Mr. Sammler's Planet (Part II)

Mr. Artur Sammler, a Polish refugee in his seventies, living in New York with his niece, Margotte, is supposedly writing a mem oir of H. G. Wells. In the thirties, Mr. Sammler had lived in London; he had then been an Anglophile journalist. In 1939 he had been trapped in Poland at the outbreak of the War. His wife had been killed, and he had been buried alive in a death-ditch. Escaping from the ditch, he had for a time been a Partisan. The Bloomsbury life of the thirties holds little interest for him now. He has, however, a cracked daughter, Shula, who is obsessed by the Wells memoir. Mr. Sammler, riding the Riverside Drive bus, has several times seen a giant black thief picking purses. Curious, fascinated by these crimes, he draws too close and is seen seeing. The black follows him home, and cornering him in the lobby of the ap artm ent building, exhibits his genitalia to him in silent warning. Stunned by this, Mr. Sammler, when he is released, enters his apartment and goes to his room. Lying down, he finds on the pillow a notebook containing a long, somewhat technical treatise by a Hindu scientist, Dr. Govinda Lai. It is called The Future of the Moon. Mr. Sammler, who is beginning to think that it may be time to contemplate leaving this planet, immerses himself in the moon’s future. Shula, believing that her father will need this monograph for his Wells memoir, has pinched it from the author. This information is brought to Sammler by a young man named Lionel Feffer, a graduate student at Columbia University, Feffer is a charming, erratic, meddling young man, something of a promoter. Mr. Sammler at this time becomes aware that his nephew, Dr. Arnold Elya Gruner, who had brought both Sammlers to America after the War and supported them generously, is in the hospital with a cerebral aneurysm and cannot live long. Gruner has two grown children, Angela and Wallace. Indulged by a rich affectionate father, Angela, a beautiful, slightly gross young woman, has rather let herself go sexually. Wallace, too, is wild, obsessed by money, an eccentric entrepreneur and chronic business failure. W allace and the impulsive Feffer have formed a new partnership. T hey are going to sell aerial photographs of country houses to the owners and put handsome labels on trees, shrubs, and flowers. Simla's ex-husband, Eisen, a war-crippled Israeli foundry worker, has just come to America to seek his fortune as a painter and sculptor. To Sammler, Eisen seems quite mad. A detective hired by Dr. Lai to recover his manuscript visits Shula. She is frightened by him, and in her father’s absence, she enters his room and pinches The Future of the Moon a second time.

V

Emil in the Rolls-Royce may have had an enviable life. The silver limousine was his faucet. He had all that power to turn on. Also he was outside the wretched, anxious rivalry rancor hatred and warfare of ordinary drivers of lesser cars. Double-parked, he was not molested by cops. As he stood beside the grand machine, his buttocks, given a rectilinear projection by the formal breeches, were nearer to the ground than most peoples’. He seemed also to have a calm, serious spirit; heavy creases in the face; lips that turned inward and never showed the teeth; midparted hair like a cowl descending to the ears; a heavy nose.

“Emil drove for Costello, for Lucky Luciano,” said Wallace, smiling. In the light of the padded gray interior, Wallace was beard-stippled.

The large dark eyes in the big orbits wished to offer courteous entertainment. When you considered how profoundly Wallace was absorbed and preoccupied by death, by business, by problems of character, you recognized how generous and how difficult this was—how much shaking, rousing, what an effort was required. Arranging a kindly smile for the old uncle.

“Luciano? Elya’s friend? Yes. Eminent Mafia.”

“Connections from way back.”

They drove out on the West Side Highway, along the Hudson. There was the water—how beautiful, unclean, insidious! and there the bushes and the trees, cover for sexual violence, knifepoint robberies, beatings and murders. On the water, bridgelight and moonlight lay smooth, enjoyably brilliant. And when we took off from all this and carried human life outward? Mr. Sammler was ready to think it might have a sobering effect on the species, at this moment exceptionally troubled. Exalted ideas might recover importance. Once we were emancipated from telluric conditions.

The Rolls had a handsome bar; it had a small light, within a mirrorlined cabinet. Wallace offered the old man liquor or Seven-Up, but he Wanted nothing. Enclosing the umbrella between high knees, he was reviewing some of the facts. Outer-space voyages were made possible by specialist-collaboration. While on earth sensitive ignorance still dreamt of being separate and “whole.” “Whole”? What “whole”? A childish notion. It led to drug, orgy, mad religions, to crime.

He shut his eyes. Breathed out of his soul some bad, and breathed in some good. No, thank you, Wallace, no whiskey. Wallace poured some for himself.

How could the ignorant, nonspecialist, be strong with strength adequate to confront these technical miracles which made him a sort of uncomprehending Congo savage? By vision, by archaic inner-preliterate purity, by natural force, nobly whole? The children were setting fire to libraries. And putting on Persian trousers, letting their sideburns grow. This was their symbolic wholeness. An oligarchy of technicians, engineers would come to govern vast slums filled with bohemian adolescents, narcotized, beflowered, and “whole.” He himself was a fragment, Mr. Sammler understood. And lucky to be that. Totality was as much beyond his powers as to make a Rolls-Royce, part by part, with his own hands. Perhaps colonies on the moon would reduce the fever and swelling here, and the passion for boundlessness and wholeness might find more material appeasement.

But fragments (a fragment like Mr. Sammler) understood: this earth was a grave; our life was lent to it by its elements and had to be returned; a time came when the simple elements seemed to long for release from the complicated forms of life, when every element of every cell said, “Enough!”; the planet was our mother and our burial ground. No wonder the human spirit wished to leave. Leave this prolific belly. Leave also this great tomb.

The moon was so big tonight that it caught the eye of Wallace, drinking in the back seat, in the unlimited luxury of upholstery and carpets. Legs crossed, leaning back, he pointed moonward past Emil, above the smooth parkway north of the George Washington Bridge.

“Isn’t the moon great? They’re buzzing away, up there,” he said.

“Who?”

“Spacecraft are. Modules.”

“Oh, yes. It’s in the papers. Would you go there?”

“Would I ever! In a minute,” said Wallace. “Out?—Out? You bet I’d go. I’d fly. In fact, I’m already signed up with Pan Am.”

“With whom?”

“With the airlines. I believe I was the 512th person to phone for a reservation.”

“Are they already taking reservations for moon excursions?”

“They most certainly are. Hundreds of thousands of people want to go. Also to Mars and Venus, jumping off from the moon.”

“How very odd.”

“What’s odd about it? To go? It isn’t odd at all.

I tell you, the airlines get bales of applications. What about you, would you take the trip, Uncle?”

“No.”

“Because of your age, maybe?”

“Possibly age. No, my travels are over.”

“But the moon, Uncle! Of course you wouldn’t physically be able to do it; but a man like you? 1 can’t believe such a person wouldn’t be raring to go.”

“To the moon? But I don’t even want to go to Europe,” Mr. Sammler said. “Besides, if I had my choice, I’d prefer the ocean bottom. In Dr. Piccard’s bathysphere. I seem to be a depth-man rather than a height-man. I do not personally care for the illimitable. The ocean, however deep, has a top and bottom, whereas there is no sky-ceiling. I think I am an Oriental, Wallace. Jews after all are Orientals. I am content to sit here on the West Side, and watch, and admire these gorgeous Faustian departures for the other worlds. Personally, I require a ceiling, although a high one. Yes, I like ceilings, and the high better than the low. In literature I think there are low-ceiling masterpieces— Crime and Punishment, for instance—and highceiling masterpieces, Remembrance of Things Past. Claustrophobia? Death is confinement.”

Wallace, continuing to smile, softly but definitely differed, yet took a subtle interest in Uncle Sammler’s views. “Of course,” he said, “the world looks different to you. Literally. Because of the eyes. How well do you see?”

“Partially only. You are right.”

“And yet you described that Negro man and his thing.”

“Ah, Feffer told you that. Your partner. I should have known he’d tell. I hope he’s not serious about snapping photographs on the bus.”

“He thinks he can, with his Minox. He is sort of a nut. I suppose that when people are young and full of enthusiasm, you say, ‘All that youth and enthusiasm,’ but as they grow older you just say. about the same behavior, ‘What a nut.’ He was very excited by your experience. What actually did the man do, Uncle? He exhibited himself. Did he drop his trousers?”

“No.”

“He opened them. And then he took out his tool. What was it like? I wonder . . . Did it occur to him that your eyesight wasn’t good enough?”

“I don’t know what occurred to him. He didn’t say.”1

“Well, tell me about his thing. It wasn’t actually black, was it? It must have been a purple kind of chocolate, or maybe the color of his palms?”

Wallace’s scientific objectivity!

“I don’t wish to talk about it, really.”

“Oh, Uncle, suppose I were a zoologist who had never seen a live whale but you knew Moby Dick from the whaleboat? Was it sixteen, eighteen inches?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Would you guess it weighed two pounds, three pounds, four?”

“I have no way to estimate. And you are not a zoologist. You just this minute became one.”

“Uncircumcised?”

“That was my impression.”

“I wonder if women really prefer that kind of thing.”

“I assume they have other interests in addition.”

“That’s what they say. But you know you can’t trust them. They’re animals, aren’t they?”

“Temporarily there is an animal emphasis.”

“I’m not taken in by the gentle-dainty-lady line. Women are lustful. More than men in my opinion. With all respect for your experience and knowledge of life, Uncle Sammler, this is a field where I wouldn’t be inclined to take your word. Angela would always say that if a man had a thick dick —excuse me, Uncle.”

“Angela is perhaps a special case.”

“You’d like to think she’s off the continuum. What if she’s not?”

“I’d like to drop the subject, Wallace.”

“No, it’s really too interesting. And this is pure objectivity, not a dirty conversation. Now, Angela gives a good report on Wharton Horricker. It seems lie’s a long, strong fellow. She says, however, that he takes too much exercise, he’s too muscular. It’s hard to get tender emotions from a man who has such steel cable arms and heavy thick weightlifting pectorals. An iron man. She says it interferes with the flow of tender feeling.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“What does she know about tender feeling? Just some guy between her legs. Everyman is her lover. No, Anyman. They say that fellows that beef themselves up like that—‘I was a ninety-pound weakling’—that such fellows are narcissistic pansies. I don’t judge anybody. What if they are homosexuals? That’s nothing anymore. I don’t think homosexuality is simply a different way of being human, I actually think it’s a disease. I don’t know why homosexuals fuss so much and proclaim themselves so normal. I believe this boom in laggots was caused by modern warfare. One result of 1914, that slaughter in the trenches, it was obviously healthier to be a woman than a man. It was better to be a child. Best of all is to be an artist, combining child, woman, and millionaire. Many a millionaire wants to be an artist, or a kid or woman. What was I talking about? Oh,

Horricker. I was saying that in spite of all that physical culture and weight lifting he was not a queer. But that he did have a fantastic image of male strength.

A person making a determined self-effort.

Angela’s job seemed to be to take him down a few pegs. She’s weepy about him today, but she’s a pig and he’ll be forgotten tomorrow. I think my sister is a swine. If he’s got too much muscle, she’s got too much fat. What about that fat bust interfering with the flow of tender feeling? What did you say just now?”

“Not a word.”

“Sometimes at night, last thing before sleeping, I go through a whole list of people and call them all swine. I find it’s marvelous therapy. I clear my mind for the night. If you were in the room, you’d only hear me saying, ‘Swine, swine, swine!' Not the names. Each name is mental. Don’t you agree that she’ll forget Horricker by tomorrow?”

“I think she will.”

“She’s a female-power type, the femme fatale. Every myth has its natural enemies. The enemy of the distinguished-male myth is the femme fatale. Between those thighs, a man’s conception of himself is just assassinated. If he thinks he’s so special she ‘ll show him. Nobody is so special. Angela represents the realism of the race, which is always pointing out that wisdom, beauty, glory, courage in men are just vanities, and her business is to beat down the man’s legend about himself. That’s why she and Horricker are finished, why she let that twerp in Mexico ball her fore and aft in front of Wharton, with who-knows-what-else thrown in free by her. In a spirit of participation.”

“I didn’t know that Horricker had such a presumptuous image of himself.”

“Let’s get back to that other matter. What else did the man do, did he shake the thing at you?”

“Not at all. But the subject is becoming unpleasant. He wras warning me not to defend the poor old man he robbed. Not to inform the police. 1 had already tried to inform them.”

“You, naturally, would feel sorry for those people he robs.”

“It s ugly. Not that I have such a tender heart.”

“You’ve probably seen too much. Weren’t you

invited to testify at the Eichmann trial?”

“I was approached. I didn’t feel up to it.”

“I often think a man’s parts look expressive. Women’s too. I think they’re just about to say something, through those whiskers.”

Sammler did not answer. Wallace sipped his whiskey as a boy might sip Coca-Cola.

“Of course,” Wallace said, “the blacks speak another language. A kid pleaded for his life-”

“What kid?”

“In the papers. A kid who was surrounded by a black gang of fourteen-year-olds. He begged them not to shoot, but they simply didn’t understand his words. Literally not the same language. Not the same feelings. No comprehension. No common concepts. Out of reach.”

I was begged, too. Sammler, however, did not say this.

“The kid? After some days he died of the wound. But the boys didn’t even know what he was saying.”

“There is a scene in War and Peace I sometimes think about,”said Sammler. “The French General Davout, who was very cruel, who was said, I think, to have torn out a man’s whiskers by the roots, was sending people to the firing squad in Moscow, but when Pierre Bezukhov came up to him, they looked into each other’s eyes. A human look was exchanged, and Pierre was spared. Tolstoy says you don’t kill another human being with whom you have exchanged such a look.”

“Oh, that’s marvelous! What do you think?”

“I sympathize with such a desire for such a belief.”

“No, I sympathize deeply. I sympathize sadly. When men of genius think about humankind, they are almost forced to believe in this form of psychic unity. I wish it were so.”

“Because they refuse to think themselves entirely exceptional. I see that. But you don’t think this exchange of looks will work? Doesn’t it happen?”

“Oh, it probably happens from time to time. Pierre Bezukhov was altogether lucky. Of course he was a person in a book. And of course life is a kind of luck, for the individual. Very booklike. But Pierre was exceptionally lucky to catch the eye of his executioner. 1 myself never knew it to work. No, I never saw it happen. It is a thing worth praying for. And it is based on something. It’s not an arbitrary idea. It’s based on the belief that there is the same truth in the heart of every human being, or a splash of God’s own spirit, and that this is the richest thing we share in common. And up to a point I would agree. But though it’s not an arbitrary idea, I wouldn’t count on it.”

“They say that you were in the grave once.”

“Do they?”

“How was it?”

“How was it. Let us change the subject. We are already on the Cross County Highway. Emil is very fast.”

“No traffic this time of night. I had my life saved one time. I cut school and roamed the park. The lagoon was frozen, but I fell through the ice. There was a Japanese type of bridge, and I was climbing the girders underneath and tumbled off. It was December, and the ice was gray. The snow was white. The water was black. I was hanging on to the ice, scared shitless, and my soul felt like a little marble rolling away, away. A bigger kid came and saved me. He was a truant, too, and he crawled out on the ice with a branch. I caught hold, and he dragged me out. Then we went to the men’s toilet in the boathouse, and I stripped. He rubbed me with his sheepskin coat. I laid my clothes on the radiator, but they wouldn’t dry. He said, ‘Jeez kid, you’re gonna catch hell.’ My dear mother raised hell all right. She pulled my ears because my clothes were wet.”

“Very good. She should have done it oftener.”

“You know something? I agree. You’re right. The memory is precious. It’s much more vivid than chocolate cake, and much richer. But Uncle Sammler, the next day at school when I saw the kid I made up my mind to give him my allowance, which was ten cents.”

“He took it?”

“He sure did.”

“I like such stories. What did he say?”

“Not a word. He just nodded his head and took the dime. He stuck it in his pocket and went back to his bigger pals. I guess he felt he had earned it on the ice. It was his fair reward.”

“I see you have these recollections.”

“Well, I need them. Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.”

And all this will continue. It will simply continue. Another six billion years before the sun explodes. Six billion years of human life! It lames the heart to contemplate such a figure. Six billion yearsl What will become of us? Of the other species, yes, and of us? How will we ever make it? And when we have to abandon the earth, and leave this solar system for another, what a moving day that will be. But by then humankind will have become very different. Evolution continues. Olat Stapledon reckoned that each individual in future ages would be living thousands of years. The future person, a colossal figure, a beautiful green color, with a hand that had evolved into a kit of marvelous instruments, tools strong and subtle, thumb and forefinger capable of exerting thousands of pounds of pressure. Each mind belonging to a marvelous analytical collective, thinking out its mathematics, its physics, as part of a sublime whole. A race of semi-immortal giants, our green descendants, dear kin and brethren, inevitably containing still some of our bitter peculiarities as well as powers of spirit. The scientific revolution was only three hundred years old. Give it a million, give it a billion more. And God? Still hidden, even from this powerful mental brotherhood, still out of reach?

But now the Rolls was in the lanes. You could hear the new spring leaves brushing and stirring as the silver car passed. After many years, Sammler still did not know the way to Elya’s house in the suburban woods, the small roads twisted so. But here was the building, half-timbered Tudor style, where the respectable surgeon and his homemaking wife had brought up two children, and played badminton on this pleasant grass. In 1947 as a refugee Sammler had been astonished at their playfulness—adults with rackets and shuttlecocks. The lawn now was lighted by the moon, which seemed to Sammler clean-shaven; the gravel, fine white, and small, made an amiable sound of grinding under the tires. The elms were thick, old— older than the combined ages of all the Gruners. Animal eyes appeared in the headlights, of beveled reflectors set out on the borders of paths shone; mouse, mole, woodchuck, cat, or glass bits peering from grass and bush. There were no lighted windows. Emil turned his brights on the front door. Wallace, as he hurried out, spilled his whiskey on the carpet. Sammler groped for the glass and gave it to the chauffeur, explaining, “This fell.” Then he followed Wallace over the rustling gravel.

As soon as Sammler entered, Emil backed away to the garage. That left only moonlight in the rooms. A house of misconceived purposes, as it had always seemed to Sammler, where nothing really functioned except the mechanical appliances. But Gruner had always taken care of it conscientiously, especially since the death of his wife, in a memorial spirit. Just as Margotte did for Ussher Arkin. That was fresh gravel in the drive. As soon as winter ended, Gruner ordered it laid down.

The moon rinsed the curtains and foamed like peroxide on the nap of the white heavy carpets.

“Wallace?" Sammler believed he heard him below in the cellar. If he didn’t turn on the lights, it was because he didn’t want Sammler to know his movements. The poor fellow was demented. Mr. Sammler, forced by life, by fate, by what you like, to be disinterested, to think to the best of his ability on universal lines, was not about to stoop to policing Wallace in his father’s house, to prevent him from digging out money—real imaginary criminal abortion dollars.

Examining the kitchen, Sammler found no evidence that anyone had lately been there. The cupboards were shut, the stainless steel sink and counters dry. As in a model exhibit. Cups on their hooks, none missing. But at the bottom of the garbage pail lined with a brown paper bag was an empty tuna-fish can; water-packed, Geisha brand, freshly fish-smelly. Aha! Had someone lunched? Emil, the chauffeur, perhaps? Or Wallace himself, straight from the can without vinegar or dressing? Wallace would have left crumbs on the counter, and the soiled fork, wild signs of eating. Sammler put back the cut tin circle, released the pedal of the pail, and went to the living room. There he felt the chain mail of the fire screen, for Shula was fond of fires. It was cool. But the evening was warm. This proved nothing.

He then went on to the second floor, recalling how he and she had played hide-and-go-seek in London thirty-five years ago. He had been good at it, talking aloud to himself. “Is Shula in this broom closet? Let me see. Where can she be? She is not in the broom closet. How mystifying! Is she under the bed? No. My, what a clever little girl. How well she hides herself. She’s simply disappeared.”While the child, just five years old, thrilling with game-fever, positively white, crouched behind the brass scuttle, where he pretended not to see her, her bottom near the floor, her large kinky head with the small red bow—a whole life there. Melancholy. Even if there hadn’t been the War.

However, theft! T hat was serious. And theft of intellectual property—even worse. And in the dark he yielded somewhat to elderly weakness. Too old for this. Toiling along the banister in the fatiguing luxury of the carpet. On the second floor, the bedrooms. He moved cautiously in darkness. In the housebound air were old odors of soap and eau de cologne. No one had lately ventilated the place.

A sound of water reached him, a slight movement in a full tub. A wallow. His hand reached in, wrist bent, sliding over the tile wall until he found the electric switch. In the light he saw Shula trying to cover her breasts with a washcloth. The enormous tub was only half occupied by her short body. The soles of her white feet he saw, the black female triangle, and the white swellings with large rings of purplish brown. The veins. Yes, yes, she belonged to the club. The gender club. This was a female. That was a male. Much difference it could make to him.

“Father. Please. Please turn off the light.”

“Nonsense. I’ll wait in the bedroom. Wrap yourself up. Be quick about it.”

He sat in Angela’s old room. When she was a young girl. Or an apprentice whore. Well, people went to the wars. They took what weapons they had, and they advanced toward the front.

Sammler sat in a peach cretonne boudoir chair. Hearing no movements in the bathroom, he called, “I’m waiting,” and she surged up from the water. He heard her feet, solid, rapid. In walking she always brushed objects with her body. She never simply walked. She touched things and claimed them. As property. Then she entered quick-footed, wearing a man’s woolen robe and a towel on her head, and she seemed to be gasping, shocked at being seen in the tub by her father.

“Well, where is it?”

“Daddy!”

“No. I am the one that is shocked, not you. Where is that document you have stolen twice?”

“It was not stealing.”

“Other people may make new rules as they go along, but I will not, and you will not put me in that position. I was about to return the manuscript to Dr. Lai, and it was taken from my desk. Just as it was taken from his hands. Same method.”

“That is not the way to look at it. But don’t excite yourself too much.”

“After all this, don’t protect my heart or hint that 1 am an old man who may fall dead of apoplexy. You won’t get away with anything like that. Now, where is this object?”

“It’s really perfectly safe.” She began to speak Polish. He strongly denied her permission to speak that language. She was trying to invoke her terrible times of hiding—the convent, the hospital, the contagious ward when the German searching party came.

“None of that. Answer in English. Have you brought it here?”

“I’ve had a copy made. Daddy, I went to Mr. Wi dick’s office . . .”

Sammler held himself in. Since lie wouldn’t allow her to speak Polish she was lapsing into something else, childishness. With small-girl softness, she lowered her mature, already fully middleaged face. She was now meeting his look from one side, with only the one expanded childlike eye, and her chin sinking toward the woolen robe.

“Yes? Well, what did you do in Mr. Widick’s office?”

