Bech Is Back by John Updike Page A

the Messiah is supposed to come, so the Ommiads walled it solid and, furthermore, put a cemetery there, because the Messiah supposedly is unable to walk across the dead.”
    “Hard for him to go anywhere if that’s the rule,” Bech said, glancing sideways to see how Bea was bearing up under these malevolent overlays of superstition. She looked pink, damp, and happy, her Holy Land glow undimmed. At the end of the pleasant path, at the Lion’s Gate, they were passed into the care of the debonair Jesuit and embarked upon the Via Dolorosa.
    • • •
    Lord, don’t let me suffocate
, Bech thought. The priest kept leading them underground, to show them buried Herodian pools, Roman guardrooms that the sinkage of centuries had turned into grottoes, and paving stones scratched by the soldiers as they played a time-killing game—proof, somehow, of the historical Jesus. Père Gibergue knew his way around. He darted into the back room of a bakery, where a dirty pillar of intense archaeological interest stood surrounded by shattered crates. By another detour, Bech and Bea were led onto the roof of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; here an ancient company of Abyssinian monks maintained an African village of rounded huts and sat smiling in the sun. One of them, standing against a cupola, posed for Bea’s camera. Below the cupola, Père Gibergue zealously explained, was the crypt where Saint Helena, mother of Constantine, discovered in the year 327 the unrotted wood of the True Cross. To the Jesuit’s sorrow, the young Russian Orthodox priest (his face waxen-white, his thin beard tapered to a double point: the very image, as Bech imagined it, of Ivan Karamazov) who answered their ring at the door of the Alexandra Hostel refused to admit them, this being a Sabbath, to the excavated cellar wherein had been found, Père Gibergue excitedly explained, a worn threshold beyond doubt stepped upon by the foot of God Incarnate.
    So this is what’s been making the goyim tick all these years
. All these levels—roofs coterminous with the street, sacred footsteps buried meters beneath their own—afflicted Bech like a sea of typographical errors. Perhaps this was life: mistake heaped upon mistake, one protein molecule entangled with another until the confusion thrived. Except that it smelled sofearfully dead. The Church of the Holy Sepulcher was so needlessly ugly that Bech said to Bea, “You should have let the Arabs design it for you.”
    Père Gibergue overheard and said, “In fact, an Arab family has been entrusted with the keys for eight hundred years, to circumvent the contention among the Christian sects.” Inside the hideous edifice, the priest, too, seemed overwhelmed; he sat on a bench near some rusting pipe scaffolding and said, “Go. I will pray here while you look.” He hid his face in his hands.
    Undaunted, Bea with her guidebook led Bech up a marble staircase to the site of the Crucifixion. This turned out to be a great smoke-besmirched heap or fungus of accreted icons and votive lamps. Six feet from the gold-rimmed hole where Christ’s cross had supposedly been socketed, a fat Greek priest, seated in his black muffin hat at a table peddling candles, was taking a swig from a bottle in a paper bag. At Bech’s side, Bea did a genuflective dip and gazed enthralled at this mass of aesthetic horrors. German tourists were noisily shuffling about, under a barrage of exploding flashbulbs.
    “Let’s go,” Bech muttered.
    “Oh, Henry, why?”
    “This frightens me.” It had that alchemic stink of medieval basements where vapors condensed as demons and pogroms and autos-da-fé. Torquemada, Hitler, the czars—every despot major or minor who had tried to stunt and crush his race had inhaled these Christly vapors. He dragged Bea away, back down to the main floor of the church, which her guidebook itself admitted to be a
conglomeration of large and small rooms, impossible to consider as a whole
.
    Père Gibergue unbowed the tan