Bech Is Back (10 page)

The professor’s wife, a novelist, took fire: “What a reactionary thing to say! I think it is beautiful, what they have done at the Kotel Ha. They have made a sacred space of a slum.”

Bech asked, “There were many Arab homes?”

The poet grimaced, while the shape of his face still smiled. “The people were relocated, and compensated.”

The female novelist told Bech, “Before ’67, when the Old City was theirs, the Jordanians built a hotel upon the Mount of Olives, using the old tombstones for the soldiers’ barracks. It was a vast desecration which they committed in full view. We felt very frustrated.”

The male novelist, whose slender, shy wife was a poetess, offered as a kind of truce, “And yet I feel at peace in the Arab landscape. I do not feel at peace in Tel Aviv, among those Miami Beach hotels. That was not the idea of Israel, to make another Miami Beach.”

“What was the idea, then?” asked the female novelist, teasing—an overweight but still-dynamic flirt. There is a lag, Bech thought, between the fading of an attractive woman’s conception of herself and the fading of the reality.

The male novelist, his tanned skin minutely veined and ponderously loose upon his bones, turned to Bech with a gravity that hushed the table; an Arab waiter, ready to serve, stood there frozen. “The idea,” it was stated to Bech in the halting murmur of an extreme confidence, “is not easy to express. Not Freud and Einstein, but not Auschwitz, either. Something … in between.”

Bech’s eye flicked uneasily to the waiter and noticed the name on his identification badge:
SULEIMAN
.

The poetess, as if to lighten her husband’s words, asked the American guests, “What have been your impressions so far? I know the question is foolish, you have been here a day.”

“A day or a week,” the female novelist boisterously volunteered, “Henry Bech will go back and write a best-selling book about us. Everyone does.”

The waiter began to serve the food—ample, deracinated, Hilton food—and while Bech was framing a politic answer, Bea spoke up for him. He was as startled as if one of his ribs had suddenly chirped. “Henry’s in raptures,” she said, “and so am I. I can’t believe I’m here, it’s like a dream.”

“A costly dream,” said the professor, the youngest of the men and the only one wearing a beard. “A dream costly to many men.” His beard was as red as a Viking’s; he stroked it a bit preeningly.

“Vision and reality,” the male novelist pronounced. “Here, they come together and clash.”

“The Holy Land,” Bea went on, undeterred, her voice flowing like milk poured from above. “I feel I was born here. Even the air is so
right
.”

Her strangeness, to her husband at this moment, did verge on the miraculous. At this table of Jews who, wearied of waiting for the Messiah, had altered the world on their own, Bea’s
voice with its lilt of hasty good news came as an amazing interruption. Bech answered the poetess as if he had not been interrupted. “It reminds me of southern California. The one time I was there, I felt surrounded by enemies. Not people like you,” he diplomatically amended, “but up in the hills. Sharpshooters. Agents.”

“You were there before Six-Day War,” joked the female professor; until then, she had spoken not a word, merely smiled toward her husband, the smiling poet. It occurred to Bech that perhaps her English was insecure, that these people were under no obligation to know English, that on their ground it was his obligation to speak Hebrew. English, that bastard child of Norman knights and Saxon peasant girls—how had he become wedded to it? There was something diffuse and eclectic about the language that gave him trouble. It ran against his grain; he tended to open books and magazines at the back and read the last pages first.

“What shall we do?” the flamboyant female novelist was urgently asking him, evidently apropos of the state of Israel. “We can scarcely speak of it anymore, we are so weary. We are weary of war, and now we are weary of talk of peace.”

“The tricky thing about peace,” Bech suggested, “is that it doesn’t always come from being peaceable.”

She laughed, sharply, a woman’s challenging laugh. “So you, too, are a reactionary. Myself, I would give them anything—the Sinai, the West Bank. I would even give them back East Jerusalem, to have peace.”

“
Not
East Jerusalem!” the Christian in their midst exclaimed. “Jerusalem,” Bea said, “belongs to everybody.”

And her face, aglow with confidence in things unseen, became a cause for wonder among the seven others. The slim, shy poetess, whose half-gray hair was parted in the exact center
of her slender skull, asked lightly, “You would like to live here?”

“We’d love to,” Bea said.

