Bech Read Online Free Page A

other sympathetically let go. The books and toys spilled; the fur began to blow down the concrete, pelts looping and shimmering as if again alive. Kate broke past the gate guard and helped him catch them; together they scooped all the loot back in the suitcase, but for a dozen fluttering books. They were heavy and slick, in the Cyrillic alphabet, like high-school yearbooks upside down. One of the watches had cracked its face. Kate was sobbing and shivering in excitement; a bitter wind was blowing streaks of grit and snow out of the coming long winter. “Genry, the books!” she said, needing to shout. “You must have them! They are souvenirs!”
    “Mail them!” Bech thundered, and ran with the terrible suitcase under his arm, fearful of being burdened with more responsibilities. Also, though in some ways a man of our time, he has a morbid fear of missing airplanes, and of being dropped from the tail-end lavatory.
    Though this was six years ago, the books have not yet arrived in the mail. Perhaps Ekaterina Alexandrovna kept them, as souvenirs. Perhaps they were caught in the cultural freeze-up that followed Bech’s visit, and were buried in a blizzard. Perhaps they arrived in the lobby of his apartment building, and were pilfered by an émigré vandal. Or perhaps (you may close your notebooks) the mailman is not clairvoyant after all.
    * See Appendix A, section I .
    * See Appendix A, section II .
    * See Appendix A, section III .
    * See Appendix A, section IV .
    * See Appendix B .

BECH IN RUMANIA;
OR, THE RUMANIAN CHAUFFEUR
    D EPLANING IN B UCHAREST wearing an astrakhan hat purchased in Moscow, Bech was not recognized by the United States Embassy personnel sent to greet him, and, rather than identify himself, sat sullenly on a bench, glowering like a Soviet machinery importer, while these young men ran back and forth conversing with each other in dismayed English and shouting at the customs officials in what Bech took to be pidgin Rumanian. At last, one of these young men, the smallest and cleverest, Princeton ’51 or so, noticing the rounded toes of Bech’s American shoes, ventured suspiciously, “I beg your pardon,
pazhalusta
, but are you—?”
    “Could be,” Bech said. After five weeks of consorting with Communists, he felt himself increasingly tempted to evade, confuse, and mock his fellow Americans. Further, after attuning himself to the platitudinous jog of translatorese, he found rapid English idiom exhausting. So it was with some relief that he passed, in the next hours, from the conspiratorial companyof his compatriots into the care of a monarchial Rumanian hotel and a smiling Party underling called Athanase Petrescu.
    Petrescu, whose oval face was adorned by constant sunglasses and several round sticking plasters placed upon a fresh blue shave, had translated into Rumanian
Typee; Pierre; Life on the Mississippi; Sister Carrie; Winesburg, Ohio; Across the River and Into the Trees;
and
On the Road
. He knew Bech’s work well and said, “Although it was
Travel Light
that made your name illustrious, yet in my heart I detect a very soft spot for
Brother Pig
, which your critics did not so much applaud.”
    Bech recognized in Petrescu, behind the blue jaw and sinister glasses, a man humbly in love with books, a fool for literature. As, that afternoon, they strolled through a dreamlike Bucharest park containing bronze busts of Goethe and Pushkin and Victor Hugo, beside a lake wherein the greenish sunset was coated with silver, the translator talked excitedly of a dozen things, sharing thoughts he had not been able to share while descending, alone at his desk, into the luminous abysses and profound crudities of American literature. “With Hemingway, the difficulty of translating—and I speak to an extent of Anderson also—is to prevent the simplicity from seeming simple-minded. For we do not have here such a tradition of belle-lettrist fancifulness against which the style of Hemingway was a rebel. Do you