Bech Read Free Page B

stare. Little burnt traces, traces of ashen tears, lingered about her eyes, which were by nature a washed-out blue. She had been trying to put on eye makeup, and had kept washing it off. Trying to be a rich man’s wife. She looked blank and wounded. Bech took her arm; they hurried downstairs like criminals on the run.
    The next day was his last full day in Russia. All month he had wanted to visit Tolstoy’s estate, and the trip had been postponed until now. Since Yasnaya Polyana was four hours from Moscow, he and Kate left early in the morning and returned in the dark. After miles of sleepy silence, she asked, “Henry, what did you like?”
    “I liked the way he wrote
War and Peace
in the cellar,
Anna Karenina
on the first floor, and
Resurrection
upstairs. Do you think he’s writing a fourth novel in Heaven?”
    This reply, taken from a little
Commentary
article he was writing in his head (and would never write on paper), somehowrenewed her silence. When she at last spoke, her voice was shy. “As a Jew, you believe?”
    His laugh had an ambushed quality he tried to translate, with a shy guffaw at the end, into self-deprecation. “Jews don’t go in much for Paradise,” he said. “That’s something you Christians cooked up.”
    “We are not Christians.”
    “Kate, you are saints. You are a land of monks and your government is a constant penance.” From the same unwritten article—tentatively titled “God’s Ghost in Moscow.” He went on, with Hollywood, Martin Buber, and his uncles all vaguely smiling in his mind, “I think the Jewish feeling is that wherever they happen to be, it’s rather paradisiacal, because they’re there.”
    “You have found it so here?”
    “Very much. This must be the only country in the world you can be homesick for while you’re still in it. Russia is one big case of homesickness.”
    Perhaps Kate found this ground dangerous, for she returned to earlier terrain. “It is strange,” she said, “of the books I translate, how much there is to do with supernature. Immaterial creatures like angels, ideal societies composed of spirits, speeds that exceed that of light, reversals of time—all impossible, and perhaps not. In a way it is terrible, to look up at the sky, on one of our clear nights of burning cold, at the sky of stars, and think of creatures alive in it.”
    “Like termites in the ceiling.” Falling so short of the grandeur Kate might have had a right to expect from him, his simile went unanswered. The car swayed; dark gingerbread villages swooped by; the back of the driver’s head was motionless. Bech idly hummed a bit of “Midnight in Moscow,” whose literal title, he had discovered, was “Twilit Evenings in theMoscow Suburbs.” He said, “I also liked the way Upton Sinclair was in his bookcase, and how his house felt like a farmhouse instead of a mansion, and his grave.”
    “So super a grave.”
    “Very graceful, for a man who fought death so hard.” It had been an unmarked oval of earth, rimmed green with frozen turf, at the end of a road in a birchwood where night was sifting in. It had been here that Tolstoy’s brother had told him to search for the little green stick that would end war and human suffering. Because her importunate silence had begun to nag unbearably, Bech told Kate, “That’s what I should do with my rubles. Buy Tolstoy a tombstone. With a neon arrow.”
    “Oh those rubles!” she exclaimed. “You persecute me with those rubles. We have shopped more in one week than I shop in one year. Material things do not interest me, Henry. In the war we all learned the value of material things. There is no value but what you hold within yourself.”
    “O.K., I’ll swallow them.”
    “Always the joke. I have one more desperate idea. In New York, you have women for friends?”
    Her voice had gone shy, as when broaching Jewishness; she was asking him if he were a homosexual. How little, after a month, these two knew each other! “Yes. I