Old Men at Midnight by Chaim Potok

Author:Chaim Potok
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780307489005
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2008-12-30T08:00:00+00:00

THE TROPE

TEACHER

1

That melancholy April, two weeks after Benjamin Walter’s wife fell ill, a woman moved into the Tudor on the other side of the rhododendron hedge. The postman, the gardener, and the owner of the local bookstore made it a point to inform him that the woman was the noted writer I. D. Chandal. Benjamin Walter, preoccupied with scholarship and in the midst of struggling for months with his memoirs, had little time for fiction. But he knew the name I. D. Chandal.

He was sixty-eight, and ailing. A tall, lean, stately man, with thick gray hair, a square pallid face split by a prominent nose, and large webbed eyes dark with brooding behind old-fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles. His long, large-knuckled fingers swollen at the joints, the dry, papery hands flecked with age spots; his lips thin and turned down at the corners; his body fragile, bones prone to breaking.

At times, in the company of intimate friends, he referred to the memoirs as his deathwork.

Much to his wonder and disquiet, when he’d begun the task of remembering his early years he discovered that his zone of deep memory was, as he put it to himself, well fortified and resistant to frontal assault. Only reluctantly did it begin to yield to determined probing, surrendering now and then a tiny territory of uncertain value: a narrow city street deep in snow; a parental voice quivering with anger; a man’s pale eggplant features spectrally detached from name and frame; a wisp of odd melody curling and fleeting as a morning mist. He barely recognized those fragments from his past, was unable to locate what he single-mindedly sought and uncovered in his scholarly tunnelings: the linking trails of cause and effect; the cords of connection, as he labeled them, that invariably led him to a unified chronicle.

He would sit in his oak-and-leather desk chair or lie back on his worn recliner, brooding, searching, writing, discarding. He had for fifty years not reflected much about his very early past, believing always that he could retrieve it with ease. How very disconcerting, the obsidian face that it now presented to him.

Especially as memory was what he was best known for; most notably, his remembering of war. War was his subject: war in general, the two world wars in particular. He was foremost among the sociologists of war, celebrated, esteemed. His monographs were studied in universities throughout the world, at West Point, in the Pentagon. Put to him an inquiry about the rise of the knightly class in Europe, and he would trace it to nomadic incursions from the steppes and to Viking raids; about the causes of the fall of Constantinople to Muhammad II in 1453, and he would connect it to the horrors of the Fourth Crusade 250 years earlier; about the rise of the cannon and firearm, and he would begin a discourse on the crossbow, its stock and recoil; about the connection in the First World War between tranquil English town, hamlet, club, and pub

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