Mr. Sammler Planet

by Saul Bellow

  "Very well, my photograph in bookshops. A fine idea. Excellent. But stealing…?"

  "It wasn't actually stealing."

  "Well, what word do you prefer, and what difference does it make? Like the old joke: what more do I learn about a horse if I know that in Latin it is called equus?"

  "But I'm not a thief."

  "Very well. In your mind you're not a thief. Only in fact."

  "I thought if you were really, really serious about H. G. Wells you would have to know if he predicted accurately about the moon, or Mars, and that you'd pay any price to have the latest, most up-to-date scientific information. A creative person wouldn't stop at anything. For the creative there are no crimes. And aren't you a creative person?"

  It seemed to Sammler that inside him (faute de mieux, in his mind) was a field in which many hunters at cross-purposes were firing bird shot at a feather apparition assumed to be a bird. Shula had meant to set him a test. Was he the real thing or wasn't he? Was he creative, a force of nature, a true original, or not? Yes, it was a fitness test, and this was very American of Shula. Did an American exist who was not morally didactic? Was there any crime committed which didn't punish the victim for "the greater good"? Was there any sinner who did not sin pro bono publico? So great was the evil of helpfulness, and so immense the liberal spirit of explanation. The psychopathology of teaching in the United States. So, then, was Papa a true creative intransigent-capable of bold theft for the sake of the memoir? Could he risk all for H. G.?

  "Truthfully, my child, have you ever read a book of Wells'?"

  "Yes, I have."

  "Tell me-but the truth, just between you and me."

  "I read one book, Father."

  "One? One book by Wells is like trying to bathe in a single wave. What was the book?"

  "It was about God."

  "God the Invisible King?"

  "That's the one."

  "Did you finish it?"

  "No."

  "Neither did I."

  "Oh, Father-you?"

  "I just couldn't read it. Human evolution with God as Intelligence. I soon saw the point, then the rest was tedious, garrulous"

  "But it was so intelligent. I read a few pages and was so thrilled. I knew he was a great man, even if I couldn't read the whole book. You know I can't read an entire book. I'm too restless. But you've read all his other books."

  "No one could read them all. I've read many. Probably too many."

  Smiling, Sammler emptied the envelopes and tossed the crumpled ball into Angela's wastepaper basket of gilded Florentine leather. Acquired by her mother on a tour. The keys he dropped into his pocket, leaning far to one side in the boudoir chair to get at the flap.

  Shula, observing silently, was smiling also, holding her wrists with her fingers, forearms crossing on her bosom to keep the robe from falling open. Sammler, despite the washrag, had seen the brown-purple tips, enriched with salient veins. At the corner of her mouth, now that she had done her mischief, there was a chaste twist of achievement. The flat black kinked hair was covered up, towel-swathed, except, as always, for the kosher sidelocks escaping at her ears. And smiling as if she had eaten a plateful of divine forbidden soup, and what was to be done about it now that it was down? At the back, the white nape of her neck was strong. Biological strength. Below the neck there was a mature dorsal hump. A grown woman. But the arms and legs were not proportionate. His only begotten child. He never doubted that she performed acts originating far beyond, in the past, of unconscious ancestral origin. He was aware how true this was of himself. Especially in religious matters. She was a praying nut, but he, after all, was given to praying, too, often addressed God. Just now he asked to understand why he so much loved this fool woman with the thick, uselessly sensual cream skin, the painted mouth, and that towel turban.

  "Shula, I know you did this for me-"

  "You are more important than that man, Father. You needed it."

  "But from now on, don't use me as an excuse. For your exploits…"

  "We nearly lost you in Israel, in that war. I was afraid you wouldn't finish your lifework."

  "Nonsense, Shula. What lifework! And killed? There? The finest death I could imagine. Besides, there was no danger. Ridiculous!"

  Shula stood up. "I hear wheels," she said. "Somebody just drove up."

  He had not heard. She had keen senses. Idiot ingenuous animal, she had ears like a fox. Rising so abrupt, standing silent to listen, queenly, dim-witted, alert. And the white feet. Her feet had not been disfigured by fashionable shoes.

  "It probably is Emil."

