Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

she said, would numb the pain, and she brought out a sizable bottle and a cup for each of us, and poured a second cup, and a third, and at last a fourth, and then it was midnight. Enough there is yet also for New Year’s, Hedda said, nicht wahr?

An anomaly. Out of the ordinary. A deviation from the natural. This homeless old man, this wandering Jewess.

*

January 27, 1950. These furnishings, these tables and chairs and credenzas and whatnot, make me uneasy. I suppose such modern geometries are the fashion in hotels that pretend to the comforts of luxury. Rectangular surfaces, ruler-straight legs, steel tops, nothing cushioned, nothing rounded. The bed, with its excessive pillows (they strain my back), has the width, or so it seems, of a horizonless continent. In the night, under a far-off ceiling, I see no end of vacuity. I feel myself a stranger in this bed, as I have not felt since my Academy cell: that narrow hard bed, my shoebox hidden beneath and my chessboard teetering on a bumpy blanket above. (And Ben-Zion Elefantin silently pondering.) Or not since the bed in which my son was conceived.

My Peg’s sweet bed, there I was never a stranger.

*

January 29, 1950. Hedda telephones now and then (she is still unemployed), asking how I am, are my new surroundings pleasant, and so on; but as her world is scarcely akin to mine, I trust these exchanges will soon fade away.

*

February 2, 1950. The disadvantage of such a high floor is the beating of the wind on the panes. A disturbing noise, different from the tapping of rain. (There are times when the latter mimicks the persistent diligence of my old Remington.) But a wild winter wind, especially at night, is frightening, like some misunderstood warning.

*

February 4, 1950. The reader, if he has not already abandoned me, will be reminded that he has been deliberately banned from viewing the contents of my father’s cigar box. During the confusion and may I say the distress of my relocation, I myself rarely looked into it, but even now, while I have the leisure to parse its perplexities (and a lone nightly meal in a reputed restaurant turns out to be less appealing than the kitchen in Temple House), I am unable to fathom its origin or its mode. For want of something more plausible, I have on occasion described these papers as a transcription. And again as a plea. And again as a deposition. But for all their particularity, there is nothing verbatim here, and how could there be? I remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing. The frenzied murmurings of two agitated boys prone and under a spell. A liar’s screed, an invention? An apparition’s fevered pedantry? And who knows such things, this garble of history and foreign babble? Not I. Nor am I a man of imagination.

Still, I must decide. Destroy what cannot be accounted for, or dispatch it all, and the cigar box itself, to the vault where the Academy History lies open to access by scholars. Already, I hear, the History is not infrequently consulted by persons with an interest in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Anglicized education. (If my reader is such a one, he should recall that for the use of citations he ought of course to ask permission of Morgan.)

I shrink from the latter course more out of caution than fear. To honor my father’s memory, I am obliged to defend the family name. I foresee that to submit for preservation an eccentricity so extreme may easily provoke accusations of innate instability, not to say lunacy. At my father’s graveside, I recall, my poor mother, ringed round by Wilkinsons, was made to endure the mutterings of such calumnies: hence the probability of disgrace.

It is betrayal that terrifies. Often and often in my cowardly memoir, I have been tempted to claim Ben-Zion Elefantin’s voice. Logic insists on it. Reason demands it. Logic and reason are themselves cowardly. What is it I am afraid to consent to? That I am beguiled by the enigma of memory? And can memory, like dream, fabricate what ordinary consciousness cannot?

*

February 7, 1950. Of late I have been reconsidering the usefulness of having my father’s artifacts appraised. What point to my keeping them here in this modernist den, where newness is king? Who will care for them as my father cared, and I after him? Who will be moved by their antiquity? For my son, who never knew his grandfather and anyhow shuns the ancestral, an inheritance of this kind can be no more than an unwanted burden. (As when the Irish maid, with her repellent brogue, recoils from what she calls my filthy pots and ugly dolls.)

Nevertheless, it may be that my father in his Egyptian ramblings may have happened upon objects of actual consequence, worthy perhaps of some museum vitrine. My hope is that a curator’s expertise may validate (dare I say it?) his life. My own craving I keep underground: only suppose that this red-kneed beaker should in fact prove to be the last remnant of Khnum on that stork-mobbed island in the middle of the Nile?

And if so?

*

February 9, 1950. The decision is made. So certain am I of its rectitude that I would engrave it in stone if I could. I will dispose of my memoir. Possibly I will quietly place it in the trash for the maid to remove. Possibly I will find a more trustworthy solution: but I will be rid of it.

A consultant from the Metropolitan Museum’s History of Near Eastern Art department has agreed to view my father’s artifacts. He makes no promises. So many of these amateur collections, he told me, reflect the collector’s enthusiasm more than his skills or his judgment. That your father worked for a season with Sir Flinders Petrie and engaged with him privately is delightful to know, but entirely irrelevant. And that he retained notes from those conversations,