St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  “I see.”

  “Cyril says I should try the water first and see if the shoe fits. And he’s right. Victorian times are over, aren’t they?”

  6

  JAKE HAD NOWHERE TO GO, HE HAD NOTHING TO DO, but he was being paid a ransom to endure his idleness. An illicit ransom, he allowed, cunningly banked abroad.

  One day you’ll be proud of me, he had once told Issy Hersh. I’m going to be a famous film director.

  Don’t shoot me the crap, his father had protested. You want me to be proud? Earn a living. Stand on your own two feet.

  Go know, Daddy. Go know.

  Jake read, he took Nancy to the movies in the afternoon, and he awakened to light up in the middle of the night, anticipating the long-distance call that would tell him his father had died. Jake wrote to Hanna, telling her about his trip to Israel, saying how he had also sought the Horseman in Gehenna, admitting that once more he had eluded him. He rearranged his library, he put all his back issues of Encounter in chronological order. He bought and labeled a steel filing cabinet and weeded the garden.

  Jake was sorting papers when the doorbell rang. The small, sneering stranger introduced himself as Mrs. Flam’s fiancé.

  “Would you care for a drink?” Jake asked.

  “It’s too early in the day for me.”

  Jake poured himself a gin and tonic. Harry Stein blew his nose and looked around stealthily, taking in everything in the living room. The rug from Casa Pupo, the winged armchair from Heal’s. The kitchen door was ajar and he could see the large gleaming refrigerator. “Nice,” he said. “Very nice.”

  Jake did not go into the kitchen for ice cubes, but decided to have his drink warm.

  “Ruthy would fancy a place like this, but she can’t afford it. Between you Yanks and Rachmanism, the rents have been forced up everywhere.”

  “Are you looking for a house, then?”

  Harry smiled.

  “You wouldn’t like to rent it for the summer? I think we’re going to Spain.”

  “Dollars for Franco,” Harry said, jubilant.

  Screw you, Jake thought, and he went to fetch some ice cubes after all.

  “Do you know how many political prisoners are still rotting in Franco’s dungeons?”

  “I’m a fascist.”

  “Don’t try to take the micky out of me.”

  “What do you want, Harry?”

  “Hear that plane going over? It’s American.”

  “I’m a Canadian.”

  “They fly overhead day and night with nuclear bombs in the hatch. One has already gone down in Greenland and another in Spain …”

  “Do you think NW3 is next?”

  “You’re a very humorous chap.”

  “Look, Harry, I read the New Statesman too. Now what is it you want?”

  Harry lit a cigarette, replacing the spent match in the box. “Are you going to charge your holiday to expenses?”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m on P.A.Y.E., taxed at source. Make thirty-five a week, take home twenty-six. What about you?”

  “None of your business. Now what is it you want?”

  “The seven hundred nicker.”

  “You must be crazy.”

  “Simply tell your cousin –”

  “I’ve already told Ruthy I haven’t seen him in years. I don’t know where he is, either.”

  “I dispute that.”

  “You what?”

  “I could turn this matter over to my solicitors.”

  “For collection?”

  “You realize, I hope, that in this country aiding and abetting a fiddle is as serious as committing one.”

  “O.K. Sue me.”

  “On the other hand, if you were prepared to settle the debt –”

  “It’s no go, Harry. Even if I were willing to pay Joey’s debt, I couldn’t spare the money at the moment.”

  “Why not dip into the numbered Swiss account?”

  “What if I was broke?”

  “We have different standards of being broke. Wouldn’t you concur?”

  “Yes, I suppose I would.”

  “Ruthy stands on her feet all day, nine to five. She’s getting varicose veins. She’s up at seven every morning, don’t you know? Washes and feeds the kiddies, dumps ’em in a council nursery, and doesn’t see them again until she gets home. Nights she has to drag her things to the laundromat. You own a washing machine here?”

  “Which’s Best Buy. We’ve also got a housekeeper.”

