Mr. Sammler's Planet

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 à 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.

IV

Dr. Gruner had private nurses around the clock. Sammler entered and found the uniformed woman sitting by the bed. The patient was sleeping. Sammler in a careful whisper introduced himself. "His uncle--oh, yes, he said you'd probably come," said the nurse. She didn't make it sound like a pleasant prediction. Under her starched cap the dyed dry hair was puffed out. The face itself, middle-aged, was fleshy, healthy, bossy. The eyes had an expression of sovereignty. Patients would be brought along the way that they must go: recovery or death.

"Is he asleep for the night, or is he taking a nap?" said Sammler.

"He may be waking up soon, but that's a guess. Miss Gruner is in the visitors' room."

"I'll stand a bit," said Sammler, not invited to sit. There were many flowers, baskets of fruit, candy boxes, best sellers. The television set was running, soundlessly. The nurse listened with an earpiece. Reflected light flickered on the wall behind the bed. Elya's hands were turned downward at his sides, as though he had arranged himself symmetrically before dropping off. The hairy hands were clean, strong, venous, with polished nails. The nails had the same shine as the shot glass from which Gruner had sipped his mineral oil. The Nujol bottle was there, too, and beside it the Wall Street Journal. Bald dignity. The cord of the electric razor was plugged in above. He always was clean-shaven. The priests of Apis the Bull, as described by Herodotus, with shaven heads and bodies. And with the sleeping mouth bulged out on one side as if Elya, who liked to say that he had grown up in Greenpoint among hoodlums, might have been dreaming about racketeers and gunfire. Under his chin the bandage was like a military collar. Sammler thought of him as a man who badly, even desperately, needed confirmation, support, and touch. Gruner was a toucher. His habit, even in passing through a room, was to touch, to take people's arms, even perhaps getting medical information about their muscles, glands, weight, or the growth of their hair. He also implanted his opinions, his hopes in their breasts, and then if he said, "Well, isn't it so?", it was indeed so. Like a modern General of the Army, an Eisenhower, he made his logistical preparations. This shrewdness was very childish. But easy to pardon. Especially at such a time. At such a time, how could he sleep?

Sammler backed through the door softly and went to the visitors' room. There Angela sat smoking but not in her usual sensual and elegant style. She had been crying, and her face was white and hot. Her figure was heavy, breasts a burden, knees bulging pale against the taut silk of the stockings. Was it only because of her father that she was weeping? Sammler sensed a combined cause for those tears. He sat opposite her and laid the Augustus John hat, mole-gray, on his lap.

"Sleeping still?"

"Yes," said Sammler.

Angela's large lips, as though to cool herself, were open; she breathed through her mouth. Hot, the slope face with close-textured skin seemed very tight. The heat rose also into the whites of the eyes. "Does he really understand the situation?"

"I wonder. But he is a doctor, and I think he does."

Angela cried again, and Sammmler was even more convinced of a second cause for her tears. "And there's nothing else wrong with him," said Angela. "He's perfectly well except for that thing--that one tiny damned thing. And you think he knows, Uncle?"

"Yes, probably."

"But acting so normal. Talking about the family. He was so glad to see you and hoped you'd come back tonight. And he still keeps worrying about Wallace."

"One can see why."

"Wallace has been such a headache. At six, seven, he was such a beautiful gifted little boy. He put together mathematical things. We thought we had another Einstein. Daddy sent him to MIT. But next thing we knew he was a bartender in Cambridge, and he beat some drunk almost to death."

"I've heard."

"And now he's bugging Daddy to get him a plane. At such a time! A flying saucer would be more like it. Of course I share some of the blame for Wallace." Sammler knew that the conversation would take a tiresome psychiatric-pediatric turn, and that he would have to endure a certain amount of explanation.

"Of course I was resentful when they brought the kid home from the hospital. I asked Mother to put his crib in the garage. I'm sure he felt rejection, from the first. I never liked him. He was too gloomy. He just wasn't like a child. He had terrible fits of rage."

"Well, everybody has a history," said Sammler.

"I think I decided in adolescence that my brother was going to be a queer. I thought it was my fault, that I was so slutty that he became frightened of girls."

"Is that so? Well, I remember your confirmation," said Sammler. "You were quite studious. I was impressed that you were studying Hebrew."

"Just a front, Uncle. I was a dirty little bitch, really."

"I wonder. In retrospect, people exaggerate so."

"Neither Father nor I ever liked Wallace. We pushed him off on Mother, and that was like condemning him for life. Then it was one thing after another, his obese stage, his alcoholic stage. Well, now have you heard? He thinks there's money hidden in the house."

"Do you think so, too?"

"I'm not sure. There have been hints from Daddy about it. Mother too before she died. She seemed to believe that now and then Daddy would--he'd step out of line, as she used to say."

"To help out famous families from Dutchess County, as Wallace tells me?"

"Is that what he says? No, Uncle, what I heard was that Daddy did favors for the Mafia characters he grew up with. Top people in the Syndicate. very well. You probably never heard of Luciano."

"Just vaguely."

"Luciano came out to New Rochelle now and then. And if Daddy did those things and they paid him in cash, it must have been embarrassing. He probably didn't know what to do with that money. But that's not what's weighing on my mind."

"No. Speaking of New Rochelle, you haven't seen Shula, have you, Angela?"

"I haven't. What is she up to?"

"She brought me a very interesting book. However, it wasn't hers to bring."

"I assume she's hiding from Eisen. She thinks he's come to claim her."

"A flattering fear. If only he were capable of coming on such a mission. If he didn't beat her, it would answer many needs. It would be a mercy. No, I don't think he wants her at all. He doesn't like it that she poses as a Catholic. That was his pretext. Although he did say he got along well with Pope Pius at Castel Gandolfo. And now Eisen is not the friend of Popes, he is an artist. I don't think he has much genius, though he's crazy enough to want great glory." But Angela didn't want to hear this now. Apparently she thought Sammler was trying to turn the subject in a theoretical direction--to discuss the creative psychotic.

"Well, he's been here."

"You saw Eisen? He's been annoying Elya? Did he go in?"

"He wanted to make drawings--to sketch him, you know."

"I don't like it. I wish he wouldn't bother Elya. What the devil does he want? Keep him away."

"Well, maybe I shouldn't have let him in. I thought he might entertain Daddy."

Sammler was about to answer, but several beats of comprehension passed through his head and made him see matters differently. Of course. Ah, yes. Angela was having her own troubles with Dr. Gruner. Angela was not one of your great weepers, not like Margotte with her high annual tearfall. If Angela was looking so wan that even the frosted hair, usually so glossy and powerful, seemed to bristle dryly and Sammler thought he saw the dark follicular spots on her scalp, it was because she had been wrangling with her father. Under stress, Sammler believed, the whole faltered, and parts (follicles, for instance) became conspicuous. Such at least was his observation. Elya must be furious with her, and she was trying to divert his attention. Visitors. Obviously this was why she had taken Eisen straight in. But Eisen was not diverting. He was one of those smiling gloomy maniacs. Very gloomy, really. A depressing fellow. The smart silk suit he had worn ten years ago in Haifa when he and his father-in-law had gone out in the street, to a café, to discuss Shula, might have made a satisfactory coffin lining. Eisen certainly deserved to be cared for, and that was one of the uses of Israel, to gather in these cripples. But now Eisen had broken out, had heard the jolly frantic music of America and wanted to get into the act. He made a beeline for the rich cousin. The rich cousin was in the hospital with some kind of fiddle-peg in his neck. Odd what an instinct they all had for molesting a dying man.

"Did Edya find Eisen amusing? I doubt it."

Angela wore a playful cap, matching the black and white shoes. Now that her head was lowered Sammler saw the large button of kid leather set in the radial creases.

"A while he did, I think," she said. "Eisen made sketches of Daddy. But then he tried to sell them to him. Daddy would hardly glance at them."

"Not surprising. I wonder where Eisen got the money to come to America."

"I don't know, maybe he saved up. He's put out with you, Uncle."

