Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  The pilot watched Henry heave the half-trunk on to the cart and trundle off, past the Co-op, toward the settlement, oblivious of the swarming mosquitoes. The settlement was comprised of fifty pre-fab cubes, known as 512s because they each measured 512 square feet. The 512s were laid out in neat rows, huddling tight to a fire station, a meeting hall and school, a nursing station, the Co-op, and the Sir Igloo Inn Café, which was run by the local bootlegger. There was also a Hudson’s Bay trading post with living quarters for the factor, a taciturn young man called Ian Campbell. Campbell had been recruited to North of Sixty directly from Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis. A wool-dyer’s boy, he now found himself master of credit and provisions, a keeper of ledgers, with something like the powers of a thane over the hunters in the community. He avoided the school-teaching couple from Toronto, who pandered to the natives, and he was no more than polite to the sluttish nurse who swam through his dreams, making him thrash about in bed at night. On occasion loneliness drove him to playing chess with the unbelievably rich crazy Jew, but, for the most part, he favoured drinking with the grey pulpy denizens of the overheated DEW line station, some eight miles from the settlement.

  In the winter you could distinguish Henry’s pre-fab from the rest, as it was the only one without quarters of frozen caribou or seal ribs stacked on the roof. It was also larger than the other pre-fabs, made up of three 512s joined together. Henry kept dogs. He could afford to feed them. Twice a week a wagon passed and filled everybody’s household tank with fresh drinking water that had been siphoned through a hole in the ice of a nearby lake. Once a day the honey wagon stopped at each pre-fab to pick up the Glad bags filled with human waste. These were dumped on the ice only three miles out to sea in spite of the hunters’ complaints. The problem was that following spring breakup the bags floated free and many a seal brought in was covered in excrement, an inconvenience.

  During the long dark winter there was a ploughed airstrip illuminated by lighted oil drums, but in summer only float planes serviced the settlement.

  A Greek immigrant, the pilot had been told in Yellowknife about Henry. He had thought, understandably, that they were pulling his leg. He had been seated in the sour-smelling Gold Range, knocking back two and a juice with some of the other bush pilots and miners when a Yugoslav foreman from the Great Con had said, “He’s been all the way to Boothia with a dog team and he knows King William like the palm of his hand.”

  “What’s he looking for?” the Greek asked, soliciting laughter. “Oil?”

  “Brethren of his who have strayed too far from the sun.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You’re not expected to.”

  The nurse was there. Thinner than he liked, older than he had been told. “I brought you something,” he said.

  “Yes,” Agnes said, “they usually do,” and she turned and walked away from him. If he followed, all right, if he didn’t, all right. It wasn’t in her hands.

  Henry, approaching the Sir Igloo Inn Café, a corrugated hut, saw a tangle of kids cavorting in the dust. As he drew nearer one of the kids squirted free, black hair flying, and disappeared behind an aluminum shed. “Isaac!” Henry called after him, abandoning his cart to pursue his son. “Isaac!”

  He found him hidden behind an oil drum, chewing greedily on a raw seal’s eye, sucking the goodness out of it. “You mustn’t,” Henry chided him, tenderly wiping the blood off his chin with a handkerchief. “It’s not kosher. It’s unclean, yingele. Trayf.”

  Isaac, giggly, his coal-black eyes bright, accepted an orange instead. “Aleph,” Henry said.

  “Aleph.”

  “Beth.”

  “Beth.”

  “And next?” Henry asked, pausing to pull his ear.

  “Gimel.”

  “Bravo,” Henry exclaimed, pushing open the door to his pre-fab.

  “Nialie,” he sang out, “it’s here.”

  His wife, an uncommonly slender Netsilik out of Spence Bay, smiled broadly. “Kayn anyhoreh,” she said.

  Together they lowered the zinc half-trunk to the floor, Henry unlocking it, taking only the bill of lading from the Nôtre Dame de Grace Kosher Meat Market, in Montreal, to the rolltop desk that had once belonged to his father. There were two bullet holes in it. “We’ve got a new pilot today. A Greek. Agnes came out to meet him.”

  “Then he will find something wrong with his engine and he will stay the night.”

  “That’s enough, Nialie.”

  At three A.M. the lowering sun bobbed briefly on the world’s rim.

