Mr. Sammler Planet

III

Homeward.

On Second Avenue the springtime scraping of roller skates was heard on hollow, brittle sidewalks, a soothing harshness. Turning from the new New York of massed apartments into the older New York of brownstone and wrought-iron, Sammler saw through large black circles in a fence daffodils and tulips, the mouths of these flowers open and glowing, but on the pure yellow the fallout of soot already was sprinkled. You might in this city become a flower-washer. There was an additional business opportunity for Wallace and Feffer.

He walked once around Stuyvesant Park, an ellipse within a square with the statue of the peg legged Dutchman, corners bristling with bushes. Tapping the flagstones with his ferrule every fourth step, Sammler held Dr. Govinda Lal's manuscript under his arm. He had brought it to read on the subway, though he didn't like being conspicuous in public, passing pages back and forth before the eye, pressing back the hat brim and his face intensely concentrated. He seldom did that.

Drop a perpendicular from the moon. Let it intersect a grave. Inside, a man till now tended, kept warm, manicured. Those heavy rainbow colors came. Decay. Mr. Sammler had once been on far more easy terms with death. He had lost ground, regressed. He was very full of his nephew, a man quite different from himself. He admired him, loved him. He could not cope with the full sum of facts about him. Remote considerations seemed to help-the moon, its lifelessness, its deathlessness. A white corroded pearl. By a sole eye, seen as a sole eye.

Sammler had learned to be careful on public paths in New York, invariably dog-fouled. Within the iron-railed plots the green lights of the grass were all but put out, burned by animal excrements. The sycamores, blemished bark, but very nice, brown and white, getting ready to cough up leaves. Red brick, the Rlends Seminary, and ruddy coarse warm stone, broad, clumsy, solid, the Episcopal church, St. George's. Sammler had heard that the original J. Pierpont Morgan had been an usher there. In Austro-Hungarian-Polish-Cracovian antiquity old fellows who had read of Morgan in the papers spoke of him with high regard as Piepernotter-Morgan. At St. George's, Sundays, the god of stockbrokers could breathe easy awhile in the riotous city. In thought, Mr. Sammler was testy with White Protestant America for not keeping better order. Cowardly surrender. Not a strong ruling class. Eager in a secret humiliating way to come down and mingle with all the minority mobs, and scream against themselves. And the clergy? Beating swords into plowshares? No, rather converting dog collars into G strings. But this was neither here nor there.

Watching his steps (the dogs), looking for a bench for ten minutes, to think or avoid thinking of Gruner. Perhaps despite great sadness to read a few paragraphs of this fascinating moon manuscript. He noted a female bum drunkenly sleeping like a dugong, a sea cow's belly rising, legs swollen purple; a short dress, a mini-rag. At a corner of the fence, a wino was sullenly pissing on newspapers and old leaves. Cops seldom bothered about these old-fashioned derelicts. Younger people, autochthonous-looking, were also here. Bare feet, the boys like Bombay beggars, beards clotted, breathing rich hair from their nostrils, heads coming through woolen ponchos, somewhat Peruvian. Natives of somewhere. Innocent, devoid of aggression, opting out, much like Ferdinand the Bull. No corrida for them; only smelling flowers under the lovely cork tree. How similar also to the Eloi of H. G. Wells' fantasy The Time Machine. Lovely young human cattle herded by the cannibalistic Morlocks who lived a subterranean life and feared light and fire. Yes, that tough brave little old fellow Wells had had prophetic visions after all. Shula wasn't altogether wrong to campaign for a memoir. A memoir should be written. Only there was little time left for relaxed narration about this and that, about things fairly curious in themselves, like Wells at seventy-eight still bucking for the Royal Society his work (on earthworms?) was not acceptable. Not earthworms. "The Quality of Illusion in the Continuity of Individual Life in the Higher Metazoa." They would not make him a Fellow. But to unscramble this would have taken weeks, and there were no free weeks for Sammler. He had other necessities, higher priorities.

He shouldn't even be reading this-this being the pages of Govinda Lal in bronze ink and old-fashioned penmanship. He wrote a Gothic hand. But Mr. Sammler, having seen through so much, had no resistance to real fascination. On page seventy, Lal had begun to speculate on organisms possibly capable of adapting themselves in exposed lunar conditions. Were there no plants which might cover the moon's surface? Water and carbon dioxide would have to be present, extremes of temperature would have to be withstood. Lichens, thought Govinda, possibly could make it. Also certain members of the cactus family. The triumphant plant, a combination of lichen and cactus, certainly would look weird to the eyes of man. But life's capacities are even now inconceivably diverse. What impossibilities has it not faced? Who knows what the depths of the seas may yet yield? Creatures, perhaps even one to a species. A grotesque individual which has found its equilibrium under twenty miles of water. Small wonder, said Govinda, that human beings stress so fiercely the next realizable possibilities and are so eager to bound from the surface of the earth. The imagination is innately a biological power seeking to overcome impossible conditions.

Mr. Sammler raised his face, aware that someone was hastening toward him. He saw Feffer. Always in a rush. Feffer was stout, should have lost weight. He had trouble with his back, and wore at times an elastic orthopedic garment. Large, with fresh color, with the vivid brown Franзois Premier beard and straight nose, Feffer always seemed to demand haste from his body, his legs. An all-but-running urgency. The hands, awkward and pink, were raised as if he feared to collide with another rush like his own. The brown eyes were key-shaped. As he grew older, the corners would be more elaborately notched.

"I thought you might stop here a minute," said Feffer. "Wallace said you had just left, so I ran down."

"Indeed? Well, the sun is shining, and I was in no hurry to go down into the subway. I haven't seen you since the lecture."

"That's right. I had to go to the telephone. I understand that you were wonderful. I genuinely apologize for the behavior of the students. That's my generation for you! I don't even know if they were real students or just tough characters-you know, militants, dropouts. It's not the kids who start the trouble. All the leaders are older. But Fanny looked after you, didn't she?"

"The young lady?"

"I didn't just disappear. I assigned a girl to look after you."

"I see. Your wife, by chance?"

"No, no." Feffer quickly smiled, and quickly went on, sitting on the edge of the bench. He wore a dark-blue velvet double-breasted jacket with large pearl buttons. His arm reached the backrest of the bench and lay affectionately near Sammler's shoulder. "Not my wife. Just a girl I fuck now and then, and look after."

"I see. It all seems so rapid. It strikes me that there is something electronic about your contacts. You shouldn't have left. I was your guest. Too late, I suppose, for you to learn manners. Still, she was very nice. She conducted me from the hall. I didn't expect such a large crowd. I thought you might be making money on me"

"I? No. Never. Believe me-no. It was a benefit for black children, just as I said. You must believe gone, Mr. Sammler. I wouldn't put you into a con, I have too much regard for you. You may not know it, or it may not matter to you, but you have a special position with me, which is practically sacred. Your life, your experiences, your character, your views plus your soul. There are relationships I would do anything to protect. And if I hadn't been called to the phone, I would have blasted that guy. I know that shit. He wrote a book about homosexuals in prison; he's like a poor man's Jean Genet. Buggery behind bars. Or being a pure Christian angel because you commit murder and have beautiful male love affairs. You know how it is."

"I have a general idea. But you misled me, Lionel."

"I didn't mean to. At the last minute a speaker didn't show for another student thing, and some of my graduate-school buddies who were frantic got hold of me. I saw a way to double the take. For the remedial-reading project. I assumed it wouldn't make so much difference to you, you would understand. I made a deal. I got the best of them."

"What was the subject of the missing speaker?"

"Sorel and Modern Violence, I think it was."

"And I talked about Orwell and what a sane person he was."

"Lots of young radicals see Orwell as part of the cold-war anti-Communist gang. You didn't really praise the Royal Navy, did you?"

"Is that what you heard?"

"If it hadn't been such an important call I would never have left. It was a question of buying or not buying a locomotive. The federal government creates these funny situations with tax breaks to encourage investment. Where it thinks dollars ought to go. You can buy a jet plane and lease it to the airlines. You can lease the locomotive to Penn Central or the B amp; O. Cattle investments get similar encouragement."

