Mr. Sammler's Planet

"It was charged against the Christian that he wanted to get rid of himself. Those that brought the charge urged him to transcend his unsatisfactory humanity. But isn't transcendence the same disorder? Isn't that also getting rid of the human being? Well, maybe man should get rid of himself. Of course. If he can. But also he has something in him which he feels it important to continue. Something that deserves to go on. It is something that has to go on, and we all know it. The spirit feels cheated, outraged, defiled, corrupted, fragmented, injured. Still it knows what it knows, and the knowledge cannot be gotten rid of. The spirit knows that its growth is the real aim of existence. So it seems to me. Besides, mankind cannot be something else. It cannot get rid of itself except by an act of universal self- destruction. But it is not even for us to vote Yea or Nay. And I have not stated my arguments, for I argue nothing. I have stated my thoughts. They were asked for, and I wanted to express them. The best, I have found, is to be disinterested. Not as misanthropes dissociate themselves, by judging, but by not judging. By willing as God wills.

"During the war I had no belief, and I had always disliked the ways of the Orthodox. I saw that God was not impressed by death. Hell was his indifference. But inability to explain is no ground for disbelief. Not as long as the sense of God persists. I could wish that it did not persist. The contradictions are so painful. No concern for justice? Nothing of pity? Is God only the gossip of the living? Then we watch these living speed like birds over the surface of a water, and one will dive or plunge but not come up again and never be seen any more. And in our turn we will never be seen again, once gone through that surface. But then we have no proof that there is no depth under the surface. We cannot even say that our knowledge of death is shallow. There is no knowledge. There is longing, suffering, mourning. These come from need, affection, and love--the needs of the living creature, because it is a living creature. There is also strangeness, implicit. There is also adumbration. Other states are sensed. All is not flatly knowable. There would never have been any inquiry without this adumbration, there would never have been any knowledge without it. But I am not life's examiner, or a connoisseur, and I have nothing to argue. Surely a man would console, if he could. But that is not an aim of mine. Consolers cannot always be truthful. But very often, and almost daily, I have strong impressions of eternity. This may be due to my strange experiences, or to old age. I will say that to me this does not feel elderly. Nor would I mind if there were nothing after death. If it is only to be as it was before birth, why should one care? There one would receive no further information. One's ape restiveness would stop. I think I would miss mainly my God adumbrations in the many daily forms. Yes, that is what I should miss. So then, Dr. Lal, if the moon were advantageous for us metaphysically, I would be completely for it. As an engineering project, colonizing outer space, except for the curiosity, the ingenuity of the thing, is of little real interest to me. Of course the drive, the will to organize this scientific expedition must be one of those irrational necessities that make up life--this life we think we can understand. So I suppose we must jump off, because it is our human fate to do so. If it were a rational matter, then it would be rational to have justice on this planet first. Then, when we had an earth of saints, and our hearts were set upon the moon, we could get in our machines and rise up..."

"But what is this on the floor?" said Shula. All four rose about the table to look. Water from the back stairs flowed over the white plastic Pompeian mosaic surface. "Suddenly my feet were wet."

"Is it a bath overflowing?" said Lal.

"Shula, did you turn off the bath?"

"I'm sure and positive I did."

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

"Oh, Uncle Sammler, what is it?"

The women followed. Necessarily slower, Sammler also climbed.

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

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

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

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

"There's something wrong with the coupling. I must have stripped the threads," said Wallace. He was astride the flowing pipe. Dr. Lal, trying to make the connection, was being sprayed, beard and chest. Shula stood close to him. If great eyes could be mechanical aids--if staring and proximity could lead to blending!

"Is there no shutoff? Is there no valve?" said Sammler. "Shula, don't get drenched. Stand back, my dear, you're in the way "

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

"You don't think so?" said Wallace.

They spoke very politely.

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

"In what sense do I know it?"

"I mean, is it city-supplied, or do you have a private source? If it is city water, the authorities will have to be called. However, if it is a driven well, there is a pump."

"The odd thing is I never knew."

"What of the sewage, is it municipal?"

"You got me there, too."

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

"I know the house," said Shula. "I'll go with you" In the sari, loosely bound, sandals dropping from her eager feet, she hurried after Lal, who ran down the stairs.

Sammler said to Wallace, "Aren't there any buckets? The ceilings will come down."

"There's insurance. Don't worry about ceilings."

"Nevertheless..."

Sammler descended.

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

"You brought some pails. Let's see if we can't lit them under the pipe. Won't do much good."

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

"Down the spout. O. K. But how long can we keep bailing?"

"Till the fire department comes."

"You called the firemen?"

"Of course. I made Margotte call."

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

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

"Yes, I suppose that's right."

"So you thought they were full of thousand-dollar bills. Ah, Wallace!"

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

"Even if he were going to live?"

"That's right. And it's like he's turning away from us. Or like a dog in the manger."

"Do you think that's a suitable figure of speech?"

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

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

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

"No. I want no part of it."

"You think I should make my own dough."

"Yes. Label the trees and bushes. Earn your own."

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

"Certainly he loved you."

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

"He would have"

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

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

"I'm sorry that so late at night you have to be bailing. You must be tired."

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

"I don't feel so hot myself. How is it downstairs, bad? A lot of water?"

No comment.

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

"Why send such messages? Censor them. Put your unconscious mind behind bars on bread and water."

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

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

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

"I would have thought if it was a lot of money the false pipe would be a thick one."

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

Suddenly the splashing stopped.

"Look! He's shut it off. It's down to a dribble. Hurray!" said Wallace.

"Dr. Lal!"

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

"Professor V. Govinda Lal."

"What is he a professor of?"

"Biophysics, I think, is his field."

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

"Just as simple as that?"

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

"You could mop up. Don't let the puddles stand all night."

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

"What thing is that?"

"Don't dislike me on account of this."

"I don't."

"Well, don't look down on me--don't despise me."

"Well, Wallace..."

"I know you must. Well, this is like an appeal. I'd like to have your good opinion."

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

"Less and less."

"You mean you're improving," said Sammler.

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

"Shall we soak up some of this water?" said Sammler. "Shall we start spreading around the Times?"

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

"So you have no connection with this house--no desire for roots, Wallace. "

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

"To Cuba, is it? But you aren't a Communist, too, Wallace?"

"Not at all. I do admire Castro, however. He has terrific style, he's a bohemian radical, and he's held his own against Washington superpower. He and his cabinet ride in jeeps. They meet in the sugar cane."

"What do you want to tell him?"

"It could be important, don't make fun of me, Uncle Sammler. I have ideas about revolution. When the Russians made their revolution, everybody said, 'A leap forward into a new stage of history.' Not at all. The Russian Revolution was a delaying action--ah, my God, what a noise. I'd better run. They could just bash down the door. They have an orgy, these guys, with their axes. And I have to have an alibi for the insurance."

He ran.

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

Water, they had brought.

Mr. Sammler had some wakeful hours that night. A predictable result of worry over Elya. Of the flood. Also of the conversation with Lal which had compelled him to state his views--historical, planetary, and universal. The order probably should be reversed: first there were the views, planetary or universal, and then there were hidden dollars, water pipes, firemen. Sammler went out and walked in the garden, behind the house, up and down the drive. He was dissatisfied. He had explained, he had taken positions, he had said things he hadn't meant, meant things he hadn't said. Indoors, there were activities, discussions, explanations, arrangements, rearrangements. In the house of a dying man. It was the turn again of certain minor things which people insisted on enlarging, magnifying, moving into the center: relationships, interior decorations, family wrangles, Minox photographs of thieves on buses, arms of Puerto Rican ladies on the Bronx Express, odi-et-amo need-and-rejection, emotional self-examinations, erotic businesses in Acapulco, fellatio with friendly strangers. Civilian matters. Civilian one and all! The high-minded, like Plato (now he was not only lecturing, but even lecturing himself), wished to get rid of such stuff--wrangles, lawsuits, hysterias, all such hole-and-corner pettiness. Other powerful minds denied that this could be done. They held (like Freud) that the mightiest instincts were bound up in just such stuff, each trifle the symptom of a deep disease in a creature whose whole fate was disease. What to do about such things? Absurd in form, but possibly real? But possibly not real? Relief from this had become imperative. And that was why, during the Aqaba crisis, Mr. Sammler had had to go to the Middle East.

