Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  “Hollis shot it dead.”

  Ebenezer Watson kicked the runners of the long sled. “Hey, what are these dang things made of?” Certainly it wasn’t the usual.

  “Char.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Fish.”

  Ephraim stooped to slip his dogs free of their traces.

  “Where are you from?”

  “The north, my good fellow.”

  “Where … north?”

  “Far,” he said.

  It was forty below on the lake and blowing. The men, knocking their throbbing feet together, their cheeks flaring crimson with cold, turned their backs to the wind. They retired to the warmth of Crosby’s Hotel, to which a first-class livery was attached. A sign posted in the window read:

  WM. CROSBY’S HOTEL

  The undersigned, thankful for past favours

  bestowed upon this

  LONG-ESTABLISHED HOTEL

  is determined to conduct this establishment in a

  manner that will meet the approbation of the public,

  and therefore begs a continuance of Public Patronage.

  REFRESHMENTS SERVED AT ANY HOUR

  OF DAY OR NIGHT

  Wm. Crosby

  Proprietor

  Ebenezer Watson took a coal-oil lamp to the window and cleared a patch of frost to keep watch.

  “What did he mean his raven?”

  Ephraim was throwing slabs of bear meat to his leaping dogs, settling them down, and starting to clear snow from a circle of ice with a board, flattening it to his satisfaction. Then he took to stacking goods from his sled on to the ice he had cleared. Animal skins. Pots and pans. A Primus stove. A soapstone bowl or koodlik. A harpoon. Books.

  “See that?”

  “What?”

  “Crazy bastard’s brought reading books with him.”

  They watched him pull a rod and what appeared to be a broadsword free of the sled ropes. Then he slipped into his snow-shoes and scrambled up the sloping shore, jumping up and down there, plunging his rod into the snow like one of their wives testing a cake in the oven with a straw from a broom. Finally finding the texture of snow he wanted Ephraim began to carve out large blocks with his sword and carry them back to his flattened circle. He built an igloo with a low entry tunnel facing south. He banked the walls with snow, tended to the seams, and cut more blocks for a windbreak. Then just before he got down on his hands and knees, disappearing inside, he banged a wooden sign into the snow and ice.

  CHURCH OF THE MILLENARIANS

  Founder

  Brother Ephraim

  The men turned up early the next morning, fully expecting to find Ephraim dead. Frozen stiff. Instead they discovered him squatting over a hole in the ice, taking a perch, setting the eye in the hook, taking another, starting over again. He threw some of the perch to his dogs, some he stacked on the ice, and now and then he nimbly skinned one, filleted it, and gulped it down raw. He also harpooned two landlocked salmon and a sturgeon. But it was something else that troubled the men. Clearly Ephraim had already found the yard in the woods where the deer wintered, walled in by some seven feet of snow into a trap of their own making. A buck hung on a pine pole lodged in the ice. Obviously it had just been dressed. The dogs, their snouts smeared with blood, were tearing into the still-steaming lungs and intestines that had been tossed to them.

  “You shouldn’ta told him I kilt his bird,” Luther Hollis said.

  “You scared?”

  “The hell I am, Mister Man. I figger he’s only passing through.”

  “Ask him.”

  “You ask him.”

  It continued overcast, the fugitive sun no more than a milky stain in a wash of grey sky. The men stopped counting the cracking trees or bunting pipes or exploding bottles. The temperature sank to fifty below. The men checked out Ephraim the next morning and he was still there, and the morning after and he was still there. The fourth morning the men had something else on their minds. Luther Hollis had been found hanging from a rafter in his sawmill. Dead by his own hand, apparently. He hadn’t been robbed, but neither had he left a note. It was baffling. Then, even as the men were deliberating, Crosby’s boy came running up to them. “I talked to him,” he said.

  “Wipe your nose.”

  But they were impressed.

  “He told me he was something called a Four by Two. What’s that?”

  Nobody knew.

  “He invited me inside, eh, and it’s really cosy, and I got to see some of the stuff he has in there.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like he has a book by Shakespeare and cutlery in sterling silver with crests of some kind on them and a blanket made of the skin of white wolves and a drawing in an oak frame of a ship with three masts called Erebus.”