"I'm sure of that."

"For not coming to see him in Israel. You were there for the war. He says you cut him."

"That doesn't concern me much. I wasn't there to pay my respects to a son-in-law or to make social visits."

"He complained to Daddy about you."

"Horrible!" said Sammler. "Everybody hitting away with these stupidities. At this time!"

"But Daddy takes an interest in all kinds of things. If everything suddenly stopped, it would be abnormal. Of course it's bad to aggravate him. For instance, he's angry with me."

"I suppose there is really no good way for Elya to do this thing."

"I'd say that he should stop talking to Widick. You know his fat lawyer, Widick?"

"Of course, I've met the man."

"Four or five times a day on the telephone. And Daddy asks me to leave the room. They're still buying and selling, trading on the stock market. Also I assume they discuss his will, or he wouldn't send me outside."

"Evidently, Angela, in spite of the case you make against Mr. Widick, you've crossed your father yourself, in some way. And you seem to want me to ask about it?"

"I think I should tell you."

"It doesn't sound good."

"It isn't. It was when Wharton Horricker and I went to Mexico."

"I believe Elya likes Horricker. He wouldn't have objected to that."

"No, he hoped that Wharton and I would get married."

"Won't you?"

Angela held a lighted cigarette in forked fingers before her face. Actions normally graceful, now distressingly heavy. She shook her head, her eyes filling, reddening. Ah, trouble with Horricker. Sammler had guessed something of the sort. It was a little hard for him to understand why she should always have so much trouble. Perhaps he put it to himself that she enjoyed so many privileges, what more did she want? She had the income from half a million to live on: tax-exempt Municipals, as Elya would repeat. She had this flesh, these sex attractions and talents--volupté she had. She brought back the French sex vocabulary Sammler had learned at the University of Cracow reading Emile Zola. That book about the fruit market. Le Ventre de Paris. Les Halles. And that appetizing woman there who was also something good to eat, a regular orchard. Volupté, seins, épaules, hanches. Sur un lit de feuilles. Cette tiédeur satinée de femme. Excellent, Emile! And--all right!--orchards suffering when there were earth tremors could drop all their pears; this too Sammler could sympathetically understand. But Angela was always unusually involved in difficulty and suffering, tripping on invisible obstructions, bringing forth complications of painful mischief which made him wonder whether this volupté was not one of the sorest strangest burdens that could be laid on a woman's soul. Saw the woman (by her own erotic account), as if in the actual bedroom. By invitation he was there, a perplexed bystander. Evidently she believed it necessary that he should know what went on in America. He did not need quite so much information. But better a surplus than ignorance. Both the U. S. A. and the U. S. S. R. were, for Sammler, utopian projects. There, in the East, the emphasis was on low-level goods, on shoes, caps, toilet-plungers, and tin basins for peasants and laborers. Here it fell upon certain privileges and joys. Here wading naked into the waters of paradise, et cetera. But always a certain despair underlining pleasure, death seated inside the health-capsule, steering it, and darkness winking at you from the golden utopian sun.

"So you've had a quarrel with Wharton Horricker?"

"He's angry with me."

"Aren't you angry with him?"

"Not exactly. I seem to be in the wrong."

"Where is he now?"

"He's supposed to be in Washington. He's doing something statistical on antiballistic missiles. For the Senate bloc against the ABM. I don't understand the thing."

"It's a pity to have such trouble now, to have a double difficulty."

"I'm afraid Daddy has found out about this."

In Angela's expression as in Wallace's there was something soft, a hint of infancy or of baby reverie. The parents must have longed overmuch for babies and so inhibited something in their children's cycle of development. Angela's last glance, before she began to sob, astonished Sammler. Open lips, wrinkled forehead, the skin expressing utter surrender, traits of the original person. An infant! But the eyes did not give up their look of erotic experience.

"Found out about what?"

"A thing that happened at Acapulco. I didn't think it was so very serious. Neither did Wharton. At the time, it was just a kick. I mean it was funny. We had a party with another couple."

"What sort of party was it?"

Well, it was a sex thing for the four of us."

"With other people? Who were they?"

"They were perfectly all right. We met them on the beach. The wife suggested it."

"An exchange?"

"Well, yes. Oh, it is done now, Uncle."

"I hear it is."

"You are disgusted with me, Uncle."

"I? Not really. I knew all this long ago. I regret it when things become so stupid, that's true. It seems to me that things poor professionals once had to do for a living, performing for bachelor parties, or tourist sex-circuses on the Place Pigalle, ordinary people, housewives, filing-clerks, students, now do just to be sociable. And I can't really say what it's all about. Is it maybe some united effort to conquer disgust? Or to show that all the repulsive things in history are not so repulsive? I don't know. Is it an effort to liberalize' human existence and show that nothing that happens between people is really loathsome? Affirming the Brotherhood of Man? Ah, well--" Sammler steadied and restrained himself. He did not want to know the details of this incident in Acapulco, didn't want to hear that the man in the case was a municipal judge from Chicago, or a chiropractor or CPA or a dope-pusher or that he made perfume or formaldehyde.

"Wharton went along, he did his share, but afterward he turned sullen. Then on the plane, flying back, he told me how angry he was about it."

"Well, he's a fastidious young man. You can see from his shirts. I assume he was well brought up."

"He acted no better than the rest of us."

"If you expected to marry Wharton, it was certainly poor judgment to do this."

Sammler badly wanted to get this conversation over. Elya had told him not to worry about the future, a hint that he was provided for; but there were also practical considerations to bear in mind. What if he and Shula had to depend on Angela? Angela had always been generous--she spent easily. When they went to a gallery or to lunch, she, naturally, paid for cabs, paid the check, left the tip, everything. But it would not do to go too deeply with Angela into this life of hers. The facts were too bad, too bald, abominable, pitiful. To a degree such behavior was based on theory, on generational ideology, part of a liberal education, and was therefore to an extent impersonal. But Angela would later regret these confessions--regret, and resent his disapproval. On the whole he received her confidences in a disinterested way. He was not unsympathetic, unfeeling; he was (she had said it herself) objective, nonjudging. As they faced Elya's death, he decided that under no circumstances and on no account would he become involved in a perverse relationship with Angela in which he had to listen for his supper. His disinterestedness would never become one of her comforts, part of the furniture of her life. Not even his anxiety over Shula's future could force him into such a position. A receiver of sordid goods? His whole heart rose against this.

"Daddy is asking very pointed questions about Wharton."

"He has heard about this episode?"

"That's right, Uncle."

"Who would tell him such things? It seems unusually cruel."

"I don't know whether you understand about that fat Widick, the lawyer. He and Wharton are related somewhere along the line. He's a bastard."

"That's not my impression at all. Normally fraudulent, perhaps, but that is simply business."

"He's a shit. Daddy thinks the world of Widick. He won the big case for him against the insurance company. I told you they talk four or five times a day on the phone. And Widick hates me."

"How do you know that?"

"I feel it. I get the spoiled-daughter look from him. There have always been people around who thought that Daddy had a bad thing about me, made me financially too independent. You know--pampered me and let me hang too loose."

"Hasn't he been exceptionally indulgent?"

"Not just for my sake, Uncle Sammler. You don't just act for yourself, and he's also lived through me. You can believe it."