“He has one of those duplicating machines. I’ve used it for Cousin Elya. And Mr. Widick never goes home. He must hate home. He’s always at the office, so I called and asked to use the machine, and he said ‘Sure.’ I Xeroxed the whole thing.”

“For me?”

“Or for Dr. Lal.”

“You thought I might want the original?”

“If it’s more convenient for you.”

“Now, what have you done with these manuscripts?”

“I locked them in two lockers in Grand Central Station.”

“In Grand Central. Good God, You have the keys, or have you lost the keys?”

“I have them, Father.”

“Where are they?”

Shula was prepared for him.

She produced two stamped and sealed envelopes. One was addressed to him, tire other to Dr.

Govinda Lai at Butler Hall.

“You were going to send these through the mails? The locker is for twenty-four hours only.

These might take a w’eek to arrive. Then what? And did you write down the numbers of the lockers? No. Then how would one know where they were if tire letters got lost? You’d have to file a claim and prove ownership, authorship. Enough to drive a man out of his mind.”

“Don’t scold so hard. I did everything for you. You had stolen property in your house. The detective said it was stolen property, and anybody who had it was a receiver of stolen property.”

“From now on, do me no such favors. It can’t even be discussed with you. You seem to have no grasp of the matter.”

“I brought it to you to show my faith in the memoir. I wanted to remind you how important it is. Sometimes you yourself forget. As if H. G. Wells were nothing so special. Well, maybe not to you but to a great many people H. G. Wells is still important and very, very special. Eve been waiting for you to finish, and be reviewed in the papers. I wanted to see my father’s picture in the bookshops, instead of all those foolish faces and unimportant stupid books.”

The soiled rental keys in the envelopes. Mr. Sammler considered them. As well as exasperating, troubling, she was of course sadly amusing. If the lockers contained the manuscripts and not wads of paper in portfolios. No, he thought not. She was only a bit crazy. His poor child. A creature caused by him and adrift in a formless, boundless world.

How had she come to be like this? Perhaps the inward, the intimate, the dear life—the thing that is oneself from earliest days—when it first learns of death is often crazed. Here magical powers must help, assuage, console, and for a woman, those marvelous powers so often are the powers of a man. As, Antony dying, Cleopatra cried she wouldn’t abide in this dull world which, “in thy absence is/ No better than a sty. . . .” And? A sty, and? He now remembered the rest, fit for this night. “There is nothing left remarkable/Beneath the visiting moon.”

And he was supposed to be the remarkable thing, he who sitting on this unglazed slipcover felt under him the tedium of its peach color and its fat red flowers. Such an article, meant to oppress and afflict the soul, was even now succeeding. He had remained touchable, vulnerable to trifles. But Mr. Sammler still received primordial messages too. And the immediate basic message was that she, this woman with her sexual female form plain in the tight wrapping of the woolen robe (especially beneath the waist, where a thing was to make a lover gasp), this mature woman should not now be asking that her daddy make sublunary objects remarkable. For one thing, he never bestrode the World like a Colossus with armies and navies, dropping coronets from his pockets. He was only an old Jew whom they had hacked at, shot at but missed killing somehow, murdering everyone else with their blasts. In their peculiar transformation: a people changed into uniform, masked in military cloth and helmets, and coming with machinery for the purpose of murdering boys, girls, men, women, making blood run, burying, and finally, exhuming and burning rotten corpses. Man is a killer. Man has a moral nature. The anomaly can be resolved by insanity only, by insane dreams in which delusions of consciousness are maintained by organization, in states of mad perdition clinging to forms of business administration. Making it “government work.” But lie, now he, dear God!, was to supply his unhinged, wavering-witted daughter with high aims. And of course in Simla’s view7 he had been getting too delicate for earthly life, too absorbed in unshared universals, excluding her. And by extravagance, by animal histrionics, by papers pinched, by goofy business with shopping bags, trash basket neuroses, exotic heartburn cookery, she wished to implicate him and bring him back, to bind him and keep him in the world beside her. Some world! Some her! Their elevation would be joint elevation. She would back him, and he would accomplish great things in the world of culture. For she was kulturnaya. Shula was so kulturnaya. Nothing was more suitable than this philistine Russian word. Kulturny. She might creep down on her knees and pray like a Christian; she might pull that on her father; she might creep into dark confession boxes; she might run to Father Robles and invoke Christian protection against his Jewish anger; but in her nutty devotion to culture she couldn’t have been more Jewish.

“Very well, my photograph in bookshops. A fine idea. Excellent. But stealing . . . ?”

“It wasn’t actually stealing.”

“Well, what word do you prefer, and what difference does it make? Like the old joke; what more do I learn about a horse if I know that in Latin it is called equus?”

“But I’m not a thief.”

“Very well. In your mind you’re not a thief. Only in fact.”

“I thought if you were really, really serious about H. G. Wells, you would have to know if he predicted accurately about the moon, or Mars, and that you’d pay any price to have the latest, most up-to-date scientific information. A creative person wouldn’t stop at anything. And aren’t you a creative person?”

It seemed to Sammler that inside him (faute de mieux, in his mind) was a field in which many hunters at cross-purposes were firing bird shot at a feather apparition assumed to be a bird. Simla had meant to set him a test. Was he the real thing or wasn’t he? Was he creative, a force of nature, a true original, or not? Yes, it was a fitness test, and this was very American of Shula. Did an American exist who was not morally didactic? Was there any crime committed which didn’t punish the victim for “the greater good”? Was there any sinner who did not sin pro bono publico? So great was the evil of helpfulness, and so immense the liberal spirit of explanation, the psychopathology of teaching in the United States. So, then, was Papa a true creative intransigent—capable of bold theft for the sake of the memoir? Could be risk all for H.G.?

“Truthfully, my child, have you ever read a book of Wells’s?”

“Yes, I have.”

“Tell me—but the truth, just between you and me.”

“I read one book. Father.”

One? One book by Wells is like trying to bathe in a single wave. What was the book?”

“It was about God.”

“God the Invisible King?” “That’s the one.”

“Did you finish it?”

“No.”

“Neither did 1.”

“Oh, Father—you?”

“I just couldn’t read it. Human evolution with God as Intelligence. I soon saw the point, then the rest was tedious, garrulous.”

But it was so intelligent. I read a few pages and was so thrilled. I knew he was a great man, even if I couldn’t read the whole book. But you’ve read all his other books.”

“No one could read them all. I’ve read many. Probably too many.”

Smiling, Sammler emptied the envelopes and tossed the crumpled ball into Angela’s wastepaper basket of gilded Florentine leather. Acquired by her mother on a tour. The keys he dropped into his pocket, leaning far to one side in the boudoir chair to get at the flap.

Simla observing silently wras smiling also, holding her wrists with her fingers, forearms crossing on her bosoirt to keep the robe from falling open. Sammler, despite the washrag, had seen the brownpurple, enriched with salient veins. At the corner of her mouth, now that she had done her mischief, there was a chaste twist of achievement. The flat black kinked hair was covered up, towel-swathed. Except, as always, for the kosher sidelocks escaping at her ears. And smiling as if she had eaten a plateful of divine forbidden soup, and what was to be done about it now that it was down? At the back, the white nape of her neck was strong. Biological strength. Below the neck there was a mature dorsal hump. A grown woman. But the arms and legs were not proportionate. His only begotten child. He never doubted that she performed acts originating far beyond, in the past, of unconscious ancestral origin. He was aware how true this was ot himself. Especially in religious matters. She was a praying nut, but he, alter all, was given to praying, too, often addressed God. Just now he asked to understand why he so much loved this fool woman with the thick, uselessly sensual cream skin, the painted mouth, and that towel turban.

“Shula, I know you did this for me—”

“You are more important than that man, Father. You needed it.”

But from now on, don t use me as an excuse. For your exploits . . .”

“We nearly lost you in Israel, in that war. I was afraid you wouldn’t finish your lifework,”

“Nonsense, Simla. What lifework? And killed?

There? The finest death I could imagine. Besides, there was no danger. Ridiculous!”

Simla stood up. “I hear wheels,” she said. “Somebody just drove up.”

He had not heard. She had keen senses. Idiot, ingenuous animal, she had ears like a fox. Rising so abruptly, standing silent to listen, queenly, dimwitted, alert. And the white feet. Her feet were not disfigured by fashionable shoes.

“It probably is Emil.”

“No, it’s not Emil. I must get dressed.”

She ran from the room.

Sammler went downstairs wondering where Wallace had gone. The doorbell began to chime and continued chiming. Margotte didn’t know how to ring, when to stop pushing a button. He could see her, through the long narrow pane, in her straw hat, and Professor V. Govinda Lal was with her.

“We hired a Hertz car,” she said. “The professor couldn’t bear to wait. We talked to Father Robles on the phone. He hadn’t seen Simla in days.”

“Professor Lal. Imperial College. Biophysics.”

“1 am Simla’s father.”

There were small bows, a handshake.

“We can sit in the living room. Shall I make a pot of coffee? Is Shula here?” said Margotte.

“She is.”

“And my manuscript?” said Lal. “The Futxire of the Moon”?

“Safe,” said Sammler. “Not actually in the house, but locked up safely. I have the keys. Professor Lal, please accept my apologies. My daughter has behaved very badly. Caused you pain.”

Sammler under the foyer light saw the shocked and disappointed face of Lai: brown cheeks, black hair, neat, vivid, and gracefully parted, and a huge spreading beard. The inadequacy of words—the need for several simultaneous languages to address all parts of the mind at once, especially those parts left free by meager communication, functioning furiously on their own. Instead, as one were to smoke ten cigarettes simultaneously; while also drinking whiskey; while also being sexually engaged with three or four other persons; while hearing bands of music; while receiving scientific notations—thus to capacity engage . . . the boundlessness of modern mental expectation.

Lai shouted, “Dear me! This is intolerable! Intolerable! Why am I sent this punishment!”

“Pour Dr. Lai a brandy, Margotte.”

“I do not drink! I do not drink!”

In the dark setting of his beard the teeth were clenched. Then, aware of his own loudness, he said in more appropriate tones, “Normally I do not drink.”

“But Dr, Lai, you recommended beer on the moon. However—I am illogical. Go on, go on, Margotte, don’t just look so solicitous. Get the brandy. I’ll have some if he won’t. You know where the liquor is. Bring twro glasses. Now, Professor, the anxiety will soon be over.”

The living room was what they called “sunken.” You had to descend. A w’ell, a pool, a tank of carpet. It was furnished or decorated with professional completeness, densely arranged. This, if you allowed it to, gave pain. Sammler had known the late Mrs. Gruner’s decorator. Or stultifier. Croze.

Croze was petite, but had the strength of an art personality. He stood like a thrush. His little belly came far forward and lifted his trousers well above the ankles. His face had lovely color, his hair was barbered to the shapely little head, he had a rosebud mouth, and after you shook hands with Croze, your own hand was all day perfumed. All this was his creation. Here many boring hours had occurred, especially after family dinners. It wouldn’t be a bad custom to send these furnishings into the tomb with the deceased, Egyptian style. However, here they all were, these spoils of silk, leather, glass, and antique wood. Here Sammler led the hairy Dr. Lai, a small man, very dark. Not black, sharpnosed, the Dravidian type, dolichocephalic, but round-featured. He had thin and hairy wrists, ankles, legs. He was a dandy. A macaroni (Sammler could not surrender the old words it had given him so much pleasure in Cracow to learn from eighteenth-century books). Yes, Govinda was a beau. He w’as also sensitive, intelligent, nervous, keen, a handsome, elegant, birdy man. One major incongruity: the round face enlarged by soft but strong beard. Behind, thin shoulder blades stuck through the linen blazer. He had a stoop.

“Where is your daughter, may I ask?”

“Coming down. I will ask Margotte to fetch her. She was frightened by your detective.”

“He wras clever to find her at all. Ingenious work. He did His job.”

“No doubt, but with my daughter his methods did not apply. Because of Poland, you see, and the War—police. She was hidden. Too bad you have had to suffer for it. But what can one do if she is somewhat . . . ?”

“Psycho?”

“That’s putting it strongly. She’s not entirely out to touch. She made a copy of your manuscript, and she took two lockers in Grand Central Station for copy and original. Here are the keys.”

Labs hand, long and thin, accepted them. “How can I be sure it’s really there, my book?” he said.

“Dr. Lai, I know my daughter. I feel quite certain. Safe in fireproof steel. In fact, I’m glad she didn’t bring the book on the train. She might have lost it—forgotten it on the seat. Grand Central is well lighted, policed, and even if one lock were to be picked by thieves, there would still be the other. Have no further anxiety. I see you are on edge. You can consider this disagreeable misadventure over.”

“Sir, I hope so.”

“Let us have a sip of brandy. We have had some trying days.”

“Agonizing. Somehow the kind of terror I anticipated in America. My first visit. I had an intuition.”

“Has America been all like that?”

“Not altogether. But almost.”

Noisy in the kitchen, Margotte was opening cans, taking down bowls, slamming the icebox, clattering the flatware. Margotte’s household doings were in continual transmission.

“I could take the train to New York,” said Lal.

“Margotte can’t drive. What will you do with the Hertz car?”

Oh, damn! I he car! Bloody machines!”

“I regret I can’t drive,” Sammler said. “Not to drive is the latest snobbery, I am told. But I am innocent of that. It is my eyesight.”

“I’d have to come back for Mrs. Arkin.”

“You might surrender your Hertz in New Rochelle, but I doubt that they are open at night.

I here must be a New York Central timetable. However, it’s close to midnight. We could ask Wallace to take you to the train, if he hasn’t slipped out the back way—Wallace Gruner,” he explained. “We are in the Gruner house. My relative—my nephew by a half-sister. But first, let us have the supper Margotte is preparing, What you said before interested me, your presentiments about the U.S.? I wenty-two years ago, my own arrival was a relief.”

“Of course in a sense the whole world is now U.S. Inescapable,” said Govinda Lal. “It’s like a big crow that has snatched our future from the nest, and we, the rest, are like little finches in pursuit trying to peck it. However, the Apollo flights are American. I have been employed by NASA. On other research. But this is where my ideas will count, if they are any use ... If I sound strange, excuse me. I’ve been distressed.”

“With good reason. My daughter did you a real injury.”

“I am beginning to feel easier. I don’t think any hard feelings will remain.”

I hrough the tinted lens and while breathing brandy fumes, Sammler provisionally approved of Govinda Lal, who reminded him in some ways of Ussher Arkin. Very often, oftener than he consciously knew, and vividly, he thought of Ussher underground, in this or that posture, of this or that color or physical condition. As he thought of Antonina, his wife. So far as he knew, the enormous grave had never been touched again. From which he himself, scratching dirt, pushing the corpses, came out choked with blood, and crept away on his belly. This preoccupation therefore was only to be expected.

Now Margotte was chopping onions in a bowl. Something to eat. Life in its lighted droplet cells continued its enactments. Poor Ussher in that plane at the Cincinnati airport. Sammler missed him and acknowledged that he had moved into the apartment with Margotte because of the contact with Ussher it afforded.

But he noted some of the same qualities, Arkin’s qualities, in this very different, duskier, smaller, bushier Lai, whose wrist was no wider than a rider.

Then Shula-Slawa came down the stairs. Lai, who saw her first, hail an expression which made Sammler immediately turn. She had dressed herself in a sari, or something like it, had found a piece of Indian material in a drawer. It couldn’t have been correctly wrapped. Especially at the bust there was an error. (Sammler with increased concern this evening for the sensitivity of that area; if there was danger of exposure or of hurt, he felt it in his own organs.) He wasn’t sure that she was wearing undergarments. She was extremely white—citrus-thick skin, cream cheeks—and her lips, looking fuller and softer than ever, were painted a peculiar orange color. Like the Neapolitan cyclamens Sammler had admired in the botanical garden. Also, she wore false eyelashes. On her forehead was a Hindu spot made with the lipstick. Exactly where the Ash Wednesday smudge had been. I he general idea was to charm and appease this angry Lai. Her eyes as she hurried, without looking, into the well of the room were heated, and in the old man’s words to himself, kookily dilated, sensuality-bent. Though ladylike, she made too many gestures, coming forward too much, wildly overprompt, having too much by far to say.

“Professor Lai!”

“My daughter.”

“Yes, so I thought.”

“I am sorry. So terribly sorry, Dr. Lai. There was a misunderstanding. You were surrounded by people. You must have thought you were just letting me look at the manuscript. But I thought you were letting me take it home to my father. As I said, you remember? That he was writing the book about H. G. Wells?”

“Wells? No. But my impression is that he is obsolete.”

“Still, for the sake of science, of science, and for the sake of literature and history, because my father is writing this important history, and you see I help him in his intellectual cultural work. There’s nobody else to do it. I never meant to make trouble.”

No. Not trouble. Only to dig a pit and cover it with brushwood, and when a man fell into it to lie flat on the ground and converse with him amorously. For Sammler now suspected that she had run away with The Future of the Moon in order to create this very opportunity, this meeting. Were he and Wells really secondary, then? Was it really done to provoke interest? Wasn’t that a familiar stratagem? To him, Sammler remembered, women used sometimes to act insolent to get his attention and say stinging things imagining that it made them fascinating. One species: but the sexes like two different savage tribes. In full paint. Surprising and shocking each other in the bush.

This Govinda, this light spry whiskered dark frail flying sort of man—an intellectual. And intellectuals she was mad for. They kept the world remarkable beneath that visiting moon. They kindled up her womb. Even Eisen, perhaps, to recover her esteem (among other reasons), had left the foundry and turned artist. Had probably lost track of the original motive, to show that he was, like her father, a man of culture. And now he was a painter. Poor Eisen.

But Shula was sitting very dose to Lai on the sofa, almost taking him by the hand, by the arm, as if bent upon having the touch of his limbs. She was assuring him that she had reproduced his manuscript with great care. She worried lest the Xerox take away the ink and wipe the pages blank. She did page one dying of anxiety. “Such a special ink you use, and what if there should be a bad reaction. I would have died.” But it worked beautifully. Mr. Widick said it was lovely copying. And it was in the two lockers. The copy was in a legal binder. Mr. Widick said you could even leave ransom money in Grand Central. Perfectly safe. Shula wanted Govinda Lai to see that the orange circle between the eyes had lunar significance. She kept tilting her face, offering her brow.

“Now, Shula, my dear,” said Sammler. “Margotte needs help in the kitchen. Go and help her.”

“Oh, Father.” She tried, speaking aside in Polish, to tell him she wished to stay.

“Shula! Go! Go on now—go!”

Obeying, she had a hot and bitter look. She wanted to show filial submission, but her behind was huffy, as she went.

“I would never have recognized, never have identified, her,” said Lai.

“Yes? Without the wig. She often affects a wig.”

He stopped. Govinda was thinking. Presumably about the recovery of his work from the locker. Yes. He felt his blazer pockets from beneath, making certain of the keys.

“You are Polish?” Lai said,

“I was Polish.”

“Artur?”

“Yes. Like Schopenhauer, whom my mother read. Artur, at that period, not very Jewish, was the most international, enlightened name you could give a boy. The same in all languages. But Schopenhauer didn’t care for Jews. He called them vulgar optimists. Optimists? If you are assigned to live near the crater of Vesuvius, it is better to be an optimist. On my sixteenth birthday my mother gave me The World as Will and Idea. Naturally it was an agreeable compliment that I could be so serious and deep. lake the great Artur. So I studied the system. I learned that only Ideas are not overpowered by the Will—the cosmic force, the Will, which drives all things. A blinding power. The inner creative fury of the world. What we see are only its manifestations. Like Hindu philosophy— Maya, the veil of appearances that hangs over all human experience. Yes, and come to think of it, according to Schopenhauer, the seat of the Will in human beings is—” “Where is it?”

“The organs of sex are the seat of the Will.”

The thief in the lobby agreed. He took out the instrument of the Will. He unzippered not the veil of Maya itself but one of its forehangings and showed his metaphysical warrant.

“And you were a friend of the famous H. G. Wells—that much is true, isn’t it?”

“I don’t like to claim the friendship of a man who is not alive to affirm or deny it, but at one time, when he was in his seventies, I saw him often.”

“Ah, then you must have lived in London.

“So we did, on Great Russell Street near the British Museum. I took walks with the old man. In those days my own ideas didn’t amount to much so I listened to his. He was a scientific humanist, with faith in an emancipated future, in active benevolence, in reason, in civilization. These are not popular ideas at the moment, but that does not necessarily influence me. Schopenhauer would not have called Wells a vulgar optimist. Wells had many dark thoughts. In The War of the Worlds he had the Martians treat us as Americans treated the bison and the passenger pigeon. Extermination.

I was flattered to be chosen to listen to the old man’s monologues. He was intelligent, and I was fond of him. Of course, all my prewar opinions have changed and become more severe. My judgments may not be normal. Like my eyesight. I observe you trying to see what is behind these tinted glasses. No, no, that’s quite all right. I have one badly damaged eye. Like the old saying about the one-eyed being King in the Country of the Blind. Wells wrote a story around this. Not a good story. A good story does not grow from a thesis. Anyway, I am not in the Country of the Blind but only one-eyed. As for Wells ... he was a writer. He wrote and wrote and wrote.”

Sammler thought that Govinda was about to speak. When he paused, several waves of silence passed, with tacit questions: You? No, you, sir: You speak. Lai was listening. Sammler felt that he owed it to him to say more.

“According to Orwell, Wells was the most influential English writer of the period from 1900 to 1920, the one who meant most to the young. He himself was a poor boy, his mother a servant, his father a gardener, I believe. And he became rich and powerful through words. Cheap printing and universal education raised Wells up, and he reached millions of people. This is an astonishing thing, Dr. Lai. The power of sentences, the strength, practically imperial strength, of poor young men like Wells or Kipling or Shaw. The only capital they ever had, a mental capital. That is one phase of the modern revolution. One can take it back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Don’t worry, sir, I am not about to lecture, I cannot bear lectures. I am only trying to satisfy your curiosity about Wells and can do that best by reviewing my own thoughts about him. Middle-class publicists, you see, not connected with any particular order, just educated more or less, little lawyers, amateur scientists, readers, bluffers, pamphleteers—in the eighteenth century—bohemians or outcasts, librettists, composers on and off, more or less artists, often on the lam, as they say in this country, holding small jobs with aristocratic families sometimes and providing entertainment, buffooning, or getting into serious controversies. The French Revolution turned many such wild characters loose. I think of people like St. Juste, like Marat with his paper L’Ami du Peuple and herpes from the sewer where he had hidden himself. Crazy sensational scribblers or provincial lawyers demanding the head of Louis XVI. In the name of the People. Getting it, too. Or take Karl Marx, there is something similar in his rise to influence. He never considered himself a bohemian of course, he loathed bohemians; in The 18th Brumaire his attack on Louis Bonaparte is really an attack on political movements organized by bohemian gangs. Still there he is: the fellow from the university who writes books which overwhelm the world. He was really an excellent journalist. As I was one myself, I am a judge of his ability. Like many journalists, Marx made up things out of other newspaper articles in the French, German, and English papers, but he made them up extremely well, writing about India or the American Civil War. It was inspired shrewdness, marvelous guessing, and powerful rhetoric. Then there was Leon Trotsky, a literary intellectual. He wrote a gorgeous romance about tlie Russian Revolution, calling it a history. Anyhow, you see how it is—people becoming authoritative and great, plebeians elevating themselves to nobility by words. Having few ideas about being noble which did not come from the ancien regime. They tried to import models from the Roman Republic, but that didn’t work. What they were really taking over was the solid weight of aristocracy, becoming the grandest of grands seigneurs, and much, much more. No ordinary society could satisfy them, but they went after worlds and universes. But needed elevation, and aped the grandeur of nobles or of the ancient world. Lordly intellectuals.

