Antiquities
Page 4
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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 than a female office hireling, racketing away into the night.
It was that “female” that was particularly wounding: was it a barb at Miss Margaret Stimmer? Apparently our friendship had escaped not a few. And so, since the others unanimously supported the likely culprit’s deflecting hypothesis (and I am sorry to say that further discussion deteriorated into a vigorous comparison of fountain pen brands, whether the Parker is actually superior to the Montblanc, etc.), my effort to secure justice and truth came to nothing.
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July 12, 1949. I no longer walk in the evenings (and besides, the paths are precariously littered with splintered branches), and have come to a certain understanding with myself. I will not permit the hurtful hostility of others to undermine what moves me. This was a lesson I learned in boyhood, when on account of my growing interest in Ben-Zion Elefantin I too became persona non grata. Our early initiation into a mutual liking of chess was bound to turn public, with my door always open in compliance with Reverend Greenhill’s instruction. No wonder our venture took on an aspect of the conspiratorial: whispered notions of when it was best to be free of the herd, or too abruptly quitting the refectory, first one, and then the other. On two or three weekday occasions, as I painfully recall, when we had found refuge in the vacant chapel, we were discovered and mocked, Ben-Zion Elefantin for his name and his incomprehensible origin, and I for my intimacy with so freakish a boy.
I speak too easily of intimacy; it was slow in coming, and was never wholly achieved. He was unnatural in too many ways. The abundance of his uncut hair, for instance: not only its earth-red yet unearthly color, but what I suspected might be a pair of long curls sprouting from the temples, each one hidden behind an ear and lost in the overall mass. Through his shut door (he never obeyed any principle he disliked) I would sometimes hear the rise and fall of foreign mutterings, morning and evening, as if he were quietly growling secret incantations. There were times when, both of us fatigued by too many battles of knights and bishops, he would sit silent and staring, having nothing to say, and waiting for me to signal some subject of merit. I told him of Mr. Canterbury’s terrible reign, and how he ought to be glad to have missed it, and of the visit the previous year from Pelham, a nearby town, of an elderly Mr. Emmet, one of the Temple cousins, hence also cousin to Henry James, whose portrait hung in the chapel. To have Mr. Emmet in our midst, however briefly (he spent but an hour or two), was considered a privilege: he had once enjoyed an afternoon’s colloquy with Henry James Senior, the novelist’s father, when the philosopher Emerson, who happened also to be present, shook Mr. Emmet’s hand, and asked him how he was, and made some comment on the charms of Concord, delighting Mr. Emmet with his attentions. For us, we were advised, great fame attached itself to Mr. Emmet’s very flesh: his was the hand that the philosopher’s hand had honored.
Emmet, Temple, James: all these local references, so dear to the Academy’s history, and passed fervently on to its pupils, left Ben-Zion Elefantin indifferent; but the mention of Canterbury roused him in a way I had never before witnessed, and he told me that it was one of the places he had been to school, and where he first learned to read English. Of all languages, he said, the language of English people was his favorite, and though he had been put in school in Canterbury for only a few weeks, and was soon taken away to Frankfurt and afterward Rome, he fell permanently into the sea of their stories, Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare and The Old Curiosity Shop and Ivanhoe and Robinson Crusoe and Adam Bede, books I had barely heard of and would never care to read, as he did, on his own, and have never read since. He told all this as if in confidence, as if he trusted me not to disclose it, as if to disclose it would increase what he believed to be his peril. He seemed to me pitiful then, with his unnatural hair and unnatural voice, which I all at once heard not so much as stilted but as somehow mysteriously archaic, or (I hardly know my own meaning as I tell this) uncannily ancestral. Too many cities were in his tones, and I argued that no one can come from everywhere, everyone must come from somewhere, and where specifically was he from? He thanked me again for our several tournaments and crossed the hall and again shut his door.
I was by now used to such opacities, and scarcely minded them, having other annoyances to trouble me, chiefly my lost status. I was, after all, a Petrie, and a Petrie by nature belongs to the mockers, not to the mocked. I sometimes thought of reversing my lot by joining in the ridicule of Ben-Zion Elefantin; but I quickly learned, after a single attempt, that it could not be done: once an outcast, always an outcast. And more: the humiliation I felt in my inability to recover my standing was small in comparison to the flood of shame that unexpectedly overtook me in having momentarily betrayed Ben-Zion Elefantin. As for the jibes, in time they diminished (I had observed Reverend Greenhill summon the worst of our tormentors for a talk), and in their place we were mutely snubbed like a pair of invisible wraiths. But it freed us from hiding, and since no one would speak to either of us, and Ben-Zion Elefantin had little to say to me, we were anyhow thrown together under a carapace of unwilling quiet. In the refectory I sat close to him with my full dinner plate before me as he carefully drew out the yolk from his single egg. And the same in chapel, when I could sense from my nearness to his breathing how tensely he listened to the readings of Scripture.