Men, thought Sammler, often sin alone; women are seldom companionless in sin. But although Angela might be trying to force this interpretation on her father's kindness, it was possible that Elya too had his own lustful tendencies. Who was Sammler to say no? Things in general were desperate. The arterial bulge in Elya's brain must have cast its shadow earlier--spatters before the cloudburst. Sammler believed in premonitions, and death was a powerful instigator of erotic ideas. Sammler's own sex impulses (perhaps even now not altogether gone) had been very different. But he knew how to respect differences. He didn't measure others by himself. Now Shula had no volupté. She had something else. Of course she was not a rich man's daughter, and money, the dollar, was certainly a terrific sexual additive. But even Shula, though a scavenger or magpie, had never actually stolen before. Then suddenly she too was like the Negro pickpocket. From the black side, strong currents were sweeping over everyone. Child, black, redskin--the unspoiled Seminole against the horrible Whiteman. Millions of civilized people wanted oceanic, boundless, primitive, neckfree nobility, experienced a strange release of galloping impulses, and acquired the peculiar aim of sexual niggerhood for everyone. Humankind had lost its old patience. It demanded accelerated exaltation, accepted no instant without pregnant meanings as in epic, tragedy, comedy, or films. He had an idea even that the very special development of the significance of prisons since the eighteenth century had some relation to this shrinking ability to endure restraint. Punishment must be fitted, closely tailored to the state of the spirit, adapted to the need of the soul. Where liberty had been promised most, they had the biggest, worst prisons. Then another question: Had Elya performed abortions to oblige old Mafia friends? As to that, Sammler had no opinion. He simply couldn't say. Elya had never wanted to be a physician. He disliked the practice of medicine. But he had done his duty. And even doctors nowadays made sexual gestures to their patients. Put women's hands on their parts. Sammler had heard of this. Physicians who rejected the Oath, who joined the Age. Also Shula, Shula stealing, was contemporary--lawless. She was experiencing the Age. In so doing, she drew her father along with her. And possibly Elya, with the screw in his throat, had not wished to be left behind either, and had delegated Angela to experience the Age for him.

Be all that as it might--life once had nearly ended. Someone ahead, carrying the light, stumbled, faltered, and Mr. Sammler had thought it was over. However, he was still alive. He had not come through, for the connotation of coming through was that of an accomplishment and little had been accomplished. He had been steered from Cracow to London, from London to the Zamosht Forest, and eventually into New York City. One result of such a history was that he had formed a habit of condensation. He was a specialist in short views. And in the short view, Angela had offended her dying father. He was angry, and she wanted Sammler to intercede for her. Maybe Elya would cut her out of his will, give his money to charity. He had made large contributions to the Weizmann Institute. That Think-tank, they called it, at Rehovoth. Or perhaps she was afraid that he himself, Sammler, who was so close to Elya, would become his heir.

"Will you talk to Daddy, Uncle?"

"About this... thing of yours? That would be up to him. I wouldn't introduce the subject. I don't think he's just become aware of your style of life. I can't say what he's gotten out of it vicariously, as you suggest. But he's not stupid, and giving a young woman like you a capital of half a million dollars to live in New York City, he would have to be very dumb to think you were not amusing yourself."

Great cities are whores. Doesn't everyone know? Babylon was a whore. Ô La Reine aux fesses cascadantes. Penicillin keeps New York looking cleaner. No faces gnawed by syphilis, with gaping noseholes as in ancient times.

"Daddy has such respect for you."

"What use should I make of that respect?"

"All the oldest, deepest, worst sexual prejudices are mobilized against me."

"Lord only knows what's in his mind," said Sammler. "Perhaps it's only one pain among many."

"He's said cruel things to me."

"This Mexican event is not the first," said Sammler. "Surely your father has always known. He hoped you would marry Horricker and stop this sexual nonsense."

"I'll see if he's awake," said Angela, and rose. Her soft and heavy self was dressed in one of its costumes. Her legs, exposed to the last quarter of the thigh, were really very strong, almost clumsy. Her face was at this moment baby-pale, and soft under the little leather cap. As she detached herself from the plastic seat, and the evening was quite warm, an odor was released. Both low comic and high serious. Goddess and majorette. The Great Sinnerl What a vexation for poor Elya. What overvaluation. What an atrocious mixture of feelings. Angela was displeased with Sammler. She walked away.

As she was going, he remembered where he had last seen a cap like hers. It was in Israel--the Six-Day War he had seen.

He had seen.

It was almost as if he had attended--among other spectators. Arriving in fast cars at a point before Mount Hermon, where a tank battle was taking place, he was one of a press group watching a fight, below. Down in the flat valley, as in Vista-Vision. Where they were standing, Mr. Sammler and the others, Israeli press officers and journalists, were safe enough. The battle was two miles or more beyond them. The tank columns were maneuvering in dust. Bombs were spilling from planes as remote as insects. You saw the wings when they spun into the light, then heard detonations, and shrubs of smoke rose briefly. Remotely, you heard machinery--distant tank treads. You heard tiny war sounds. Then two more cars came tearing up, joined the group, and cameramen leaped out. They were Italians, paparazzi, someone explained, and had brought with them three girls in mod dress. The girls might have come from Carnaby Street or from King's Road in their buskins, miniskirts, false eyelashes. They were indeed British, for Mr. Sammler heard them talking, and one of them had on just the sort of little cap that Angela wore, of houndstooth check. The young ladies had no idea where they were, what this was about, had been quarreling with their lovers, who were now lying in the road on their bellies. Photographing battle, the shirts fluttering on their backs. The girls were angry. Carried off from the Via Veneto, probably, without knowing clearly where the jet was going. Then, bare to the waist, a runt but muscular, a Swiss correspondent with small twisted kinky-blond beard and his chest hung with cameras began to complain to the Israeli captain that it was improper for these girls to be at the front. Sammler heard him give this protest through his teeth, which were bad and tiny. The place where they were standing had been bombed earlier. One could not see why. There seemed no military reason for it. But the ground was full of large holes, still black with fresh bomb soot.

"Put them at least in those holes," the Swiss Insisted.

"What?"

"Foxholes, foxholes. Another shell may come. You can't have them walking on the road, like this. You can't have it, don't you understand?" He was an unbearable little man. His war was being ruined by these stupid girls in costume. The Israeli officer gave in. He made the girls get into the burnt holes. All you could see of them then was heads and shoulders. Not quite frightened of their anger, but beginning to be. Somewhat stunned by now, in the paint of great amorousness, one beginning to sob a little, and another puffing up and growing red. Becoming middle-aged--a scrubwoman. Frills of glistening black rising about the girls, the cordite-shining grass.

Other things as strange were occurring. Father Newell, the Jesuit correspondent, was there. He wore the full battle dress of the Vietnam jungles--yellow, black, and green daubs and stripes of camouflage. Representing a newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was it, or Lincoln, Nebraska? Sammler still owed him ten dollars, his share of the tald they had hired in Tel Aviv to drive to the Syrian front. But he didn't have Father Newell's address. He might have tried harder to find it. On his way home from Southeast Asia, the priest was a tourist in Athens, looking at the Acropolis, when he heard of the fighting and went at once. The big jungle boots were as ample as galoshes. Father Newell sweated in his green battle clothes. His hair cropped Marine-style, his eyes also green and the cheeks splendid meat-red. Down below the tanks raced and the smoke puffed yellow from the ground. Few sounds rose.

Mr. Sammler in the waiting room now stirred and stood up. Wallace, entering from the general light of the corridor into the lamplight of the visitors' room, was already speaking to him. "Dad is sleeping, Angela says. I don't suppose you've had a chance to talk to him about the attic?"

"I have not."

Wallace was not alone. Eisen entered at his back. Wallace and Eisen knew each other. How well? A curious question. But quite long, at any rate. They had met when Wallace, after his attempted horse tour of Central Asia and his arrest by the Russian authorities, had visited Israel, and stayed with Cousin Eisen. Wallace had then prepared a full set of notes (going to work at once) for an essay arguing that the modernization Israel was bringing to the Middle East was altogether too rapid for the Arabs. Pernicious. Wallace, of course, was bound to oppose Elya's Zionism. But Eisen, never comprehending, unaware of Wallace's sudden passion (soon vanishing) for Arab culture, brought him coffee in bed while he was working. Because Wallace was just out of a Soviet prison, thanks to Gruner and Senator Javits, and Eisen knew what it was to be in Russian hands. He had made Wallace rest, he waited on him. On his mutilated feet he had learned to move rapidly. Ingenious adaptation. The shuffle of his toeless feet in Haifa had put Sammler's teeth on edge. He couldn't have endured two hours alone with handsome, curly, smiling Eisen. But Wallace, with his great-orbited eyes and long lashes, reaching a skinny hairy arm from the bed and, without looking, accepting coffee in trembling fingers, coddled himself ten days in Eisen's bed after the jails of Soviet Armenia. The Russians had sent him to Turkey. From Turkey he went to Athens. From Athens, like Newell the Jesuit later, he flew to Israel. Tenderly, devotedly, Eisen had waited on him.