  “Nice. Very nice.”

  “I think so. Well,” Jake said, looking at his watch.

  “Is that your final word, then? You won’t honor your cousin’s debt?”

  Jake nodded.

  “You don’t remember having met me before, do you?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Not to worry. Very few people notice me. I’m used to it, don’t you know?”

  But even then Harry hesitated at the door.

  “You say you haven’t got the money, Mr. Hersh, and that even if you so desired you couldn’t spare it. A pity, that. For is it not a fact that at the moment you are being paid more monthly not to work than I take home in a year?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “I put it to you that you have lied to me.”

  “Where have we met before, Harry?”

  “I take it you are implying that we couldn’t possibly move in the same circles.”

  “Inferring.”

  Harry’s cheeks bled red.

  “Now tell me how come you know – or think you know – about my private affairs?”

  “If you lied to me about that, I say you are prevaricating about your cousin. You know the present abode of Joseph Hersh. Or de la Hirsch. And you are protecting him.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  It was only after Harry had left that Jake noticed the large round hole burned into the fabric of the new winged armchair from Heal’s. Why, the bastard, Jake thought, with sneaking admiration, he did it on purpose.

  7

  THE NEXT MORNING’S MAIL BROUGHT A LONG AND abusive letter. LBJ, the war in Vietnam, Barry Goldwater, the CIA, the murder of Malcolm X, and the John Birch Society were all evoked, as well as earlier, if not more vile, examples of American obloquy. Jake passed the letter to Nancy and opened the Times.

  MONTHLY TESTS FOR CANCER

  Every woman over the age of twenty-four, the Health Council enjoined, should carry out two simple tests for breast cancer each month, as nearly thirty women die from breast cancer every day – a fifth of all cancer deaths.

  A few minutes a month – that’s all the time needed to check that nothing is going wrong. We hope that every woman over 24 will make it routine, like turning over the mattress.

  Nancy, eight months pregnant, went to bed early. So did Jake. The telephone wakened him at three a.m. My father, he thought. But when he said hello, nobody replied. Hello, hello. He could hear breathing at the other end of the line, nothing more.

  “Harry, you prick!”

  Jake knew better than to try to sleep again. He lit a cigarillo, pulled Johnson’s Lives of the Poets out from between the magazines and scripts stacked on his bedside table, and waited. Twenty minutes later the phone rang again.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” Nancy asked.

  “No. Please go to sleep, dear.”

  In the morning, Jake received a pamphlet about political conditions in present-day Spain, Vicky having drawn the cartoon for the cover. It compared unfavorably with the material he had picked up at the Spanish tourist office about the delights of Torremolinos, and he suggested half-heartedly to Nancy that maybe they ought to consider the Câte d’Azur instead, once the baby came.

  Why? He was worried about the milk there, maybe it wouldn’t agree with the baby. But she was going to nurse this baby, just like the others. Well, there was olive oil with everything, and the kids wouldn’t like it. But the south of France was far too expen
sive. Yes, yes, but Spain was only cheap because the workers were on starvation wages. Furthermore, tourism helped to prop up a corrupt dictatorship. Oh, really, and wasn’t it a little bit late in the day for him to develop the sort of hypersensitive social conscience he mocked in others. The hell it was.

  Nancy quit the kitchen for her bedroom and Jake went out for a walk, Sammy trailing after.

  “Hey,” Jake said. “Across the street. There’s a kid in your school uniform.”

  Sammy didn’t deign to look. “Is he leading an elephant?” he asked.

  “Um, no.”

  “Then it isn’t Rogers.”

  After dinner, Jake settled in for an evening’s television. News for the Deaf, which he watched weekly, so that should his hearing fail he would not have to learn lip-reading from scratch, was followed by BORN TO LIVE.

  The walls of Denise Legrix’s Paris studio are covered with her paintings; paintings of such power that few would credit the artist was born without arms or legs.

