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warming Bech’s veins, he was emboldened to say, “There’s one novel of mine you never mention here. Yet it’s my longest and you could say my most ambitious—
The Chosen.
”
    The members of the board glanced at one another. “
Vyvolení
,” the sexy long-toothed girl, dropping her smile, explained to the nearly bald, thin-skinned man.
    In the face of their collective silence, Bech blushed and said, “Maybe it’s a terrible book. A lot of American critics thought so.”
    “Oh, no, sir,” the little blonde said, her own color rising. “Henry Bech does not produce terrible books. It is more a matter—” She could not finish.
    The dark one spoke, her smile restored but the sparkle banished from her eyes by a careful dullness. “It is that we are feeling
Vyvolení
is for the general Czech reader too—”
    “Too special,” the chairman of the board supplied, quite pleased at having found the exact shade of prevarication within the English language.
    “Too Jewish,” Bech translated.
    In chorus, somewhat like the Germans singing, the board reassured him that nothing could be too Jewish, thatmodern Czechoslovakia paid no attention to such things, that the strain of Jewish-American literary expression was greatly cherished in all progressive countries. Nevertheless, and though the meeting ended with fervent and affectionate handshakes all around, Bech felt he had blundered into that same emptiness he had felt when standing in the crammed Old Jewish Cemetery, near the clock that ran backwards. He knew now why he felt so fond of the Ambassador and his wife, so safe in the Residence, and so subtly reluctant to leave. He was frightened of Europe. The historical fullness of Prague, layer on layer, castles and bridges and that large vaulted hall with splintered floorboards where jousts and knightly elections used to be held; museums holding halls of icons and cases of bluish Bohemian glass and painted panoramas of the saga of the all-enduring Slavs; tilted streets of flaking plasterwork masked by acres of scaffolding; that clock in Old Town Square where with a barely audible whirring a puppet skeleton tolls the hour and the twelve apostles and that ultimate bogeyman Jesus Christ twitchily appear in two little windows above and, one by one, bestow baleful wooden stares upon the assembled tourists; the incredible visual pâtisserie of baroque church interiors, mock-marble pillars of paint-veined gesso melting upward into trompel’oeil ceilings bubbling with cherubs, everything gilded and tipped and twisted and skewed to titillate the eye, huge wedding-cake interiors meant to stun Hussite peasants back into the bosom of Catholicism—all this overstuffed Christian past afflicted Bech like a void, a chasm that he could float across in the dew-fresh mornings as he walked the otherwise untrod oval path but which, over the course of each day, like pain inflicted under anaesthesia, workedterror upon his subconscious. The United States has its rough spots—if the muggers don’t get your wallet, the nursing homes will—but it’s still a country that never had a pogrom.
    More fervently than he was a Jew, Bech was a writer, a literary man, and in this dimension, too, he felt cause for unease. He was a creature of the third person, a character. A character suffers from the fear that he will become boring to the author, who will simply let him drop, without so much as a terminal illness or a dramatic tumble down the Reichenbach Falls in the arms of Professor Moriarty. For some years now, Bech had felt his author wanting to set him aside, to get him off the desk forever. Rather frantically hoping still to amuse, Bech had developed a new set of tricks, somewhat out of character—he had married, he had written a best-seller. Nevertheless, and especially as his sixties settled around him, as heavily as an astronaut’s suit, he felt boredom from above dragging at him; he was—as H. G. Wells put it in a grotesquely cheerful