Antiquities by Cynthia Ozick (new ebook reader txt) 📕

taken aback by his cousin’s appearance: the skin of the brow already markedly lined, while the hint of a beard was late in its growth. He seemed simultaneously both a youth and a seasoned elder. His authority was innate and absolute. But for my father, most uncanny of all was this: to look into the face of Cousin William was akin to gazing into a mirror. The brilliant blue of the eye was the same, though set off against bronze, and the bold cast of the jaw, with its slight yet telltale prognathic ridge (which I too have inherited), was unmistakably familial. Yet though Cousin William was tall, my father was significantly taller, and when he was unceremoniously conscripted and sent to toil among the dark and puny fellahin, he loomed over them, he records, like a white pillar. He had in his enthusiasm immediately presented his genealogical findings to his cousin, but was abruptly warned that such fooleries were irrelevant to the work at hand. You can stay, Cousin William told him, if you are willing to pick up a spade. And if you are willing to pay for your keep.

Under the weight and strain of the long, groaning measuring chains, and his labors with pickaxe and ropes, my father soon threw off his own shirt and wound it around his head as a shelter from the blasting Levantine sun. He gradually became indistinguishable in complexion from his companions, who churned around him in their dusky swarms; he even learned a few words of their language. He grew used to the daylong sound of the great sieves skittering and shuddering like tireless dice. Hauling their laden baskets, the women and children crawled to and fro as mindlessly as a procession of beetles. The children looked underfed, and the women in their ragged tunics, or whatever they were, seemed to my father hardly women at all. His tent at night was invaded by insects of inconceivable size. In daylight, wherever the ubiquitous sand with its scatterings of wild brush and grasses gave way to more familiar vegetation, the earth itself had a reddish tint. And in those ferociously brilliant sunsets, even the sand turned red.

My father did indeed pay for his keep, and more: two extra horses, the photographic equipment soon to arrive from Germany, and an occasional repast for the youngest children, much frowned on for its disruption of duty. And still my father was joyful in those infrequent intervals when Cousin William was inclined to engage with him, most usually to lament an impending shortfall of means: after all, they were two civilized men in happy possession of the selfsame civilized tongue! There were even times when Cousin William spoke thrillingly of his plans for the decades ahead: he would search in the Holy Land for all those famed yet lost and buried Biblical cities, among them Lachish and Hinnom, and so many storied others. He meant one day, he said, to open the womb of the land that was the mother of true religion.

In late August, when the season of excavation was brought to a close, my father turned to an unused page in his notebook and requested that Cousin William inscribe it. And here it is now, clear under my present gaze: “From Petrie to Petrie, Giza, Egypt, 1880.” And my father’s comment below: “Proof that we are of the same blood.”

With nothing useful to occupy him now, my father hired a boatman to ferry him across the Nile to Cairo, where he purchased some proper clothing and had a proper bath and settled, like any idle pleasure-seeker, in a lavish hotel, where, I presume, he pondered his fate and his future. Here there is nothing introspective, but for a single word, joined by a question mark: “Ethel?” (My mother’s name.) What follows is a brief account of sailing down the Nile in a felucca, together with a chattering guide, all very much in the vein of a commonplace travelogue. Indeed, it reads as if copied from a Baedeker. He describes the green of the water, a massive colony of storks dipping their beaks, a glimpse of an occasional water buffalo, and on the opposite bank, as they were nearing the First Cataract at Aswan, a series of boulders on the fringe of what (so the guide informed him) was an island with a history of its own, littered with the vestigial ruins of forgotten worship. The boulders were huge and gray, like the backs of a herd of elephants, and beyond them a palm-studded outgrowth. But it was not for these vast vertebrae that the island was called Elephantine, my father learned; it had, it was said, the shape of a tusk. And here he wrote bluntly in his notebook: “So much for the Nile.”

In Cairo he loitered discontentedly, as he admits, too often pestered by street vendors pressing on him what purported to be invaluable relics of this era and that, or original bits of limestone casing salvaged from a nearby pyramid. He passed them by, but not always. He was tempted to believe in material authenticity; Cousin William had inspired him. (At this juncture it behooves me to remark that my father never again came into the presence of Sir Flinders Petrie, though for the remainder of his life he read of Cousin William’s archaeological repute with persistent and considerable pride.)

To fill those desolate hours—in the sparseness of his final passages he hardly ever speaks of going home—my father began to frequent the souks with their luring rows of antiquities shops, where he saw and he bought, and sometimes believed, and sometimes did not. The dealers were pleased to educate him. Some objects were precious but likely looted. Others were forgeries, and still others purposeful pretenders from small local factories staffed by assiduous carvers and sculptors; caution was necessary. Let the buyer beware! Still, my father saw and bought, saw and bought, and in one honest shop chose a ring of true gold,