St. Urbain's Horseman

by Mordecai Richler

  You know what life is, Yankel?

  Tell me, you’re so smart.

  A circle. A little kikeleh.

  Arriving early on Saturday morning, Jake pounded on the door of their house in Newquay. “Let me in, let me in! It’s your husband! Get that buck nigger out of your bed at once!”

  Jake slept in until noon and then spent the afternoon on the beach with Sammy and Molly, mindful of sharks, ever-watchful for the periscopes of German submarines.

  Nobody on the beach passed an anti-semitic remark.

  Not one of the planes circling overhead was a Stuka.

  He was close enough to the house to see if it caught fire, and he figured he could get there in time to rescue Nancy and the baby. Pilar too.

  In other words, he thought, something really nasty is in the works. Look out, Yankel, any minute now the shit hits the fan.

  After the children had gone to bed, he and Nancy ate dinner together, and he told her, though they were certainly not to count on anything, that the picture his agent was striving to set up for him looked extremely promising. He would know more on Monday.

  “As girls go,” he said, “you’re bloody expensive. Look how far I’ve come, just to make love to you. I nearly turned back at Plymouth, when I realized you are still unable …”

  “I promise not to send you back to London entirely frustrated.”

  “Ooo,” he said, slapping his cheek, “you filthy thing.”

  Sunday afternoon he started back for London, promising to use his safety belt and never to exceed seventy miles per hour; and early Monday morning he sat in the projection room at Pinewood, idly probing his scalp for nascent tumors, then placing a hand over his heart to feel for palpitations, as he waited for Jimmy Blair and the others to arrive so that they could screen a film together. He was almost asleep when Sid Patmore whacked the door open to say he had just heard, on the car radio, that the fighting had started. An Israeli spokesman had declared that in response to an Egyptian attack, Israeli armor had gone into action. A fierce tank battle was in progress in Sinai.

  Soon there were ten of them in the projection room, chain-smoking and gin-soaked, speculating round a transistor radio. This time, Jake thought, the bloody Egyptians would suck Israeli armor deeper and deeper into Sinai, then Jordan would mount an assault on the Sharon Plain, severing Israel where it was only twelve miles wide. Jake would have to volunteer. He would be obliged to fight. Like the Horseman, he thought.

  Along the Ebro.

  At Bab el Wad.

  Cairo claimed forty-four planes shot down. There was dancing in the streets. The headline in the first edition of the Evening Standard announced that Germany was to send Israel twenty thousand gas masks. “Nowadays,” Jake hollered at the others, “everybody is a black humorist,” and he crushed the Standard into a ball.

  The Egyptian air force was destroyed on the ground; Jordan undone. Well-meaning acquaintances bought Jake drinks in the bar at Pinewood Studios.

  “You’ve got to hand it to the Israelis,” somebody said. “Bloody good show,” another man cut in, slapping him on the back.

  Israelis swam in the Suez Canal and camped on the banks of the Jordan. Cousin Joey, Jake knew, was there, he had to be, probably in the struggle for Jerusalem. Hoping to find a photograph of him, Jake bought all the newspapers. He screened whatever newsreel footage he could get, stopping the cameras from time to time, to get a closer look at a frame. No Horseman. But in a photograph on the front page of the Daily Mail, among the officers conferring with Dayan, stood Elan, Colonel Elan, looking uncommonly handsome and assured.

  Jake had never seen Elan again after the day at Beersheba. Neither had he ever run into the Coopers elsewhere. Elan, Jake assumed, had fought bravely, leading his men, not following after. And wherever he was today Mr. Cooper had, Jake felt sure, given generously to support the Israeli war effort. So would all the Coopers everywhere. A man came around to collect from Jake too. Much to his own embarrassment, Jake hesitated. Dayan, melodramatic eyepatch and all, was a hero. Our hero. And yet – and yet – put this arrogant general, this Dayan, into an American uniform, call him MacArthur, call him Westmoreland, and Jake would have despised him. Jake wrote out a check, but unhappily. Being the old kind of Jew, a Diaspora Jew, he was bound to feel guilty either way.

  Immediately the fund-raiser quit the house, the telephone rang. It was long distance. Montreal. “Yes,” Jake said.

  “I’ve got some bad news for you,” Uncle Abe said.

  “My father’s dead.”