"Ah, here is my father-in-law."

Was it with pleasure at seeing him that Eisen beamed, or was it because the event (Eisen in New York for the first time in his life) was so splendid? He was gay but stiff, cramped under the arms and between the legs by his new American clothes. Wallace must have taken him to one of those execrable mod male shops, like Barney's. Perhaps to one of the unisex establishments. The madman wore a magenta shirt with a persimmon-colored necktie as thick as an ox tongue. The gloom of his never-ending laughter, the shining of his excellent teeth unharmed by the Stalingrad siege and unaffected by starvation when he hobbled over the Carpathians and the Alps. Teeth like that deserved a saner head.

"How nice to find you here," said Eisen to Sammler in Russian.

Sammler answered in Polish, "How are you, Eisen?"

"You wouldn't stop to visit me in my country, so I came to see you in yours," said Eisen.

In this reproach, a familiar and traditional Jewish opening, there was at least a vestige of normalcy. Not so in the next statement. "I have come to America to make myself a new career." Karyera was the word he employed. Dressed in the cramping narrow gray-denim garments, obviously old stock from the Ivy League period that had been palmed off on him, in magenta, persimmon, and tomato colors (the red Chelsea boots mounting to the ankles), his unbarbered curls fusing head and shoulders and brutally eliminating the neck, he was obviously getting a new image, revising his self-conception. No longer a victim of Hitler and Stalin; deposited starved-to the bones on Israel's sands; lice, lunacy, and fever his only assets; taken from internment in Cyprus; taught a language and a trade. But you could not tell recovery where to stop. He had gone on to become an artist. Rising from negligibility, expendability, something that waited to be slaughtered with a trenching tool (Eisen said he had watched this before escaping from Nazi-occupied territory into the Russian zone--men too insignificant to waste bullets on, having their heads smashed by shovel blows); but rising and rising to heights of world mastery. By the divinity of art. Speaking, inspired, to mankind. Making signs in the universal language of charged pigments. Hurray, Eisen, flying from peak to peak! Though his colors were grayer than slate, blacker than coal, redder than disease, and his life studies were double dead, the bus that brought him in from Kennedy was a limousine; the expressways greeted him like a glorious astronaut, and he faced his Karyera with the moist laughing teeth, in most desperate ecstasy. (To pair with the Russian Karyera, you wanted the Russian Extass!)

He and Wallace were already doing business together. Eisen was designing labels for the trees and the bushes. They showed Sammler sample cards: QUERCUS and ULMUS, in thick blotchy letters of Gothic black. Other labels in the foreign cursive style Eisen had learned in the Gymnasium were neater. Poor Eisen had been a schoolboy when the war broke out and had no higher education. Sammler did his best to say something appropriate and harmless though he was repelled by everything that Eisen set on paper.

"These have got to be modified here and there," said Wallace. "But the idea is surprisingly right. For a greenie, you know."

"You are going into this business, really?"

Wallace said firmly, even with a slight jeer (forming about a dimple) at the old man's doubts, "Definitely, really, Uncle. In fact I'm going to test-fly some planes tomorrow, in Westchester. I'm going back this evening to spend the night at the old place."

"Is your pilot's license still good?"

"Why, of course it's good."

"Well, it must be an agreeable feeling of excitement--a new enterprise, with friends and relatives. What have you got there, Eisen?"

A heavy green baize bag hung from cords wound about Eisen's wrist. "Here? I have brought work of mine in a different medium." Eisen said. He clinked down the weight on the glass tabletop; the baize fell back.

"You've made some paperweights."

"Not paperweights. You could use them for that purpose, Father-in-law, but they are medallions." You couldn't offend Eisen because he took such pleasure in his accomplishments. As if he were inhaling some aromatic rarity, he began to close his eyes and to show those peerless bones, his teeth, and with both hands smoothed back the curls over his ears. "I have invented a new process in the foundry," he said. In technical Russian he began to explain, but Sammler said, "You are losing me, Eisen. I am not familiar with the vocabulary."

The metal was crude-looking, partly bronze but also pale yellow, tinged with sulfides like fool's gold. And Eisen had made the usual Stars of David, branched candelabra, scrolls and rams' horns, or inscriptions flaming away in Hebrew: Nahamu! "Comfort ye!" Or God's command to Joshua: Hazak! With a certain interest Sammler watched these crude, lunky pieces being laid out. After each, a pause, while the face of the connoisseur was intently examined for the beautiful reaction obviously due. These iron pyrites, belonging at the bottom of the Dead Sea.

"And what is this, Eisen, a tank, I take it, a Sherman tank?"

"Metaphor for a tank. Nothing is literal in my work."

"No one simply hallucinates any more," said Mr. Sammler in Polish. The remark was unnoticed.

"Shouldn't these be ground smoother?" said Wallace. "And what is this word?"

"Hazak, hazak," said Sammler. "The order God gave before Jericho, to Joshua. 'Strengthen thyself.'"

"Hazak, v'ematz," said Eisen.

"Yes, well... Why does God speak such a funny language?" said Wallace.

"I brought these medallions to show to Cousin Elya."

"Nonsense," said Sammler. "Elya's sick. He can't handle this rough heavy metal."

"No, no, I'll hold up one piece at a time. I want him to see what I accomplished. Twenty-five years ago I came to the Eretz a broken man. But I wouldn't die. I couldn't shut my eyes--not before I did something like a human being, something important, beautiful."

Sammmler ventured no comment. After all, his heart was not so hard to touch. Moreover, he had been trained in the ancient mode of politeness. Almost as, once, women had been brought up to chastity. Well-schooled in murmuring over the trash Shula found in wastebaskets, he made the necessary sounds and passes of the hand, but then he said again that Elya was very ill. These medallions might tire him.

"I differ," said Eisen. "On the contrary. How can art hurt?" He began to stow the clinking pieces in the baize bag.

Wallace then said to someone behind Sammler, "Yes, he is. " The private nurse had come in.

"Who is?"

"You, Uncle. This Is Mr. Sammler here."

"Is Elya asking for me?"

"You're wanted on the telephone. You are Uncle Sammler?"

"Miss? I am Artur Sammler."

"A Mrs. Arkin. She wants you to call home."

"Oh, Margotte. Did she phone Elya's room? I hope she didn't wake him."

"The call was to the floor, not to the room."

"Thank you. Oh, yes, where is the public phone?"

"Do you need dimes, Uncle?" Sammler picked two warm coins out of Wallace's palm. Wallace had been clutching his money.

Margotte tried extraordinarily hard to speak firmly. "Uncle? Now listen. Where did you leave Dr. Lal's manuscript?"

"I left it on my desk."

"Are you sure?"

"Of course I am sure. On my desk."

"Is there no other place you might have put it? I know you aren't absent-minded, but the strain is unusual."

"It isn't on the desk? Is Dr. Lal with you?"

"I sat him down in the living room."

Among the pots of soil. What must this Lal be feeling!

"And does he know it's gone?"

"I couldn't very well lie to him. I had to tell him. He wanted to wait here for you. We raced back from Butler Hall, of course. He was so anxious."

"Now, Margotte, we must keep our heads."

"He is in such distress. Really, Uncle, no one has the right to expose a person to such things."

"My apologies to Dr. Lal. I regret more than I can say... I can imagine how upset he is. But Margotte, only one person in the world could have taken that notebook. You must find out from the elevator man. Has Shula been there?"

"Rodriguez lets her in as one of the family. She is one of the family."

Rodriguez had a giant ring of keys, practically a hoop. He fetched it at need from a nail in the brick wall of the cellar.

"Really, Shula is too stupid. Enough is enough. I've been too easy with her. The embarrassment is terrible. Being the father of the woman-lunatic who ambushes this unhappy Indian. You spoke to Rodriguez?"

