Bech Is Back (8 page)

Bech boarded the plane (from Australia, from Canada) so light-headed with lack of sleep it alarmed him hardly at all when the machine rose into the air. His stomach hurt as if lined with grit, his face looked gray in the lavatory mirror. His adventures seemed perilous, viewed backward. Mysterious diseases, strange men laughing in the night, loose women. He considered the nation he was returning to: its riots and scandals, its sins and power and gnashing metal. He thought of Bea, his plump suburban softy, her belly striated with fine silver lines, and vowed to marry her, to be safe.

I
NEVER SHOULD
have married a Christian, Bech thought, fighting his way up the Via Dolorosa. His bride of some few months, Beatrice Latchett (formerly Cook) Bech, and the Jesuit archaeologist that our Jewish-American author’s hosts at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim had provided as guide to the Christian holy sites—a courtly Virgil to Bech’s disbelieving Dante—kept getting ahead of him, their two heads, one blond and one bald, piously murmuring together as Bech fell behind in the dusty jostle of nuns and Arab boys, of obese Protestant pilgrims made bulkier still by airline tote bags. The incessant procession was watched by bored gaunt merchants with three-day beards as they stood before their souvenir shops. Their dark accusing sorrow plucked at Bech. His artist’s eye, always, was drawn to the irrelevant: the overlay of commercialism upon this ancient sacred way fascinated him—Kodachrome where Christ stumbled, bottled Fanta where He thirsted. Scarves, caftans, olive-wood knickknacks begged to be bought. As a child, Bech had worried that merchants
would starve; Union Avenue in Williamsburg, near where his uncles lived on South Second Street, had been lined with disregarded narrow shops, a Kafka world of hunger artists waiting unwatched in their cages. This was worse.

Père Gibergue had confirmed what Bea already knew from her guidebooks: the route Jesus took from Pilate’s verdict to Golgotha was highly problematical, and in any case, all the streets of first-century Jerusalem were buried under twelve feet of rubble and subsequent paving. So they and their fellow pilgrims were in effect treading on air. The priest, wearing flared slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, stopped to let Bech catch up, and pointed out to him overhead a half-arch dating, it seemed certain, from the time of Herod. The other half of the arch was buried, lost, behind a gray façade painted with a polyglot array in which Bech could read the word G
IFTS.
Bea’s face, beside the tanned face of the archaeologist, looked radiantly pale. She was lightly sweating. Her guidebook was clutched to her blouse like a missal. “Isn’t it all wonderful?” she asked her husband.

Bech said, “I never realized what a big shot Herod was. I thought he was just something on the back of a Christmas card.”

Père Gibergue, in his nearly flawless English, pronounced solemnly, “He was a crazy man, but a great builder.” There was something unhappy about the priest’s nostrils, Bech thought; otherwise, his vocation fit him like a smooth silk glove.

“There were several Herods,” Bea interposed. “Herod the Great was the slaughter-of-the-innocents man. His son Herod Antipas was ruling when Jesus was crucified.”

“Wherever we dig now, we find Herod,” Père Gibergue said, and Bech thought,
Science has seduced this man. In his archaeological
passion, he has made a hero of a godless tyrant
. Jerusalem struck Bech as the civic embodiment of conflicted loyalties. At first, deplaning with Bea and being driven at night from the airport to the Holy City through occupied territory, he had been struck by the darkness of the land, an intended wartime dark such as he had not seen since his GI days, in the tense country nightscapes of England and Normandy. Their escort, the son of American Zionists who had emigrated in the Thirties, spoke of the convoys that had been forced along this highway in the ’67 war, and pointed out some hilly places where the Jordanian fire had been especially deadly. Wrecked tanks and trucks, unseeable in the dark, had been left as monuments. Bech remembered, as their car sped vulnerably between the black shoulders of land, the rapt sensation (which for him had been centered in the face, the mouth more than the eyes—had he been more afraid of losing his teeth than his sight?) of being open to bullets, which there was no dodging. Before your brain could register anything, the damage would be done. Teeth shattered, the tongue torn loose, blood gushing through the punctured palate.