"Are you already making such sums that you need these deductions?"

Sammler didn't want to lead Feffer into dream conversation, exaggeration, fantasy, lying. He didn't know how much the poor young man made up simply to impress, to entertain. Feffer had a strange need to cover himself with the brocade of boasts. Money, brag-Jewish foibles. American too? Being deficient in contemporary American information, Sammler was tentative here. It was, however, no kindness to listen to this big talk. Sammler appreciated the degree of life in young Feffer, the marvelous rich color of his cheeks, the passion-sounds he made. The voice resembling an instrument played with higher and higher intensity but musically hopeless-the undertones appealing really for help.

But sometimes Mr. Sammler felt that the way he saw things could not be right. His experiences had been too peculiar, and he feared that he projected peculiarities onto life. Life was probably not blameless, but he often thought that life was not and could not be what he was seeing. And then again, most powerfully, he occasionally felt on the contrary that he was a million times exceeded in strangeness by the phenomena themselves. What oddities!

"Really, Lionel, you aren't about to buy a whole locomotive."

"Not alone. As part of a group. One hundred thousand dollars a share."

"And what about this other plan, with Wallace? Photographing houses and identifying trees."

"It does sound hokey, but it's really a very good business idea. I intend to experiment with it personally. I have a great gift for salesmanship, I'll say that for myself. If the thing pans out, I'll organize it nationally, with sales crews in every part of the country. We'll need regional plant specialists. The problems would be different in Portland, Oregon, from Miami Beach or Austin, Texas. `All men by nature desire to know.' That's the first sentence of Aristotle's Metaphysics. I never got much farther, but I figured that the rest must be out of date anyway. However, if they desire to know, it makes them depressed if they can't name the bushes on their own property. They feel like phonies. The bushes belong. They themselves don't. And I'm convinced that knowing the names of things braces people up. I've gone to shrinkers for years, and have they cured me of anything? They have not. They have put labels on my troubles, though, which sound like knowledge. It's a great comfort, and worth the money. You say, 'I'm manic.' Or you say, 'I'm a reactive-depressive.' You say about a social problem, 'It's colonialism.' Then the dullest brain has internal fireworks, and the sparks drive you out of your skull. It's divine. You think you're a new man. Well, the way to wealth and power is to latch on to this. When you set up a new enterprise, you redescribe the phenomena and create a feeling that we're getting somewhere. If people want things named or renamed, you can make dough by becoming a taxonomist. Yes, I definitely intend to try out this idea of Wallace's."

"It's ill-timed. Does he have to have a plane?"

"I can't say if it's essential, but he seems to have a thing about piloting. Well, that's his bag. Other people have other bags."

This last statement about other people was injected with much significance. Sammler saw what was happening. Feffer was pretending to hold back, out of a delicacy he didn't have, a piece of information he couldn't wait to release. His eagerness shone from his face. In the eyes. Upon the ready lips.

"What are you referring to?"

"I'm really referring to a certain Hindu scientist. I believe that his name is Lal. I think that this Lal is a guest lecturer at Columbia University."

"What about him?"

"Several days ago, after his lecture, a woman approached him. She asked to see his manuscript. He thought she just wanted to glance at something in the text and he let her take it. There was a small crowd of people around. I believe H. G. Wells was mentioned. Then the lady disappeared with the manuscript."

Mr. Sammler removed his hat and placed it on his lap over the sea-marbled cardboard.

"She walked off with it?"

"Disappeared with the only copy of the work."

"Ah. How unfortunate. The only, eh? Quite bad."

"Yes, I thought you might think so. Dr. Lal expected her to come back with it, that she might be just an absentminded person. He didn't say anything for twenty-four hours. But then he went to the authorities. Is it the department of astronomy? Or some space program Columbia has?"

"How is it that you always have information of this sort, Lionel?"

"I have to have these contacts in my way of life. Naturally I know the security people-the campus cops. Anyway, they weren't equipped to handle this. They had to call in investigators. The Pinkertons. The original Pinkerton was picked by Abraham Lincoln himself to organize the Secret Service, you know. You do know that, don't you?"

"It doesn't seem to me an item of great importance. I suppose these Pinkertons will know how to recover this article. Isn't it stupid to have only one copy? With all these Xeroxes and reproducing machines, and the man is a scientist."

"Well, I don't know. There was Carlyle. There was T. E. Lawrence. Brilliant people, weren't they? And they both lost the only copy of a masterpiece."

"Dear, dear."

"By now the campus is covered with posters. Manuscript missing. And there is a description of the lady. Often seen at public lectures. She wears a wig, carries a shopping bag, is associated somehow with H. G. Wells."

"Yes, I see."

"You wouldn't know anything about it, would you, Mr. Sammler? Naturally I want to help."

"I am astonished by the amount of information that sticks to you. You remind me of a frog's tongue. It flips out and comes back covered with gnats."

"I didn't think I was doing any harm. Where you are concerned, Mr. Sammler, I have only one interest, and that is protection. I have a protective instinct toward you. I am aware it might be Oedipal-the names, again-but I have a feeling of veneration toward you. You are the only person in the world with whom I would use a word like veneration. That's the kind of word you write down, not say."

"Yes, I understand rust somewhat, Lionel." Mr. Sammler's forehead, grown damp, was itching. He touched it finely with his ironed pocket handkerchief. It was Shula who brought back his handkerchiefs ironed so smooth and flat.

"I know that you are trying to condense what you know, your life experience. Into a Testament."

"How do you know this?"

"You told me."

"Did I? I don't remember ever saying that. It is very private. If I am saying things unaware, it's a bad sign. I certainly never meant to mention it."

"We were standing in front of the Bretton Hall Hotel, that miserable bunch of decay, and you were leaning on the umbrella. And may I say"-there were signs of an upward expansion of feeling-"I may have doubts about other people, whether they're even human, but I love you without reservation. And to relieve your mind, you didn't discuss anything, you only said that you would like to boil down your experience of life to a few statements. Maybe just one single statement."

"Sydney Smith."

"Smith?"

"He said, 'Short views, for God's sake, short views.' An English clergyman."

To hear what Shula-Slawa had done (folly-devotion-to- Papa-comedy-theft) filled oppressively certain spaces for oppression which had opened and widened during the last three decades. Because of Elya, they were all agape today. Before 1939 Sammler could recall no such heaviness and darkness. Was there anywhere in the world a shrinking-tincture that could be prescribed for such openings? Mr. Sammler did try to turn toward the fun of the thing, imagining Shula in space shoes, disorderly crimson on the mouth, coming up like a little demon body from Grimm's Fairy Tales, making off with the treasure of a Hindu sage. Sammler himself was treated like some sort of Enchanter by Shula. She thought he was Prospero. He could make beautiful culture. Compose a memoir of the highest distinction, so magical that the world would long remember what a superior thing it was to be a Sammler. The answer of private folly to public folly (in an age of overkill) was more distinction, more high accomplishments, more dazzling brilliants strewn before admiring mankind. Pearls before swine? Mr. Sammler, thinking of Rabbi Ipsheimer, whom he had been dragged by Shula to hear, revised the old saying. Artificial pearls before real swine were cast by these jet-set preachers. To have thought this made him more cheerful. His nervously elegant hand made a shaking bridge over the tinted spectacles, adjusting them without need on the nose. Well, he was not what Shula believed him to be. Moreover, he was not what Feffer thought. How could he satisfy the needs of these imaginations? Feffer in the furious whirling of his spirit took him for a fixed point. In such hyperenergetic revolutions you fell in love with ideas of stability, and Sammler was an idea of stability. And how lavishly Feffer flattered him! Sammler was sorry about that. He made sure his large hat was covering the notebook entirely.

"Is there anything you would like me to do?" said Feffer.

"Why yes, Lionel." He rose. "Walk with me to the subway. I'm going to Union Square."

By the wrought-iron gate they left the little park, westward past the Quaker Meeting House, and then the cool sandstone buildings set back among trees. The chained bellies of garbage cans. One of the chains even wore a sheath. And there were dogs, more dogs. Devoted dog-tendance-by schoolchildren, by women in fairly high style, by certain homosexuals. One would have said that only the Eskimos had nearly so much to do with dogs as this local branch of mankind. The veterinarians must be sailing in yachts, surely. Their fees were high.

