Bech at Bay (28 page)

It was true, Bech was having fun, though his lecture was still unwritten, a fact that he tried all day to forget and which gave him the horrors when he awoke at night, his temples aching with an excess of convivial aquavit and
congratulatory champagne. To him, Sweden was a stupefying Heaven. He liked the quick arc of daylight, like cold crystal, and the giant Nikki Ste.-Phalle sculptures at the Moderna Museet—women! more power to them! Greta! Ingrid! from Stockholm their beauty, tinged with melancholy as beauty must be, had come forth to flood the filmstruck world—and a certain pastel lightness to the city, under its close sub-arctic sky. It reminded him of Leningrad, as it had appeared to him in 1964, when he was but forty-one, and susceptible to the charms of a stony-faced
apparatchika
in a military jacket, and thrilled to be breathing Tolstoyan air. Now an old man, he saw through dimmed eyes. He had done what he could; he had tried to write his own books rather than books others wanted him to write; he had come to this Northern fastness to put his pen to rest. He gave interviews to the
Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen, Damernas Värld, Dagens Nyheter, Västerbottens-Kuriren.
The interviewer from
Svenska Dagbladet
asked Bech what he thought of the future of Socialism. He answered that he thought it was in a down phase, but would be back, as an alternative; the world was a sick man turning over and over in bed. The weak must always be protected somewhat from the strong, but not so satisfactorily that no incentive remains to become strong. Failure must have real penalties, or there will be no striving for success. Man is in the awkward position of being kinder than Nature.

The
Svenska Dagbladet
interviewer, an alert round-headed lad with already thinning hair, asked him if these insights were to be the burden of his Nobel lecture.

“If they were,” Bech asked, “why would I be giving them away to you and your readers now? But tell me, what is a Nobel Lecture about, usually?”

The young man thought. His eyelashes were white, which gave him, with his clever thin mouth, a delicately clownish look. “Oh, the importance of writing. And how the winner came to write.”

“Do those seem to you worth talking about?”

The interviewer, interviewed, shrugged evasively. “It is the custom.”

“Sweden is a land of customs, yes?”

The young man, his reddish fair hair so fine that strands of it stood up straight with static electricity, smiled hesitantly. His English was not quite good enough to be certain if he was being teased. “You could say so,” he replied.

“I understand that at some point angels will break into our hotel room.”

“Singers heralding the advent of St. Lucia, our festival of light.” The interviewer was still worrying over Sweden’s being a land of customs—America, perhaps, being a land devoid of customs. “Our winters are long,” he said, “with very short days, so there is perhaps a Swedish need to be festive—to have festivities. We light many candles, many torches—you will see. Nobel Week is more a holiday now than Christmas.”

The Swedes had provided on their long pieces of paper a minute-by-minute forecast of what would happen at the ceremony—the music to be played; the order of procession; the seating on the stage, amid the many Academies, with Prizewinners arrayed facing the King and Queen; the braided arrangement of flowers to mark the edge of the stage—and at the banquet afterwards, in the vast Blue Hall of Stockholm’s red-brick City Hall, thirteen hundred guests eating from special Nobel dinnerware (
Nobelservisen
) while the Uppsala male choir sang and young women in blue
peasant outfits danced down the broad stairs and streams of waiters bore aloft torrents of softly flaming platters of dessert. But to earn his place in such grand procedures Bech had to deliver his lecture.

“My God, what I am going to do?” he asked Robin back in the hotel room. “I have to give the damn thing in two days, and I have no time to write it, there are all these receptions, all this champagne I have to keep drinking.”

“Henry, I hate to see you rattled like this. I have a feminine need to think of you as debonair.”

“Nothing I can say will be good enough. I’m unworthy.”

“They already know that. You told me the Academy didn’t mean to elect you, they were casting protest votes against each other.”

“My informant might have been pulling my leg. They have this weird Viking sense of humor. Ho, ho, have a smash on the noggin.”

“Did you know,” Robin asked him, “that during the war they weren’t so neutral? I was reading on the Internet how the Sapo, their secret police, turned over Norwegian resistance fighters to the Nazis. And a lot of Swedish-Jewish businessmen got mysteriously fired. Hitler
loved
the Swedes; they were his idea of a real
Volk.
”

“Stop scaring me. You and Golda, you have all this racial prejudice.”

“She’s not so dumb. Here. Focus on your daughter for once.” She thrust Golda into his arms. The infant’s bottom felt damp. When she grinned, with her scattered teeth, she drooled. Another tooth coming. Her slimy little curious hand reached out and grabbed a piece of Bech’s cheek and squeezed.

“
Ow
,” he said.

“She’s so used to being with me all day she doesn’t understand your whiskers. I’m putting on a cocktail dress and getting out for an hour. A nice young accountant in the office downstairs offered to show me the hotel computer system, and then take me for a drink to some American-style skyview place along the waterfront. He was shocked when I told him I hadn’t seen anything of Stockholm. He couldn’t believe I was so neglected.”

“Did you tell him it’s mostly your choice? Inger offered to find us an African sitter, though it isn’t easy up here.”

“They’re all these Senegalese brand-name-pocketbook ripoff peddlers. She said there are some dark-skinned Turks, but I said no Moslems, thanks.”

“There you go. More prejudice. Until Israel, Moslems were much better to Jews than Christians.”

Robin read the anxiety, the potential defeat, on his face and said, “Henry, I’m young. I’m stir-crazy. I’ll be back in time for you to go to the official concert at eight. Golda needs some daddy magic. You and she can write your lecture together.”