  “He passed away an hour ago.”

  “I see.”

  “Will you come to the funeral?”

  “I’ll be out on the morning flight. Is my sister there?”

  Rifka came to the telephone, sobbing. “He was such a good man,” she said. “Such a wonderful father.”

  All of them would be clustered around the wall-telephone in the kitchen. His aunts, his uncles, nodding their heads, weeping.

  “He didn’t have an enemy in the world,” Rifka continued.

  Or a friend. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Jake said, hanging up.

  He didn’t even have to pack. His bags were ready for Newquay. Jake called Air Canada and had only just poured himself a brandy when the telephone startled him again.

  “Well, your friend Dayan knows how to take orders, doesn’t he?”

  Oh, God, Harry.

  “You know where he just got back from, don’t you?”

  “No, Harry. Tell me.”

  “South Vietnam. He went there to learn about napalm straight from Westmoreland and Marshal Ky. And he got his start working hand in glove with the British army police in 1920, terrorizing Arab villages.”

  “Harry, you misery, don’t you care about the Jewish children?”

  “I care about workers’ children everywhere and I hate reaction wherever it appears. Israel supported the French in Algeria in 1954 and supplied arms to the Portuguese government in Angola. Do they care about agrarian land revolution or radical land reform? Not on your nelly. Zionism got rid of the Arab fellahs and wants to stay rid of them.”

  Cutting Harry short, Jake told him he was going to Montreal; he would be gone for a week. Yes, yes, he could have the run of the house, dammit. Jake would leave a key under the mat.

  Jake called Nancy to tell her what had happened and promised to call again from Montreal, after the funeral.

  After all, Issy Hersh had held on for longer than six weeks. It was two months since Jake had last seen him.

  15

  A GLASS OF WATER, WITH A SWAB OF ABSORBENT COTTON resting on the rim, was perched on top of the faulty, whirring air conditioner. Jake’s grandmother freshened the water each morning. It was there to slake her first-born son’s soul, in the event that it returned thirsty or feverish. The late Issy Hersh’s small, modest apartment was stifling. Overflowing. It reeked of Hersh sweat, decaying Hersh bodies, the rumpled men received visitors in the little box of a living room. While Jake’s grandmother, Fanny, his sister Rifka, his aunts, accepted mourners like dues in the master bedroom, where cancer, lodging in Issy Hersh’s kidney, had taken root and spread tentacles throughout his body.

  Earlier, when Jake had emerged from the airplane at Dorval, the worse for six hours of gin, he had discovered Herky pacing up and down in front of the customs barrier.

  “Good flight?” Herky barked.

  Jake shrugged.

  “How’s the family?”

  “Well.”

  “And the wife, keeping her looks?”

  Fuck you.

  “He died peacefully. I want you to know that.” Once inside his air-conditioned Buick, Herky demanded, “That a good tie?”

  “What?”

  “We’re going straight to Paperman’s.” The funeral parlor. “They’ll have to cut it with a razor blade. That’s the law, you know.” Go to hell, Herky.

  Jake’s big-booted, leathery-faced grandmother, the belly that had swelled for fourteen children hangin
g useless now, an empty pouch – foolish Fanny determined to outquake Rifka – his dour girdled aunts – all combined to send up a counterpoint of sobs and moans throughout the rabbi’s eulogy at the funeral parlor. The solemn menfolk, the brothers and cousins next in line, glared at the coffin, this one tolerating what he had been assured was a stomach ulcer and another awaiting the results of a biopsy.

  All his life Issy Hersh had worn forced-to-clear suits and fire sale shoes and now even his casket seemed too large. His last bargain.

  The rabbi was brief.

  “Words fail me to adequately express the sorrow I share with you. Even as Jewish law limits the topics of discussion for those who mourn, I find my speech curtailed because I mourn with you for Isaac Hersh, who all his years exuded and emanated Jewishness, real yiddishkeit, affluent in the rich symbolism of his people, which he readily spread amongst us. May the fond memories we have of a fine, outpouring Jewish soul inspire us to emulate all that was good in him …”

  The women, subsiding into limousines, caught their second wind at the cemetery and began to lament anew, wailing with abandon. Poor Fanny, whose perch within the family hierarchy was exceedingly rocky now, the tolerated second wife of an under-insured, all but penniless husband, with a stepdaughter who abominated her and a stranger for a stepson, necessarily outbid all the others. Even Aunt Sophie, over whom her son, twenty-two-year-old Irwin, obese, his face florid, held a parasol. Irwin, who wore a straw hat with a tartan band, was staring at Jake. Jake shot him a piercing look, and Irwin, flushing a deeper red, wiggled his eyebrows pleadingly and averted his eyes.