  Denise Legrix is in her early fifties. She has a ready smile and a quick wit, but it is in her eyes that one catches a hint of her strength. As we talked, she telephoned for a taxi, dialing the number with a paper knife held between her shoulder and neck. I met her when I was preparing tonight’s program. I had framed several questions to bridge my anticipated embarrassment. I need not have bothered. With a knife held under her right armpit and a fork balanced on her left stump, she ate her food with no more fuss …

  Harry didn’t phone until two in the morning.

  “Don’t answer it,” Nancy said.

  But Jake had already grabbed the receiver. “Harry, if you call here once more I’m going to come around to knock your fucking brains out.”

  No answer. Only breathing.

  “What if it isn’t him?” Nancy asked.

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  Jake dialed Harry’s number. The phone rang. Rang and rang. Finally Harry said, “Hullo,” his voice thick with sleep.

  “Harry, it’s Hersh. Jake Hersh.”

  “Wha …”

  “If you don’t stop calling here at all hours of the night I’m going to report you to the police.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You heard me, Harry.”

  “This is an outrage.”

  “Harry, I’ve been thinking. Maybe I live in a house like this, possibly I make so much more money than you do, because I’m intelligent and talented and you’re just a mindless little fart.”

  There was a long and excruciating pause. Finally, Harry said: “I dispute that.”

  “But it happens to be true all the same,” Jake hollered. Then he hung up, agitated and ashamed.

  “I don’t think you should have said that to him,” Nancy said.

  “All right. O.K. I already did say it.”

  The phone began to ring again.

  “You see, it’s a crank. Somebody who doesn’t even know us.”

  Nancy took the phone off the hook, buried it under a pillow, and said, “Let’s go to sleep now.”

  A policeman, fortunately not Sergeant Hoare, came to call at breakfast time. A Mr. Harry Stein had complained that he had been wakened in the middle of the night by phone calls of a threatening nature. Flushed and overeager, Jake explained that, on the contrary, sir, he had been troubled by nuisance calls at all hours of the night and he had merely warned Mr. Stein to desist.

  How did Mr. Hersh know the party in question was Mr. Stein?

  I’m glad you asked me that question. Because, Jake said, before meeting Mr. Stein, he had never been troubled with such calls.

  Did Mr. Hersh have any further proof?

  Certainly. But he would only divulge it at the proper time.

  Be that as it may, would Mr. Hersh, in the meantime, promise not to bother Mr. Stein any more.

  Yes.

  Immediately the bobby had gone, Jake climbed to his attic and phoned Harry.

  “Well, now. I say, I say. Aren’t you the clever little bastard?”

  “Oh. But I thought, in your opinion, I was, quote – a mindless little fart – unquote.”

  Choke to death on Kotex.

  “For your information, Mr. Hersh, I belong, intellectually, if not materially, to the top two percent of the population of this country.”

  “Ha, ha. That’s rich. Says who?”

  “Mensa.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t know Latin, then?”

  “It’s a dead language.”

  “Mensa is Latin for table. It’s the name of a round-table society I belong to, the only qualification being that your native intelligence places you in the top two percent.”

  “After all that sobbing about Spain, you’re an elitist. A squalid little fascist.”

  “Mensa has no political or religious affiliations. It does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, or social class. If we are an élite, it is not by birth, background, or wealth, but on the sole basis of innate intelligence.”

  “Now hold on there. Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me, little man, that you’re one of the intellectual élite?”

  “I’m saying it is a scientifically proven fact.”

  “You’re being taken for a ride, Harry.”

  “Am I?”

  “What did you pay to join this nut club? How much did they take you for?”

  “I passed a test proving my qualifications.”

  “If you could, so could my son Sammy. Blindfolded.”

  “Would you be prepared to submit to the test, then?”

  “Well, um, sure. But who has time for such nonsense?”

  “I see.”

  “You see. O.K. Where do I get it?”

  “I’ll have the test sent to you.”

