Bech Is Back by John Updike

beautiful,” Bea said, skinning out of her blouse and bra in one motion.
    How, Bech asked himself, out of a great materialist nation containing one hundred million fallen-away Christians had he managed to pick this one radiant aberration as a bride?
Instinct
, he answered himself; his infallible instinct for the distracting. At the height of the lovemaking that the newlyweds squeezed into the dusky hour before they were due to go out to dinner, the bloodshot eyeball of the unsuccessful taper-selling priest reappeared to him, sliding toward Bech as toward a demon brother unexpectedly encountered while robbing the same tomb.
    The dinner was with Israeli writers, in a restaurant staffed by Arabs. Arabs, Bech perceived, are the blacks of Israel. Slim young men, they came and went silently, accepting orders and serving while the lively, genial, grizzled, muscular intellectuals talked. The men were an Israeli poet, a novelist, and a professor of English; their wives were also a poet, a novelist, and a professor, though not in matching order. All six had immigrated years ago and therefore were veterans of several wars; Bech knew them by type, fell in with their chatter and chaffing as if back into a party of uncles and cousins. Yet he scentedsomething outdoorsy, an unfamiliar toughness, a readiness to fight that he associated with Gentiles, as part of the psychic kit that included their indiscriminate diet and their bloody, lurid religion. And these Jews had the uneasiness, the slight edge, of those with something to hold on to. The strength of the Wandering Jew had been that, at home nowhere specific, he had been at home in the world. The poet, a man whose face appeared incessantly to smile, broadened as it was by prominent ears and a concentration of wiry hair above the ears, said of the Wailing Wall, “The stones seem smaller now. They looked bigger when you could see them only up close.”
    The professor’s wife, a novelist, took fire: “What a reactionary thing to say! I think it is beautiful, what they have done at the Kotel Ha. They have made a sacred space of a slum.”
    Bech asked, “There were many Arab homes?”
    The poet grimaced, while the shape of his face still smiled. “The people were relocated, and compensated.”
    The female novelist told Bech, “Before ’67, when the Old City was theirs, the Jordanians built a hotel upon the Mount of Olives, using the old tombstones for the soldiers’ barracks. It was a vast desecration which they committed in full view. We felt very frustrated.”
    The male novelist, whose slender, shy wife was a poetess, offered as a kind of truce, “And yet I feel at peace in the Arab landscape. I do not feel at peace in Tel Aviv, among those Miami Beach hotels. That was not the idea of Israel, to make another Miami Beach.”
    “What was the idea, then?” asked the female novelist, teasing—an overweight but still-dynamic flirt. There is a lag, Bech thought, between the fading of an attractive woman’s conception of herself and the fading of the reality.
    The male novelist, his tanned skin minutely veined and ponderously loose upon his bones, turned to Bech with a gravity that hushed the table; an Arab waiter, ready to serve, stood there frozen. “The idea,” it was stated to Bech in the halting murmur of an extreme confidence, “is not easy to express. Not Freud and Einstein, but not Auschwitz, either. Something … in between.”
    Bech’s eye flicked uneasily to the waiter and noticed the name on his identification badge: SULEIMAN .
    The poetess, as if to lighten her husband’s words, asked the American guests, “What have been your impressions so far? I know the question is foolish, you have been here a day.”
    “A day or a week,” the female novelist boisterously volunteered, “Henry Bech will go back and write a best-selling book about us. Everyone does.”
    The waiter began to serve the food—ample, deracinated, Hilton food—and while Bech was framing a politic