At this moment, walking in white moonlight on Elya Gruner's washed gravel, which had been cut with black tracks by the fire engines, he recognized and again identified his motives. He had gone back to 1939. He wanted to refer again to Zamosht Forest, to more basic human characteristics. When had things seemed real, true? In Poland when blinded, in Zamosht when freezing, in the tomb when hungry. So he had persuaded Elya to let him go, to send him, and he had renewed his familiarity with a certain sort of fact. Which, as he was older and more fragile, had made his legs tremble more; the more he tried to stiffen himself up the more he faltered. Few outer signs of this were given. But wasn't he too old? Did he have any business to fly to a war?

It was announced in Athens, on the plane, that this flight would not continue because the fighting had already begun in Israel. Grounded! He must get out. The Greek heat was dizzy, in the airport. The public music circled through Mr. Sammler's unwilling head. The sugary coffee, the sticky drinks, also were a trial to him. The suspense, the delay, gnawed him intolerably. He went into the city and visited airline offices, he asked a business friend of Elya's, in oil or gasoline, to help, he visited the Israeli consulate and obtained a seat on the first El Al flight. He waited again at the airport until four a. m. among journalists and hippies. These young people--Dutch, German, Scandinavian, Canadian, American--had been encamped at Eilath on the Red Sea. The Bedouins on the ancient route from Arabia into Egypt had sold them hashish. It was a jolly place. Now with their guitars they wanted to go back. Responding to a primary event. Though recognizing no governments.

The jet was packed. One could not move. For lean old men, breathing was difficult. A television man beside Sammler offered him a pull from his whisky bottle. "Thank you," said Sammler, and accepted. He swallowed down Bell's scotch. Just then the sun ran up from the sea like a red fox. It was not round but long, not far but near. The metal of the engines, those shapely vats in which the freezing air was screaming--light into blackness, blackness into light-hung under the wings beside Sammler's window. Whisky from a bottle--he smiled at himself--made him a real war correspondent. An odd person to be rushing to this war, although no more odd than these Stone Age bohemians with their solemn beards. There were others besides who did not seem very useful in a crisis. Sammler would be filing his old-fashioned dispatches to Mr. Jerzy Zhelonski in London to be read by a very mixed Polish public.

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

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

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

"Well, they did a job, didn't they," said Father Newell. "How many casualties, would you say?"

"I have no idea."

"This was a small Russian experiment, I believe," Father Newell said. "Now they know."

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

Walking the narrow road with Father Newell, picking up curious objects, shells, bandages, Arab comic books and letters, stepping aside for trucks stacked high with bread, weighing down the springs, projecting at the rear. But really the main subject could not be changed, the subject of the dead. Bristling in the green-brown and gravy-colored woolens. The suffocating wet cardboard fumes they gave off. In the superhot, the crack light, the glassy persistency and distortion of the desert light, these swollen shapes were the main thing to be seen. They were the one subject the soul was sure to take seriously. And this perhaps was what Sammler's instinct had directed him to do. To go to Kennedy, to get on a jet, to land in Tel Aviv, to have snapshots taken, to obtain a press card, to find a bus to Gaza, to visit the great sun wheel of white desert in which these Egyptian corpses and machines were embedded, to make his primary contact. Certain desires thus were met, for which he could not account. And this war was, as human affairs went, a most minor affair. In modern experience, so very little. Nothing at all. And the people involved in it, the boys, after fighting, played soccer at Al Arish. They cleared a space, and they kicked and butted, they leaped up, they trotted on the sand. Or in the shade of the hangars they took out their books and read biology or chemistry, philosophy, preparing for exams perhaps. Then he and Father Newell were called over to look at captured snipers on the bed of a truck, trussed up and blindfolded. Below these eye rags, the desperate faces, as if it were not a most minor affair. One saw those, and then the next things, and then other things. And evidently Mr. Sammler had his own need for these sights, for which he mastered the trembling of his legs or the wish to cry which flashed through him when he saw the snipers' bandaged faces. He was taken down to the sea by some men. They entered the water to refresh themselves. He too went in and stood. In a broad band along the beaches the foam mixed with heat-shimmer for many miles, in varying deep curves of seething white between the sand and the great blue. For a little while, in the water, he did not smell rotting flesh, but soon had to tie a handkerchief over his face. The handkerchief quickly absorbed the smell. It tainted his clothing. His spittle tasted of it.

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

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

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

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

"Why aren't you in bed?"

"I'm going."

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

Feeling what a strange species he belonged to, which had organized its planet to such an extent. Of this mass of ingenious creatures, about half had gone into the state of sleep, in pillows, sheeted, wrapped, quilted, muffled. The waking, like a crew, worked the world's machines, and all went up and down and round about with calculations accurate to the billionth of a degree, the skins of engines removed, replaced, million-mile trajectories laid out. By these geniuses, the waking. The sleeping, brutes, fantasists, dreaming. Then they woke, and the other half went to bed.

And that is how this brilliant human race runs this wheeling globe.

He joined the other sleepers for a while.

VI

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

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

He found Shula in the kitchen. "Everyone has left?" he said. "Now how do I get to New York?"

She was pouring coffee through the filter cane, having first boiled the grounds, French style.

"Took off," she said. "Dr. Lal wasn't able to wait. There was no room for me. He rented a two-seater. A gorgeous little Austin Healy, did you see it?"

"And Emil, where is he?"

"He had to take Wallace to the airport. Wallace has to fly--to test-fly. For his business, you know what I mean. They're going to take pictures and so on."

"And I am stuck. Is there a timetable? I've got to be in New York."

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

"Extremely inconsiderate. You knew and Margotte knew that I had to get back."

"The little car was very pretty. Margotte didn't look right in it."

"I am annoyed."

"Margotte has thick legs, Father. You've probably never even noticed. Well, they won't show in the car. Dr. Lal will call later in the day. You'll see him all right."

"Whom, Lal? Why? The document is there, isn't it?"

"There?"

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

"I locked it up myself, with the quarter, and took out the key. No, youll see him because Margotte is out for him. Maybe you didn't notice that either. I really need to talk to you about this, Father."

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

"I can see what she sees. Dr. Lal is very distinguished. You know it. Don't pretend, after the way you talked in the kitchen. It was beautiful."

"Well, well. What will I do? This thing of Elya's is very bad, you know."

"Very?"

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

"Father, just leave it to me. And you haven't finished shaving. No, go on, and I'll bring you a cup of coffee."

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

"Busy signal," she said.

"Yes, I know."

"There's a telephone crisis, anyway, all over New York. The experts are working on it."

She went into the garden, and Sammler again tried dialing the hospital. All lines were busy in that dreary place, and he hung up the repetitious croaking instrument. Thinking of the colossal number of conversations, all those communings. Utilizing the invisible powers of the universe. Out in the garden, Shula was also engaged in conversation. It was warm. Tulips, daffodils, jonquils, and a paradise of gusts. Evidently she asked the flowers how they were today. No answers required. Brilliant instances sufficed. She herself was a brilliant instance of something organically strange. His glimpse of the entire Shula last night now made him feel her specific weight, as she trod the grass. The entire female body was evoked, white skin everywhere, the thighs, the trunk, the actual feet, the belly with its organs, together with the kinky hair straggling from the scarf. All visible and almost palpable. And even about plants, who knew the whole truth? On educational TV one night he and Margotte watched a singular botanist who had attached a polygraph machine--a lie-detector--to flowers and recorded the reactions of roses to gentle and violent stimuli. Stridency made them shrink, he said. A dead dog cast before them caused aversion. A soprano singing lullabies had the opposite effect. Sammler would have guessed that the investigator himself, his pale leer, his wild stern police nose would distress roses, African violets. Even without nerves these organisms were discerning. We with our oversupply of receptors were in a state of nervous chaos. Amid the tree shadows, pliant, and the window-frame shadows, rigid, and the brass and glass reflections, semi- steady, Mr. Sammler wiped his shoes with the paper towel Shula had placed under the coffee cup. The shoes were damp, still. They were soggy, unpleasantly so. Margotte also had her plants, and Wallace was about to found a plant business. It would be too bad if the first contacts of plants were entirely with the demented. Maybe I'd better have a word with them myself. Mr. Sammler was heavyhearted and tried to divert himself. The heaviness was brutally persistent, however.

