Lal's hand, long and thin, accepted them.
"How can I be sure it's really there, my book?" he said. "
"Dr. Lal, I know my daughter. I feel quite certain. Safe in fireproof steel. In fact, I'm glad she didn't bring the book on the train. She might have lost it--forgotten it on the seat. Grand Central is well lighted, policed, and even if one lock were to be picked by thieves, there would still be the other. Have no further anxiety. I see you are on edge. You can consider this disagreeable misadventure over. The manuscript is safe. "
"Sir, I hope so."
"Let us have a sip of brandy. We have had some trying days."
"Agonizing. Somehow the kind of terror I anticipated in America. My first visit. I had an intuition."
"Has America been all like that?"
"Not altogether. But almost."
Noisy in the kitchen, Margotte was opening cans, taking down bowls, slamming the icebox, clattering the flatware. Margotte's household doings were in continual transmission.
"I could take the train to New York," said Lal.
"Margotte can't drive. What will you do with the Hertz car?"
"Oh, damn! The car! Bloody machines!"
"I regret I can't drive," Sammler said. "Not to drive is the latest snobbery, I am told. But I am innocent of that. It is my eyesight."
"I'd have to come back for Mrs. Arkin."
"You might surrender your Hertz in New Rochelle, but I doubt that they are open at night. There must be a Penn Central timetable. However, it's close to midnight. We could ask Wallace to take you to the train, if he hasn't slipped out the back way--Wallace Gruner," he explained. "We are in the Gruner house. My relative--my nephew by a half-sister. But first let us have the supper Margotte is preparing. What you said before interested me, your presentiments about the U. S.? Twenty-two years ago, my own arrival was a relief."
Of course in a sense the whole world is now U. S. Inescapable," said Govinda Lal. "It's like a big crow that has snatched our future from the nest, and we, the rest, are like little finches in pursuit trying to peck it. However, the Apollo flights are American. I have been employed by NASA. On other research. But this is where my ideas will count, if they are any use.... If I sound strange, excuse me. I've been distressed."
"With good reason. My daughter did you a real injury."
"I am beginning to feel easier. I don't think any hard feelings will remain."
Through the tinted lens and while breathing brandy fumes, Sammler provisionally approved of Govinda Lal, who reminded him in some ways of Ussher Arkin. Very often, oftener than he consciously knew, and vividly, he thought of Ussher underground, in this or that posture, of this or that color or physical condition. As he thought of Antonina, his wife. So far as he knew the enormous grave had never been touched again. From which he himself, scratching dirt, pushing the corpses, came out choked with blood, and crept away on his belly. This preoccupation therefore was only to be expected.
Now Margotte was chopping onions in a bowl. Something to eat. Life in its lighted droplet cells continued its enactments. Poor Ussher in that plane at the Cincinnati airport. Sammler missed him and acknowledged that he had moved into the apartment with Margotte because of the contact with Ussher it afforded.
But he noted some of the same qualities, Arkin's qualities, in this very different, duskier, smaller, bushier Lal, whose wrist was no wider than a ruler.
Then Shula-Slawa came down the stairs. Lal, who saw her first, had an expression which made Sammler immediately turn. She had dressed herself in a sari, or something like it, had found a piece of Indian material in a drawer. It couldn't have been correctly wrapped. It also covered her head. Especially at the bust there was an error. (Sammler with increased concern this evening for the sensitivity of that area; if there was danger of exposure or of hurt, he felt it in his own organs.) He wasn't sure that she was wearing undergarments. No, there was no Büstenhalter. She was extremely white--citrus-thick skin, cream cheeks--and her lips, looking fuller and softer than ever, were painted a peculiar orange color. Like the Neapolitan cyclamens Sammler had admired in the botanical garden. Also, she wore false eyelashes. On her forehead was a Hindu spot made with the lipstick. Exactly where the Ash Wednesday smudge had been. The general idea was to charm and appease this angry Lal. Her eyes as she hurried, without looking, into the well of the room were heated, and in the old man's words to himself, kookily dilated, sensuality-bent. Though ladylike, she made too many gestures, coming forward too much, wildly overprompt, having too much by far to say.
"Professor Lal!"
"My daughter."
"Yes, so I thought."
"I am sorry. So terribly sorry, Dr. Lal. There was a misunderstanding. You were surrounded by people. You must have thought you were just letting me look at the manuscript. But I thought you were letting me take it home to my father. As I said, you remember? That he was writing the book about H. G. Wells?"
Wells? No. But my impression is that he is very obsolete."
"Still, for the sake of science, of science, and for the sake of literature and history, because my father is writing this important history, and you see I help him in his intellectual cultural work. There's nobody else to do it. I never meant to make trouble."
No. Not trouble. Only to dig a pit and cover it with brushwood, and when a man fell into it to lie flat on the ground and converse with him amorously. For Sammler now suspected that she had run away with The Future of the Moon in order to create this very opportunity, this meeting. Were he and Wells really secondary, then? Was it really done to provoke interest? Wasn't that a familiar stratagem? To him, Sammler remembered, women used sometimes to act insolent to get his attention and say stinging things imagining that it made them fascinating. Was this why Shula had taken the book? Out of female seductiveness? One species: but the sexes like two different savage tribes. In full paint. Surprising and shocking each other in the bush. This Govinda, this light spry whiskered dark frail, flying sort of a man--an intellectual. And intellectuals she was mad for. They kept the world remarkable beneath that visiting moon. They kindled up her womb. Even Eisen, perhaps, to recover her esteem (among other reasons), had left the foundry and turned artist. Had probably lost track of the original motive, to show that he was, like her father, a man of culture. And now he was a painter. Poor Eisen.
But Shula was sitting very close to Lal on the sofa, almost taking him by the hand, by the arm, as if bent upon having a touch of his limbs. She was assuring him that she had reproduced his manuscript with great care. She worried lest the Xerox take away the ink and wipe the pages blank. She did page one dying of anxiety. "Such a special ink you use, and what if there should be a bad reaction. I would have died." But it worked beautifully. Mr. Widick said it was lovely copying. And it was in the two lockers. The copy was in a legal binder. Mr. Widick said you could even leave ransom money in Grand Central. Perfectly safe. Shula wanted Govinda Lal to see that the orange circle between the eyes had lunar significance. She kept tilting her face, offering her brow.
"Now, Shula, my dear," said Sammler. "Margotte needs help in the kitchen. Go and help her."
"Oh, Father."
She tried, speaking aside in Polish, to tell him she wished to stay.
"Shula! Go! Go on now--go!
As she obeyed, her cheeks had a hot and bitter look. Before Lal she wanted to show filial submission, but her behind was huffy as she went.
"I would never have recognized, never have identified her," said Lal.
"Yes? Without the wig. She often affects a wig."
He stopped. Govinda was thinking. Presumably about the recovery of his work from the locker. Yes. He felt his blazer pockets from beneath, making certain of the keys.