Bech at Bay (2 page)

“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.