On a certain morning of fine weather when Exodus was the theme of Reverend Greenhill’s sermon, and the rout of the Egyptians was under moral consideration (whether so massive a drowning of men and horses was too wrathful a punishment even for oppressors), Ben-Zion Elefantin for the first time made himself known to me. A three-hour Sunday afternoon recess had been declared: another of Reverend Greenhill’s ameliorating innovations, where formerly Mr. Canterbury had enforced a Sabbath study period of the same length, to be conducted in strictest silence. On this day of freedom, while our classmates were out on the sunny lawns, tossing balls and aimlessly running and blaring their laughter to the skies, Ben-Zion Elefantin and I sat on my bed as usual, with my chessboard between us. But the game was somehow desultory, and on an impulse, remembering the morning’s sermon and the strange profundity of his attentiveness, I told him that I owned some actual things from the time of the Pharaohs, whether he could believe me or not. My father, before I was born, I said, was once in Egypt, when my mother was too ill to go with him, but still he brought back for her a gold Egyptian ring, which for some reason she never wore. I said I had often seen the ring in the pretty bowl on her dresser along with her necklaces and bracelets, but it int
erested me far less than the other things my father had come home with, and if he didn’t believe me that they were really from Egypt, I could show them to him. I had never before spoken to anyone of what lay hidden in the pouch in the cabinet under my table, and the reader may question why I did so now. A kind of agitation seemed to possess him, and I saw that his face was burning bloodlike, nearly the color of his hair. You know nothing of Egypt, he said, nothing, you think everything in the Bible is true, but there is more than the Bible tells, and omission is untruth. (I am trying to render the queer way of his speech, how the suddenness of its heat turned it old and ornate, as if he was not a boy but a fiery ghost in some story.) I’ll show you, I said, and what makes you think you know more about Egypt than my own father, who really was there, and went down the Nile in a boat, and was close to Sir Flinders Petrie, his cousin, an expert on everything Egyptian, and do you even know who Sir Flinders Petrie is? He said he did not, but neither would Sir Flinders Petrie, whoever he was, know the truth of Ben-Zion Elefantin. This took me aback; how stupid you sound, I said, and he gave me an answer both triumphal, as in an argument he was bound to win, and also despairing, as if he was conscious of how I would receive it. I myself, he said, was born in Egypt, and lived there until it was time for my schooling. I was instantly doubtful: hadn’t my father in his notebook described the Egyptians as dusky? And in pictures of pyramids and palms and such weren’t Egyptians always shown to be copper-colored? Certainly no Egyptian had hair the color of red earth. You can’t be Egyptian, I said. Oh, he said, I am not Egyptian at all. But if you were born in Egypt and aren’t Egyptian, I asked, what are you? Then I saw something like a quiver of fear pass over his eyelids. I am Elefantin, he said, and he
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July 19, 1949. It has been more than a week since I was made to break off, and I have since not had the heart to come back to my Remington. At that time, as it happened, I had been typing at three in the afternoon, and I hope the reader will not be tempted to think that I had altered my midnight labors out of cowardice, to accommodate my accusers. No, it was because I was driven to go on, my memories racked me, and though three was most often the hour when I helplessly succumbed to a doze, with the fans struggling against the heat, still I could not contain my feeling, stirred as I was by my retelling of Ben-Zion Elefantin’s unimaginable words (which I have yet to record). So inwardly gripped was I, that I was altogether deaf to the voices that wafted through the open window, until I was distracted by an unwelcome tumult of loud and offensive laughter. In some exasperation I looked out to see its source. My six colleagues were lazily gathered under the maples, a sign that they were hardly at work on their memoirs. One of them, his arm in the air, appeared to be pointing upward, directly at my window, and then the laughter erupted again. It was, not surprisingly, that childish cackling old man, the spiteful culprit himself, the vandal, the despoiler of my Remington. He stood with his walker before him, and, having caught my eye, stepped forward with the start of a salute, as if about to wave in ill-intended greeting. And then—I knew it seconds before—a broken branch under his feet—he had been looking up and never saw it. He tottered for an instant and lurched downward, his legs snarled in the legs of the walker, and fell in a twisted heap of elderly limbs. I was witness to all of it, the shrieking and calling, Hedda and two or three others of the staff all at once there, warning and herding the others out of the way, five stricken old men, and then the ambulance with its distant siren, and the police and the gurney, and my enemy was taken away. He died in the hospital six days later (yesterday), not, they say, from the fractured hip or the surgery or the infamously inevitable pneumonia that set in soon after, but from, they say, heart failure. And Hedda tells me, with some contempt, that one of the kitchen help believes it was I who destroyed him, I with my evil eye. A foolish superstition, yet I feel its vengeful truth.
We were seven, and now we are six. I think incessantly of death, of oblivion, how nothing lasts, not even memory when the one who remembers is gone. And how can I go on with my memoir, to what end, for what purpose? What meaning can it have, except for its writer? And for him too (I mean for me), the past is mist, its figures and images no better than faded paintings. Where now is Ben-Zion Elefantin, did he in fact exist? Today he is no more than an illusion, and perhaps he was an illusion then?
