"They say that you were in the grave once."
"Do they?"
"How was it?"
"How was it. Let us change the subject. We are already on the Cross County Highway. Emil is very fast."
"No traffic, this time of night. I had my life saved, one time. It was before New Rochelle. I cut school and roamed the park. The lagoon was frozen, but I fell through the ice. There was a Japanese type of bridge, and I was climbing the girders, underneath, and tumbled off. It was December, and the ice was gray. The snow was white. The water was black. I was hanging on to the ice, scared shitless, and my soul felt like a little marble rolling away, away. A bigger kid came and saved me. He was a truant, too, and he crawled out on the ice with a branch. I caught hold, and he dragged me out. Then we went to the men's toilet in the boathouse, and I stripped. He rubbed me with his sheepskin coat. I laid my clothes on the radiator, but they wouldn't dry. He said, 'Jeez kid, you're gonna catch hell.' My dear mother raised hell all right. She pulled my ears because my clothes were wet."
"Very good. She should have done it oftener."
"You know something? I agree. You're right. The memory is precious. It's much more vivid than chocolate cake, and much richer. But Uncle Sammler, the next day at school when I saw the kid I made up my mind to give him my allowance, which was ten cents."
"He took it?"
"He sure did."
"I like such stories. What did he say?"
"Not a word. He just nodded his head and took the dime. He stuck it in his pocket and went back to his bigger pals. I guess he felt he had earned it on the ice. It was his fair reward."
"I see you have these recollections.
"Well, I need them. Everybody needs his memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door."
And all this will continue. It will simply continue. Another six billion years before the sun explodes. Six billion years of human life! It lames the heart to contemplate such a figure. Six billion years! What will become of us? Of the other species, yes, and of us? How will we ever make it? And when we have to abandon the earth, and leave this solar system for another, what a moving-day that will be. But by then humankind will have become very different. Evolution continues. Olaf Stapledon reckoned that each individual in future ages would be living thousands of years. The future person, a colossal figure, a beautiful green color, with a hand that had evolved into a kit of extraordinary instruments, tools strong and subtle, thumb and forefinger capable of exerting thousands of pounds of pressure. Each mind belonging to a marvelous analytical collective, thinking out its mathematics, its physics as part of a sublime whole. A race of semi-immortal giants, our green descendants, dear kin and brethren, inevitably containing still some of our bitter peculiarities as well as powers of spirit. The scientific revolution was only three hundred years old. Give it a million, give it a billion more. And God? Still hidden, even from this powerful mental brotherhood, still out of reach?
But now the Rolls was in the lanes. You could hear the new spring leaves brushing and stirring as the silver car passed. After many years, Sammler still did not know the way to Elya's house in the suburban woods, the small roads twisted so. But here was the building, half-timbered Tudor style, where the respectable surgeon and his homemaking wife had brought up two children, and played badminton on this pleasant grass. In 1947 as a refugee Sammler had been astonished at their playfulness--adults with rackets and shuttlecocks. The lawn now was lighted by the moon, which seemed to Sammler clean-shaven; the gravel, fine, white, and small, made an amiable sound of grinding under the tires. The elms were thick, old--older than the combined ages of all the Gruners. Animal eyes appeared in the headlights, or beveled reflectors set out on the borders of paths shone: mouse, mole, woodchuck, cat, or glass bits peering from grass and bush. There were no lighted windows. Emil turned his brights on the front door. Wallace, as he hurried out, spilled his whisky on the carpet. Sammler groped for the glass and gave it to the chauffeur, explaining, "This fell." Then he followed Wallace over the rustling gravel.
As soon as Sammler entered, Emil backed away to the garage. That left only moonlight in the rooms. A house of misconceived purposes, as it had always seemed to Sammler, where nothing really functioned except the mechanical appliances. But Gruner had always taken care of it conscientiously, especially since the death of his wife, in a memorial spirit. Just as Margotte did for Ussher Arkin. That was fresh gravel in the drive. As soon as winter ended, Gruner ordered it laid down. The moon rinsed the curtains and foamed like peroxide on the nap of the white heavy carpets.
"Wallace?" Sammler believed he heard him below in the cellar. If he didn't turn on the lights, it was because he didn't want Sammler to know his movements. The poor fellow was demented. Mr. Sanunler, forced by life, by fate, by what you like, to be disinterested, to think to the best of his ability on universal lines, was not about to stoop to policing Wallace in his father's house, to prevent him from digging out money--real or imaginary criminal abortion dollars.
Examining the kitchen, Sammler found no evidence that anyone had lately been here. The cupboards were shut, the stainless-steel sink and counters dry. As in a model exhibit. Cups on their hooks, none missing. But at the bottom of the garbage pail lined with a brown paper bag was an empty tuna-fish can; water-packed, Geisha brand, freshly fish-smelly. Sammler held it to his nose. Aha! Had someone lunched? Emil the chauffeur, perhaps? Or Wallace himself, straight from the can without vinegar or dressing? Wallace would have left crumbs on the counter, and the soiled fork, disorderly signs of eating. Sammler put back the cut tin circle, released the pedal of the pail, and went to the living room. There he felt the chain mail of the fire screen, for Shula was fond of fires. It was cool. But the evening was warm. This proved nothing.
Then he went on to the second floor, recalling how he and she had played hide-and-go-seek in London thirty-five years ago. He had been good at it, talking aloud to himself. "Is Shula in this broom closet? Let me see. Where can she be? She is not in the broom closet. How mystifying! Is she under the bed? No. My, what a clever little girl. How well she hides herself. She's simply disappeared." While the child, just five years old, thrilling with game fever, positively white, crouched behind the brass scuttle where he pretended not to see her, her bottom near the floor, her large kinky head with the small red bow--a whole life there. Melancholy. Even if there hadn't been the war.
However, theft! That was serious. And theft of intellectual property--even worse. And in the dark he yielded somewhat to elderly weakness. Too old for this. Toiling along the banister in the fatiguing luxury of the carpet. He belonged at the hospital. An old relative in the waiting-room. Much more appropriate. On the second floor, the bedrooms. He moved cautiously in darkness. In the housebound air were old odors of soap and eau de cologne. No one had lately ventilated the place.
A sound of water reached him, a slight movement in a full tub. A wallow. His hand reached in, wrist bent, sliding over the tile wall until he found the electric switch. In the light he saw Shula trying to cover her breasts with a washcloth. The enormous tub was only half occupied by her short body. The soles of her white feet, he saw, the black female triangle, and the white swellings with large rings of purplish brown. The veins. Yes, yes, she belonged to the club. The gender club. This was a female. That was a male. Much difference it could make to him.
"Father. Please. Please turn off the light."
"Nonsense. I'll wait in the bedroom. Wrap yourself up. Be quick about it."
He sat in Angela's old room. When she was a young girl. Or an apprentice whore. Well, people went to the wars. They took what weapons they had, and they advanced toward the front.