Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  She thought it best not to correct him. Instead she said, “Isn’t all property theft?”

  “Yes, certainly, but there are still some unenlightened running dogs of capitalism about who see things differently.”

  They fell to reminiscing about the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth, L.B. reading one of his stories aloud.

  “Were you too young to remember, Moishe, when Kronitz carried me off to the mountains to take his pleasure with me?”

  Bits of green pasta adhered to her feathery moustache and clacky dentures.

  “Too young to remember? Gitel, it broke my heart.”

  Kronitz had been carried off by cancer long since. Kugelmass, hopelessly dotty, was wasting in the Jewish Old People’s Home. Gitel dabbed at her tears with a black lace handkerchief, an Ogilvy’s price tag dangling from one of its corners. “Does anybody care about our stories now? Who will sing our songs, Moishe, or remember me when my breath was still sweet?” Die Roite Gitel fumbled in her handbag and brought out a sterling silver compact. “Birks,” she said. “Now tell me how come a handsome boy like you, such a catch, isn’t married yet with children?”

  “Well, Gitel, if only I had been somewhat older and you just a little younger,” he said, reaching out to squeeze her knee, frail as a chicken bone.

  “Oh you’re such a devil you. So why did you ever break up with Solomon Gursky’s daughter? What’s her name? Remind me.”

  “Lucy.”

  “Lucy. Of course. Everything she touches on Broadway turns to gold. If it’s a hit, she’s got a piece of it. And her dacha in Southampton, it was featured in People, you could die. She collects those paintings, you know the kind I mean, they look like blow-ups from comic books. Oy, what a world we live in today. Did you know that the Chinese now rent out railway crews and construction gangs to richer Asian countries? Fifty years after the Long March they’re back in the coolie business.”

  “And die Roite Gitel reads People.”

  “Moishe, you could have been living on easy street.”

  “Like father, like son.”

  “Shame on you. I never blamed L.B. for writing those speeches for Mr. Bernard. As for the others, with the exception of Shloime Bishinsky and maybe Schneiderman, it was envy pure and simple. Those days. My God, my God. Before you were even a bar mitzvah boy, the Gurskys were mobsters as far as our group was concerned. Capitalism’s ugliest face, as we used to say. Then when I led the girls out against Fancy Finery during that terrible heat wave you could die, certainly nobody could sleep, and there was bupkes left in our pathetic strike fund, guess what? Knock knock at my door. Who’s there? Not the RCMP this time. Not the provincials again. But Solomon’s man, your buddy Tim Callaghan with a satchel and in it there is twenty-five thousand dollars in hard cash and that isn’t the best of it. Buses will pick up the strikers and their kids on Friday afternoon to take them to the mountains for a week. Everybody’s invited. What are you talking about, I say? Even Solomon Gursky can’t have a big enough house in the mountains for that bunch. They’re going to Ste.-Adèle, Callaghan says, and there will be rooms for everybody. Tell them to bring bathing suits. Hey, hey there, I say, Ste.-Adèle’s restricted, no Jews or dogs on the beach. Just make sure, Callaghan says, that everybody’s gathered outside here by four o’clock.

  “So when they finally put Solomon on trial I naturally had to get to see our benefactor up close. It wasn’t easy. Listen, you’d think it was John Barrymore playing His Majesty’s Theatre, or today say one of those rockers who dress like girls singing at the Forum, you had to line up for hours before the courtroom opened. Not only Jews waiting to get in, but mafiosi from the States. And big-shot goyishe lawyers there to take notes if one of their bosses’ names is taken in vain. And all those debutantes of his, mooning over him. I didn’t blame them one bit. If Solomon Gursky had curled his little finger at me, I would have quit the Party. Anything. But it wasn’t me he had eyes for. It was obviously somebody who never turned up.”

  Yes, Moses thought, one eye brown, one eye blue.

  “Every time the courtroom door opened he looked up from the table, but it was never whoever he was waiting for.”

  “Were you in court when the customs inspector testified?” This country, Solomon had written in his journal, has no tap root. Instead there’s Bert Smith. The very essence.

  “Who?”

  “Bert Smith.”

  “No. I was there the day of the fat Chinaman, you know the one who was supposed to have known plenty. Well let me tell you he waddled up to the witness stand and he couldn’t even button his suit jacket over his belly, but then he stopped and looked at Solomon and Solomon smiled and said something to him in Chinese, and I’ve never seen anything so amazing in my life. By the time the fat Chinaman sat down in the box his suit seemed too large for him, he was swimming in it, and he couldn’t remember a thing.”