  The Reverend Columbus Green knew Greek. “Erebus,” he said, “is the name of the place of darkness, between Earth and Hades.”

  The cold broke, the wind gathered force, and it began to snow so thick that a man, leaning into the wind, squinting, still couldn’t see more than two feet ahead of him. Overnight the drifting snow buried roads and railway tracks. The blizzard blew for three days and then the sun rose in a blue sky so hard it seemed to be bolted into place. On Friday the men who had waited things out in Crosby’s Hotel found that the only exit was through a second-floor window.

  Ephraim was still in place. But now there were three more igloos on the lake, many more yelping dogs, and what Ebenezer Watson described as dark little slanty-eyed men and women everywhere, unloading things. Ebenezer, and some of the others, maintained a watch from the window in Crosby’s Hotel. When the first evening star appeared they saw the little dark men, beating on skin drums, parading their women before them to the entry tunnel of Ephraim’s igloo. Ephraim appeared, wearing a black silk top hat and fringed white shawl with vertical black stripes. Then the little men stepped forward one by one, thrusting their women before them, extolling their merits in an animated manner. Oblivious of the cold, a young woman raised her sealskin parka and jiggled her bare breasts.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “Whatever them Millenarians is it’s sure as shit a lot more fun than what we got.”

  Finally Ephraim pointed at one, nodded at another, and they quickly scrambled into his igloo. The men, beating on their drums, led the remaining women back to their igloos, punching and kicking them. An hour later they were back, all of them, and one after another they crawled into Ephraim’s igloo. There was a good deal of hollering and singing and clapping and what sounded like dancing. The Reverend Columbus Green, who had been urgently sent for, bundled up and listened by the shore, not going too close or staying too long, a Bible held to his breast. Then he reported to the men waiting in Crosby’s Hotel. “I think they are singing in the language of the Lord in there,” he said.

  “Don’t sound like English to me.”

  “Hebrew.”

  “That’s just bullshit,” Ebenezer Watson said, affronted.

  Pressed, the Reverend Columbus Green allowed that he wasn’t absolutely sure. The wind had distorted things and it had been a long time since he had studied Hebrew in the seminary.

  “What’s the Church of the Millenarians?” Ebenezer asked.

  “I’m afraid I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Figgers.”

  The next evening the little brown men and women were gone, but before they left they had erected a sizeable sailcloth tent on the ice. There was something else. White robes were being aired on lines supported by pine poles, maybe thirty of them exploding like crackers each time they were slapped by the wind. The men in Crosby’s Hotel drank several rounds and then descended in a body to Ephraim’s igloo on the frozen lake.

  “What are them sheets for?”

  “Them aren’t sheets, my good fellow. Them are ascension robes to be worn for the ascent into heaven. Those among you who can read raise your hands.”

  Six of them raised their hands, but Dunlap was only bragging.r />
  “Wait here.”

  Ephraim was gobbled up by his entry tunnel then emerged a moment later to distribute pamphlets: Evidence from the Scriptures of the Second Coming of Christ in the Eastern Townships about the year 1851.

  “It is more difficult,” Ephraim told them, his eyes hot, “for a rich son of a bitch to enter heaven than to piss through the eye of a needle. Do not comfort yourselves, my good fellows, thinking hell is an abstraction. It’s a real place just waiting on sinners like you. If you have ever seen a hog on a spit, its flesh crackling and sizzling, squirting fat, well that’s how hot it is in hell’s coolest regions. The first meeting is tomorrow night at seven in the tent. Bring your womenfolk and your children. I have come to save you.”

  Two

  1983 it was. Autumn. The season of the sodden partridges, drunk from pecking at fallen, fermented crab apples. One of them wakened Moses Berger with a start, slamming into his bedroom window and sliding to the grass. Responding to the brotherly call of another dipso in trouble, Moses yanked on his trousers and hurried outside. He had turned fifty-two a few months earlier and was not yet troubled by a paunch. It wasn’t that he exercised but rather that he ate so sparingly. He was not, as he had once hoped, even unconventionally handsome. A reticent man of medium height with receding brown hair running to grey and large, slightly protuberant brown eyes, their pouches purply. His nose bulbous, his lips thick. But even now some women seemed to find what he sadly acknowledged as his physical ugliness oddly compelling. Not so much attractive as a case to answer.