“Wells was not pretentious. He was more devoted to his ideas than to his self-image. The popular condition has also produced great men. In America Abraham Lincoln, a poet and a man of sublime character. But of course, and how sad it is, people of the opposite type are commoner, a Mussolini, for instance, who wrote spicy novels and was a publicist, a ridiculous Italian opera, Verdi, bombast politician. So in any number of ways, by concentrating upon words, extracting secrets of power; from schoolrooms and from public libraries, with primers and with dictionaries, digging it all out of the ABC’s until, soaring from their slums, they were addressing worldwide millions. A man like Wells did not choose the way of art. He preferred to be a spokesman or explainer, an encyclopedist. I don’t care much for his educational works, The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind, The Shape of Things to Come, The Science of Life, The Outline of History. They are gabby books. The words have gone bad. It is a spoiled language. The body of common words in daily use, debauched by journalism, advertising, propaganda, politics, preaching and oratory, trade, cant, this vast demotic reservoir which all minds used for all purposes, to cook, to drink, to swim in, or to empty bladders, or to drown in, certain people of genius also managed to use for poetry. Say a great field marshal of words like the famous James Joyce. Or other exalted souls. Truly disinterested. Peopleof marvelous beauty, like the French Symbolists. Seers, Dr. Lai. As one of them said, the common brass, coming to consciousness, finding itself a trumpet. Redeeming the common word from gross use. As I sometimes think of it, making vehicles for churchless souls to race swifter to Ciod. Wells was not of this type at all. But at least he did not lose his good sense. He was a responsible individual. But the majority of these writers, Dr. Lai, careerists, fonctionnaires, outcasts, and lunatics, demagogues with an eye for advancing themselves in the worldly way because the middle class in its law-abiding tedium wanted to hear only about criminals, outcasts, and lunatics. It is still bound by the human average—by itself. It wants, and admires, rebellion, irrationality, pathology, sodomy, havoc, passionate intensity. The morons got it from the yellow press or from detective stories, the more refined from attacks on civilization. While in the worldly way the able writer could become a gentleman, an aristocrat, a royal personality, a cultfigure, or the tyrant himself. And having become aristocrats through skill with words, they felt obliged to go into action. Evidently it’s a disgrace for true nobility to substitute words for acts. You can see this in the career of M. Malraux, or of M. Sartre. Von can see it in Hamlet when he feels that humiliation, Dr. Lal, saying, ‘I . . . must (like a whore) unpack my heart with words.’ ”

“ ‘And fall a-cursing like a very drab.’ ”

“Yes, that is the full quotation. Or to Polonius, ‘Words, words, words.’ Words are for the elderly and for the young who are old-in-heart. Of course this is the state of a prince whose father has been murdered. The motive for action now is that art has fallen in esteem. Public events themselves, without suspended disbelief, have this odd aesthetic character and are startlingly like plays. One barbarous crisis after another, without interludes. The redeemed world lias been polluted again. What the famous Joyce knew, the young men who write for Time and Esquire also know. And so the advanced intelligentsia, looking for new rackets, have decided that word and print are now obsolete and conduct public funeral services for poor old Gutenberg, for which they get large fees and international publicity. You can’t bury Gutenberg in a book. Only in images. But speaking more broadly, and coming back to Wells, whom I have not mislaid, Dr. Lal, the problem all along has been the inheritance of a minority civilization, an aristocratic culture, by the whole mass of mankind. This was how Wells himself saw it, and he was hopeful of creating orderly conditions for this transmission. Orderly British-style conditions. Decent, VictorianEdwardian, nonoutcast, nonlunatic, grateful conditions. But this gentle British model could not succeed in such colossal turmoil, could not hold its own against such wild, heaving, glittering, ferocious, fascinating irrationalities, passions, poisons, and evils. In World War II, Wells despaired. He compared humankind to rats in a sack, desperately struggling and biting.”

“Ah, you did know the man well,” said Lal. “And how clearly you put things. You are a first-rate condenser. I wish I had your talent. I lacked it sorely when I wrote my book.”

“Your book, what I had time to read of it, is very clear.”

“I hope you will read it all. Excuse me, Mr. Sammler, I am confused. I don’t know quite where Margotte has brought me, or where we are. You explained, but 1 did not follow.”

“This is Westchester County, not far from New Rochelle, and the house of my nephew, Dr. Arnold Elya Gruner. At the moment, he is in the hospital.”

“I see. Is he very sick?”

“There is an escape of blood in the brain.”

“An aneurysm. It can’t be reached for surgery?”

“It can’t be reached.”

“Dear, dear.”

“I know. He will die in a day or two. He is dying. A good man. He brought us from a DP camp, Shula and me, and for twenty-two years he has taken care of us with kindness. Twenty-two years without a day of neglect, without a single irascible word.”

“A gentleman.”

“Yes, a gentleman. You can see that she and I are not very competent. I did some journalism, until about fifteen years ago. It was never much. Recently I wrote a Polish report on the war in Israel. It was Dr. Gruner who paid my way.”

“He simply let you be a kind of philosopher?”

“If that is what I am. I am familiar with many explanations of things. To tell the truth I am tired of most of them.”

“Alt, you have an eschatological point of view, then. How interesting.”

Sammler, not much caring for the word eschatological, shrugged. “You think we should go into space, Dr. Lai?” “You are very sad about your nephew. Perhaps you would prefer not to talk.”

“Once the mind takes to this way of turning, it keeps turning, and it dips through all events.”

“Like a Ferris wheel,” said fragile, black-bearded Govinda Lai. “I should say that I have done work for Worldwide Technics, in Connecticut, who are a firm of contractors whom NASA has employed for various research projects. Mine are highly sophisticated and theoretical assignments having to do with order in biological systems and trying to have exceedingly complex mechanisms reproduce themselves. Though it will not greatly signify to you, I am associated with the bang-bang hypothesis, re-

lated to the firing of simultaneous impulses, atomic theories of cellular conductivity. As you mentioned Rousseau, man may or may not have been born free. That is one of those ideas which I can take or leave, but I can say with assurance that he would not exist without his atomistic chains. I refer to those linked structures of the cell constituted by the organism out of simpler elements. These are matters of order, Mr. Sammler. Though I have not the full blueprint to present. I am not yet that universal genius. In earnest, however, biological science is in an extraordinary state of progress. To participate is a privilege. This chemical order, which is a fundamental of life, is of great beauty. Oh, yes, of very great beauty. And what a high privilege. It occurred to me as you were speaking of another matter that to desire to live without order is to desire to turn from the fundamental biological governing principle. Which is widely presumed to be there only to free us, a platform for impulse. From order, from governing principle, the human being can tear himself to express his immense privilege of sheer liberty or unaccountability of impulse. The biological fundamentals are the peasantry, the whole individual considering himself to be a prince. It is the Cigale and the Fourmi. The ant was once the hero, but now the grasshopper is the whole show. My father taught me math and French. I, like you, have loved French literature. First in Bombay, and then in Manchester, until my scientific interests matured. But as to your question about space. There is, of course, much objection to these expeditions. Accusation that it is money taken from school, slum, and so on, of course. Just as the Pentagon money is withheld from social improvements. If it be. Moneyalone does not necessarily make the difference, does it? I think not. The Americans have always been reckless spenders. Bad, no doubt, but there is such a thing as fruitful gaspillage. Wastefulness can be justified if it permits inventiveness, originality, adventure. Unfortunately the results are mostly and usually corrupt, making vile profits, playboy recreations, and building reactionary fortunes. As far as Washington is concerned, a moon expedition no doubt is superb PR. It is show biz. My slang may not be current.”

“I am not a good authority.”

“You know however what I have in mind. Circuses. Dazzlement. The U.S. becoming the greatest dispenser of science fiction entertainment. As far as the organizers and engineers are concerned, it is a vast opportunity, but that is not of high theoretical value. Still at the same time something serious happens within. The soul most certainly feels the grandeur of this achievement. I believe the soul feels it, and therefore it is a necessity. It may introduce new sobriety. Naturally the technology will impress minds more than the personalities. The astronauts may not seem so very heroic. More like super chimpanzees. Especially if they do not express themselves beautifully. But after all, this is the function of poets. If any. But even the technicians, I venture to guess, will be ennobled. But do you agree, sir, that we should go into space?”

“Well, why not? Up to a point, yes. Although I don’t think it can be rationally justified.”

“Why not? I can think of many justifications. I see it as a rational necessity. You should have finished my book.”

“Then I would have found the irresistible proof?” Sammler smiled through the tinted glasses, and the blind eye attempted to participate. In the old black and neat suit, his stiff and slender body upright and his fingers, which trembled strongly under strain, lightly holding his knees. A cigarette (he smoked only three or four a day) burned between his awkward hairy knuckles.

“I simply mean you would be acquainted with my argument which I base in part on U.S. history.

After 1776 there was a continent to expand into, and this space absorbed all the mistakes. Of course I am not a historian. But if one cannot make bold guesses, one will have to surrender all to the experts. Europe after 1789 did not have the space for its mistakes. Result: war and revolution, with the revolutions ending up in the hands of the madmen.”

“De Maistre said that.”

“Did he? I don’t know w7ho he was.”

“It may be enough to know that he agrees. Revolutions do end up in the hands of madmen. Of course there are always enough madmen for every purpose. Besides, if the power is great enough, it will make its own madmen by its own pressure. Power certainly corrupts, but that statement is humanly incomplete. Isn’t it too abstract? What should certainly be added is the specific truth that having power destroys the sanity of the powerful. It allows their irrationalities to leave the sphere of dreams and come into the real world. But there— excuse me. I am no psychologist. As you say, however, one must be allowed to make guesses.”

“Perhaps it is natural that an Indian should be supersensitive to a surplus of humanity. A Chinese would be, too. Any nation of vast multitudes. We are crowded in, packed in, now, and human beings must feel that there is a way out, and that the intellectual power and skill of their own species opens this way. The invitation to the voyage, the Baudelaire desire to get out—get out of human circumstances—or the longing to be a drunken boat, or a soul whose craving is to crack open a closed universe is still real; only the impulse does not have to be assigned to tiresomeness and vanity of life, and it does not necessarily have to be a death-voyage. The trouble is that we will have to be trained specialists to take the trip. The longing soul cannot by direct impulse go because it has the boundless need or the mind for it or the suffering power. It will have to know engineering and wear those peculiar suits, and put up with personal, organic embarrassments. Perhaps the problems of radiation will prove insuperable, or strange diseases will be contracted on other worlds. Still, there is a universe into which we can overflow. Obviously we cannot manage with one single planet. Nor refuse the challenge of a new type of experience. We must recognize the extremism and fanaticism of human nature. Not to accept the opportunity would make this earth seem more and more a prison. If we could soar out and did not, we would condemn ourselves. We would be more than ever irritated with life. As it is, the species is eating itself up. And now Kingdom Come is directly over us and waiting to receive the fragments of a final explosion. Much better the moon.”

Sammler did not think that that must necessarily happen. “There is also an instinct against leaping into Kingdom Come,” he said.

It amused him, and not superficially, that this conversation occurred in the late Hilda Gruner’s living room, Govinda Lal bringing to it, small, hunched, dusky, with his rusty-gilt complexion, his full face and beard something reminiscent of an Oriental painting. Sammler himself came under this influence, like a figure in Indian color—the red cheeks, the spreading white hair at the back, the circles of his specs, and the cigarette smoke about his hair. To Wallace he had insisted that he was an Oriental, and now felt that he resembled one.

“As for the present state of affairs,”said Govinda, “I see that personal dissatisfaction, which is so great, may contribute energy to the biggest job which fate has secretly prepared—earth-departure. It may be the compression preceding the new expansion. To hurl yourself toward the moon, you may need an equal and opposite inertia. An inertia at least 250,000 miles deep. Or more. We moreover seem to have it. Who knows how these things work? You know the famous Oblomov? He couldn’t get out of bed? This phantom of inertia or paralysis? The opposite was frantic activism—bomb-throwing, civil war, a cult of violence. Do we always, always in the pain of misery, do a thing? Persist until exhausted? Perhaps, “lake my own temperament, for instance. I confess to you, Mr. Sammler and how glad I am that your daughter’s peculiarities have brought us together—I think we shall be friends) ... I confess that I am originally—originally you understand—of a melancholy, depressed character. As a child, I could not bear to be separated from Mother. Nor, for that matter, Father, who was as I said a teacher of French and mathematics. Nor the house, nor playmates. When visitors had to leave, I would make violent scenes. I was an often-sobbing little boy. All parting was such an emotional ordeal that I would get sick. I must have felt separation as far inward as my constituent molecules, and trembled in billions of nuclei. Hyperbole? Perhaps, my dear Mr. Sammler. But I have been convinced since my early work in the biophysics of vascular beds (I will not trouble you with details) that nature, more than an engineer, is an artist. Behavior is poetry, is metaphorical order, is metaphysics. From the high-frequency tens of millisecond brain responses in corticothalamic nets to the grossest of ecological phenomena, it is all the printing out in mysterious code of sublime metaphor. I am speaking of my own childhood passions, and the body of an individual is electronically denser than the tropical rain forest is dense with organisms. And all these existences are, it often suggests itself, poems. I do not even try to overcome this impression of universal poetry anymore. But to return to the question of my own personality, I see now that I had set myself a task of distance from objects of closest attachment. In which, Mr. Sammler, outer space is an opposite, personally an emotional pole. One is born between his mother’s legs, afterwards persisting outwards. To see the sidereal archipelago is one thing, but to plunge into it, into a dayless, nightless universe, why that, you see, makes sea-depth petty, the leviathan no more than a polliwog—”

Margotte came in—short, thick, rapid, efficient legs, but drying her hands ineptly in both skirt and apron—saying, “We will all feel better when we eat something. For you, Uncle, we have lobster salad, and some Crosse &: Blackwell soup and Bauernbrot and butter, and coffee. Dr. Lai, I assume you are not a meat eater. Do you like cottage cheese?”

“If you please, no fish.”

“But where is Wallace?” said Sammler.

“Oh, he went up with tools to fix something in the attic.” She smiled as she returned to the kitchen, smiled especially at Govinda Lal.

Lai said, “I am very much taken with Margotte.”

Sammler thought, she intended, sight unseen, that you should be taken with her. I can give you pointers on being happy with her. I’ll lose my sanctuary, perhaps, but I can give that up if this is serious. With an outer-space perspective perhaps immediate urgencies and egoism are lessened and marriage would be a kindly association—sub specie ae tern i tat is. Besides, though small, Govinda was in certain ways like Ussher Arkin. Women do not like too much change.

“Margotte is an excellent person,” said Sammler.

“That is my impression. And exceedingly, highly attractive. Has her husband been dead long?”

“Three years, poor fellow.”

“Poor fellow indeed, to die young, and with such a desirable wife.”

“Come, I am hungry,” said Sammler. Already he was considering how to take Simla out of this. She was smitten with this Indian. Had her desires. Needs. Was a woman after all. What could one do for a woman? Little, very little. Or for Elya, with the spray bubbling in his head? Terrible.

However, they sat down to a little supper in Elya’s kitchen, and the conversation continued.

Now that Sammler had been charmed by Govinda and seen, or imagined, a resemblance to Ussher Arkin, and was affectionately committed, it went with his habit of mind to see him also as an Eastern curiosity, a bushy little planet-buzzing Oriental demon, mentally rebounding from limits like a horsefly from glass. Wondering if the fellow might be a charlatan, in some degree. No, no, not that. His conversation was conversation and not a line. This was no charlatan, only an oddity. He was excellent, solid. His one immediately apparent weakness was to want his credentials known. He let fall names and titles—the Imperial College, his intimate friend Professor Waddington, his position as hunchconsultant with Professor Hoyle, his connection with Dr. Feltstein of NASA, and his participation in the Bellagio conference on theoretical biology. This was pardonable in a little foreigner. The rest was perfectly straight. Of course it amused Sammler that he and Lai spoke such different brands of foreign English, and it was also diverting that they were tall and short. To him height meant pituitary hyperactivity and maybe vital wastage. The large sometimes seemed to have diminished minds, as if the shooting up cost the brain something. Strangest of all in the eighth decade of one’s life, however, was a spontaneous feeling of friendship. At his age? That was for your young person, still dreaming of love, of meeting someone of the opposite sex who wotdd cure you of all your troubles, heart and soul, and whom you would cure and fulfill the same. From this came a disposition for sudden attachments such as you now saw in Lal, Margotte, anti Simla. But for himself, at his time of life and because he had come back from the other world, there were no rapid connections. His own first growth of affections had been consumed. His onetime human—merely human but very precious —life had been burnt away. More green growth rising from the burnt black would simply be natural persistency, the Life Force working, trying to start again.

However, he must say that while this little supper in the kitchen (laid on with Margotte’s maladroit bounty) lasted, the old man experienced the utmost joy. It also seemed to him that the others felt as he did: Slmla-Slawa in her misbound sari following the conversation with devoted eyes and mumming every word with soft orange-painted lips, leaning her head on her palm; Margotte, delighted of course; she was gone on this little Hindu; the occasion was intellectual, and moreover she was feeding everyone. Could any instant of life be nicer? To Sammler these female oddities were endearing.

Dr. Lai was saying that we did not get much from our brains, considering what brains were, electronically, with billions of instantaneous connections. “What goes on within a man’s head,” he said, “is far beyond his comprehension, of course. In very much the same way as a lizard or a rat or a bird cannot comprehend being organisms. But a human being, owing to dawning comprehension, may well feel that lie is a rat who lives in a temple. In his external development, as a thing, a creature, in cerebral electronics he enjoys an adaptation, a fitness which makes him feel the unfitness of his personal human efforts. Therefore, at the lowest, a rat in a temple. At best, a clumsy thing, with dawning awareness of the finesse of internal organization employed in crudities.”

“Yes,” said Mr, Sammler, “that is a very nice way lo put it, though I am not sure that there are many people so fine that they can feel this light weight of being so much more than they can grasp.”

“I should be extremely interested to hear your views,” said Lai.

“My views?”

“Oh, yes, Papa.”

“Yes, dear Uncle Sammler.”

“My views.”

A strange thing happened. He felt that he was about to speak his full mind. Aloud! That was the most striking part of it. Not the usual self-communing of an aged and peculiar person. He was about to say what he thought, and viva voce.

“Simla is fond of lectures, 1 am not,”he said. “I am extremely skeptical of explanations, rationalistic practices. 1 dislike the modern religion of empty categories, and people who make the motions of knowledge.”

“View it as a recital rather than a lecture,” said Lai. “Consider the thing from a musical standpoint.”

“A recital. That is more inviting,” said Sammler, putting his cup down. “Recitals are for trained performers. I am not ready for the stage. But there isn’t much time. So, ready or not ... I keep my own counsel much too much, and I am tempted to pass on some of my views. Or impressions. Of course, the old always fear they have decayed unaware. How do I know I have not? Simla, who thinks her papa is a powerful wizard, and Margotte, who likes discussion of ideas so much, they will deny it.”

“Of course,” said Margotte. “It simply is not so.”

“Well, I have seen it happen to others, why not to me? One must live with all combinations of the facts. I remember a famous anecdote about a demented man: Someone said, ‘You are a paranoiac, my dear fellow,’ and he answered, ‘Perhaps, but that doesn’t prevent people from plotting against me.’ That is an important ray of light from a dark source. I can’t say that I have felt any weakness in the head, but it may be there. Luckily, my views are short. I suppose, Dr. Lai, that you are right. Biologically, chemically, the subtlety of the creature is beyond the understanding of the creature. We have an inkling of it, and feel how, by comparison, the internal state is so chaotic, such a hodgepodge of odi el amo. They say our protoplasm is like seawater. Our blood has a Mediterranean base. Now we live in a social and human sea. Inventions and ideas bathe our brains, which sometimes, like sponges, must receive whatever the currents bring and digest the mental protozoa. 1 do not say there is no alternative to such passivity, but there are times, states, in which we lie under and feel the awful volume of cumulative consciousness, we feel the weight of the world. The world is a terror, certainly, and mankind in a revolutionary condition becoming, as we say, modern—more and more mental, the realm of nature, as it used to be called, turning into a park, a zoo, a botanical garden, an Indian reservation. And then there are always human beings who take it upon themselves to represent or interpret the old savagery, the primal fierceness of the fierce, lest we forget it. It is even said, here and there, that the real purpose of civilization is to permit us all to live like primitive people and lead a Neolithic life in an automated society. That is a droll point of view. I don’t want to lecture you, however. If one lives in his room, as I do, though Shula and Margotte take such excellent care of me, one has fantasies about addressing a captive audience. Recently, 1 tried to give a speech at Columbia. It did not go well.”

“Oh, but please continue,” said Dr. Lal. “We are most attentive.”

