Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

the yolk from his single egg. And the same in chapel, when I could sense from my nearness to his breathing how tensely he listened to the readings of Scripture.

On a certain morning of fine weather when Exodus was the theme of Reverend Greenhill’s sermon, and the rout of the Egyptians was under moral consideration (whether so massive a drowning of men and horses was too wrathful a punishment even for oppressors), Ben-Zion Elefantin for the first time made himself known to me. A three-hour Sunday afternoon recess had been declared: another of Reverend Greenhill’s ameliorating innovations, where formerly Mr. Canterbury had enforced a Sabbath study period of the same length, to be conducted in strictest silence. On this day of freedom, while our classmates were out on the sunny lawns, tossing balls and aimlessly running and blaring their laughter to the skies, Ben-Zion Elefantin and I sat on my bed as usual, with my chessboard between us. But the game was somehow desultory, and on an impulse, remembering the morning’s sermon and the strange profundity of his attentiveness, I told him that I owned some actual things from the time of the Pharaohs, whether he could believe me or not. My father, before I was born, I said, was once in Egypt, when my mother was too ill to go with him, but still he brought back for her a gold Egyptian ring, which for some reason she never wore. I said I had often seen the ring in the pretty bowl on her dresser along with her necklaces and bracelets, but it interested me far less than the other things my father had come home with, and if he didn’t believe me that they were really from Egypt, I could show them to him. I had never before spoken to anyone of what lay hidden in the pouch in the cabinet under my table, and the reader may question why I did so now. A kind of agitation seemed to possess him, and I saw that his face was burning bloodlike, nearly the color of his hair. You know nothing of Egypt, he said, nothing, you think everything in the Bible is true, but there is more than the Bible tells, and omission is untruth. (I am trying to render the queer way of his speech, how the suddenness of its heat turned it old and ornate, as if he was not a boy but a fiery ghost in some story.) I’ll show you, I said, and what makes you think you know more about Egypt than my own father, who really was there, and went down the Nile in a boat, and was close to Sir Flinders Petrie, his cousin, an expert on everything Egyptian, and do you even know who Sir Flinders Petrie is? He said he did not, but neither would Sir Flinders Petrie, whoever he was, know the truth of Ben-Zion Elefantin. This took me aback; how stupid you sound, I said, and he gave me an answer both triumphal, as in an argument he was bound to win, and also despairing, as if he was conscious of how I would receive it. I myself, he said, was born in Egypt, and lived there until it was time for my schooling. I was instantly doubtful: hadn’t my father in his notebook described the Egyptians as dusky? And in pictures of pyramids and palms and such weren’t Egyptians always shown to be copper-colored? Certainly no Egyptian had hair the color of red earth. You can’t be Egyptian, I said. Oh, he said, I am not Egyptian at all. But if you were born in Egypt and aren’t Egyptian, I asked, what are you? Then I saw something like a quiver of fear pass over his eyelids. I am Elefantin, he said, and he

*

July 19, 1949. It has been more than a week since I was made to break off, and I have since not had the heart to come back to my Remington. At that time, as it happened, I had been typing at three in the afternoon, and I hope the reader will not be tempted to think that I had altered my midnight labors out of cowardice, to accommodate my accusers. No, it was because I was driven to go on, my memories racked me, and though three was most often the hour when I helplessly succumbed to a doze, with the fans struggling against the heat, still I could not contain my feeling, stirred as I was by my retelling of Ben-Zion Elefantin’s unimaginable words (which I have yet to record). So inwardly gripped was I, that I was altogether deaf to the voices that wafted through the open window, until I was distracted by an unwelcome tumult of loud and offensive laughter. In some exasperation I looked out to see its source. My six colleagues were lazily gathered under the maples, a sign that they were hardly at work on their memoirs. One of them, his arm in the air, appeared to be pointing upward, directly at my window, and then the laughter erupted again. It was, not surprisingly, that childish cackling old man, the spiteful culprit himself, the vandal, the despoiler of my Remington. He stood with his walker before him, and, having caught my eye, stepped forward with the start of a salute, as if about to wave in ill-intended greeting. And then—I knew it seconds before—a broken branch under his feet—he had been looking up and never saw it. He tottered for an instant and lurched downward, his legs snarled in the legs of the walker, and fell in a twisted heap of elderly limbs. I was witness to all of it, the shrieking and calling, Hedda and two or three others of the staff all at once there, warning and herding the others out of the way, five stricken old men, and then the ambulance with its distant siren, and the police and the gurney, and