I shall get hold of Shula right away, Mr. Sammler decided. He hated scenes with his daughter. She might set her teeth, burst into screams. He cared too much for her. He cherished her. And really, his only contribution to the continuation of the species! It filled him with heartache and pity that he and Antonina had not blended better. Since she was a child he had seen, especially in the slenderness of Shula's neck, so vulnerably valved, in the visible glands, and blue veins, in the big bluish eyelids and top-heavy head, a pitiful legacy, loony, frail, touching him with a fear of doom. Well, the Polish nuns had saved her. When he came to the convent to get her, she was already fourteen years old. Now she was over forty, straying about New York with her shopping bags. She would have to return the manuscript immediately. Dr. Govinda Lal would be frantic. Who knew what Asiatic form that man's despair was taking.

Meantime too there was in Sammler's consciousness a red flush. Possibly due to Elya Gruner's condition. This assumed a curious form, that of a vast crimson envelope, a sky-filling silk fabric, the flap fastened by a black button. He asked himself whether this might not be what mystics meant by seeing a mandala, and believed the suggestion might have been implanted by association with Govinda, an Asiatic. But he himself, a Jew, no matter how Britannicized or Americanized, was also an Asian. The last time he was in Israel, and that was very recent, he had wondered how European, after all, Jews were. The crisis he witnessed there had brought out a certain deeper Orientalism. Even in German and Dutch Jewry, he thought. As for the black button, was it an after-image of the white moon?

Through Fifteenth Street ran a warm spring current. Lilacs and sewage. There were as yet no lilacs, but an element of the savage gas was velvety and sweet, reminiscent of blooming lilac. All about was a softness of perhaps dissolved soot, or of air passed through many human breasts, or metabolized in multitudinous brains, or released from as many intestines, and it got to one-oh, deeply, too! Now and then there came an appreciative or fanciful pleasure, apparently inconsequent, suggested by the ruddy dun of sandstone, by cool corners of the warmth. Bliss from his surroundings! For a certain period Mr. Sammler had resisted such physical impressions-being wooed almost comically by momentary and fortuitous sweetness. For quite a long time he had felt that he was not necessarily human. Had no great use, during that time, for most creatures. Very little interest in himself. Cold even to the thought of recovery. What was there to recover? Little regard for earlier forms of himself. Disaffected. His judgment almost blank. But then, ten or twelve years after the war, he became aware that this too was changing. In the human setting, along with everyone else, among particulars of ordinary life he was human-and, in short, creatureliness crept in again. Its low tricks, its doggish hind- sniffing charm. So that now, really, Sammler didn't know how to take himself. He wanted, with God, to be free from the bondage of the ordinary and the finite. A soul released from Nature, from impressions, and from everyday life. For this to happen God Himself must be waiting, surely. And a man who has been killed and buried should have no other interest. He should be perfectly disinterested. Eckhardt said in so many words that God loved disinterested purity and unity. God Himself was drawn toward the disinterested soul. What besides the spirit should a man care for who has come back from the grave? However, and mysteriously enough, it happened, as Sammler observed, that one was always, and so powerfully, so persuasively, drawn back to human conditions. So that these flecks within one's substance would always stipple with their reflections all that a man turns toward, all that flows about him. The shadow of his nerves would always cast stripes, like trees on grass, like water over sand, the light-made network. It was a second encounter of the disinterested spirit with fated biological necessities, a return match with the persistent creature.

Therefore, walking toward the BMT, Union Square Station, one hears Feffer explain why it is necessary to purchase a Diesel locomotive. A beautiful stroke of business. So apt! So congruent with spring, death, Oriental mandalas, sewer gas edged with opiate lilac sweetness. Bliss from bricks, from the sky! Bliss and mystic joy!

Mr. Artur Sammler, confidant of New York eccentrics; curate of wild men and progenitor of a wild woman; registrar of madness. Once take a stand, once draw a baseline, and contraries will assail you. Declare for normalcy, and you will be stormed by aberrancies. All postures are mocked by their opposites. This is what happens when the individual begins to be drawn back from disinterestedness to creaturely conditions. Portions or aspects of his earlier self revive. The former character asserts itself, and sometimes disagreeably, weakly, disgracefully. It was the earlier Sammler, the Sammler of London and Cracow, who had gotten off the bus at Columbus Circle foolishly eager to catch sight of a black criminal. He now had to avoid the bus, dreading another encounter. He had been warned, positively instructed, to appear no more.

"Just a minute, now," said Feffer. "I know you hate subways. Isn't there a switch here? I thought you were positively claustrophobic."

Feffer was extremely intelligent. He had been admitted to Columbia without a high-school certificate by obtaining unheard-of marks in the entrance examinations. He was sly, shrewd, meddling, as well as fresh, charming and vigorous. In his eyes a strangely barbed look appeared, a kind of hooking intensity. Sammler, the earlier Sammler, had had little power to resist such looks.

"It isn't because of the crook you saw on the bus, is it?"

"Who told you about him?"

"Your niece, Mrs. Arkin, did. I mentioned that before the lecture."

"So you did. And she told you, eh?"

"Yes, about the fancy dress, the Dior accessories, and all of that. What a terrific gas! So you're afraid of him. Why? Has he spotted you?"

"Something like that."

"Did he speak?"

"Not a word."

"There's something going on, Mr. Sammler. I think you'd better tell me about it. You may not understand the New York idiom. You may be in danger. You should tell a younger person."

"You confuse me, Feffer. There are moments when I am slightly not myself under your influence. I get muddled. You're very noisy, very turbulent."

"The man has done something to you. I just know it What's he done? He may hurt you. You may be in trouble, and you shouldn't keep it to yourself. You're wise, but not hip, and this cat, Mr. Sammler, sounds like a real tiger. You've seen him in action?"

"Yes."

"And he's seen you looking?"

"That, too."

"That's serious. Now what has he done to scare you off the bus? You told the cops."

"I tried to. Come, Feffer, you're involving me in things I don't like."

"It's being driven from the bus that should bother you, interference with your customs, your habits, and so on. Are you afraid of him?"

"Well, I was aroused. My heart did beat awfully hard. The mind is so odd. Objectively I have little use for such experiences, but there is such an absurd craving for actions that connect with other actions, for coherency, for forms, for mysteries or fables. I may have thought that I had no more ordinary human curiosity left, but I was surprisingly wrong. And I don't like it. I don't like any of it."

"When he saw you, did he chase you?" said Feffer.

"He came after me, yes. Now let's drop the matter."

Feffer was unable to do that. His face was flaming. Within the old-fashioned frame of the beard, it prickled with wild modern passions. "He followed you but he didn't say anything? He must have gotten his message through, though. What did he do? He threatened you. Did he pull a switchblade on you?"

"No."

"A gun? Didn't he point a gun at you?"

"No gun."

Had Sammler been in good balance he would have been able to resist Feffer. But his balance was not good. Descending to the subway was a trial. The grave, Elya, Death, entombment, the Mezviuski vault.

"But he found out where you live?" said Feffer.

"Yes, Feffer, he tracked me. He must have had an eye on me for some time. He followed me into my lobby."

"But what did he do, Mr. Sammler! For God's sake, why won't you say!"

"What is there to say? It is ludicrous. It is not worth discussing. Simply nonsensical."

"Nonsensical? Are you sure it's nonsense? You'd better let a younger person judge. A different generation. A different…"

"Well, perhaps you have a natural claim to these bizarre nonsensical things. Such a hungry curiosity about them. I'll make it brief. The man exhibited himself to me."

"He didn't! That's just wild! To you? That's far out! Did he corner you?"

"Yes."

"In your own lobby, he pulled his thing on you? He flashed it?"

Sammler would say no more about it.

