Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

It was off-putting to think (no doubt a derisive invention of the rowdies) that he kept on his table a photograph of his dead wife, or was it his dead child, with a wilting lily before it. But no pupil who was called to stand at that table had ever reported seeing anything like this. It was the carpet that surprised, a meadowlike flourish of purple flowers and curled fronds; it appeared to be Reverend Greenhill’s sole indulgence. We who remembered Mr. Canterbury’s introduction of this luxury knew better. And anyhow Reverend Greenhill had requested before his departure that every middle- and upper-form boy study his Geography of Great Britain and put a green mark, if he could find them, on the Hebrides.

As for the carpet: I have since come to believe that monastic zeal conceals a sybarite.

*

October 4, 1949. It was on this carpet that we settled in our customary chess posture, I uneasily on one side, he on the other, with my shoebox between us. I had fixed the hour at eleven that night, when both masters and boys were safely asleep, while in some distant valley Reverend Greenhill, as I supposed, was stalking the spoor of those venerated names I had already forgotten. I am sorry, Ben-Zion Elefantin said, that I declined to come away when you asked. That stupid lecture, what a bore, I said, why would you want to stay? Oh, he said, this man they shamed, he is loyal and they say he is disloyal, it is as if he is Elefantin, but you are my friend and once more I have disappointed you. You haven’t, it’s just the way you are, I said, and got up to pull aside the curtains at the big paneled windows to let in the light. It was no more than pale misty moonlight, but it was enough; it wouldn’t do to switch on the lamp on Reverend Greenhill’s table. Even as late as it was, some lone boy on his way to the toilet might see the brightness under the doorsill and spy on us. Look, I said, I’ve brought you something important. It’s only for you, no one else would understand.

And again I told him that my father had once traveled to Egypt, and while sailing upstream on the Nile had observed on his left the jumbled greenery of Elephantine Island and the white masses of storks crowding the banks. I told him more: I said that my father, fresh from Sir Flinders Petrie’s tutelage, had recognized from afar the broken earth mounds of abandoned excavations, and had ordered his guide to take him ashore. No, the guide said, there has come recently a very strong khamsin, it tears up the ground and overturns the ruins, it is not safe now to tread there. But my father insisted, and the two of them picked their way through silted stones and newborn chasms while the guide went on groaning his refusal. It was here, pulled up from a deep ditch resembling a tunnel, that my father found what I keep in this box.

The reader may well wonder at these prevarications. Nothing of the sort is recorded in my father’s fading notes as I have described them here. Under the woolen socks that covered my shoebox I had hidden what I felt to be a tribute, a token, a proof, though of what? For a long time I was unknowing; but now nothing was obscured and I knew and I knew and I knew. Our knees, our shoulders, our breathings, had touched. It was as if the crisis of my father’s desires were destined to fall upon such a bony specter as Ben-Zion Elefantin; yet I was in fear of his repugnance, and of my own diffidence before it. I had seen how the meek bent of his scrawny shoulders could flame into an obdurate certainty: would he scoff at my father’s chief finding as he had scoffed at all the others? And how could he dare to scoff if I convinced him, however falsely, of my father’s credibility? And of the khamsin and the silted stones and the storks?

Then I took out from my shoebox the beaker with its long stork’s neck and its one emerald eye.

Here it is, I said, it’s for you, I want you to have it. You can show it to your parents to decide if it’s real. It can’t be fake, my father didn’t get it from some shady shopkeeper or anything fishy like that. Look, it’s in the shape of a stork! No, he said, not a stork, the body of the ibis is white like a stork’s but the beak is black and curved downward. All right, I said, but it’s yours anyway, it was meant for you, some day you will be going from here, your parents will send for you. Oh, he said, I can never predict when my uncle will come, and my parents are far away.

I felt his reluctance. I saw that he preferred silence, turning his hungry face to the silhouetted shelves of Reverend Greenhill’s books, as if by his look he could swallow them all. The carpet under the deluding moonlight seemed all at once botanically alive, a real garden, with rose-red petals and grass-green stalks, and the beaker standing on its base of avian knees like some wild wayward bird that had lost its way and landed there. The minutes of quiet took on the gravity of the ceremonial, though I could not have named it that, nor am I confident even now of that sacerdotal term. What I knew was only that something crucial, some merciless thirst, was at stake: that my connection, however fearful or tenuous, with Ben-Zion Elefantin must not be cut off. Sooner or later he would leave. Sooner or later I would never see him again. He put out his hand to me and I took it. Thank you, he said, but it is impossible, what is such