Free Bech Is Back by John Updike

was just something on the back of a Christmas card.”
    Père Gibergue, in his nearly flawless English, pronounced solemnly, “He was a crazy man, but a great builder.” There was something unhappy about the priest’s nostrils, Bech thought; otherwise, his vocation fit him like a smooth silk glove.
    “There were several Herods,” Bea interposed. “Herod the Great was the slaughter-of-the-innocents man. His son Herod Antipas was ruling when Jesus was crucified.”
    “Wherever we dig now, we find Herod,” Père Gibergue said, and Bech thought,
Science has seduced this man. In his archaeologicalpassion, he has made a hero of a godless tyrant
. Jerusalem struck Bech as the civic embodiment of conflicted loyalties. At first, deplaning with Bea and being driven at night from the airport to the Holy City through occupied territory, he had been struck by the darkness of the land, an intended wartime dark such as he had not seen since his GI days, in the tense country nightscapes of England and Normandy. Their escort, the son of American Zionists who had emigrated in the Thirties, spoke of the convoys that had been forced along this highway in the ’67 war, and pointed out some hilly places where the Jordanian fire had been especially deadly. Wrecked tanks and trucks, unseeable in the dark, had been left as monuments. Bech remembered, as their car sped vulnerably between the black shoulders of land, the rapt sensation (which for him had been centered in the face, the mouth more than the eyes—had he been more afraid of losing his teeth than his sight?) of being open to bullets, which there was no dodging. Before your brain could register anything, the damage would be done. Teeth shattered, the tongue torn loose, blood gushing through the punctured palate.
    Then, as the car entered realms of light—the suburbs of Jerusalem—Bech was reminded of southern California, where he had once gone on a fruitless flirtation with some movie producers, who had been unable to wrap around his old novel
Travel Light
a package the banks would buy. Here were the same low houses and palm fronds, the same impression of staged lighting, exclusively frontal, as if the backs of these buildings dissolved into unpainted slats and rotting canvas, into weeds and warm air: that stagnant, balmy, expectant air of Hollywood when the sun goes down. The Mishkenot—the official city guesthouse, where this promising fifty-two-year-old writer and his plump Protestant wife were to stay forthree weeks—seemed solidly built of the same stuff of cinematic illusion: Jerusalem limestone, artfully pitted by the mason’s chisel, echoing like the plasterboard corridors of a Cecil B. De Mille temple to the ritual noises of weary guests unpacking. A curved staircase of mock-Biblical masonry led up to an alcove where a desk, a map, a wastebasket, and a sofa awaited his meditations. Bech danced up and down these stairs with an enchantment born in cavernous movie palaces; he was Bojangles, he was Astaire, he was George Sanders, wearing an absurd headdress and a sneer, exulting in the captivity and impending torture of a white-limbed maiden who, though so frightened her jewels chatter, will not forswear her Jahweh. Israel had no other sentimental significance for him; his father, a 47th Street diamond merchant, had lumped the Zionists with all the
Luftmenschen
who imagined that mollifying exceptions might be stitched into the world’s cruel and necessary patchwork of competition and exploitation. To postwar Bech, busy in Manhattan, events in Palestine had passed as one more mop-up scuffle, though involving a team with whom he identified as effortlessly as with the Yankees.
    Bea, an Episcopalian, was enraptured simply at being on Israel’s soil. She kept calling it “the Holy Land.” In the morning, she woke him to share what she saw: through leaded windows, the Mount of Olives, tawny and cypress-strewn, and the silver bulbs of a Russian church gleaming in the Garden