Bech Read Free Page A

During what Bech took to be a lengthy threat to call the police, the offender, a morose bleary-eyed man costumed like a New York chestnut vender, stared stubbornly at the sidewalk by their feet.
    As they moved away, he said in soft English to Bech, “Your shoes. I give forty rubles.”
    Bech pulled out his wallet and said, “
Nyet, nyet
. For your shoes I give fifty.”
    Kate with a squawk flew between them and swept Bech away. She told him in tears, “Had the authorities witnessed that scene we would all be put in jail, biff, bang.”
    Bech had never seen her cry in daylight—only in the dark of projection rooms. He climbed into the Zil feeling especially sick and guilty. They were late for their luncheon, with a cherubic museum director and his hatchet-faced staff. In the course of their tour through the museum, Bech tried to cheer her up with praise of Socialist realism. “Look at that turbine. Nobody in America can paint a turbine like that. Not since the thirties. Every part so distinct you could rebuild one from it, yet the whole thing romantic as a sunset. Mimesis—you can’t beat it.” He was honestly fond of these huge posterish oils; they reminded him of magazine illustrations from his adolescence.
    Kate would not be cheered. “It is stupid stuff,” she said. “We have had no painters since Rublyov. You treat my countryas a picnic.” Sometimes her English had a weird precision. “It is not as if there is no talent. We are great, there are millions. The young are burning up with talent, it is annihilating them.” She pronounced it
anneeheel
—a word she had met only in print, connected with ray guns.
    “Kate, I
mean
it,” Bech insisted, hopelessly in the wrong, as with a third-grade teacher, yet also subject to another pressure, that of a woman taking sensual pleasure in refusing to be consoled. “I’m telling you, there is artistic passion here. This bicycle. Beautiful impressionism. No spokes. The French paint apples, the Russians paint bicycles.”
    The parallel came out awry, unkind. Grimly patting her pink nostrils, Ekaterina passed into the next room. “Once,” she informed him, “this room held entirely pictures of
him
. At least that is no more.”
    Bech did not need to ask who
he
was. The undefined pronoun had a constant value. The name was unspeakable. In Georgia Bech had been shown a tombstone for a person described simply as Mother.
    The next day, between lunch with Voznesensky and dinner with Yevtushenko (who both flatteringly seemed to concede to him a hemispheric celebrity equivalent to their own, and who feigned enchantment when he tried to explain his peculiar status, as not a lion, with a lion’s confining burden of symbolic portent, but as a graying, furtively stylish rat indifferently permitted to gnaw and roam behind the wainscoting of a fire-trap about to be demolished anyway), he and Kate and the impassive chauffeur managed to buy three amber necklaces and four wooden toys and two very thin wristwatches. The amber seemed homely to Bech—melted butter refrozen—but Kate was proud of it. The wristwatches he suspected would soon stop; they were perilously thin. The toys—segmentedKremlins, carved bears chopping wood—were good, but the only children he knew were his sister’s in Cincinnati, and the youngest was nine. The Ukrainian needlework that Ekaterina hopefully pushed at him his imagination could not impose on any woman he knew, not even his mother; since his “success,” she had her hair done once a week and wore her hems just above the knee. Back in his hotel room, in the ten minutes before an all-Shostakovich concert, while Kate sniffled and sloshed in the bathroom (how could such a skinny woman be displacing all that water?), Bech counted his rubles. He had spent only a hundred and thirty-seven. That left one thousand two hundred and eighty-three, plus the odd kopecks. His heart sank; it was hopeless. Ekaterina emerged from the bathroom with a strange, bruised