"Stupendous!" said Feffer. "What the devil was it like?" He was also laughing. How marvelous, what a… a sudden glory. And If Sammler was any interpreter of laughter, Feffer was dying to see this phenomenon. To protect Sammler, yes. To guide him through the dangers of New York, yes. But to see, to meddle, to intrude, that was Lionel all over. Had to have a piece of the action-Sammler believed that was the current expression. "He yanked out his cock? Didn't say a word? Just flashed? Wow, Mr. Sammler! What the hell did he mean? How big a thing was it? You didn't say. I can imagine. It could be straight out of Finnegans Wake. 'Everyone must bare his crotch!' And he operates between Columbus Circle and Seventy- second Street in the rush hours? Well, what does one do about this? New York is really a gas city. And all those guys running for mayor like a bunch of lunatics. And Lindsay, just imagine Lindsay campaigning on his record. His record, no less, when they can't even send a cop to arrest a bandit. And the other guys with their record! Mr. Sammler, I know a guy at NBC television who has a talk show. It's really Fanny's husband. We ought to put you on that to discuss all this."

"Oh, come, Feffer."

"It would do everyone a hell of a lot of good to hear you. I know, I know, it's as the man said, it's not the mind of the viewer you'll reach but his backsides. You'll tickle his backsides with beautiful feathers of deep thought."

"Absolutely."

"And yet, Mr. Sammler, to have influence and power. Or just confronting the phony with the real thing. You should denounce New York. You should speak like a prophet, like from another world. TV should be used. Used by us-and you might like coming out of isolation."

"We did that at Columbia yesterday, Feffer. I came out of isolation. You've already turned me into a performer."

"I'm thinking only of the good you could do."

"You're thinking of the arrangements you could promote, how you could get a finder's fee from Fanny's husband, and how close you could bring together the TV and that person's genitalia." Mr. Sammler was intensely smiling. Another moment, and he would actually have been laughing, drawn out of his preoccupations.

"Very well," said Feffer. "I don't have the same ideals of privacy as you. I'm willing to drop it."

"By all means."

"I'll ride uptown on the bus with you."

"No, thanks."

"To make sure no one bothers you."

"What you want is to have me point him out."

"Really, I know how you dislike, you hate, subways."

"It's quite all right."

"Of course you've stirred up my curiosity, why should I deny it? I know you finally told me about him to get rid of me, and here I am pestering you still. You say he wears a camel's-hair coat?"

"I thought it was that."

"A homburg? Dior shades?"

"Homburg I'm certain of. The Dior is a guess."

"You're a good observer, I take your word for it. A mustache, also, fancy shirts and psychedelic neckties. He's a prince of some kind, or thinks he is."

"Yes," said Sammler. "A certain majesty is assumed."

"I have an idea about him."

"Let him be. Leave him alone, I advise you."

"I wouldn't actually tangle with him. I'd never do that. He wouldn't even suspect I was there. But cameras can be introduced anywhere. They even have photos of the child in the womb. Somehow they got a camera in. I just acquired a new Minox which is as small as a cigarette lighter."

"Don't be stupid, Lionel."

"He'd never know. I assure you. Wouldn't be aware. Pictures could be valuable. Catch a criminal, sell the story to Look. Do a job on the police at the same time, and on Lindsay, who has no business being mayor while running for president. A triple killing."

The low wall of Union Square, the raised green platform of lawn parted by dry gray pathways, and the fast traffic circling-the foul, reckless, stinking automobiles. Sammmler did not need Feffer's hand on his elbow. He drew away.

"I go down here."

"This time of day you can't get a taxi. The shift is changing. I'll ride uptown with you."

Sammler, still holding hat and notebook by his side, the umbrella hooked on his wrist, pursued his way in the half- light of the corridors, in the smoke of grilled sausages. The quick turnstiles metered the tokens with a noise of ratchets. The bison-rumble of trains. Sammler wanted to ride alone. Feffer could not let him go. Feffer could not be quiet. His need was to be perpetually arresting, radiant with fresh interest. And, of course, because he respected Sammler so much he had to make tests or insert small notes or hints of disrespect, a little here, a bit there, liberties, familiarities, insinuations, exploring for spoilage. My dear fellow, why look k so hard? There is corruption in many places. I could show you.

"This Fanny-the girl who guided you-she's very willing," said Feffer.

He ran on. "Nowadays girls are. Still somewhat shy. Not really so marvelous in the sack. In spite of big tits. Married of course. The husband works at night. He bosses the talk show I referred to…" And on: "I like companionship. We spend a lot of time together. Then when the insurance adjuster came…"

"What adjuster was that?" said Sammler.

"I put in a claim on a piece of luggage damaged at the airport. The fellow came over when Fanny was visiting me, and he fell in love with her-bang! Like that. He was a swinger, too, with chimpanzee teeth. Said he was a dropout from the Harvard School of Business. A real yellow face, and sweating. Awful. He looked like an oil filter that should have been changed five thousand miles ago."

"Ah, did he?"

"So I encouraged his interest in Fanny. That was good for my claim. Would I give him her phone number? I certainly did."

"With her permission?"

"I didn't think she'd mind. Then he phoned and said, 'This is Gus, honey. Meet me for a drink.' But her husband had picked up the phone. He works nights. And next time Gus came to see me I said, 'Boy, Gus, her husband is really sore. Stay away. He's tough, too.' Then Gus said…"

Was there no Eighteenth Street station? There was Twenty-third, Thirty-fourth. At Forty-second you changed to the IRT.

"Gus said, 'What am I afraid of? Look, I carry a gun.' He pulled out a pistol. I was flabbergasted. But it wasn't much of a gun either. I said, 'A thing like that? You couldn't shoot through a telephone book with it.' And before I knew it, he had the telephone book on a music stand and was aiming at it. That crazy sonofabitch. He was only five feet from it, and he fired. I never heard such a roar. The whole building heard. But I was right. The bullet went in only two inches. Couldn't pierce the Manhattan directory."

"Yes, a poor weapon."

"You know something about weapons?"

"Something."

"Well, you could just about wound a guy with that gun. Probably wouldn't kill unless you shot him in the head at short range. What a lot of lunatics around."

"Quite so."

"But I'm getting about two hundred bucks from insurance, which is more than the suitcase is worth, a piece of trash."

"Yes, clever business."

"Next day Gus came again and wanted me to write a recommendation for him."

"To whom?"

"To his superior in the adjuster's office."

At Ninety-sixth Street they ascended together into the full blast of Broadway. Feffer accompanied Sammler to his door.

"If you need assistance, Mr. Sammler…"

"I won't invite you up, Lionel. The fact is I'm feeling tired."

"It's spring. I mean it's the temperature change," said Feffer.

"Even youth is susceptible to that."

Mr. Sammler in the elevator, extracting the Yale key from his change purse. He pushed into the foyer. In honor of spring, Margotte had set forsythia in Mason jars. One jar was overturned at once. Sammler brought a roll of paper towels from the kitchen, ascertaining as he went through the house that his niece had gone out. Soaking up the spilt water, watching the absorbent paper darken, he then lifted the telephone onto the maple arm of the sofa, sat on the bandanna covers, and dialed Shula. No reply. Perhaps she had turned off her telephone. Sammler had not seen her for several days. Now a thief, she very likely was in hiding. If Eisen was actually in New York, she had an added reason for locking herself away. Sammler could not imagine, however, that Eisen would actually want to molest her. He had other irons in the fire, he had other fish to fry (how fond old Sammler was of such expressions!).

Carrying the paper towels, the sopping and the dry, back to the kitchen, Sammler cut himself several slices of salami with the large chef's knife (Margotte seemed to have no small knives, she pared onions, even, with these great blades). He made a sandwich. Colman's English Mustard, still a favorite. Margotte's low-calorie cranberry juice. Unable to find clean glasses, he sipped from a paper cup. The feel of wax was disagreeable but he was on his way out of the house and had no time for washing and drying. He went at once across Broadway to Shula's apartment. He rang, he rapped, he raised his voice and said, "Shula, it's Father. Open. Shula?" wrote a note and slipped it under the door. "Call me at once." Then, descending in the black elevator (how rusty and black it was!), he looked into her mailbox, which she never locked. It was full, and he sorted through the mail. Throwaway stuff. Personal letters, none. So she was evidently away, hadn't taken out her letters. Maybe she had caught a train to New Rochelle. She had a key to the Gruner house. Sammler had refused the offer of a key to her apartment. He didn't want to walk in when she was with a lover. Such a lover as she would have was surely to be dreaded. Undoubtedly she had one now and then. Perhaps for her complexion, when it was bad. He once had heard a woman say this. And Shula was proud of her clear skin. How could you know what people-individuals-were really doing!