Bech felt he had to step on this creeping “we” of hers. “My wife speaks for herself,” he said. “Her enthusiasm overwhelmed even the priest who took us up the Via Dolorosa this afternoon. My own impression was that the Christian holy sites are hideously botched. I liked the mosques.”

Bea explained with the patience of a saint, “I said to myself, I’ve waited for this for thirty-nine years, and I’m not going to let anybody, even my husband, ruin it for me.”

Sunday-school pamphlets, Bech imagined. Bible illustrations protected by a page of tissue paper. Bea had carried those stylized ochre-and-moss-green images up from infancy and, when the moment had at last arrived, had placed them carefully upon the tragic, eroded hills of Jerusalem and pronounced the fit perfect. He loved her for that, for remaining true to the little girl she was. In the lull of silence her pious joy had induced, Suleiman came and offered them dessert, which the sated Israelis refused. Bech had apple pie, Bea had fig sherbet, to the admiration of their hosts. Young in marriage, young in appetite.

“You know,” he told her in the taxi back to the Mishkenot, “the Holy Land isn’t holy to those people tonight the way it is to you.”

“I know that, of course.”

“To them,” he felt obliged to press on, “it’s holy because it
is
land at all; after nineteen hundred years of being pushed around, the Jews have a place where they can say, O.K., this is it, this is our country. I don’t think it’s something a Christian can understand.”

“I certainly can. Henry, it saddens me that you feel you
must explain all this to me. Rodney and I once went to a discussion group on Zionism. Ask me about Herzl. Ask me about the British Mandate.”

“I explain it only because you’ve surprised me with your own beliefs.”

“I’ll keep them to myself if they embarrass you.”

“No, just don’t offer to immigrate. They don’t want you. Me, they wouldn’t mind, but I have enough problems right now.”

“I’m a problem.”

“I didn’t say that. My work is a problem.”

“I think you’d work very well here.”

“Jesus, no. It’s depressing. To me, it’s just a ghetto with farms. I
know
these people. I’ve spent my whole life trying to get away from them, trying to think bigger.”

“Maybe that’s your problem. Why try to get away from being Jewish? All those motorcycles, and Cincinnati, and Saint Bernard—you have to make it all up. Here, it’d be real for you. You could write and I could join a dig, under Father Gibergue.”

“What about your children?”

“Aren’t there kibbutz schools?”

“For Episcopalians?”

She began to cry, out of a kind of sweet excess, as when angels weep. “I thought you’d like it that I love it here,” she got out, adding, “with you.”

“I
do
like it. Don’t you like it that I like it in Ossining, with you?” As their words approached nonsense, some dim sense of what the words “holy land” might mean dawned on him. The holy land was where you accepted being. Middle age was a holy land. Marriage.

• • •

Back in their room in the Mishkenot, a calling card had been left on a brass tray. Bech looked at the Hebrew lettering and said, “I can’t read this.”

“I can,” Bea said, and turned the card over, to the Roman type on the other side.

“What does it say?”

Bea palmed the card and looked saucy. “My secret,” she said.

I never should have married a Christian
, Bech told himself, without believing it. He was smiling at the apparition of his plump Wasp wife, holding a calling card shaped like a stone in Herod’s wall.

Wifely, she took pity. “Actually, it’s somebody from
The Jerusalem Post
. Probably wanting an interview.”

“Oh God,” Bech said.

“I suppose he’ll come again,” Bea offered.

“Let’s hope not,” Bech said, blasphemously.

B
EA
on her mother’s side was a Sinclair, and a long-held dream of hers had been to visit the land of her ancestors—the counties of Sutherland and Caithness in the eastern Scots Highlands. Bech, now legally established in the business of making her dreams come true, and slightly enriched by the sale of a forgotten
Collier’s
chestnut to a public-television series promoting Minor Masters of the American Short Story, volunteered to take her there, as a fortieth-birthday present. They parked their crumbling mock-Tudor manse in Ossining and its three juvenile inhabitants with a house-sitting young faculty couple from Mercy College and flew that May to London, entraining north to Edinburgh and thence to Inverness. Bech liked Great Britain, since its decline was as notorious as his, and he liked trains, for the same reason. The farther north they went, the strangely happier he became.

