Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick Page A

wild wisps of her hair; she yawned; then she continued the hunt, bathing her fingers in the mixed-up cardboard froth of yellow and orange and brown.
    "There will after this be two more boxes," she informed me. She was prepared for a season of puzzles. This one belonged to Willi; he didn't care for such things. Neither did Gert or Heinz, who had given up their own boxes. The boys, all three of them, had no interest in puzzles or cards (they hated cards) or even books. They fled the house the instant they woke. They were bored with water and marsh, and nowadays were out exploring the neighborhood, where they happened on a meadow ideal for kite-flying. It lay behind a soldiers' monument—a tall cenotaph topped by a winged bronze Victory and dedicated to the fallen of the Great War. Every morning they ran to the meadow to fly their kites. Then they would lie on their backs in the grass, manufacturing whistles out of moist green blades and staring up at the sun-gilded angel. And afterward they would jump up to run with the kites again, in a flagging wind, so that the kites would swoop down and suddenly lift and finally crash, like fallen soldiers.
    "He gives presents," Mrs. Mitwisser said. "Many presents. Immer, immer! Puzzles, kites. This James!" It came out "Chames," bitterly, in her resisting and clotted accent. With a wandering hand she sculpted an apparition out of the air: a puzzle-piece in the form of an invisible man, whose presence hung over the house.
    I said, "He's kind to the boys then—"
    "To my husband he is kind. So kind we become Parasiten. " Her attention flitted away. With quick precision she locked a scalloped bulge into its small harbor. A flowering twig materialized under her palm. "And you, Rüslein, they don't pay you, hah?" Her tongue felt along her lower lip, navigating, as though she might find a word cruising on its surface. Then she found it: "Confess!"
    "They don't pay me, no. I mean they haven't yet."
    "They cannot pay until he permits. There is no money until he permits. He permits the puzzles and the kites. He permits the new shelves for my husband's books. He permits the pretty little cakes. He permits the flat in the city, and when that is not useful he permits this house. He does not permit you because he does not know you are here." Mrs. Mitwisser laughed. It was a laugh of perfect sanity. "We have no money because we are Parasiten. When he comes he will see you and they will tell him and he will know."
    "When will that happen?"
    "When he wishes, then he will come."
    She held up a pair of unlikely shapes—each one a circle of fangs—and snapped them together, efficiently, like the jaws of a crocodile. Or like a navigator squeezing the legs of a caliper in order to shrink the world.

14
    T HE KARAITES.
    I begin to see them, dimly, dimly, passing shadows, remote echoes, grayly trudging on the farthest rim of history, the other side of history, the underside. They are inked letters seeping through the backs of the pages of old chronicles: faint glyphs glimmering, just visible, an inside-out alphabet.
    They come to me piecemeal, little by little, at Professor Mitwisser's whim. Or else he discharges them in a great cannon-blast of erudition, a whole colony shot out all at once in a single obscuring cloud.
    They are dissidents; therefore they are haters. But they are also lovers, and what they love is purity, and what they hate is impurity. And what they consider to be impurity is the intellect's explorations; and yet they are themselves known for intellect.
    Intellect engenders meaning: interpretation; commentary; parable; illumination; insight; dialogue; argument; corroboration; demurral; debate; irony; anecdote; analysis; analogy; classification; clarification. All these the Karaites repudiate as embroidery and fraudulence in the hands of their enemies (though not in their own hands). And all these are Talmud, the first layer of which is Mishna, containing commentary on Scripture, and the second