He came to the point. First, how apt it was that Wallace should flood the attic. Why, it was a metaphor for Elya's condition. In connection with that condition there arose other images--a blistering of the brain, a froth or rusty scum of blood over that other plant which lay in one's head. Something like convolvulus. No, like fatty cauliflower. The screw on the artery could not reduce the pressure, and where the vessel was varicose and weaker than cobweb it would open. A terrible flood! One might try to think of mitigating things--That, oh well! Life! Everyone who had it was bound to lose it. Or that this was Elya's moment of honor and that he called upon his best qualities. That was all very well, until death turned its full gaze on the individual. Then all such ideas were nothing. The point was that he, Sammler, should be at the hospital, now; to do what could be done; to say what might be said, and what should be said. Exactly what should or might be said Sammler did not know. He could not find the precise thing. Living as he did, in this inward style, working out his condensations or contractions, one became uncommunicative. To explain or expand his thoughts tired and vexed him, as he had learned last night. But he did not feel uncommunicative toward Elya. On the contrary, he wanted to say everything possible. He wanted to go to the hospital and say something! He loved his nephew, and he had something that Elya needed. All concerned ought to have had it. The first place at Elya's bedside belonged to Wallace or to Angela, but they were not about to take it.

Elya was a physician and a businessman. With his own family, to his credit, he had not been businesslike. Nevertheless, he had the business outlook. And business, in business America, was also a training system for souls. The fear of being unbusinesslike was very great. As he was dying Elya might conceivably draw strength from doing business. He had in fact done that. He kept talking to Widick. And Sammler had nothing with a business flavor to offer him. But at the very end business would not do for Elya. Some, many, would go on with business to the last breath, but Elya was not like that, not so limited. Elya was not finally ruled by business considerations. He was not in that insect and mechanical state--such a surrender, such an insect disaster for human beings. Even now (now perhaps more than ever) Elya was accessible. In fact Sammler had not seen this in time. Yesterday, when Elya began to speak of Wallace, when he denounced Angela, he, Sammler, ought to have stayed with him. Any degree of frankness might have been possible. In the going phrase, a moment of truth. Meaning that most conversation was a compilation of lies, of course. But Elya's was not one of those sealed completed impenetrable systems, he was not one of your monstrous crystals or icicles. Feeling, or stroking the long green fibers of the afghan, Sammler put it to himself that because he and Antonina had been designated, part of a demonstration of the meaninglessness of this vivid shuffle with its pangs of higher intuition from the one side and the continual muddy suck of the grave underfoot--that because of this he himself, Artur Sammler, had put up obstinate resistance. And Elya, too, was devoted to ideas of conduct which seemed discredited, which few people explicitly defended. It was not the behavior that was gone. What was gone was the old words. Forms and signs were absent. Not honor but the word honor. Not virtuous impulse, but the terms beaten into flat nonsense. Not compassion; but what was a compassionate utterance? And compassionate utterance was a mortal necessity. Utterance, sounds of hope and desire, exclamations of grief. Such things were suppressed, as if illicit. Sometimes coming through in ciphers,... buildings (the empty tailor shop facing the hospital). At this stage of things there was a terrible dumbness. About essentials, almost nothing could be said. Still, signs could be made, should be made, must be made. One should declare something like this: "However actual I may seem to you and you to me, we are not as actual as all that. We will die. Nevertheless there is a bond. There is a bond." Mr. Sammler believed that if this was not said in so many words it should be said tacitly. In fact it was continually asserted, in many guises. And anyway, we know what is what. But Elya at this moment had a most particular need for a sign and he, Sammler, should be there to meet that need.

He again telephoned the hospital. To his surprise, he found himself speaking with Gruner. He had asked for the private nurse. One could get through? Elya must be molested by calls. With the mortal bulge in his head he was still in the game, did business.

"How are you?"

"How are you, Uncle?"

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

"How are you feeling?"

"There's been no change. I thought we would be seeing each other."

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

"When you left yesterday, it was like unfinished business between us. We got sidetracked by Angela and such hopeless questions. There was something I was meaning to ask. About Cracow. The old days. And by the way, I bragged about you to a Polish doctor here. He wanted very much to see the Polish articles you sent from the Six-Day War. Do you have copies?"

"Certainly, at home. I have plenty."

"Aren't you at home now?"

"Actually I'm not."

"I wonder if you'd mind bringing the clippings. Would you mind stopping off?"

"Of course not. But I don't want to lose the time."

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

"Yes?"

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

Uneasiness somewhat interfered with Sammler's breathing. Long and thin, he held the telephone, concentrating, aware of the anxious Intensity gathered in his face. He was silent. Elya said, "Angela is on her way over."

"I am coming too."

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

"Good-by, for now."

"Good-by, Uncle Sammler."

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

"Where is the timetable?" he said.

"I can't find it. The Gruners don't use the train. Anyway, you'll get to New York quicker with Emil. He's going to the hospital."

"I don't suppose he'd wait at the airport for Wallace. Not today."

"Why did you say that about Lal, that he was just a bushy black little fellow?"

"I hope you're not personally interested in him."

"Why not?"

"He's not at all suitable, and I'd never give my consent."

"You wouldn't?"

"No, no. He wouldn't make any kind of husband for you."

"Because he's an Asiatic? You wouldn't be so prejudiced. Not you, Father."

"Not the slightest objection to an Asiatic. There is much to be said for exotic marriages. If your husband is a bore, it takes years longer to discover it, in French. But scientists make bad husbands. Sixteen hours a day in the laboratory, absorbed in research. You'd be neglected. You'd be hurt. I wouldn't allow it."

"Not even if I loved him?"

"You also thought you loved Eisen."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He would tell her to shut up."

"That's right."

"If a husband treated me like that, I couldn't bear it."

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

"He didn't!"

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

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

"He doesn't have ideas--he has delusions, brainstorms. However, he wouldn't be the first maniac to make money. And his scheme has charm, dealing in plant names... well, some of the plants do have beautiful names. Take one like Gazania Pavonia."

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

"I may try again."

"You must."

"To find a place for it among my preoccupations."

"You should have no other preoccupations. Only creative ones."

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

"Bring your coffee out."

"I'd like that, Shula." He handed her the cup and stepped onto the lawn. "And my shoes are wet from last night."

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

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

"Is Emil coming straight back or waiting for that lunatic?"

"I don't know. Why do you keep calling him a lunatic? Why is Wallace a lunatic?"

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

"Because he flooded the house?" said Shula.

"Because he flooded it. Because now he's flying around with his cameras."

"He was looking for money. That's not crazy, is it?"

"How do you know about this money?"

"He told me. He thinks there's a fortune here. What do you think?"

"I wouldn't know. But Wallace would have such fantasies--Ali Baba, Captain Kidd, or Tom Sawyer treasure fantasies."

"But he says--no joking--there's a fortune of money in the house. He won't rest until he finds it. Wouldn't it be a little mean of Cousin Elya..."

"To die without saying where it is?"

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

"It's up to him. Elya will do as he likes. I assume Wallace has asked you to help find this secret hoard."

"Yes."

"What did he do, promise a reward?"

"Yes, he did."

"I don't want you to meddle, Shula. Keep out of it."

"Shall I bring you a slice of toast, Father?"

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

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

"That must be Wallace for sure. He said he was going to fly a Cessna."

"I suppose it is Wallace."

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

"Emil, I've been waiting to go to the station."

"Of course, Mr. Sammler. But right now there aren't many trains. How is Dr. Gruner, do you know?"

"I spoke to him," Sammler said. "No change."

"I'd be glad to take you to town."

"When?"

"Very soon."

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

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

"Do you think he knows what he's doing, Emil?"

"Without a license they wouldn't let him fly."

"That's not what I mean."

"He's the type of kid who wants to put things together his own way."

"I'm not sure he'll ever know..."

"He finds out as he goes along. He says that's what Action painters do."

"I could have more confidence in the process. I don't think he should be flying about today. His feelings, whatever they are--rivalry with his father, grief, or whatever--may carry him away."

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

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

"I figure he wants shots from every altitude. He's flying low, all right."

"If he doesn't hit the house, I'll be very pleased."

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

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

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

"Yes, he talks that way to me, too. But I've been eighteen years with the Gruners and know that character. He's very, very disturbed about the doctor."

"Yes, I think he is. I agree. But that little machine... Like an ironing board with an egg beater. Are you a family man, Em--do you have children?"

"Two. Grown up and graduated."

"Do they love you?"

"They act like it."

"That's already a great deal."

He was beginning to consider that he might not reach New York in time. Even Elya's request for clippings might delay him too long. But--one thing at a time. Then Wallace 's engine grew louder. The noise attacked one's skull. It gave Sammler a headache. The injured eye felt pressure. The air was parted. On one side nuisance, on the other a singular current, an insidious spring brightness.

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

"He's going to crash. He'll hit the roof next time."