  “I’ll tell you what he said to him. ‘Tiu na xinq’, which means ‘Fuck your name’,” Moses said, and then he asked Gitel if she would like a liqueur with her coffee.

  “What about you?” she asked, fishing.

  “I don’t these days.”

  “Thank God for that much.” She ordered a B & B. “And what are you living on now that you can afford to invite me to the Ritz for a flirt?”

  “This and that.”

  “And what do you do out there, buried in that cabin in the woods?”

  If he told her the truth her manner would change, she would begin to humour him, an unredeemed nut-case, obsessed with delusions about Solomon Gursky. Moses lit a cigar. “I go to A.A. meetings. I read. I watch hockey games on TV.”

  “Oy, Moishe, Moishe, we all had such hopes for you. What kind of life is that?”

  “Enough personal questions for one day.”

  Gitel refused to let him put her in a taxi, saying, “You sit here and drink your coffee. I’ve got some shopping to do.”

  “Gitel, for Christ’s sake!”

  Outside, maybe a half hour later, Moses found her wandering down Sherbrooke Street, looking stricken. “It’s my address,” she said, tumbling into his arms. “I know I’m staying with my daughter, but sometimes I just can’t remember …”

  Moses drove Gitel home, out to the suburban barrens of Côte St. Luc, then he made right for the Eastern Townships Autoroute, peeling off at exit 106. Back in his cabin, he flicked on the TV and Sam Birenbaum’s face filled the screen. Sam, who had fallen out with the network years ago, now pontificated on PBS.

  My God, Moses thought, lighting a Monte Cristo, how many years was it since Sam had taken him to that lunch at Sardi’s? Twenty-five at least. “I’ve got something absolutely ridiculous to tell you,” Sam had said. “CBS wants to hire me for more than twice what I’m earning now and send me to London. But if I leave the Times I could freelance. Molly thinks it’s time I got some real writing done.”

  “Ah ha.”

  “What are you ah-ha-ing me for? I hate TV and everybody associated with it. It’s out of the question.”

  Moses flicked off the TV, poured himself a Perrier, and resolved once more to sort out the clutter in his cabin, starting tomorrow.

  There was a shelf laden with material on Marilyn Monroe, including a photograph taken at Peter Lawford’s beach house and Dr. Noguchi’s autopsy report. The photograph, taken in July 1962, showed a group sipping cocktails at Lawford’s poolside: Marilyn Monroe, President Kennedy, and several unidentified figures, among them an old man seated in a chair, a malacca cane held between his knees, his hands clasped over the handle, his chin resting on his hands. Dr. Noguchi’s autopsy notes described Marilyn as a “36-year-old, well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female weighing 117 pounds and measuring 65 ½ inches in height.” He ascribed the cause of death to “acute barbiturate poisoning due to ingestion of overdose.” Moses had attached a file card and a telegram to the report with a paper clip. The file card noted that the FBI had impounded the tapes of the phone numbers Marilyn had dialled
on her last day. The telegram, sent to Moses from Madrid and of course unsigned, read: I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING BUT THE LAST PHONE CALL WAS NOT FROM ME. I TRUST THE WORK GOES WELL.

  Moses’s work table was strewn with xeroxed pages from Solomon’s journals, tantalizing segments mailed to him when least expected from Moscow, Antibes, Saigon, Santa Barbara, Yellowknife, and Rio de Janeiro. The pages sent from Rio de Janeiro began with a description of the dragon’s chair:

  “The accused was obliged to sit in a chair, like one in a barber shop, to which he was tied with straps covered over with foam rubber, while other foam rubber strips covered his body; they tied his fingers with electric wires, and his toes also, and began administering a series of electric shocks; at the same time, another torturer with an electric stick gave him shocks between the legs and on the penis.”

  An earlier volume was introduced with lines from Milton’s Samson Agonistes:

  All mortals I excell’d, and great in hopes …

  Fearless of danger, like a petty god

  I walk’d about admir’d of all and dreaded

  On hostile ground, none daring my affront.

  The margins of each page of the journals were crammed with notes and queries and cross-references in Moses’s untidy scrawl. See Otto Braun, A Comintern Agent in China, 1932–39. Check Li Chuang on Snowy Mountains and Marshy Grasslands. Smedley and Snow contradict each other here. Consult Liu Po-cheng, Recalling the Long March, Eyewitness Accounts.

