Heir to the Glimmering World by Cynthia Ozick

speak to her or anyone about my unpaid salary: I was to wait and wait, and I could not object, because they had taken me in when I had nowhere to go—a refugee of sorts.
    In the meantime, I was hiddenly flush with money of my own, in twenty-dollar bills. Ribbon, carbon, paper; alcohol for cleaning the keys; a small can of oil. For a few dollars the fossil might be restored to life, and then my acquaintance with the Karaites, whatever they were, could begin; I knew only that Karaites were not Charismites. Cautiously, noiselessly, I pulled open the bottom drawer of my dresser. The Bear Boy, quiescent in his scalloped collar, lay there as silently as Mrs. Mitwisser in her bed. I pushed him aside to find Bertram's blue envelope.
    It was not there. My fortune was gone.

11
    I N THE MORNING I raised a hullabaloo.
    I was eighteen, an unformed creature, and (as people say) ignorant of the world. I had endured my stringent childhood in Thrace, a backwater townlet where lives were turned away from the impress of events even as they were unfolding—a period of turbulence that had begun to shake the ground of Europe. For the denizens of Thrace—for Lena and her sons, and for every other native household—Europe was beyond reality, and for me it was nearly the same: the fanciful habitation of Pinocchio and Becky Sharp and Sidney Carton. (Only many decades later would I come to agree with Ninel about the useless delusions of literature.) Yet I question now why I did not question then, in that third-floor bedroom in the marshy reaches of the Bronx, what even I, in my unformed ignorance, could see was Professor Mitwisser's peculiar situation. Why, after his rescue by the conscientious if mistaken Board of the Hudson Valley Friends College, was he not instantly recruited by some eager university? It was an era—I have since understood—of foreign flooding: an influx of refugee scholars, injured, diminished, confused, streaming into the chaos of an alien haven and hoping for an academic berth of some kind; for a replica of the old life, the old reverence. A substantial flock settled in the New School in New York; a handful went to Chicago and Princeton; the rest, in their broken dignity, dragging their medals and degrees, drooped toward whatever uncertain welcome they might find in institutions north or west or south. Mitwisser was not among any of these.
    At eighteen I was as uncomprehending of the times—of all that world-upheaval—as if I were still a raw weed in the hinterlands of Thrace; even so, I saw in Mitwisser something vengeful. He was off course; he was not what he had been; but the weeping that had terrorized me made me believe that everything was tainted for him, he had given up on retrieval. No waiter would bow to him ever again. What was a university to him now? Devils lurked in those honored halls; his own students, his own colleagues, had ended as devils. And all those others, the great foreign influx, the scholars, the refugees—they were only dwarves in this new place. Mann, Einstein, Arendt, yes, the grand explainers (I would one day pursue them myself), idols of the popular journals; but the rest were dwarves, rebuffed, humiliated, obscured, trampled on, zwergenhaft. Better to be a heretic! Better to be a Karaite! Better to separate oneself from the explainers! To set oneself against the explainers!
    It was through glimmerings like these—primitive and unschooled though I was—that I took in Rudolf Mitwisser's discontents on the night the money in Bertram's blue envelope vanished. I knew nothing of world-upheaval, I knew nothing of that great scholarly flood. But in Mitwisser's tears as they fled down the rough channels of his scored skin, I caught the glitter of heresy—the resolution of a man who has turned his back on a received course.
    And I did raise a hullabaloo. I thought it was my right. I lasted until morning and then I raised a hullabaloo—and in between, roiling on my pillow in that airless room