Then, as the car entered realms of light—the suburbs of Jerusalem—Bech was reminded of southern California, where he had once gone on a fruitless flirtation with some movie producers, who had been unable to wrap around his old novel
Travel Light
a package the banks would buy. Here were the same low houses and palm fronds, the same impression of staged lighting, exclusively frontal, as if the backs of these buildings dissolved into unpainted slats and rotting canvas, into weeds and warm air: that stagnant, balmy, expectant air of Hollywood when the sun goes down. The Mishkenot—the official city guesthouse, where this promising fifty-two-year-old writer and his plump Protestant wife were to stay for
three weeks—seemed solidly built of the same stuff of cinematic illusion: Jerusalem limestone, artfully pitted by the mason’s chisel, echoing like the plasterboard corridors of a Cecil B. De Mille temple to the ritual noises of weary guests unpacking. A curved staircase of mock-Biblical masonry led up to an alcove where a desk, a map, a wastebasket, and a sofa awaited his meditations. Bech danced up and down these stairs with an enchantment born in cavernous movie palaces; he was Bojangles, he was Astaire, he was George Sanders, wearing an absurd headdress and a sneer, exulting in the captivity and impending torture of a white-limbed maiden who, though so frightened her jewels chatter, will not forswear her Jahweh. Israel had no other sentimental significance for him; his father, a 47th Street diamond merchant, had lumped the Zionists with all the
Luftmenschen
who imagined that mollifying exceptions might be stitched into the world’s cruel and necessary patchwork of competition and exploitation. To postwar Bech, busy in Manhattan, events in Palestine had passed as one more mop-up scuffle, though involving a team with whom he identified as effortlessly as with the Yankees.

Bea, an Episcopalian, was enraptured simply at being on Israel’s soil. She kept calling it “the Holy Land.” In the morning, she woke him to share what she saw: through leaded windows, the Mount of Olives, tawny and cypress-strewn, and the silver bulbs of a Russian church gleaming in the Garden of Gethsemane. “I never thought I’d be here,
ever
,” she told him, and as she turned, her face seemed still to brim with reflected morning light. Bech kissed her and over her shoulder read a multilingual warning not to leave valuables on the window sill.

“Why didn’t you ask Rodney to bring you,” he asked, “if it meant so much?”

“Oh, Rodney. His idea of a spiritual adventure was to go backpacking in Maine.”

Bech had married this woman in a civil ceremony in lower Manhattan on an April afternoon of unseasonable chill and spitting snow. She was the younger, gentler sister of a mistress he had known for years and with whom he had always fought. He and Bea rarely fought, and at his age this appeared possibly propitious. He had married her to escape his famous former self. He had given up his apartment at 99th and Riverside—an address consecrated by twenty years of
Who’s Who
s—to live with Bea in Ossining, with her twin girls and only son. These abrupt truths, still strange, raced through his mind as he contemplated the radiant stranger whom the world called his wife. “Why didn’t you tell me,” he asked her now, “you took this kind of thing so much to heart?”

“You knew I went to church.”

“The E
pis
copal church. I thought it was a social obligation. Rodney wanted the kids brought up in the upper middle class.”

“He thought that would happen anyway. Just by their being his children.”

“Lord, I don’t know if I can hack this: be an adequate stepfather to the kids of a snob and a Christian fanatic.”

“Henry, this is your Holy Land, too. You should be thrilled to be here.”

“It makes me nervous. It reminds me of
Samson and Delilah
.”

“You
are
thrilled. I can tell.” Her blue eyes, normally as pale as the sky when the milkiest wisps of strato-cirrus declare a storm coming tomorrow, looked up at him with a new, faintly forced luster. The Holy Land glow. Bech found it distrustworthy, yet, by some twist, in some rarely illumined
depth of himself, flattering. While he was decoding the expression of her eyes, her mouth was forming words he now heard, on instant replay, as “Do you want to make love?”

“Because we’re in the Holy Land?”

