Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

assembly. Ben-Zion Elefantin was now fifteen, and nearly as small as before. I tried to catch his look, but his watchfulness seemed inward: on this day of farewell was he thinking of me, of how he cast me away for some preternatural cause? Was my father’s stork, with its blinded eye, the abomination, or was it I?

Really, I ask myself to this very hour, was it I?

*

January 26, 1950. A catastrophe. How could this have happened? I blame it on my increasing forgetfulness, but how could I have forgotten what clings fast to my heart? Or perhaps I did not forget it, and those burly defectors Hedda called back from the city to pack up my things (one hundred or so boxes) carelessly left it behind? Too late now to retrieve it. Worse yet, given its weakened carriage and its increasing rust (that vinegar bath), was it mistaken for debris, and disposed of? The wrecking ball, I hear, has already had its way. So here I sit, with a bottle of ink before me, and my old Montblanc grudgingly resurrected (I had to replace the nib). In my eyrie on the highest floor of this solid old building the new windows admit no street noises, and the walls are inches thick. In this place no one could complain of my Remington! And I have nothing else as a sign of what was. Her grave is far away.

I am no longer accustomed to longhand, it tires my palsied wrists. (With my Remington it was the shoulders.) And even so fine a pen as a Montblanc can sometimes falter on a thin sheet of paper and spurt a droplet of ink; the cuff of my sleeve is spattered. No matter. I can see ahead almost to the close of my memoir; I am loath to put paid to it now. (I despise unfinished effort, as I have often reminded my son.) And then what will become of it? What of value or interest can it have? I have all along spoken of my reader, but can such a chimera exist? These days I sometimes feel as if I myself am a chimera: I walk the city streets in a cloud of uncertainty. I hardly know which way to turn, which is East and which is West. What was once second nature (the life of offices all around me, the lunches, the drinks, the handshake) dizzies me a little, the sidewalk density, the careless mob of unseeing people one must sidestep to avoid collision. Here and there the dirty pigeons, and overhead no birds. The absence of birds! The sky turned zigzag by the contours of this and that high-rise. And no trees.

It was my good fortune to have the December 15th date of eviction put off, though it inconvenienced the scheduled demolition and the difference affected the cost (which I was satisfied to reimburse). Ned Greenhill, or was it his son, managed to persuade Morgan (via John Theory) to allow me to remain through the holidays. Strange as it was, I spent Christmas Eve with Hedda in the kitchen. When Temple House was new, and the Trustees numbered twenty-five and the staff thirty-two, how convivial we were, all those fine fellows now long gone, the gossip, the overblown stories of old business triumphs, the somewhat modest tree (artificial, but genuine silver and costly), the feasting (stuffed goose and liver terrine and buttered shallots and curried lamb), and up and down the table, an infinite row of wines. And while I speak of remembered holidays, I am unhappy to mention that childhood’s Christmases were more somber. The fir with its fragile colored glass globes and its gilt star nearly touching the ceiling, and the gaudily wrapped presents below, among them, I knew, the standard toy army and, one glorious year, my coveted chessmen. (Wooden, but I had dreamed of ivory.) And sometimes, when my mother seemed out of sorts and complained of feeling sick, it was only the two of us: my saddened father and I.

In our doomed and abandoned Temple House, Hedda had enlivened the kitchen as well as she could, hanging red and green crepe-paper streamers from cabinet door to cabinet door. The dinner, she told me, was to be anything I desired, but dessert must be a Viennese treat. I dreaded another Sacher torte; too much sugar makes my teeth ache. The pots on the stove were steaming as always, and while the oven was baking whatever it might be, I was not unpleased to go on with our whimsical game. Hedda surprised me instead with what I supposed was a Christmas song (she had learned it in kindergarten, she said, and still remembered every word), as well as a scrap of paper in her own striving half-English. To me it has no holiday resonance of any kind, but I put it in my pocket and keep it still, if only to take note of Hedda’s Teutonic script; and I record it here, I hardly know why.

A pine tree high in the North he lonely stands.

Under snow and wind he sleeps.

A palm tree he dreams a land to the East,

traurig on the desert sand.

If these words can claim some coherent sense, I cannot discern it; but when Hedda sang them in her emotional German, she appeared to feel its meaning. Her eyes were wet. North, East, what fleeings, what unwilled supplantings? The author, she reminded me, is the very one who echoed the loss of my darling Peg.

Yet the Christmases referenced above are, if I may say so, boilerplate. Certainly I favor tradition; I am aware that ancestral decorum ought not to be scorned. The aberrant is to be shunned. Life’s fundamental rhythms depend on sameness, not deviation. All this I long ago learned from my mother.

Hedda’s dessert turned out to be an elaborate pancake called (a name I cannot pronounce) Kaiserschmarren, filled with caramelized almonds and raisins soaked in rum. It did make my teeth ache; but the rum,