Bech (4 page)

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 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 he?”

Petrescu, who certainly knew all about Ionesco, stared at Bech with blank expectance. Even in this innermost sanctum he had kept his sunglasses on. Bech said, irritated, “A playwright. Lives in Paris. Theatre of the Absurd. Wrote
Rhinoceros
,” and he crooked a forefinger beside his heavy Jewish nose, to represent a horn.

Taru emitted a dainty sneeze of laughter. Petrescu translated, listened, and told Bech, “He is very sorry he has not heard of this man. Western books are a luxury here, so we are not able to follow each new nihilist movement. Comrade Taru asks what you plan to do while in the People’s Republic of Rumania.”

“I am told,” Bech said, “that there are some writers interested in exchanging ideas with an American colleague. I believe my embassy has suggested a list to you.”

The musical voice went on and on. Petrescu listened with a cocked ear and relayed, “Comrade Taru sincerely wishes that this may be the case and regrets that, because of the lateness of the hour and the haste of this meeting urged by your embassy, no secretaries are present to locate this list. He furthermore regrets that at this time of the year so many of our fine writers are bathing at the Black Sea. However, he points out that there is an excellent production of
Desire Under the Elms
in Bucharest, and that our Carpathian city of Brasov is indeed worthy of a visit. Comrade Taru himself retains many pleasant youthful memories concerning Brasov.”

Taru rose to his feet—an intensely dramatic event within
the reduced scale he had established around himself. He spoke, thumped his small square chest resoundingly, spoke again, and smiled. Petrescu said, “He wishes you to know that in his youth he published many books of poetry, both epic and lyric in manner. He adds, ‘A fire ignited here’ ”—and here Petrescu struck his own chest in flaccid mimicry—“ ‘can never be quenched.’ ”

Bech stood and responded, “In my country we also ignite fires
here
.” He touched his head. His remark was not translated and, after an efflorescent display of courtesy from the brilliant-haired little man, Bech and Petrescu made their way through the empty mansion down to the waiting car, which drove them, rather jerkily, back to the hotel.

“And how did you like Mr. Taru?” Petrescu asked on the way.

“He’s a doll,” Bech said.

“You mean—a puppet?”

Bech turned curiously but saw nothing in Petrescu’s face that betrayed more than a puzzlement over meaning. Bech said, “I’m sure you have a better eye for the strings than I do.”

Since neither had eaten, they dined together at the hotel; they discussed Faulkner and Hawthorne while waiters brought them soup and veal a continent removed from the cabbagy cuisine of Russia. A lithe young woman on awkwardly high heels stalked among the tables singing popular songs from Italy and France. The trailing microphone wire now and then became entangled in her feet, and Bech admired the sly savagery with which she would, while not altering an iota her enameled smile, kick herself free. Bech had been a long time without a woman. He looked forward to three more nights sitting at this table, surrounded by traveling salesmen from East Germany and Hungary, feasting on
the sight of this lithe chanteuse. Though her motions were angular and her smile was inflexible, her high round bosom looked soft as a soufflé.

But tomorrow, Petrescu explained, smiling sweetly beneath his sad-eyed sunglasses, they would go to Brasov.

Bech knew little about Rumania. From his official briefing he knew it was “a Latin island in a Slavic sea,” that during World War II its anti-Semitism had been the most ferocious in Europe, that now it was seeking economic independence of the Soviet bloc. The ferocity especially interested him, since of the many human conditions it was his business to imagine, murderousness was among the more difficult. He was a Jew. Though he could be irritable and even vengeful, obstinate savagery was excluded from his budget of emotions.

Petrescu met him in the hotel lobby at nine and, taking his suitcase from his hand, led him to the hired car. By daylight, the chauffeur was a short man the color of ashes—white ash for the face, gray cigarette ash for his close-trimmed smudge of a mustache, and the darker residue of a tougher substance for his eyes and hair. His manner was nervous and remote and fussy; Bech’s impression was of a stupidity so severe that the mind is tensed to sustain the simplest tasks. As they drove from the city, the driver constantly tapped his horn to warn pedestrians and cyclists of his approach. They passed the prewar stucco suburbs, suggestive of southern California; the postwar Moscow-style apartment buildings, rectilinear and airless; the heretical all-glass exposition hall the Rumanians had built to celebrate twenty years of industrial progress under Socialism. It was shaped like a huge sailor’s cap, and before it stood a tall Brancusi column cast in aluminum.

