Bech at Bay Read Online Free PDF

headwaiter—“informs me that several busloads of Germans have made reservations tonight and suggests we might want to move to the back room.” To Bech he explained, “This is the only country in Europe both West Germans and East Germans have easy access to. They get together in these restaurants and drink pilsner and sing.”
    “Sing?”
    “Oh boy, do they sing. They crack the rafters.”
    “How do the Czechs like that?”
    “They hate it,” the square-faced man said with his urchin smile.
    The restaurant was in a vast wine cellar once attached to somebody’s castle. They woke up the dozing Akron husband and moved to a far recess, a plastered vault where only the Ambassador could stand upright without bumping his head. Whereas Mr. Akron kept falling asleep, his wife was full of energy; she and the Ambassador’s wife had sat up till dawn catching up on Ohio gossip, and then she had spent the day seeing all the available museums, including those devoted to Smetana and Dvořák and the one, not usually visited by Americans, that displayed the diabolical items of espionage confiscated at the border. Now, exhilarated by being out of Akron, Annie still maintained high animation, goading the Ambassador’s wife into a frenzy of girlish glee. They had gone to the same summer camp and private school, come out at the same country-club cotillion, and dropped out the same year of Oberlin to marry their respective Republican husbands. Bech felt it a failing in himself, one further inroad of death, that he found there being
two
of them, these perfect Midwestern beauties, somehow dampening to his desire: it halved rather than doubled it. The thought of being in bed with four such cornflower-blue eyes, a quartet of such long scissoring legs, a pair of such grainy triangular tongues, and two such vivacious, game, fun-loving hearts quailed his spirit, like the thought of submitting to the gleaming apparatus in Kafka’s story about the penal colony. Annie, on her second vodka fizz, was being very funny about the confiscated devices displayed in the border museum—radio transmitters disguisedas candy bars, poison-dart fountain pens,
Playboys
from the era when pubic hair was still being airbrushed out—but gradually her lips moved without sound emerging, for the Germans had begun to sing. Though they were out of sight in another part of the subterranean restaurant, their combined voices were strong enough to make the brickwork vibrate as the little low nook cupped the resonating sound. Bech shouted in the Ambassador’s ear, “What are they singing about?”
    “Der Deutschland!” the answer came back. “Mountains! Drinking!”
    When the united German chorus began to thump their beer mugs on the tables, and then thump the tables on the floor, circular vibrations appeared in Bech’s mug of pilsner. The noise was not exactly menacing, Bech decided; it was simply unconsciously, helplessly large. The Germans in Europe were like a fat man who seats himself, with a happy sigh, in the middle of an already crowded sofa. The Czech waiters darted back and forth, wagging their heads and rolling their eyes in silent protest, and a gypsy band, having made a few stabs at roving the tables, retreated to a dark corner with glasses of brandy. Gypsies: Bech looked among them for the curly head, the skinny sallow shoulders of his dissident friend, who had talked so movingly about books, but saw only mustachioed dark men, looking brandy-soaked and defeated.
    Next day—there seemed to be endless such days, when Bech awakened at his end of the palatial arc, shuffled in his bare feet across the parquet, through a room in which fresh flowers had always been placed, to the brassy, rumblingbathroom, and then breakfasted in enchanted solitude, like a changeling being fed nectar by invisible fairies, and took his proprietorial stroll along the oval path, bestowing terse nods of approval upon the workmen—he had an appointment to meet some literary