"It was Shula."

"Ah"

"Dr. Lal had a report from the detective who visited her today, at noon. I think the man threatened her."

"As I feared."

"He said the manuscript must be back by ten a. m. tomorrow; otherwise he would come with a warrant."

"To search? Arrest?"

"I don't know. Neither does Dr. Lal. But she got very excited. What she said was that she would go to her priest. She would go to Father Robles and complain to the Church."

"Margotte, you had better check with that priest. A search warrant in that apartment? She has been filling it with trash for twelve years. If the police put down their hats, they'll never find them again. But I would say she has gone to New Rochelle."

"Do you think so?"

"If she's not with Father Robles, that's where she is." Sammler knew her ways; knew them as the Eskimo knows the ways of the seal. Its breathing-holes. "She is protecting me now, because the stolen property is in my hands. She must have been terrified by the detective, poor thing, and then waited till we had both gone out." Spying on my door like the black man. Feeling that she was not included by her father among his most serious concerns. Determined to regain the top priority. "I have let her go too far with this H. G. Wells nonsense. And now someone has been hurt."

This unlucky Lal, who must have been sick of earth to begin with if he had such expectations of the moon.

And partly he was right, for humankind kept doing the same stunts over and over. The old comical-tearful stuff. Emotional relationships. Desires incapable of useful fulfillment. Over and over, trying to vent and empty the breast of certain cries, of certain fervencies. What positive balance was possible? Was this passional struggle altogether useless? It was the energy bank also of noble purposes. Barking, hissing, ape-chatter, and spitting. But there were times when Love seemed life's great architect. Weren't there? Even stupidity might at times be hammered out as a golden background for great actions. Mightn't it? But for these weaknesses and these tenacious sicknesses, were there true cures? Sometimes the idea of cures seemed to Sammler itself pernicious. What was cured? You could rearrange, you could orchestrate the disorders. But cure? Nonsense. Change Sin to Sickness, a change of words (Feffer was right), and then enlightened doctors would stamp the sickness out. Oh, yes! So, then, philosophers, men of science, of brilliant intellect, understanding this more and more clearly, are compelled to sue for divorce from all these human states. Then they launch outward, moonward, their flying arthropod hardware. "I shall go to New Rochelle with Wallace," said Sammler. "She is certainly there. To be sure, we will check with Father Robles. If he knows where she is... I'll call back."

Because she was not an American he felt a certain solidarity with Margotte. From her he did not have to conceal his (foreign) mortification. And she had shown delicacy in remembering not to ring Elya's room.

"What shall I do with Dr. Lal?"

"Apologize," he said. "Reassure. Comfort him, Margotte. Tell him I'm sure the manuscript is safe. Explain Shula's respect for the written word. And please ask him to keep the detectives out of this."

"Wait a minute. He is here. He would like to say a word."

An Eastern voice enriched the wire.

"Is this Mr. Sammler?"

"It is."

"Dr. Lal, here. This is the second robbery. I cannot tolerate much more. Since Mrs. Arkin has appealed for patience, I can hold off just a very little longer. But very little. Then I must have the police detain your daughter."

"If only it would help to put her behind bars! Believe me, I am sorrier than I can say. But I am perfectly sure the manuscript is safe. I understand you have no other copy."

"Three years of composition."

"That is distressing. I had hoped it was more like six months. But I can see how much careful preparation it would need." Normally Sammler shunned flattery, but now he had no choice. Moisture formed upon the black instrument, against his ear, and on his cheek was a red pressure mark. He said, "The work is brilliant."

"I am glad you think so. Judge how it affects me."

I can judge. Anyone can clutch anyone, and whirl him off. The low can force the high to dance. The wise have to reel about with leaping fools. "Try not to be too anxious, sir. I can recover your manuscript, and will do it tonight. I don't use my authority often enough. Believe me, I can control my daughter, and I shall."

"I had hoped to publish by the time of the first moon landing," said Lal. "You can imagine how many bad paperbacks will be out. Confusing to the public. Meretricious."

"Of course." Sammler sensed that the Indian, probably passionate, resisting great internal pressure, was after all being decent, allowing for the frailty of an old man, the tightness of the situation. He thought, The fellow is a gentleman. Inclining his head within the soundproof metal enclosure, the dotted voile of insulation, Sammler yielded to Oriental suggestion: "May the sun brighten your face. Single you out among the multitude (imagining Hindus always in crowds: like mackerel-crowded seas) many years yet." Sammler was determined that Shula should hurt no one but himself. He had to put up with it, but no one else should. "I shall be interested in your comments on my essay."

"Of course," said Sammler, "we will have a long talk about it. Please stand by. I will phone as soon as there is some news. Thank you for bearing with me."

Both parties hung up.

"Wallace," said Sammler, "I think I shall be driving to New Rochelle with you."

"Really? Then Dad did say something about the attic?"

"It has nothing to do with the attic."

"Then why? Is it something about Shula? It must be."

"Why, yes, in fact. Shula. Can we leave soon?"

"Emil is out there with the Rolls. Might as well use it while we can. What is Shula up to? She called me."

"When?"

"Not long ago. She wanted to put something in Dad's wall safe. Did I know the combination. Naturally I couldn't say I knew the combination. I'm not supposed to know."

"Where was she calling from?"

"I didn't ask. Of course you've seen Shula whispering to the flowers in the garden," said Wallace. Wallace was not observant and took little interest in the conduct of others. But for that very reason he prized highly the things he did notice. What he noticed he cherished. He had always been kind and warm to Shula. "What language does she speak to them, is it Polish?"

The language of schizophrenia, very likely.

"I used to read Alice in Wonderland to her. Those talking flowers. The garden of live flowers."

Sammler opened the patient's door and saw him sitting up, alone. Dr. Gruner in his large black spectacles was studying, or trying to study, a contract or legal document. He would sometimes say that he should have been a lawyer, not a doctor. Medical school had not been his choice but his mother's. Of his own free will he had probably done little. Consider his wife.

"Come in, Uncle, and shut the door. Let's make it fathers only. I don't want to see children tonight."

"I understand that feeling," said Sammler. "I've had it often."

"It's a pity about Shula, poor woman. But she is only wacky. My daughter is a dirty cunt."

"A different generation, a different generation."

"And my son, a high-IQ moron."

"He may come around, Elya."

"You don't believe it for a minute, Uncle. What, a ninth-inning rally? I ask myself what I spent so many years of my life on. I must have believed what America was telling me. I paid for the best. I never suspected that I wasn't getting the best."

Had Elya spoken in excitement, Sammler would have tried to calm him. He was, however, speaking factually and he sounded utterly level. In the goggles he looked particularly judicious. Like the chairman of a Senate committee hearing scandalous testimony without loss of composure.

"Where is Angela?"

"Gone to the ladies' to have a cry, I suppose. If she isn't Frenching an orderly, or in a daisy chain. When she goes around the corner, you never know."

"Oh, too bad. You ought not to be quarreling."

"Not quarreling. Just making things plainer, spelling them out. I figured this Horricker to marry her, but he'll never do it now."

"Is that certain?"

"Did she tell you what happened in Mexico?"

"Not in detail."

"That's just as well, if you don't know the details. The joke you made was right on the head, about the billiard table in hell, about something green where it's hot."

"It wasn't aimed at Angela."

"Of course I knew my daughter with twenty-five thousand tax-free dollars must be having herself a tine. I expected that, and as long as she was handling herself maturely and sensibly I had no objections. All that, theoretically, is fine. You use the words 'mature' and 'sensible,' and they satisfy you. But then you take a close look, and when you take a close look, you see something else. You see a woman who has done it in too many ways with too many men. By now she probably doesn't know the name of the man between her legs. And she looks... Her eyes--she has fucked-out eyes."

"I'm sorry."

Something very odd in Elya's expression. There were tears about, somewhere, but dignity would not permit them. Perhaps it was self-severity, not dignity. But they did not come out. They were rerouted, absorbed into the system. They were subdued, converted into tones. They were present in the voice, in the color of the skin, in the lights of the eye.

