Antiquities, Cynthia Ozick [most popular ebook readers .txt] 📗

of saving the Jews. There may be, as always, the usual kernel of truth in this; but that the Jews weren’t saved in any event (nor many others, for that matter) is proof of the overall purposelessness of that war. Hitler and Stalin, Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The newspapers are rife with grotesque tales of camps and ovens; one hardly knows what to believe, and I am nowadays drawn far less to these public contentions than to my own reflections. This is not to say that I am not proud of my son’s participation in the war, though it lacked a certain manliness, I mean of exposure to danger, since he was never on the battlefield, but rather in a printing office—something to do with a publication for soldiers and sailors.

In connection with which, the reader will have observed that save for her passing, I have had little to say of my late dear wife, an avid lover, as I earlier indicated, of the decorative arts; I hope to correct this here. Yet Miranda’s influence on our son was perhaps too pressing, and may have led him to his current frivolous preoccupations in California. Miranda herself was fond of such fanciful trivia, in the form of heading the flower committee of her Women’s Club and numerous like pursuits, e.g., her accumulation of painted bowls and porcelain figurines in the Japanese style: a man in a flat hat drawing a bucket out of a well, a sloe-eyed woman posed on a bridge. More to the point, she was much interested in the lives of Carole Lombard and Myrna Loy, those so-called “stars” of cinema. She liked to joke that I had married her only because of her clear resemblance to Myrna Loy, which was certainly not the case; at the time I scarcely knew the name. Miranda was indeed very pretty, but the reason for our marriage, of which our son was the premature consequence, remains entirely private. Nor can I deny that her parents insisted on it.

I see that I have again digressed, and though I mean to enlighten the reader further with regard to Ben-Zion Elefantin, I detect at this moment a relieving breath of a breeze beyond the sultry movements of the fans. The evening cool has begun, and I am off to walk in its respite. Yet first I must secure this manuscript before leaving my study. Until its completion I keep it for privacy in an unidentifiable box with a lid. It once held my father’s cigars, and their old aroma lingers still.

*

July 6, 1949. A calamity, an outburst of childish spite. An inconceivable act of vengeance. It could not have been spontaneous; it had to have been carefully plotted, my habits noted, my comings and goings spied on. My colleagues have long been aware that at the close of these brutal equatorial days, I have taken to tracing the paths circling the maples, where wisps of evening airs rustle in their leaves. (Early this morning the staff, I am relieved to say, righted the benches and disposed of the debris, including a considerable scattering of beer bottles.)

At such times it is good to walk and think, walk and think. How am I to tell more of Ben-Zion Elefantin? I cannot reveal him in the way of dialogue (a practice my son puts his trust in, he informs me, as an aspiring screenwriter). I have not that gift or inclination. Nor am I certain it will finally be possible to reveal Ben-Zion Elefantin by any narrative device. It may be that all I knew of him was fabrication or delusion.

I wandered thusly, mulling these enigmas, for half an hour or so, and then returned to my study refreshed, intending despite the late hour to set down my thoughts. What I saw before me—saw in one hideous instant—was a scene of ghastly vandalism. On the surface of my writing table stood my little bottle of India ink, uncorked, with its rubber stopper prone beside it. Someone—someone!—had spilled its contents over the body of my Remington, obliterating the letters on its keys and wetting the roller so repulsively that it gleamed like some slithering black slime. Miss Margaret Stimmer’s Remington violated, the very machine, now mine, once touched by her prancing fingers, and all I have left to remind me of my sweet Peg.

*

July 8, 1949. The reader will have noted that the foregoing paragraphs have been written, perforce, in longhand, and at various intervals, in various states of mind. Hedda of the kitchen staff (it was she who inspired the Sacher torte), seeing my distress, volunteered to take the despoiled Remington away in an attempt to clean it. She assured me that vinegar would do the job well enough, and so it mostly has, if not to my full satisfaction. The balls of my fingers still turn black from the keys, and the friction of typing sends up a fine mist of charcoal-like dust to coat my eyeglasses and nose. Hedda calms me with the promise that all this will not persist, and advises patience, or else a second vinegar bath. That the mechanism has not been irreparably harmed hardly assuages my shock: the assailant is one of us, a fellow Trustee!

I convened a meeting, not in my study as customary, but in the old chapel, with its reminder of the role of conscience in life. My purpose was to initiate a small facsimile of trial by jury, every man on his honor. Each of my six colleagues denied any malfeasance, but no one more vociferously than our nonagenarian, on whose collar and sleeve I had noticed some minute signs of spatter. Of course, he replied, what do you expect of a fountain pen when you inadvertently press too hard on its point? Why am I alone to be named culpable, when all, excepting yourself, write with ordinary pen and ink, as men of authority usually do? Only you, he went on, conduct yourself no better