  Henry, who had only ten minutes before it would start to climb again, stood and turned to the east wall, the one that faced Jerusalem, and began his evening prayers. Unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul.

  Henry’s faith, conceived on the shores of another sea, nurtured in Babylon, burnished in Spain and the Pale of Settlement, seemingly provided for all contingencies save those of the Arctic adherent. So Henry, a resourceful man in some matters, usually improvised, his religious life governed not by the manic sun of the Beaufort Sea, but instead by a clock attuned to a saner schedule. A southern schedule.

  Henry slept for six hours, waking the next morning, Friday, to find Nialie salting a brisket that had defrosted during the night. She allowed the blood to drain into the sink, even as her grandmother had learned to do it as a child during the season of Tulugaq who had come on the wooden ship with three masts. The sabbath chicken lay trussed in a pot, the braided bread was ready for the oven.

  His morning prayers done, Henry shed his talith, folded it neatly, and removed his phylacteries. Immediately after breakfast he sat down at his desk to write a letter to Moses Berger.

  By the Grace of G-d,

  15 Nissan, 5734

  Tulugaqtitut, NWT

  Dear Moses,

  Have you heard that since February photographs taken from a satellite have revealed fractures in the Tweedsmuir Glacier? My charts show the Tweedsmuir to be 44 miles long and 8 miles wide. Since February it has stepped up its pace as it marches across the Alsek River Valley. In fact the glacier, which has been creeping southeast at a rate of less than 2 ft. 3 in. a day, is now heaving forward about 13 feet daily. At peak periods last winter Tweedsmuir was moving an astonishing 288 ft. a day. I realize this sudden restlessness is not without precedent and could be an isolated, freakish matter. But I would be grateful if the next time you see Conway at the Institute you had a word with him and checked out the movement of the other glaciers. I am particularly interested in any changes in the habits of the Barnes Ice Cap where, all things considered, it might begin again.

  Conway, as you know, has no time for loonies like me, but you might point out to him that in the last 15 years there has been a marked increase in precipitation on the Barnes Ice Cap, especially in winter.

  Nialie sends hugs to you and Beatrice and so does Isaac. Isaac (somewhat late in the day, it’s true) is making gratifying progress with his aleph beth. I would be grateful if you would write soon. We worry about you.

  Love,

  HENRY

  The last time Henry had seen Moses was just after he had been fired by NYU. Henry, in New York to consult with the Rebbe at 770 Eastern Parkway, had gone to visit Moses in his apartment. A fetid basement hole on Ninth Avenue. Furniture you couldn’t unload on the Salvation Army. Empty Scotch bottles everywhere. On the bathroom sink a bar of soap resting in slime with indentations made by the teeth marks of mice.

  Four o’clock in the afternoon it was and Moses was still lying in bed, his face puffy and bruised, a purple bloom on his forehead. “What’s today?” he asked.

  “Wednesday.”

  Henry rented a car and drove Moses to the clinic in New Hampshire.

  “He looks like he ran into a wall,” the doctor said. “Who did he get into a fight with this time?”

  “That’s unfair. He was mugged. Look here, Moses has never been violent.”

  The doctor extracted a typed sheet from a file on his desk. “O
n a flight to New York a couple of years ago—unprovoked, according to eyewitnesses—he tried to punch out a couple of furriers and had to be forcibly restrained by crew members. Your friend is filled with bottled-up rage. Shake the bottle hard enough and the cork pops.”

  Moses’s last letter to Henry had been bouncy, even joyous, which was worrying, because in the past that had always been an alarm signal. He and Beatrice were living together again, this time in Ottawa. Moses, who was lecturing at Carleton, didn’t dare disgrace himself again, but he seemed well aware of that.

  … and I haven’t had a drink or even risked anything as intoxicating as coq au vin for six months, two weeks, three days and four hours. Bite your tongue, Henry, I may have been through that revolving clinic door for the last time.

  Beatrice is in Montreal this week, writing an ode-to-Canada introduction to the annual report for Clarkson, Wiggin, Delorme. It’s a grind, but surprisingly well paid. She says Tom Clarkson (LCC, Bishop’s, Harvard MBA) is an insufferable bore, but, hell, he’s putting her up at El Ritzo. For all that she’s lonely, so I just might surprise her and fly into Montreal one of these nights in time to take her to dinner.…

  Henry hesitated before sealing his letter. Should he add a postscript about his cousin Lionel’s perplexing visit? No, he wouldn’t, because he was ashamed and had already been rebuked by Nialie for his meek behaviour. Mr. Milquetoast, that’s me.