"I must go, Elya. I'll take Wallace with me. I'll be back tomorrow."

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 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 people's. 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 Savonarola nose. The Rolls still carried MD on the license plates.

"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 business, by problems of character, by death, you recognized how generous and how difficult this was--how much trying, shaking, rousing, what an effort was required. Arranging a kindly smile for the old uncle.

"Luciano? Elya's friend? Yes. Eminent Mafia. Angela mentioned him."

"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, sluggings, 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. Violence might subside, exalted ideas might recover importance. Once we were emancipated from telluric conditions.

In the Rolls was a handsome bar; it had a small light, within the mirror-lined 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 dreamed of being separate and "whole."

"Whole"? What "whole"? A childish notion. It led to all this madness, mad religions, LSD, suicide, to crime.

He shut his eyes. Breathed out of his soul some bad, and breathed in some good. No, thank you, Wallace, no whisky. 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, the men who ran the grand machines, infinitely more sophisticated than this automobile, 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. So perhaps, perhaps! colonies on the moon would reduce the fever and swelling here, and the passion for boundlessness and wholeness might find more material appeasement. Humankind, drunk with terror, calm itself, sober up.

Drunk with terror? Yes, and 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. Passion for the infinite caused by the terror, by timor mortis, needed material appeasement. Timor mortis conturbat me. Dies irae. Quid sum miser tunc dicturus.

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, around it," 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 five-hundred-twelfth 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? I 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 high-ceiling 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 rush to 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 to see?"

"I don't know what occurred to him. He didn't say."

"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 leviathan 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. They're raunchier 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 prefer 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 he'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 weight-lifting 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 any more. 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. Such gentlemen. Of course they have us to point at and we're not so great. I believe this boom in faggots was caused by modern warfare. One result of 1914, that slaughter in the trenches. The men were getting blasted. 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, or dervish--do I mean a dervish? A shaman? A necromancer is probably what I mean. Plus millionaire. Many a millionaire wants to be an artist, or a kid or woman and a necromancer. 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 hell 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 shell forget Horricker by tomorrow?"

"I think she may. But I trust she's not too lost."

"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 was warning me not to defend the poor old man he robbed. Not to inform the police. I 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."

"You wrote that article about that crazy character from Lodz--King Rumkowski."

"Yes."

"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 whisky 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 child died?"

"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 Bezhukov 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."

"You only sympathize."

"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 Bezhukov 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. I 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. It was before New Rochelle. 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 years! 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. Olaf 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 extraordinary 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, or 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 whisky 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. Sanunler, 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 or imaginary criminal abortion dollars.

Examining the kitchen, Sammler found no evidence that anyone had lately been here. 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. Sammler held it to his nose. 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, disorderly 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.

Then he 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! That 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. He belonged at the hospital. An old relative in the waiting-room. Much more appropriate. 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.

Sammmler 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. Lal, 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 I 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. Severe, he 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. Widick's office..."

Sammler held himself in. Since he wouldn't allow her to speak Polish she was lapsing into something else, childishness. With small-girl softness, she lowered her mature, already fully middle-aged face. She was now meeting his look from one side, with only the one expanded childlike eye, and her chin shyly, slyly 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, the other to Dr. Govinda Lal at Butler Hall.

"You were going to send these through the mails? The locker is for twenty-four hours only. These might take a week to arrive. Then what? And did you write down the numbers of the lockers? No. Then how would one know where they were if the letters got lost? You'd have to make 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. I've 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 end, 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 glazed 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." All of that! But in this world he, now he, dear God! was to supply his unhinged, wavering-witted daughter with high aims. And of course in Shula's view 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 crawl 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. For the creative there are no crimes. 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. Shula 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 he risk all for H. G.?

"Truthfully, my child, have you ever read a book of Wells'?"

"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 I."

"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. You know I can't read an entire book. I'm too restless. 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.

Shula, observing silently, was smiling also, holding her wrists with her fingers, forearms crossing on her bosom to keep the robe from falling open. Sammler, despite the washrag, had seen the brown-purple tips, 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 of himself. Especially in religious matters. She was a praying nut, but he, after 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, Shula. What lifework! And killed? There? The finest death I could imagine. Besides, there was no danger. Ridiculous!"

Shula 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 abrupt, standing silent to listen, queenly, dim-witted, alert. And the white feet. Her feet had not been 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 Shula in days."

"Professor Lal. Imperial College. Biophysics."

"I am Shula'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.

"And my manuscript?" said Lal. "The Future 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 Lal: 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 whisky; while also being sexually engaged with three or four other persons; while hearing bands of music; while receiving scientific notations--thus to capacity engagé... the boundlessness, the pressure of modem expectations.

Lal shouted, "Dear me! This is intolerable! Intolerable! Why am I sent this punishment!"

"Pour Dr. Lal 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. Lal, you recommended beer on the moon. However--I am illogical. Go on, go on, Margotte, don't just look solicitous. Get the brandy. I'll have some if he won't. You know where the liquor is. Bring two glasses. Now, Professor, the anxiety will soon be over."

The living room was what they called "sunken. " You had to descend. A well, 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 stultifies. Croze. Croze was petit, 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. He was creative. Capable of criminal acts, probably. 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. Lal, a small man, very dark. Not black, sharp-nosed, the Dravidian type, dolichocephalic, but round-featured. Probably from Punjab. 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 pick up from eighteenth-century books). Yes Govinda was a beau. He was 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 was clever to find her at all. Ingenious work. He did his job."

"No doubt, but with my daughter Pinkerton methods did not apply. Because of Poland, you see, and the war police. She was hidden. So she panicked. 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 of 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."

Lal's hand, long and thin, accepted them.

"How can I be sure it's really there, my book?" he said. "

"Dr. Lal, 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. The manuscript is safe. "

"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! The 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. There must be a Penn 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.? Twenty-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."

Through 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 Lal, whose wrist was no wider than a ruler.

Then Shula-Slawa came down the stairs. Lal, who saw her first, had 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. It also covered her head. 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. No, there was no Büstenhalter. 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. The general idea was to charm and appease this angry Lal. 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 Lal!"

"My daughter."

"Yes, so I thought."

"I am sorry. So terribly sorry, Dr. Lal. 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 very 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. Was this why Shula had taken the book? Out of female seductiveness? 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 a 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 close to Lal on the sofa, almost taking him by the hand, by the arm, as if bent upon having a 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 Lal 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!

As she obeyed, her cheeks had a hot and bitter look. Before Lal she wanted to show filial submission, but her behind was huffy as she went.

"I would never have recognized, never have identified her," said Lal.

"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?" he said.

"I was Polish."

"Artur?"

"Yes. Like Schopenhauer, whom my mother read. Arthur, 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? Living 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. Like the great Arthur. So I studied the system, and I still remember it. 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 drew aside not the veil of Maya itself but one of its forehangings and showed Sammler 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, in Woburn Square 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. Scientific humanism, faith in an emancipated future, in active benevolence, in reason, in civilization. Not popular ideas at the moment. Of course we have civilization but it is so disliked. I think you understand what I mean, Professor Lal."

"I believe I do, yes."

"Still, you know, Schopenhauer would not have called Wells a vulgar optimist. Wells had many dark thoughts. Take a book like The War of the Worlds. There the Martians come to get rid of mankind. They treat our species as Americans treated the bison and other animals, or for that matter the American Indians. Extermination."

"Ah, extermination. I assume you have some personal acquaintance with the phenomenon?"

"I do have some, yes."

"Indeed?" said Lal. "I have seen some of it myself. As a Punjabi."

"You are a Punjabi?"

"Yes, and in nineteen forty-seven studying at the University in Calcutta and present at the terrible riots, the fighting of Hindus and Moslems. Since called the great Calcutta killing. I am afraid I have seen homicidal maniacs."

"Ah."

"Yes, and slaying with loaded sticks and sharp iron bars. And the corpses. Rape, arson, looting."