"I don't think he can buzz it any closer while snapping pictures," Emil said.

"He must certainly be below the permissible point."

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

"Wasn't he about to strike the chimney?"

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

"They shouldn't let him fly."

"Well, he's gone. Maybe that's it."

"Shall we start?" said Sammler.

"I'm supposed to pick up the cleaning woman at eleven--I think the phone has been ringing."

"The cleaning woman? Shula's in the house. She will answer."

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

"Going where?"

"I wouldn't know. To the store, maybe. I'll get the phone."

The call was for Sammler. It was Margotte.

"Hello, Margotte. Well--?"

"We opened the lockers."

"What did you find, what she said?"

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

"Come, what about the second locker?"

"Thank God! We found the manuscript there."

"Intact?"

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

"Oh, I am very glad. For him, and for myself. Even for Shula. But where is the copy she made on Widick's machine? She must have misplaced or lost that. But Dr. Lal must be delighted."

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

"I wish you had knocked at my door. You knew I had to get to town."

"Dear Uncle Sammler, we thought of that, but there was no room in the car. Am I mistaken, or are you irritated? You sound annoyed. We could have dropped you at the station." What Sammler refrained from saying was that he and Lal might have dropped her, Margotte, at the station. Was he annoyed! But even now, with skull-pressure, eye-pangs, he did not want to be too hard on her. No. She had her own female vital aims. No sense of the vital aims of others. His tension now. "Govinda was so anxious to leave. He insisted. However, the trains are fast. Besides, I phoned the hospital and talked to Angela. Elya's condition is just the same."

"I know. I've spoken to him."

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

"Of course. Home is better. By all means."

"Angela talked to me in a very, mature way. She was sad, but she sounded so calm, and so aware." Margotte's kind and considerate views of people were terribly trying to Sammler. "She said that Elya was asking for you. He very much wishes to see you."

"I might have been there now...."

"Well, he's down below anyhow," she said. "So take your time. Have lunch with us."

"I need to stop at the house. But no lunch."

"You wouldn't be in the way. Govinda likes you so much. He admires you. Anyway, you are my family. We love you like a father. All of us. I know I am a pest to you. I was to Ussher, too. Still, we loved each other."

"Well, well, Margotte. All right. Now let's hang up."

"I know you want to get away. And you don't like long phone conversations. But Uncle, I'm insecure about my ability to interest a man like Dr. Lal on the mental level."

"Nonsense, Margotte, don't be a fool. Don't get on the mental level. You charm him. He finds you exotic. Don't have long discussions. Let him do the talking."

But Margotte went on talking. She was putting in more coins. There were bongs and chimes. He did not hang up. Neither did he listen.

Further tests for Elya he took to be a tactic of the doctors. They protected their prestige by appearing to make real moves. But Elya himself was a doctor. He had lived by such gestures and had to submit to them now and without complaint. That certainly he would do. Now what of Elya's unfinished business? Before the vessel wall gave out did he really want to go on about Cracow? To talk about Uncle Hessid, who ground cornmeal and wore a derby and fancy vest? Sammler could recall no such individual. No. Elya with strong family feelings he could not gratify, wanted Sammler there to represent the family. His thin, lean presence, his small ruddy face, wrinkled on the one side. It was even more than piety for kinship which the age, acting through his children ("high-IQ moron, fucked-out eyes"), had leveled with derision and knocked flat. And Gruner called upon Sammler as more than an old uncle, one-eyed, growling peculiarly in Polish-Oxonian. He must have believed that he had some unusual power, magical perhaps, to affirm the human bond. What had he done to generate this belief? How had he induced it? By coming back from the dead, probably.

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

By coming back, by preoccupation with the subject, the dying, the mystery of dying, the state of death. Also, by having been inside death. By having been given the shovel and told to dig. By digging beside his digging wife. By this digging, not speaking, he tried to convey something to her and fortify her. But as it had turned out, he had prepared her for death without sharing it. She was killed, not he. She had passed the course, and he had not. The hole deepened, the sand clay and stones of Poland, their birthplace, opened up. He had just been blinded, he had a stunned face, and he was unaware that blood was coming from him till they stripped and he saw it on his clothes. When they were as naked as children from the womb, and the hole was supposedly deep enough, the guns began to blast, and then came a different sound of soil. The thick fall of soil. A ton, two tons, thrown in. A sound of shovel-metal, gritting. Strangely exceptional, Mr. Sammler had come through the top of this. It seldom occurred to him to consider it an achievement. Where was the achievement? He had clawed his way out. If he had been at the bottom, he would have suffocated. If there had been another foot of dirt. Perhaps others had been buried alive in that ditch. There was no special merit, there was no wizardry. There was only suffocation escaped. And had the war lasted a few months more, he would have died like the rest. Not a Jew would have avoided death. As it was, he still had his consciousness, earthliness, human actuality--got up, breathed his earth gases in and out, drank his coffee, consumed his share of goods, ate his roll from Zabar's, put on certain airs--all human beings put on certain airs--took the bus to Forty-second Street as if he had an occupation, ran into a black pickpocket. In short, a living man. Or one who had been sent back again to the end of the line. Waiting for something. Assigned to figure out certain things, to condense, in short views, some essence of experience, and because of this having a certain wizardry ascribed to him. There was, in fact, unfinished business. But how did business finish? We entered in the middle of the thing and somehow became convinced that we must conclude it. How? And since he had lasted--survived--with a sick headache--he would not quibble over words--was there an assignment implicit? Was he meant to do something?

"I never want to annoy Lal," said Margotte. "He's gentle and small. By the way, Uncle, is the cleaning woman there?"

"Who? Cleaning?"

"You say charwoman. So is that the char? I hear the vacuum running."

"No, my dear, what you hear is our relative Wallace in his airplane. Don't ask me more. Well see each other later."

He found his sodden shoes baking in the kitchen. Shula had set them on the open door of the electric oven and the toes were smoking. That, too! hen he had cooled them, he labored to put them on with the handle of a tablespoon. The recovery of the manuscript helped him to be patient with Shula. She did not actually step over the line. The usefulness of these shoes, however, was at an end. They were ready for the dustbin. Not even Shula herself would want to retrieve them. And the immediate problem was not shoes, he could get to New York without shoes. Emil had already gone to fetch the charwoman. Taxis were listed in the Yellow Pages, but Sammler did not know which company to call, nor how much it might cost. He had only four dollars. Not to embarrass the Gruners you had to tip fifty cents at least. There was also fare to the city. Longmouthed, silent, and with a hectic color, he tried to make the penny calculations. He saw himself, somewhere, eight cents short, trying to convince a policeman that he was not a panhandler. It would be better to wait. Perhaps Emil would meet Shula in the road, bringing her back with the char. Shula usually had money.

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

"Would you like the air conditioner, Mr. Sammler?"

"Thank you, Emil."

Examining the sky, Emil said, "It looks as if Wallace has all his pictures. He must be on his way to Newark."

"Yes, he's gone, thank God."

"I know the doctor wants to see you." Sammler was already seated. "What's the matter with your shoes?"

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

"The doctor talks about you all the time."

"Does he?"

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

"Not demonstrative."

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

Mr. Sammler's root feeling (a prejudice, if you like) was that women with exceedingly skinny legs could not be loving wives or passionate mistresses. Especially if with such legs they also had bouffant hairstyles. Hilda had been an agreeable person, cheerful, amiable, high-pitched, even at times breezy. But strictly correct. Often the doctor would demonstratively embrace her and say, "The world's best wife. Oh! I love you, Hil." He would clasp her from the side and kiss her on the cheek. This was permitted. It was allowed under a new dispensation which acknowledged the high value of warmth and impulsiveness. Undoubtedly Elya's feelings were strong, unlike Hilda's. But impulsive? There was in his conduct a strong element of propaganda. It came to him, perhaps, from the American system as a whole and showed his submissiveness. Everyone, to everyone, had a way of making propaganda for the good. Democracy was propagandistic in its style. Conversation was often nothing but the repetition of liberal principles. But Elya had certainly been disappointed in his wife. Sammler hoped that he had love affairs. With a nurse, perhaps? Or a patient who had become a mistress? Sammler did not recommend this for everyone, but in Elya's case it would have been beneficial. But no, probably the doctor was respectable. And it's a doomed man that woos affection so much.

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

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

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

"It's O. K., Mr. Sammler."

Sammler insisted, 'Here, Emil, take it, take it."