  Lionel’s visit would have been a trial at the best of times, but as his cousin came during Aseret Yemai Tushuvah, the Ten Days of Repentance, it was a mitzvah to be reconciled with a family member who had wronged you, even as it was written: “A person should be pliant as a reed and not hard like a cedar in granting forgiveness.”

  Lionel, his sister Anita, and his younger brother Nathan were the heirs apparent to McTavish Distillers Ltd., Jewel Investment Trust, Acorn Properties, Polar Energy, and the rest of the increasingly diversified Gursky empire. Lionel, Henry remembered, had been the boldest of the Gursky brood even as a child. Grabbing maids where he shouldn’t. Propelling his bicycle into whatever new boys had been screened to play with him, knowing that their palpitating mothers wouldn’t dare complain.

  Henry hadn’t heard from Lionel, who presided over the New York office of McTavish Distillers, for a good ten years when the distressing phone call came. Henry grasped that so far as Lionel was concerned he was certifiable if push came to shove, and maybe he was right. Retrieving an old quarterly McTavish report from a bottom desk drawer, and skimming through it before being confronted by Lionel, was enough to confirm to Henry his own inadequacies. Oy, was he ever in for a drubbing! Lionel, unlike him, was bound to be in tune with the songs that money sang. Bank debentures, floating bond rates, amortization of deferred charges, et cetera. All Greek to Henry.

  LIONEL, FLYING INTO YELLOWKNIFE on one of the Gursky jets, recalled his cousin Henry as a backward boy—no, just this side of retarded—whom he used to tease because he was such a bed-wetter. Henry had actually had to repeat the sixth grade. Then, if memory served, there had been no high school for the little prick, but instead an endless spill of grim deferential tutors and shrinks and maybe a private school or two for rich kids whose elevator didn’t go to the top floor. Somewhere along that troubled road Henry had found God and retreated into a Brooklyn yeshiva where he no longer dared to even change his toothpaste brand without the approval of his mighty Oz, the Rebbe who ruled the funny-farm at 770. And then— presto!—he had lit out for the Arctic, of all places, where he took a stone-age bride, an Eskimo. Wait, wait. There had been a newspaper story that had prompted Henry’s flight to the far north—something that Lionel’s parents had worried about in the kitchen, gabbing away in Yiddish. Lionel dimly remembered bits and pieces. A newspaper item recounting that, inexplicably, for the third time in a century, a remote band of Eskimos was starving. The authorities were baffled because at the time there was no shortage of blubber or whatever it was they ate. The nutty natives simply refused food. Even when government officials airlifted in all manner of supplies they still wouldn’t eat. Psychologists who were hurried out to the scene hinted at dark tribal rites, the curse of shamans, referring dumbfounded reporters to Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido, The Golden Bough, Totem and Taboo. But all the natives would allow was that it was forbidden, it was the Day of the … what? The Owl? The Eagle? Some shit like that. Nobody could understand the problem, and then Henry flew out and somehow or other set things right. Some of the Eskimos had died, but many were saved.

  Henry flew into Yellowknife on a Ptarmigan Air Otter, taking Isaac with him so that he could have a first look at Sir John Franklin High School, which he would most likely have to attend once he had graduated from primary school in the settlement. Nialie was not disposed to accept the alternative, the Rebbe’s yeshiva high school in Crown Heights. “The other boys wouldn’t accept him as such a shayner yid. He would be picked on just because he’s a different colour.”

  The enterprising commissioner of the Northwest Territories, anticipating possible investments, had led the delegation greeting Lionel at the airport. Lionel, grown bald and portly, resplendent in a beaver coat, a Giorgio Armani suit and sheepskin-lined boots, his eyes hidden behind tinted aviator glasses. The commissioner had ordained that the penthouse apartment in the nine-storey building, known locally as The Highrise, should be made available to Lionel, the bar thoughtfully stocked only with bottles blessed with the Gursky brand names. The penthouse, lavishly appointed by North of Sixty standards, had been built to accommodate Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip on their visit to the Northwest Territories in 1970. “I hope you’ll be comfortable between the royal sheets,” the commissioner said, his eyes twinkling.