  Solomon’s Chinese journals luxuriated in detailed descriptions of barbarism. A Twenty-fifth Army scout, captured by the KMT, suffers the death of a thousand cuts. A weeping KMT spy is buried alive in the sand. A landlord’s head is lopped off in Hadapu, his last words, Tiu na xinq. There were acid portraits of Braun, the womanizer; Manfred Stern, later celebrated as General Kleber in Spain; Steve Nelson and Earl Browder in Shanghai; Richard Sorge’s arrival. There was also an unflattering sketch of a forty-year-old Mao, long before he took charge. Gaunt, eyes burning, suffering from malaria.

  Other pages dealt with the crossing of the Great Grasslands, that treacherous plateau, eleven thousand feet high, between the watersheds of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Late August 1935 that was, and the journey, which took six days and many lives, was undoubtedly the worst ordeal of the Long March. There were no signposts, no trails, no food, no yaks, no herdsmen. Solomon, who claimed that he was with the Fourth Regiment of the First Army Corps, calculating that they were the first human beings in three thousand years to pass through the tall, sometimes poisonous grass.

  Rain, sleet, hail, wind, fog, and frost. For the most part the men chewed raw unmilled wheat. It ripped their intestines, bloodied their bowels. Some died of dysentery, others of diarrhoea. The Tibetan muck, Solomon wrote, reminded him of Vimy Ridge. Men being sucked into the bog, disappearing. Unfortunately there were no fat corpse rats to roast. When they did find sufficient twigs for a fire, the men boiled leather belts and harnesses. The starving and feverish soldiers of the rear guard were driven to searching through the feces of fallen comrades for undigested grains of corn or wheat. Then, on the fifth day, Solomon’s bunch was lost in fog and frost. What appeared to be a trail made by the advance guard led them to a ditch filled with stagnant water. Late the next morning, a fierce wind blew the fog away. Then a raven appeared out of nowhere, soaring and swooping, and the men followed it to the banks of the Hou River. On the far bank, where there was dry ground and some wood to be found, they built a camp-fire and roasted their few remaining grains of unmilled wheat.

  Chang-feng Chen, Moses had scribbled in a margin, mentioned the raven. So did Hi Hsin, who wrote that just before the appearance of the big black bird Solomon had tramped up and down, searching the skies, some sort of sad clacking noise, an inhuman call, coming from the back of his throat.

  Ten

  Bert Smith had been living in Montreal for ten years now, since 1963, renting a room with kitchen privileges from a Mrs. Jenkins. He was used to being laughed at. Striding back from the meeting in the church basement in his scout master’s uniform, a scrawny seventyyear-old, his snaggle teeth still in place, he had to endure the oily Greeks nudging each other on their stoops, setting down their cans of Molson to belch. He was obliged to tolerate the whistles of French-Canadian factory girls with curlers in their hair. Street urchins with scraped knees were sent out to torment him, buzzing him on their skateboards. “Hey, sir, you want to ‘be prepared’, wear a safe.”

  Their ridicule, far from being humiliating, was fortifying. His crown of thorns. Rome was laid waste by the vandals and Canada, corrupt beyond salvation, would fall to the mongrels. The native-born young of the once True North, Strong and Free undone by jungle music, rampaging sex and the sloth licensed by a Judas state.

  Case in point.

  Last summer there had been two able-bodied men sharing the room next to his own in Mrs. Jenkins’s house. Both white, both Christian. They slept in until noon, then caught the latest porn movie at The Pussycat, subsisting on welfare, leaving instructions for their cheques to be forwarded to Fort Lauderdale during the winter. One day an indignant Smith invited them into his room and showed them a faded photograph of his parents taken in front of their sod hut in Gloriana. His father pale and wasted, his mother, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, looking more washed out than her calico dress. “Theirs was the indomitable spirit that tamed the wilderness,” Smith said. “Look at Saskatoon now. Or Regina.”

  “I been there, Smitty, and they’re so far behind the times there’s still dinosaur shit on the sidewalks.”

  “Where would this country be today had it been left to your sort to pioneer the west?”

  One of the men asked if he could borrow a ten spot until Monday.

  “No way,” Smith said.

  Mrs. Jenkins, a good sort, was blessed with a lively sense of humour.

  Question: What is a nigger carpenter’s favourite tool?

  Answer: A jigsaw.

