Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

also razed by enemies, our neighbors the priests of Khnum, who hated us because we doubted their gods? And were we too not exiled from our soil and compelled to sojourn elsewhere? We who revered Moshe our Teacher and faithfully followed him into the wilderness and never made obeisance to a gilded bovine of the barnyard!

It is through these commandments and ordinances that we have been made to disappear. And so we live on as apparitions, fearful of mockery. And I, Ben-Zion Elefantin, am just such an apparition, am I not?

*

August 3, 1949. Oh my feelings, my feelings! How they drive me, not since the passing of my darling, my Peg, my own sweet Peg, never since then, and I scarcely know why. My father’s box here on my desk a veritable oven, the words within burn and burn, indeed they smell of clinging smoke, I begin to fear they are counterfeit, contraband of my own making, my brain is dizzied, I am not myself, we are under a violent tropical heat breathing fire, 103 degrees on this the second brutal day of it, the fans vanquished, a cosmic furnace where sanity wants nothing more than ice water, and this foolish woman chooses to cook her Saftgoulasch! She comes to me panting, with a red face and the sweat flooding her neck, to give me news of that feckless pair of kitchen defectors, and to complain yet again how doubly hard the work is for her without the men to do the heavy labor, is she expected to lift barrels? And das Flittchen Amelia, she is for spite schtum (when excited Hedda loses hold of her English), she knows three days already where they go, ein hochnäsige restaurant making bigger its business where are so many trains and in this bitter house so much work and Mäuse in the pantry and that old man sick in his head crying crying stinking of his own kacken, wie lang müssen wir noch auf diese verehrte Finanziere und ihre blöden Papiere warten?

And so forth. I told her that the mills of the bankers grind slowly, and what leads her to think that in such miserable heat any normal man could get that greasy damn stew down his gullet, and as for the mainstay of the staff going off to wait tables in the city, no wonder the rats are leaving the sinking ship, so why not the Oyster Bar in preference to this waning mice-ridden edifice?

Hedda is a respectable woman. I have never before quarreled with her. I have never thought to offend her.

*

August 5, 1949. Relief. After four detestable days, that hellish heat wave has broken. Hedda has begun to speak to me again, though I never did eat her stew. As for the Oyster Bar’s coming to mind, I believe it must have been some considerable time before my retirement that Ned Greenhill and I last lunched there. It was convenient for both of us, my office just around the corner from Grand Central, and the Courthouse downtown, ten minutes by subway. In homage to the name, Ned habitually ordered oysters, while I, mindful of my nervous digestion, kept to milder flounder. The place in those days had its own confidential dimness. A couple of fellows could sit with their drinks in a semblance of seclusion, while up and down the ramp the plebs ran for their trains. I remember how the tables vibrated with the underground scrapings of wheels on rails. A pity, all this remodeling and refurbishing and hiring of new staff. Nowadays every comfortable old space submits to this fad of architectural vastness, every public room a modernist boast. Happily the Academy escaped this destiny when it was metamorphosed into Temple House, though perhaps too many of the original Oxonian genuflections were retained. (I mean those fortresslike gray turrets that some of the upper-form rowdies claimed were in need of condoms.) Casual reminiscences such as these began our infrequent meetings, but after several glasses of wine we ventured, on the occasion I allude to, into more personal exchanges. I might insert here that Ned is careful never to speak of his son, I suspect out of consideration of me, since I have so little to say of mine. Unlike many of his kind, he is no braggart, especially in view of his own success. (I see in the Times that he is currently being sought after for an appellate appointment.) At Harvard he studied philosophy with one Harry Wolfson, a luminary unfamiliar to me, but well known, Ned made clear, to Reverend Greenhill—at least to his library, as I lately saw for myself. (I regret to say that I also saw rodent droppings all along the shelves.) Ned’s memories of our long-ago headmaster have often dominated our conversations: Reverend Greenhill’s amusement at the similarity of their family names coexisting with the dissimilarity of their ancestry, his eagerness to introduce Ned to the understanding of Greek, and his general favoritism toward Ned, unluckily making him the butt of his classmates.

At his mention of this word, I asked whether he recalled an undersized and taciturn fourth-form boy with a farcical pachyderm name, which everyone ridiculed. I said this jokingly, and almost dismissively, so as not to reveal my ardent interest in what he might tell me. Oh yes, he said, who could forget such an oddity, myself in particular, since I too was mocked, and worse than mocked, along with the other Jewish boys, but in my case all the more so because Reverend Greenhill had singled me out. It was not only for the pleasure he took in my being drawn to the classical languages, rare enough in the Academy, he told me, but also because he had observed my restraint when bullied, and believed I might understand this boy’s irregular situation, and would be willing to befriend him. No former headmaster had agreed to take in a pupil sent over from the Elijah Foundation, and Canterbury