children.
Downstairs, in Sydney, Moira was up, fiddling with last night’s dishes and whistling to herself. Bech recognized the tune. “Where’s Peter?” he asked.
“He’s gone,” she said. “He doesn’t believe you exist. We waited up hours for you last night and you never came home.”
“We
were
home,” Hannah said.
“Oh, it dawned on us finally.” She elaborated: “Peter was so moody I told him to leave. I think he still loves
you
and has been leading this poor lass astray.”
“What do you like for breakfast?” Hannah asked Bech, as wearily as if she and not he had been awake all night. Himself,he felt oddly fit, for being fifty and on the underside of the world. “Tell me about Afghanistan—should I go there?” he said to Moira, and he settled beside her on the carpeted divan while Hannah, in her lumpy blue robe, shuffled in the kitchen, making his breakfast. “Grapefruit if you have it,” he shouted to her, interrupting the start of Moira’s word tour of Kabul. “Otherwise, orange juice.”
My God
, he thought to himself,
she has become my wife. Already I’m flirting with another woman
.
Bech boarded the plane (from Australia, from Canada) so light-headed with lack of sleep it alarmed him hardly at all when the machine rose into the air. His stomach hurt as if lined with grit, his face looked gray in the lavatory mirror. His adventures seemed perilous, viewed backward. Mysterious diseases, strange men laughing in the night, loose women. He considered the nation he was returning to: its riots and scandals, its sins and power and gnashing metal. He thought of Bea, his plump suburban softy, her belly striated with fine silver lines, and vowed to marry her, to be safe.
THE HOLY LAND
I NEVER SHOULD have married a Christian, Bech thought, fighting his way up the Via Dolorosa. His bride of some few months, Beatrice Latchett (formerly Cook) Bech, and the Jesuit archaeologist that our Jewish-American author’s hosts at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim had provided as guide to the Christian holy sites—a courtly Virgil to Bech’s disbelieving Dante—kept getting ahead of him, their two heads, one blond and one bald, piously murmuring together as Bech fell behind in the dusty jostle of nuns and Arab boys, of obese Protestant pilgrims made bulkier still by airline tote bags. The incessant procession was watched by bored gaunt merchants with three-day beards as they stood before their souvenir shops. Their dark accusing sorrow plucked at Bech. His artist’s eye, always, was drawn to the irrelevant: the overlay of commercialism upon this ancient sacred way fascinated him—Kodachrome where Christ stumbled, bottled Fanta where He thirsted. Scarves, caftans, olive-wood knickknacks begged to be bought. As a child, Bech had worried that merchantswould starve; Union Avenue in Williamsburg, near where his uncles lived on South Second Street, had been lined with disregarded narrow shops, a Kafka world of hunger artists waiting unwatched in their cages. This was worse.
Père Gibergue had confirmed what Bea already knew from her guidebooks: the route Jesus took from Pilate’s verdict to Golgotha was highly problematical, and in any case, all the streets of first-century Jerusalem were buried under twelve feet of rubble and subsequent paving. So they and their fellow pilgrims were in effect treading on air. The priest, wearing flared slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, stopped to let Bech catch up, and pointed out to him overhead a half-arch dating, it seemed certain, from the time of Herod. The other half of the arch was buried, lost, behind a gray façade painted with a polyglot array in which Bech could read the word G IFTS. Bea’s face, beside the tanned face of the archaeologist, looked radiantly pale. She was lightly sweating. Her guidebook was clutched to her blouse like a missal. “Isn’t it all wonderful?” she asked her husband.
Bech said, “I never realized what a big shot Herod was. I thought he
Downstairs, in Sydney, Moira was up, fiddling with last night’s dishes and whistling to herself. Bech recognized the tune. “Where’s Peter?” he asked.
“He’s gone,” she said. “He doesn’t believe you exist. We waited up hours for you last night and you never came home.”
“We
were
home,” Hannah said.
“Oh, it dawned on us finally.” She elaborated: “Peter was so moody I told him to leave. I think he still loves
you
and has been leading this poor lass astray.”
“What do you like for breakfast?” Hannah asked Bech, as wearily as if she and not he had been awake all night. Himself,he felt oddly fit, for being fifty and on the underside of the world. “Tell me about Afghanistan—should I go there?” he said to Moira, and he settled beside her on the carpeted divan while Hannah, in her lumpy blue robe, shuffled in the kitchen, making his breakfast. “Grapefruit if you have it,” he shouted to her, interrupting the start of Moira’s word tour of Kabul. “Otherwise, orange juice.”
My God
, he thought to himself,
she has become my wife. Already I’m flirting with another woman
.
Bech boarded the plane (from Australia, from Canada) so light-headed with lack of sleep it alarmed him hardly at all when the machine rose into the air. His stomach hurt as if lined with grit, his face looked gray in the lavatory mirror. His adventures seemed perilous, viewed backward. Mysterious diseases, strange men laughing in the night, loose women. He considered the nation he was returning to: its riots and scandals, its sins and power and gnashing metal. He thought of Bea, his plump suburban softy, her belly striated with fine silver lines, and vowed to marry her, to be safe.
THE HOLY LAND
I NEVER SHOULD have married a Christian, Bech thought, fighting his way up the Via Dolorosa. His bride of some few months, Beatrice Latchett (formerly Cook) Bech, and the Jesuit archaeologist that our Jewish-American author’s hosts at the Mishkenot Sha’ananim had provided as guide to the Christian holy sites—a courtly Virgil to Bech’s disbelieving Dante—kept getting ahead of him, their two heads, one blond and one bald, piously murmuring together as Bech fell behind in the dusty jostle of nuns and Arab boys, of obese Protestant pilgrims made bulkier still by airline tote bags. The incessant procession was watched by bored gaunt merchants with three-day beards as they stood before their souvenir shops. Their dark accusing sorrow plucked at Bech. His artist’s eye, always, was drawn to the irrelevant: the overlay of commercialism upon this ancient sacred way fascinated him—Kodachrome where Christ stumbled, bottled Fanta where He thirsted. Scarves, caftans, olive-wood knickknacks begged to be bought. As a child, Bech had worried that merchantswould starve; Union Avenue in Williamsburg, near where his uncles lived on South Second Street, had been lined with disregarded narrow shops, a Kafka world of hunger artists waiting unwatched in their cages. This was worse.
Père Gibergue had confirmed what Bea already knew from her guidebooks: the route Jesus took from Pilate’s verdict to Golgotha was highly problematical, and in any case, all the streets of first-century Jerusalem were buried under twelve feet of rubble and subsequent paving. So they and their fellow pilgrims were in effect treading on air. The priest, wearing flared slacks and a short-sleeved shirt, stopped to let Bech catch up, and pointed out to him overhead a half-arch dating, it seemed certain, from the time of Herod. The other half of the arch was buried, lost, behind a gray façade painted with a polyglot array in which Bech could read the word G IFTS. Bea’s face, beside the tanned face of the archaeologist, looked radiantly pale. She was lightly sweating. Her guidebook was clutched to her blouse like a missal. “Isn’t it all wonderful?” she asked her husband.
Bech said, “I never realized what a big shot Herod was. I thought he
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