“I’m so excited,” Bea confessed. She blushed, waiting for his response. Another hunger artist.

“Wouldn’t it be blasphemous?” Bech asked. “Anyway, we’re being picked up to sight-see in twenty minutes. What about breakfast instead?” He kissed her again, feeling estranged. He was too old to be on a honeymoon. His marriage was like this Zionist state they were in: a mistake long deferred, a miscarriage of passé fervor and antiquated tribal righteousness, an attempt to be safe on an earth where, for Jews, there was no safety.

Their quarters in the Mishkenot included a kitchen. Bea called from within it, “There’s two sets of silver. One says Dairy and the other says Meat.”

“Use one or the other,” Bech called back. “Don’t mingle them.”

“What’ll happen if I do?”

“I don’t know. Try it. Maybe it’ll trip the trigger and bring the Messiah.”

“Now who’s being blasphemous? Anyway, the Messiah
did
come.”

“We can’t all read His calling card.”

Her only answer was the clash of silver.

I’m too old to be married
, Bech thought, though he smiled to himself as he thought it. He went to the window and looked at the view that had sexually stimulated his wife. Beyond the near, New Testament hills, the color of unglazed Mexican pottery, were lavender desert mountains like long folds in God’s comfortless lap.

“Is there anything I should know about eggs and butter?” Bea called.

“Keep them away from bacon.”

“There isn’t any bacon. There isn’t any meat in the fridge at all.”

“They didn’t trust you. They knew you’d try to do something crummy.” His Christian wife was thirteen years younger than he. Her belly bore silver stretch marks from carrying twins. She made gentle yipping noises when she fucked. Bech wondered whether he had ever really been a sexy man, or was it just an idea that went with bachelorhood? He had been a satisfactory sprinter, he reflected, but nobody up to now had challenged his distance capacity. At his age, he should be jogging.

The first sight they were taken to, by a Jewish archaeologist in rimless glasses, was the Wailing Wall. It was a Saturday. Sabbath congregations were gathered in the sun of the limestone plaza the Israelis had created by bulldozing away dozens of Arab homes. People were chanting, dancing; photographs were forbidden. Men in sidelocks were leaning their heads against the wall in prayer, the broad-brimmed hats of the Hasidim tipped askew. The archaeologist told Bech and Bea that for a millennium the wall could not be seen from where they stood, and pointed out where the massive, characteristically edged Herodian stones gave way to the smaller stones of Saladin and the Mamelukes. Bea urged Bech to walk up to the wall. The broad area in front of it had been designated a synagogue, with separate male and female sections, so they could not pass in through the fence together. “I won’t go where you can’t go,” he said.

Bech’s grandfather, a diamond-cutter and disciple of Spinoza, had come to the United States from the ghetto of Amsterdam in 1880; Bech’s father had been an atheistic socialist; and in Bech socialist piety had dwindled to a stubborn wisp of artistic conscience. So there was little in his background to answer to the unearthly ardor of Bea’s urging. “I want you to, Henry. Please.”

He said, “I don’t have a hat. You have to have a hat.”

“They have paper yarmulkes there. In that basket,” the archaeologist offered, pointing. He was a short bored bearded man, whose attitude expressed no wish, himself, to approach the wall. He stood on the blinding limestone of the plaza as if glued there by his shadow.

“Let’s skip it,” Bech said. “I get the idea from here.”

“No, Henry,” Bea said. “You must go up and touch it. You must. For me. Think. We may never be here again.”

In her plea he found most touching the pronoun “we.” Ever since his honorable discharge from the armed forces, Bech had been an I. He picked a black paper hat from the basket, and the hat was unwilling to adhere to his head; his hair was too woolly, too fashionably full-bodied. Graying had made it frizzier. A little breeze seemed to be blowing outward from the wall and twice threatened to lift his yarmulke away. Amid the stares of congregated Hasidic youth, their side curls as menacing as lions’ manes, he held the cap to the back of his skull with his hand and approached, step by cautious step, all that remained of the Temple.