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acknowledgment of his own mortality that the boy Bech had read back when everything in print impressed him—an experiment whose chemicals were about to be washed down the drain. The bowls in his palace bathroom had voracious drains, gulping black holes with wide brass rims, like greedy bottomless bull’s-eyes.
Ne, ne!
    Around him in Czechoslovakia things kept happening. Little Akron Annie returned from a shopping expedition in the countryside with an old-fashioned sled, of bright-yellow wood, with the fronts of the runners curved up like a ram’s horns. Her children back in Ohio would love it. The photographer and his assistant had a fearful spat in French and German, and the boy disappeared for a nightand came creeping back to the Residence with a black eye. The Ambassador, taking his wispy daughter with him, had to drive to Vienna for a conference with all the American ambassadors of Central Europe for a briefing on our official stance in case Kurt Waldheim, a former assistant killer of Jews, was elected President of Austria. There was, in his unavoidable absence, a reception at the Residence; Bech gave a talk, long scheduled and advertised, on “American Optimism as Evinced in the Works of Melville, Bierce, and Nathanael West,” and the Ambassador’s wife introduced him.
    “To live a week with Henry Bech,” she began, “is to fall in love with him.”
    Really? he thought. Why tell me now?
    She went on quite brightly, leaning her scratchy voice into the mike and tripping into spurts of Czech that drew oohs and ahs from the attentive audience; but to Bech, as he sat beside her watching her elegant high-heeled legs nervously kick in the shadow behind the lectern, came the heavy, dreary thought that she was doing her job, that being attractive and vivacious and irrepressibly American was one of the chores of being an American ambassador’s wife. He stood blearily erect in the warm wash of applause that followed her gracious introduction. The audience, lit by chandeliers here in the palace ballroom, was all white faces and shirtfronts. He recognized, in a row, the young board of the publishing house for translations, and most of the crowd had a well-groomed, establishment air. Communists, opportunists, quislings.
    But afterwards it was the dissidents, in checked shirts and slouchy thrift-shop dresses, who came up to him like favored children. The scarred man, his shiny black eyesmounted upon the curve of his face like insect eyes, shook Bech’s hand, clinging, and said, apropos of the speech, “You are naughty. There is no optimism.”
    “Oh, but there is, there is!” Bech protested. “Underneath the pessimism.”
    The gypsy was there, too, in another loose blouse, with her hair freshly kinked, so her sallow triangular face was nested as in a wide pillow, and only half-circles of her great gold earrings showed. “I like you,” she said, “when you talk about books.”
    “And I you,” he answered. “That was
such
a lovely book you showed me the other night. The delicate thin paper, the hand-done binding. It nearly made me cry.”
    “It makes many to cry,” she said, much as she had solemnly said, “We are not monks. We do not enjoy to suffer.”
    And a blond dissident, with plump lips and round cheeks, who looked much like the blonde at the publishing house except that she was older, and wiser, with little creased comet’s tails of wisdom trailing from the corners of her eyes, explained, “Václav sends the regrets he could not come hear your excellent talk. He must be giving at this same hour an interview, to very sympathetic West German newspaperman.”
    Syzygy, dark-suited and sweating as profusely as a voodoo priest possessed by his deity, could not bear to look at Bech. “Not since the premiere of
Don Giovanni
has there been such a performance in Prague,” he began but, unable out of sheer wonder to continue, shudderingly closed his eyes behind the phantom pince-nez.
    At last Bech was alone in his