Bech Is Back by John Updike

to reshape, to activate him forcefully, she had implied that his perfection lay nowhere but in a deepening of the qualities he already possessed. Since he was Jewish, the more Jewish he became in her Christian care, the better.
    “Wasn’t it wonderful?” she asked.
    “It was something,” was all he would grant her. Strange diseases, he thought, demand strange remedies: he, her. As they linked arms, after the separation imposed by a sexist orthodoxy, Bech apprehended Bea with refreshed clarity, by this bright, dry light of Israel: as a creature thickening in the middle, the female of a species mostly hairless and with awkward gait, her flesh nearing the end of its reproductive capacity and her brain possessed by a bizarre creed, yet pleasing to him and asking for his loyalty as unquestioningly, as helplessly as she gave him hers.
    Their guide led them up a slanted road, past an adolescentsoldier with a machine gun, to the top of the wall. On their left, the faithful continued to circle and pray; on their right, a great falling off disclosed the ugly results of archaeology, a rubble of foundations. “The City of David,” the archaeologist said proudly, “just where the Bible said it would be. Everything,” he said, and his gesture seemed to include all of the Holy City, “just as it was written. We read first, then we dig.” At the Gate of the Moors, their guide yielded to a courtly Arab professor—yellow face, brown suit, Oxford accent—who led them in stockinged feet through the two mosques built on the vast platform that before 70 A.D. had supported the Temple. Strict Jewish believers never came here, for fear of accidentally treading upon the site of the Holy of Holies, the Ark of the Covenant. Within the Aqsa Mosque, Bech and Bea were informed of recent violence: King Abdullah of Jordan had been assassinated near the entrance in 1951, before the eyes of his grandson the present King Hussein; and in 1969, a crazed Australian had attempted to set the end nearest Mecca afire, with considerable success. Craziness, down through history, has performed impressively, Bech thought.
    They were led past a scintillating fountain, up a few marble stairs, to the Dome of the Rock. Inside an octagon of Persian tile, beneath a dizzingly lavish and symmetrical upward abyss, a spine of rock, the tip of Mount Moriah, showed where Abraham had attempted to sacrifice Isaac and, failing that, had founded three religions. Here also, the professor murmured amid the jostle of the faithful and the touring, Cain and Abel had made their fatally contrasting offerings, and Mohammed had ascended to Heaven on his remarkable horse Burak, whose hoofprints the pious claim to recognize, along with the fingerprints of an angel who restrained the Rockfrom going to Heaven also. For reasons known best to themselves, the Crusaders had hacked at the Rock. Great hackers, the Crusaders. And Suleiman the Magnificent, who had wrested the Rock back from the (from his standpoint) infidels, had his name set in gold on high, within the marvelous dome. The King of Morocco had donated the green carpets, into which Bea’s stockinged feet dug impatiently, aching to move on from these empty wonders to the Christian sites.
Sexy little feet
, Bech thought. From boyhood on, spying his mother’s shoeless feet flitting by, he had responded to the dark band of reinforcement that covers half of a woman’s stockinged toes, giving us eight baby cleavages.
    “Do you wish to view the hairs from the Beard of the Prophet?” the professor asked, adding, “There is always a great crowd around them.”
    Hairs of the Prophet were the kind of sight Bech liked, but he said, “I think my wife wants to push on.”
    They were led down from Herod’s temple platform along a peaceable path beside an Arab cemetery. Their guide suddenly chuckled; his teeth were as yellow as his face. He gestured at a bricked-up portal in the Old City wall. “That is the Golden Gate, the gate whereby