As for the dead man, I cannot mourn. How can I mourn the envious boor who wounded my sweet Peg? Still, there is a kind of mourning in the air, the gloom seeps and seeps, one feels the breath of a void, not only of a missing tenant of Temple House (him I cannot mourn) but of the limitless void that awaits us. The tremor in my left hand has lately worsened. When I shave, the leathern creature in the mirror is someone I do not know, and too often I draw blood from his living flesh, if flesh it is. Hedda reports that the afternoon tea trays, all save mine, are sent back untouched. And more: she tells me that the other one, that other puerile fellow, the dead man’s inseparable accomplice and defender, sits all day in his apartment and weeps. But I cannot forget that when my enemy stood pointing and jeering at my window, the laughter of his steady companion was the loudest. (So much for the delicate syllables of their precious Gerard Manley Hopkins.)
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July 20,1949. I have decided, after all, to continue with my memoir. Too many reflections on death contaminate life. And should not each man live every day as if he were immortal? After all this time, I cannot proceed from where I left off: let those broken words hang cryptic and unfinished while I describe my surprise at Ben-Zion Elefantin’s indifference to my father’s treasure. With the exception of the notebook, I had emptied the pouch of all its objects, one by one, and set them out in a row on my table. I say his indifference, but since his turmoil was unabated, I should rather say contempt. You suppose these things to be uncommon, he said, on account of what you believe to be their ancient age, but your father may have been gullible, as so many are. They can be found by the hundreds, real and false. My parents would know. They know such things with their fingertips. My father, I protested, wasn’t gullible, and why should your parents know more than my father, who brought them back from Egypt? My father, I told you, worked in Giza with Sir Flinders Petrie, his very own cousin, and Sir Flinders Petrie isn’t gullible, he knows more about Egypt than anyone. He coughed out a small gurgling noise that I took to be a scoff, and then his voice too became small and quiet and more foreign than ever. My parents, he said, are traders.
Even as a boy of ten I understood what a trader was. My father, I had seen, was every morning absorbed by stocks and bonds, and followed them in the newspapers, and besides, according to what I took in from his talk, I knew that traders lived in Wall Street, not in legendary places like Egypt. All this I explained to Ben-Zion Elefantin. And after this conversation he had no more to say, and I was glad that I had not yet revealed to his certain scorn, as I had at first intended, what I imagined to be my father’s dearest prize, the emerald-eyed beaker in its box under my bed. A misunderstanding had come between us, or was it a quarrel, and why? He left me and went to his room and again shut the door, and for all the next week he kept away.
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July 21, 1949. The reader will, I trust, understand why I must eke out my memoir in these unsatisfying patches. In part it is simple fatigue. The tremor in my left hand has somehow begun to assert itself in my right hand as well, hence my typing becomes blighted by too many errors, which I must laboriously correct. After an hour or so at my Remington I feel called upon to lie down, and invariably this leads to a doze. I will confess to another cause of hiatus upon hiatus, and here I admit also to a growing sympathy for my colleagues, who, it is clear, have achieved little or nothing beyond an initial paragraph or two, if even that. As I move on with my chronicle, I more and more feel an irrepressible ache of yearning, I know not for what. Hardly for my boyhood in the Academy, with all its stringencies and youthful cruelties. I
am, if I may express it so, in a state of suffering of the soul as I write, a suffering that is more a gnawing paralysis than a conscious pain. I earnestly wish to stop my memoir, and I may not, so how can I blame those others who have stopped, or not so much as begun? I fear that I am again in the grip of the void. All around me the talk is of the accident under the maples, and how it came about, and of broken branches, and the terror of falling. Nor am I immune from that terror, and see anew the wisdom of my having given up my meditative if lonely evening walks in the perilous paths beneath the trees. I think of the loneliness I felt in my childhood, which returns to me now, as if all loneliness, past and present, were one. To be shunned in the company of Ben-Zion Elefantin was painful enough (after all, we had each other), but to endure, all on my own, the snubs and the silences of those persecutors who had once been my peers, was another.
Then how relieved and grateful I was when the following Sunday he came to sit quietly beside me in chapel (where the pew had been spitefully left unoccupied to my right and my left), as if he meant to forgive me for what he deemed to be my fault. And when at last we were set free from the tiresome readings and hymns (the sermon that day was from Matthew), with no discussion of any kind he led me not to my room but to his, and we sat on his bed facing each other as always, though with no chessboard between us, and his door shut as always. His room was nearly identical to mine, the bed as narrow, the walls as bare, the ceiling as stained: a monklike cubicle reminiscent, yes, of a prisoner’s cell. Still, a certain surprising difference was instantly noticeable. I kept a stack of books on my table, all of them schoolbooks: my History of the World, my Beginner’s Algebra, my (hated) Gallic Wars, and so forth; but here his table was altogether clear of any evidence of schooling, as if he meant to wash away all signs of it, except for a fourth-form Intermediate Arithmetic, with its bruised and faded binding, tossed to the floor among gray clumps of wandering dust. (It was plain that he had chosen not to obey the requirement of cleaning one’s own room.)