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

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

Except on special occasions (Feffer's lecture, twenty-four? forty-eight hours ago?), Sammler never came this way any more. Walking for exercise, he didn't venture this far uptown. And now, from Elya's Bolls Royce, he inspected the subculture of the underprivileged (terminology recently acquired in the New York Times), its Caribbean fruits, its plucked naked chickens with loose necks and eyelids blue, the wavering fumes of Diesel and hot lard. Then Ninety-sixth Street, tilted at all four corners, the kiosks and movie houses, the ramparts of wire-fastened newspaper bundles, and the colors of panic waving. Broadway, even when there was some urgency, hurrying to see Elya for possibly the last time, always challenged Sammler. He was never up to it. And why should there be any contest? But there was, every time. For something was stated here. By a convergence of all minds and all movements the conviction transmitted by this crowd seemed to be that reality was a terrible thing, and that the final truth about mankind was overwhelming and crushing. This vulgar, cowardly conclusion, rejected by Sammler with all his heart, was the implicit local orthodoxy, the populace itself being metaphysical and living out this interpretation of reality and this view of truth. Sammler could not swear that this was really accurate, but Broadway at Ninety-sixth Street gave him such a sense of things. Life, when it was like this, all question-and-answer from the top of intellect to the very bottom, was really a state of singular dirty misery. When it was all question-and-answer from the top of intellect to the very bottom, was really a state of singular dirty misery. When it was all question-and-answer it had no charm. Life when it had no charm was entirely question-and-answer. The thing worked both ways. Also, the questions were bad. Also, the answers were horrible. This poverty of soul, its abstract state, you could see in faces on the street. And he too had a touch of the same disease--the disease of the single self explaining what was what and who was who. The results could be foreseen, foretold. So, then, brought down Broadway in high style, Sammler visited his own (what did Wallace call it?) his own turf. As a tourist. And then Emil, by way of Riverside Drive, came round and set him down before the great, used, soiled mass of conveniences where he and Margotte lived. The time was half past twelve.

"It shouldn't take long. Elya asked for some papers."

There was a tightness at his heart. The remedy was fuller breathing, but he could not get his chest to rise and fall. Something had locked it. Margotte and Govinda were not back. The pin-up lamp burned needlessly in the foyer above the sofa with its maple armrests, the bandanna covers. There was a certain peace in the house. Or did it seem so because he had no time to sit down? He changed shoes, shook a few dollars from his jar, put the newspaper clippings into his wallet. On his desk was a bottle of vodka. Shula provided this out of the wages Elya paid her. It was excellent, Stolichnaya, imported from the Soviet Union. Sammler made use of it about once a month. He uncorked the bottle now and drank a glass. It went down burning, and he made a face. First aid for the old. Then he opened his door to the back stairs, slipping the latch lest one of the strong drafts there should come slamming and lock him out. He put his old shoes into the incinerator drop. He didn't want Shula arguing that she had done them no harm in the electric oven. They had had it.

For once the lobby television worked. Gray and whitish figures, unsteady on the vertical hold, wavered and fizzed. Sammler saw himself mortally pale on the screen. The shuddering image of an aged man. This lobby was like certain underground carpeted rooms in disused theaters--spaces to shun. It was less than two days ago that the pickpocket had forced him, belly-to-back, across this same brass-bolted rug into the corner beside the Florentine table.

Unbuttoning his puma-colored coat in puma silence to show himself. Was this the sort of fellow called by Goethe eine Natur? A primary force?

He stopped Emil from getting out of the car for him.

"I can work the door myself."

"We're off, then. Open the bar, pour yourself a drink."

"I hope the traffic will not be too thick."

"We'll go straight down Broadway."

"Turn on the TV."

"Thanks. No TV."

Again Sammler smelled the enclosed, fabric-scented air. He did not make himself comfortable. The tightness of heart was greater than before. It went on contracting; he thought it could not be worse, and then it was worse. The traffic was unusually heavy, jammed up at the lights. Delivery trucks were double-parked, triple-parked. The use of private cars in Manhattan had never seemed so irrational... swept by impatience toward the drivers of these large, purposeless machines but then the sweeping feelings swept beyond him. Conveyed in air-conditioned silence by the roarless power of the engine, he sat forward with his thighs upon the backs of his hands. Evidently Elya thought that he owed it to himself to maintain this Rolls. He couldn't have had much use for such a prestigious machine. It wasn't as if he were a Broadway producer, an international banker, a tobacco millionaire. Where did it take him? To Widick's law office. To Hayden, Stone Incorporated, where he had an account. On High Holy Days, he went to the temple on Fifth Avenue. On Fifty-seventh Street were his tailors, Felsher and Kitto. The temple and the tailors had been selected by Hilda. Sammler would have sent him to another tailor. Elya had a tall figure and wide stiff shoulders, too wide, considering the flatness of his body. His buttocks were too high. Like my own, for that matter. Sammler, in the sound-deadened cabinet of the Rolls, saw the resemblance. Felsher and Kitto made Elya too dapper. The trousers were too narrow. The virile bulge that appeared when he sat was inappropriate. He used matching ties and handkerchiefs by Countess Mara, and sharp, swaggering shoes which connected him less with medicine than with Las Vegas, with racing, broads, and singers in the rackets. Things equivocally related to his kindliness. Swaying his shoulders like a gunman. Wearing double-vented jackets. Playing gin and canasta for high stakes and talking out of the corner of the mouth. Detesting Kulturny physicians who wanted to discuss Heidegger or Wittgenstein. Real doctors had no time for that phony stuff. He was a keen spotter of phonies. He could easily afford this car, but had none of the life that went with it. No Broadway musicals, no private jet. His one glamorous eccentricity was to fly to Israel on short notice and stroll into the King David Hotel without baggage, his hands in his pockets. That struck him as a sporting thing to do. Of course, thought Sammler, Elya was also peculiar; surgery was psychically peculiar. To enter an unconscious body with a knife? To take out organs, sew in the flesh, splash blood? Not everyone could do that. And perhaps he kept the car for Emil's sake. What would Emil do if there no Rolls? Now there was the likeliest answer of all. The protective instinct was strong in Elya. Undisclosed charities were his pleasure. He had many stratagems of benevolence. I have reason to know. How very odd--astonishing, the desire to relieve and protect us. It was astonishing because Elya the surgeon also despised incompetence and weakness. Only great and powerful instincts worked so deeply and deviously, coming out on the side of things despised. But how could Elya afford to have rigid ideas of strength? He himself was a hooked man. Hilda had been far stronger than he. In the Mafioso swagger were pretensions of lawless liberty. But it was little Hilda with the rodlike legs and the bouffant hair and faultless hemlines and sweet refinements who was the real criminal. She had had her hook in Elya. And there had never been any help for Elya. Who was there to help him? He was the sort of individual from whom help emanated. There were no arrangements for return. However, it would soon be over. It was about to wash away.

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

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

But now, as they were nearing the Center, Emil stopped the car and pushed back the glass slide.

"Why are you stopping?"

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

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

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

"Feffer?"

"That fat kid. The pink face, the beard. He's fighting. Can't you see?"

"Where is this? In the street? Is it Eisen?"

"It's the other fellow who's in trouble. The young guy, the beard. I think he's getting hurt."

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

"One of those is Feffer?"

"Yes, Mr. Sammler."

"Wrestling with someone--with the bus driver?"

"Not the driver, no. I think not. Somebody else."

"Then I must go and see what it is."

The craziness of these delays! Almost deliberate, almost intentional, they were breaking down every barrier of patience. They got to you at last. Why this, why Feffer? But he could see now what Foil meant. Feffer was pinned to the front of a bus. That was Feffer against the wide bumper. Sammler began to pull at the handle of the door.

"Not on the street side, Mr. Sammler. You'll be hit." But Sammler, his patience utterly lost, was already hurrying through traffic.

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

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

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

"What are you doing here?" said Sammler in Russian.

"And you, Father-in-law--what are you doing?"

"I? I am rushing to the hospital to see Elya."

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

"What a stupid thing!"

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

"Let him give up the camera. Why doesn't he give it to him?" said Sammler.

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

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

"But I don't know English."

"Then help the boy."

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

Sammler said to the pickpocket, "Let go. Let him go."

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

"Give him the camera, Feffer. Hand it over," Sammler said. Feffer, with a stare of shock and appeal, looked as if he expected soon to lose consciousness. He did not bring down his arm.

