Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Put plainly, except for the evidence of his corpse, it seemed that Isaac Grant, MD, had never existed.

  Seven

  Sean Riley was the first person Moses Berger looked for whenever his research obliged him to pass through Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories. Riley had gone right from Spitfires over Malta during World War II into three years of crop dusting in Kenya. Then, back in Canada, he had enrolled in a Trans-Canada Airlines school, emerging as a Viscount pilot in 1951, a tour of duty that ended in ignominy. One day, before setting out on a run from Montreal to Halifax, Riley read aloud to his passengers a head-office edict that cited the variegated role of a Cunard liner’s captain and enjoined TCA pilots to be entertaining hosts as well as fliers of unrivalled skill. “I am now,” he said, yanking a harmonica out of his pocket, “going to play ‘Kisses Sweeter Than Wine’ and will accept two more requests before taking off into the wild blue yonder.”

  Inevitably Riley, like so many free spirits or undischarged bankrupts, runaway husbands, unredeemed drunks and other drifters, retreated to North of Sixty, flying DC-3s, Cessnas and Otters out of Yellowknife. He became the favourite pilot of the NWT’s Superior Court Justice, flying him over the barrens on the court circuit again and again. One night in 1969, drinking late with Moses in The Trapline, Riley told him that he was flying the court party, as well as a few reporters, out on the circuit in the morning. Moses, who was bound for Tulugaqtitut, the settlement on the Beaufort Sea where Henry Gursky had been rooted for years, could hitch a ride with them.

  The court party was comprised of the judge, a crown prosecutor, two defence lawyers, and a clerk. They were joined by three reporters, two of them from “the outside”. The two men from “the outside” represented the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun. The third reporter, a girl named Beatrice Wade, was a native of Yellowknife, then with the Edmonton Journal. A raven-haired beauty, with breasts too rudely full for such a trim figure and coal-black eyes that shone with too much appetite.

  Riley, assembling the passengers on the runway, couldn’t resist performing for the reporters from “the outside”. “This old heap, held together with bobby pins and glue, is a DC-3, which some call the workhorse of the north, our own Model-T, but what more experienced northerners refer to as the widowmaker. Anybody want to take a picture of your intrepid flyboy before we take off?”

  One of the reporters obliged.

  “Now, hold on a minute, this may not be O’Hare or Kennedy, but safety is our first consideration. We’ve got to have this baby de-iced.”

  Riley gave Beatrice the nod. She promptly slipped two fingers into her mouth, whistled, and an Eskimo boy arrived on the trot, clearing the wings of snow with a kitchen broom.

  Moses, who had hoped to sit next to Beatrice on the flight, was outmanoeuvred by Roy Burwash, the tall sallow Englishman from the Vancouver Sun, and had to settle for a seat across the aisle.

  “Oh, Vancouver’s all right,” Burwash allowed, “but something of a cultural desert, and journalistic standards aren’t what I was used to in London.”

  “Who did you work for on Fleet Street?” Moses asked.

  “I have been published in Lilliput and Woman’s Own.”

  “Who did you work for is what I asked.”

  “The Daily Sketch.”

  “And what do you miss most in Vancouver? The gas fire in your bed-sitter in Kentish Town, luncheon vouchers, or your weekly night out with the lads at Raymond’s Revue Bar?”

  Beatrice, seated by the window, leaned forward for a better look at Moses. “You’re bad,” she said.

  Light snow began to fall as the DC-3 lowered into the first settlement on the court circuit. Moses, taking advantage of the stop, slipped away to seek out aged Eskimos who might remember tales told to them by their grandparents about the man with the hot eyes who had come on the ship with three masts. He also looked out for any Eskimo who had four fringes hanging from his parka, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands.

  After lunch Riley took off in a partial whiteout, soon rose above it, and a couple of hours later found a hole in the clouds, plunged through it, and skittered to a stop just short of a signpost thrust into the ice.

  WELCOME TO AKLAVIK

  Pop. 729 Elevation 30 ft.

  Never Say Die.

  A party of bemused Eskimos greeted the DC-3. “You guys bring the mail?” one of them asked.

  “We haven’t got your bloody welfare cheques,” Riley said. “We’re the court party, come to fill your jail, and standing right over there, well that’s the hanging judge.”