His happiness first hit him in Edinburgh, as he lugged their suitcases up a mountainous flight of stairs from the sunken glass-and-iron sheds of Waverley Station. As he turned onto
North Bridge, at the far end of which their hotel waited, his eyes confronted not metropolitan rectangles but a sweeping green shoulder of high and empty land named, Bea read aloud at his side from out of her blue guidebook, Arthur’s Seat. Burdened by baggage as he was, Bech felt lifted up, into the airy and the epic. Scotland seemed at a glance ancient, raw, grimy, lush, mysterious, and mannerly. Like Bech, it was built solid of disappointments. Lost causes abounded. Defenders of the Castle had been promptly hanged outside the Portcullis Gate, witches were burned in bundles, Covenanters were slaughtered. In Holyrood Palace, the red-haired Queen of Scots, taller than Bech had expected, slipped in her brocaded slippers down a spiral stone staircase to visit the handsome boy Darnley, who, devoid of all common sense, one evening burst into her little supper room and, with others, dragged off her pet secretary David Rizzio and left him in the audience chamber dead of fifty-six stab wounds.
The alleged indelible stain of blood, if it exists, is concealed by the floor covering. Jealousy of Rizzio’s political influence, and perhaps a darker suspicion in Darnley’s mind, were the probable motives for the crime
. Dried blood and dark suspicions dominated the Caledonian past; nothing in history sinks quicker, Bech thought, than people’s actual motives, unless it be their sexual charm. In this serene, schizophrenic capital—divided by the verdant cleavage of a loch drained in 1816—he admired the biggest monument ever erected to an author, a spiky huge spire sheltering a statue of Sir Walter Scott and his dog. He glanced, along the slanting Royal Mile, down minuscule alleys in the like of which Boswell had caught and clipped his beloved prostitutes. “Heaven,” Bech kept telling Bea, who began to resent it.

But Bech’s abrasive happiness grew as, a few days later, the windows of their next train gave on the gorse-blotched slopes
of the Grampians, authentic mountains green and gray with heather and turf. In Inverness, they rented a little cherry-red car in which everything normally on the right was on the left; groping for the gear-shift, Bech grabbed air, and, peering into the rearview mirror, saw nothing. Bea, frightened, kept reminding him that she was there, on his left, and that he was driving terribly close to that stone wall. “Do you want to drive?” he asked her. At her expected answer of “Oh, no,” he steered the short distance to Loch Ness; there they stood among the yellow-blooming bushes on the bank, hoping to see a monster. The water, dark even in the scudding moments of sunlight, was chopped into little wavelets each shadow of which might be a fin, or a gliding plesiosaur nose. “It’s possible,” Bech said. “Remember the coelacanth.”

His fair wife touched his arm and shivered. “Such dark water.”

“They say the peat, draining into it. Tiny black particles suspended everywhere, so all these expensive cameras they lower down can’t see a thing. There could be whales down there.”

Bea nodded, still staring. “It’s much bigger than anybody says.”

Married peace, that elusive fauna swimming in the dark also, stole back upon them at the hotel, a many-gabled brick Guests beside the pretty river Ness. After dinner, in the prolonged northern light, they wandered across a bridge and came by chance upon a stadium where a show for tourists was in progress: Scots children in kilts performed traditional dances to the bagpipes’ keening. The couple loved, when they travelled, all children, having none of their own. Their marriage would always be sterile; Bea had been willing, though nearing the end of her fourth decade, but Bech shied
from paternity, with its overwhelming implication of commitment. He aspired to be no more than one of mankind’s uncles, and his becoming at a blow stepfather to Bea’s twin adolescent girls, Ann and Judy, and to little Donald (who had at first called him “Mr. Bech” and then “Uncle Henry”), was bliss and burden enough, in the guardianship line. His books and in his fallow years his travels were his children, and by bringing Bea along he gave her what he could of fresh ties to the earth. Some of the Scots performers were so small they could barely hop across the swords laid flat on the grass, and some had to be tugged back and forth in the ritual patterns by their older sisters. Watching the trite, earnest routines, Bea beside Bech acquired a tranced smile; tears had appeared in her blue eyes without canceling the smile, an unsurprising combination in this climate where sun and shower and rainbow so swiftly alternated. In the sheltered bleachers where they sat they seemed the only tourists; the rest were mothers and fathers and uncles, with children’s raincoats in their laps. As Bech and Bea returned to their hotel, the still-twilit sky, full of hastening clouds, added some drops of silver to the rippling river that looked as pure as soda water, though it was fed by the black loch.