“A person’s views are either necessary or superfluous,” said Sammler. “The superfluous irritates me sharply. I am an extremely impatient individual. However, it is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location, and avoid originality. It may be boring, but one has to know where he is. We cannot have the Mississippi flowing toward the Rockies for a change. Now, as everyone knows, it has only been in the last two centuries that the majority oE people in civilized countries have claimed the privilege of being individuals. Formerly they were slave, peasant, laborer, even artisan, but not person. It is clear that this revolution, a triumph for justice in many ways—slaves should be free, killing toil should end, the sold should have liberty—has also introduced new kinds of grief and misery, and so far, on the broadest scale, it has not been altogether a success. I will not even talk about the Communist countries, where the modern revolution has been most thwarted. To us the results are monstrous. Let us think only about our own part of the world. We have fallen into much ugliness. It is bewildering to see how much these new individuals suffer, with their new1 leisure and liberty. Though I feel sometimes quite disembodied, I have little rancor and quite a lot of sympathy. Often I wish to do something, but it is a dangerous illusion to think I can do much for more than a very fewr. Perhaps the best is to have some order within oneself. Better than what many call love. Perhaps it is love to hold to orderly form. But I don’t want to claim too much. What I was saying —you see I am getting old. I was saying that this liberation into individuality has not been a great success. For a historian, of great interest, but for one aware of the suffering it is appalling. Hearts that get no real wage, ‘souls that find no nourishment. Falsehoods, unlimited. Desire, unlimited. Possibility, unlimited. Impossible demands upon complex realities, unlimited. Revival in childish and vulgar form of ancient religious ideas, mysteries, utterly unconscious of course—astonishing. Mithraism, Manichaeism, Gnosticism. When my eye is strong, I sometimes read in the Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion. Many fascinating resemblances appear. But one notices most a peculiar playacting, an elaborate and sometimes quite artistic manner of presenting oneself as an individual and a strange desire for originality, distinction, interest—yes, interest! A dramatic derivation from models, together with the repudiation of models. Antiquity accepted models, the Middle Ages had the imitatio, but modern man, perhaps because of division of labor and collectivization, has a fever of originality. The idea of the uniqueness of the sold. An excellent idea. A true idea. But in these forms? In these poor forms? Dear God! With hair, with clothes, with drugs, with genitalia, with round trips through evil, monstrosity, and orgy, with even God recovered through obscenities? How’ terrified the soul must be in this vehemence, how little that is really dear to it it can see in these saclic exercises. And even there, the Marquis de Sade in his crazy way was an Enlightenment phjlosophe. Mainly he intended blasphemy. But for those who follow (unaware) his recommended practices, the idea no longer is blasphemy, but rather hygiene, pleasure which is hygiene too, and a charmed and interesting life. An interesting life is the supreme concept of dullards.

“Perhaps I am not thinking clearly of the whole, because I know I have particular instances in mind today. Besides, I am aware of the abnormality of my own experience. Sometimes I wonder whether I have any place here, amongst you others. I assume I am one of you. But also I am not. I suspect my own judgments. My lot has been extreme. For a long time I saw things with peculiar hardness. Almost like a criminal—a person wdio brushes aside flimsy ordinary arrangements and excuses, and simplifies everything brutally. Not exactly as Mr. Brecht said, Erst kommt das fressen, und dann kommt das moral. That is swagger. Aristotle said something like it and did not swagger or act like a bully. Anyway, by force of circumstances I have had to ask myself simple questions, like ‘Will I kill him? Will he kill me? Is he too strong? Am I too weak?’

“And I know now that humankind marks certain people for death. It does not mind at all if they die. Against them there shuts a door. If they sinned too much, if they took a certain gamble. ... In a moving picture, for instance, or in a mystery novel, if there is a blackmailer, an extremely adulterous wife, a person cruel to children or to animals, the public watches with satisfaction the death of the individual thus marked. He is gladly written off, doomed. Well, Shula and I have been in this written-off category. If you chance nevertheless to live, having been out leaves you with idiosyncrasies. I apologize to you for this deformity. Certain subjects obsess me. One, related to this subject, is a person thrown into prominence in wartime Poland. I very often think of him in this connection. He was in the city of Lodz, a big textile city. When the Germans arrived, they installed in authority this individual. He is still often discussed in refugee circles. Rumkowski was his name. He was a failed businessman. Elderly. A noisy individual, corrupt, director of an orphanage, a fundraiser, a bad actor, a distasteful lun-figure in the Jewish community. A man with a bit to play, like so many modern individuals. Have you ever heard of him?”

Lai had not heard of him.

“Well, you shall hear a little. The Nazis made him Judenaltester. The city was fenced off. The ghetto became a labor camp. The children were seized and deported for extermination. There was famine. The dead were brought down to the sidewalk and lay there to wait for the corpse wagon. Amidst all this, Rumkowski was King. He had his own court. He printed money and postage stamps with his picture. He had pageants and plays organized in his honor. There were ceremonies to which he wore royal robes, and he drove in a broken coach of the last century, very ornate, gilded, pulled by a dying white nag. On one occasion he showed courage, protesting the arrest and deportation, in plain words the murder, of his council. For this he was beaten up and thrown out into the street. But he was a terror to the Jews of Lodz. He was a dictator. He was their Jewish King. A parody of the tiling—a mad Jewish King presiding over the death of half a million people. Perhaps his secret thought was to save a remnant. Perhaps his mad act was meant to amuse or divert the Germans. These antics of failed individuality, the grand seigneur absurdities—this odd rancor against the evolution of human consciousness, bringing forth these struggling selves, horrible clowns, from every hole anti corner. Yes, this would have appealed to those people. Humor seldom fails to appear in such murder programs. This harshness toward clumsy pretensions, toward the bad joke of the self which we all feel. And besides, a door had been shut against these Jews; they belonged to the category written off This theatricality of King Rumkowski evidently pleased the Germans. They had a predilection for such Ubu Roi murder farces. They played at Pataphysics. Here at any rate one can see peculiarly well the question of the forms to be found for the actions of liberated consciousness, and the blood-minded hatred, the killers’ delight taken in its failure and abasement. What I think of is the theatricality of the Rumkowski event. Of course the player was doomed. Many other players, with less agony, have also a sense of doom. As for the others, the large mass of the condemned, 1 assume, as they were starving, that they felt less anti less. Even starving mothers could not feel for more than a day or two the children torn from them. Hunger pains put out grief. Erst kommt das fressen, you see.

“Perhaps my sense of connection is faulty. Please tell me if it seems so. My aim is to bring out . . . though the man was perhaps crazy from the start; perhaps shock even made him saner; in any case, at the end, he voluntarily stepped into the train for Auschwitz ... to bring out the weakness of the outer forms which are at present available for our humanity, and the pitiable lack of confidence in them. The early result of our modern individuality boom. These ego ideas taken from poetry, history, tradition, biography, cinema, journalism, advertising. As Marx pointed out . . .” But he did not say what Marx had pointed out. He thought, and the others did not speak. His food had not been touched. “I understand that old man was very lewd,” he said. “He fingered the young girls. His orphans, perhaps. He knew all would die. Then everything seemed to come out as an efflorescence, a spilling of his ‘personality.’ Perhaps when people are so desperately impotent they play that instrument, the personality, louder and wilder. It seems to me that I have seen this often. I remember reading in a book, but can’t remember where, that when people had found a name for themselves, Human, they spent a lot of time Acting Human, laughing and crying and getting others to laugh and cry, seeking occasions, provoking, taking such relish in wringing their hands, in drawing tears from their glands, and swimming and boating in that cloudy, contaminated, confusing, surging medium of human feelings, taking the passion-waters, exclaiming over their fate. This exercise wTas condemned by the book, especially the lack of originality. The writer preferred intellectual strictness, hated emotion, demanded exalted tears only, tears shed at last, after much resistance, from the most high-minded of recognitions.

“But suppose one dislikes all this theater of the soul? I too find it tiresome to have to meet it so often and in such familiar forms. I have read many disagreeable accounts of it. I have seen it described as so much debris of the ages, ihstorical junk, dead weight, hereditary deformity. The Self may think it wears a gay, new ornament, delightfully painted, but from outside we see that it is a millstone. Or again, this personality of which the owner is so proud is from the Woolworth store, cheap tin or plastic from the five-and-dime of souls. Seeing it in this way, a man may feel that being human is hardly worth the trouble. But where is the desirable self that one might be? Dove sia? as the question is sung in the opera? That depends. It depends in part on the will of the questioner to see merit. It depends on his talent and his disinterestedness.

“But setting this aside for the moment, I think we may summarize my meaning in terms like these: that many have surged forward in modern history, after long epochs of namelessness and bitter obscurity, to claim and to enjoy (as people enjoy things now) a name, a dignity of person, a life such as belonged in the past only to gentry, nobility, the royalty, or the gods of myth. And that this surge has, like all such great movements, brought misery and despair, that its successes are not clearly seen, but that the pain of heart it makes many people feel is incalculable, that most forms of personal existence seem to be discredited, and that there is a peculiar longing for nonbeing. As long as there is no ethical life and everything is poured so barbarously and recklessly into personal gesture this must be endured. And there is a peculiar longing for nonbeing. Maybe it is more accurate to say that people want to visit all other states of being in a diffused state of consciousness, not wishing to be any given thing but instead to become comprehensive, entering anti leaving at will. Why should they lie human? In the forms offered there is little scope for the great powers of nature in the individual, the abundant, generous powers. The divine strength is rarely sensed by him. Even the powers of irrationality are dimmer. Even darkness is not as dark as it is supposed to be. So it certainly seems to me that mankind wants a divorce from all the states that it knows.

“It was charged against the Christian that he wanted to get rid of himself. Those that brought the charge urged him to transcend his unsatisfactory humanity. But isn’t transcendence the same disorder? Isn’t that also getting rid of the human being? Well, maybe man should get rid of himself. Of course. If he can. But also he has something in him which he feels it important to continue. Something that deserves to go on. Can we find fault with that? Besides, mankind cannot be something else. It cannot get rid of itself except by an act of universal self-destruction. But it is not even for us to vote Yea or Nay. And I have not stated my arguments, for I argue nothing. I have stated my thoughts. They were asked for, and I wanted to express them. The best, I have found, is to be disinterested. Not as misanthropes dissociate themselves, by judging, but by not judging. By willing as God wills.

“During the War I had no belief, and I had always disliked the ways of the Orthodox. I saw that God was not impressed by death. Hell was his indifference. But inability to explain is no ground for disbelief. Not as long as the sense of God persists. I could wish that it did not persist. The contradictions are so painful. No concern for justice? Nothing of pity? Is God only the gossip of the living? Then we watch these living speed like birds over the surface of a water, and one will dive or plunge but not come up again and never be seen anymore. And in our turn we will never be seen again, once gone through the surface. But then we have no proof that there is no depth under the surface. We cannot even say that our knowledge of death is shallow. There is no knowledge. There is longing, suffering, mourning. These come from need, affection, and love—the needs of the living creature, because it is a living creature. There is also strangeness, implicit. There is also adumbration. Other states are sensed. All is not flatly knowable. There would never have been any inquiry without this adumbration, there would never have been any knowledge without it. But I am not life’s examiner, or a connoisseur, and I have nothing to argue. Surely a man would console, if he could. But that is not an aim of mine. Consolers cannot always be truthful. But very often, and almost daily, 1 have strong impressions of eternity. This may be due to my strange experiences, or to old age. I will say that to me it does not feel elderly. Nor would I mind if there were nothing after death. If it is only to be as it was before birth, why should one care? There one would receive no further information. One’s ape restiveness would stop. 1 think I would miss mainly my God adumbrations in the many daily forms. Yes, that is what I should miss.

“So then, Dr. Lai, if the moon were advantageous for us metaphysically, 1 woidd be completely for it. As an engineering project, colonizing outer space, except for the curiosity, the ingenuity of the thing, is of little real interest to me. Of course the drive, the will to organize this scientific expedition must be one of those irrational necessities that make up life—this life we think we can understand. So I suppose we must jump off, because it is our human fate to do so. If it were a rational matter, then it would be rational to have justice on this planet first. Then, when we had an earth of saints, and our hearts were set upon the moon, we could get in our machines and rise up . . .”

But what is this on the floor?” said Shula. — All four rose about the table to look. WaBter from the backstairs flowed over the white plastic Pompeian mosaic surface. “Suddenly my feet were wet.” “Is it a bath overflowing?” said Lai. “Shula, did you turn off the bath?” “I’m sure and positive I did.”

“I believe it is too rapid for bath water,” said Lal. “A pipe presumably is burst.” Listening, they heard a sound of spraying above, and a steady, rapid tapping, trickling, cascading, snaking of water on the staircase. “An open pipe. It sounds a flood.” He broke from the table and ran through the large kitchen, the thin hairy fists laid on his chest, his head drawn down between thin shoulders.

“Oh, Uncle Sammler, what is it?”

The women followed. Necessarily slower, Sammler also climbed.

Wallace’s theory that there were dummy pipes in the attic filled with criminal money had been put to the test. Sammler guessed, since Wallace was so mathematical, loved equations, spent nights working out gambling odds, that he had prepared a plumbing blueprint before taking up the wrench.

Treading carefully in dry places became pointless on the second floor. There the carpeted corridor was like a soaked lawn and sucked at Sammler’s cracked shoes. The attic door was shut but water ran under it.

“Margotte,” said Sammler. “Go down this instant. Call the plumber and the fire department. Call the firemen first and tell them you are calling in the plumber. Don’t stand. Be quick.” He took her arm and turned her toward the door.

Wallace had evidently tried to stuff his shirt into the break. When calculation failed, he fell apart. The garment lay underfoot, and lie and Lal were trying to bring together the open ends of pipe.

“There’s something wrong with the coupling. I must have stripped the threads,” said Wallace. He was astride the flowing pipe. Dr. Lai, trying to make the connection, was being sprayed, beard and chest. Simla stood close to him. If great eyes coidd be mechanical aids—if staring and proximity could lead to blending!

“Is there no shutoff? Is there no valve?” said Sammler. “Simla, don’t get drenched. Stand back, my dear, you’re in the way.”

“I doubt we can accomplish anything by this means,” said Lal. The water fizzed loudly.

“You don’t think so?” said Wallace.

They spoke very politely.

“Well, no. For one thing there is too much water force. And as you see, this connecting metal cannot be advanced.” He lowered the pipe and stepped aside. At the waist his gray trousers were black with water. “Do you know the water system here?”

“In what sense do I know it?”

“I mean, is it city-supplied, or do you have a private source? If it is city water, the authorities will have to be called. However, if it is a driven well, the solution may lie in the cellar. If it is a well, there is a pump.”

“The odd thing is I never knew.”

“What of the sewage, is it municipal?”

“You got me there, too.”

“If it is a well and there is a pump, there is a switch also. I shall go down. Is there a flashlight?”

“I know the house,” said Simla. “I’ll go with you.” In the sari, loosely bound, shoes dropping from her white, eager, short feet, she hurried after Lai, who ran down the stairs.

Sammler said to Wallace, “Aren’t there any buckets? The ceilings will come down.”

“There’s insurance. Don’t worry about these ceilings.”

“Nevertheless . . .”

Sammler descended.

Under the kitchen sink and in the broom closet he found yellow plastic pails and climbed back. He recognized that lie had the peculiar anxieties of the poor relation. He had certainly disliked this house, always. Found it hard while eating benefactor’s bread to be natural here. Besides, all this dense comfort, the rooms crowded with conversation pieces, attractions, stood on a foundation of nullity. The work of Mr. Croze, with his rosebud mouth, visible nostrils, Oscar Wilde hairdo, suave little belly, and perfumed fingers, who sent, as Elya bitterly said once, as tough and cynical a business statement as he had ever seen. Elya conceded he was being done right by, but didn’t like being upgraded by Mr. Croze, who dealt in beautiful rewards, in domestic dukedoms for slum boys who made good! Still— a flood! Sammler could not bear it. Besides, it was a typical Wallace production, like the sinking of the limousine in Croton Reservoir, the horse-pilgrimage into Soviet Armenia, the furnishing of a law office to work crossword puzzles in—protests against his father’s valueless success. There was nothing new in this. Regularly now, for generations, prosperous families brought forth their anarchistic sons—these boy Bakunins, geniuses of liberty, arsonists, demolishers of prisons, property, palaces. Bakunin had loved fires. Wallace worked in water, a different medium. And it was very curious (Sammler with the two plastic buckets, which were as yellow and as light as leaves or feathers, had time on the stairs, while the water ran, to entertain the curiosity) that in speaking of his father that afternoon Wallace had said he was hooked like a fish by the aneurysm and jerked into the wrong part of the universe, drowning in the air.

“You brought some pails. Let’s see if we can’t fit them under the pipe. Won’t do much good.”

“It may do some. You can open a window and spill the water into the gutters.”

“Down the spout. OK. But how long can we keep bailing?”

“Till the fire department comes.”

“You called the firemen?”

“Of course. I made Margotte call.”

“They’ll file a report. That’s what the insurance people will go by. I’d better put away these tools. I mean, I want this to seem accidental.”

“That these pipes just dropped apart? Opened by themselves? Nonsense, Wallace, pipes only burst in winter.”

“Yes, I suppose that’s right.”

“So you thought they were full of thousand-dollar bills . . . ah, Wallace!”

“Don’t scold me, Uncle. There’s loot here somewhere. I know my father. He’s a hider. And what good is the money to him now? He couldn’t afford to declare it even if—”

“Even if he were going to live?”

“That’s right. And it’s like he’s turning away from us. Or like a dog in the manger.”

“Do you think that’s a suitable figure of speech?”

“It wouldn’t be suitable for you, but when I say it it doesn’t make much difference. I’m a different generation. I never had any dignity to start with. A different set of givens, altogether. No natural feeling of respect. Well, I certainly fucked these pipes up good and proper.”

Sammler was considering how much alike Wallace and Shula were, with their misdeeds. You had to stop and turn and wait for them. They would not be omitted. Sammler held the second bucket under tire splashing pipe. Wallace had gone to empty the first from the dormer, turning back with grimy wet hands, bare-chested, the short black hair neatly symmetrical like a clerical dickey. Arms were long, shoulders white, shapely to no purpose. And with a certain drop of the mouth, smiling at himself, transmitting to Sammler as he had done before the mother’s sense of the graceful boy, the child’s large skull anti long neck, the clear-lined brows, crisp hair, fine small nose. But, as in certain old paintings, another world was also represented above, and one could imagine on a straight line over Wallace’s head symbols of turbulence: smoke, fire, flying black things. Arbitrary rulings. A sealed judgment.

“If he would tell me where the dough is, it could at least cover the water damage. But he won’t, and you won’t ask him.”

“No. I want no part of it.”

“You think I should make my own dough.”

“Yes. Label the trees and bushes.”

“We will. In fact, that’s all I want from the old man, a stake for the equipment. It’s his last chance to show confidence in me. To wish me well. To give me like his blessing. Do you think he loved me?”

“Certainly he loved you.”

“As a child. But did he love me as a man?”

“He would have.”

“If I had ever been a man according to his idea. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

Sammler, having recourse to one of his blind looks, could always express his thought. Or if you had loved him, Wallace. These are very transitory opportunities. One must be nimble.

“I’m sorry that so late at night you have to be bailing. You must be tired.”

“I suppose I am. Dry old people can go on and on. Still, I am beginning to feel it.”

“I don’t feel so hot myself. How is it downstairs, bad? A lot of water?”

No comment.

“It always turns out like this. Is that my message to the world from my unconscious self?”

“Why send such messages? Censor them. You could put your unconscious mind behind bars on bread and water.”

“No, it’s just the mortal way I am. You can’t hold it down. It must come out. I hate it too.”

Lean Mr. Sammler, delicately applying the light pail to the pi pe, while the rapid water splashed.

“I know that Dad had guys up here installing phony connections.”

“I would have thought if it was a lot of money the false pi pe would be a thick one.”

“No, he wouldn’t do an obvious thing. You have the wrong image of him. He has a lot of scientific cool. It could have been this pipe. He could have rolled the bills tight and small. He is a surgeon. He has the skill and the patience.”

Suddenly the splashing stopped.

“Look! He’s shut it off. It’s down to a dribble. Hurray!” said Wallace.

“Dr. Lai!”

“What a relief. He found a turnoff. Who is that fellow?”

“Professor V. Govinda Lai.”

“Of what is he a professor?”

“Biophysics, I think, is his field.”

“Well, lie certainly uses his head. It never once occurred to me to find out where our water came from. There must be a well. Can you imagine that! And we’ve been here since I was" ten. June 8, 1949. I’m a Gemini. Lily of the valley is my birth flower. Did you know the lily of the valley was very poisonous? We moved on my birthday. No party. The van got stuck between the gateposts on moving day. So it’s not municipal water—I’m so astonished.” With his usual lightness, he introduced general considerations. “It’s supposed to be a sign of the Mass Man that he doesn’t know the difference between Nature and human arrangements. He thinks the cheap commodities—water, electricity, subways, hot dogs are like air, sunshine, and leaves on the trees.”

“Just as simple as that?”

“Ortega y Gasset thinks so. Well, I’d better see what the damage is and get the cleaning woman in.”

“You could mop up. Don’t let the puddles stand all night.”

“I don’t know the first thing about mopping. I doubt that I ever even held a mop in my hands. But I could spread newspapers. Old Timeses from the cellar. But just one thing, Uncle.”

“What thing is that?”

“Don’t dislike me on account of this.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, don’t look down on me—don’t despise me.”

“Well, Wallace . . .”

“I know you must. Well, this is like an appeal. I’d like to have your good opinion.”

“Are you depressed, Wallace, when things go wrong like this?”

“Less and less. You see, if Angela inherits the house, that ends my chances for the money. She’ll put the place up for sale, being unmarried. She doesn’t have any sentiment about the old homestead. The roots. Well, neither do I, when you come right down to it. Dad doesn’t really like the place himself. No, I don’t feel any black gloom about the water damage. Everything is replaceable. At exorbitant prices. But the estate will pay the bill, which will be a real gyp. And there’s insurance. Possessive emotions are in a transitional phase. I really think they are.” Wallace could turn suddenly earnest, but his earnestness lacked weight. Earnestness was probably Wallace’s ideal, his true need, but the young man was incapable of finding his own essences. “I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of, Uncle,” he said. “If I have to live on a fixed income from a trust, it’ll be the end of me. I’ll never find myself then. I’ll just rot. I need to crash out of the future my father has prepared for me. Otherwise, everything just goes on being possible, and all these possibilities are going to be the death of me. I have to have my own necessities, and I don’t see those anywhere. All I see is ten thousand a year, like my father’s life sentence on me. I have to bust out while he’s still living. When he dies, I’ll get so melancholy I won’t be able to lift a finger.”

“Shall we soak up some of this water?” said Sammler. “Shall we start spreading around the Tim esT’

“Oh, that can wait. The hell with it. We’ll get screwed anyway on the repairs. You know, Uncle, I think I’m just half as smart as a man needs to be to work out these things, so I never get more than halfway there.”

“So you have no connection with this house—no desire for roots, Wallace?”

“No, of course not. Roots? Roots are not modern. That’s a peasant conception, soil and roots. Peasantry is going to disappear. That’s the real meaning of the modern revolution, to prepare world-peasantry for a new state of existence. I certainly have no roots. But even I am out of date. What I’ve got is a lot of old wires, and even wires belong to the old technology. The real thing is telemetry. Cybernetics. I’ve practically decided, Uncle Sammler, if this enterprise doesn’t pan out, with FelTer, that I’ll go to Cuba.”

“To Cuba, is it? But you aren’t a Communist, too, Wallace?”

“Not at all. I do admire Castro, however. He has terrific style, he’s a bohemian radical, and he’s held his own against Washington superpower. He and his Cabinet ride in jeeps. They have meetings in the sugarcane.”

