Bech Read Online Free Page B

follow the difficulty?”
    “Yes. How did you get around it?”
    Petrescu did not seem to understand. “Get around, how? Circumvent?”
    “How did you translate the simple language without seeming simple-minded?”
    “Oh. By being extremely subtle.”
    “Oh. I should tell you, some people in my country think Hemingway
was
simple-minded. It is actively debated.”
    Petrescu absorbed this with a nod, and said, “I know for a fact, his Italian is not always correct.”
    When Bech got back to his hotel—situated on a square rimmed with buildings made, it seemed, of dusty pink candy—a message had been left for him to call a Mr. Phillips at the U.S. Embassy. Phillips was Princeton ’51. He asked, “What have they got mapped out for you?”
    Bech’s schedule had hardly been discussed. “Petrescu mentioned a production of
Desire Under the Elms
I might see. And he wants to take me to Brasov. Where is Brasov?”
    “In Transylvania, way the hell off. It’s where Dracula hung out. Listen, can we talk frankly?”
    “We can try.”
    “I know damn well this line is bugged, but here goes. This country is hot. Anti-Socialism is busting out all over. My inkling is they want to get you out of Bucharest, away from all the liberal writers who are dying to meet you.”
    “Are you sure they’re not dying to meet Arthur Miller?”
    “Kidding aside, Bech, there’s a lot of ferment in this country, and we want to plug you in. Now, when are you meeting Taru?”
    “Knock knock. Taru. Taru Who?”
    “Jesus, he’s the head of the Writers’ Union—hasn’t Petrescu even set up an appointment? Boy, they’re putting you right around the old mulberry bush. I gave Petrescu a list of writers for you to latch on to. Suppose I call him and wave the big stick and ring you back. Got it?”
    “Got it, tiger.” Bech hung up sadly; one of the reasons he had accepted the State Department’s invitation was that he thought it would be an escape from agents.
    Within ten minutes his phone rasped, in that dead rattly way it has behind the Iron Curtain, and it was Phillips, breathless,victorious. “Congratulate me,” he said. “I’ve been making like a thug and got
their
thugs to give you an appointment with Taru tonight.”
    “This very night?”
    Phillips sounded hurt. “You’re only here four nights, you know. Petrescu will pick you up. His excuse was he thought you might want some rest.”
    “He’s extremely subtle.”
    “What was that?”
    “Never mind,
pazhalusta
.”
    Petrescu came for Bech in a black car driven by a hunched silhouette. The Writers’ Union was housed on the other side of town, in a kind of castle, a turreted mansion with a flaring stone staircase and an oak-vaulted library whose shelves were twenty feet high and solid with leather spines. The stairs and hallways were deserted. Petrescu tapped on a tall paneled door of blackish oak, strap-hinged in the sombre Spanish style. The door opened soundlessly, revealing a narrow high room hung with tapestries, pale brown and blue, whose subject involved masses of attenuated soldiery unfathomably engaged. Behind a huge polished desk quite bare of furnishings sat an immaculate miniature man with a pink face and hair as white as a dandelion poll. His rosy hands, perfectly finished down to each fingernail, were folded on the shiny desk, reflected like water flowers; and his face wore a smiling expression that was also, in each neat crease, beyond improvement. This was Taru.
    He spoke with magical suddenness, like a music box. Petrescu translated his words to Bech as, “You are a literary man. Do you know the works of our Mihail Sadoveanu, of our noble Mihai Beniuc, or perhaps that most wonderful spokesman for the people, Tudor Arghezi?”
    Bech said, “No, I’m afraid the only Rumanian writer I know at all is Ionesco.”
    The exquisite white-haired man nodded eagerly and emitted a length of tinkling sounds that was translated to Bech as simply “And who is