"I say let him have that stupid thing. He wants the film. Don't be an idiot " Feffer may have been holding out in expectation of a squad car, waiting for the police to save him. It was hard otherwise to explain his resistance. Considering the Negro's strength--his crouching, squeezing, intense animal pressing-power, the terrific swelling of the neck and the tightness of the buttocks as he rose on his toes. In straining alligator shoes! In fawn-colored trousers! With a belt that matched his necktie--a crimson belt! How consciousness was lashed by such a fact!

"Eisen!" said Sammler, furious.

"Yes, Father-in-law."

"I ask you to do something."

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

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

It was a feeling of horror and grew in strength, grew and grew. What was it? How was it to be put? He was a man who had come back. He had rejoined life. He was near to others. But in some essential way he was also companionless. He was old. He lacked physical force. He knew what to do, but had no power to execute it. He had to turn to someone else--to an Eisen! a man himself very far out on another track, orbiting a very different foreign center. Sammler was powerless. To be so powerless was death. And suddenly he saw himself not so much standing as strangely leaning, as reclining, and peculiarly in profile, and as a past person. That was not himself. It was someone--and this struck him--poor in spirit. Someone between the human and not-human states, between content and emptiness, between full and void, meaning and not-meaning, between this world and no world. Flying, freed from gravitation, light with release and dread, doubting his destination, fearing there was nothing to receive him.

"Eisen, separate them," he said. "He's been choked enough. The police will come, and then there will be arrests. And I must go. To stand here is crazy. Please. Just take the camera. Take it. That will stop this."

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

"Don't hit him, Eisen. I never said that. I tell you no!" said Sammler.

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

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

"You said, Father-in-law!"

They quarreled in Russian before the crowd.

"You said I had to do something. You said you had to go. I must do something. So I did."

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

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

"I am horrified!" Sammler said.

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

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

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

Damn these--these occasions! he was thinking. Damn them, it was IIya who needed him. It was only IIya he wanted to see. To whom there was something to say. Here there was nothing to say.

Now he heard someone ask, "Where are the cops?"

"Busy. On the take. Writing tickets, someplace. Those shits. When you need 'em."

"There's plenty of blood. They better bring an ambulance."

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

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

"Get away from me, Eisen."

"What should I do?"

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

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

"Nonsense, don't put on agony with me. This is the man. He's badly hurt."

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

"Did you, now!"

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

Sammler now saw the squad car, the whirling roof light, and the policemen coming out at a saunter, pushing away the crowd. Emil drew Sammler away to the side of the bus and said, "You don't want any of this. We have to go."

"Yes, Emil, of course."

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

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

"Why, sure. Are you all shook up?" He helped him In. Emirs own hand was shaking, and Sammler himself had trembling arms and legs. An extraordinary weakness came up the legs from beneath.

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

"What was all that about?"

"I wish I knew," said Sammler.

"Who was that black character?"

"Poor man, I can't really say who he is."

"He took two mean wallops, there."

"Eisen is brutal."

"What did he have in that bag?"

"Pieces of metal. I feel responsible, Emil, because I appealed to Eisen, because I wanted so badly to get to Dr. Gruner."

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

"Do I look sick? No, Emil. But I think I will shut my eyes. " Sammler was sick with rage at Eisen. The black man? The black man was a megalomaniac. But there was a certain--a certain princeliness. The clothing, the shades, the sumptuous colors, the barbarous-majestical manner. He was probably a mad spirit. But mad with an idea of noblesse. And how much Sammler sympathized with him--how much he would have done to prevent such atrocious blows! How red the blood was, and how thick--and how terrible those crusted, spiny lumps of metal were! And Eisen? He counted as a war victim, even though he might anyhow have been mad. But he belonged in the mental hospital. A homicidal maniac. If only, thought Sammler, Shula and Eisen had been a little less crazy. Just a little less. They would have gone on playing casino in Haifa, those two cuckoos, in their whitewashed Mediterranean cage. For they used to get the cards out when they weren't scandalizing the neighborhood with their screams and slaps. But no. Such individuals had the right to be considered normal. They had liberty of movement, on top of it.. They had passports, tickets. So then, poor Eisen flew across with his works. Poor soul, poor dog-laughing Eisen.

They all had such fun! Wallace, Feffer, Eisen, Bruch, too, and Angela. They laughed so much. Dear brethren, let us all be human together. Let us all be in the great fun fair, and do this droll mortality with one another. Be entertainers of your near and dear. Treasure hunts, flying circuses, comical thefts, medallions, wigs and saris, beards. Charity, all of it, sheer charity, when you consider the state of things, the blindness of the living. It is fearful! Not to be borne! Intolerable! Let us divert each other while we live!

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

"The doctor is not back?" said Emil.

Obviously not. Angela sat alone in the hospital room.

"Then O. K. I'll be standing by if you want me."

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

"Benson and Hedges, right?"

When he left she said, "I don't like to send an elderly elderly person on errands."

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

"Emil is part of Daddy's gang. They're very attached."

"What's happening?"

"I wish I knew. He was taken down for tests, but two hours is a long time. I assume Dr. Cosbie knows his stuff. I don't like the man. I don't go for the magnolia charm. He acts as if he ran a military academy in the South. But I'm not one of the boys. Drill is not my dish. He's cross, cold, and repulsive. One of those good-looking men who don't realize that women dislike them. Take the straight chair, Uncle. You like those better. I have to talk to you."

Sammler drew the seat under him, and out of the light--he couldn't bear to face windows through which nothing but blue sky was visible. He saw trouble. Himself aroused, he was sensitive to all the signs. Another woman would have had a hectic color; Angela was candle-white. The amusing husky voice, copying Tallulah's perhaps, fell short of amusement. Her throat was prominent, it looked swollen, and the light brown brows, penciled out like wings, kept rising. She tried at times to give a look of appeal. She was angry, too. It was heavy going. Even wrinkling her forehead seemed difficult. Something was obstructed. With a low necked satin blouse she wore a miniskirt. No, Sammler changed that, it was a microskirt, a band of green across the things. The frosted hair was pulled back tightly; the skin was full of female qualities (the hormones). On her cheeks large gold earrings lay. A big, shapely woman childishly dressed, erotically playing the kid, she was not likely to be taken for a boy. Sitting near her, Sammler could not smell the usual Arabian musk. Instead her female effluence was very strong, a salt odor, similar to tears or tidewater, something from within the woman. Elya's words had taken effect strongly--his "Too much sex." Even the white lipstick suggested perversion. But this was curiously without prejudice. Sammler felt no prejudice about perversion, about sexual matters. Nothing. It was too late in the day for that. Too much heat was on. Much larger powers of distortion were at work. The smash of Eisen's medallions on the pickpocket's face was still with Sammler. His own nerves, in the elementary way of nerves connected this with the crushing of his eye under the rifle butt thirty years ago. The sensations of choking and falling--one could live through that again. If it was worth living through. He waited for the rubber bump of Elya's wheeled stretcher against the door.

"Has Wallace shown up? He was supposed to land at Newark."

"He didn't. I've got to tell you about Brother. When did you see him? I heard from Margotte about the pipes."

"In the flesh? I saw him last night. And this morning in the sky."

"Oh, so you watched him looping around, that idiot."

"Has he had an accident?"

"Oh, don't worry, he isn't hurt. I wish he had given himself a good bang, but he's like a Hollywood stunt man."

"He hasn't crashed, has he?"

"What do you think! It's already an item on the radio. He scraped his wheels off on a house."

"Dear Lord! Did he have to parachute? Was it your house?"

"He made a crash landing. It was some big place in Westchester. God alone knows why that creep should be out buzzing houses when we're in this predicament. It's enough to drive me mad."

"You don't mean that Elya heard this on the radio!"

"No, he didn't hear. He was already going down in the elevator."

"You say Wallace isn't hurt?"

"Wallace is in seventh heaven. Overjoyed. He had to have stitches in his cheek."

"I see. He'll have a scar. All this is terrible!"

"You have too much sympathy for him."

"I do admit that all this feeling sorry for people can be wearing. I also am provoked by him."

"You should be. They really ought to put my kid brother away. Lock him up in an asylum. You should have heard him babbling."

"Then you've spoken to him?"

"He had some guy to describe the beautiful landing. Then he took the phone in person. Something terrific. As if he had reached the North Pole by bicycle. You know we'll be sued for damages to the house. The plane is wrecked. Civil Aeronautics will take away his license. I wish they'd take him away, too. But he was very high. He said, 'Shouldn't we tell Dad?'"

"No!"