“What do you want to tell him?”

“It could be important, don’t make fun of me, Uncle Sammler. I have an idea about revolutions. When the Russians made their revolution, everybody said, ‘A leap forward into a new stage of history.’ Not at all. The Russian Revolution was a delaying action meant to arrest the idea of the new, not to advance it. The unconscious genius of Russian absolutism had a mysterious intuition about the future and did all it could to delay it. This tied Socialism to the Closed Society. It is the small states which must be imaginative. For the big ones it’s impossible—ah, my God, what a noise. It’s the fire trucks. I’d better run. They could just bash down

the door. They have an orgy, these guys, with their axes. And I have to have an alibi for the insurance.”

He ran.

In the yard the rotating lights swept through the trees, dark red over the lawn, the walls and windows. The bell was slamming, bangalang, and deeper down the road gulping passionate shrieks approached the mortal-sounding sirens. More engines were arriving. From the attic window Sammler watched as Wallace ran out, his hands raised, explaining to the helmeted men as they sprang in the soft gum boots from the trucks.

Water they had brought.

Mr. Sammler had some wakeful hours that night. A predictable result of the flood. Also of the conversation with Lai, which had compelled him to state his views—historical, planetary, and universal. The order probably should be reversed: first there were the views, planetary or universal, and then there were hidden dollars, water pipes, firemen. Sammler went out and walked in the garden, behind the house, up and down the drive. Inside there were activities, discussions, explanations, arrangements, rearrangements. It was the turn again of certain minor things which people insisted on enlarging, magnifying, moving into the center: relationships, interior decorations, family wrangles, Minox photographs of thieves on buses, arms of Puerto Rican ladies on the Bronx Express, odi-ct-nmo need-andrejection, emotional self-examinations, erotic business in Acapulco, fellatio with friendly strangers. Civilian matters. Civilian one and all! The highminded, like Plato, wished to get rid of all these things—the wrangles, the lawsuits, the hysterias, all such hole-and-corner pettiness. Other powerful minds denied that this could be done. They held (as Freud did) that the mightiest instincts were bound up in these trifles, each one the symptom of a deep disease in a creature whose whole fate was disease. What to do about such things? Absurd in form, but possibly real? But possibly not real? Relief from this had become imperative. And that was why, during the Aqaba crisis, Mr. Sammler had had to go to the Middle East.

At this moment, walking in white moonlight on Elya Gruner’s washed gravel, which had been cut with black tracks by the fire engines, he recognized and again identified his motives. He had gone back to 1939. He wanted to refer again to Zamosht Forest, and to more basic human characteristics. As they seemed. So he had persuaded Elya to let him go, to send him, and he had renewed his familiarity with a certain sort of fact. Which, as he was older and more fragile, had made his legs tremble more; the more he tried to stiffen himself up the more he faltered. But few outer signs of this were given.

It was announced in Athens, on the plane, that this flight would not continue because the fighting had already begun in Israel. The Greek heat was dizzy, in the airport. The public music circled through Mr. Sammler’s unwilling head. The sugary coffee, the sticky drinks also were a trial to him. The suspense, the delay gnawed him intolerably. He went into the city and visited airline offices, he tried a business friend of Elya’s, in oil or gasoline, he visited the Israeli consulate and obtained a seat on the first El A1 flight. He waited again at the airport until 4 A.M. among journalists and hippies. These young people—Dutch, German, Scandinavian, Canadian, American—had been encamped at Eilath on the Red Sea. The Bedouins on the ancient route from Arabia into Egypt sold them hashish. It was a jolly place. Then when Israel’s Eilath hippies were called up for military service, their foreign friends left, too, but now with their guitars they wanted to go back. Responding to a primary event. Though recognizing no governments and discussing no general issues (one could appreciate this rejection of discussion, of currentevents phrases), they had their archaic instincts for loyalty, for war.

The Boeing cabin was jammed. A television man beside Sammler offered him a pull from his whiskey bottle. “Thank you,” said Sammler, and accepted. Just then the sun ran up from the sea like a red fox. It was not round but long, not far but near. The metal of the engines, these shapely vats in which the freezing air was screaming—light into blackness, blackness into light—hung under the wings beside Sammler’s window. Whiskey from a bottle—he smiled at himself—made him a real war correspondent. An odd person to be rushing to this war, although no more odd than these Stone Age bohemians with their solemn beards, bare feet, and electric guitars. He would be filing his old-fashioned dispatches to Mr. jerzy Zhelonski in London to be read by a very mixed Polish public.

Mr. Sammler had had no business, at his age, in a white cap and striped seersucker jacket, to be riding in a press bus behind those tanks to Gaza, to El Arish and beyond. But he had arranged it all himself. There was nothing accidental about it. In these American articles of dress he had perhaps passed for a younger man. Americans and Englishmen always looked a little younger. He was one of the journalists. He walked about in conquered Gaza. They were sweeping broken glass. In the square, armor and guns. Just beyond, the cemetery walls, the domes of white tombs. In the dust, scraps of food baking, sour; odors of heating garbage and of urine. Broadcast Oriental jazz winding like dysentery through the bowels. Such deadly comical music. Women, oldish women only, went marketing, or set out to market; there couldn’t have been much to buy. The black veils were transparent. You saw the heavy-boned mannish faces under-

neath—large noses, the stern mouths projecting over stonelike teeth. There was nothing to keep you in Gaza for long. The bus stopped for Sammler, and Father Newell in his Vietnam battle dress greeted him.

Knowing modern warfare, the Father was able to point things out which Sammler might have missed when they passed the last of the irrigated fields and entered the Sinai Desert. Then they began to see the dead, the unburied Arab bodies. Father Newell showed him the first. Sammler might never have noticed, might have taken the corpse for nothing but a greenish gunnysack, stuffed tight, dropped from a truck on the white sand.

Driven off the road, stogged in the sand, wrecked on the dunes, smashed or burnt—all these vehicles, the personnel carriers, tanks, trucks, the light cars smashed flat, wheels freed, escaped, and very thick about these machines, the dead. There were dug positions, emplacements, trenches, and in them, too, there were hundreds of corpses. The odor was like damp cardboard. The clothes of the dead, greenish-brown sweaters, tunics, shirts were strained by the swelling, the gases, the fluids. Swollen gigantic arms, legs, roasted in the sun. The dogs ate human roast. In the trenches the bodies leaned on the parapets. The dogs came cringing, flattening up. The inhabitants had run away from tHe encampments you saw here and there—the low tents, Bedouin-style, but made of plastic crate wrappings dumped from ships, pieces of styrofoam, dirty sheets of cellulose like insect moltings, large cockroach cases.

“Well, they did a job, didn’t they,” said Father Newell. “How many casualties, would you say?”

“I have no idea.”

“They said they would cut every throat in Israel.”

“They said? But the Russians gave the word. This was a small Russian experiment, I believe.”

In the sun the faces softened, blackened, melted, and flowed away. The flesh sank to the skull, the cartilage of the nose warping, the lips shrinking, eyes dissolving, fluids filling the hollows and shining on the skin. As Mr. Sammler and Father Newell walked together, they were warned not to step off the road because of mines. Sammler read out for the priest the Russian letters stenciled white on the green tanks and trucks: Gorkiskii Autozavod, most of them said. Father Newell seemed to know a lot about gun calibers, armor thickness, ranges. In a lowered voice, out of respect for the Israelis who denied its use, he positively identified the napalm. See all that reddish, all that mauve out there? Salmon-pink with a green tinge in the clinkers was the sure sign. It was a real little war. These Jews were tough. He spoke to Sammler as one American to another. The long blue seersucker stripes, the soiled white cap from Kresge’s, the little spiral book in which Sammler made his notes for Polish articles, also from Kresge’s, accounted for this. It was a real war. Everyone respected killing. Why not the priest? He walked in the big American battle boots as if he were not altogether a priest. He was not altogether what he was assumed to be. Nor was Sammler. What Sammler was he could not clearly formulate. Human, in some altered way. The human being at the point where he attempted to obtain his release from being human. Wasn’t this what Sammler had been getting at in the kitchen, talking to Lai and the ladies of divorce from every human state? Petitioning for a release from God’s attention? My days are vanity. I would not live always. Let me alone. To be visited every morning, to be called upon, to be magnified. Let me alone.

Walking the narrow road with Father Newell, picking up curious objects, shells, bandages, Arab comic books and letters, stepping aside for trucks stacked high with bread, weighing down the springs, projecting at the rear. But really the desperate subject could not be changed, the subject of the dead who were bristling in the green-brown and gravy-colored woolens, and the suffocating wet cardboard fumes they gave off. In the superhot, the crack light, the glassy persistency and distortion of the desert light, these swollen shapes were the main thing to be seen. They were the one subject the soul was sure to take seriously. And this perhaps was what Sammler’s instinct had directed him to come for. When lie began to concentrate upon the Aqaba crisis, when he began to be agitated about the threat of the superpowers, the danger to the Jews, when he spent his days in bed reading one-eyed all that he could find, speeches, statements, news analyses, a powerful, a convulsive, painful knot began to form, his Polish twist, as he privately, somberly identified it. So he was here. He took advantage of new conditions and flew to Lvdda, he went to Tel Aviv and got a press card, he found a bus to Gaza, to make his primary contact, to visit the great sunwheel of white desert in which these Egyptian corpses and machines were embedded. Certain desires thus were met, for which he could not account.

And it was, as human affairs went, a most minor affair. In modern experience, so very little. And the people involved in it sturdily did it. After fighting, the boys played soccer at El Arish. They cleared a space, and they kicked and butted, they leaped up, boot and head. In the shade of the hangars they took out their books and read biology or chemistry, philosophy, preparing for exams or exercising the intelligence. Then he and Father Newell were called over to look at captured snipers on the bed of a truck, trussed up and blindfolded. Below these eye rags, the desperate faces. One saw those, and then the next things, and then other things. And evidently Mr. Sammler had his own need for these sights, for which he mastered the trembling of his legs or the wish to cry which flashed through him at the fear so plain in the snipers’ bandaged faces. He was taken down to the sea by some men. They entered the water to refresh themselves. He too went in and stood. In a broad band along the beaches the foam mixed with heat shimmer for many miles, in varying deep curves of seething white between the sand and the great blue. For a little while, in the water, he did not smell the rotting, but it soon came back. He tied a handkerchief over his face, but that soon was saturated. His spittle tasted of it.

Well, thought Mr. Sammler. Someone had had wrong policies. Incorrect decisions had been made when these Egyptians were sent to drive these tanks here, and the guns. Sammler read in Le Monde that the Russian officials responsible had at that same moment been enjoying a cruise in the Baltic aboard a ship of the Red fleet. And everyone had heard on the radio that Colonel Nasser had pretended to resign. But he had first prepared demonstrations against his resignation. Beggars had been brought in trucks and were paid pennies to cry out, “No, no, we want our great leader.”Yes, while the bureaucrats studied a colder and darker sea. And Sammler then considered that if he had been a passenger in a taxi which struck a cyclist on Broadway and hurt him, he would have been prostrated with heartsickness. But the people responsible for the slaughter of so many Egyptians were not prostrated at all and in fact went sailing for pleasure on the Baltic or had the presence of mind to organize demonstrations, Mussolini-style, and to playact and to have ever shrewder political ideas. It was conventional to be shocked by the dead. It was coldness not to be. Mr. Sammler was neither conventional nor cold, but he was far from satisfied with himself. You could take a moon view of such events, you coidd put great distance between yourself and them. You could stare at them strangely. You could say that the private person, privileged to view, to stare, to examine or brood was encouraged to indulge himself in an unreal fastidiousness or inner delicacy equal and opposite to this political murclerousness and quite as undesirable. Mr. Sammler also seemed in the wrong, in his own heaviness of heart.

Via London, ten days later, he flew home. As if he had been on some sort of mission: self-assigned, fact-finding. He observed that modern London was very playful. He visited his old flat in Great Russell Street. He noted that the traffic was very thick. He saw that there were more drunkards in the streets, that the British advertising industry had discovered the female nude, and that most posters in the Underground were of women in undergarments. He found his acquaintances as old as himself. Then BOAC brought him back to Kennedy Airport, and soon afterward he was in the Forty-Second Street Library reading, as always, Meister Eckhart.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit. Poor is he who has nothing. He who is poor in spirit is receptive of all spirit. Now God is the Spirit of spirits. The fruit of the spirit is love, joy, and peace. See to it that you are stripped of all creatures, of all consolation from creatures. For certainly as long as creatures comfort and are able to comfort you, you will never find true comfort. But if nothing can comfort you save God, truly God will console you.”

Mr. Sammler could not say that he believed what he was reading. He could, however, say that he cared to read nothing but this.

On the lawn before the half-timbered house the ground was damp, the grass was fragrant. Or was it the soil itself that smelled so fresh? In the clarified, moon-purged air, he saw Shula coming, looking for him.

“Why aren’t you in bed?”

“I’m going.”

She gave him Elya’s own afghan to cover himself with, and he lay down.

Feeling what a strange species he belonged to, which had organized its planet to such an extent. Of this mass of ingenious creatures, about half had gone into the state of sleep, in pillows, sheets, in wrappings, quilts, muffles. The waking, like a crew, worked the world’s machines, and all went up and down and round about with calculations accurate to the billionth of a degree, the skins of engines removed, replaced, million-mile trajectories laid out. By these geniuses, the waking. The sleeping are brutes, fantasts, dreaming. Then they wake, and the other half go to bed. And that is how this brilliant human race runs this wheeling globe. He joined the other sleepers for a while.

VI

Rising at midmorning and going to shave in the small lavatory off the den. The washstand was dark onyx, the fittings gold, the faucets dolphins, the soap dish a scallop, the towel thick as mink. Mirrors on four walls showed Mr. Sammler to himself in more aspects than he wanted. The soap was spermy sandalwood. The blade was dull and had to be honed on the porcelain. Very likely ladies occasionally slipped in to trim their legs with this razor. Sammler did not want to seek another blade upstairs. The master bedroom was seriously water-damaged. The ladies had pulled the twin mattresses from the beds to a dry corner. Dr. Lal had slept in the guest room. Wallace? Perhaps he had spent the night on his head, like a yogi.

Then Sammler stopped shaving, paused, and stared at himself, his dry, small, “cured” face undergoing in the mirror a strong inrush of color. Even the left, the swelled, the opaque guppy eye took up some light from this. Where were they all? Opening the door, he listened. There was no sound. He went into the garden. Dr. Lai’s car was gone. He looked in the garage, and that was empty.

He found Shula in the kitchen. “Everyone has left?” he said. “Now how do I get to New York?” She was pouring coffee through the filter cone, having first boiled the grounds, French-style.

“Gone,” she said. “Dr. Lai wasn’t able to wait. There was no room for me. He rented a twoseater. A gorgeous little Austin-LIealey, did you see it?”

“And Emil, where is he?”

“He had to take Wallace to the airport. Wallace lias to fly—to test-fly. For his business, you know what I mean. They’re going to take pictures and so on.”

“And I am stuck. Is there a timetable? I’ve got to be in New York.”

“Well, it’s nearly ten o’clock now, and there aren’t so many trains. I’ll phone. And then Emil should be back soon, and he can drive you. You were sleeping. Dr. Lai didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Jolly nice. You knew, and Margotte knew, that I had to get back.”

“The little car was very pretty. Margotte didn’t look right in it.”

“Didn’t she?”

“Margotte has thick legs. You’ve probably never even noticed.”

“They won’t show in the car.”

“Dr. Lal will call later in the day. You’ll see him all right.”

“Whom, Lai? Why? The document is there, isn’t it?”

“There?”

“Don’t irritate me by repeating questions. I am already irritated. Why didn’t you wake me? The document is in the locker, isn’t it?”

“I locked it in myself, with the quarter, and took out the key. No, you’ll see him because Margotte is out for him. Maybe you didn’t notice that either.”

“Yes. I did, yes, to tell the truth. Well, she’s a widow, and she’s had enough of mourning, and she needs somebody like that. We aren’t much comfort to her. I don’t know what she sees in that bushy black little fellow. It’s just loneliness, I suppose.”

“I can see what she sees. He’s very distinguished. You know it. Don’t pretend, after the way you talked in the kitchen. It was beautiful.”

“Well, well. What will I do? This thing of Elya’s is very bad, you know.”

“Very?”

“The worst. And I should have realized that returning might present problems.”

'"Father, just, leave it to me. And you haven’t finished shaving. Now, go on, and I’ll bring you a cup of coffee.”

He went, thinking how he had been feinted out of position. Outgeneraled like a Pompey, a Labienus, by Caesar. He should not have left the city. He was cut off from his base, and now how was he to reach Elya, who needed him today? Picking up the phone in the den to call the hospital, he heard the busy signal Shula was getting from the New York Central. Patience, waiting now were necessary—things Mr. Sammler had no talent for. But he had studied, he had trained himself. One began with external composure. So he sat down on the hassock, looking at the sofa, and at the silken green luxurious wool of Elya’s own afghan he had slept under. It was a lovely morning, too. The sun came in as he sipped the coffee Shula brought him. Glass tables on legs and semicircular struts of brass spattered the Oriental rug with light, brought out the colors and the figures.

“Busy signal,” he said.

“Yes, I know.”

“There’s a telephone crisis, anyway, all over New York. You can’t get through anywhere. The experts are working on it.”

She went into the garden, and Sammler again tried dialing the hospital. All lines were busy in that dreary place, and he hung up the repetitious croaking instrument. Thinking of the colossal number of conversations, all those communings. Utilizing the invisible powers of the universe. Out in the garden, Shula was also engaged in conversation. It was warm. Tulips, daffodils, jonquils, and a paradise of gusts. Evidently she asked the flowers how they were today. No answers required.

Brilliant instances sufficed. She herself was a brilliant instance of something organically strange. His glimpse of the entire Shula last night now made him feel her specific weight, as she trod the grass. I he entire female body was evoked, white skin everywhere, the thighs, the trunk, the actual feet, the belly with its organs, together with the kinky hair straggling from the scarf. All visible and almost palpable. And even about plants, who knew the whole truth? On educational TV one night he and Margotte watched a singular botanist who had attached a polygraph machine—a lie detector—to flowers and recorded the reactions of roses to gentle and violent stimuli. Stridency made them shrink, he said. A dead dog cast before them caused aversion. A soprano singing lullabies had the opposite effect. Sammler would have guessed that the investigator himself, his pale leer, his wild stern police nose would distress roses, African violets. Even without nerves these organisms were discerning. We with our oversupply of receptors were in a state of nervous chaos. Amid the tree shadows, pliant, and the window-frame shadows, rigid, and tire brass and glass reflections, semisteady, Mr. Sammler wiped his shoes with the paper towel Shula had placed under the coffee cup. The shoes were damp still. They were soggy, unpleasantly so. Margotte also had her plants, and Wallace was about to found a plant business. It would be too bad if the first contacts of plants were entirely with the demented. Maybe I’d better have a word with them myself. Mr. Sammler was heavyhearted and tried to divert himself. The heaviness was brutally persistent, however.

He came to the point. First, how apt it was that Wallace should flood the attic. Why, it was a metaphor for Elya’s condition. In connection with that condition there arose other images—a blistering of the brain, a froth or rusty scum of blood over that other plant which lay in one’s head. Something like convolvulus. No, fatty cauliflower. The screw on the artery coidd not reduce the pressure, and where the vessel was varicose and weaker than cobweb it would open. A terrible flood! One might try to think of mitigating things—that, oh, well! Life! Everyone who had it was bound to lose it. Or that this was Elya’s moment of honor and that lie called upon his best qualities. That was all very well, until death turned its full gaze on the individual. Then all such ideas were stared down. The point was that he, Sammler, should be at the hospital now; to do what could be done; to say what might be said, and what should be said. Exactly what this was, Sammler did not know. He could not find the precise thing. Living as he did, in this inward style, working out his condensations or contractions, breeding short views, one became strangely uncommunicative. To explain or expand his brevities tired and vexed him.

But he did not feel uncommunicative toward Elya. On the contrary, he wanted to say everything possible. He wanted to go to the hospital and say everything! He loved his nephew, and he had something that Elya needed. All concerned ought to have had it. The first place at Elya’s bedside belonged to Wallace or to Angela, but they were not about to come forward, Elya was a physician and a businessman. With his own family, to his credit, he had not been businesslike, one must say. Nevertheless, he had something of a business outlook. And business, in business America, was also a training system for souls. The fear of being unbusinesslike was very great. As he was dying Elya might conceivably draw strength from doing business. He had, in fact, done that. And Sammler had nothing with a business flavor to offer him. But at the very end business would not do. Some, many, would continue business to the last breath, but Elya would not be like that, he was not so limited. Into one group of attitudes or another, as Sammler saw it, people settled. They then had their bit, their thing, they acted it out repeatedly, they did not advance from the large, overall determinate form. But some advanced into a wider range. Some changed. Some changed, some had power to change. This greater plasticity, this generative, regenerative power was what Sammler respected most deeply. Elya was not finally ruled by business considerations. He was not in that insect and mechanical state—such a surrender, such insect iteration and persistency, such a disaster for human beings, destroying natural powers, powers of sympathy, powers of generosity, of compassion. Compassion, notwithstanding enormities and degradations visible to all, was as natural as breathing. And compassionate utterance. Oh, yes, the repetition of hope and desire, and the exclamation of grief. Things suppressed, as if illicit. Sometimes coming through in ciphers, in vague figures scrawled on the windows of condemned buildings (the empty tailor shop facing the hospital) . At this stage of things there .was a terrible dumbness. About essentials almost nothing was said.

Still, signs could be made, should be made, must be made. One should say something like this: “However actual I may seem to you and you to me, we are not as actual as all that. We will die. Nevertheless there is a bond. There is a bond.” Mr. Sammler believed that if this was not said in so many words it should be said tacitly. In fact it was continually asserted, in many guises. But Elya at this moment had a most particular need for it, and he, Sammler, should be there to meet that need.

He again telephoned the hospital. To his surprise he found himself speaking with Gruner. He had asked for the private nurse. One could get through? Elya must be molested by calls.

“How are you?”

“How are you, Uncle?”

The actual meaning of this might have been, “Where are you?”

“How are you feeling?”

“There’s been no change. I thought we would be seeing each other.”

“I’m coming in. I’m sorry. When there’s something important there is always some delay. It never fails, Elya.”

“When you left yesterday, it was like unfinished business between us. We got sidetracked by Angela and such hopeless questions. There was something I was meaning to ask.”

“About Cracow? The old days?”

“That, too. And by the way, I bragged about you to a Polish doctor here. He wanted very much to see the Polish articles you sent from the Six-Day War. Do you have copies?”

“Certainly, at home. I have plenty.”

“Aren’t you at home now?”

“Actually, I’m not.”