"I see."

Sammler looked at him. An intelligent and sensitive man, this was, with an expressive face. Of course such expressiveness was sometimes a sign of subjectivity and of inward mental habits. Not an outgoing imagination. He was beginning to think, however, that this Lal was, like Ussher Arkin, a man he could talk to. "Then it is not a theoretical matter to you. Nor to me. But excellent goodhearted gentlemen, Mr. Arnold Bennett, Mr. H. G. Wells, lunching at the Savoy,.. Olympians of lowerclass origin. So nice. So serious. So English, Mr. Wells. I was flattered to be chosen to listen to his monologues. I was also fond of him. Of course since Poland, nineteen thirty-nine, my judgments are different. Altered. Like my eyesight. I see you trying to observe what is behind these tinted glasses. No, no, that's quite all right. One eye is functioning. 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. 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, containing tacit questions: You? No, you, sir: You speak. Lal was listening. The sensitivity of a hairy creature; the animal brown of his eyes; the good breeding of his attentive posture.

"You wish me to say more about Wells, since Wells is in a way behind all this?"

"Would you, kindly?" said Lal. "You have doubts about the value of Wells's writing."

"Yes, of course I have. Grave doubts. Through universal education and cheap printing poor boys have become rich and powerful. Dickens, rich. Shaw, also. He boasted that reading Karl Marx made a man of him. I don't know about that, but Marxism for the great public made him a millionaire. If you wrote for an elite, like Proust, you did not become rich, but if your theme was social justice and your ideas were radical you were rewarded by wealth, fame, and influence."

"Most interesting."

"Do you find it so? Excuse me, I am heavy-hearted this evening. Both heavy-hearted and talkative. And when I meet someone I like, I am apt to be garrulous at first."

"No, no, please continue this explanation."

"Explanation? I have an objection to extended explanations. There are too many. This makes the mental life of mankind ungovernable. But I have thought about the Wells matter--the Shaw matter, and about people like Marx, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Marat, Saint-Just, powerful speakers, writers, starting out with no capital but mental capital and achieving an immense influence. And all the rest, little lawyers, readers, bluffers, pamphleteers, amateur scientists, bohemians, librettists, fortune tellers, charlatans, outcasts, buffoons. A crazy provincial lawyer demanding the head of the King, and getting it, too. In the name of the people. Or Marx, a student, a fellow from the University, writing books which overwhelm the world. He was really an excellent journalist and publicist. As I was a journalist myself, I am a judge of his ability. Like many journalists, he made things up out of other newspaper articles, the European press, but he made them up extremely well, writing about India or the American Civil War, matters of which he actually knew nothing. But he was marvelously shrewd, a guesser of genius, a powerful polemicist and rhetorician. His ideological hashish was very potent. Anyhow, you see what I mean--people become authoritative and plebeians of genius elevate themselves first to nobility and then to universal glory, and all because they had what all poor children got from literacy: the ABCs, the dictionary, the grammar books, the classics. Until, soaring from their slums or their little petit-bourgeois parlors, they were addressing worldwide millions. These are the people who set the terms, who make up the discourse, and then history follows their words. Think of the wars and revolutions we have been scribbled into."

The Indian press had much responsibility for those riots, certainly," said Lal.

"One thing in Wells's favor was that because of personal disappointments he at least did not demand the sacrifice of civilization. He did not become a cult-figure, a royal personality, a grand art hero or activist leader. He did not feel disgraced by words. Many did and do."

"Meaning what, sir?"

"Well you see," said Mr. Sammler, "in the great bourgeois period, writers became aristocrats. And having become aristocrats through their skill in 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 Monsieur Malraux, or Monsieur Sartre. You can see it much farther back 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, or for the young who are old-in-heart. Of course this is the condition of a prince whose father has been murdered. But when people out of a contempt for impotence and paralyzed talk throw themselves into noble actions, do they know what they are doing? When they being to call for blood, and advocate terror, or proclaim a general egg- breaking to make a great historical omelet, do they know what they are calling for? When they have struck a mirror with a hammer, aiming to repair it, can they put the fragments together again? Well, Dr. Lal, I am not sure what good this examination or rebuke can do. It is not as if I were certain that human beings can be controlled at any level of complexity. I would not swear that mankind was governable. But Wells was inclined to believe that it was. He thought, most of the time, that the minority civilization could be transmitted to the great masses, and that orderly conditions for this transmission were possible. Decent, British-style, Victorian-Edwardian, nonoutcast, nonlunatic, grateful conditions. But in World War Two he despaired. He compared humankind to rats in a sack, desperately struggling and biting. Indeed it was ratlike and sacklike. Indeed so. But now I have exhausted my interest in Wells. Yours too, I hope, Dr. Lal."

"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 Mrs. Arkin has brought me, or where we are. You explained, but I 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. And you are dreadfully disturbed."

"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 my daughter 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. But 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."

"Ah, 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. Lal?"

"You are very sad about your nephew. Perhaps you would prefer not to talk."

"Once you begin talking, once the mind takes to this way of turning, it keeps turning, and it dips through all events. And perhaps it makes matters slightly more tolerable to let it turn. Though I can't see why they should be tolerable. It is really a frightful moment. But what can one do? The thoughts continue turning."

"Like a Ferris wheel," said fragile, black-bearded Govinda Lal. "I should say that I have done work for Worldwide Technics, in Connecticut. Mine are highly sophisticated and theoretical assignments having to do with order in biological systems, how complex mechanisms reproduce themselves. Though it will not greatly signify to you, I am associated with the bang-bang hypothesis, related to the firing of simultaneous impulses, atomic theories of cellular conductivity. As you mentioned Rousseau, man may or may not have been born free. But I can say with assurance that he would not exist without his atomistic chains. I do hope you like my jokes. I enjoy your wit. If not mutual, that would be too bad. I refer to those chain structures of the cell. These are matters of order, Mr. Sammler. Though I have not the full blueprint to present. I am not yet that universal genius. Ha, ha! In earnest, however, biological science is in an extraordinary state of progress. Oh, it is lovely, it is so beautiful! To participate is a privilege. This chemical order, which is a fundamental of life, is of great beauty. Oh, yes, very great. 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. Are we crazy, or what? 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 like 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 maths and French. The chief anxiety of my father's life was that his students would cut up the Encyclopedia Britannica with razors and take the articles with them for home perusal. He was a simple person. Because of him, I have loved French literature. First in Calcutta, and then in Manchester, I studied it 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. What nonsense! It is propaganda by the social-science bureaucracy. They would hog the funds. Besides, money alone 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."

The rich and Oriental voice was very pleasing.

"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 entertainments. 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. Not to go where one can go may be stunting. 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 superchimpanzees. 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 much about him."

"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 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. Calcutta is so teeming, so volcanic. A Chinese would be similarly sensitive. 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 only trained specialists will be able 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 must necessarily happen.

"Do you think the species doesn't want to live?" he said.

"Many wish to end it," said Lal.

"Well, if as you say we are the kind of creature which is compelled to do what it is capable of doing, it would follow that we must demolish ourselves. But isn't that up to the species? Could we say that at this point politics is anything but pure biology? In Russia, in China, and here, very mediocre people have the power to end life altogether. These representatives--not representatives of the best but Calibans or, in the jargon, creeps--will decide for us all whether we live or die. Man now plays the drama of universal death. Should all not die at once, together, like one great individual death, expressing freely all of man's passions toward his doom? Many say they wish to end it. Of course that may be only rhetoric."

"Mr. Sammler," said Lal, "I believe you intimate that there is an implicit morality in the will-to-live and that these mediocrities in office will do their duty by the species. I am not sure. There is no duty in biology. There is no sovereign obligation to one's breed. When biological destiny is fulfilled in reproduction the desire is often to die. We please ourselves in extracting ideas of duty from biology. But duty is pain. Duty is hateful--misery, oppressive."

