Bech at Bay Read Online Free PDF Page A

your idea,” Bech concluded for him, by “your” meaning “Czechoslovakia’s.”
    The Ambassador, as they walked along cobblestones one night to a restaurant, felt free outdoors to express his opinion on this very subject. “Up until
sixty
-eight,” he said in his rapid and confident entrepreneurial way, seeing the realities at a glance, “it was interesting to be an intellectual here, because to a degree they had done it to themselves: most of them, and the students, were for Gottwald when he took over for the Communists in
for
ty-eight. They were still thinking of
thir
ty-eight, when the Germans were the problem. But after
six
ty-eight and the tanks, they becamean occupied country once more, as they were under the Hapsburgs, with no responsibility for their own fate. It became just a matter of power, of big countries versus little ones, and there’s nothing intellectually interesting about that, now is there, professor?”
    Addressed thus ironically, Bech hesitated, trying to picture the situation. In his limited experience—and isn’t all American experience intrinsically limited, by something thin in our sunny air?—power was boring, except when you yourself needed it. It was not boring to beat Hitler, but it had become boring to outsmart, or be outsmarted by, the Russians. Reagan was no doubt President because he was the last American who, imbued with the black-and-white morality of the movies, still found it exciting.
    “I mean,” the Ambassador said impatiently, “I’m no intellectual, so tell me if I’m way off base.”
    Bech guessed the little man simply wanted flattery, a human enough need. Bech sopped it up all day in Czechoslovakia while the Ambassador was dealing with the calculated insults of European diplomacy. “You’re right on, Mr. Ambassador, as usual. Without guilt, there is no literature.”
    The Ambassador’s wife was walking behind, with the wife of the Akron couple and the fashionable photographer’s young assistant; their heels on the cobbles were like gunfire. The wife from Akron, named Annie, was also blonde, scratchy-voiced, and sexy with that leggy flip shiksa sexiness which for Bech was the glowing center of his American patriotism.
For purple mountain majesties
raced through his mind when the two women laughed, displaying their healthy gums, their even teeth,
for amber waves of grain.
    He was happy—so happy tears crept into his eyes, aided by the humid wind of this Prague spring—to be going out to a restaurant without having to sign books or talk tostudents about Whitman and Melville, the palefaces and red men, the black-humor movement, imperial fiction, and now the marvellous minimalists, the first wave of writers raised entirely within the global village, away from the malign influences of Gutenbergian literacy. Idolized Bech loved, at the end of a long day impersonating himself, being just folks: the shuffle around the table as he and his fellow Americans pragmatically tried to seat themselves, the inane and melodious gabble, the two American women sinking their white teeth into vodka fizzes, the headwaiter and the Ambassador enjoying their special, murmurous relationship. The husband from Akron, like the Ambassador a stocky businessman, sat nodding off, zombified by jet lag. They had flown from Cleveland to New York, New York to London, London to Frankfurt, rented a Mercedes, driven through the night, and been held six hours at the Czech border because among their papers had been discovered a letter from their hostess that included a sketchy map of downtown Prague. Communists hate maps. Why is that? Why do they so instinctively loathe anything that makes for clarity and would help orient the human individual? Bech wondered if there had ever before been regimes so systematically committed to perpetuating ignorance. Then he thought of another set: the Christian kingdoms of medieval Europe.
    The Ambassador announced, “My friend Karel here”—the