  “I’ll require a board to go under my mattress. My back, you know.”

  “Right, right. Now I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that there are old natives here who still tell tales about your great-grandfather, tales handed down from one generation to another. Would you care to meet any of them, Mr. Gursky?”

  “Tight schedule. Can I get back to you after I’ve met with my cousin?”

  Lionel was annoyed that when Henry, that God-crazed fool, finally did turn up, he had brought his little half-breed son with him. But the boy, obviously as dim-witted as his father, settled unobtrusively into a corner with a comic book and the latest issue of The Moshiach Times. Page one delivered a Tzivot Hashem Report from a girl named Gila, rooted in Ashkelon. She wrote, “Our madircha, our counsellor in Tzivot Hashem, tells us that there are children like ourselves all over the world, all trying to do the same thing, to carry out the commands of our Commander-In-Chief, Hashem.” The proper noun Hashem was followed by an asterisk that led to a footnote explaining, “Hashem: A name of G-d,” as if Isaac didn’t know as much.

  Isaac seemed self-absorbed, indifferent, while the two men talked or, more accurately, Lionel pontificated and Henry listened.

  “I think it’s time we put our fathers’ quarrels behind us, Henry, don’t you?”

  Nialie had made Henry promise. Don’t fidget. Look him in the eye. Yes, he had assured her, but he had already lowered his eyes and begun to cross and uncross his legs.

  “You’re a character, Henry. You’re really something else. Do you know you still haven’t cashed your last dividend cheque?”

  “I’ll send it to the bank first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “That cheque was for three million, eight hundred thousand and some odd dollars. Have you any idea what you’ve already lost in interest?”

  Having managed to put him on the defensive, Lionel now did his shrewd best to evoke the old days, reminding him of the games they had played together behind those tall sheltering walls. Then, tired of dribbling, he went for the basket. Mr. Bernard, he said, was now seventy-four years old, he no longer dipped both oars in the water, so it was sad but inevitable that control of James McTavish Distillers Ltd. would soon fall into Lionel’s hands.

  “What about Nathan?”

 
“Let’s be serious. It’s a humbling thought,” Lionel went on to say, “but also a challenge. Remember what John Kennedy (another bootlegger’s son, eh) said? The torch has been passed to another generation. I used to shmooze with Bobby. I know Teddy. Sinatra has been to our place in Southampton. You know who sang at my Lionel Jr.’s bar mitzvah? Diana Ross. Kissinger has to use the can there’s one of the girls from Rowan and Martin being shtupped by the schwartze. Not Sammy Davis Jr., but the other one. The funny one. Rocky was at the bar mitzvah. So were Elaine and Swifty and Arnie Palmer. We golf together. About the distillery. There will be changes. Long overdue. Control should pass into my hands, but there’s a kicker. What we have to remember is that this is a public company with an enviable cashflow and shares that are presently under-valued, so there are lots of vultures circling out there. The family, assuming all of us vote our shares as a block (after all, we’re mishpoche, no matter whose version of the old quarrel you accept) still only controls 21.7 percent of the company. According to the best advice available to me—and I’m talking Lehmann Brothers, I’m talking Goldman Sachs—we’re vulnerable. Maybe even a sitting duck. Now put plainly, Henry, you have no real interest in the company. Why, you’ve never so much as attended a board meeting. That’s not a reproach. We’re all so damned proud of you. You’re into things that really matter. God and eternity and shit like that. Henry, you’re a saint. A flicking saint. I look up to you. But somebody’s got to stay in New York and watch over the shop. It isn’t carved in stone anywhere that a Getty will always run Getty Oil or a Ford Ford. You’re lucky enough to have it you’ve got to watch over it day and night. Henry, in order to protect everybody’s interest, including yours and Lucy’s, I need the authority to vote both your shares. I brought along some proxy papers. You could have the Rebbe look them over. Or I tell you what. And I want you to know I didn’t come here intending to make this offer. I could regret it tomorrow. My lawyers will think I’m crazy. I am crazy! I’m willing to buy out all your shares at 25 percent above current market value. What do you think?”