"Yes?" said Sammler, in doubt. "When you know what pain is, you agree that not to have been born is better. But being born one respects the powers of creation, one obeys the will of God--with whatever inner reservations truth imposes. As for duty--you are wrong. The pain of duty makes the creature upright, and this uprightness is no negligible thing. No, I stand by what I first said. There is also an instinct against leaping into Kingdom Come."

The scene, for such a conversation, was itself curious--the green carpets, large pots, silk drapes of the late Hilda Gruner's living room. Here Govinda Lal, small, hunched, dusky, with his rusty-gilt complexion, his full face and beard, was like an Oriental ornament or 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 two hundred fifty thousand 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? You have mentioned that. Do we always, always to the point of misery, do a thing? Persist until exhausted? Perhaps. Take 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 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 tenths-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 any more. 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, afterward persisting outward. To see the sidereal archipelagoes is one thing, but to plunge into them, 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 and Blackwell onion soup and bauernbrot and butter, and coffee. Dr. Lal, 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.

Lal said, "I am very much taken with Mrs. Arkin."

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 aeternitatis. 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 Shula 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. Elya reappeared strangely and continually, as if his face were orbiting--as if he were a satellite.

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 in another aspect, 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. One had no time to make funny observations, or paltry ones; one must be decisive and trust one's instincts. Lal was the real thing. His conversation was conversation, it was 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 hunch-consultant 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 Lal spoke such different brands of foreign English, and it was also diverting that they were tall and short. To him height meant 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 would cure you of all your troubles, heart and soul, and for whom you would cure and fulfill the same. From this came a disposition for sudden attachments such as you now saw in Lal, Margotte, and Shula. 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, onetime 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, while this little supper in the kitchen (laid on with Margotte's maladroit bounty) lasted, the sad old man experienced the utmost joy, too. It seemed to him that the others also felt as he did: Shula-Slaws 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. Lal 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 he 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 to 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 Lal.

"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.

"Shula is fond of lectures, I am not," he said. "I am extremely skeptical of explanations, rationalistic practices. I 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 Lal. "Consider the thing from a musical standpoint."

"A recital. It is Dr. Lal who should give it--he has a musical voice. 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? Shula, 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. Lal, 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 et amo. They say our protoplasm is like sea water. Our blood has a Mediterranean base. But 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. I do not say there is no alternative to such passivity, which is partly comical, 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. Not at all funny. 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, a world's fair, an Indian reservation. And then there are always human beings who take it upon themselves to represent or interpret the old savagery, tribalism, the primal fierceness of the fierce, lest we forget prehistory, savagery, animal origins. 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. Very recently, I tried to give a speech at Columbia. It did not go well. I think I made a fool of myself."

"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. My impatience sometimes borders on rage. It is clinical."

"No, no, Papa."

"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 of 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 soul 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 new 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 one can do much for more than a very few."

"What is one supposed to do?" said Lal.

"Perhaps the best is to have some order within oneself. Better than what many call love. Perhaps it is love."

"Please do say something about love," said Margotte.

"But I don't want to. 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. Orphism, Mithraism, Manichaeanism, Gnosticism. When my eye is strong, I sometimes read in the Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. Many fascinating resemblances appear. But one notices most a peculiar play-acting, 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--I don't want to turn into a history book before your eyes--but modern man, perhaps because of collectivization, has a fever of originality. The idea of the uniqueness of the soul. An excellent idea. A true idea. But in these forms? In these poor forms? Dear God! With hair, with clothes, with drugs and cosmetics, with genitalia, with round trips through evil, monstrosity, and orgy, with even God approached through obscenities? How terrified the soul must be in this vehemence, how little that is really dear to it it can see in these Sadic exercises. And even there, the Marquis de Sade in his crazy way was an Enlightenment philosophe. 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. I am very sad and torn today. Besides, I am aware of the abnormality of my own experience. Sometimes I wonder whether I have any place here, among other people. I assume I am one of you. But also I am not. I suspect my own judgments because my lot has been extreme. I was a studious young person, not meant for action. Suddenly, it was all action--blood, guns, graves, famine. Very harsh surgery. One cannot come out intact. For a long time I saw things with peculiar hardness. Almost like a criminal--a person who brushes aside flimsy ordinary arrangements and excuses, and simplifies everything brutally. Not exactly as Mr. Brecht said, Erst kommt das Fressen, and dann kommt die 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? If I sleep, will I ever wake? Am I really alive, or is there nothing left but an illusion of life?' And I know now that humankind marks certain people for death. Against them there shuts a door. Shula and I have been in this written-off category. If you chance nevertheless to live, having been out leaves you with idiosyncrasies. The Germans attempted to kill me. Then the Poles also shot at me. I would have died without Mr. Cieslakiewicz. He was the one man with whom I was not written off. By opening the tomb to me, he let me live. Experience of this kind is deforming. I apologize to you for the deformity."

"But you are not deformed."

"I am of course deformed. And obsessed. You can see that I am always talking about play-acting, originality, dramatic individuality, theatricality in people, the forms taken by spiritual striving. It goes round and round in my head, all of this. I cannot tell you how often, for instance, I think about Rumkowski, the mad Jewish King of Lodz."

"Who is that?" said Lal.

"A person thrown into prominence in Lodz, the 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 fund-raiser, a bad actor, a distasteful fun-figure in the Jewish community. A man with a bit to play, like so many modern individuals. Have you ever heard of him?"

Lal had not heard of him.

"Well, you shall hear a little. The Nazis made him Judenältester. 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 thing--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 acting was meant to amuse or divert the Germans. These antics of failed individuality, the grand seigneur or dictatorial absurdities--this odd rancor against the evolution of human consciousness, bringing forth these struggling selves, horrible clowns, from every hole and corner. Yes, this would have appealed to those people. Humor seldom failed to appear in their murder programs. This harshness toward clumsy pretensions, toward the bad joke of the self which we all feel. The imaginary grandeur of insects. And besides, the door had been shut against these Jews; they belonged to the category written off. This theatricality of King Rumkowski evidently pleased the Germans. It further degraded the Jews to have a mock king. The Nazis liked that. They had a predilection for such Ubu Roi murder farces. They played at Pataphysics. It lightened or relieved the horror. 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."

"Excuse me, but I have failed to make this connection," said Lal.

"Yes, I am sure I could be more lucid. It is part of the self-communing obsession that I have. But in the Book of Job there is the complaint that God requires far too much. Job protests that he is magnified unbearably--'What is man, that thou shouldst magnify him? And that thou shouldst set thine heart upon him? And that thou shouldst visit him every morning and try him every moment? How long wilt thou not depart from me, nor let me alone till I swallow down my spittle?' And saying 'I would not live always.'

'Now I shall sleep in the dust.' This too great demand upon human consciousness and human capacities has overtaxed human endurance. I am not speaking only of moral demand, but also of the demand upon the Imagination to produce a human figure of adequate stature. What is the true stature of a human being? This, Dr. Lal, was what I meant by speaking of the killers' delight in abasement in parody--in Rumkowski, King of rags and shit, Rumkowski, ruler of corpses. And this is what preoccupies me with the theatricality of the Rumkowski episode. 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, I assume, as they were starving, that they felt less and 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. In such a figure we have the very worst of cases. The most monstrous kind of exaggeration. We see the disintegration of the worst ego ideas. Such 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 was 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, historical junk, dead weight, as bourgeois property, as 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. Where is the desirable self that one might be? Dov'è 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. It is right that we should dislike contrived individuality, bad pastiche, banality, and the rest. It is repulsive. But individualism is of no interest whatever if it does not extend truth. As personal distinction, enhancement, glory, it is for me devoid of interest. I care for it only as an instrument for obtaining truth," said Sammler. "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 and leaving at will. Why should they be human? In most of the forms offered there is little scope for the great powers of nature in the individual, the abundant, generous powers. In business, in professions, in labor; as a member of the public; as an inhabitant of the cities, these strange pits; as experiencer of compulsions, manipulations; as endurer of strain; as father, husband obliging society by performing his quota of actions--the individual seems to feel these powers less, less and less. So it certainly seems to me that he wants a divorce from all the states that he knows.