  He did not have to worry about Jews on the street that he lived on in lowest Westmount, just this side of the railroad tracks. The street of peeling rooming houses with rotting, lopsided porches was altogether too poor for that lot. Even so, there was no shortage of trash. Noisy Greek immigrants cultivating tomato plants in rock-hard back yards. Swarthy, fart-filled Italians. Forlorn French-Canadian factory girls spilling over $4.99 plastic chairs from Miracle Mart, yammering each to each. West Indians with that arrogant stride that made you want to belt them one. Polacks, Portuguese. “Happily,” he once said to Mrs. Jenkins, “we will not live long enough to see Canada become a mongrelized country.”

  The concern, deeply felt, came naturally to Smith, an Anglo-Saxon westerner, born and bred.

  Back in 1907, the legendary Canadian journalist John Dafoe wrote an article aimed at enticing American immigrants to the prairie, assuring them there was no chance of a mongrel race or civilization taking hold in western Canada. Yes, there had been an influx of land-hungry foreigners, but most of them were of Teutonic and Scandinavian stock. The only alien race present in numbers in the west, the Slavs, were being rapidly Anglicized. Mind you, among more fastidious westerners there was also considerable concern about the quality of British immigrants. J.S. Woodsworth, who would become a saint in the Canadian socialist pantheon, a founder of the CCF party, worried in Strangers Within Our Gates or Coming Canadians, published in 1909 , about the immigration of Dr. Barnardo’s urchins with their inherited tendencies to evil. He liked to tell the story of how an English magistrate had chastised a young offender: “You have broken your mother’s heart, you have brought down your father’s grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. You are a disgrace to your country. Why don’t you go to Canada?”

  The British, Woodsworth protested, were dumping the effluvium of their slums on the prairie. A case in point, certainly, was Bert Smith’s father, Archie. A child of Brixton’s Cold Harbour Lane, apprenticed to a butcher at the age of twelve, he married Nancy, the dim daughter of a neighbo
uring greengrocer ten years later, and then in 1901 had the misfortune to attend a free lecture by the Reverend Ishmael Horn. Short of stature, this obviously worthy greybeard with the hot black eyes was a compelling figure, eloquent as well, extolling the virtues of Gloriana, his projected all-British colony in the Canadian west. To begin with, however, the Reverend Horn ridiculed the wretched circumstances under which his audience lived now. “Look at you,” he said, “packed like sardines in stinking hovels, enduring the rich man’s contumely, your bairns prey to pulmonary consumption and rickets.” His voice soaring, he told them about the fertile land with the invigorating climate that awaited them; a land where they could sow wheat and grow apple and pear trees; a veritable parkland rich in game of all kinds; a land of sweet grass and sparkling streams and brooks filled with leaping trout. Two hundred acres of their own choosing were there for the asking, he said. A manner of homestead that only the toffs could afford on this blighted island.

  So Archie and Nancy Smith joined the queue, filling out the necessary forms for the Reverend Horn’s secretary, the fetching Miss Olivia Litton, whom some would later remark had reeked suspiciously of spirituous liquors at the time. They signed the forms and pledged to pay a deposit against passage money within the week.

  Some months before, the Reverend Horn had been to see an official of the Canadian Immigration Department in Ottawa.

  “Sir, I cannot tell you how it grieves me to see the pristine prairie, the fine British province of Saskatchewan, polluted by dirty, ignorant Slavs in their lice-ridden sheepskin coats, and by the mad followers of Prince Kropotkin and Count Leo Tolstoy, the latter a novelist who celebrates adultery. Why are we welcoming these peasants when stout British yeomen, men of valour who held the thin red line against the Dervishes at Omdurman and marched through the Transvaal with Kitchener, are crying out for land?”

  The Reverend Horn promised to deliver four thousand skilled farmers, the flower of the sceptr’d isle, to the prairie at five dollars a head. In exchange he was granted an option on homesteads in twelve townships in Northern Saskatchewan, the wilderness where he was to establish the all-British colony of Gloriana. He was also provided with a Boer War troopship, the Dominion Line’s Excelsior, at Liverpool dock. The Excelsior, later to be dubbed the Excrement by its discontented passengers, was originally built to accommodate seven hundred cavalrymen and their horses. But on March 10, 1902, some two thousand emigrants were caught in the scrimmage on the gangway, the first of the settlers bound for the promised land of Gloriana. Among them was a terrified Archie with Nancy bearing her budgerigar in a cage. There were scrofulous Cockneys, Welsh miners spitting coal dust, and navvies from the Gorbals already staggering drunk. There were women with howling babes in their arms and children scurrying here, there, and everywhere, out to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. There were parrots and canaries and yelping dogs and a pet goat that would be roasted long before they reached Halifax.