When he returned, he asked Margotte, "You haven't seen Shula, have you?"

"No, Uncle Sammler, I haven't. You had a call, though, from your son-in-law."

"Eisen has called?"

"I told him you were at the hospital."

"What did he seem to want?"

"Why, to see the family. Though he said they don't come to see him when they're in Israel, not Elya and not you. He really sounded hurt."

Margotte's sympathies, so readily available, so full, made others feel stony-hearted.

"And Elya, how is he?" she said.

"Not well, I'm afraid."

"Oh, I must go and visit poor Elya."

"Perhaps you should, but very briefly."

"Oh, I wouldn't tire him. As for Shula, she's afraid to see Eisen. She thinks she did him a terrible injury when you forced her to leave."

"I never did. She was glad to go. He seemed glad, too. Did Eisen inquire for her?"

"Not a word. Didn't even mention her name. He talked about his work. His art. He's hunting for a studio."

"Yes… Well, it won't be easy to find in this city of artists. Lofts. But then of course he fought at Stalingrad, he could winter in a loft."

"He wanted to go to the hospital and do a drawing of Elya."

"A thing we should prevent, by any means."

"Uncle Sammler, would you join me for a cutlet? I'm cooking schnitzel."

"Thank you, I've eaten."

He went to his room.

With a reading glass held trembling in the long left hand, Sammler threw quivering transparencies on the writing paper. From the desk lamp, glassy nuclei of brightness followed the words he wrote.

Dear Professor Doctor:

Your manuscript is safe. The woman who borrowed it is my daughter. She meant no harm. It was only her thick-handed, clumsy way of helping me, advancing an imaginary project that obsesses her. She is pierced by an inspiration-H. G. Wells, the scientific future. She believes we share this inspiration. I am pierced sometimes from a different side by the vision of her activities. Psychologically archaic-all the fossils in her mental strata fully alive (the moon, too, is a kind of fossil)-she dreams about the future. Yet everyone grapples, each in his awkward muffled way, with a power, a Jacob's angel, to get a final satisfaction or glory that is withheld. In any case, kindly ask the authorities to call off their search. I beg you. My daughter evidently believed you were lending her this document, though it may point to treachery aforethought that she did not give you her name and address. However, I would be glad to bring The Future of the Moon to you. I have been reading it with fascination, though on the scientific side my qualifications are nil. More than thirty years ago, I enjoyed the friendship of H. G. Wells whose moon-fantasy you undoubtedly know-Selenites, subterranean moon-ocean, and all of that. As correspondent for Eastern European periodicals, I lived in England for many years. Woburn Square. Ah, it was lovely. But I apologize for my daughter. I can well imagine the anguish of spirit she must have caused you. In women the keenest sense of wrongdoing seems to be in a different place. The notebook lies before me at this moment. It is marbled green cardboard and the ink is brown and iridescent, almost bronze. I can be phoned at any hour of the night at the Endicott number under the date above.

Your obedient servant,

Artur Sammler

"Margotte," he said, leaving his desk.

She sat alone, eating in the dining room, under an imitation Tiffany shade of gay red-and-green paper. The tablecloth was an Indonesian print. All was really very dark, in the awkward room. She herself looked dark there, cutting the yellow-crusted veal on her dish. He should, more often, sit down to meals with her. A childless widow. He was sorry for her, the small face with its heavy black bangs. He took a chair. "Look here, Margotte, we have a problem with Shula."

"Let me set a place for you."

"No, thank you, I have no appetite. Please sit down. I'm afraid Shula stole something. Not a theft, really. That would be nonsense. She took something. A manuscript by a Hindu scientist at Columbia. It was, of course, done for me. That idiocy about H. G. Wells. You see, Margotte, this Indian book is about colonizing the moon and the planets. Shula took away the only copy."

"The moon. How fascinating, Uncle."

"Yes, industries on the moon. Manufacturing centers on the moon. How to build cities."

"I can see why Shula wanted it for you."

"But it must be returned. Why, it's stolen goods, Margotte, and detectives have been called in. And I can't find Shula. She knows she has done wrong."

"Oh, Uncle Sammler, would you call it a crime? Not by Shula. Poor creature."

"Yes, poor creature. To whom would this not apply, if you start to say poor creature?"

"I would never have said it about Ussher. I wouldn't say it about you, either."

"Really? Well, all right. I accept the correction. However, that Indian must be notified. Here I have a letter for him."

"Why not a telegram?"

"Useless. Telegrams are no longer delivered."

"That's what Ussher used to say. He said the messengers just threw them down the sewer."

"Mailing won't do. It might take three days for the letter to arrive. All these local communications are in decay," said Sammler. "Even Cracow in the days of Franz Josef was more efficient than the U. S. postal system. And Shula may be picked up by the police, that's what I'm afraid of. Could we send the doorman in a cab?"

"What's the matter with the telephone?"

"Yes, certainly, if I could be sure we would talk to Dr. Lal himself. A direct explanation. I hadn't thought of that. But how to get his number!"

"Couldn't you just take the manuscript to him?"

"Now that I know I have the only copy, I hesitate, Margotte, to go into the street with it, and especially at night, when people are being mugged. Suppose it were snatched out of my hands?"

"And the police?"

"They have given little satisfaction. I wish to avoid them. I did think perhaps of the security officers at Columbia, or even the Pinkerton people, but I would rather hand it over personally to Dr. Lal to make sure no charges will be brought against Shula. The Indian temperament is so excitable, you know. If he doesn't meet any of us, become personally acquainted, he will let the police advise him. Then we would need a lawyer. Don't suggest Wallace. In the past, Elya always had Mr. Widick take care of such matters."

"Well, perhaps handing him a letter is best. Better than the telephone. Maybe I should carry the letter to him, Uncle. Personally."

"Ah, yes, a woman. Coming from a woman, it might have a softening effect."

"Better than a doorman. It's still light. I can get a cab."

"I have a little money in my room. About ten dollars."

Then he heard Margotte on the telephone, making inquiries. He suspected that things were being done the least efficient way. But Margotte was prompt to help when difficulties were real. She didn't start discussions about Shula-the effects of the war or Antonina's death or puberty in a Polish convent or what terror could do to the psyche of a young girl. Elya was right. Ussher, too. Margotte was a good soul. Not persisting mechanically in her ways when the signal was given. As others did, jumping into their routines. Tumbling into their grooves. In the bathroom there was a great rush of water.

She was taking a shower, the usual sign that she was preparing to go out. If she had three occasions to leave the house, she took three showers in a day. He next heard her walking very rapidly in her bedroom, shoeless, but thumping quickly, opening closets and drawers. In about twenty minutes, dressed in her black basic and wearing a black straw hat, she was at his door and asking for the letter. She was a dear thing.

"You know where he is?" said Sammler. "Did you talk to him?"

"Not personally, he was out. But he's staying at Butler Hall, and the switchboard knew all about it."

Gloves, though the evening was warm. Perfume, quite a lot. Bare arms. Bruch might have liked those arms. They had a proper little heaviness of their own. She was at times a pretty woman. And Sammler saw that she was glad to have this errand. It saved her from an empty night at home. Ussher had been fond of late-late shows. Margotte rarely turned on the television set. It was often out of repair. Since Ussher's death, it had begun to look old-fashioned in its wood cabinet. Maybe it wasn't wood, but a woodlike wig of some dark and grained material.

"If I meet Dr. Lal-and should I wait for him at Butler Hall? Shall I bring him back with me?"

"I was planning to go again to the hospital," said Sammler.

"You know, it's very bad for Elya."

"Oh, poor Elya. I know it's one thing on top of another. But don't make yourself too tired. You just got in."

"I'll lie down for fifteen minutes. Yes, if Dr. Lal wants to come, by all means, yes. Let him come."

