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.