Bech at Bay Read Free

Thelma, in the West Side apartment as the tawny sun from New Jersey entered horizontally, like bars of music.…
    “Kafka more
Schmerz
,” his Czech fan was going on, as if the buried writer, with his dark suit and quizzical smile, were standing right there beside the still-erect one, for comparison. “You more
Herz.
More—” He broke down into Czech, turning to face the Ambassador.
    “More primitive energy,” the Ambassador translated. “More raw love of life.”
    Bech in fact had felt quite tired of life ever since completing his last—his final, as he thought of it—and surprisingly successful novel, whose publication coincided with the collapse of his one and only marriage. That was why, he supposed, you travelled to places like this: to encounter fictional selves, the refreshing false ideas of you that strangers hold in their minds.
    In Czechoslovakia he felt desperately unworthy; the unlucky country seemed to see in him an emblem of hope. Not only had his first and last novels been translated here (
Lekhá cesta, Velká myšlenka
) but a selection of essays and short fiction culled from
When the Saints
(
Když svatí
). All three volumes carried opposite the title page the same photo of the author, one taken when he was thirty, before his face had bulked to catch up to his nose and before his wiry hair had turned gray; his hair sat on his head then like a tall turban pulled low on his forehead. The rigors of Socialist photogravure made this faded image look as if it came not from the 1950s but from the time before World War I, when Proust was posing in a wing collar and Kafka in a bowler hat. Bech had ample opportunity to examine the photo, for endless lines formed when, at a Prague bookstore and then a few days later at the American Embassy, book-signingsessions were scheduled, and these Czech versions of his books were presented to him over and over again, open to the title page. His presence here had squeezed these tattered volumes—all out of print, since Communist editions are not replenished—up from the private libraries of Prague. Flattered, flustered, Bech tried to focus for a moment on each face, each pair of hands, as it materialized before him, and to inscribe the difficult names, spelled letter by letter. There were many young people, clear-eyed and shy, with a simple smooth glow of youth rather rarely seen in New York. To these fresh-faced innocents, he supposed, he was an American celebrity—not, of course, a rock star, smashing guitars and sobbing out his guts as the violet and magenta strobes pulsed and the stadium hissed and waved like a huge jellyfish, but with a touch of that same diabolic glamour. Or perhaps they were students, American-lit majors, and he something copied from a textbook, and his signature a passing mark. But there were older citizens, too—plump women with shopping bags, and men with pale faces and a pinched, pedantic air. Clerks? Professors? And a few persons virtually infirm, ancient enough to remember the regime of Tomáš Masaryk, hobbled forward with a kindly, faltering expression like that of a childhood sweetheart whom we cannot at first quite recognize. Most of the people said at least “Thank you”; many pressed a number of correctly shaped, highly complimentary English sentences upon him.
    Bech said “
Děkuji
” and “
Prosím
” at random and grew more and more embarrassed. Across the street, Embassy underlings gleefully whispered into his ear, Czech policemen were photographing the line; so all these people were putting themselves at some risk—were putting a blot on theirrecords by seeking the autograph of an American author. Why? His books were petty and self-indulgent, it seemed to Bech as he repeatedly signed them, like so many checks that would bounce. In third-world countries, he had often been asked what he conceived to be the purpose of the writer, and he had had to find ways around the honest answer, which was that the purpose of the writer