  The partridge hadn’t broken its neck. It was merely stunned. Flapping its wings it flew off, barely clearing the woodpile, undoubtedly pledging to avoid fermented crab apples forever.

  Some hope.

  His own head far from clear, Moses retreated to his cabin high in the woods overlooking Lake Memphremagog and reheated what remained of last night’s coffee, lacing it with a shot of Greysac’s cognac, now yet another Gursky brand name.

  The Gurskys.

  Ephraim begat Aaron.

  Aaron begat Bernard, Solomon, and Morrie, who then begat children of their own.

  Morning rituals. Moses conceded yet again that his wasting life had been drained of potential years ago thanks to his obsession with the Gurskys. Even so, it could still be retrieved from insignificance, providing he managed, between bouts of fermented crab apples, to complete his biography of Solomon Gursky. Yes, but even in the unlikely event he ever got to finish that unending story, the book could never be published unless he was willing to be carted off in a straitjacket, declared mentally unbalanced.

  Slipping on his reading glasses, scanning the faded charts and maps tacked to his wall, Moses had to allow that were he an objective observer he would be the first to endorse such a judgement. The one living-room wall free of ceiling-to-floor bookcases was dominated by an enormous map of Canada, circa 10,000 B.C., when most of the country had still been buried under the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets. Alongside there was a smaller 1970 government surveyor’s map of the Northwest Territories, Ephraim Gursky’s journey out traced in red ink. Moses’s Arctic books were stacked here, there, and everywhere, most of them annotated again and again: Franklin, M’Clure, Richardson, Back, Mackenzie, M’Clintock and the rest, but that was not what concerned him right now.

  Right now Moses was determined to find his missing salmon fly, a Silver Doctor, which he had misplaced somewhere or other. He knew that he shouldn’t waste his morning searching for it. Certainly he had no need of it until next summer. All the same, he turned to his worktable, speculating that it might be buried among his papers there. His work table, made up of an oak door laid on two steel filing cabinets, was strewn with pages from Solomon Gursky’s journals, tapes made by his brother Bernard, clippings, file cards and notes. Dipping into the mess, he retrieved his copy of The Newgate Calendar Improved, Being INTERESTING MEMOIRS of NOTORIOUS CHARACTERS who have been convicted of offences AGAINST THE LAWS OF ENGLAND. He opened it, pretending he didn’t know that beginning on page 78 he would discover an account of the early years of Solomon Gursky’s grandfather.

  EPHRAIM GURSKY

  Several times convicted—Sentenced once to Coldbath Fields, once to Newgate— And finally on October 19, 1835, transported to Van Diemen’s Land.

  Moses, who could recite the rest of the calendar entry by heart, poured himself another coffee, enriched by just a squirt of cognac.

  Greysac’s cognac. Gursky cognac.

  Drifting into the bedroom, he raised his glass to the portrait of his father that hung on the wall. L.B. Berger in profile, pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight. Moses turned away, but in his mind’s eye, L.B. confronted him at the kitchen table once again. “I’ve got news for you,” he said. “I didn’t make you a drunk. I deserved better.”

  If not for his father taking him to that Gursky birthday party when he had been only eleven years old, Moses might never have become enthralled with Solomon. The legendary Solomon. His bane, his spur. Instead he might have enjoyed a life of his own. A wife. Children. An honourable career. No, the booze would have got to him in any event.

  Once, enduring the first of his many confinements in the clinic in New Hampshire, there to dry out, Moses had foolishly submitted to prying questions.

  “You talk about your father with such rage, even …”

  “Contempt?”

  “… but when you tell stories of your childhood you make it sound enviable. How did you feel in those days?”

  “Cherished.”