“I wonder if you’d mind bringing the clippings. Would you mind stopping off?”

“Of course not. But I don’t want to lose the time.”

“I may have to go down for tests.” Elya’s voice was filled with unidentifiable tones. Sammler’s interpretive skill was insufficient. He was uneasy. “Why shouldn’t there be time? There’s time enough for everything,” said Elya. This had an odd ring, and the accents were strange.

“Yes?”

“Of course, yes. It was good you called. A while ago I tried to phone you. There was no answer. You went out early.”

Sammler was silent. Elya said, “Angela is on her way over.”

“I’m coming too.”

“Yes.” Elya lingered somewhat on the shortest words. “Well, Uncle?”

“Good-bye, for now.”

“Good-bye, Uncle Sammler.”

Uneasiness somewhat interfered with his breathing. Long and thin, he stood at the window concentrating, aware of the anxious intensity gathered in his face. If he was to keep his composure—and there was nothing to be gained by letting it slip from him now—he must rearrange certain impressions, he must not puzzle too long over Elya’s words, his tone.

Rapping at the pane, Sammler tried to get Simla’s attention. Among the wagging flowers, she was conspicuously white. His Primavera. On her head she wore a dark-red scarf. Covering up, afflicted always by the meagerness of her hair. It was perhaps the natural abundance, growth-power, exuberance that site admired in flowers. Seeing her among the blond open-mouthed daffodils, her father believed that she was in love. From the hang of her shoulders, the turn of the orange lips, he saw that she was already prepared to accept unrequited longing. Dr. Lal was not for her; she would never clasp his head or hold his beard between her breasts. You could seldom get people to long for what was possible—that was the cruelty of it.

“Where is the timetable?” he said.

“I can’t find it. The Gruners don’t use the train. Anyway, you’ll get to New York quicker with Emil. He’s going to the hospital, he told me.”

“I don’t suppose he’d wait at the airport for Wallace. Not today.”

“Why did you say that about Lai, that he was just a bushy black little fellow?”

“I hope you’re not personally interested in him.”

“Why not?”

“He’s not at all suitable, and I’d never give my consent.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“No, no. He wouldn’t make any kind of husband for you.”

“Because he’s an Asiatic? You wouldn’t be so prejudiced. Not you, Father.”

“Not the slightest objection to an Asiatic. But scientists make bad husbands. Sixteen hours a day in the lab, absorbed in research. You’d be neglected. You’d be hurt. I wouldn’t allow it.”

“Not even if I loved him?”

“You also thought you loved Eisen.”

“He didn’t love me. Not enough to forgive my Catholic background. And I couldn’t discuss anything with him. Besides, sexually he was a verygross person. Things I wouldn’t care to tell you about, Father. But he is very common. He’s here in New York. If he comes near me, I’ll stab him.”

“You amaze me, Shula. You would actually stab Eisen with a knife?”

“Or with a fork. Or scissors. I often regret that I let him beat me in Haifa and didn’t do anything back to him. He hit me really too hard, and I should have defended myself.”

“All the more important that you should avoid future mistakes. I have to protect you from failures I can foresee. A father should.”

“But what if I did love Dr. Lal? And I saw him first.”

“Rivalry—a poor motive. Shula, we must take care of each other. As you look after me on the H. G. Wells side, I think about your happiness. Margotte is a much less sensitive person than you. If a man like Dr. Lai was mentally absent for weeks at a time, she’d never notice. Don’t you remember how Ussher used to speak to her?”

“He would tell her to shut up.”

“That’s right.”

“If a husband treated me like that, I couldn’t bear it.”

“Exactly. Wells also thought that people in scientific research made poor husbands.”

“He didn’t!”

“I seem to remember his saying that. Does Wallace really know the first thing about aerial photography?”

“He knows so many things. What do you think of his business idea?”

“There are so many bizarre, monstrous ways to make money. This one, dealing in plant names . . . well, some of the plants do have beautiful names. Take one like Gazania Pavonia.”

“Gazania Pavonia is darling. Well, come out in the sun and enjoy the weather. I feel much better when you take an interest in me. I’m glad you understand that I did the H. G. Wells thing for you. You aren’t going to give up the project, are you? It would lie a sin. You were made to write that book, and it would lie a masterpiece. Something terrible will happen if you don’t. Bad luck. I feel it inside.”

“I may try again.”

“You must.”

“To find a place for it among my preoccupations.”

“You should have no other preoccupations. Only creative ones.”

Mr. Sammler smelling of sandalwood soap started for the garden to wait for Emil. Perhaps the soap odor would evaporate in the sun. He didn’t have it in him to rinse again in the onyx bathroom. Too close in there.

“Shall I bring your coffee?”

“I’d like that, Shula. And my shoes are wet from last night.”

Black fluid, white light, green ground, the soil heated and soft, penetrated by new growth. In the grass, a massed shine of particles, a turf-buried whiteness, and from this dew, wherever the sun could reach it, the spectrum flashed: like night cities seen from the jet, or the galactic sperm of worlds.

“Here. Sit. Take these things off. You’ll catch cold. I can dry them in the oven.” Kneeling, she removed the wet shoes. “How can you wear them? Do you want to catch pneumonia?”

“Is Emil coming straight back or waiting for that lunatic?”

“I don’t know. Why is Wallace a lunatic?”

To a lunatic, how would you define a lunatic? And was he himself a perfect example of sanity? He was certainly not. They wrere his people—he was their Sammler. They shared the same fundamentals.

“Because lie flooded the house?” said Shula.

“Because he flooded it. Because now he’s flying around with his cameras.”

“He was looking for money.”

“How do you know that?”

“He told me so. He thinks there’s a fortune here. What do you think?”

“Supposedly Elya’s abortion money. I wouldn’t know. That is beyond me. But Wallace would have such fantasies—Ali Baba, Captain Kidd, or Tom Sawyer treasure fantasies. There was also Fafnir the famous dragon who slept on rubies, emeralds, diamonds.”

“Slept?”

“There’s something about a hoard of jewels that puts monsters to sleep. A figure, probably, for the torpor of mankind amidst the treasures of creation.”

“Or like women who are very beautiful but dumb?” said Shula.

“Something like.”

“But he says—no joking—there’s a fortune of money in the house. lie won’t rest until he finds it. Wouldn’t it be a little mean of Cousin Elya?”

“To die without saying where it is?”

“Yes.” Shula seemed slightly ashamed, now that her meaning was explicit.

“It’s up to him. He’ll do as he likes. I assume Wallace has asked you to help find this secret hoard.”

“Yes.”

“What did he do, promise a reward?”

“Yes, he did.”

“I don’t want you to meddle, Shula. Keep out of it.”

“Do you want a slice of toast, Father?”

He didn’t answer. She went away, taking his wet shoes.

Above New Rochelle, several small planes snored and buzzed. Probably Wallace was piloting one of them. Unto himself a roaring center. To us, a sultry beetle, a gnat propelling itself through blue acres. Sammler set back his chair into the shade. What had been in the sun a mass of foliage now resolved itself into separate leaves and trees. Then the silver-gray Rolls turned the corner of the high hedges. The geometrical, dignified, monogrammed radiator flashed its rods. Emil stepped out, looking upward. A yellow plane flew over the house.

“That must be Wallace for sure. He said he wras going to fly a Cessna.”

“I suppose it is Wallace.”

“He wanted to try the equipment on a place he knows.”

“Emil, I’ve been waiting to go to the station.”

“Of course, Mr. Sammler. But right now there aren’t many trains. I’d be glad to take you to town when I go.”

“When?”

“Very soon.”

“It would save time. I have to stop at home. You aren’t going back to the airport for Wallace?”

“He was going to land at Newark and take the bus.”

“Do you think he knows what he’s doing, Emil?”

“Without a license they wouldn’t let him fly.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“He’s the type of kid who wants to put things together his own way.”

“I’m not sure he’ll ever know . . .”

“He finds out as he goes along. That’s the idea, anyway.”

“I could have more confidence in the process. I don’t think he should be flying about today. I hope his feelings, whatever they are—rivalry with his father, or whatever—will not carry him away.”

“If it was my dad, I’d be at the hospital right now. It’s all different, now. We old guys have to go along.”

Lifting his cap to extend the shade over his eyes, he gazed after the speeding Cessna. He revealed his long, full-bottomed Lombard nose. He had the wolfish North Italian look. His skin was tight. Perhaps he had been, as Wallace insisted, Emilio, a fierce little driver for the Mafia. But he was now at the stage of life at which the once compact person begins to show an elderly frailty. This appeared in the shoulders and at the back of the neck, where the creases were deep. He was connected with the very finest, the supreme land vehicle. No competition with aircraft. He leaned against the fender, arms folded, making sure that no button scratched the finish. He held the hair-fragrant cap and tapped himself. He lightly struck the descending terraces, the large wrinkles of his forehead.

“I figure he wants shots from every altitude. He’s flying low, all right.”

“If he doesn’t hit the house, I’ll be very pleased.”

“He could rack up the perfect score, after flooding the joint. You wonder, will he want to top that?”

Mr. Sammler brought out the folded handkerchief to slip under the lenses before removing his glasses, covering his disfigurement from Emil. He was unable to stare up longer, his eyes were smarting.

“How can one guess?” said Sammler. “Yesterday he said that it was his unconscious self that opened the wrong pipe.”

“Yes, he talks that way to me, too. But I’ve been eighteen years with the Gruners and know that character. He’s very, very disturbed about the Doctor.”

“Yes, I think he is. I agree. But that little machine . . . like an ironing board with an eggbeater. Are you a family man, Emil—do you have children?”

“Two. Grown-up and graduated.”

“Do they love you?”

“They act like it.”

“That’s already a great deal.”

He was beginning to consider that he might not reach New York in time. Even Elya, asking for clippings, was delaying him. But—one thing at a time. Then Wallace’s engine grew louder. The air was parted. On one side nuisance, on the other a bad current going through the air, an insidious spring brightness.

Blasting, shining, clear yellow, the color of a bird’s bill, the Cessna made another, lower pass at the house. The trees threshed under it.

“He’s going to crash.”

“I don’t think he can buzz it any closer while snapping pictures,” Emil said.

“He must certainly be below the permissible point.”

The plane, rising, banking, grew smaller; you could hardly hear it now.

“Wasn’t he about to strike the chimney?”

“It looked close, but only from our angle,” said Emil.

“They shouldn’t let him fly.”

“Maybe that’s it.”

“Well, he’s gone. Shall we start?” said Sammler.

“I’m supposed to pick up the cleaning woman at eleven—I think the phone has been ringing.”

“The cleaning woman? Shula’s in the house. She will answer.”

“She’s not,” said Emil. “When I drove up I saw her in the road, walking along with her purse.”

“Going where?”

“I wouldn’t know. To the store, maybe. I’ll get the phone.”

The call was for Sammler. It was Margotte.

“Hello, Margotte. Well—?”

“We opened the lockers.”

“What did you find, what she said?”

“Not exactly, Uncle. In the first locker was one of Shula’s shopping bags, and in it there was only the usual stuff. Christian Science Monitors from way back, clippings, and some old copies of Life. Also a great deal of student-revolt literature. SDS. Dr. Lai was shocked. He was very upset.”

“Come, what about the second locker?”

“Thank God! We found the manuscript there.”

“Intact?”

“I think so. He’s looking through it.” She spoke away from the phone. “Are pages torn out? No, Uncle, he doesn’t think so.”

“Oh, I am very glad. For him, and for myself. For Shula also. But where is the copy she made on Widick’s machine? She must have misplaced or lost that. But Dr. Lai must be delighted.”

“Oh, he is. He’s just going to wait at the soda fountain. It’s such a chaos in Grand Central.”

“I wish you had knocked at my door. I must get into town.”

“Dear Uncle Sammler, we thought of that, but there was no room in tire car. We could have dropped you at the station.” What Sammler refrained from saying was that he and Lai might have dropped her, Margotte, at the station. But even now, with all the urgency he felt, he could not demand too much of her. No. She had her own aims, female, vital aims. “Govinda was so anxious to leave. He insisted. However, the trains are fast. Besides, I just phoned the hospital and talked to Angela. Elya’s condition is the same.”

“I know. I’ve spoken to him.”

“Well, you see? And he has to have some tests, so you would only have to wait if you were here. Now, I’m taking Dr. Lal home to lunch. There’s so much he doesn’t eat, and Grand Central is a madhouse. And it smells so of hot dogs. Because of him I notice it now for the first time.”

“Of course. Home is better. By all means.”

“Angela talked to me in a very mature way. She was sad, but she sounded so calm, and so aware.” Margotte’s kind and considerate views of people were sometimes terribly trying to Sammler. One must agree or stand convicted of harshness. “She said that Elya was asking for you. He very much wishes to see you.”

“I’d have been there now if it hadn’t been for these . . . these occurrences.”

Instead of occurrences he might have said this nonsense. But it wasn’t nonsense to Margotte. Not if she and Dr. Lai had found each other. If this had happened, it had happened because he, Sammler, was once acquainted with H. G. Wells and because Govinda Lai had become fascinated by the technical problems involved in colonizing the moon; and because Shula, who loved lectures, had pinched a manuscript and put it in her shopping bag with old Christian Science Monitors, and brought it to her father out of an instinct resembling that of a she-wolf with a cub to feed. Out of these absurdities Margotte might get herself a husband. Good. OK.

Further tests for Elya he took to be a tactic of the doctors. They protected their prestige by appearing to make real moves when there were no moves to make. But Elya himself was a doctor. He had lived by such gestures and had to submit to them now and without complaint. That certainly he would do. Now what of Elya’s unfinished business? Before the vessel wall gave out did he perhaps want to reminisce about a Cracow Sammler had never cared for? To talk about Uncle Hessid, who ground cornmeal and wore a derby and fancy vest? Sammler could recall no such individual. No. Elya with strong family feelings he could not gratify—the son who was a “high-IQ moron,” the daughter with the “fucked-out eyes”—had the anger of the dying. He was in a rage. He must be. Especially as, except for the one thing, this stab in the brain, he was perfectly well and vigorous, not worn out by moribund months. Forces, at full strength, to go and jump. Well, he wanted Sammler there to represent the family. To transmit something by his thin, lean presence, his small ruddy face, infinitely wrinkled on the one side. It was even more than piety for kinship which the Age, acting through his children, had leveled with ridicule, and knocked flat. Gruner called upon Sammler as more than an old uncle, one-eyed and growling peculiarly in Polish-Oxonian. He must have believed that he had some unusual power, magical perhaps, to affirm the human bond. What had he done to generate this belief? How had he induced it? By coming back from the dead, probably.

Margotte was talking. She had much to say and did not notice his silence.

By coming back, by preoccupation with the subject, the dying, the mystery of dying, the state of death. Also, by having been inside death. By having been given the shovel and told to dig. By digging beside his digging wife. She was faltering. He helped her. By this digging, not speaking, he tried to convey something to her and fortify her in the acceptance of death. But as it had turned out, he had prepared her for death without sharing it. She was killed, not he. She had passed the course, and he had not. The hole deepened, the sand clay and stones of Poland, their birthplace, opened up. He had just been blinded, he had a stunned face, and he was unaware that blood was coming from him till they stripped and lie saw it on his clothes. When they were as naked as children from the womb, and the hole was supposedly deep enough, the guns began to fire, and then the soil, a ton, two tons, thrown in; a sound of shovel metal, gritting. Strangely exceptional, Mr. Sammler had come crawling from this. It seldom occurred to him to consider this an achievement. Achievement? If the war had lasted a few months more he would have died like the others. As it was, he still had his consciousness, earthliness, human actuality—got up, breathed his earth-gases in and out, drank his coffee, consumed his share of goods, ate his roll from Zabar’s, put on certain airs—all human beings put on certain airs—took the 1ms to Forty-Second Street as if he had an occupation, ran into a black pickpocket. In short, a living man. Or one who had been sent back again to the end of the line. Waiting for something. Assigned to figure out certain things, to condense in short views some essence of experience, and because of this having a certain

wizardry ascribed to him. There was, in fact, unfinished business. How did business finish? We entered in the middle of the thing and somehow became convinced that we must conclude it. But how?

“So take your time,” said Margotte. “Have lunch with us.”

“I have to stop by, but I’ll go straight on.”

“You wouldn’t be in the way. Govinda likes you so much.”

“Does he?”

“He admires you. He says you’re very special. Anyhow, nothing should ever stop you from going to your own house.”

“I understand.”

“We love you like a father. Bruch comes right out and says so. But I know that even Wallace and Angela feel that way.”

“That may not have much relation to what I do. I feel distant much of the time. I am distant.”

“No, you seem, you really aren’t. Sometimes I am a pest. I’m a bother to the people I love. I was a pest to Ussher. He said so. Still we loved each other.”

“Well, well, thank you, Margotte. All right. Now let’s hang up.”

“I know you want to get away, and you don’t like long conversations on the phone, but there’s one thing more. You probably guess it. I’m insecure about my ability to interest a man like Govinda on the mental level.”

“Nonsense, Margotte, you had no trouble of that sort with Ussher. Don’t get on the mental level. But if you must, as you probably must, you can get him to react as Ussher did. Just charm him. You have already.”

“But you see, Ussher had those terrific outbursts. He would yell, ‘Shut up, you fool!’ ”

“Yes, but he also liked yelling. He enjoyed yelling at you like that.”

“I wouldn’t want to annoy Lai. He’s gentle and small. By the way, Uncle, is the cleaning woman there?”

“Who? Cleaning?”

“You say charwoman. As you say tinned fruit, not canned. So is that the char? I hear the vacuum running,”

“No, my dear, what you hear is our relative Wallace in his airplane. He is flying back and forth, snapping pictures of the house and the grounds.”

“Ah, so? But does he know how to do it?”

“That I cannot say. I trust he knows how. But he is starting a new enterprise and practicing on his own property. Don’t ask me more. We’ll see each other later.”

He found his sodden shoes baking in the kitchen. Simla had set them on the open door of the electric oven and the toes were smoking. That, too! When he had cooled them he labored to put them on with the handle of a tablespoon. The recovery of the manuscript, however, helped him to be patient with Simla. She did not actually step over the line. The usefulness of these shoes was at an end. They were ready for the dustbin. Not even Simla herself would want to retrieve them. And the immediate problem was not shoes, but how to get to New York. Many of Sammler’s nightmares involved reaching a destination. It could be almost as terrible in the waking state. Emil had already gone to fetch the charwoman. Taxis were listed in the Yellow7 Pages, but Sammler did not know which company to call, nor how much it might cost. He had only four dollars. Not to embarrass the Gruners you had to tip fifty cents at least. There was also fare to the city. Long-mouthed, silent, and with a hectic color, he tried to make the penny calculations. He saw himself, somewhere, eight cents short, trying to convince a policeman that he was not a panhandler. He had better wait. Perhaps Emil would meet Simla in the road, bring her back with the char. Simla would have money.

But Emil returned with the Croatian woman alone, and when he had shown her the water damage, he put on his cap, and behaving to Sammler like a chauffeur, not at all treating him like a poor relation, he opened the silver door.

“Would you like the air conditioner, Mr. Sammler?”

“Thank you, no, Emil.”

Examining the sky, Emil said, “It looks as if Wallace has all his pictures. He must be on his way to Newark. He might make it to the hospital before we do.”

“Yes, he’s gone, thank God.”

“How is Dr, Gruner, do you know?”

“I spoke to him,” Sammler said. “There seemed to be no change.”

“I know he wants to see you.” Sammler was already seated. “What’s the matter with your shoes?”

“I had trouble getting them on, and now I can’t lace them. There’s another pair at home. May we stop at the apartment?”

“The Doctor talks about you all the time.”

“Does he?”

“He’s got a very special thing about his uncle.”

“I love him, too,” said Sammler.

“He’s an affectionate fellow. I don’t want to badmouth Mrs. Gruner, but you know how she was.”

“Not demonstrative.”

Emil shut the door, and, very correct, walked behind the car and let himself into the driver’s seat. “Well, she was very correct,” he said. “As lady of the house she was first class. Like laid out with a rider. Reserved. Fair. OK. She had it all organized, the gardener, the laundress, the cook, me. The Doctor was grateful, being a kid from a rough neighborhood. She made him real Ivy. A gentleman.” Emil backed the slow, silver, high-bodied car, poor Elya’s car, out the drive. He gave Sammler the proper options of conversation or privacy. Sammler chose privacy and drew shut the glass panel.

Mr. Sammler’s root feeling (a prejudice, if you like) was that women with exceedingly skinny legs, like goalkeepers in a farfetched satire on soccer, could not be loving wives or passionate mistresses. Especially if they also had a bouffant hairstyle. Hilda had been an agreeable person, cheerful, amiable, high-pitched, even at times breezy. But strictly correct. Often the Doctor would demonstratively embrace her and say, “The world’s best w7ife. I love you, Hi!.” He would clasp her from the side and kiss her on the cheek. This was permitted— merely permitted. It was correct under a new dispensation which acknowledged the high value of warmth and impulsiveness. Undoubtedly Elya’s feelings were strong, unlike Hilda’s. But impulsive? There was also, in his conduct, a strong element of propaganda. It came to him, perhaps, from the American system as a wrhole and expressed a will to obedience in him. Everyone, to everyone, had a way of making propaganda for the good. Democracy was propagandistic in its style. Conversation was often nothing but the repetition of sound principle. But Elya had certainly been disappointed in his wife. Sammler hoped that he had love affairs. With a nurse, perhaps? Or a patient who had become a mistress? Sammler did not recommend this for everyone, but in Elya’s case it would have been beneficial. However, nothing of the sort had ever happened. No. The doctor was respectable. And it’s a doomed man that woos so much affection.

It was full spring. The Cross County, the Sawmill River, the Henry Hudson thick with reviving grass and dandelions, the oven of the sun baking green life again. One was both sickened and strengthened by this swirling, the roughness and the srveetness of it. Then—Mr. Sammler’s elbow at rest on the gray cushion, and holding the back of one hand in the palm of the other—then there were the gray, yellow, homogeneous highways, from the engineering standpoint so impressive, from the political viewpoint evident stupidities. But as someone had said about statesmen, the foremost of the Gadarene swine. Who had? He couldn’t remember. Yet he was not cynical about these matters. He was not against civilization, nor against institutions, nor against order. When the grave was dug, institutions and the rest had not been for him. No order intervened for Antonina. But there was no need to thrust oneself personally into every general question—to assail Churchill, Roosevelt for having known (and surely they did know) what was happening and failing to help Antonina. Emotions of justified reproach, supremacy in blame made no appeal to Sammler. The individual was the supreme judge of nothing. Because he had to find tilings out for himself he was necessarily the intermediate judge. But never final. Existence was not accountable to him. Indeed not. Nor would he ever put together the inorganic, organic, natural, bestial, human, and superhuman in any dependable arrangement, but however fascinating and original his genius, only idiosyncratically, in a shaky scheme, mainly decorative or ingenious. Of course at the moment of launching from this planet to another something was ended, finalities were demanded, summaries. Everyone appeared to feel this need. Unanimously all tasted, and each in his own way, tire flavor of the end of things-as-known. And by way of summary, perhaps, each accented more strongly his own subjective style and the practices by which he was known. Thus Wallace, on the day of destiny for his father, flew in the Cessna snapping photographs. Thus Shula, hiding from Sammler, was staying in the house undoubtedly to look for treasure. Thus Angela, making more experiments in sensuality, smearing all with her female fluids. Thus Eisen with his art, the Negro with his penis. And in the series, but not finally, himself, with his condensed views. Eliminating the superfluous. Identifying the necessary.