Before she went, Margotte wanted to kiss the old man. He did not move away, although he felt that people were seldom in a fit state for kissing and that mostly it was done, in defilement, as a reminder of beatitude. But this kiss of Margotte's, reaching upward, getting on her toes and swelling her plump strong legs, was an appropriate one. She seemed grateful that he chose to live with her rather than with Shula, that he liked her so much, and that he turned to her also in trouble. Through him, moreover, she was going to meet a distinguished gentleman, a Hindu scientist. She was perfumed, she was wearing eye make-up.

He said, "I should be home by about ten."

"Then, if he is there, dear Uncle, I'll bring him back and he can wait here with me. He'll be so eager for his manuscript."

He saw her soon in the street. Touching the frieze curtain, he watched her going toward West End Avenue, up the pale width of the sidewalk, alert for a taxi. She was small, she was strong, and had a sort of compact female pride. Somewhat shaking, as women do when they hurry. Gotten up strangely. And altogether odd. Females! The drafts must blow between their legs. Such observations originated mainly in kindly detachment, in farewell-detachment, in earth-departure-objectivity.

In daylight still, the white Spry sign across the Hudson began to flash against pale green and also down into the dark water, while in the sunset copper the asphalt belly of the street was softly disfigured, softly rank, with its manhole covers. And the cars always packed tightly into the street. Machines for going away.

Removing shoes and socks, Mr. Sammler raised a long foot to the sink. Wasn't he too old for such movements? Evidently not. In the privacy of his room he was actually less stiff in the limbs. He bathed the feet and did not dry them thoroughly, for it was a warm evening. Evaporation relieved the smarting. As evolutionary time went we had not long been bipeds, and the flesh of the feet suffered for it, especially in spring when organisms experienced a peculiar expansion. Tired and breathing quietly, Sammler lay down. He left his feet uncovered. He brought the coolness of the sheet over his flat, slender chest. He turned away his lamp to shine on the drawn curtain.

The luxury of nonintimidation by doom-that might describe his state. Since the earth altogether was now a platform, a point of embarkation, you could think with a very minimum of terror about going. Not to waive another man's terror for him (he was thinking of Elya with the calibrated metal torment in his throat). But often he felt himself very nearly out of it. And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good-a melancholy good.

Ah. Before he had let go the curtain, when Margotte disappeared, before sitting to remove the shoes, before turning to wash his feet, he had seen, come to think of it, the moon not too remote from the Spry sign, and round as a traffic signal. This moon image or circular afterimage was still with him. And we know now from photographs the astronauts took, the beauty of the earth, its white and its blue, its fleeces, the great glitter afloat. A glorious planet. But wasn't everything being done to make it intolerable to abide here, an unconscious collaboration of all souls spreading madness and poison? To flush us out? Not so much Faustian aspiration, thought Mr. Sammler, as a scorched- earth strategy. Ravage all, and what does death get? Defile, and then flee to the bliss of oblivion. Or bolt to other worlds.

He recognized by these thoughts that he was preparing to meet Govinda Lal. They would possibly discuss such matters. Dr. Lal, whose field seemed to be biophysics, and who might, like most experts, turn out to be a nonindividual, gave signs, in his writing anyway, of wider thoughtfulness. For after each technical section he offered remarks on the human aspects of future developments. He seemed aware, for instance, that the discovery of America had raised hopes in the sinful Old World of a New Eden. "A shared consciousness," Lal had written, "may well be the new America. Access to central data mechanisms may foster a new Adam." Well, it was very odd what Mr. Sammler found himself doing as he lay in his room, in an old building. Settling, the building had cracked its plaster, and along these slanted cracks he had mentally inscribed certain propositions. According to one of these he, personally, stood apart from all developments. From a sense of deference, from age, from good manners, he sometimes affirmed himself to be out of it, hors d'usage, not a man of the times. No force of nature, nothing paradoxical or demonic, he had no drive for smashing through the masks of appearances. Not "Me and the Universe." No, his personal idea was one of the human being conditioned by other human beings, and knowing that present arrangements were not, sub specie aeternitatis, the truth, but that one should be satisfied with such truth as one could get by approximation. Trying to live with a civil heart. With disinterested charity. With a sense of the mystic potency of humankind. With an inclination to believe in archetypes of goodness. A desire for virtue was no accident.

New worlds? Fresh beginnings? Not such a simple matter. (Sammler, reaching for diversion.) What did Captain Nemo do in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? He sat in the submarine, the Nautilus, and on the ocean floor he played Bach and Handel on the organ. Good stuff, but old. And what of Wells' Time Traveler, when he found himself thousands of years in the future? He fell in square love with a beautiful Eloi maiden. To take with one, whether down into the depths or out into space and time, something dear, and to preserve it-that seemed to be the impulse. Jules Verne was quite right to have Handel on the ocean floor, not Wagner, though in Verne's day Wagner was avant-garde among the symbolists, fusing word and sound. According to Nietzsche the Germans, insufferably oppressed by being German, used Wagner like hashish. To Mr. Sammler's ears, Wagner was background music for a pogrom. And what should one have on the moon, electronic compositions? Mr. Sammler would advise against that. Art groveling before Science.

But Sammler was preoccupied by different matters, far from playful. Feffer, wishing to divert him, had told him the tale of the insurance adjuster who pulled out the pistol. It was no diversion. Feffer had said that with that rotten gun you would have to shoot a man at close range, and in the head. Killing point blank. This shooting in the head was what Sammler had been attempting to shut out, screen off. Hopeless. Diversion shriveled up. He was obliged to give in, to confront certain insufferable things. These things were not subject to control. They had to be endured. They had become a power within him which did not care whether he could bear them or not. Visions or nightmares for others, but for him daylight events, in full consciousness. Certainly Sammler had not experienced things denied to everyone else. Others had gone through the like. Before and after. Especially non-Europeans had a quieter way of taking such things. Surely some Navaho, Apache must have fallen into the Grand Canyon, survived, picked himself up, possibly said nothing to his tribe. Why speak of it? Things that happen, happen. So, for his part, it had happened that Sammler, with his wife and others, on a perfectly clear day, had had to strip naked. Waiting, then, to be shot in the mass grave. (Over a similar new grave Eichmann had testified that he had walked, and the fresh blood welling up at his shoes had sickened him. For a day or two, he had to lie in bed.) Sammler had already that day been struck in the eye by a gun butt and blinded. In contraction from life, when naked, he already felt himself dead. But somehow he had failed, unlike the others, to be connected. Comparing the event, as mentally he sometimes did, to a telephone circuit: death had not picked up the receiver to answer his ring. Sometimes, when he walked on Broadway today, and heard a phone ringing in a shop when doors were open, he tried to find, to intuit, the syllable one would hear from death. "Hello? Ah, you at last. "

"Hello. " And the air of the street visibly vapored with lead, and also with a brass tinge. But if there were live New York bodies passing as there had once been dead ones piled on top of him, if there were this crowd strolling, lounging, dragging, capering (a Broadway rabble to which he belonged)-if there were this, there was also enough to feed every mouth: baked goods, raw meat, smoked meat, bleeding fish, smoked fish, barbecued pork and chicken, apples like ammunition, antihunger orange grenades. In the gutters, along curbs was much food, eaten, as he saw at three a. m., by night-emerging rats. Buns, chicken bones, which, once, he would have thanked God to have. When he was a partisan in Zamosht Forest, freezing, the dead eye like a ball of ice in his head. Envying fallen sticks from his nearness to their state. In a moldered frozen' horse blanket and rag-wrapped feet. Mr. Sammler carried a weapon. He and other starved men chewing at roots and grasses to stay alive. They drifted out at night to explode bridges, unseat rails, kill German stragglers.

