Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

Who slipped into their room one night,

  And crept beneath the bed;

  And there he saw them at the fun,

  And he his tool did dandle.

  Says he, “I’ll give them a thing

  Much better than a candle.”

  The sum Ephraim was offered for his candlesticks in the first pawnbroker’s shop he entered did not tempt him; he also declined the pittance proffered in the second jerryshop he visited. Unfortunately, coming out of yet another shop, he was nabbed by a peeler.

  Shedding hot tears, Ephraim fell to the gutter, kicking his legs, hoping to attract the sympathy of passersby. He protested that he was an orphan, driven by hunger to pawning his beloved granny’s candlesticks, but his story wouldn’t wash. Ephraim spent his first night in London incarcerated in the gassy bowels of a rotting hulk on the lower Thames and within a week he was sentenced to six months in the notorious “Steel” (so-called after the Bastille) in Coldbath Fields.

  On arrival, the lags sized him up and assumed that once Sergeant Walsh had wearied of him, he would be sequestered in the harem until things sorted themselves out and he found a protector. But the obdurate Ephraim refused to lower his trousers for Sergeant Walsh. As a consequence, he was obliged to ride the cockchafer every morning, treading down a wheel of twenty-four steps that sank away from him at an infuriating fixed rate in stifling heat. When that failed to do the trick Sergeant Walsh sentenced him to a week of shot-drill on the square. For this exercise he joined other offenders in a row, the men posted three yards apart. On a shouted order from Sergeant Walsh each man picked up a twenty-four-pound cannon-ball, lugged it as far as his neighbour’s position and hurried back to his own place, where another cannon-ball left there by his other neighbour was waiting for him. The drill usually lasted an hour, sometimes longer, depending on how urgently Sergeant Walsh needed a beer. When Ephraim still resisted the sergeant’s advances, he earned himself some time on the crank. This required him to turn a sand-filled drum with a crank handle, the drum’s revolutions recorded by a clock mechanism. He was birched again and again. Then one morning Sergeant Walsh was found squatting in an outhouse, his throat slashed from ear to ear. Detectives descended on the Steel, questioning all the lags, putting everybody on short ration, flogging indiscriminately, but the culprit was never discovered. Ephraim, a prime suspect, was vouched for by Izzy Garber, who swore that the boy, troubled by a fever, had slept by his side all through the night.

  The impudent, astonishingly resourceful Izzy Garber, a hirsute, barrel-chested master of magic, was a born scrounger for whom nothing was impossible, even within the bleak confines of the Steel. At the right moment Izzy’s loosely worn shirt would yield salamis, coils of stuffed derma, roasted chickens or rounds of cheese acquired who knows where, God knows how. He also never lacked for tobacco and gin and Indian hemp and soothing salves to heal the lacery of cuts burnt into Ephraim’s back. The other prisoners, even the turnkeys, treated Izzy with deference, calling upon him again and again to extract teeth, set broken bones, or stitch knife wounds, no questions asked. Izzy, never without his yarmulke, embossed with the inscription, “Honour the Sabbath, To keep it Holy,” was the most triumphantly Jewish man Ephraim had ever met. “Look at their God, or son of, as those sods would have it. Turn the other cheek. The meek shall inherit the earth. Codswallop. Nancyboy horseshit. But our God is truly vengeful,” Izzy once said, thrusting his siddur at Ephraim. “So say your evening prayers, because it doesn’t pay to mess with Jehovah, that old Jew tucker.”

  Izzy aside, Ephraim’s sojourn in the Steel proved an invaluable learning experience. From coiners who normally operated in the Holy Land rookery of St. Giles he learned how to take a counterfeit with an unmilled edge and work it into acceptable coin. Practising with pickpockets of his own age he was soon adjudged sufficiently adroit to become a dipper, although he had no intention of putting himself in the hands of a kidsman when he got out.

  “Nischt fur dich,” Izzy Garber said.

  From a member of the swell mob out of Seven Dials Ephraim absorbed all he needed to know about garroting. But Izzy proved Ephraim’s most beneficial teacher. One night he told him how he had used to work village greens as a prater, or bogus preacher, raising funds for a mission to the savages of the Gold Coast. “‘Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy the sinners thereof out of it.’” Another night Izzy recalled his days as a professional beggar. He told Ephraim how, posted outside a church, waiting for the Christians to emerge, he would promptly fall to the ground, simulating convulsions: foam, produced by soap shavings under his tongue, bubbling pathetically to his lips. Then, as soon as sympathetic members of the congregation had flocked around, he would whip out his letter.