  “Yesterday you mentioned there were quarrels.”

  “Oh yes, over the validity of Nachum Schneiderman’s ‘Reply to the Grand Inquisitor’. Or the Stalin-Hitler Pact. Or the question Malraux posed to the Communist Writers’ Congress, namely, ‘And what about the man who is run over by a streetcar?’”

  “Well?”

  “In a perfect socialist transport system, the answer goes, there will be no accidents.”

  Those, those were the days before Bernard Gursky had summoned Moses’s father—L.B. Berger, the noted Montreal poet and short-story writer—with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. The Bergers had not yet been lifted into tree-lined Outremont, but were still rooted in that cold-water flat on Jeanne Mance Street. A flat that rocked day and night with the unscheduled comings and goings of loopy, loquacious Russian Jews. Yiddish poets, essayists, playwrights, journalists, actors and actresses. Artists, the lot. Washed on to the shores of a cold country that was as indifferent to them as they were to it. Except, of course, for L.B., who was sustained by larger ambitions and had already seen his poetry published in English-language little magazines in Montreal and Toronto, as well as once in Poetry Chicago. L.B. was the sun around which the others spun at a sometimes dizzying speed. Sleep-walking through the day, they grudgingly rendered unto Canada what was Canada’s, earning their keep as minor Zionist functionaries, bookkeepers to the needle trade, insurance collectors for the Pru, synagogue secretaries, beneficial loan society officials or, as in the case of L.B., as a parochial school teacher, badgered by pushy parents. But at night they wakened to their real life of the soul. They elbowed for places at the great L.B.’s table in Horn’s Cafeteria on Pine Avenue or, more often, at the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth in the cold-water flat on Jeanne Mance. There they consumed gallons of coffee or lemon tea with tray after tray of cinnamon buns, honey cake or kichelach, all prepared by L.B.’s wife.

  Except for his mother, Moses remembered, the women were glamorous beyond compare. They wore big floppy hats pricked by peacock plumes, and flowing black capes, never mind the patches. They favoured ivory cigarette holders. Zipora Schneiderman, Shayndel Kronitz and, above all, Gitel Kugelmass, Moses’s first unrequited love. The voluptuous Gitel, who usually wore an ostrich boa or a fox biting its own tail, missing either clumps of feather or fur. Chiffons, silks. The celebrated Roite Gitel, who had led the millinery workers out against Fancy Finery. Perfumed and p
owdered she was, her eyes kohled, her lips scarlet, her hands heavy with antique rings. Occasionally she sipped apricot brandy in a sticky shot glass to warm her kishkas in winter. Moses, anticipating her every need—emptying her ashtray—fetching her coffee—was rewarded from time to time with a perfume-laden hug or a pinch of his cheek.

  Except for his mother, the women, who had never heard of inequality, poured oil onto the flames of every dispute ignited by the men, arguing along with them far into the night about the show trials that had been held in a faraway city as cold as their own, pitching into quarrels over the merits of Osip Mandelstam, Dali, Malraux, Eisenstein, Soutine, Mendele Moykner Sforim, Joyce, Trotsky, Buñuel, Chagall, and Abraham Reisen, who had written:

  Future generations,

  Brothers still to come,

  Don’t you dare

  Be scornful of our songs.

  Songs about the weak,

  Songs of the exhausted

  In a poor generation,

  Before the world’s decline.

  Shloime Bishinsky, a latecomer to the group, was an interesting case. Slight, droopy, seemingly the most mild of men, he was a fur dyer cursed with catarrh, a hazard of his trade. When Poland was about to be partitioned, he was caught in Bialystok, in the Russian zone. More politically informed aunts and cousins fled to the other zone. They knew, say what you like, that the Germans were a civilized people. But Shloime’s family, too late for the last train out, failed to escape to Auschwitz. Instead they were transported to Siberia, a journey of two weeks. From there, Shloime slipped into the Middle Kingdom and then Harbin, in the puppet state of Manchuko, where once grand White Russian ladies now stripped in cabarets. Eventually he reached Japan itself, sailing as a stoker from Yokohama to Vancouver.