  “Right. And I’m willing to put down ten quid to your one that I score higher than you ever did. Intellectual élite, my ass.”

  “We have a bet then, Mr. Hersh.”

  “Indeed we do. And meanwhile, no more phone calls in the middle of the night, you understand?”

  “I refute such a charge.”

  “Just remember what I said.”

  “Have you had any further thoughts about your cousin’s debt to Ruthy?”

  “No. Goodbye.”

  At the breakfast table, Nancy decided to say nothing. She poured him more coffee.

  “What is it with me,” he demanded. “Wherever I put my foot down, it’s quicksand.”

  8

  UNDERLINE WHICH OF THE FOUR NUMBERED figures fits into the empty space.

  Insert the missing number.

  Complete the following.

  SCOTLAND 27186453 LOTS 7293 LOAN 8367 AND

  Underline the odd-man-out.

  AZEETRIULOS

  OHEELORRUMAELUS

  NIVOERINNIURIS

  REALOPPOOSILILOO

  It’s ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.

  While John was at work on the repapering of the hall, Billy and Tony had strict instructions that they should remain in the garden.

  Having tired of playing cricket, the boys looked around for something to do. In the course of their wanderings, they came across a pair of snails, so they decided to have a snail-race. The snails were of somewhat different types, and the boys recognized that one of them was a type which preferred climbing, whereas the other was more of a walker. Consequently, some care had to be taken in order to give them both an equal chance.

  Both snails were the same size and shape – in fact, the only difference between them was that one preferred to climb rather than to go along the level. The climber found that during his twelve waking hours he could only climb three feet, and during his twelve sleeping hours he slid down a foot. The walker found that he had no bother with sliding, of course, although he slept the same length of time as the other snail.

  In consequence, the boys found a wall, and placed both snails at the foot of it. Four feet away from the other side of the wall was the finishing-post, a luscious shrub.
If the wall was seven feet in height, and the two snails had sufficient ambition to aim directly for the shrub, how many feet away from the shrub would the walker have to be placed in order to give each snail a fair chance?

  A children’s game.

  Insert the word in the brackets which can be prefixed by any of the letters on the left.

  Although he is known to posterity on account of his engravings, Albrecht Dürer, who worked during the sixteenth century, would also seem to have had a certain interest in things mathematical.

  In his famous picture ‘melancolia,’ for instance, astronomy, architecture, and solid geometry all have their place – together with an example of a fourth-order Magic Square, the numbers in the centre of the bottom line of which are reputed to date the picture.

  Although, in actual fact, the numbers in the Magic Square are quite clear, consisting of the numbers 1–16 inclusive, suppose that some of them were not, and that the Square gave the appearance shown in Fig. 10.

  Fig. 10

  In what year did Dürer engrave his masterpiece?

  And doesn’t prove a damn thing, either.

  9

  THE GRAND INQUISITOR BROUGHT JAKE TO HIS OFFICE by dispatching notices of reassessment for seven years, 1960 through 1966, requiring a total of no less than £7,200 in settlement thereof within thirty-one days.

  “What happens now?” Jake demanded of Oscar Hoffman.

  “Don’t worry about a thing. They’ll compromise. They always do.”

  Hoffman accompanied Jake to the Grand Inquisitor’s office, where after an exchange of niceties –

  “Ah,” Jake exclaimed, espying a copy of Dance & Dancers in the out tray, “I see you are a ballet lover too.”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you think of Nureyev’s Romeo?”

  “I’m afraid I’m odd man out there. I thought it was overrated.”

  “I’m glad you said that, because so did I.”

  The inspector, who turned out to be a gawky, hesitant clerk in his twenties, contemplated the account sheets for the first trading year of Jacob Hersh Productions Ltd., and read aloud, “On the first annual meeting of Jacob Hersh Productions Ltd., on Oct. 12, 1960, the chairman declared that on a turnover of £10,000 there was a profit of £841.19.6. It was decided not to declare a dividend. Is that correct?”