  THIS IS TO CERTIFY, to all whom it may concern, that the EXEMPLAR, Captain Staines, was returning to Liverpool Dock, from the Canadas, laden with beaver pelts from Rupert’s Land, and that said vessel encountering a prodigious GALE and ICEBERGS off the banks of Newfoundland, and was dismasted and finally wrecked on the ice. That the above-mentioned vessel foundered and only the second mate and three of the crew, the bearers of these certificates, escaped a watery grave. These survivors were humanely picked up by the brig GLORIANA, Capt. Wescott, and landed at Tilbury Dock. That we, the Masters of Customs, and one of Her Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for the said dock, do hereby grant and afford to said ISRAEL GRANT this vouchment of the truth of the said wreck and do empower him to present and use this certificate for twenty-eight days from the date thereof, to enable him to acquire such temporal aid as may be essential to reaching his wife and children in the Outer Hebrides. And this certificate further sheweth that he may not be interrupted in the said journey by any constabulary or other official authority, provided that no breach of the peace or other cognizable offence be committed by the said Petitioner.

  As witness to our hands,

  Magnus McCarthy, M.C. £1-0-0

  Archibald Burton, J.P. £ 1-0-0

  Given at Liverpool Dock, this 27th day of January 1831.

  GOD SAVE THE KING

  Given his skill in penmanship and Latin, and the connections he had made in the Steel, Ephraim envisaged setting himself up as a screever once his sentence was done. Izzy was pleased with his protégé. “It wouldn’t be nice for a Yiddisher boy to be a footpad or a dragsman. Remember, tsatskeleh, we are the People of the Book.”

  “How will I find you after I get out?”

  “Don’t worry,” Izzy said. “I’ll find you.”

  On his release, Ephraim dug his money out of its hiding place in Hyde Park, acquired the necessary quills and inks and parchments, and moved into a lodging house in Whitechapel. Within months he was prospering. After dark he drifted from gin-shop, through bordello to gaming-house, seeking Izzy Garber, unavailingly. But during the day he was hard at it. He wrote letters for ruined clergymen. “Milady—I held the rank of Captain in the Peninsular War. I have struggled exceedingly hard, after being discharged from the service on account of my crippling wounds, but unhappily.…” Keeping a sharp eye on the death notices in the Times, he would send an appropriately dressed dollymop, a pillow bound to her belly, to the fashionable home of the newly bereaved family of a gentleman. She would carry a letter saying that the bearer had been seduced by the deceased and was now with child but utterly without means, cast off by her own family, and though she did not wish to publicize the affair.…

  His letters, the penmanship exquisite, were signed with the names of sea captains, rectors, major generals, and lords of the realm; and they were garnished with heart-rending appeals, nicely turned Latin phrases and suitable biblical quotations.

  Such was the demand for Ephraim’s inventive pen that he soon acquired an opera hat, a white waistcoat, an elegant snuff box and a silk handkerchief. He was brought to the attention of a theatrical producer, who offered him a position in his combine of brothels. Ephraim declined, but he did accompany him
to a boxing match and saw Ikey Pig, a Jew, badly mauled. However, one taste of the fancy was enough to make him a victim of boximania. He was with the producer again when an American Negro, an escaped slave, had the effrontery to challenge for the enviable title of Champion of England. As Pierce Egan wrote of this match, “that a FOREIGNER should have the temerity to put in a claim, even for the mere contention of tearing the CHAMPION’S CAP from the British brow, much more the honour of wearing it, or bearing it away from GREAT BRITAIN, such an idea however distant, never intruded itself into the breasts of an Englishman.”

  Ephraim, despairing of ever finding Izzy, became a regular at Laurent’s Dancing Academy in Windmill Street, the Argyll Rooms, and of course Kate Hamilton’s night house, flourishing there as a favourite of Thelma Coyne, whom he considered establishing in a flat in Holborn as his very own poule-de-luxe.

  Wandering through Piccadilly one night he was drawn into his first, admittedly spurious, acquaintance with Canada through a theatrical poster.

  EGYPTIAN HALL

  Piccadilly

  JUST ARRIVED

  Canadian North American

  INDIANS!

