Read Bech for Free Online

Now and then a young man, slender and with hair combed into a parrot’s peak, would leap into the air and seem to hover, emitting a shrill palatal cry. The men in Transylvania appeared lighter and more fanciful than the women, who moved, in their bell-skirted cocktail dresses, with a wooden stateliness perhaps inherited from their peasant grandmothers. Each girl who passed near their table was described by Petrescu, not humorously at first, as a “typical Rumanian beauty.”
    “And this one, with the orange lips and eyelashes?”
    “A typical Rumanian beauty. The cheekbones are very classical.”
    “And the blonde behind her? The small plump one?”
    “Also typical.”
    “But they are so different. Which is more typical?”
    “They are equally. We are a perfect democracy.” Between spates of dancing, a young chanteuse, more talented than the one in the Bucharest hotel, took the floor. She had learned, probably from free-world films, that terrible mannerism of strenuousness whereby every note, no matter how accessibly placed and how flatly attacked, is given a facial aura of immense accomplishment. Her smile, at the close of each number, combined a conspiratorial twinkle, a sublime humility, and an element of dazed self-congratulation. Yet, beneath the artifice, the girl had life. Bech was charmed by a number, in Italian, that involved much animated pouting and finger-scolding and placing of the fists on the hips. Petrescu explained that the song was the plaint of a young wife whose husband was always attending soccer matches and never stayed home with her. Bech asked, “Is she also a typical Rumanian beauty?”
    “I think,” Petrescu said, with a purr Bech had not heard before, “she is a typical little Jewess.”
    The drive, late the next afternoon, back to Bucharest was worse than the one out, for it took place partly in the dark. The chauffeur met the challenge with increased speed and redoubled honking. In a rare intermittence of danger, a straight road near Ploesti where only the oil rigs relieved the flatness, Bech asked, “Seriously, do you not feel the insanity in this man?” Five minutes before, the driver had turned to the back seat and, showing even gray teeth in a tight tic of a smile, had remarked about a dog lying dead beside the road. Bech suspected that most of the remark had not been translated.
    Petrescu said, crossing his legs in the effete and weary way that had begun to exasperate Bech, “No, he is a good man, an extremely kind man, who takes his work too seriously. In that he is like the beautiful Jewess whom you so much admired.”
    “In my country,” Bech said, “ ‘Jewess’ is a kind of fighting word.”
    “Here,” Petrescu said, “it is merely descriptive. Let us talk about Herman Melville. Is it possible to you that
Pierre
is a yet greater work than
The White Whale
?”
    “No, I think it is yet not so great, possibly.”
    “You are ironical about my English. Please excuse it. Being prone to motion sickness has discollected my thoughts.”
    “Our driver would discollect anybody’s thoughts. Is it possible that he is the late Adolf Hitler, kept alive by Count Dracula?”
    “I think not. Our people’s uprising in 1944 fortunately exterminated the Fascists.”
    “That is fortunate. Have you ever read, speaking of Melville,
Omoo
?”
    Melville, it happened, was Bech’s favorite American author, in whom he felt united the strengths that were later to go the separate ways of Dreiser and James. Throughout dinner, back at the hotel, he lectured Petrescu about him. “No one,” Bech said—he had ordered a full bottle of white Rumanian wine, and his tongue felt agile as a butterfly—“more courageously faced our native terror. He went for it right between its wide-set little pig eyes, and it shattered his genius like a lance.” He poured himself more wine. The hotel chanteuse, who Bech now noticed had buck teeth as well as gawky legs, stalked to their table, untangled her