  The older generation of Hersh menfolk, brothers and cousins to Issy, filed past the grave dutifully but truculent, appealingly truculent, each taking up the workman’s spade in turn to shovel wet clay onto the coffin. Smack, smack. The Hershes, all of them, seemingly one cherished decomposing body to Jake now. Like him, susceptible to germs. Wasting. Shivering together in spite of the blistering heat. Diminished by one.

  Suddenly, the enveloping black birds began to twitter. All manner of rabbis, young and old, blackbearded and cleanshaven, rocked in prayer, heads bobbing, competing in piety. For each Hersh buried paid dividends above ground. Every expired Hersh was bound to be commemorated by a rabbi’s study or additional classroom for the yeshiva, a sefer torah donated here or an ark paid for there, a parochial-school library or a fully equipped kindergarten. In Everlasting Memory of …

  “Oy, oy,” Rifka wailed.

  “Issy! My Issy!” Fanny put in, outreaching her.

  Jake couldn’t even coax a tear out of himself; he felt altogether too drained and fearful of the wailing to come.

  But once back in the widow’s apartment, a veritable oven that day, their hands washed and stomachs biting with hunger, the men shed their jackets and loosened their ties and belts, the women unbuckled and unzipped. Everybody was talking at once, positioning themselves by the table, as plates of hardboiled eggs, bagels, and onion rolls were followed by platters of lox, roast chicken, and steaming potato varenikes, apple cake and chocolate chip cookies, peaches and plums, bottles of Tab and diet Pepsi. Once more Jake sensed the immense Irwin gaping at him. Caught out, Irwin wiggled his eyebrows again, blushed, and spit a plum pit into his hand.

  Uncle Sam switched on his transistor radio and the sated Hershes gathered around to hear the ram’s horn blown at the wailing wall in Jerusalem.

  “If only Issy could have lived,” Jake’s grandmother said, crumpling, “to hear the shofar blown in Jerusalem.”

  An interloping rabbi squeezed the old lady’s mottled hand. “You mustn’t question the Almighty,” he cautioned her, “or He might call you up for an answer.”

  Exactly what Rabbi Meltzer had told the Horseman. Did they subscribe, Jake wondered, to the same chief rabbi of platitudes? Had they been issued with similar condolence kits on graduation from yeshiva?

  Now the men, slippered and unshaven (except for Jake, who scorned that ritual), staked claims, according to their need, to a place on the sofa or a chair by the balcony door, the seat handiest to the kitchen or the one nearest the toilet. As Uncle Jack emerged from the toilet, Irwin asked, “Everything come out all right?” his shoulders heaving with laughter. Then he caught Jake’s reproving glance, shrugged, and retreated.

  “Did you notice that Sugarman, the chazer, wasn’t even at Paperman’s?”

  “It wasn’t overcrowded with your in-laws either.”

  Uncle Abe rubbed his unshaven chin and complained of the first day’s stiffness.

  “After a few days it gets soft,” he was assured.

  “That’s my trouble too,” Uncle Lou said.

  Uncle Sam figured the rabbi’s speech was a washout, but Uncle Morrie didn’t agree. “A rabbi’s speech,” he said, “should be like a miniskirt. Eh, Yankele?”

  Jake saluted the reference to London.

  “Long enough to cover the subject, short enough to make it interesting.”

  Herky, encouraged, pitched in with a convoluted story about a cracker, a Jew, and a Negro, all delivered in an Amos ’n’ Andy accent, and culminating with the Negro saying, “I’ve got foah inches. Is that all? the hebe asks. Foah inches from the ground, baby.”

  Uncle Morrie laughed and wiped the corners of his eyes with a handkerchief. “You guys,” he said.

  Jake’s ponderous silence was taken for disapprobation.

  “Listen here, Yankele,” Uncle Lou said, clapping him on the back. “If it was your Uncle Morrie here we had just buried –”

  Which earned him a poisonous look.

