Students (not unlike yourselves) compelled to buy paperback copies of his novels—notably the first, Travel Light, though there has lately been some academic interest in his more surreal and “existential” and perhaps even “anarchist” second novel, Brother Pig—or encountering some essay from When the Saints in a shiny heavy anthology of mid-century literature costing $12.50, imagine that Henry Bech, like thousands less famous than he, is rich. He is not. The paperback rights to Travel Light were sold by his publisher outright for two thousand dollars, of which the publisher kept one thousand and Bech’s agent one hundred (10% of 50%). To be fair, the publisher had had to remainder a third of the modest hard-cover printing and, when Travel Light was enjoying its vogue as the post-Golding pre-Tolkien fad of college undergraduates, would amusingly tell on himself the story of Bech’s given-away rights, at sales meetings upstairs in “21.” As to anthologies—the average permissions fee, when it arrives at Bech’s mailbox, has been eroded to $64.73, or some such suspiciously odd sum, which barely covers the cost of a restaurant meal with his mistress and a medium wine. Though Bech, and his too numerous interviewers, have made a quixotic virtue of his continuing to live for twenty years in a grim if roomy Riverside Drive apartment building (the mailbox, students should know, where his pitifully nibbled checks arrive has been well scarred by floating urban wrath, and his last name has been so often ballpointed by playful lobby-loiterers into a somewhat assonant verb that Bech has left the name plate space blank and depends upon the clairvoyance of mailmen), he in truth lives there because he cannot afford to leave. He was rich just once in his life, and that was in Russia, in 1964, a thaw or so ago.
Russia, in those days, like everywhere else, was a slightly more innocent place. Khrushchev, freshly deposed, had left an atmosphere, almost comical, of warmth, of a certain fitful openness, of inscrutable experiment and oblique possibility. There seemed no overweening reason why Russia and America, those lovable paranoid giants, could not happily share a globe so big and blue; there certainly seemed no reason why Henry Bech, the recherché but amiable novelist, artistically blocked but socially fluent, should not be flown into Moscow at the expense of our State Department for a month of that mostly imaginary activity termed “cultural exchange.” Entering the Aeroflot plane at Le Bourget, Bech thought it smelled like his uncles’ backrooms in Williamsburg, of swaddled body heat and proximate potatoes, boiling. The impression lingered all month; Russia seemed Jewish to him, and of course he seemed Jewish to Russia. He never knew how much of the tenderness and hospitality he met related to his race. His contact man at the American Embassy—a prissy, doleful ex-basketball-player from Wisconsin, with the all-star name of “Skip” Reynolds,—assured him that two out of every three Soviet intellectuals had suppressed a Jew in their ancestry; and once Bech did find himself in a Moscow apartment whose bookcases were lined with photographs (of Kafka, Einstein, Freud, Wittgenstein) pointedly evoking the glory of pre-Hitlerian Judenkultur. His hosts, both man and wife, were professional translators, and the apartment was bewilderingly full of kin, including a doe-eyed young hydraulics engineer and a grandmother who had been a dentist with the Red Army, and whose dental chair dominated the parlor. For a whole long toasty evening, Jewishness, perhaps also pointedly, was not mentioned. The subject was one Bech was happy to ignore. His own writing had sought to reach out from the ghetto of his heart toward the wider expanses across the Hudson; the artistic triumph of American Jewry lay, he thought, not in the novels of the Fifties but in the movies of the Thirties, those gargantuan, crass contraptions whereby Jewish brains projected Gentile stars upon a Gentile nation and out of a simple immigrant joy gave a formless land dreams and even a kind of conscience. The reservoir of faith, in 1964, was just going dry; through depression and world convulsion the country had been sustained by the arriviste patriotism of Louis B. Mayer and the brothers Warner. To Bech, it was one of history’s great love stories, the mutually profitable romance between Jewish Hollywood and bohunk America, conducted almost entirely in the dark, a tapping of fervent messages through the wall of