  The Canadian flag was planted in the snow outside the community hall even as the judge hurried into his robes. The first defendant was a surly, acne-ridden Dogrib sporting a Fu Manchu moustache, FUCK inked immediately above the knuckles of one hand and YOU on the other. Charged with breaking and entering he stood before the judge, swaying on his feet.

  “Did you heave a rock through the window of the Mad Trapper’s Café in order to gain access?” the judge asked.

  “It was closed and I was hungry.”

  MOSES SAT NEXT TO BEATRICE on the flight into Inuvik and that night they became lovers, Moses apologizing for his inadequacy. “Sorry. I’m afraid I’ve had too much to drink.”

  “How long have you known Henry Gursky?”

  “Ever since I was a child. Why?”

  “Are you also filthy rich?”

  Unwilling to tell her about his legacy, he said, “I’m just a stop-gap teach filling in here and there until they find out about me.”

  “Find out what?”

  “That I’m a drunk.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “But there has to be a reason.”

  “Why are you left-handed?”

  “That’s not a proper analogy.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “Have you ever tried stopping?”

  “Christ.”

  “Have you?”

  “Regularly.”

  “What gets you started again?”

  “Enduring other people mostly.”

  “Nosey ones like me?”

  “Like that bloody Burwash.”

  “But he’s no worse than you. Or didn’t you also want to get me in the sack the minute you saw me on the plane?”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “I don’t mean that I’m special. I mean that I was there, that’s all, which is enough for most of you.”

  “Let’s go to sleep.”

  “But we can’t yet. We still haven’t reached the apogee of the evening, you know, the point where you show me a picture of your wife and tell me what a terrific gal she is, and you don’t know what got into you, maybe it was those northern lights, maybe it was the booze, but would I please not ever write or phone you at home, now there’s a good girl.”

  “I’m not married.”

  “That’s difficult to credit. I mean a guy like you. Such an obvious barrel of fun,” she said, making him laugh for the first time.

  “You’re nice,” he said.

  “No hyperbole, please. My head will swell.”

  “Beautiful?”

  “I’m thirty years old.”

  “Now you know that I’m not married,” he said, “but surely a girl like you—”

  “—as talented and intelligent as you—”

  “—must have a boy friend?”

  “The men around here are afraid of women, especially talky ones.

  They like huntin’ and fishin’ and watching ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ on TV and talking dirty about us in The Trapline,” she said, reaching out for him.

  “I’m afraid I’ve had too much to drink to be of any more use tonight.”

  “You’re not sitting for an exam, Moses. Relax. Give it a try.”

  When he wakened in the morning, he found that she was already up, reading in bed. A paperback edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Surprise, surprise,” she said
, “I’m not just a sensational lay.”

  THE FOLLOWING SPRING the ebullient commissioner of the Northwest Territories convened his council, declared 1970 Centennial Year, and invited Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne for the revels.

  Beatrice, recently appointed to handle the commissioner’s public relations, slipped into his office one afternoon and surreptitiously added Moses’s name to the guest list for the royal banquet.

  “Who’s Berger?” the commissioner asked, going through the list the next morning.

  “Why, the distinguished Arctic scholar,” Beatrice said, simulating surprise.

  Moses, who was lecturing at NYU at the time, his status shaky, flew in from New York a few days early, bringing everything Beatrice had forgotten in his apartment on her last visit, as well as a gift, a black silk negligee. Beatrice met him at the airport and they proceeded directly to her place. They were still in bed together when she made him promise that he would turn up sober for the banquet. So going about his rounds in Yellowknife the morning in question, Moses drank nothing but coffee. However, once he caught up with Sean Riley at noon in The Gold Range, he saw no harm in joining him for two and a juice, providing he sipped his beer slowly.

  “Right now,” Riley said, “I’m being pursued by a publisher in town for the banquet, one of your brethren out of Edmonton. A smiler born, awfully fancy, he sits down at your table and you’re surrounded. He wants me to write a book about my thrilling adventures in the Land of the Midnight Sun.”

  True to his pledge, Moses turned up sober and properly attired in black tie for the royal banquet in the Elks Hall. Then he caught a glimpse of Professor Knowlton Hardy, surrounded by admirers, and hastened over to the bar for just one, a quick one, a double.

