Bech Is Back by John Updike Page B

oval of his head. He asked hopefully, “Enough?”
    “More than,” Bech said.
    The Jesuit nodded. “A great pity. This should be Chartres. Instead …” He told Bea, “With your camera, you should photograph that, what the Greeks are doing. Without anyone’s permission, they are walling up their sector of the nave. It is barbarous. But not untypical.”
    Bea peered through a gilded grate into a sector of holy space crowded with scaffolding and raw pink stone. She did not lift her camera. She had been transported, Bech realized, to a realm beyond distaste. “We cannot go without visiting the Sepulcher of Christ,” she announced.
    Père Gibergue said, “I advise against it. The line is always long. There is nothing to see. Believe me.”
    Bech echoed, “Believe him.”
    Bea said, “I don’t expect to be here ever again,” and got into line to enter a little building that reminded Bech, who joined her, of nothing so much as those mysteriously ornate structures that used to stand in discreet corners of parks in Brooklyn and the Bronx, too grand for lawn mowers but unidentified as latrines; he had always wondered what had existed inside such dignified small buildings—mansions in his imagination for dwarfs. The line moved slowly, and the faces of those returning looked stricken.
Impossible to consider as a whole
.
    There were two chambers. The outer held a case containing a bit of the stone that the Angel is said to have rolled away from the mouth of the tomb; a German woman ahead of Bech in line kissed the cracked glass top of the case and caressed herself in an elaborate spasm of pious gratification, eyeballs rolling, a dovelike moan bubbling from her throat. He was relieved that Bea was better behaved: she glanced down, made a mental note, and passed by. She had pinned up her fineblond hair and hid it under a kerchief like an Arab woman. As she bowed her head he glimpsed the damp nape of her neck as if seeing it for the last time. They were about to be separated by an infamous miracle.
    The inner chamber was entered by an opening so small Bech had to crouch, though the author was not tall. Within, as had been foretold, there was “nothing to see.” Smoking lamps hanging thick as bats from the low ceiling. A bleak marble slab. No trace of the original sepulcher hewn from the rock of Golgotha. In the confines of this tiny space, elbow to elbow with Bech, another stocky Greek priest, looking dazed, was waving lighted tapers held cleverly between his spread fingers. The tapers were for sale. The priest looked at Bech. Bech didn’t buy. With a soft grunt of irritation, the priest waved the lighted tapers out. Bech was fascinated by this sad moment of disappointed commerce; he imagined how the wax must drip onto the man’s fat fingers, how it must hurt. A hunger artist. The priest eyed Bech again. The whites above his dolefully sagging lower lids were very bloodshot. Smoke gets in your eyes.
    Back in their room at the Mishkenot, he asked Bea, “How’s your faith?”
    “Fine. How’s yours?”
    “I don’t know much about places of worship, but wasn’t that the most God-forsaken church you ever did see?”
    “It’s history, Henry. You have to see through external accidents to the things of the spirit. You weren’t religiously and archaeologically prepared. The guidebook warns people they may be disappointed.”
    “Disappointed! Disgusted. Even your poor Jesuit, who’s been there a thousand times, had to hide his face in his hands. Did you hear him complain about what the Greeks weredoing to their slice of the pie? Did you hear his story about the Copts swooping down one night and slapping up a chapel that then couldn’t be taken away for some idiotic superstitious reason?”
    “They wanted to be close to the Holy Sepulcher,” Bea said, stepping out of her skirt.
    “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Bech said. “It was garbage, of an ultimate sort.”
    “It was beautiful to be there, just