“Members of the Academy, distinguished guests both foreign and domestic,” Bech began his lecture. “The Nobel Prize has become so big, such a celebrity among prizes, that no one is worthy to win it, and the embarrassed winner can shelter his unworthiness behind the unworthiness of everyone else.” The audience was scattered on the chairs set out in the long and tawny main salon of the Swedish Academy, a room a-brim with pilasters and archways like a Renaissance fantasy, a vision by Michelangelo of human form turned into architecture. The King—tall
and studious-looking, wearing glasses whose rims were of a regal thinness—was not there, nor his beautiful black-haired Queen. Bech had been foolish to think of himself as speaking from the top of the world. He was speaking to an indifferent audience of pale polite faces, in an overheated space on the Northern edge of Europe, a subcontinent whose natives for a few passing centuries had bullied and buffaloed the rest of the world. Among the faces he recognized few. Meri Jo Zwengler and lanky, shaggy, laid-back Jim Flaggerty, his editor, grayer-headed than twenty years ago but still ruminating on a piece of phantom gum in his mouth, had flown over from Vellum to hold his hand. Some pinstriped minions from the Ambassador’s staff had been delegated to attend. Robin perched in the front row, her face a luminous pearl of warmth in the frosty jumble of alien visages. The audience as a whole had stirred in surprise when Bech, following his crisp introduction by Professor Sture Allén, had come to the lectern carrying a baby. But, being in the main Swedish, the audience suppressed its titters, as if this living child were an eccentricity of ethnic costume, like Wole Soyinka’s African robes of a few years ago.

“It lifts one up, this Prize,” Bech continued his lecture, Golda wriggling and threatening to corkscrew in his crooked right arm, “to a terrible height, a moment of global attention, and tempts one to pontificate. I could talk to you about the world,” he said, “as it exists in this year of 1999, waiting for the odometer to turn over into a new millennium, watching to see if Islamic militants will lock ever more of its surface into a new Dark Age, or if China will push the United States aside as top superpower, or Russia will spit out capitalism like a bad fig, or the gap between
those who ride in airplanes and those who drive ox-carts will widen to the point of revolution or lessen to the point of Disneyfied, deep-fried homogeneity—but what, my distinguished friends, do I know of the world? My life has been spent attending to my inner weather and my immediate vicinity.” In that vicinity, Golda was getting impatient. She had that solemn look which, combined with a spicy nether smell, signalled a development that would soon need tending to. Meri Jo and Robin were right; he could spiel on forever, once given a podium and a captive audience. It was something about himself he would have preferred never to have discovered. “Or,” Bech went on, “I could talk to you about art, in the spasmodic, distracted practice of which I have spent my finest and most valuable hours. Is art, as the ancients proposed, an imitation of life, or is it, as the moderns suggest, everything that life is not—order instead of disorder, resolution rather than inconclusiveness, peace and harmony in preference to our insatiable discontent and, at the bottom of our souls, as Kierkegaard and Strindberg and Munch teach us, our terror? Our dread—dread at being here, on this planet that appears lonelier and more negligible with each new revelation from astronomy. Or is art
both
duplication and escape—life tweaked, as it were, into something slightly higher, brighter, other? We feel it to be so, as it is engendered at the end of a pencil point or on a computer screen. Art is somehow
good
, if only for the artist.”

Golda wriggled more strenuously, straining his venerable armature of bone and muscle. Bech studied the audience, a sea of white visages dotted here and there with a black or yellow face. To Golda’s short-sighted, slate-blue eyes—two shades of blue, actually: a darker ring and a
paler, more skyey iris inside—the crowd must recede endlessly, out the back wall into the entire rest of the Earth. “I represent,” Bech could not resist going on, “only myself; in citizenship I am an American and in religion a non-observant Jew, but when I write I am nothing less than a member of my triumphant but troubled species, with aspirations it may be to speak for the primates, the vertebrates, and even the lichen as well.
Life!
the toast in Hebrew cries, in awe at least of the molecular amazingness of it, regardless of whatever atrocities appetitive organisms visit upon one another. I came here, ladies and gentlemen, determined not to generalize away the miracle, the quizzical quiddity, of the specific, that which is ‘the case,’ as Wittgenstein put it, and in honor of the majesty of my task developed an absolute writer’s block in regard to the lecture I am now audibly failing to deliver. So I (just a minute more, sweetie) invoke the precedent of my predecessor Nobel Laureate in Literature Naguib Mahfouz—a writer, by the way, who was knifed in the throat for his efforts to describe the life of his Egypt with accuracy and equanimity, a true hero in a field, literature, rife with false heroics—and have asked my daughter to speak for me. She is ten months old, and will enjoy her first birthday in the new millennium. She belongs to the future. The topic we have worked out between us is, ‘The Nature of Human Existence.’ ” Bech repeated, in his presidential voice: “The Nature of Human Existence.”

He and Golda had rehearsed, but there was no telling with infants; the wiring of their minds hadn’t yet jelled. If she had begun, with her loaded diaper and confining paternal arm, to scream, that would have been a statement, but an overstatement, and not her father’s sort of statement.
She did not let him down. She had her young mother’s clear mind and pure nature, purged of much of the delusion and perversity whose devils had tormented the previous two thousand years, or should one say previous 5,760 years? In the audience, wide-jawed, luminous Robin parted her lips in maternal and wifely concern, as if to intervene in a rescue. He shifted their child to his other arm, so that her little tooth-bothered mouth came close to the microphone—state-of-the-art, a filigreed bauble on an adjustable stem. She reached out with the curly, beslobbered fingers of one hand as if to pluck the fat metallic bud. He felt the warmth of her skull, an inch from his avid nose; he inhaled her scalp’s powdery scent. Into the dear soft warm crumpled configuration of her ear he whispered, “Say hi.”

“Hi!” Golda pronounced with a bright distinctness instantly amplified into the depths of the beautiful, infinite hall. Then she lifted her right hand, where all could see, and made the gentle clasping and unclasping motion that signifies bye-bye.