Bech Read Free

its great brocaded double bed. He would drink from a gift bottle of Georgian brandy and stand by the window, looking down on the golden windows of an apartment building where young Russians were Twisting to Voice of America tapes. Chubby Checker’s chicken-plucker’s voice carried distinctly across the crevasse of sub-arctic night. In an adjoining window, a couple courteously granted isolation by the others was making love; he could see knees and hands and then a rhythmically kicking ankle. To relieve the pressure, Bech would sit down with his brandy and write to distant women boozy, reminiscent letters that in the morning would be handed solemnly to the ex-basketball-player, to be sent out of Russia via diplomatic pouch. * Reynolds, himself something of a spy, was with them whenever Bech spoke to a group, whether of translators (when asked who was America’s best living writer, Bech said Nabokov, and there was quite a silence before the next question) or of students (whom he assured that Yevtushenko’s
Precocious Autobiography
was a salubrious and patriotic work that instead of being banned should be distributed free to Soviet schoolchildren). “Did I put my foot in it?” Bech would ask anxiously afterward—another “act.”
    The American’s careful mouth twitched. “It’s good for them. Shock therapy.”
    “You were charming,” Ekaterina Alexandrovna always said loyally, jealously interposing herself, and squeezing Bech’s arm. She could not imagine that Bech did not, like herself, loathe all officials. She would not have believed that Bech approached Reynolds with an intellectual’s reverence for the athlete, and that they exchanged in private not anti-Kremlinvitriol but literary gossip and pro football scores, love letters and old copies of
Time
. Now, in her campaign to keep them apart, Kate had been given another weapon. She squeezed his arm smugly and said, “We have an hour. We must rush off and
shop
.”
    For the other thing, there was not much to buy. To begin, he would need an extra suitcase. He and Ekaterina, in their chauffeured Zil, drove to what seemed to Bech a far suburb, past flickerings of birch forest, to sections of new housing, perforated warehouses the color of wet cement. Here they found a vast store, vast though each salesgirl ruled as a petty tyrant over her domain of shelves. There was a puzzling duplication of suitcase sections; each displayed the same squarish mountain of dark cardboard boxes, and each pouting princess responded with negative insouciance to Ekaterina’s quest for a leather suitcase. “I know there have been some,” she told Bech.
    “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I want a cardboard one. I love the metal studs and the little chocolate handle.”
    “You have fun with me,” she said. “I know what you have in the West. I have been to Science-Fiction Writers’ Congress in Vienna. This great store, and not one leather suitcase. It is a disgrace upon the people. But come, I know another store.” They went back into the Zil, which smelled like a cloakroom, and in whose swaying stuffy depths Bech felt squeamish and chastened, having often been sent to the cloakroom as a child at P.S. 87, on West 77th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. A dozen stuffy miles and three more stores failed to produce a leather suitcase; at last Kate permitted him to buy a paper one—the biggest, with gay plaid sides, and as long as an oboe. To console her, he also bought an astrakhan hat. It was not flattering (when he put it on, the haughty salesgirl laughedaloud) and did not cover his ears, which were cold, but it had the advantage of costing all of fifty-four rubles. “Only a
boyar
,” said Kate, excited to flirtation by his purchase, “would wear such a wow of a hat.”
    “I look like an Armenian in it,” Bech said. Humiliations never come singly. On the street, with his suitcase and hat, Bech was stopped by a man who wanted to buy his overcoat. Kate translated and then scolded.