"Yes," said Angela. She was furious. With Dr. Cosbie, with Wallace, with Widick, Horricker. And she was bitter with Sammler, too. And he himself was far from normal. Far! The injured black man. The blood. And now, confronted by all that superfeminity, sensuality, he saw everything with heightened clarity. As he had seen Riverside Drive, wickedly illuminated, after watching the purse being picked on, the bus. That was how he was seeing now. To see was delicious. Oh, of course! An extreme pleasure! The sun may shine, and be a blessing, but sometimes shows the fury of the world. Brightness like this, the vividness of everything, also dismayed him. The soft clearness of Angela's face, the effort of her brows--the full mixture of fineness and rankness he saw there. And the sun was squarely at the window. The streaked glass ran with light like honey. A barrage of sweetness and intolerable brightness was laid down. Sammler did not really want to experience this. It all rose against him, too dizzy, too turbulent.

"I can see that you and Elya went on talking about that event."

"He won't let it alone. It's cruel. Both to himself and to me. I can't stop him."

"What is there for you to do but give in? He's the one with the thing to do. There should be no arguments. Perhaps young Mr. Horricker should come up. Why doesn't he come? Show that he doesn't take it too much to heart. Does he, by the way?"

"He says so."

"Maybe he loves you."

"Him? Who knows. But I wouldn't ask him to come. That would be using Daddy's illness."

"You don't want him back?"

"Want him? Maybe. I'm not sure."

Was there a successor in view? Human attachments being so light, there were probably lists of alternates, preconscious reserves--men met in the park while walking the dog; people one had chatted with at the Museum of Modern Art; this fellow with the sideburns; that one with dark sexy eyes; the person with the child in a sanitarium, the wife with multiple sclerosis. To go with quantities of ideas and purposes there were quantities of people. And all this came from Angela's conversation. He heard and remembered everything, every drab fact, every crimson touch. He didn't want to listen, but she told him things. He had no wish to remember, but he remembered it all. And Angela really was a beauty. She was big, but a beauty, a healthy young woman. Healthy young women have their needs. Her legs were--her thighs nearly all shown down from the green ribbon of skirt--she was, beautiful. Horricker would suffer, knowing he had lost her. Sammler was still thinking things through. Tired, dizzy, despairing, he still thought. Still in touch. With reality, that is.

"Wharton is no kid. He knew what he was getting into, down in Mexico," said Angela.

"Ah, I don't understand any of that. I assume he's read some of those books you lent me--Bataille and other theorists--about transgression and pain and sex; lust, crime, and desire; murder and erotic pleasure. It didn't mean much to me, any of that stuff."

"I know it's not your kind of thing. But Wharton got his kicks out of that little broad. He liked her. Better than I liked the other man. I'd never see him again. But then on the plane Wharton perversely became jealous. Wouldn't let it alone."

"My only thought is that Elya might feel more at peace with you if he saw Horricker."

"I'm furious that Wharton should blab to Widick, and Widick to Father."

"I'm not prepared to believe that Mr. Widick would speak to Elya of this. He's decent enough in most ways. I don't know him well, of course. My main impression is of a stout lawyer. Not a villain. A big soft face."

"That fat sonofabitch. I'll curse him when I see him. I'll tear his hair out."

"Don't be so sure that it was some evil-doer. You may be wrong. Elya's extremely intelligent and quick to pick up hints."

"Who could it be, then? Wallace? Emil? But whoever dropped the hint, it began with Wharton, too weak to keep his mouth shut. Well, if he wants to visit Father that's all right. But I'm offended. I'm furious."

"You do have a feverish look, Angela. I don't want to agitate you. But in view of your father's preoccupation with all this, with Mexico, do you think you should arrive in such a costume?"

"This skirt, you mean?"

"It's very short. My opinion may be worthless, but it seems bad judgment to wear that kind of sexual kindergarten dress."

"Now it's my clothes! Are you speaking for him, or for yourself?"

The sunlight was yellow, sweet. It was horrible.

"Oh yes, I know I may be out of order, with bad puritanical attitudes from the sick past which have damaged civilization so much. I did read your books. We've discussed all this. But really, how do you expect your father not to be excited, to feel bitter, when he sees this provoking Baby Doll costume?"

"Really? My skirt? It never occurred to me. I dressed quickly and ran out. This is a strange thing to take up with me now. Everybody wears these skirts. I don't think I care for the way you put it."

"Undoubtedly I could have put it better. I don't want to be disagreeable. There are other things to think about."

"That's right. And I'm under a terrible burden. It is terrible."

"I'm sure of it."

"I'm in despair, Uncle."

"Yes, you must be. Of course you are. Yes."

"Yes, what? It sounds as if there's something more."

"There is. I'm in a state, too, about your father. He's been a great friend to me. I am sick, too, about him."

"We don't have to beat around the bush, Uncle."

"No. He's going to die."

"That's coming out with it all right," she said. She was for plain speaking, was this too plain?

"It's as terrible to say as to hear."

"I'm sure you love Daddy," she said.

"I do."

"Apart from the practical reasons, I mean."

"Of course Shula and I have been supported by him. I never concealed my gratitude. I hope that has been no secret," said Sammler. As he was dry and old, the beating of his heart, even violent beating, would not be evident. "If I were practical, if I were very practical, I would be careful not to antagonize you. I think there are reasons other than the practical ones."

"Well, I hope we're not going to quarrel."

"That's right," said Sammler. She was angry with Wallace, with Cosbie, Horricker. He did not want to add himself to the list. He needed no victory over Angela. He only wanted to persuade her of something, and didn't know whether even that was feasible. But he was certainly not about to make war on suffering females. He began to talk. "I'm feeling very jumpy, Angela. There are certain damaged nerves you don't hear from for years, and then they act up, they flare up. They're burning now, very painfully. Now I'd like to say something about your father, as long as we're waiting for him. On the surface, I don't have much In common with Elya. He's a sentimental person. He makes a point, too much of a point, of treasuring certain old feelings. He's on an old system. I've always been skeptical of that myself. One might ask, where is the new system? But we don't have to get into that. I never had much natural liking for people who make open..."never had much natural liking for people who make open declarations of affection. Being a 'Britisher' was one of my foibles. Cold? But I still appreciate a certain restraint. I didn't care for the way Elya courted everyone, tried to make contact with people, winning their hearts, engaging their interest, getting personal even with waitresses, lab technicians, manicurists. It was always too easy for him to say 'I love you.' He was forever saying it to your mother in public, embarrassing her. I don't intend to discuss her with you. She had her good points. But as I was a snob about the British, she was a German Jewess who cultivated the Wasp style (now outmoded, by the way), and I recognized it. She was going to refine your father, an Ostjude. He was supposed to be the expressive one, the one with the heart. Isn't that about right? So your father was assigned to be expressive. He certainly had his work cut out for him with your mother. I think it would have been easier to love a theorem in geometry than your poor mother. Excuse me, Angela, for going on like this."

She said, "It's like we're sitting on the edge of a cliff anyway, waiting here."

"All right, Angela. One might as well talk, then. Not to add to your difficulties... I just saw something peculiarly nasty, on my way over. Partly my fault. I feel distressed. But I was saying that your father has had his assignments. Husband, medical man--he was a good doctor--family man, success, American, wealthy retirement with a Rolls Royce. We have our assignments. Feeling, outgoingness, expressiveness, kindness, heart--all these fine human things which by a peculiar turn of opinion strike people now as shady activities. Openness and candor about vices seem far easier. Anyway, there is Elya's assignment. That's what's in his good face. That's why he has such a human look. He's made something of himself. He hasn't done badly. He didn't like surgery. You know that. He dreaded those three- and four-hour operations. But he performed them. He did what he disliked. He had an unsure loyalty to certain pure states. He knew there had been good men before him, that there were good men to come, and he wanted to be one of them. I think he did all right. I don't come out nearly so well myself. Till forty or so I was simply an Anglophile intellectual Polish Jew and person of culture--relatively useless. But Elya, by sentimental repetition and by formulas if you like, partly by propaganda, has accomplished something good. Brought himself through. He loves you. I'm sure he loves Wallace. I believe he loves me. I've learned much from him. I have no illusions about your father, you understand. He's touchy, boastful, he repeats himself. He's vain, grouchy, proud. But he's done well, and I admire him."

"So he's human. All right, he's human." She was, perhaps, only half following him, though she looked straight at him, full-face, knees apart so that he saw the pink material of her undergarment. Seeing that pink band, he thought, "Why argue? What is the point?" But he replied.

"Well, everybody's human only in some degree. Same more than others."

