Free Bech Is Back by John Updike Page B

gentle yipping noises when she fucked. Bech wondered whether he had ever really been a sexy man, or was it just an idea that went with bachelorhood? He had been a satisfactory sprinter, he reflected, but nobody up to now had challenged his distance capacity. At his age, he should be jogging.
    The first sight they were taken to, by a Jewish archaeologist in rimless glasses, was the Wailing Wall. It was a Saturday. Sabbath congregations were gathered in the sun of the limestone plaza the Israelis had created by bulldozing away dozens of Arab homes. People were chanting, dancing; photographs were forbidden. Men in sidelocks were leaning their heads against the wall in prayer, the broad-brimmed hats of the Hasidim tipped askew. The archaeologist told Bech and Bea that for a millennium the wall could not be seen from where they stood, and pointed out where the massive, characteristically edged Herodian stones gave way to the smaller stones of Saladin and the Mamelukes. Bea urged Bech to walk up to the wall. The broad area in front of it had been designated a synagogue, with separate male and female sections, so they could not pass in through the fence together. “I won’t go where you can’t go,” he said.
    Bech’s grandfather, a diamond-cutter and disciple of Spinoza, had come to the United States from the ghetto of Amsterdam in 1880; Bech’s father had been an atheistic socialist; and in Bech socialist piety had dwindled to a stubborn wisp of artistic conscience. So there was little in his background to answer to the unearthly ardor of Bea’s urging. “I want you to, Henry. Please.”
    He said, “I don’t have a hat. You have to have a hat.”
    “They have paper yarmulkes there. In that basket,” the archaeologist offered, pointing. He was a short bored bearded man, whose attitude expressed no wish, himself, to approach the wall. He stood on the blinding limestone of the plaza as if glued there by his shadow.
    “Let’s skip it,” Bech said. “I get the idea from here.”
    “No, Henry,” Bea said. “You must go up and touch it. You must. For me. Think. We may never be here again.”
    In her plea he found most touching the pronoun “we.” Ever since his honorable discharge from the armed forces, Bech had been an I. He picked a black paper hat from the basket, and the hat was unwilling to adhere to his head; his hair was too woolly, too fashionably full-bodied. Graying had made it frizzier. A little breeze seemed to be blowing outward from the wall and twice threatened to lift his yarmulke away. Amid the stares of congregated Hasidic youth, their side curls as menacing as lions’ manes, he held the cap to the back of his skull with his hand and approached, step by cautious step, all that remained of the Temple.
    It was, the wall, a Presence. The great rectangular Herodian stones, each given a shallow border, like a calling card, by the ancient masons, were riddled with paper lice. Into the cracks of erosion, tightly folded prayers had been stuffed—the more he looked, the more there were. Bech supposedpaper lasted forever in this desert climate. The space around him, the very air, felt tense, like held breath. Numbly he reached out, and, as he touched the surprisingly warm sacred surface, an American voice whined into his ears from a small circle of Hasidim seated on chairs nearby. “Who is this God?” the voice was asking loudly. “If He’s so good, why does He permit all the pain in the world? Look at Cambodia, man.…” The speaker and his audience were undergoing the obligatory exercise of religious debate. The Jewish tongue, divinely appointed to be active. Bech closed his ears and backed away rapidly. The breeze made another grab at his paper yarmulke. He dropped the flimsy thing into the basket, and Bea was waiting on the other side of the fence.
    She was beaming, proud; he had been attracted to that in her which so purely encouraged him. Amid many in this last, stalled decade of his who had wished