Sammler himself, shooting men. There was Feffer's mad insurance adjuster, clutched by impulse or desire for display, firing at the telephone book on the music stand. That had something comically fanatical about it. Putting a bullet through a million close-printed names-a parlor game. But Sammler was driven through the parlor and back to Zamosht Forest. There at very close range he shot a man he had disarmed. He made him fling away his carbine. To the side. A good five feet into snow. It landed flat and sank. Sammler ordered the man to take off his coat. Then the tunic. The sweater, the boots. After this, he said to Sammler in a low voice, "Nicht schiessen." He asked for his life. Red-headed, a big chin bronze-stubbled, he was scarcely breathing. He was white. Violet under the eyes. Sammler saw the soil already sprinkled on his face. He saw the grave on his skin. The grime of the lip, the large creases of skin descending from his nose already lined with dirt-that man to Sammler was already underground. He was no longer dressed for life. He was marked, lost. Had to go. Was gone. "Don't kill me. Take the things." Sammler did not answer, but stood out of reach. "I have children." Sammler pulled the trigger. The body then lay in the snow. A second shot went through the head and shattered it. Bone burst. Matter flew out.

Sammler picked up as much as he could-gun, shells, food, boots, gloves. Two shots in winter air; the sound would carry for miles. He hurried, looking back once. The red hair and thick nose he could see from the bushes. Regrettably there was no chance to get the shirt. The stinking woolen socks yes. He had wanted those badly. He was too weak to carry his loot far. He sat down under winter-creaking trees and ate the German's bread. With it, he took snow into his mouth to help the swallowing, which was difficult. He had no saliva. The thing no doubt would have happened differently to another man, a man who had been eating, drinking, smoking, and whose blood was brimming with fat, nicotine, alcohol, sexual secretions. None of these in Sammler's blood. He was then not entirely human. Rag and paper, a twine-wound bundle, and those objects might have been blown where they liked, if the string had snapped. One would not have minded much.

At that minimum we were. Not much there for human appeal, for the pleading of a distorted face and sinews spreading into the throat.

When Mr. Sammler hid later in the mausoleum, it was not from the Germans but from the Poles. In Zamosht Forest the Polish partisans turned on the Jewish fighters. The war was ending, the Russians advancing, and the decision seems to have been taken to reconstruct a Jewless Poland. There was therefore a massacre. The Poles at dawn came shooting. As soon as it was light enough for murder. There was fog, smoke. The sun tried to rise. Men began to drop, and Sammler ran. There were two other survivors. One played dead. The other, like Sammler, found a break and rushed through. Hiding in the swamp, Sammler lay under a tree trunk, in the mud, under scum. At night he left the forest. He took a chance with Cieslakiewicz next day. (Was it only a day? Perhaps it was longer.) He spent those summer weeks in the cemetery. Then he appeared in Zamosht, in the town itself, wild, gaunt, decaying, the dead eye bulging-like a whelk. One of the doomed who had lasted it all out.

Scarcely worth so much effort, perhaps. There are times when to quit is more reasonable and decent and hanging on is a disgrace. Not to go beyond a certain point in hanging on. Not to stretch the human material too far. The nobler choice. So Aristotle thought.

Mr. Sammler himself was able to add, to basic wisdom, that to kill the man he ambushed in the snow had given him pleasure. Was it only pleasure? It was more. It was joy. You would call it a dark action? On the contrary, it was also a bright one. It was mainly bright. When he fired his gun, Sammler, himself nearly a corpse, burst into life. Freezing in Zamosht Forest, he had often dreamed of being near a fire. Well, this was more sumptuous than fire. His heart felt lined with brilliant, rapturous satin. To kill the man and to kill him without pity, for he was dispensed from pity. There was a flash, a blot of fiery white. When he shot again it was less to make sure of the man than to try again for that bliss. To drink more flames. He would have thanked God for this opportunity. If he had had any God. At that time, he did not. For many years, in his own mind, there was no judge but himself.

In the privacy of his bed he turned very briefly to that rage (for reference, he did it). Luxury. And when he himself was nearly beaten to death. Had to lift dead bodies from himself. Desperate! Crawling out. Oh heart-bursting! Oh vile! Then he himself knew how it felt to take a life. Found it could be an ecstasy.

He got up. It was pleasant here-the lamplight, his own room. He had gathered a very pleasant sort of intimacy about himself: But he got up. He wasn't resting, and he might as well go to the hospital. His nephew Gruner needed him. That thing was fizzing in his brain. Soil was scattered on his face. Look hard. You must see some grains. So, rising, Sammler smoothed back the bedding, the coverlet. He never left a bed unmade. He drew on clean socks. Up to the knee.

Too bad! Too bad, that is, to be pounded back and forth so abnormally on the courts, like a ball between powerful players. Or subject to wild instances. Oh merciless! Thank you, no, no! I did not want to fall into the Grand Canyon. Nice not to have died? Nicer not to have fallen in. Too many inside things were ruptured. To some people, true enough, experience seemed wealth. Misery worth a lot. Horror a fortune. Yes. But I never wanted such riches.

After the socks his ten-year-old shoes. He kept having them resoled. Good enough for getting around Manhattan. He took excellent care of his things, he stuffed his good suit with tissue paper, put in shoe trees at night even though this leather was puckered with age and wear, streaming with wrinkles. These same shoes Mr. Sammler had worn in Israel, in the summer of x967. Not Israel only but also Jordan, the Sinai Desert, and into Syrian territory during the Six-Day War. His second visit. If it was a visit. It was an expedition. At the beginning of the Aqaba crisis he had suddenly become excited. He could not sit still. He had written to an old journalist friend in London and said he was obliged to go, he absolutely must go, as a journalist, and cover the events. There was an association of Eastern European publications. All Sammler really wanted was credentials, a card to enable him to wire cables, a press pass to satisfy the Israelis. The money was supplied by Gruner. And so Sammler had been with the armies on the three fronts. It was curious, that. At the age of seventy-two on battlegrounds, wearing these shoes and a seersucker jacket and soiled white cap from Kresge's. Tankmen spotted him as an American because of the jacket, shouting, "Yank!" Coming up to them, he spoke to some in Polish, to others in French, English. He thought of himself at moments as a camel among the armored vehicles. No Zionist, Mr. Sammler, and for many years the same people were threatened by extermination: the so-called powers letting things drift toward disaster; men armed for a massacre. And he refused to stay in Manhattan watching television.

Perhaps it was the madness of things that affected Sammler most deeply. The persistence, the maniacal push of certain ideas, themselves originally stupid, stupid ideas that had lasted for centuries, this is what drew the most curious reactions from him. The stupid sultanism of a Louis Quatorze reproduced in General de Gaulle-Neo-Charlemagne, someone said. Or the imperial ambition of the Czars in the Mediterranean. They wanted to be the dominant naval power in the Mediterranean, a stupid craving of two centuries, and this, under the "revolutionary" auspices of the Kremlin, was still worked at, in the same way-worked at! Did it make no difference that soon floating dominion by armed ships would be as obsolete as Ashurbanipal, as queer as the dog-headed gods of Egypt? Why, no, it made no difference. No more than the disappearance of Jews from Poland made a difference to the anti-Semitism of the Poles. This was the meaning of historical stupidity. And the Russians also, with their national tenacity. Give them a system, let them grasp some idea, and they would plunge to the depths with it, they would apply it to the end, pave the whole universe with hard idiot material. In any case, it had seemed to Sammler that he must reach the scene. He would be there, to send reports, to do something, perhaps to die in the massacre. Through such a thing he could not sit in New York. That! Quivering, riotous, lurid New York-Feffer's gas city! And Sammler himself went to an extreme, became perhaps too desperate, carried away, beginning to think of sleeping pills, poison. It was really the tangled nervous system, the "nerve-spaghetti." These were his old Polish nerves raging. It was his old panic, his peculiar affliction. He would not read a second day's reports on Shukatry's Arabs in Tel Aviv killing thousands. He told Gruner that. Gruner said, "If you feel so strongly about it, I think you should go." Now Sammler thought that he had been guilty of exaggeration. He had lost his head. Still he had been right to go.