"Some very little?"

"That's the way it seems. Very little. Faulty. Scanty. Dangerous."

"I thought everybody was born human."

"It's not a natural gift at all. Only the capacity is natural."

"Well, Uncle, why are you putting me through this? What have you got in mind? You're after something."

"Yes, I suppose I am."

"You're criticizing me."

"No, I'm praising your father."

Angela's gaze was dilated, brilliant, smeary, angry. No fights, for God's sake, with a despairing woman. Still, he was getting at something. He held his thin body rigid; the ginger-gray brows overhung the tinted dimness of the shades.

"I don't like the opinion I think you have of me," she said.

"Why should that matter on a day like this? Well, perhaps I do feel that today there ought to be a difference. Perhaps if we were in India or Finland we might not be in quite the same mood. New York makes one think about the collapse of civilization, about Sodom and Gomorrah, the end of the world. The end wouldn't come as a surprise here. Many people already bank on it. And I don't know whether humankind is really all that much worse. In one day, Caesar massacred the Tencteri, four hundred and thirty thousand souls. Even Rome was appalled. I am not sure that this is the worst of all times. But it is in the air that things are falling apart, and I am affected by it. I always hated people who declared it was the end. What did they know about the end? From personal experience, from the grave if I may say so, I knew something about it. But I was flat, dead wrong. Anybody may feel the truth. But suppose it to be true--true, and not a mood, not ignorance or destructive pleasure or the doom desired by people who have botched everything. Suppose it to be so. There is still such a thing as a man--or there was. There are still human qualities. Our weak species fought its fear, our crazy species fought its criminality. We are an animal of genius."

This was a thing he often thought. At the moment it was only a formula. He did not thoroughly feel it.

"O. K., Uncle."

"But we don't have to decide whether the world is ending. The point is that for your father it is the end."

"Why are you pushing that, as if I didn't know. What do you want from me?"

Indeed what? From her, sitting there, breasts shown, diffusing woman-odors, big eyes practically merged; tormented, and at this moment strangely badgered by Caesar and the Tencteri, by ideas. Let the poor creature be. For now she was claiming to be a poor creature. And she was. But he could not let her be--not yet.

"As a rule these aneurysms cause instant death," he said. "With Elya there has been a delay, which gives an opportunity."

"An opportunity? What do you mean?"

"A chance to resolve some things. And it has made your father realistic--facing up to facts that were obscure."

"Facts about me, for instance? He didn't really want to know about me."

"Yes."

"What are you getting at?"

"You've got to do something for him. He has a need."

"What something am I supposed to do?"

"That's up to you. If you love him, you can make some sign. He's grieving. He's in a rage. He's disappointed. And I don't really think it is the sex. At this moment that might well be a trivial consideration. Don't you see, Angela? You wouldn't need to do much. It would give the man a last opportunity to collect himself."

"As far as I can see, if there is anything at all in what you say, you want an old-time deathbed scene."

"What difference does it make what you call it?"

"I should ask him to forgive me? Are you serious?"

"I am perfectly serious."

"But how could I--It goes against everything. You're talking to the wrong person. Even for my father it would be too hokey. I can't see it."

"He's been a good man. And he's being swept out. Can't you think of something to say to him?"

"What is there to say? And can't you think of anything but death?"

"But that's what we have before us."

"And you won't stop. I know you're going to say something more. Well, say it."

"In so many words?"

"In so many words. The fewer the better."

"I don't know what happened in Mexico. The details don't matter. I only note the peculiarity that it is possible to be gay, amorous, intimate with holiday acquaintances. Diversions, group intercourse, fellatio with strangers--one can do that but not come to terms with one's father at the last opportunity. He's put an immense amount of feeling into you. Probably most of his feeling has gone toward you. If you can in some way see this and make some return..."

"Uncle Sammler!" She was furious.

"Ah. You're angry. Naturally."

"You've insulted me. You've been trying hard enough. Well, now you have--you've insulted me, Uncle Sammler."

"It was not the object. I only believe that there are things everyone knows, and must know."

"For God's sake, quit this."

"I shall mind my own business."

"You lead a special life in that dumpy room. Charming, but what's it got to do with anything! I don't think you understand people's business. What do you mean about fellatio? What do you know about it?"

Well, it hadn't worked. What she threw at him was what the young man at Columbia had also cried out. He was out of it. A tall, dry, not agreeable old man, censorious, giving himself airs. Who in hell was he? Hors d'usage. Against the wall. A la lanterne! Very well. That was little enough. He ought not perhaps to have provoked Angela so painfully. By now he himself was shaking.

The gray nurse at this moment came and called Sammler to the telephone. "You are Mr. Sammler, aren't you?"

He started. Quickly he got to his feet. "Ah! Who wants me? Who is it?" He didn't know what to expect.

"The phone wants you. Your daughter. You can take it outside, at the desk."

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

"In New Rochelle. Where is Elya?"

"We are waiting for him. What do you want now, Shula?"

"Have you heard about Wallace?"

"Yes, I've heard."

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

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

"I wouldn't dream of it."

"But you did."

"I didn't. If we differ, it's in your interest."

"Shula, don't fool with me. Enough of my interests. Let them alone. You called with a purpose. I'm afraid I begin to understand."

"Yes, Father."

"You succeeded!"

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

"Dear God."

"I haven't counted it," she said.

"I will not have you lying."

"All right, I did count. But I don't really know about money. I don't understand business."

"Did you speak to Wallace on the phone?"

"Yes."

"And did you tell him about this?"

"I didn't say one single word."

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

"Father!"

"Yes, Shula."

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

An excellent question, a shrewd, relevant question. He had lost out with Angela, he had infuriated her. He knew what she would say. "I'll never forgive you, Uncle." And what's more she never would.

"We will live on what there is."

"But suppose he doesn't leave any provision?"

"That's as he wishes. Up to him, entirely."

"We are part of the family. You are the closest to him."

"You will do as I tell you."

"Listen to me, Father. I have to look out for you. You haven't even said anything to me about finding this."

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

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

"Like Govinda Lal."

"Yes, why not? I've made myself as interesting as I could within my means."

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

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

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

"Each time I count, it's different."

"How much was it the last time?"

"Either six or eight thousand. I laid it all out on the floor. But I was too excited to count straight."

"I assume it's much, much more, and I can't allow you to keep any."

"I won't."

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

"You must give Widick every cent."

"Yes, Father. It's painful, but I will. Ill hand it over to Widick. I think you're making a mistake."

"No mistake. And don't take off as you did with Govtnda 's manuscript."

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

"Good-by, Shula. You're a good daughter. The best of any. No better daughter."

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

"When did he die?" said Sammler. "Just now?"

While I was stupidly urging Angela!

"A little while back. We had him down in the special unit, doin' the maximum possible."

"You couldn't do anything about a hemorrhage, I see, yes."

"You are his uncle. He asked me to say good-by to you."

"I wish I had been able to say it also to him. So it didn't happen in one rush?"

"He knew it was startin'. He was a doctor. He knew it. He asked me to take him from the room."

"He asked you to?"

"It was obvious he wanted to spare his daughter. So I said tests. It's Miss Angela?"

"Yes, Angela."

"He said he preferred downstairs. He knew I'd take him anyway."

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

"The procedure was correct. He knew it was."

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

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

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

"You'll have to wait and see him at the chapel, sir. It's not allowed."

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

"Would you make one?"

"I would."

"I'll send his nurse with you," said the doctor.

They went down in the elevator, the gray woman and Mr. Sammler, and through lower passages paved in speckled material, through tunnels, up and down ramps, past laboratories and supply rooms. Well, this famous truth for which he was so keen, he had it now, or it had him. He felt that he was being destroyed, what was left of him. He wept to himself. He walked at the habitual rapid sweeping pace, waiting at crossways for the escorting nurse. In stirring air flavored with body-things, sickness, drugs. He felt that he was breaking up, that irregular big fragments inside were melting, sparkling with pain, floating off. Well, Elya was gone. He was deprived of one more thing, stripped of one more creature. One more reason to live trickled out. He lost his breath. Then the woman came up. More hundreds of yards in this winding underground smelling of serum, of organic soup, of fungus, of cell-brew. The nurse took Sammler's hat and said, "In there. " The door sign read P. M. That would mean post-mortem. They were ready to do an autopsy as soon as Angela signed the papers. And of course she would sign. Let's find out what went wrong. And then cremation.

"To see Dr. Gruner. Where?" said Sammler.

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

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

The End