the San Gabriel Range; and his favorite Jewish writer was the one who turned his back on his three beautiful Brooklyn novels and went into the desert to write scripts for Doris Day. This may be, except for graduate students, neither here nor there. There, in Russia five years ago, when Cuba had been taken out of the oven to cool and Vietnam was still coming to a simmer, Bech did find a quality of life—impoverished yet ceremonial, shabby yet ornate, sentimental, embattled, and avuncular—reminiscent of his neglected Jewish past. Virtue, in Russia as in his childhood, seemed something that arose from men, like a comforting body odor, rather than something from above, which impaled the struggling soul like a moth on a pin. He stepped from the Aeroflot plane, with its notably hefty stewardesses, into an atmosphere of generosity. They met him with arms heaped with cold roses. On the first afternoon, the Writers’ Union gave him as expense money a stack of ruble notes, pink and lilac Lenin and powder-blue Spasskaya Tower. In the following month, in the guise of “royalties” (in honor of his coming they had translated Travel Light, and several of his Commentary essays [“M-G-M and the U.S.A.”; “The Moth on the Pin”; “Daniel Fuchs: An Appreciation”] had appeared in I Nostrannaya Literatura, and since no copyright agreements pertained the royalties were arbitrarily calculated, like showers of manna), more rubles were given to him, so that by the week of his departure Bech had accumulated over fourteen hundred rubles—by the official exchange rate, fifteen hundred and forty dollars. There was nothing to spend it on. All his hotels, his plane fares, his meals were paid for. He was a guest of the Soviet state. From morning to night he was never alone. That first afternoon, he had also been given, along with the rubles, a companion, a translator-escort: Ekaterina Alexandrovna Ryleyeva. She was a notably skinny red-headed woman with a flat chest and paper-colored skin and a translucent mole above her left nostril. He grew to call her Kate.
“Kate,” he said, displaying his rubles in two fistfuls, letting some drift to the floor, “I have robbed the proletariat. What can I do with my filthy loot?” He had developed, in this long time in which she was always with him, a clowning super-American manner that disguised all complaints as “acts.” In response, she had strengthened her original pose—of schoolteacherish patience, with ageless peasant roots. Her normal occupation was translating English-language science fiction into Ukrainian, and he imagined this month with him was relatively a holiday. She had a mother, and late at night, after accompanying him to a morning-brandy session with the editors of Yunost, to lunch at the Writers’ Union with its shark-mouthed chairman, to Dostoevski’s childhood home (next to a madhouse, and enshrining some agonized crosshatched manuscripts and a pair of oval tin spectacles, tiny, as if fashioned for a dormouse), a museum of folk art, an endless restaurant meal, and a night of ballet, Ekaterina would bring Bech to his hotel lobby, put a babushka over her bushy orange hair, and head into a blizzard toward this ailing mother. Bech wondered about Kate’s sex life. Skip Reynolds solemnly told him that personal life in Russia was inscrutable. He also told Bech that Kate was undoubtedly a Party spy. Bech was touched, and wondered what in him would be worth spying out. From infancy on we all are spies; the shame is not this but that the secrets to be discovered are so paltry and few. Ekaterina was perhaps as old as forty, which could just give her a betrothed killed in the war. Was this the secret of her vigil, the endless paper-colored hours she spent by his side? She was always translating for him, and this added to her neutrality and transparence. He, too, had never been married, and imagined that this was what marriage was like.
She answered, “Henry”—she usually touched his arm, saying his name, and it never ceased to thrill him a little, the way the “H” became a breathy guttural sound between “G” and “K”—“you must not joke. This is your money. You earned it by the sweat of your brain. All over Soviet Union committees of people sit in discussion over Travel Light, its wonderful qualities. The printing of one hundred thousand copies has gone poof! in the bookstores.” The comic-strip colors of science fiction tinted her idiom unexpectedly.
Copyright © 1998 by John Updike. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
