"Will you talk to Daddy, Uncle?"
"About this... thing of yours? That would be up to him. I wouldn't introduce the subject. I don't think he's just become aware of your style of life. I can't say what he's gotten out of it vicariously, as you suggest. But he's not stupid, and giving a young woman like you a capital of half a million dollars to live in New York City, he would have to be very dumb to think you were not amusing yourself."
Great cities are whores. Doesn't everyone know? Babylon was a whore. Ô La Reine aux fesses cascadantes. Penicillin keeps New York looking cleaner. No faces gnawed by syphilis, with gaping noseholes as in ancient times.
"Daddy has such respect for you."
"What use should I make of that respect?"
"All the oldest, deepest, worst sexual prejudices are mobilized against me."
"Lord only knows what's in his mind," said Sammler. "Perhaps it's only one pain among many."
"He's said cruel things to me."
"This Mexican event is not the first," said Sammler. "Surely your father has always known. He hoped you would marry Horricker and stop this sexual nonsense."
"I'll see if he's awake," said Angela, and rose. Her soft and heavy self was dressed in one of its costumes. Her legs, exposed to the last quarter of the thigh, were really very strong, almost clumsy. Her face was at this moment baby-pale, and soft under the little leather cap. As she detached herself from the plastic seat, and the evening was quite warm, an odor was released. Both low comic and high serious. Goddess and majorette. The Great Sinnerl What a vexation for poor Elya. What overvaluation. What an atrocious mixture of feelings. Angela was displeased with Sammler. She walked away.
As she was going, he remembered where he had last seen a cap like hers. It was in Israel--the Six-Day War he had seen.
He had seen.
It was almost as if he had attended--among other spectators. Arriving in fast cars at a point before Mount Hermon, where a tank battle was taking place, he was one of a press group watching a fight, below. Down in the flat valley, as in Vista-Vision. Where they were standing, Mr. Sammler and the others, Israeli press officers and journalists, were safe enough. The battle was two miles or more beyond them. The tank columns were maneuvering in dust. Bombs were spilling from planes as remote as insects. You saw the wings when they spun into the light, then heard detonations, and shrubs of smoke rose briefly. Remotely, you heard machinery--distant tank treads. You heard tiny war sounds. Then two more cars came tearing up, joined the group, and cameramen leaped out. They were Italians, paparazzi, someone explained, and had brought with them three girls in mod dress. The girls might have come from Carnaby Street or from King's Road in their buskins, miniskirts, false eyelashes. They were indeed British, for Mr. Sammler heard them talking, and one of them had on just the sort of little cap that Angela wore, of houndstooth check. The young ladies had no idea where they were, what this was about, had been quarreling with their lovers, who were now lying in the road on their bellies. Photographing battle, the shirts fluttering on their backs. The girls were angry. Carried off from the Via Veneto, probably, without knowing clearly where the jet was going. Then, bare to the waist, a runt but muscular, a Swiss correspondent with small twisted kinky-blond beard and his chest hung with cameras began to complain to the Israeli captain that it was improper for these girls to be at the front. Sammler heard him give this protest through his teeth, which were bad and tiny. The place where they were standing had been bombed earlier. One could not see why. There seemed no military reason for it. But the ground was full of large holes, still black with fresh bomb soot.
"Put them at least in those holes," the Swiss Insisted.
"What?"
"Foxholes, foxholes. Another shell may come. You can't have them walking on the road, like this. You can't have it, don't you understand?" He was an unbearable little man. His war was being ruined by these stupid girls in costume. The Israeli officer gave in. He made the girls get into the burnt holes. All you could see of them then was heads and shoulders. Not quite frightened of their anger, but beginning to be. Somewhat stunned by now, in the paint of great amorousness, one beginning to sob a little, and another puffing up and growing red. Becoming middle-aged--a scrubwoman. Frills of glistening black rising about the girls, the cordite-shining grass.
Other things as strange were occurring. Father Newell, the Jesuit correspondent, was there. He wore the full battle dress of the Vietnam jungles--yellow, black, and green daubs and stripes of camouflage. Representing a newspaper in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was it, or Lincoln, Nebraska? Sammler still owed him ten dollars, his share of the tald they had hired in Tel Aviv to drive to the Syrian front. But he didn't have Father Newell's address. He might have tried harder to find it. On his way home from Southeast Asia, the priest was a tourist in Athens, looking at the Acropolis, when he heard of the fighting and went at once. The big jungle boots were as ample as galoshes. Father Newell sweated in his green battle clothes. His hair cropped Marine-style, his eyes also green and the cheeks splendid meat-red. Down below the tanks raced and the smoke puffed yellow from the ground. Few sounds rose.
Mr. Sammler in the waiting room now stirred and stood up. Wallace, entering from the general light of the corridor into the lamplight of the visitors' room, was already speaking to him. "Dad is sleeping, Angela says. I don't suppose you've had a chance to talk to him about the attic?"
"I have not."
Wallace was not alone. Eisen entered at his back. Wallace and Eisen knew each other. How well? A curious question. But quite long, at any rate. They had met when Wallace, after his attempted horse tour of Central Asia and his arrest by the Russian authorities, had visited Israel, and stayed with Cousin Eisen. Wallace had then prepared a full set of notes (going to work at once) for an essay arguing that the modernization Israel was bringing to the Middle East was altogether too rapid for the Arabs. Pernicious. Wallace, of course, was bound to oppose Elya's Zionism. But Eisen, never comprehending, unaware of Wallace's sudden passion (soon vanishing) for Arab culture, brought him coffee in bed while he was working. Because Wallace was just out of a Soviet prison, thanks to Gruner and Senator Javits, and Eisen knew what it was to be in Russian hands. He had made Wallace rest, he waited on him. On his mutilated feet he had learned to move rapidly. Ingenious adaptation. The shuffle of his toeless feet in Haifa had put Sammler's teeth on edge. He couldn't have endured two hours alone with handsome, curly, smiling Eisen. But Wallace, with his great-orbited eyes and long lashes, reaching a skinny hairy arm from the bed and, without looking, accepting coffee in trembling fingers, coddled himself ten days in Eisen's bed after the jails of Soviet Armenia. The Russians had sent him to Turkey. From Turkey he went to Athens. From Athens, like Newell the Jesuit later, he flew to Israel. Tenderly, devotedly, Eisen had waited on him.
"Ah, here is my father-in-law."
Was it with pleasure at seeing him that Eisen beamed, or was it because the event (Eisen in New York for the first time in his life) was so splendid? He was gay but stiff, cramped under the arms and between the legs by his new American clothes. Wallace must have taken him to one of those execrable mod male shops, like Barney's. Perhaps to one of the unisex establishments. The madman wore a magenta shirt with a persimmon-colored necktie as thick as an ox tongue. The gloom of his never-ending laughter, the shining of his excellent teeth unharmed by the Stalingrad siege and unaffected by starvation when he hobbled over the Carpathians and the Alps. Teeth like that deserved a saner head.
"How nice to find you here," said Eisen to Sammler in Russian.
Sammler answered in Polish, "How are you, Eisen?"