Read Online Bech by John Updike - Free Book Online Page B

to say to her. I’m just curious about such an intense conjunction of good looks and brains. I mean, what does a soul do with it all?”
    “You may ask her. Tomorrow night?”
    “I’m sorry, I can’t. I’m scheduled to go to the ballet, and the next night the legation is giving a cocktail party for me, and then I fly home.”
    “Home? So soon?”
    “It does not feel soon to me. I must try to work again.”
    “A drink, then. Tomorrow evening before the ballet? It is possible? It is not possible.”
    Petrov looked puzzled, and Bech realized that it was his fault, for he was nodding to say Yes, but in Bulgarian nodding meant No, and a shake of the head meant Yes. “Yes,” he said. “Gladly.”
    The ballet was entitled
Silver Slippers
. As Bech watched it, the word “ethnic” kept coming to his mind. He had grown accustomed, during his trip, to this sort of artistic evasion, the retreat from the difficult and disappointing present into folk dance, folk tale, folk song, with always the implication that, beneath the embroidered peasant costume, the folk was really one’s heart’s own darling, the proletariat.
    “Do you like fairy tales?” It was the damp-palmed interpreter who accompanied him to the theatre.
    “I
love
them,” Bech said, with a fervor and gaiety lingering from the previous hour. The interpreter looked at him anxiously, as when Bech had swallowed the brandy in one swig, and throughout the ballet kept murmuring explanations of self-evident events on the stage. Each night, a princess would put on silver slippers and dance through her mirror to tryst with a wizard, who possessed a magic stick that she coveted, for with it the world could be ruled. The wizard, as a dancer, was inept, and once almost dropped her, so that anger flashed from her eyes. She was, the princess, a little redhead with ahigh round bottom and a frozen pout and beautiful free arm motions, and Bech found it oddly ecstatic when, preparatory to her leap, she would dance toward the mirror, an empty oval, and another girl, identically dressed in pink, would emerge from the wings and perform as her reflection. And when the princess, haughtily adjusting her cape of invisibility, leaped through the oval of gold wire, Bech’s heart leaped backward into the enchanted hour he had spent with the poetess.
    Though the appointment had been established, she came into the restaurant as if, again, she had been suddenly summoned and had hurried. She sat down between Bech and Petrov slightly breathless and fussed, but exuding, again, that impalpable warmth of intelligence and virtue.
    “Vera, Vera,” Petrov said.
    “You hurry too much,” Bech told her.
    “Not so very much,” she said.
    Petrov ordered her a cognac and continued with Bech their discussion of the newer French novelists. “It is tricks,” Petrov said. “Good tricks, but tricks. It does not have enough to do with life, it is too much verbal nervousness. Is that sense?”
    “It is an epigram,” Bech said.
    “There are just two of their number with whom I do not feel this: Claude Simon and Samuel Beckett. You have no relation, Bech, Beckett?”
    “None.”
    Vera said, “Nathalie Sarraute is a very modest woman. She felt motherly to me.”
    “You have met her?”
    “In Paris I heard her speak. Afterward there was the coffee. I liked her theories, of the, oh,
what
? Of the
little
movements within the heart.” She delicately measured a pinch of space and smiled, through Bech, back at herself.
    “Tricks,” Petrov said. “I do not feel this with Beckett; there, in a low form, believe it or not, one has human content.”
    Bech felt duty-bound to pursue this, to ask about the theatre of the absurd in Bulgaria, about abstract painting (these were the touchstones of “progressiveness”; Russia had none, Rumania some, Czechoslovakia plenty), to subvert Petrov. Instead, he asked the poetess, “Motherly?”
    Vera explained, her hands delicately modeling the air, rounding into