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room, feeling bloated by the white wine and extravagant compliments. This was his lastnight in the last palace built in Europe. Tomorrow, Brno, and then the free world. The moon was out, drenching in silver, like the back of a mirror, the great oval park—its pale path, its bushes with their shadows like heaps of ash, the rectilinear unused tennis courts, as ominous as a De Chirico. Where had the moon been all week? Behind the castle. Behind Hradčany. Bech moved back from the window and got into his king-size bed. From afar he heard doors slam, and a woman’s voice cry out in ecstasy: the Ambassador returning to his bride, having settled Waldheim’s hash. Bech read a little in Hašek’s
Good Soldier Schweik
, but even this very tedious national classic did not soothe him or allay his creeping terror.
    He lay in bed sleepless, beset by panic.
Jako by byl nemocen, zjistil, že může ležet jen v jedné poloze, na zádech. Obrátit se na druhý bok znamenalo nachýlit se nad okraj propasti, převrátit se na břicho znamenalo riskovat, že utone ve vodách věčného zapomnění, jež bublaly ve tmě zahřívané jeho tělem.
A single late last trolley car squealed somewhere off in the labyrinth of Prague. The female cry greeting the Ambassador had long died down. But the city, even under its blanket of political oppression, faintly rustled, beyond the heavily guarded walls, with footsteps and small explosions of combustion, as a fire supposedly extinguished continues to crackle and settle.
Zkoušel se na tyto zvuky soustředit, vymačkat z nich pouhou silou pozornosti balzám jejich nepopiratelnosti, nevinnost, která byla hlavním rysem jejich prosté existence, nezávisle na jejich dalších vlastnostech. Všechny věci mají tutéž existenci, děli se o tytéž atomy, přeskupují se: tráva v hnůj, maso v červy. Temnota za touto myšlenkou jako sklo, z něhož se stírá námraza. Zkoušel si příjemně oživit svůj vecěrní triumf, předčítání odměněné tak vřelým potleskem.
He thought of the gypsy, Ila, Ila with herbreasts loose in her loose blouse, who had come to his lecture and reception, braving the inscrutable Kafkaesque authorities, and tried to imagine her undressed and in a posture of sexual reception; his creator, however, was too bored with him to grant his aging body an erection and by this primordial method release his terror, there in the Ambassador’s great guest bed, its clean sheets smelling faintly of damp plaster.
    Becha to neuspalo. Jeho panika, jako bolest, která sílí, když se jí obíráme, když jí rozněcujeme úpornou pozorností, se bez hojivého potlesku jitřila; nicméně jako rána, zkusmo definovaná protiinfekčním a odmítavým vzepřením těla, začala nabírit jistou podobu.
His panic felt pasty and stiff and revealed a certain shape. That shape was the fear that, once he left his end of the gentle arc of the Ambassador’s Residence, he would—up in smoke—cease to exist.

Bech Presides
    Henry Bech had reached that advanced stage of authorship when his writing consisted mostly, it seemed, of contributions to Festschrifts—slim volumes of tributes, often accompanied by old photographs and an uneasy banquet at the Century Club or Lutèce or Michael’s Pub, in honor of this or that ancient companion in literature’s heady battles. These battles, even for their most enthusiastic veterans, took the form of a swift advance achieved in the dawn dimness of youthful ignorance, the planting of a bright brave flag in some momentary salient of the avantgarde’s wavering front line, and then a sluggish retreat back through the mud of a clinging fame, sporadically lit by flares of academic exegesis. Such an honorable retreat could go on virtually forever, thanks to modern medicine, which keeps reputations breathing right through brain death.
    Dear Mr. Bech:
    As you doubtless are aware, Isaiah Thornbush will turn seventy in 1991. We of the Aesop Press, castingabout for