Bech by John Updike Read Free Book Online Page B

laundry.”
    “And we went,” Petrescu said, “to La Caverne Bleue.”
    “Say,” Phillips said, “you really went underground.”
    “I think of myself,” Bech said modestly, “as a sort of low-flying U-2.”
    “All kidding aside, Henry”—and here Phillips took Bech by the arms and squeezed—“it sounds as if you’ve done a sensational job for us. Sensational. Thanks, friend.”
    Bech hugged everyone in parting—Phillips, the chargé d’affaires, the junior chargé d’affaires, the ambassador’s twelve-year-old nephew, who was taking archery lessons near the airport and had to be dropped off. Bech saved Petrescu for last, and walloped his back, for his escort had led him to remember, what he was tempted to forget in America, that reading can be the best part of a man’s life.
    “I’ll send you razor blades,” he promised, for in the embrace Petrescu’s beard had scratched.
    “No, no, I already buy the best. Send me books, any books!”
    The plane was roaring to go, and only when safely, or fatally, sealed inside did Bech remember the chauffeur. In the flurry of formalities and baggage handling there had been no goodbye. Worse, there had been no tip. The leu notes Bech had set aside were still folded in his wallet, and his start of guilt gave way, as the runways and dark fields tilted and dwindled under him, to a glad sense of release. Clouds blotted outthe country. He realized that for four days there; in that driver’s care, he had been afraid. The man next to him, a portly Slav whose bald brow was beaded with apprehensive sweat, turned and confided something unintelligible, and Bech said, “
Pardon, je ne comprends pas. Je suis Américain
.”

THE BULGARIAN POETESS
    “Y OUR POEMS . Are they difficult?”
    She smiled and, unaccustomed to speaking English, answered carefully, drawing a line in the air with two delicately pinched fingers holding an imaginary pen. “They are difficult—to write.”
    He laughed, startled and charmed. “But not to read?”
    She seemed puzzled by his laugh, but did not withdraw her smile, though its corners deepened in a defensive, feminine way. “I think,” she said, “not so very.”
    “Good.” Brainlessly he repeated “Good,” disarmed by her unexpected quality of truth. He was, himself, a writer, this fortyish young man, Henry Bech, with his thinning curly hair and melancholy Jewish nose, the author of one good book and three others, the good one having come first. By a kind of oversight, he had never married. His reputation had grown while his powers declined. As he felt himself sink, in his fiction, deeper and deeper into eclectic sexuality and bravura narcissism, as his search for plain truth carried him furtherand further into treacherous realms of fantasy and, lately, of silence, he was more and more thickly hounded by homage, by flat-footed exegetes, by arrogantly worshipful undergraduates who had hitchhiked a thousand miles to touch his hand, by querulous translators, by election to honorary societies, by invitations to lecture, to “speak,” to “read,” to participate in symposia trumped up by ambitious girlie magazines in shameless conjunction with venerable universities. His very government, in airily unstamped envelopes from Washington, invited him to travel, as an ambassador of the arts, to the other half of the world, the hostile, mysterious half. Rather automatically, but with some faint hope of shaking himself loose from the burden of himself, he consented, and found himself floating, with a passport so stapled with visas it fluttered when pulled from his pocket, down into the dim airports of Communist cities.
    He arrived in Sofia the day after a mixture of Bulgarian and African students had smashed the windows of the American legation and ignited an overturned Chevrolet. The cultural officer, pale from a sleepless night of guard duty, tamping his pipe with trembling fingers, advised Bech to stay out of crowds and escorted him to his