“Brancusi,” Bech said. “I didn’t know you acknowledged him.”

“Oh, much,” Petrescu said. “His village is a shrine. I can show you many early works in our national museum.”

“And Ionesco? Is he really a non-person?”

Petrescu smiled. “The eminent head of our Writers’ Union,” he said, “makes little jokes. He is known here but not much produced as yet. Students in their rooms perhaps read aloud a play like
The Singer Devoid of Hair
.”

Bech was distracted from the conversation by the driver’s incessant mutter of tooting. They were in the country now, driving along a straight, slightly rising road lined with trees whose trunks were painted white. On the shoulder of the road walked bundle-shaped old women carrying knotted bundles, little boys tapping donkeys forward, men in French-blue work clothes sauntering empty-handed. At all of them the driver sounded his horn. His stubby, gray-nailed hand fluttered on the contact rim, producing an agitated stammer beginning perhaps a hundred yards in advance and continuing until the person, who usually moved only to turn and scowl, had been passed. Since the road was well traveled, the noise was practically uninterrupted, and after the first half hour nagged Bech like a toothache. He asked Petrescu, “Must he do that?”

“Oh, yes. He is a conscientious man.”

“What good does it do?”

Petrescu, who had been developing an exciting thought on Mark Twain’s infatuation with the apparatus of capitalism, which had undermined his bucolic genius, indulgently explained, “The bureau from which we hire cars provides the driver. They have been precisely trained for this profession.”

Bech realized that Petrescu himself did not drive. He reposed
in the oblivious trust of an airplane passenger, legs crossed, sunglasses in place, issuing smoother and smoother phrases, while Bech leaned forward anxiously, braking on the empty floor, twitching a wheel that was not there, trying to wrench the car’s control away from this atrociously unrhythmic and brutal driver. When they went through a village, the driver would speed up and intensify the mutter of his honking; clusters of peasants and geese exploded in disbelief, and Bech felt as if gears, the gears that regulate and engage the mind, were clashing. As they ascended into the mountains, the driver demonstrated his technique with curves: he approached each like an enemy, accelerating, and at the last moment stepped on the brake as if crushing a snake underfoot. In the jerking and swaying, Petrescu grew pale. His blue jaw acquired a moist sheen and issued phrases less smoothly. Bech said to him, “This driver should be locked up. He is sick and dangerous.”

“No, no, he is a good man. These roads, they are difficult.”

“At least please ask him to stop twiddling the horn. It’s torture.”

Petrescu’s eyebrows arched, but he leaned forward and spoke in Rumanian.

The driver answered; the language clattered in his mouth, though his voice was soft.

Petrescu told Bech, “He says it is a safety precaution.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

Petrescu was truly puzzled. He asked, “In the States, you drive your own car?”

“Of course, everybody does,” Bech said, and then worried that he had hurt the feelings of this Socialist, who must submit to the aristocratic discomfort of being driven. For the remainder of the trip, he held silent about the driver. The
muddy lowland fields with Mediterranean farmhouses had yielded to fir-dark hills bearing Germanic chalets. At the highest point, the old boundary of Austria-Hungary, fresh snow had fallen, and the car, pressed ruthlessly through the ruts, brushed within inches of some children dragging sleds. It was a short downhill distance from there to Brasov. They stopped before a newly built pistachio hotel. The jarring ride had left Bech with a headache. Petrescu stepped carefully from the car, licking his lips; the tip of his tongue showed purple in his drained face. The chauffeur, as composed as raked ashes no touch of wind has stirred, changed out of his gray driving coat, checked the oil and water, and removed his lunch from the trunk. Bech examined him for some sign of satisfaction, some betraying trace of malice, but there was nothing. His eyes were living smudges, and his mouth was the mouth of the boy in the class who, being neither strong nor intelligent, has developed insignificance into a character trait that does him some credit. He glanced at Bech without expression; yet Bech wondered if the man did not understand English a little.