Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

anew the wisdom of my having given up my meditative if lonely evening walks in the perilous paths beneath the trees. I think of the loneliness I felt in my childhood, which returns to me now, as if all loneliness, past and present, were one. To be shunned in the company of Ben-Zion Elefantin was painful enough (after all, we had each other), but to endure, all on my own, the snubs and the silences of those persecutors who had once been my peers, was another.

Then how relieved and grateful I was when the following Sunday he came to sit quietly beside me in chapel (where the pew had been spitefully left unoccupied to my right and my left), as if he meant to forgive me for what he deemed to be my fault. And when at last we were set free from the tiresome readings and hymns (the sermon that day was from Matthew), with no discussion of any kind he led me not to my room but to his, and we sat on his bed facing each other as always, though with no chessboard between us, and his door shut as always. His room was nearly identical to mine, the bed as narrow, the walls as bare, the ceiling as stained: a monklike cubicle reminiscent, yes, of a prisoner’s cell. Still, a certain surprising difference was instantly noticeable. I kept a stack of books on my table, all of them schoolbooks: my History of the World, my Beginner’s Algebra, my (hated) Gallic Wars, and so forth; but here his table was altogether clear of any evidence of schooling, as if he meant to wash away all signs of it, except for a fourth-form Intermediate Arithmetic, with its bruised and faded binding, tossed to the floor among gray clumps of wandering dust. (It was plain that he had chosen not to obey the requirement of cleaning one’s own room.)

Yet his table held a panoply of perplexing items: a drawstring sack of some fine material, silk or satin, and next to it a pair of small black cubes, or were they boxes, attached to what appeared to be twin leather leashes, rather like a pony’s reins. And lying open beside this eerie contraption, a distinctly foreign-looking book. Its blackened corners were frayed, and an unknown odor drifted faintly from it, like the smell, I imagined, of some forest fungus. I saw that its letters were unrecognizable, and asked whether he could actually read such ugly blotches, and what language was that? He said nothing at first, as if deciding whether to answer, and then shut the book and opened the drawer of his table and carefully deposited it there, meanwhile maneuvering the contraption with its curly reins into its sack before positioning this too, again delicately, into that same hidden place. It is very old, this language, he said finally, and I must now apologize to you. You could not know, he said, how could you know, no one ever knows, they suppose this and that, or they think I speak foolishness, and why should I have expected that you, unlike all others, would understand? His voice shook, and also his hands. Perhaps, he said, it is that I believed you to be my friend, and now I am ashamed. I am your friend, I said, and was all at once frightened by my own words, as if I might really be speaking truth. To be the friend of a grotesquerie (this fearsome term comes to me only now) seemed far more dangerous than the boyish pariahship that was already my plight. The peril worsened: he slid off his end of his bed and pulled me down beside him, with his face so close to mine that I could almost see my eyes in the black mirror of his own. I had never before felt the heat of his meager flesh; sitting side by side in the chapel’s confining pews, our shoulders in their Academy blazers had never so much as grazed—nor had our knees in our short trousers. And now, the two of us prone on the floor among the nubbles of dust, breathing their spores, I seemed to be breathing his breath. Our bare legs in the twist of my fall had somehow become entangled, and it was as if my skin, or his own, might at any moment catch fire. He spoke with a rhythmic rapidity, almost as if he were reciting, half by rote, some time-encrusted liturgical saga. It had no beginning, it promised no end, it was all fantastical middle, a hallucinatory mixture of languages and implausible histories. And what was I, pressed body to body, to make of it?

The attentive reader (if by now such reader there be) is my witness; only see how I have too long put off the telling of it, and how can I tell it even now, when in fulfillment of my memoir I must? Can I reach out my fingers to capture a cloud, a vapor, an odor? Then do not think that I own the power to replicate any graspable representation of what came to pass that afternoon in my tenth year, when the shouts from the football field were themselves no more than some distant ghostly abrasion. Nevertheless, insofar as my feeble understanding under these circumstances will permit, I will attempt to extract from Ben-Zion Elefantin’s untamed babblings a semblance of human coherence. As I say, I must try. But no, it cannot be done; not by me, and who else is there? No other person on earth, and this damnable tremor begins to rock my wrists, my fatigue defeats me, the keys of my Remington are no better than boulders, I fear a panic will soon overtake me if I do not stop, and here thank God is Hedda with the supper tray thank God thank God thank God

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3:30 am

Sleep has eluded me for many hours, so deep is my abashment. To have lost