Removing shoes and socks, Mr. Sammler raised a long foot to the sink. Wasn't he too old for such movements? Evidently not. In the privacy of his room he was actually less stiff in the limbs. He bathed the feet and did not dry them thoroughly, for it was a warm evening. Evaporation relieved the smarting. As evolutionary time went we had not long been bipeds, and the flesh of the feet suffered for it, especially in spring when organisms experienced a peculiar expansion. Tired and breathing quietly, Sammler lay down. He left his feet uncovered. He brought the coolness of the sheet over his flat, slender chest. He turned away his lamp to shine on the drawn curtain.
The luxury of nonintimidation by doom--that might describe his state. Since the earth altogether was now a platform, a point of embarkation, you could think with a very minimum of terror about going. Not to waive another man's terror for him (he was thinking of Elya with the calibrated metal torment in his throat). But often he felt himself very nearly out of it. And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good--a melancholy good.
Ah. Before he had let go the curtain, when Margotte disappeared, before sitting to remove the shoes, before turning to wash his feet, he had seen, come to think of it, the moon not too remote from the Spry sign, and round as a traffic signal. This moon image or circular afterimage was still with him. And we know now from photographs the astronauts took, the beauty of the earth, its white and its blue, its fleeces, the great glitter afloat. A glorious planet. But wasn't everything being done to make it intolerable to abide here, an unconscious collaboration of all souls spreading madness and poison? To flush us out? Not so much Faustian aspiration, thought Mr. Sammler, as a scorched- earth strategy. Ravage all, and what does death get? Defile, and then flee to the bliss of oblivion. Or bolt to other worlds.
He recognized by these thoughts that he was preparing to meet Govinda Lal. They would possibly discuss such matters. Dr. Lal, whose field seemed to be biophysics, and who might, like most experts, turn out to be a nonindividual, gave signs, in his writing anyway, of wider thoughtfulness. For after each technical section he offered remarks on the human aspects of future developments. He seemed aware, for instance, that the discovery of America had raised hopes in the sinful Old World of a New Eden. "A shared consciousness," Lal had written, "may well be the new America. Access to central data mechanisms may foster a new Adam." Well, it was very odd what Mr. Sammler found himself doing as he lay in his room, in an old building. Settling, the building had cracked its plaster, and along these slanted cracks he had mentally inscribed certain propositions. According to one of these he, personally, stood apart from all developments. From a sense of deference, from age, from good manners, he sometimes affirmed himself to be out of it, hors d'usage, not a man of the times. No force of nature, nothing paradoxical or demonic, he had no drive for smashing through the masks of appearances. Not "Me and the Universe." No, his personal idea was one of the human being conditioned by other human beings, and knowing that present arrangements were not, sub specie aeternitatis, the truth, but that one should be satisfied with such truth as one could get by approximation. Trying to live with a civil heart. With disinterested charity. With a sense of the mystic potency of humankind. With an inclination to believe in archetypes of goodness. A desire for virtue was no accident.
New worlds? Fresh beginnings? Not such a simple matter. (Sammler, reaching for diversion.) What did Captain Nemo do in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea? He sat in the submarine, the Nautilus, and on the ocean floor he played Bach and Handel on the organ. Good stuff, but old. And what of Wells' Time Traveler, when he found himself thousands of years in the future? He fell in square love with a beautiful Eloi maiden. To take with one, whether down into the depths or out into space and time, something dear, and to preserve it--that seemed to be the impulse. Jules Verne was quite right to have Handel on the ocean floor, not Wagner, though in Verne's day Wagner was avant-garde among the symbolists, fusing word and sound. According to Nietzsche the Germans, insufferably oppressed by being German, used Wagner like hashish. To Mr. Sammler's ears, Wagner was background music for a pogrom. And what should one have on the moon, electronic compositions? Mr. Sammler would advise against that. Art groveling before Science.
But Sammler was preoccupied by different matters, far from playful. Feffer, wishing to divert him, had told him the tale of the insurance adjuster who pulled out the pistol. It was no diversion. Feffer had said that with that rotten gun you would have to shoot a man at close range, and in the head. Killing point blank. This shooting in the head was what Sammler had been attempting to shut out, screen off. Hopeless. Diversion shriveled up. He was obliged to give in, to confront certain insufferable things. These things were not subject to control. They had to be endured. They had become a power within him which did not care whether he could bear them or not. Visions or nightmares for others, but for him daylight events, in full consciousness. Certainly Sammler had not experienced things denied to everyone else. Others had gone through the like. Before and after. Especially non-Europeans had a quieter way of taking such things. Surely some Navaho, Apache must have fallen into the Grand Canyon, survived, picked himself up, possibly said nothing to his tribe. Why speak of it? Things that happen, happen. So, for his part, it had happened that Sammler, with his wife and others, on a perfectly clear day, had had to strip naked. Waiting, then, to be shot in the mass grave. (Over a similar new grave Eichmann had testified that he had walked, and the fresh blood welling up at his shoes had sickened him. For a day or two, he had to lie in bed.) Sammler had already that day been struck in the eye by a gun butt and blinded. In contraction from life, when naked, he already felt himself dead. But somehow he had failed, unlike the others, to be connected. Comparing the event, as mentally he sometimes did, to a telephone circuit: death had not picked up the receiver to answer his ring. Sometimes, when he walked on Broadway today, and heard a phone ringing in a shop when doors were open, he tried to find, to intuit, the syllable one would hear from death. "Hello? Ah, you at last. "
"Hello. " And the air of the street visibly vapored with lead, and also with a brass tinge. But if there were live New York bodies passing as there had once been dead ones piled on top of him, if there were this crowd strolling, lounging, dragging, capering (a Broadway rabble to which he belonged)--if there were this, there was also enough to feed every mouth: baked goods, raw meat, smoked meat, bleeding fish, smoked fish, barbecued pork and chicken, apples like ammunition, antihunger orange grenades. In the gutters, along curbs was much food, eaten, as he saw at three a. m., by night-emerging rats. Buns, chicken bones, which, once, he would have thanked God to have. When he was a partisan in Zamosht Forest, freezing, the dead eye like a ball of ice in his head. Envying fallen sticks from his nearness to their state. In a moldered frozen' horse blanket and rag-wrapped feet. Mr. Sammler carried a weapon. He and other starved men chewing at roots and grasses to stay alive. They drifted out at night to explode bridges, unseat rails, kill German stragglers.