  Before dinner the royal couple was entertained by a group of outstanding Inuit artists, flown in from remote settlements for the occasion. Professor Hardy rose to introduce the first poet. He explained that unimaginable hardship was the coin of the Inuit’s daily existence, but, reflecting on the woof and warp of their lives, they made ecstasy the recurring theme of their anacreontic salute to the world. This remarkable people plucked odes of joy, pace Beethoven, out of the simplest blessings enshrining them in their own form of haiku. Then Oliver Girskee stood up and recited:

  Cold and mosquitoes

  These two pests

  Come never together …

  Ayi, yai, ya.

  Following the traditional drum dancers, there was a demonstration, rare as it was lively, by the Keewatin and High Arctic champions of the mouth-pull, a contest wherein the two opponents hook their fingers into each other’s mouths and pull away until one of them faints or admits defeat. Then Minni Altakarilatok and Timangiak Gor-ski, the justifiably celebrated Cape Dorset throat-singers, were heard from.

  “The distinctive sounds of throat-singing,” Professor Hardy explained to the royal family and their entourage, “part of a time-honoured native tradition, are made by producing guttural nasal and breathing sounds, rather like dry gargling. The art cannot be described, but it can be likened to the sounds of great rivers … the gentle glide of the gull … the crumbling of the crisp white snow of the mighty gale of the Arctic.”

  Once the performers were done, Professor Hardy stood up to announce that the evening’s artistic events, which had displayed the many-faceted face of Inuit culture to such advantage, were now over. Next a beaming Moses—terrifying Beatrice—rose to say a few unscheduled words. He expressed the hope that this prized part of the Canadian mosaic would never be contaminated by the introduction of mindless American television into the pristine northland, and sank back into his seat, acknowledging applause with a blissful smile and calling for another drink.

  Then it was time to eat. Smoked Arctic char and cream of tomato soup followed by caribou steak. Vanessa Hotdog, who was serving Prince Philip, hesitated before removing his steak plate. “Darn it, Dook, hold on to your knife and fork, there’s dessert coming.”

  For years the Eskimos of the Keewatin, the Central and High Arctic and Baffin regions, were known to Ottawa only by the numbers on the identification discs they wore around their necks. Then, in 1969 , they were granted surnames. Many chose traditional Inuktituk names, say Angulalik or Pekoyak. More rambunctious spirits insisted on invented surnames such as Hotdog, Coozycreamer or Turf’n’Surf. One name that recurred among a roving band of natives out of King William Island was Gursky or variations thereof including Gor-ski, Girskee, Gur-ski and Goorsky.

  Moses had found what he believed to be the first mention of the name Gursky, in this case spelled Gor-ski, in the diaries of Angus McGibbon, the Hudson’s Bay Company chief factor of the Prince of Wales’s Fort. The entry was dated May 29, 1849.

  “The weather continues extremely cold. Severe frost again last night. Jos. Arnold has taken very ill with considerable pain across his body from his back to his breasts. The ignorant natives who are wintering with us have offered all manner of herbs and potions for a cure, but I will have none of it. Ordered some blood taken from Arnold, after which he found the pain somewhat easier.

  “McNair and his party arrived before dinner from Pelly Bay by way of Chesterfield Inlet with the most astonishing tale, if true.”

  McNair’s tale:

  “A young white man who is unknown to the Compy. or opposition is living with a wandering band of Esquimaux in Pelly Bay and appears to be worshipped by them as a manner of faith-healer or shaman. He goes by the name of Ephrim Gor-ski, but possibly because of his dark complexion and piercing eyes the Esquimaux call him Tulugaq, which means raven in their lingo. McNair, hardly averse to claiming the reward, dared to conjecture that the young man might prove to be a survivor of the Franklin expedition but this vain hope was soon dashed. Gor-ski had no intelligence of either the Terror or Erebus. He claimed to be a runaway off an American whaler out of Sag Harbour, but was not in want of rescue. Gor-ski was obviously at ease with the Esquimaux in a snow house and when one of them brought in freshly killed seal he partook with them of the soup of hot blood and invited McNair and his party to share in that disgusting broth.

  “McNair lingered for two days in camp, his curiosity aroused by this man who claimed to be an American yet spoke with a Cockney accent, and who lived as a native, but was proficient in Latin and had a Bible with him. On the eve of the second day McNair witnessed an odd ceremony. Gor-ski emerged out of the entry tunnel of his snow house wearing a silk top hat and a fringed white shawl with vertical black stripes: and then the native women did disport themselves before him.

