Free Bech by John Updike

nuance, as it were, the square corners of her words. “After her talk, we—talked.”
    “In French?”
    “And in Russian.”
    “She knows Russian?”
    “She was born Russian.”
    “How is her Russian?”
    “Very pure but—old-fashioned. Like a book. As she talked, I felt in a book, safe.”
    “You do not always feel safe?”
    “Not always.”
    “Do you find it difficult to be a woman poet?”
    “We have a tradition of woman poets. We have Elisaveta Bagriana, who is very great.”
    Petrov leaned toward Bech as if to nibble him. “Your own works? Are they influenced by the
nouvelle vague
? Do you consider yourself to write anti
-romans
?”
    Bech kept himself turned toward the woman. “Do you want to hear about how I write? You don’t, do you?”
    “Very much yes,” she said.
    He told them, told them shamelessly, in a voice that surprised him with its steadiness, its limpid urgency, how once he had written, how in
Travel Light
he had sought to show people skimming the surface of things with their lives, taking tints from things the way that objects in a still life color oneanother, and how later he had attempted to place beneath the melody of plot a countermelody of imagery, interlocking images which had risen to the top and drowned his story, and how in
The Chosen
he had sought to make of this confusion the theme itself, an epic theme, by showing a population of characters whose actions were all determined, at the deepest level, by nostalgia, by a desire to get back, to dive, each, into the springs of their private imagery. The book probably failed; at least, it was badly received. Bech apologized for telling all this. His voice tasted flat in his mouth; he felt a secret intoxication and a secret guilt, for he had contrived to give a grand air, as of an impossibly noble and quixotically complex experiment, to his failure when at bottom, he suspected, a certain simple laziness was the cause.
    Petrov said, “Fiction so formally sentimental could not be composed in Bulgaria. We do not have a happy history.”
    It was the first time Petrov had sounded like a Communist. If there was one thing that irked Bech about these people behind the mirror, it was their assumption that, however second-rate elsewhere, in suffering they were supreme. He said, “Believe it or not, neither do we.”
    Vera calmly intruded. “Your personae are not moved by love?”
    “Yes, very much. But as a form of nostalgia. We fall in love, I tried to say in the book, with women who remind us of our first landscape. A silly idea. I used to be interested in love. I once wrote an essay on the orgasm—you know the word?—”
    She shook her head. He remembered that it meant Yes.
    “—on the orgasm as perfect memory. The mystery is, what are we remembering?”
    She shook her head again, and he noticed that her eyes were gray, and that in their depths his image (which he could notsee) was searching for the thing remembered. She composed her finger tips around the brandy glass and said, “There is a French poet, a young one, who has written of this. He says that never else do we, do we so gather up, collect into ourselves, oh—” Vexed, she spoke to Petrov in rapid Bulgarian.
    He shrugged and said, “Concentrate our attention.”
    “—concentrate our attention,” she repeated to Bech, as if the words, to be believed, had to come from her. “I say it foolish—foolishly—but in French it is very well put and—
correct
.”
    Petrov smiled neatly and said, “This is an enjoyable subject for discussion, love.”
    “It remains,” Bech said, picking his words as if the language were not native even to him, “one of the few things that still deserve meditation.”
    “I think it is good,” she said.
    “Love?” he asked, startled.
    She shook her head and tapped the stem of her glass with a fingernail, so that Bech had an inaudible sense of ringing, and she bent as if to study the liquor, so that her entire body borrowed a rosiness from