  “– and your father, may he rest in peace, was still with us, he would be leading with the jokes.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” Jake said, sorry that they had misunderstood him.

  “Then here’s one for you, by jove, with a Limey twist. ’Ow do you get six elephants into a Vauxhall?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Blimey, old thing. Three in the front, three in the back.”

  Jake mustered a smile and raised his glass to Uncle Lou. “And ’ow would you get six giraffes into the same car?” A pause. “You remove the elephants,” Lou exploded.

  “Clever.”

  “Yankel, you should never lose your stench of humor. That’s a philosophy that’s never failed me.”

  “I remember,” Jake said, and he drifted onto the balcony where Irwin towered over a brood of younger cousins, a transistor clapped to his ear.

  “Mays just homered,” he said. “They’re going to walk McCovey,” and seeing Jake, he gulped, and turned his back to him.

  Jake decided to seek out Fanny before he had drunk himself into incoherence. She was in the small bedroom.

  “Anything I can do for you?” Jake asked.

  “Sit.”

  So he sat.

  “You know, one night – after we were married, you understand – your father and I, well …” She blushed. “… We were fooling around, you know. You know what I mean?”

  “You were what?”

  “Well, you know. I got pregnant. But he made me see somebody.”

  “Why?”

  “He thought his brothers would laugh at him. At his age, a baby.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re a very thoughtful person. I’d come to visit you in London, if I could afford it.”

  Which drove Jake back into the hall, where he could see Irwin, alone on the balcony now, waddling over to the railing. He thrust a finger into his nostril, dug fiercely, and slowly, slowly, extracted a winding worm of snot. Irwin contemplated it, sleepy-eyed, before he wiped it on the railing.

  Uncle Jack was holding forth, dribbling cigar ash.

  “Hey, did you hear the one about the two Australian fairies? One of them went back to Sydney.”

  Herky clapped Jake on the back. “Got to talk to you.” He ushered Jake into the toilet ahead of him. “How are you fixed money-wise, kid?”

  “I’d love to help you, Herky,” Jake replied, s
waying, “but it’s all tied up.”

  “You don’t understand. I don’t need your money. You’ve got kids now. I’m sure you want to invest for the future. You’re my one and only brother-in-law and … well, I’d like to put you on to something good.”

  “I read you.”

  Herky lit up, exuding self-satisfaction. “What do you think is the most valuable thing in the world today?”

  “The Jewish tradition.”

  “Where will boozing get you? Nowhere.” Herky plucked Jake’s glass out of his hand. “I’m serious, for Chrissake.”

  “All right, then. Not having cancer.”

  “I mean a natural resource.”

  “Gold?”

  “Guess again.”

  “Oil?”

  Herky spilled over with secret knowledge. “Give up?”

  Don’t you know you’re going to die, Herky? But he didn’t say it.

  “Water.”

  “What?”

  “H2O. Watch this.” With a flick of the wrist, Herky flushed the toilet. “It’s going on everywhere, day and night. Now you take the Fraser River, for instance. More than once a day the untreated contents of one hundred thousand toilet bowls empty into it.”

  “That’s a lot of shit, Herky.”

  “Flush, flush, flush. Canada’s got more clean water than any other country in the Free World, but even so, there’s a limit, you know.”

  Jake retrieved his drink.

  “You project ten years ahead and there will be container tankers, fleets of them, carrying not oil or iron ore, but pure Canadian water, to polluted American cities.”

  “So?”

  “Watch closely now.” Herky flushed the toilet again. “All over the city, people are doing the same, but – but – this toilet, like any other, flushes the same amount of water no matter what the need. You read me?”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “I call them mindless, these toilets, I mean.”

  “I’m tired, Herky. Come to the point.”

  “The average person urinates maybe four times a day, but defecates only once, yet this toilet is mindless, it is adjusted to provide enough power to flush a stool down the drain each time. Millions of gallons daily are being wasted in the Montreal area alone. Which is where I come in. We are developing a cistern that will give you all the zoom you need for defecation, but will release only what’s necessary to wash urine away. In other words, a toilet with a mind. The biggest breakthrough since Thomas Crapper’s Niagara. Once we get costs down and go into production, I expect our unit to become mandatory equipment in all new buildings. I’m offering you a chance to come in on the ground floor. Well?”