  “McNair: ‘Eight of them exhibited some most curious dances and contortions, till at length their gestures became indecent and wanton in the highest degree, and we turned away from the display.’

  “Of course McNair is a low, superficial creature, who lies more frequently than he speaks the truth and can take more than a glass of Grog. He fell into the habit of intemperance after he got into Disgrace in consequence of employing one of the Compy.’s Servants in cutting off the Ears of an Indian who had had an intrigue with his Woman, but which would not have been thought so much of had it been done by himself in the heat of passion or as a punishment for Horse Stealing. Quite possibly there is more bibulous fancy than truth to McNair’s tale.

  “Had Jos. Arnold bled again tonight, but he continues to complain of dizziness and a general weakness of the limbs. He is a born malingerer.”

  McNair’s tale and its possible connection with Sir John Franklin’s fate—not to mention the reward and glory waiting on the man who solved the riddle—must have worried McGibbon, for six weeks later he sent a party out to Pelly Bay to investigate. They found that the Esquimaux had long gone, and the white man with them, if he had ever existed. All that remained of their camp was seal bones, other animal scraps, a discarded ulu, a tent ring, and that celebrated soapstone carving that is still on display at Hudson’s Bay House in Winnipeg. Another northern enigma. For while small soapstone carvings of seals, walruses,
whales, and other mammals indigenous to the Arctic are far from uncommon, “The McGibbon Artifact”, as it has become known, remains the only Eskimo carving of what was clearly meant to represent a kangaroo.

  Eight

  Beatrice had never cared for his cabin in the woods. His Gurskyiana mausoleum. The first time he had driven her out there, she said, “But I come from the backwoods, Moses, and couldn’t wait to get out. Why would you bring me here?”

  1971 that was, shortly after he had been fired by NYU for “moral turpitude”. They were living together in Montreal, Moses idle, Beatrice working for an ad agency, hating it. After work she joined him in one downtown bar or another, usually finding him already sodden, his grin silly.

  “Weekends,” he said, pouring himself a drink. “It’s not that long a drive.”

  “I suppose.”

  They separated for the first time the following summer and ten days later Moses was back in the clinic in New Hampshire. Discharged in the autumn, he first had to endure the traditional farewell meeting in the doctor’s office. “So tell me,” the doctor said, glancing at the fat file on his desk, “it’s 3:30 A.M., August 5, 1962. They break in and find Marilyn Monroe lying face down on the bed, bare shoulders exposed, the phone clutched in her right hand. Who was trying to reach her just before she died?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Clever clever. Now turn over your hands and let the nice doctor have a look.”

  His fingernails had driven deep cuts into the palms.

  “Be well, old friend. Please stay well this time.”

  Moses immediately struck out for the 91. He drove through New Hampshire and Vermont to Quebec’s Eastern Townships, crossing the border at Highwater. Wet slippery leaves lay scattered everywhere on the Quebec side, the bare trees already black and brittle. BIENVENUE. Even if the border had been unmarked Moses would have known that he was back in the Townships. Penury advertised. Suddenly the road was rippled and cracked and he had to swerve to avoid potholes. Rusting pickup trucks, bashed and abandoned, cannibalized years ago, lay in the tall grass and goldenrod here and there. Sinking barns rotted in the fields. Small mills, which had once manufactured bobbins—employing eight of the locals—chewing their fingers—were shuttered. In lieu of elegant little signs directing you toward the ivy-covered Inn on Crotched Mountain or the Horse and Hound, originally built as a farmhouse in 1880, there were roadside CANTINES with tarpaper roofs, proclaimed by a stake banged into the dirt, OPEN/OUVERT, and offering Hygrade hotdogs and limp greasy pommes frites made of frozen potatoes. There were no impeccably appointed watering holes, where the aging bartender, once Clean for Gene, would offer you a copy of Mother Jones with your drink. However, you could pull in at “Mad Dog” Vachon’s and knock back a Molson, maybe stumbling on a three-week-old copy of ’Allo Police. Or the Venus di Milo, where scantily clad pulpy waitresses out of Chicoutimi or Sept-Iles stripped and then sank to a bare stage to simulate masturbation, protected against splinters by a filthy flannel sheet.