The Early Stories (132 page)

“It's an epigram,” Bech said.

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

“None.”

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

“You have met her?”

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

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

Bech felt duty-bound to pursue this, to ask about the theatre of the absurd in Bulgaria, about abstract painting. These were the touchstones of American-style progressiveness; Russia had none, Romania some, Czechoslovakia plenty. Instead, he asked the poetess, “Motherly?”

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

“In French?”

“And in Russian.”

“She knows Russian?”

“She was born Russian.”

“How is her Russian?”

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

“You do not always feel safe?”

“Not always.”

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

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

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

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

“Very much yes,” she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shrugged and said, “Concentrate our attention.”

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

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

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

“I think it is good,” she said.

“Love?” he asked, startled.

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

Petrov asked aloud Bech's opinion of Dürrenmatt.

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

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

The Hermit
 

He had had brothers—two older than he, and one younger. He remembered his childhood as a tussle, a noisy competition for food, for clothes that fit, for attention. Now, in the woods, there was no noise. There was sound, but not noise. In the beginning, during the first nights, the scrabbling and travelling of animals—the house apparently adjoined a confluence of paths—felt loud and harsh to him, a crackling and rustling that overflowed his consciousness, which was held cupped for sleep. Now he no longer heard these sounds, as a mechanic is deaf to a machine that is working smoothly. As he settled in, as March yielded to April and April to May, everything in his sudden environment sank into invisibility, into the utter transparency of perfect order.

And yet never in his life had he seen so well, seen so much. He had never excelled at school or in the competition within the family; something he could not quite believe was as simple as stupidity clouded his apprehension. Something numbed his grip at the moment of grasping, unfocused his wits at the demand for concentration, scattered his purpose when it needed to be single. It was as if his mind, or that set of switches and levers that translated his mind into the motions of the outer world, was too finely adjusted to bear the jostle of others, to function in the heavy damp climate human activity bred. The climate of humanity, he saw now, had never been congenial to him.

He had found the house while hunting, deep in the tract of second- or third-growth forest owned by a steel company. The steel company was at the other end of the state, in Pittsburgh. Fifteen years ago it had bought local land wholesale, on the speculation that it contained low-grade iron ore. The company had not yet mined it and perhaps never would. In the meantime, these hundreds of acres grew wild, submerging their interior
demarcations—old boundary stones and tumbling dry walls and rusting barbed-wire fences like strands of a forgotten debate.

The house frightened him when he first saw it. A roofless sandstone shell with some cedar shingles still clinging to a lean-to, it had no business being there. Its ghostly presence turned the wilderness menacing. How old was it? The trees around it were tall but not thick, and a vestigial farmyard remained, earth too packed to encourage roots. Perhaps the land had been cleared a century ago, perhaps it had been farmed as recently as before the war. He saw no sign of a fire in the ruin. Not only the roof but the floor had been carried away by weather; the cellar hole, brimming with tumbled rocks and matted brambles, gaped between the floor beams, which were still solid enough to support his weight. They were spaced a stride apart, and when he looked up, the blue sky showing between the naked rafters exhilarated him, as if, a little dizzily, he had taken flight in a skeletal basket attached to a great blue balloon. With necessarily rhythmic motions he stepped from beam to beam, remembering an uncle of his who played the organ in the Lutheran church, and how precisely this uncle's feet would dance on the pedal keyboard.

Part of the house was still sheltered. What must have been the kitchen, the lean-to, still held its roof and its floor. There was even part of an interior wall—papered pine boarding rather than plaster-and-lath—and a doorframe from which the door had long vanished. Another doorless rectangle straddled a sandstone threshold bearing two damp depressions—puddles smaller than saucers—and a patch of parallel grooves left by the mason's serrated chisel. The stone was intact, and the timbering that boxed in the shattered windows seemed, though pitted and warped, sound enough. With doors, fresh sashes, some reboarding and shingling, the room could be made weathertight. He wondered why no one else had thought of it. The site seemed ignored even by vandals. The initials gouged here and there were as gray as the wood. The cola cans scattered in the cellar hole had rotted with rust, and the empty shotgun shells below one sill seemed older than last hunting season. Perhaps, he thought, the steel company had discouraged trespassers and then lost interest, in the lordly way of giants. Certainly the house seemed to be waiting for no one but him, not even for lovers.

His younger brother, the schoolteacher, was the first to visit him. He had not been here a week and was still engaged in carpentry. A factory-puttied window sash, each pane labelled with the purple emblem of the glass company,
was leaning against a birch, giving the bits of moss and grass around the roots the refracted, pampered look of greenhouse shoots. It was March, and the undergrowth was still simple and precious. Each mottled spear of skunk cabbage nosing its way up through the leaf mold had an air of arrival. A smothered spring made the ground on this side of the house very damp.

“It's not your land, Stanley,” his brother told him. “It's not even government land.”

“Well, they can kick me off, then. All I can lose is the lumber and nails.”

“How much do you want to use it?”

“I don't know yet.”

“Is there a woman you're going to bring up?” Morris's delicate skin registered a blush; Stanley had to laugh. Morris was younger even than his years. He was now in his late twenties, and had grown a mustache; it was as if a child had painted a male doll with the delicate pink of a girl and then, realizing its mistake, had solemnly dabbed black beneath the nose.