Antiquities

in the singing of a certain few hymns, but for others he was willfully silent. In appearance he was also uncommon. He was so thin as to approach the skeletal (his legs were nearer to bone than flesh), and this I attributed to his sparseness of diet. His complexion was what I believe is called olive, of the kind known to characterize the Mediterranean and Levantine peoples; but in contrast to this deficit of natural ruddiness, his hair was astoundingly red. And not the red of the Irish. As I write, I am put in mind of my father’s description of the red earth of his days with Cousin William: deeper and denser and more otherworldly than any commonplace Celtic red.
He had come to us shortly after that influx of Jews, but he hardly seemed one of them, and they too, as we all did, were wary of everything about him, particularly his outlandish names, both the first and the last, which were all it was possible to know of him. There were some, playing on his surname, who joked that he was undoubtedly a Jew, given the elephantine length of his nose. To these jibes he said nothing, and merely turned away. And others (the more rowdy among us) claimed that only a Jew would flaunt Zion so brazenly, forgetting that the Psalms recited in chapel, which so frequently invoked Zion, were part and parcel of our Christian worship. I was particularly alert to this error, since on the Wilkinson side there can be found (too many, my father said) evangelical pietists who cling ardently to Zion, a few of whom are bizarrely devoted to speaking in tongues. And in the Petrie line too there have been numerous Old Testament appellations; we were once a sober crew of Abrahams and Nathans and Samuels, all of them proper Christians.
But there was more than Ben-Zion Elefantin’s unusual name to irritate conventional expectations. Though rarely heard, his voice was perplexing. It had in it a pale echo of Mr. Canterbury’s admirable vowels, but also an alien turn of the consonants, suggesting a combination of foreignisms—where exactly was he from? And why was he a full semester behind, in the form below mine, despite the fact, as I later learned, that at nearly twelve he was two years older than I? And was he mad, or merely a liar? I came, in time, to think the latter, though I was, I confess, something of a liar myself, feigning injuries of every variety in order to evade the football field. Mr. Canterbury had been inclined to expose me, and for punishment doubled my obligations to football and riding (like my father before me, I was greatly averse to horses); but Reverend Greenhill’s view was that one’s duty to God did not necessarily include kicking and galloping, and he sent me off to do as I pleased, as long as it harmed neither man nor beast.
What it pleased me to do during those football afternoons when the halls were deserted, and the shouting was distant and muffled, was to sit on my bed with my chessboard before me, while hoping to outwit a phantom opponent. On the memorable day I will now record, my door, according to protocol, was ajar, and when I looked up from my wooden troops, I saw Ben-Zion Elefantin standing there. Without speaking a word, he hopped on the bed to face me, and began maneuvering first a knight, and then a rook, and finally a queen, and I heard him say, very quietly, indeed humbly, If you don’t mind, checkmate. I asked him then whether he, like me at that hour, had explicit permission to exempt himself from the field. He seemed to consider this for a moment, and said, with unhurried directness, I have no interest in that. I thought it was natural to inquire, since he was new to the Academy, in what other activity he did take interest. Chapel, he said. I found this unlikely; no boy I knew regarded chapel as anything other than a morning of aching tedium. Are you religious, I asked. The word does not apply, he said, at least not in the sense you intend. It was a strange way of speaking; no normal boy spoke like a book. I asked where he had been to school before coming to us. Oh, he said, many schools, in many places, but I never stay long, and until now was never taught fractions. Is that why, I asked, they’ve put you in fourth? Oh, he said, it hardly matters where I am put, before long they will call me away. Thank you, he said, for the pleasure of the game. And then he left me and went back to his room and shut the door.
*
July 5, 1949. Aside from yesterday’s stifling weather (continuing at 97 degrees today), which compelled my breaking off my narrative too abruptly, the Fourth of July could not have been more disagreeable. A group of unruly youths from a neighboring town notorious for its shabbiness invaded our grounds, overturned the handsome old benches under the maples, and, targeting our windows, tossed deafening volleys of firecrackers while shouting obscenities. To such depths has patriotism fallen. Those warlike fumes have seeped into my study, where they hover still, stirred by useless electrical fans (I have two, and they do nothing to alleviate the abominable heat). One of the household staff, a half-incomprehensible native of Vienna, I suppose intending to please, made a pitiful attempt to celebrate the holiday by presenting us with what she calls a Sacher torte, an absurdly irrelevant cake of some kind, overly sugared; but one can expect nothing comfortably familiar from this postwar flotsam and jetsam. As for the disastrous war itself, our hard-won victory on two fronts is by now four years gone, yet there are some who even today decline to forgive President Roosevelt for, as they say, putting Americans at risk for the sake