Looking from the window, passing all in state, in an automobile costing upward of twentythousand dollars, Mr. Sammler still saw that together with the end of things-as-known the feeling for new beginnings was nevertheless very strong. Marriage for Margotte, America for Eisen, business for Wallace, love for Govinda. And away from this deathburdened, rotting, spoiled, sullied, exasperating, sinful earth but already looking toward the moon and Mars with plans for founding cities.

He tapped the glass partition with a coin. The tollbooth was approaching.

“It’s OK, Mr. Sammler.”

Sammler insisted, “Here, Emil, take it, take it.”

Thought and observation helped Sammler bear his feelings. In the deepest stratum they were very dark, and the current much too swift. This speed and darkness he blamed on his personal experience which had taught him, naturally, to exaggerate and to expect dire things.

Measured by watch hands the trip was brief. In the off-hour, traffic moved quickly on the gray and yellow masterwork roads. Emil knew exactly how to drive. He was the faultless driver of the faultless car. He entered the city at 125th Street, under the ultrahigh railroad bridge that crossed the meat wholesalers’ area. Sammler had some affection for this intricate bridge and the structural shadows it threw. Reflected in the shine of the meat trucks. The sides of beef and pork, gauze-wrapped, bloodspotted. Things edible would always be respected by a man who had nearly starved to death. The laborers, too, in white smocks, broad and heavy, a thickset personnel, butcher’s men. By the river the smell was equivocal. You were not sure whether the rawness came from tidewater or the blood. And here Sammler once saw a rat he took for a dachshund. The breeze out of this corner had the fragrance of meat-dust. That was sprayed from the band saws that went through frozen fat, through marbled red or icy porphyry, and whizzed through bone. Try to stroll here. The pavements were waxed with fat.

Then a right turn, downtown on Broadway. The street rose while the subway was lowering. Up, the brown masonry; and down, the black shadow and steel tracks. Then tenements, the Puerto Rican squalor. Then the university, squalid in a different way. It was already too warm in the city. Spring lost the touch of winter and at once got the summer rankness. Between the pillars at 116th Street Sammler looked into the brick quadrangles. He half expected Eeffer to pass, or the bearded man in Levi’s who had said he couldn’t come, just a day and a half before. He saw growing green. But green in the city had lost its association with sanctuary. The old-time poetry of parks was banned, with obsolete thickness of shade leading to private meditation. The truth was now slummier and called for litter in the setting—leafy reverie? A thing of the past.

Except on special occasions (Feffer’s lecture, day before yesterday) Sammler never came this way anymore. Walking for exercise, he didn’t venture this far uptown. And now, from Elya’s Rolls-Royce, he inspected the subculture of the underprivileged (terminology recently acquired in the New York Times), its Caribbean fruits, its naked chickens with loose necks and shut eyes blue, the wavering fumes of diesel and hot lard. Then 96th Street, tilted at all four corners, the kiosks and movie houses, the ramparts of wire-fastened newspaper bundles, and the colors of panic waving. Broadway, even when there was some urgency, hurrying to see Elya for possibly the last time, always challenged him. He was never up to it. And why should there be any contest? But there was, every time. For something was stated here. By a convergence of all minds and all movements the conviction transmitted by this crowd seemed to be that reality was a terrible tiling, and that the final truth about mankind was overwhelming and crushing. This vulgar, cowardly conclusion, rejected by Sammler with all his heart, was the implicit local orthodoxy, what the jargon called consensus, the populace itself being metaphysical and living out this interpretation of reality and this view of truth. Sammler could not swear that this was really accurate, but Broadway at g6th Street gave him this sense of things. Life, when it was like this, all question-and-answer from the top ot intellect to the very bottom, was really a state of singular dirty misery. When it was all question-andanswer it had no charm.

Life when it had no charm was entirely question-andanswer. This poverty of soul, its abstract state, you could see in faces on the street. He had also a touch of the same disease—the disease of the single self explaining what was what and who was who. The results could be foreseen, foretold. So, then, brought down Broadway in high style, Sammler visited his own (what did Wallace call it?) his own turf. As a tourist.

And then Emil, by way of Riverside Drive, came around and set him down before the great, used, soiled mass of conveniences where he and Margotte lived. The time was half past twelve.

“It shouldn’t take long. Elya asked for some papers.”

There was a tightness at his heart. The remedy was fuller breathing, but he could not get his chest to rise and fall. Something had locked it. Margotte and Govinda were not back. The pinup lamp burned needlessly in the foyer above the sofa with its maple armrests, the bandanna covers. There was a certain peace in the house. Or did it seem so because he had no time to sit down? He changed shoes, shook a few dollars from his jar, put the newspaj:)er clippings into his wallet. On his desk was a bottle of vodka. Shula provided this out of the wages Elya paid her. It was excellent, Stolichnaya, imported from the Soviet Union. Sammler made use of it about once a month. He uncorked the bottle now and drank a glass. It went down burning and he made a face. First aid for the old. Then lie opened his door to the backstairs, slipping the latch lest one of the strong drafts there should come slam-

ming and lock him out. He put his old shoes into the incinerator-drop. He didn’t want Shula arguing that she had done them no harm with the electric oven. They had had it.

In the lobby he met Lai and Margotte. They had been shopping.

“Did you know, Uncle, that all along Broadway in the Nineties there are Oriental food shops? Dr. Lai has bought some marvelous things. He’s going to teach me how to use Indian seasoning.”

For once the lobby television worked. Gray and whitish figures, unsteady on the vertical hold, wavered and fizzed. Were they, the three of them, forming that picture? He couldn’t make it out. This lobby was like certain underground carpeted rooms in locked theaters—spaces to shun. It was less than

two days ago that the pickpocket had forced him, belly-to-back, across this same brass-bolted rug into the corner beside the Florentine table. Unbuttoning his puma-colored coat in puma silence to show himself. This was the sort of fellow called by Goethe eine Natur, a primary force.

“And so, your document is safe,” said Sammler.

“I am pleased, of course,” said Govinda. “I also was careless. I am to blame, too.”

His head was set low between raised bony shoulders. His feet in long shoes twisted outward. The beard was probably ill advised, shortening him further and making him look slightly hunchbacked. But the eyes were rich and fine. The man was nice. As for Margotte, with German charm, she was smiling at them both. Her teeth were small, bumpy, and clean. The skin stretched earward, and the dark blue of ber eyes extended into the pleasure creases. Before the much taller Mr. Sammler these two people, delighted with each other, seemed to announce how lucky they were. Lovers like to parade their good fortune. Let the world see that Love is still Love. Then, also, Margotte was Sammler’s benefactress, he was the elder, the responsible male, the relative, the friend of Ussher Arkin, and he was supposed to satisfy himself that she was not about to make a fool of herself. He approved. To Sammler, her low forehead, further reduced by the straw hat, seemed sweet. If silly, too, that silliness was normal and tolerable. She sent the old man no secret pleas, no appeals for his sanction. She would be all right, Margotte. Unless Govinda turned out to have some frantic Indian neuroses which Occidental eyes could not detect.

“Uncle, come up and join us.”

“No, no. Emil is waiting.”

“Oh, of course. You must go to the hospital. I am sorry.”

“I wish to say again that your daughter was not entirely to blame,” said Govinda. “I should never have given the manuscript to the first stranger who came up.”

“Excuse me, but I have no time now. I have to get downtown. Good-bye.”

He stopped Emil from getting out of the car.

“I can work the door myself.”

“We’re off, then. Open the bar, pour yourself a drink.”

“1 hope the traffic will not be too thick.”

“We’ll go straight down Broadway. Turn on tire TV.”

“Thanks. No TV.”

Again Sammler smelled the enclosed, fabricscented air. He did not make himself comfortable. The tightness of heart was greater than before. It was aggravated by delays, for the traffic was unusually heavy, jammed up at the lights. Delivery

trucks were doubleparked, triple-parked. The use of private cars in Manhattan had never seemed so irrational and harmful. He was swept by impatience toward the drivers of these large, purposeless cars but stopped himself, decided to cast out such feelings. Conveyed in air-conditioned silence by the roarless power of the engine, he sat forward with his thighs upon the backs of his hands. Evidently Elya thought that he owed it to himself to maintain this Rolls. He couldn’t have had much use for such a prestigious machine. It wasn’t as if he were a Broadway producer, an international banker, a tobacco millionaire. Where did it take him? To Widick’s law office. To Hayden Stone and Company, where he had an account. On High Holy Days, he went to the Temple on Fifth Avenue. On 57th Street were his tailors, Felsher and Kitto. The Temple and the tailors had been selected by Hilda. Sammler would have sent him to another tailor. Elya had a tall figure and wide stiff shoulders, too wide, considering the flatness of his body. His buttocks were too high. I.ike my own, for that matter. Sammler, in the sounddeadened cabinet of the Rolls, saw the resemblance.

Felsher and Kitto made Elya too dapper. The trousers were too narrow. The virile bulge that appeared when he sat was inappropriate. He used matching ties and handkerchiefs by Countess Mara, and sharp, swaggering shoes which connected him less with medicine than with Las Vegas, with racing, broads, and singers in the rackets. Tilings equivocally related to his kindness. Swaying his shoulders like a gunman. Wearing double-vented jackets. Playing gin and canasta for high stakes and talking out of the corner of the mouth. Detesting kulturny physicians who wanted to discuss Heidegger or Wittgenstein. Great doctors had no time for that, and the rest were phonies, and it was a racket. He was a keen spotter of rackets. He could easily afford this car, but had none of the life that went with it. No Broadway musicals, no private jet. His one glamorous eccentricity was to fly to Israel on short notice and stroll into the King David Hotel without baggage, his hands in his pockets. Of course, thought Sammler, Elya was also peculiar, surgery was psychically peculiar. To enter an unconscious body with a knife? To take out organs, sew in the flesh, splash blood? Not everyone could do that. And perhaps he kept the car for Emil’s sake. What would Emil do if there were no Rolls? Now there was the likeliest answer of all. The protective instinct was strong in Elya. Undisclosed charities were his pleasure. He had many stratagems of benevolence. I have reason to know. How very odd—astonishing, the desire to relieve and protect us. It was astonishing because Elya the surgeon also despised incompetence and weakness. Only great and powerful instincts worked so deeply and deviously, coming out on the side of things despised. All these master forces were in part hypocritical. But how could Elya afford to have rigid ideas of strength? He himself was a hooked man. Hilda had been far stronger than he. In the Mafioso swagger were pretensions of lawless liberty. But it was little Hilda with the rodlike legs and the bouffant hair and faultless hemlines and sweet refinements who had had the stronger will. Wallace was wiser than he knew when he said that his father was hooked. By the aneurysm? He was hooked long before. And there had never been any help for Elya. Who was there to help him? He was the sort of individual from whom help emanated. There were no arrangements for return. However, it would soon be over. It was about to wash away.

As for the world, was it really about to change? What, by the fact of moving into space, away from earth? There would be changes of heart? There would be new conduct? Why, because we were tired of the old conduct? That reason was not sufficient. Why, because the world was breaking up? Well, America, if not the world. Well, staggering, if not breaking.

Emil was driving more steadily again, below 72nd Street. The traffic had eased. There were no truck deliveries to impede it. Lincoln Center was approaching, and at Columbus Circle, the Huntington Hartford Building, which Bruch called the Taj Mahole. Wasn’t that funny! said Bruch. At his own jokes, he rolled with laughter. Apelike he put his hands on his paunch and closed his eyes, letting the tongue come blindly out of his head. What a building! All holes. But that was some lunch they put down for only three bucks. He raved about the bill of fare—Hawaiian chicken and saffron rice. Finally he had taken the old man there. It was indeed a grand lunch. But Lincoln Center Sammler had seen only from the outside. He was cold to the performing arts, and shunned large crowds. Exhibitions, electrical or nude, he had attended only because it amused Angela to keep him up to date. But he passed by the pages of the Times that dealt with painters, singers, fiddlers, or playactors. He saved his reading eye for better things. He had noted with hostile interest crews wrecking the nice old tenements and greasy spoons, and the new halls rising. Now as they were nearing the Center, Emil stopped the car and pushed back the glass slide.

“Why are you stopping?”

Emil said, “There’s something happening across the street.” He looked, wrinkling his face deeply, as if this explanation must really be heeded. But why, at such a time, should he have stopped for anything? “Don’t you recognize those people, Mr. Sammler?”

“Which? Has someone scraped someone? Is it a traffic thing?” Of course he lacked authority to tell Emil to drive on, but he gestured, nevertheless, with the back of his hand. He waved Emil forward.

“No, I think you’ll want to stop, Mr. Sammler. I see your son-in-law there. Isn’t that him, with the big green bag? And isn’t that Wallace’s partner?”

“Feffer?”

“That fat kid. The pink face, the beard. He’s fighting. Can’t you see?”

“Where is this? In the street? Is it Eisen?”

“It’s the other fellow who’s in trouble. The pink face, big build, the beard. I think he’s getting hurt.”

On the east side of the slant street a bus had pulled to the curb at a wide angle, obstructing traffic. Sammler could see now that someone was struggling there, in the midst of a crowd.

“One of those is Feffer?”

“Yes, Mr. Sammler.”

“Wrestling with someone—with the bus driver?”

“Not the driver, no. I think not. Somebody else.”

“Then I must go and see what it is.”

The craziness of these delays! Almost conscious, almost intentional, they were breaking down every barrier of patience. They got to you at last. Why this, why Feffer? It was not Feffer with unfinished business. But he couldn’t pass by. He could see now what Emil meant. Feffer was pinned to the front of a bus. That was Feffer on the wide bumper. Sammler began to pull at the handle of the door.

“Not on the street side, Mr. Sammler. You’ll be hit.”

But Sammler, his patience lost, was already hurrying through traffic.

Feffer, in the midst of the crowd, was fighting the black man, the pickpocket. There were twenty people at least, and more were stopping, but no one was about to interfere. Struggling in the black man’s grip, Feffer was forced back against the big cumbersome machine. His head was knocking against the windshield below the empty driver’s seat. The man was squeezing him, and Feffer was scared. He resisted, he defended himself, but he was inept. He was overmatched. Of course. How could it be otherwise? His bearded face was frightened. Upturned, the broad cheeks flamed, and his wide-spaced brown eyes appealed for help. Or were thinking what to do. What should he do? Like a man groping in a stream for a lost object, while staring into air, mouth gaping in his beard. But he woidd not give up the Minox. One arm was held straight up, out of reach. The weight of the big body in the fawn-colored suit crushed him. He had had the bad luck to get his candid shot. The black man was snatching at the Minox. To get the tiny camera, to give Feffer a few kicks in the ribs, in the belly—what else would he have had in mind? Leaving, without haste if possible, before the police arrived. But Feffer, near panic, still was obstinate. Shifting his grip the Negro grabbed and twisted his collar, holding him as he had held Sammler with his forearm against the wall. He choked Feffer with the neckband. The Dior shades, round and bluish, had not dropped off. Feffer had caught the spouting red necktie in his fist, but could do nothing with it.

How shall we save this prying, stupid, idiotic boy? He may be hurt. And I must go. There’s no time. “Some of you,” Sammler ordered. “Here! Help him. Break this up.” But of course some of you did not exist. No one would do anything, and suddenly Sammler felt extremely foreign—voice, accent, syntax, mode, spirit, everything foreign.

Emil had seen Eisen. Sammler looked for him now. And there he was, smiling and very pale. He was evidently waiting to be discovered. Then he seemed delighted.

“What are you doing here?” said Sammler in Russian.

“And you, Father-in-law—what are you doing?”

“I? I am rushing to the hospital to see Elya.”

“Yes. And I was with my young friend on the bus when he took the picture. Of a purse being opened. I saw it myself.”

“What a stupid thing!”

Eisen held his ereen baize bag. It contained his sculptures or medallions. Those Dead Sea pieces— iron pyrites, or whatever they were.

“Let him give up the camera. Why doesn’t he give it to him?” said Sammler.

“But how do we prevail upon him?” said Eisen in a tone of: discussion.

“Get a policeman,” Sammler said. He would have liked to say, too, “Stop this smiling.”

“But I don’t know English.”

“Then help the boy.”

“You help him, Father-in-law. I am a foreigner and a cripple. You’re older, true. But I just got to this country.”

Sammler said to the pickpocket, “Let go. Let him go.”

The man’s large face turned. New York was reflected in the lenses, under the stiff curves of the homburg. Perhaps he recognized Sammler. But nothing was said.

“Give him the camera, Feffer. Hand it over,” Sammler said.

Feffer, with a stare of shock and appeal, looked as if he expected soon to lose consciousness. He clid not bring down his arm.

“I say let him have that stupid thing. He wants the film. Don’t be an idiot.”

Feffer may have been holding out in expectation of a squad car, waiting for the police to save him. It was hard otherwise to explain his resistance. Considering the Negro’s strength—his crouching, squeezing, intense animal pressing power, the terrific swelling of the neck and the tightness of the buttocks as he rose on his toes. In straining alligator shoes! In fawn-colored trousers! In a belt that matched his necktie—a crimson belt! How consciousness was lashed by such a fact!

“Eisen!” said Sammler, furious.

“Yes, Father-in-law.”

“I ask you to do something.”

“Let them do something.” He motioned with the baize bag to the bystanders. “I only came to America forty-eight hours ago.”

Again Mr. Sammler turned to the crowd, staring hard. Wouldn’t anyone help? So even now—now, still!—one believed in such things as help. Where people were, help might be. It was an instinct and a reflex. (An unexasperated hope?) So, briefly examining faces, passing from face to face among the people along the curb—red, pale, swarthy, lined taut or soft, grim or adream, eyes bald-blue, iodinereddish, coal-seam black—how strange a quality their inaction had. They were expecting gratification oh! at last! of teased, cheated, famished needs. Someone was going to get it! Yes. And the black faces? A similar desire. Though there was nothing to hear, Sammler had the sense that something was barking away. Then it struck him that what united everybody was a beatitude of presence. As if it were—yes—blessed are the present. They are here and not here. They are present while absent. So they were waiting in that ecstatic state. What a supreme privilege! And there was only Eisen to break up the fight. Which was, after all, an odd sort of fight. Sammler did not believe that the black man would choke Feffer into unconsciousness; he woidd only go on screwing the collar tighter until Feffer surrendered the Minox. Of course, there was always a chance that the black man might become more violent. But there was something worse here than this event itself, namely, the feeling that stole over Sammler.

It was a feeling of horror and grew in strength, grew and grew. What was it? How was it to be put? He was a man who had come back. He had rejoined life. He was near to others. But in some essential way he was also companionless. He was old. He lacked physical force. He knew what to do, but had no power to execute it. He had to turn to someone else—to an Eisen! a man himself very far out on another track, an orbiter of very different centers. Sammler was powerless. To be so powerless was death. And suddenly he saw himself not so much standing as strangely leaning, as reclining, and peculiarly in profile, and as a past person. That was not himself. It was someone—and this smote him—poor in spirit. Someone between the human and not-human states, between content and emptiness, between full and void, meaning and not-meaning, between this world and that world or no world.

“Eisen, separate them,” he said, “He’s been choked enough. The police will come, and then there will be arrests. I must go. I can’t wait. Get between them. Please. Just take the camera. Then it will stop.”

Then handsome Eisen, shrugging, grinning, making a crooked movement of the shoulders, working them free from the tight denim, stepped away from Sammler as though he were doing a very amusing thing at his special request. He drew up the sleeve of his right arm. The dark hairs were thick. Then shortening his grip on the cords of the baize bag he swung it very wide, swung with full force and struck the pickpocket on the side of the face. It was a hard blow. The glasses flew. The hat. Feffer was not immediately freed. The man seemed to rest on him. Obviously stunned. Eisen was a laborer, a foundry worker. He had the strength not only of his trade but also of madness. There was something limitless, unbounded, about the way he squared off, took the man’s measure, a kind of sturdy viciousness. Everything went into that blow, discipline, murderousness, everything. What have I done! This is much worse! This is the worst thing yet. Sammler thought Eisen had crushed the man’s face. And he was now about to hit him again, with his medallions. The black man had dropped Feffer and was turning. His lips came away from his teeth. Eisen had gashed his skin and the cheek was bleeding and swelling. Eisen clinked the weights from his wrist, spread his legs. “He’ll kill that cock sucker!” someone in the crowd said.

“Don’t hit him, Eisen. I never said that. I tell you no!” said Sammler.

But the bag of weights was speeding from the other side, very wide but accurate. It struck more heavily than before and knocked the man down. He did not drop. He lowered himself as though he had decided to lie in the street. The blood ran in points on his cheek. The terrible metal had cut through the baize.

Eisen now heaved his weapon back over the shoulder, prepared to slam it straight down on the man’s skull. Sammler seized his arm and twisted him away. “You’ll murder him. Do you want to beat out his brains?”

“You said! Father-in-law.”

They quarreled in Russian before the crowd.

“You said this cannot go on. I had to do something. You had to go. I must do something. So I did.”

“I didn’t say to hit him with these damned irons. I didn’t say to hit him at all. You’re crazy, Eisen, crazy enough to murder him.”

The pickpocket had tried to brace himself on his elbows. His body now rested on his doubled arms. He bled thickly on the asphalt.

“I am horrified!” Sammler said.

Eisen, still handsome, curly, still with the smile, though now panting, and the peculiar set of the toeless feet, seemed amused at Sammler’s ludicrous inconsistency. Ele said, “You can’t hit a man like this just once. When you hit him you must really hit him. Otherwise he’ll kill you. You know. We both fought in the war. You were a Partisan. You had a gun. So don’t you know?” His laughter, his logic, laughing and reasoning at Sammler’s absurdities made him repeat until lie stuttered. “If inin. No? If out—out. Yes? No? So answer.”

It was the reasoning that sank Sammler’s heart completely. “Where is Feffer?” he said, and turned away.

Feffer, resting his forehead against the bus, was getting back his breath. Putting it on, no doubt. To Sammler this exaggeration was revolting.

