit se nad okraj propasti, převrátit se na břicho znamenalo riskovat, že utone ve vodách věčného zapomnění, jež bublaly ve tmě zahřívané jeho tělem. A single late last trolley car squealed somewhere off in the labyrinth of Prague. The female cry greeting the Ambassador had long died down. But the city, even under its blanket of political oppression, faintly rustled, beyond the heavily guarded walls, with footsteps and small explosions of combustion, as a fire supposedly extinguished continues to crackle and settle. Zkoušel se na tyto zvuky soustředit, vymačkat z nich pouhou silou pozornosti balzám jejich nepopiratelnosti, nevinnost, která byla hlavním rysem jejich prosté existence, nezávisle na jejich dalších vlastnostech. Všechny věci mají tutéž existenci, děli se o tytéž atomy, přeskupují se: tráva v hnůj, maso v červy. Temnota za touto myšlenkou jako sklo, z něhož se stírá námraza. Zkoušel si příjemně oživit svůj vecěrní triumf, předčítání odměněné tak vřelým potleskem. He thought of the gypsy, Ila, Ila with her breasts loose in her loose blouse, who had come to his lecture and reception, braving the inscrutable Kafkaesque authorities, and tried to imagine her undressed and in a posture of sexual reception; his creator, however, was too bored with him to grant his aging body an erection and by this primordial method release his terror, there in the Ambassador’s great guest bed, its clean sheets smelling faintly of damp plaster.
Becha to neuspalo. Jeho panika, jako bolest, která sílí, když se jí obíráme, když jí rozněcujeme úpornou pozorností, se bez hojivého potlesku jitřila; nicméně jako rána, zkusmo definovaná protiinfekčním a odmítavým vzepřením těla, začala nabírit jistou podobu. His panic felt pasty and stiff and revealed a certain shape. That shape was the fear that, once he left his end of the gentle arc of the Ambassador’s Residence, he would—up in smoke—cease to exist.