Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

my enemy was taken away. He died in the hospital six days later (yesterday), not, they say, from the fractured hip or the surgery or the infamously inevitable pneumonia that set in soon after, but from, they say, heart failure. And Hedda tells me, with some contempt, that one of the kitchen help believes it was I who destroyed him, I with my evil eye. A foolish superstition, yet I feel its vengeful truth.

We were seven, and now we are six. I think incessantly of death, of oblivion, how nothing lasts, not even memory when the one who remembers is gone. And how can I go on with my memoir, to what end, for what purpose? What meaning can it have, except for its writer? And for him too (I mean for me), the past is mist, its figures and images no better than faded paintings. Where now is Ben-Zion Elefantin, did he in fact exist? Today he is no more than an illusion, and perhaps he was an illusion then?

As for the dead man, I cannot mourn. How can I mourn the envious boor who wounded my sweet Peg? Still, there is a kind of mourning in the air, the gloom seeps and seeps, one feels the breath of a void, not only of a missing tenant of Temple House (him I cannot mourn) but of the limitless void that awaits us. The tremor in my left hand has lately worsened. When I shave, the leathern creature in the mirror is someone I do not know, and too often I draw blood from his living flesh, if flesh it is. Hedda reports that the afternoon tea trays, all save mine, are sent back untouched. And more: she tells me that the other one, that other puerile fellow, the dead man’s inseparable accomplice and defender, sits all day in his apartment and weeps. But I cannot forget that when my enemy stood pointing and jeering at my window, the laughter of his steady companion was the loudest. (So much for the delicate syllables of their precious Gerard Manley Hopkins.)

*

July 20,1949. I have decided, after all, to continue with my memoir. Too many reflections on death contaminate life. And should not each man live every day as if he were immortal? After all this time, I cannot proceed from where I left off: let those broken words hang cryptic and unfinished while I describe my surprise at Ben-Zion Elefantin’s indifference to my father’s treasure. With the exception of the notebook, I had emptied the pouch of all its objects, one by one, and set them out in a row on my table. I say his indifference, but since his turmoil was unabated, I should rather say contempt. You suppose these things to be uncommon, he said, on account of what you believe to be their ancient age, but your father may have been gullible, as so many are. They can be found by the hundreds, real and false. My parents would know. They know such things with their fingertips. My father, I protested, wasn’t gullible, and why should your parents know more than my father, who brought them back from Egypt? My father, I told you, worked in Giza with Sir Flinders Petrie, his very own cousin, and Sir Flinders Petrie isn’t gullible, he knows more about Egypt than anyone. He coughed out a small gurgling noise that I took to be a scoff, and then his voice too became small and quiet and more foreign than ever. My parents, he said, are traders.

Even as a boy of ten I understood what a trader was. My father, I had seen, was every morning absorbed by stocks and bonds, and followed them in the newspapers, and besides, according to what I took in from his talk, I knew that traders lived in Wall Street, not in legendary places like Egypt. All this I explained to Ben-Zion Elefantin. And after this conversation he had no more to say, and I was glad that I had not yet revealed to his certain scorn, as I had at first intended, what I imagined to be my father’s dearest prize, the emerald-eyed beaker in its box under my bed. A misunderstanding had come between us, or was it a quarrel, and why? He left me and went to his room and again shut the door, and for all the next week he kept away.

*

July 21, 1949. The reader will, I trust, understand why I must eke out my memoir in these unsatisfying patches. In part it is simple fatigue. The tremor in my left hand has somehow begun to assert itself in my right hand as well, hence my typing becomes blighted by too many errors, which I must laboriously correct. After an hour or so at my Remington I feel called upon to lie down, and invariably this leads to a doze. I will confess to another cause of hiatus upon hiatus, and here I admit also to a growing sympathy for my colleagues, who, it is clear, have achieved little or nothing beyond an initial paragraph or two, if even that. As I move on with my chronicle, I more and more feel an irrepressible ache of yearning, I know not for what. Hardly for my boyhood in the Academy, with all its stringencies and youthful cruelties. I am, if I may express it so, in a state of suffering of the soul as I write, a suffering that is more a gnawing paralysis than a conscious pain. I earnestly wish to stop my memoir, and I may not, so how can I blame those others who have stopped, or not so much as begun? I fear that I am again in the grip of the void. All around me the talk is of the accident under the maples, and how it came about, and of broken branches, and the terror of falling. Nor am I immune from that terror, and see