Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

fits of longing and loss that sometimes flood me), it occurs to me to ask: in the many pages of my memoir that heap up under my hand, am I not Ben-Zion Elefantin’s Boswell? It discomfits me to think that if I am Boswell, the small figure I was once so achingly devoted to imagined himself to be Dreyfus.

*

November 12, 1949. I have spoken before of those wretched showers of our youth: a common space of two overhead nozzles, heated by a coal stove that spat out its fickle warmth no more than inches from its maw. Two showerheads to serve one hundred pupils, with five minutes allotted for each, no matter the season; but from November to March the queue was not long. A boy would prefer to stink, and many did, rather than endure the frigid air of this glacial hell, or the water that was colder than air. It was here that I found myself unexpectedly alone with Ben-Zion Elefantin. He stood before me wet and naked and shivering, and I the same before him; but the blaze of his hair was darkened by water, and his ribs were as skeletal as his pitiful knees. His bare feet were paler than his hands. Without his cap and his blazer, he seemed smaller than ever. Nearly a month had gone by with not a syllable between us. I felt a little afraid; what must I say?

I asked him why.

He said nothing. So again I asked why.

Because I believed you were my friend.

I am your friend, I said.

And again he said nothing. You have to tell me why, I said, you have to.

A cloud of vapor spilled out of his mouth, and I saw the same rise up from mine. It was hard to breathe in that place.

But it’s real. You saw for yourself that it’s real. And your parents, you told me they buy and sell such things.

They keep me safe from them. That is why I am sent to school. To keep me from abomination.

I knew this word. Mr. Canterbury had spoken it in chapel many times.

And it was Ben-Zion Elefantin’s last word to me. I can hear it now, in a kind of self-willed hallucination: that curiously wavering uncharted bookish voice of his own making. An orphaned voice of no known origin.

*

December 12, 1949. No uncle came for him. He remained with the Fourth Form, moved up to the Fifth and the Sixth and the Seventh, and I, in the Eighth, later that year, in June, wore cap and gown for Commencement. The ceremony was held in a capacious tent on the football field, equipped with row upon row of folding chairs to accommodate the mass of parents and well-wishers who were expected to attend. Or were, perhaps, not entirely expected, which may have explained why Reverend Greenhill had appointed the Seventh Form to fill most of the empty places, should there be any. At one side was the dais on which the graduates were to congregate, and at the other a long table freighted with lemonade and cinnamon ices and strawberries and scones heavily blanketed by chocolate syrup and caramel cream, the last an innovation of Reverend Greenhill’s. (I heard him remark to one of the visitors that this violation of a traditional Scottish biscuit might not appeal to a fastidious palate, but the graduates were, after all, still boys.) As the procession shuffled forward to the blare of some hidden operatic loudspeaker, one could see a scattering of fathers, and with them the young women who from their age and attire, I now speculate, might be second wives, or even former nannies. The mothers, with their uplifted faces, were seated nearer the lectern, where Reverend Greenhill waited for the sounds of Aida to ebb. (My own mother was not among them. She had sent me a congratulatory note, fearing she would be too fatigued to sustain the long festivities.) First came the lesser prizes: for Attentiveness, for Patience, for Enterprise, for Courtesy, for Equestrian Skills, and all the rest; and then the Award for Excellence in Latin, renamed Classics (to include private study of Greek), won, predictably, by Edwin J. Greenhill. And following this, the Headmaster’s Oration. Gentlemen, Reverend Greenhill began, I mean not to orate, but rather to bless. As you embark on this new phase of your lives, I hope you will carry with you the aspirations and virtues of our time-honored Academy, and that each of you will strive, as you grow into men, to be both a scholar and yes, a gentleman. But a scholar can be cruel, and a gentleman can be coarse. And here he read out, in his thin but reassuring voice, two passages from Scripture, the first from the Old Testament, the second from the New, in that order, he said, especially to note how the New and the Old are in harmony. A Jew named Abraham, he said, hastened to succor three parched strangers, and gave them water, and fed them, and cooled them from the sun in the shade of a tree, all unaware that they were angels. In the same way, we learn in the Gospel of Luke how a Samaritan, neither Jew nor Christian, found on the highway a man who had been beaten and robbed and lay nearly dead, and carried him to an inn and cared for him like a brother. And so, though I wish each graduate of our beloved Temple Academy for Boys to excel as a scholar and a gentleman, I hope that you will, above all, be kind.

Familiarity brought tedium. I half-heard all this, and at so distant a time I can barely give its gist. Besides, so commonplace in chapel were these exhortations, they might well have been tattooed on the palms of our hands. As for me, I had my eye on a brilliant red blemish at the edge of that restless puddle of Seventh Formers who had come to swell the