The Puttermesser Papers
Page 23
She sees elation dissipate and ignominy conquer.
She sees the divinely palpable Dickens celebrated in every corner of Eden. Then she sees him led back, a grown man, to the blacking factory where the boy had suffered.
She sees a hooked fish returned to dread: her father’s life, tossed back to the Czar.
She sees the alphabet fleeing from having been invented.
She sees infants searching for the wombs that had expelled them.
She sees Science longing for Alchemy.
She sees a bearded young man clutching a book of the history of humankind, weeping because he has been made into a godhead; she sees him mourning the deadly fruit of his apotheosis.
Remorse coats the celestial streets with a remorseless ash, as white as the snow that has returned to the sockets of Plato’s lost eyes. For every display of splendor there is the debilitation of decay. She sees the towers of civilizations gleam and fade. She sees infatuations wither. She sees small heaps of char: the embers of tremendous loves, loves as famous as Dido and Aeneas, or Rachel and Akiba. She sees the lofty tells of ambition dwindling into resignation and defeat.
Puttermesser, whose name means nothing more troublesome than butter-cutter, walks through the white ash of Paradise, herself a shadow though casting none, and longs for the plain green earth.
She has seen into the sod of PARDES, so this is what she sings:
At the point of a knife
I lost my life.
Butter, butter, butter,
butter knife.
If I were alive I wouldn’t fault
anything under the heavenly vault.
Better, better, better,
better life.
Better never to have loved than loved at all.
Better never to have risen than had a fall.
Oh bitter, bitter, bitter
butter
knife.
Note on the Author
CYNTHIA OZICK IS THE author of numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction. She is a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Man Booker International Prize. Her stories have won four O. Henry first prizes and, in 2012, her novel Foreign Bodies was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She currently lives in New York.