Damn these—these occasions! he was thinking. Damn them, it was Elya who needed him. It was Elya lie wanted to see. To whom there was something to say.

Now he heard someone ask, “Where are the cops?”

“Busy. On the take. Writing tickets, someplace. Those shits. When you need ‘em.”

“There’s plenty of blood. They better bring an ambulance.”

The light upon the dull kinks, the porous carbon-cake of the man’s head, still dropping blood, showed his eye shut. But he wished to stand. He made efforts.

Eisen said to Sammler, “This is the man, isn’t it? The man you told about who followed you? Who showed you his jinjik?”

“Get away from me, Eisen.”

“What should I do?”

“Go away. Get away from here. You’re in trouble,” said Sammler. He spoke to Feffer, “What have you to say now?”

“I caught him in the act. Please wait awhile, he hurt my throat.”

“Nonsense, don’t put on agony with me. This is the man. He’s badly hurt.”

“I swear he was picking the purse, and I got two shots of him.”

“Did you, now!”

“You seem angry, sir. Why are you so angry with me?”

“I have no time to tell you. But it’s outrageous. You went after this man to molest him and exploit him, to sell his picture!”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“I blame myself. Now he’s all in blood. Now look at him.”

“Listen, I don’t know what to do if it’s going to turn into a thing. I don’t want to get mixed up in this. I’d have to testify against a black man. And here are the cops. They’ll take us all in.”

Sammler now saw the squad car, the whirling roof light, and the policemen coming out, at a saunter, pushing away the crowd.

Emil drew Sammler away to the side of the bus and said, “You don’t want any of this. We have to go.”

“Yes, Emil, of course.”

They crossed the street. Avoid getting mixed up with the police. They might detain him for hours. He should never have stopped at the flat. He should have gone directly to the hospital.

“I think I would like to sit in the front with you, Emil.”

“Why sure. Are you all shook up?” He helped him in. Emil’s own hand was shaking, and he himself had trembling arms and legs. An extraordinary weakness came up the legs from beneath.

The great engine ignited. Coolness poured from the air conditioner. Then the Rolls entered traffic.

“What was all that about?”

“I wish I knew,” said Sammler.

“Who was that black character?”

“Poor man, I can’t really say who he is.”

“He took two mean wallops, there.”

“Eisen is brutal.”

“What did he have in that bag?”

“I think what they call fool’s gold. Pieces of metal. Medallions. I feel responsible, Emil, because I appealed to Eisen, because I wanted so badly to get to Dr. Gruner.”

“Well, maybe the guy has a thick skull. I guess you never saw anybody hitting to kill. You want to lie down in back for ten minutes? I can stop.”

“Do I look sick? No, Emil. But I think I will shut my eyes.”

Sammler was in a rage with Eisen. He bad given those atrocious blows to a better man than himself. It wasn’t hard to be better than Eisen. And you had to reckon in Eisen’s madness; he counted as a war victim, even though he might anyhow have been mad. But he belonged in the mental hospital. Homicidal maniac: artist-type. Maybe this was why his life studies had a mortuary look. But why was the black man better? The impression was based on a certain princeliness—the clothing, the Dior shades, the sumptuous matching colors. And his manner, barbarous-majestical. Cornering a poor old white man, but not violent, making a superior, noble gesture. He showed his patent of nobility and let the obvious conclusion be drawn—don’t fight the king. But then Eisen, with his metal worker’s muscles, gave him those two atrocious blows with his bag. And the art was not consummate enough, but those crusted, congested spiny lumps of metal took further glory from the red of blood and from the ecstasy of murder. Mr. Sammler had reason to know something about this. If only, thought Sammler, Shula and Eisen had been a little less mad. Just a little less. They would have gone on playing casino in Haifa, those two cuckoos, in their whitewashed Mediterranean cage. For they used to get the cards out when they weren’t scandalizing the neighborhood with their screams and slaps. But there was so much latitude for such individuals. They had the right to be considered normal. They had liberty of movement on top of it. So then, poor Eisen flew across with his works. Poor soul, poor dog-laughing Eisen. He was just mad enough to be a medium, and in his turbulence you could see how things were working out. Jews, driven to slaughter as if they hadn’t been human, proving that they were human because they could slaughter, too. After all, a part of the species demonstrating that they were not lambs but butchers, also. Capable of spilling blood.

Then, then, dear brethren, let us all be human together. So let us all be in the great fun fair, and do this droll mortality with one another. All terror and all sickness use as batteries to light things up. Be entertainers of your near and dear. Treasure hunts, flying circuses, comical thefts, medallions, wigs and saris, beards. Charity, all of it, sheer charity, when you consider the state of things, the blindness of the living man, the pain of his coming to be, the suffocation of deepest needs, the shocking incompleteness of things good, the limited moves even of genius, the powers of nonsense and inconsequence. Let us divert each other w’hile we live!

“I’ll park here and go up with you,” said Emil. “They can give me a ticket if they like.”

“The Doctor is not back?” said Emil.

Obviously not. Angela sat alone in the hospital room.

“Then OK. I’ll be standing by if you want me.”

“I seem to be smoking three packs a day. I’m out of cigarettes, Emil. I can’t even concentrate on a newspaper.”

“Benson & Hedges, right?”

When he left she said, “I don’t like to send an elderly person on errands.”

Sammler made no reply. The Augustus John hat was in his hand. He didn’t lay it on the clean newmade bed.

“Emil is part of Daddy’s gang. They’re very attached.”

“What is happening?”

“I don’t know. He needed tests, Dr. Cosbie told me, but I can’t see why tests should take so long. It’s been two hours. I suppose this Cosbie knows his stuff, but lie’s cross, he’s cold. He behaves as if he ran a military academy in the South. I don’t like the magnolia charm at best, but he’s repulsive. Sit down, Uncle. Take the straight chair. I know you like that better.”

Sammler as he drew the seat under him and out of the light—he would not sit facing a window through which one could see nothing but blue sky—asked her where Wallace was. “He was going to land at Newark.”

“I’ve got to tell you about Brother,” she said. “When did you last see him?”

“When? In the flesh last night. And this morning in the sky.”

“I got Margotte’s report on the flood. Bad, Uncle?”

“Middling bad.”

“Middling bad wasn’t good enough today.”

“Has he hurt himself?”

“He never really hurts himself. He should have been a stunt man in Hollywood. Elis bag is mischief, but getting off with scratches. Let me tell you the latest.” Today Angela’s face had little color. It was calm and smooth. She raised her large, light-brown brows. The wings, thought Sammler, of a lame expressive power.

“Apparently he’s had an accident.”

“One of his close things. It’s already an item on the radio, and I was told about it on the phone. He scraped a house with the plane and knocked off his landing gear.”

“The house? Your house?”

“A big Westchester house. Whose I don’t know. They really ought to put my kid brother away.”

“But he landed? Without wheels?”

“He made a belly landing. He damaged the machine, smashed a lot of equipment. I don’t know what the insurance arrangements are. As usual, I suppose it’ll cost a few thousand to square it.”

“And he himself?”

“He cut his cheek, and had to be taken for stitches. He seemed very pleased.”

“I’m pleased, too, that lie’s not hurt. You’ve talked to him, then?”

“He had some man call to tell me about the crash, and what a beautiful landing he made. Then he came on himself, in person, with a story about his stitches. He was very high.”

“I know the state. His vivacity.”

“He says he’ll have a scar, and he was overjoyed. He must have talked for half an hour.”

“He does like long telephone conversations. I know that.”

“Hours and hours, isn’t that right? More like a girlfriend. I used to think when I went along that I was doing some good, relating to him. All the discussions we never had face to face.”

“So he very nearly killed himself today.”

“He’ll be along by and by, after he fills out the papers and answers the cpiestions about low flying. He doesn’t want to lose his license. He’s going to claim engine trouble. First thing he thought of.”

Angela looked simple today. She wore a lownecked white satin blouse and her skirt was exceedingly short—a miniskirt. No, Sammler corrected the term, a microskirt. She had pulled back her frosted hair and fastened it at the back, leaving the shape of the face entirely clear. Large simple gold earrings were her only ornament. Her composure, her bearing, her skin full of female skinqualities (the presence of hormones, which males note), her heavy eyes, combined to give an impression of unusual immobility. It seemed difficult for her to wrinkle her forehead, to raise her brows. There was no odor of Arabian musk, her favorite perfume. Instead her female effluence was very strong today, a salt odor, something from inside the woman. Elya’s bitter words had had their effect on Sammler. He could not look at her eyes without thinking of her father’s words, imagining her in bed, and—a worse fancy—the white of semen on her mouth. But these were, curiously, images nearly devoid of prejudice. Or very nearly. One must change one’s outlook. The past perhaps exaggerated the seriousness of these things. There was a new dispensation he tried to teach himself (current, if not altogether new), which saw no wrong in any sexual practices. All positive; no sin; no wrong. The real definition of good and evil only Nature could set. Thou Nature art my Goddess. This a wicked bastard had said. But there were no wickeds now, no bastards, either.

“Did you speak to your father today?” said Sammler.

“I spoke. That doesn’t mean that he said anything to me. He’s angry about Horricker, about Mexico. He can’t forget it. I thought he was cruel today, really cruel.”

“It might have been a good idea for Horricker to visit Elya. Just to show that he didn’t take it too much to heart. Does he take it to heart, by the way?”

“He says so. No, Uncle, I won’t ask him. It would seem like a pitch by me—using Daddy’s illness to woo him back.”

“And you don’t want him now.”

“Well . . . yes, yes and no. I’m hurt, too.”

Was there already a successor in view? She was a healthy young woman. Health was what they called this. She was healthy, and healthy young women have their needs. Angela appeared to guess what he was thinking, and lightly raised her shoulders—the blond tan, the Mexican sun—to dismiss his criticism or confirm that she meant what she said about Wharton. Had her feelings been plucked out overnight? Was that possible? She was, really, a beauty. Perhaps a little too large; her thighs, nearly all shown, were big, almost gross. But they were— she was—beautiful. Horricker would suffer when he knew that he had lost her.

“Look. Wharton is no kid. He understood the proposition. He went into it with eyes wide open. He got his bang out of it, and then decided to blame me. I had to take the blame, but he liked that little broadie. That was clear enough, believe me. Then he got on the plane, and it occurred to him that I had got my kicks out of it, too. Then he began to turn on me, I don’t care for that. He’s a man of weak character. Either you accept the modern definitions and rules or you don’t. You can’t have it both ways. I feel really bad about Wharton. But if he wants me back, he’ll have to make a move, too. Not just give me a bad character.”

“I was thinking only that your father likes Horricker. He would have been glad.”

“That’s up to Horricker. If he wanted to come, it would be nice.”

“Now, do you think, Angela—you said Elya was angry today—do you think your father could be pleased by such a costume?”

“This skirt, you mean?”

“It’s very short. This is a hospital, he is sick. My opinion may be worthless, but it seems bad judgment to wear that kind of sexual kindergarten dress. It’s not the way a dying man wants to see his daughter. As Baby Doll. Especially in view of the other difficulty.”

“Do you really think it could matter? Impossible. It never even occurred to me.”

“Indeed?”

“And I’m not sure I care for the way you put it.”

“I coidd undoubtedly have put it better.”

“Father always liked the way I dress.”

“He may have liked it.”

“Sometimes a parent—a father—wants you to do such things for him, if he hasn’t had them himself, if he has missed them. If this came from anybody but you, EIncle Sammler, I’cl resent it.”

“I’m glad you make an exception of me. I mean no harm.”

“Probably not.”

“Only, at such a time, a man in your father’s position has different requirements.”

“You and I obviously can’t see this in the same way.”

“Because you are a modern individual. But I believe that even on the moon—three and a half billion years old but the essence of the modernto-be; I mean that only what is modern can reach the moon—and that on the moon itself a man who was dying would be moved one way or another by his children.”

“Uncle Sammler, you’re trying to provoke me.

I don’t know what’s gotten into you.”

“You’ve just told me how angry he is. As he’s going to die, and today is not simply any day, that’s what has gotten into me. Shall I spell it out even more? I’ll tell you, then, Elya is a sentimental person, and to tell the truth I have never had any natural liking for people who make false declarations of affection. Your father tried to win people’s hearts, even people he met casually, manicurists, lab technicians, waitresses. It was always too easy for him to say ‘I love you,’ as he was forever telling your mother. You won’t be offended if I say it would be easier to love a theorem in geometry than your poor mother. But your father’s assignment was the heart. For our sins we all have our assignments. But what is unusual is that your father made something of his assignment. After a terribly bad start. Among other things, other qualities—he is kind. He hasn’t done his human work badly. I don’t come out nearly so well. Till forty or so I was simply an Anglophile intellectual Polish Jew and person of culture—relatively useless. But Elya, through this sentimental repetition, and by formulas, if you like, actually brought himself through. He loves you. He probably loves Wallace. He loves me. I’ve learned from him. He is touchy, boastful, repetitious; he is vain, grouchy, proud, and often confused in mind. But he is generous. He is kind, and he is honorable. He is charitable. That’s a great deal to say.”

“Yes,” said Angela. She saw the old uncle’s point of view. But she objected to criticism, to coaching, and interference was intolerable. Especially as it was the Mexican holiday she was being hammered for. “I’m sure you love Daddy. I mean apart from the practical reasons.”

“Of course, Shula and I have been supported by him. I never concealed my gratitude. I hope it has been no secret,” said Sammler.

“All right, I know practical considerations are not the point with you.”

“If they were, I would be careful not to antagonize you.”

As he was a dry old man, the beating of his heart, even violent beating, would not be evident.

“What have you got in mind for me?”

“I think you ought to do something for Elya.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Can’t you think of something? Perhaps you could tell him that you love him, or ask him to forgive you.”

“What, Uncle, are you serious? You mean like a traditional deathbed scene?”

“What you call it doesn’t matter.”

“I’ll curse Widick when I see him for saying these things to Daddy about Mexico, for dragging us through this at a time when my father’s resistance is low and all the old prejudices come swimming up, all the most vicious feelings. He really has fucked us up, that fat son of a bitch.” Her breasts rose angrily. She held her breath. She had pulled her belly in. Then from her soft nose she bitterly released the cigarette smoke.

“You mustn’t think that I’m just trying to increase your difficulties.”

“For God’s sake, Uncle, what do you want?”

“I’m trying to tell you.”

“Well, Uncle, I’m suffering also. And I have a burden, too. And I’m in despair, too. I haven’t got it easy.”

“I don’t assume that you do. But first, about Elya . . .”

“Say what you think and have it over with.”

“In so many words?”

“In so many words.”

“I don’t know what you did in Mexico, but I know what your father thinks. It doesn’t matter at all to me. I am not your judge. I only note the peculiarity that, if Elya is right, one can be very gay with strangers, and very intimate tvith beach acquaintances—fellatio, or whatever, in so many words—one can do that, but not come to terms with one’s father on a day like this.”

“You’re certainly specific enough now,” she said. He had insulted her terribly. She was hot. But with lame expressive power, those light-brown wings, her brows, kept rising, while the rest of her wrhite face showed little change. It was her composure that was the problem—a deadly mass of white. She could not control herself, really. “You certainly take a traditional line, Uncle Sammler.”

“Perhaps it seems so. But there are two traditions here. Yours is even older, I think. One has to do with the setting of limits, and the other doesn’t recognize limits. Without limits you have monstrosity, always. Within limits? Well, within limits monsters also appear. But not inevitably.”

At this troubled moment the nurse came and called Sammler to the telephone. “You are Mr. Sammler, aren’t you?”

He quickly got to his feet. “Who wants me? Who is it?” He didn’t know what to expect.

“The phone wants you.”

“Yes, I understand that. But did they say who it was?”

“The lady said site was your daughter. You can take it here, outside.”

“Yes, Shula, yes,” her father said. “What is it? Speak up. Where are you?”

“In New Rochelle. Where is Elya?”

“We’re waiting for him. What do you want, Shula?”

“Have you heard about Wallace?”

“Yes, I’ve heard.”

“He did a really great thing when he brought in that plane without wheels.”

“Yes, magnificent. He’s certainly a marvelous fellow. Now, Shula, I want you out of there. You are not to prowl around that house, you have no business there. I wanted you to come back with me. You are not supposed to disobey me.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

“But you did.”

“I didn’t. If we differ, it’s only in your interest.”

“Shula, don’t fool with me. You called with a purpose. I’m afraid I begin to understand.”

“Yes, Father.”

“You succeeded!”

“Yes, Father, aren’t you pleased? In the—guess where? In the den where you slept. In the hassock you sat on this morning. When I brought in the coffee and saw you on it, I said, ‘That’s where the money is.’ I was just about sure. So when you went away, I came back and opened it up, and it was filled—filled with money. Would you think that about Cousin Elya? I’m surprised at him. I didn’t want to believe it. The hassock was upholstered with packages of hundred-dollar bills. Money was the stuffing.”

“Dear God.”

“I haven’t counted it,” she said.

“I will not have you lying.”

“All right, I did count. But I don’t really know about money. I don’t understand.”

“Did you speak to Wallace on the phone?”

“Yes.”

“And did you tell him about this?”

“I didn’t say one single word.”

“Good, very good, Shula. I expect you to turn it over to Mr. Widick. Call him to come and get it, and tell him you want a receipt for it.”

“Father!”

“Yes, Shula.”

He waited. He knew that gripping one of those New Rochelle white telephones she was marshaling her arguments, she was mastering her resentment at his ancient-father’s stubbornness and stupid rectitude. At her expense. He knew quite well what she was feeling. “What will you live on, Father, when Elya is gone?” she said.

“We will live on what there is.”

“But suppose he doesn’t leave any provision.”

“That’s as he wishes. Up to him, entirely.”

“We are part of the family. You are the closest to him.”

“You will do as I tell you.”

“Listen to me. Father. I have to look out for you. You haven’t even said anything to me about finding this.”

“It was damn clever of you, Shula. Yes. Congratulations. That was clever.”

“It really was. I noticed how the hassock bulged under you, not like other hassocks, and when I felt around I heard the money rustle. I knew from the rustle what it was. Of course I didn’t say anything to Wallace. He’d squander it in a week. I thought I’d buy some clothes. If I was dressed at Lord & Taylor, maybe I’d be less of an eccentric type, and I’d have a chance with somebody.”

“Like Govinda Lal.”

“Yes, why not? I’ve made myself as interesting as I could within my means.”

Her father was astonished by this. Eccentric type? She was aware of herself, then. There was a degree of choice. The wig, the scavenging, the shopping bags were to an extent deliberate. Was that what she meant? How fascinating!

“And I think,” she was saying, “that we should keep this. I think Elya would agree. I’m a woman without a husband, and I’ve never had children, and this money comes from preventing children, and I think it’s only right that I should take it. For you, too, Father.”

“I’m afraid not, Shula. Elya may already have told Mr. Widick about this. I’m sorry. But we’re not thieves. It’s not our money. Tell me how much it was.”

“Each time I count, it’s different.”

“How much was it the last time?”

“Either six or eight thousand.”

“I assume it’s much, much more, and I can’t allow you to keep any.”

Of course she would, he was certain of it. As a trash-collector, treasure-hunter, she would be unable to surrender it all.

“You must give Widick every cent.”

“Yes, Father. It’s painful, but I will. I’ll hand it over to Widick, I think you’re making a mistake.”

“No mistake. And don’t take off as you did with Govinda’s manuscript.”

Too late to be tempted. One more desire gone. He very nearly smiled.

“Good-bye, Shula. You’re a good daughter. The best of any. No better daughter.”

Wallace, then, had been right about his father. He had done favors for the Mafia. Performed some operations. The money did exist. There was no time to think about all this, however. He put up the phone and left the marble counter to find that Dr. Cosbie had been waiting for him. The one-time football star in his white coat held his upjier lip pressed by the nether one. The bloodless face and gas-blue eyes had been trained to transmit surgeons’ messages. The message was plain. It was all over.

“When did he die?” said Sammler. “Just now?”

“A little while back. We had him down in the special unit, doin’ the maximum possible.”

“You couldn’t do anything about a hemorrhage,

I see, yes.”

“You are his uncle. He asked me to say good-bye to you.”

“I wish I had been able to say it also to him. So it didn’t happen in one rush?”

“He knew it was startin’. He was a doctor. He knew it. He asked me to take him from the room.”

“He asked you to?”

“It was obvious he wanted to spare his daughter. So I said tests. It’s Miss Angela?”

“Yes, Angela.”

“He said he preferred downstairs. He knew I’d take him anyway.”

“Of course. As a surgeon, Elya knew. He certainly knew the operation was futile, all that torture of putting a screw in his throat.” Sammler removed his glasses. His eyes, one a sightless bubble, under the hair of overhanging brows, were level with Dr. Cosbie’s, “Of course it was futile.”

“The procedure was correct. He knew it was.”

“My nephew wished always to agree. Of course he knew. It might have been kinder though not to make him go through it.”

“I suppose you want to go in and tell Miss Angela?”

“Please tell Miss Angela yourself. What I want is to see my nephew. How do I get to him? Give me directions.”

“You’ll have to wait and see him at the chapel, sir. It’s not allowed.”

“Young man, it is important and you had better allow me. Take my word for it. I am determined. Let us not have a bad scene out here in the corridor. You would not want that, would you?”

“Would you make one?”

“I would.”

“I’ll send his private with you,” said the doctor.

They went down in the elevator, the nurse and Mr. Sammler, and through lower passages paved in speckled material, through tunnels, up and down ramps, past laboratories and supply rooms. Then the nurse took Sammler’s hat and said, “In there.” The door sign read P.M. That would mean postmortem. They were ready to do an autopsy as soon as Angela signed the papers. And of course she would sign. Let’s find out what went wrong. And then cremation.

“To see Dr. Gruner. Where?” said Sammler.

The attendant pointed to the wheeled stretcher on which Elya lay. Sammler uncovered his face. The nostrils, the creases were very dark, the shut eyes pale and full, the bald head high-marked by gradients of wrinkles. In the lips bitterness and an expression of obedience were combined.

Sammler in a mental whisper said, “Well, Elya. Well, well, Elya.” And then in the same way he said, “Remember, God, the soul of Elya Gruner, who, as willingly as possible and as well as he was able, and even to an intolerable point, and even in suffocation and even in the blinding of death was eager, even childishly perhaps (may I be forgiven for this) , even with a certain servility, to do what was required of him. At his best this man was much kinder than at my very best I have ever been or could ever be. He was aware that he must meet, and he did meet—through all the confusion and degraded clowning of this life through which we are speeding—he did meet the terms of his contract. The terms which, in his inmost heart, each man knows. As I would know mine. As all know. For that is the truth of it—that we all know, God, that we know, that we know, we know, we know.”

The end

Mr. Sammler’s Planet will be published by Viking on January 30. It is the February selection of the Literary Guild.