Sammler, from keeping his own counsel for so long, from seven decades of internal consultation, had his own views on most matters. And even the greatest independence was insufficient, still not enough. And there were mental dry courses in his head, of no interest to anyone else, perhaps-wadis, he believed such things were called, small ravines made by the steady erosion of preoccupations. The taking of life was one of these. Just that. His life had nearly been taken. He had seen life taken. He had taken it himself. He knew it was one of the luxuries. No wonder princes had so long reserved the right to murder with impunity. At the very bottom of society there was also a kind of impunity, because no one cared what happened. Under that dark brutal mass blood crimes were often disregarded. And at the very top, the ancient immunities of kings and nobles. Sammler thought that this was what revolutions were really about. In a revolution you took away the privileges of an aristocracy and redistributed them. What did equality mean? Did it mean all men were friends and brothers? No, it meant that all belonged to the elite. Killing was an ancient privilege. This was why revolutions plunged into blood. Guillotines? Terror? Only a beginning-nothing. There came Napoleon, a gangster who washed Europe well in blood. There came Stalin, for whom the really great prize of power was unobstructed enjoyment of murder. That mighty enjoyment of consuming the breath of men's nostrils, swallowing their faces like a Saturn. This was what the conquest of power really seemed to mean. Sammler tied his shoelaces-continued dressing. He brushed at his hair. Trancelike. At several removes from the self in the glass, opposite. And for the middle part of society there was envy and worship of this power to kill. How those middle-class Sorels and Maurrases adored it-the hand that gripped the knife with authority. How they loved the man strong enough to take blood guilt on himself. For them an elite must prove itself in this ability to murder. For such people a saint must be understood as one who was equal in spirit to the fiery twisting of crime in the inmost fibers of his heart. The superman testing himself with an ax, crushing the skulls of old women. The Knight of Faith, capable of cutting the throat of Isaac upon God's altar. And now the idea that one could recover, or establish, one's identity by killing, becoming equal thus to any, equal to the greatest. A man among men knows how to murder. A patrician. The middle class had formed no independent standards of honor. Thus it had no resistance to the glamour of killers. The middle class, having failed to create a spiritual life of its own, investing everything in material expansion, faced disaster. Also, the world becoming disenchanted, the spirits and demons expelled from the air were now taken inside. Reason had swept and garnished the house, but the last state might be worse than the first. Well, now, what would one carry out to the moon?

He brushed the felt hat with an elbow, backed into the vestibule, locked and tested the door, buzzed for the elevator, and descended. Mr. Sammler, back walking the streets, which now were dark blue, a bluish glow from the street lamps. Stooped, walking quickly. He had only two hours, and if he couldn't catch the Eighty-sixth Street Crosstown to Second Avenue, he would be forced to take a cab. West End was very gloomy. He preferred even fuming, heaving, fool-heaped, quivering, stinking Broadway. With the tufts above his glasses silken, graying, tangled, rising as he faced the phenomenon. No use being the sensitive observer, the tourist (was there any land stable enough to tour?), the philosophical rambler out on Broadway, inspecting the phenomenon. The phenomenon had in some way achieved a sense of its own interest and observability. It was aware of being a scene of perversity, it knew its own despair. And fear. The terror of it. Here you might see the soul of America at grips with historical problems, struggling with certain impossibilities, experiencing violently states inherently static. Being realized but trying itself to realize, to act. Attempting to make interest. This attempt to make interest was, for Mr. Sammler, one reason for the pursuit of madness. Madness makes interest. Madness is the attempted liberty of people who feel themselves overwhelmed by giant forces of organized control. Seeking the magic of extremes. Madness is a base form of the religious life.

But wait-Sammler cautioning himself. Even this madness is also to a considerable extent a matter of performance, of enactment. Underneath there persists, powerfully too, a thick sense of what is normal for human life. Duties are observed. Attachments are preserved. There is work. People show up for jobs. It is extraordinary. They come on the bus to the factory. They open the shop, they sweep, they wrap, they wash, they fix, they tend, they count, they mind the computers. Each day, each night. And however rebellious at heart, however despairing, terrified, or worn bare, come to their tasks. Up and down in the elevator, sitting down to the desk, behind the wheel, tending machinery For such a volatile and restless animal, such a high-strung, curious animal, an ape subject to so many diseases, to anguish, boredom, such discipline, such drill, such strength for regularity, such assumption of responsibility, such regard for order (even in disorder) is a great mystery, too. Oh, it is a mystery. One cannot mistake this for thorough madness, therefore. One thing, though, the disciplined hate the undisciplined to the point of murder. Thus the working class, disciplined, is a great reservoir of hatred. Thus the clerk behind the wicket finds it hard to forgive those who come and go their apparent freedom. And the bureaucrat, glad when disorderly men are killed. All of them, killed.

What one sees on Broadway while bound for the bus. All human types reproduced, the barbarian, redskin, or Fiji, the dandy, the buffalo hunter, the desperado, the queer, the sexual fantasist, the squaw; bluestocking, princess, poet, painter, prospector, troubadour, guerrilla, Che Guevara, the new Thomas а Becket. Not imitated are the businessman, the soldier, the priest, and the square. The standard is aesthetic. As Mr. Sammler saw the thing, human beings, when they have room, when they have liberty and are supplied also with ideas, mythologize themselves. They legendize. They expand by imagination and try to rise above the limitations of the ordinary forms of common life. And what is "common" about "the common life"? What if some genius were to do with "common life" what Einstein did with "matter"? Finding its energetics, uncovering its radiance. But at the present level of crude vision, agitated spirits fled from the oppressiveness of "the common life," separating themselves from the rest of their species, from the life of their species, hoping perhaps to get away (in some peculiar sense) from the death of their species. To perform higher actions, to serve the imagination with special distinction, it seems essential to be histrionic. This, too, is a brand of madness. Madness has always been a favorite choice of the civilized man who prepares himself for a noble achievement. It is often the simplest state of availability to ideals. Most of us are satisfied with that: signifying by a kind of madness devotion to, availability for, higher purposes. Higher purposes do not necessarily appear.

If we are about to conclude our earth business-or at least the first great phase of it-we had better sum these things up. But briefly. As briefly as possible.

Short views, for God's sake!

Then: a crazy species? Yes, perhaps. Though madness is also a masquerade, "… the project of a deeper reason, a result of the despair we feel before infinities and eternities. Madness is a diagnosis or verdict of some of our greatest doctors and geniuses, and of their man-disappointed minds. Oh, man stunned by the rebound of man's powers. And what to do? In the matter of histrionics, see, for instance, what that furious world-boiler Marx had done, insisting that revolutions were made in historical costume, the Cromwellians as Old Testament prophets, the French in 1789 dressed in Roman outfits. But the proletariat, he said, he declared, he affirmed, would make the first non-imitative revolution. It would not need the drug of historical recollection. From sheer ignorance, knowing no models, it would simply do the thing pure. He was as giddy as the rest about originality. And only the working class was original. Thus history would get away from mere poetry. Then the life of humankind would clear itself of copying. It would be free from Art. Oh, no. No, no, not so, thought Sammler. Instead, Art increased, and a sort of chaos. More possibility, more actors, apes, copycats, more invention, more fiction, illusion, more fantasy, more despair. Life looting Art of Its wealth, destroying Art as well by its desire to become the thing itself. Pressing Itself into pictures. Reality forcing itself Into all these shapes. Just look (Sammler looked) at this imitative anarchy of the streets-these Chinese revolutionary tunics, these babes in unisex toyland, these surrealist warchiefs, Western stagecoach drivers-Ph.D.s in philosophy, some of them (Sammler had met such, talked matters over with them). They sought originality. They were obviously derivative. And of what-of Paiutes, of Fidel Castro? No, of Hollywood extras. Acting mythic. Casting themselves into chaos, hoping to adhere to higher consciousness, to be washed up on the shores of truth. Better, thought Sammler, to accept the inevitability of imitation and then to imitate good things. The ancients had this right. Greatness without models? Inconceivable. One could not be the thing itself-Reality. One must be satisfied with the symbols. Make it the object of imitation to reach and release the high qualities. Make peace therefore with intermediacy and representation. But choose higher representations. Otherwise the individual must be the failure he now sees and knows himself to be. Mr. Sammler, sorry for all, and sore at heart.

Before lighting out, before this hop to the moon and outward bound, we had better look into some of this. As for the Crosstown and at this time of night, it was a perfectly safe bus to take.