  "No, it's not Emil. I must get dressed."

  She ran from the room.

  Sammler went downstairs wondering where Wallace had gone. The doorbell began to chime and continued chiming. Margotte didn't know how to ring, when to stop pushing a button. He could see her, through the long narrow pane, in her straw hat, and Professor V. Govinda Lal was with her.

  "We hired a Hertz car," she said. The Professor couldn't bear to wait. We talked to Father Robles on the phone. He hadn't seen Shula in days."

  "Professor Lal. Imperial College. Biophysics."

  "I am Shula's father."

  There were small bows, a handshake.

  "We can sit in the living room. Shall I make a pot of coffee? Is Shula here?" said Margotte.

  "And my manuscript?" said Lal. "The Future of the Moon?"

  "Safe," said Sammler. "Not actually in the house, but locked up safely. I have the keys. Professor Lal, please accept my apologies. My daughter has behaved very badly. Caused you pain."

  Sammler under the foyer light saw the shocked and disappointed face of Lal: brown cheeks, black hair, neat, vivid, and gracefully parted, and a huge spreading beard. The inadequacy of words-the need for several simultaneous languages to address all parts of the mind at once, especially those parts left free by meager communication, functioning furiously on their own. Instead, as one were to smoke ten cigarettes simultaneously; while also drinking whisky; while also being sexually engaged with three or four other persons; while hearing bands of music; while receiving scientific notations-thus to capacity engagй… the boundlessness, the pressure of modem expectations.

  Lal shouted, "Dear me! This is intolerable! Intolerable! Why am I sent this punishment!"

  "Pour Dr. Lal a brandy, Margotte."

  "I do not drink! I do not drink!"

  In the dark setting of his beard the teeth were clenched. Then, aware of his own loudness, he said in more appropriate tones, "Normally I do not drink."

  "But, Dr. Lal, you recommended beer on the moon. However-I am illogical. Go on, go on, Margotte, don't just look solicitous. Get the brandy. I'll have some if he won't. You know where the liquor is. Bring two glasses. Now, Professor, the anxiety will soon be over."

  The living room was what they called "sunken. " You had to descend. A well, a pool, a tank of carpet. It was furnished or decorated with professional completeness, densely arranged. This, if you allowed it to, gave pain. Sammler had known the late Mrs. Gruner's decorator. Or stultifies. Croze. Croze was petit, but had the strength of an art personality. He stood like a thrush. His little belly came far forward and lifted his trousers well above the ankles. His face had lovely color, his hair was barbered to the shapely little head, he had a rosebud mouth, and after you shook hands with Croze, your own hand was all day perfumed. He was creative. Capable of criminal acts, probably. All this was his creation. Here many boring hours had occurred, especially after family dinners. it wouldn't be a bad custom to send these furnishings into the tomb with the deceased, Egyptian style. However, here they all were, these spoils of silk, leather, glass, and antique wood. Here Sammler led the hairy Dr. Lal, a small man, very dark. Not black, sharp-nosed, the Dravidian type, dolichocephalic, but round-featured. Probably from Punjab. He had thin and hairy wrists, ankles, legs. He was a dandy. A macaroni (Sammler could not surrender the old words it had given him so much pleasure in Cracow to pick up from eighteenth-centu
ry books). Yes Govinda was a beau. He was also sensitive, intelligent, nervous, keen, a handsome, elegant, birdy man. One major incongruity. the round face enlarged by soft but strong beard. Behind, thin shoulder blades stuck through the linen blazer. He had a stoop.

  "Where is your daughter, may I ask?"

  "Coming down. I will ask Margotte to fetch her. She was frightened by your detective."

  "He was clever to find her at all. Ingenious work. He did his job."

  "No doubt, but with my daughter Pinkerton methods did not apply. Because of Poland, you see, and the war police. She was hidden. So she panicked. Too bad you have had to suffer for it. But what can one do if she is somewhat…?"

  "Psycho?"

  "That's putting it strongly. She's not entirely out of touch. She made a copy of your manuscript, and she took two lockers in Grand Central Station for copy and original. Here are the keys."

  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 Bьstenhalter. 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 kitch
en. 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.