  Will perform at the above hall, at 2 o’Clock in the afternoon, & 8 o’Clock in the Evening

  A Grand Indian Council

  In front of the Wigwam, when the whole Party will appear in FULL NATIVE COSTUME,

  Displaying all the Implements of War.

  THE CHIEF

  Will Shoot An Apple Off A Boy’s Head!

  A Facsimile of Scalping!

  Never before attempted in this country

  THE WAR DANCE

  In which the Indians will give a true Specimen of the FURIOUS RAGE with which feelings are aroused against their adversary at an approaching conflict.

  BURYING THE HATCHET, AND SMOKING

  THE CALUMET (OR PIPE) OF PEACE.

  A slash glued to the poster announced:

  Entirely due to Sacred ABORIGINAL RITES

  There will be no Performances,

  Wednesday, Oct. 8 or Thursday, Oct. 9.

  Thrilled by the events in Egyptian Hall, but naggingly suspicious of the chief, Ephraim slipped backstage after the performance. Voices were raised in the chief’s dressing room.

  “Paskudnyak! Mamzer!”

  “Hok mir nit kayn tchynik.”

  “Ver derharget!”

  His doubts happily confirmed, Ephraim kicked open the door. The hirsute, barrel-chested chief instantly dived behind a screen. His plump raging wife scooped up a hatchet.

  “Izzy, come on out of there.”

  “Ephraim!”

  The two old lags embraced. “I told you I’d find you,” Izzy said, and then turning to his wife he added, “This lad here can set bones almost as well as I can. You can’t teach these things. You’ve got to have the touch.”

  They repaired through greasy fog to a garlicky, smoke-filled basement kitchen in Soho that kept open late to cater to the troupe as well as other dubious night people. Buxom waitresses in stained lowcut blouses sailed through the jostling crowd, hoisting tankards of ale even as they slapped probing hands, their curses drowned in a cacophony of Yiddish, Greek, and Italian. In a gas-lit corner, an old jeweller, one eye sprouting a magnifying glass, bargained with a solemn moustachioed Sikh. At Izzy’s table, platters of chopped liver and shmaltz herring were followed by steaming trays of stuffed derma, boiled flanken, kasha drenched in chicken fat and potato kreplach. Shouting over the din, Ephraim congratulated Izzy on the full house at the Egyptian Hall and then asked why there would be no performances on the Wednesday and Thursday of the following week.

  Affronted, Izzy replied, “I think it would be most inappropriate for us to perform the war dance on Yom Kippur.”

  “Gottzedank,” Mrs. Garber said.

  What finally brought Ephraim down, as it would many times in the future, was a dangerous admixture of vanity, lust, and recklessness. Many a night he entertained two particularly pert Irish girls, the Sullivan sisters, in his attic rooms. The obliging sisters, who lived in the same lodging house as he did, thrived as palmers by day, prostitutes by night. On occasion Ephraim, in a mood to go on the randy, would treat the two of them to an evening at the Eagle, splurging on a box. Not for the small profit involved, but because he enjoyed the sport of it, there were nights when Ephraim would go out bug-hunting with them. The sisters, posted under a gas lamp, would lure a likely, prosperous-looking drunk, preferably a country bumpkin, into buying them a tot in a gin-shop where Ephraim waited. Jammed tight against the crowded bar, Dotty would stroke him, lick his ear, and sing softly:

  Tell me, what it is I spy,

  Frisky Johnny, randy Johnny,

  Hanging down beside your thigh,

  Frisky Johnny, randy Johnny?

  Have you got a swelling there,

  Frisky Johnny, randy Johnny?

  Meanwhile Kate would pick his pocket and usually that’s all there was to it. But if the victim caught on to what was happening, making a fuss, then Ephraim would be called upon to act as the sisters’ stickman. Simulating outrage, he would elbow through to the victim, vociferous in his defence, assuring him that he had seen everything. Then, as soon as Kate had slipped him the booty, he would rush off, ostensibly to fetch a peeler, but actually hurrying back to his lodging to await the girls, a bottle of claret uncorked on his bedside table. If necessary, back in the gin-shop the girls would submit to a useless search, protesting their innocence, bawling at their offended modesty, until the embarrassed victim would flee into the fog.

  Bug-hunting became such a plague that questions were raised in parliament. Irate citizens wrote to the Times, inveighing against Scotland Yard’s ineptitude. And so, inevitably, one night the sisters’ victim turned out to be a police detective, working with an accomplice of his own. The accomplice, another detective, followed Ephraim out of the gin-shop, nabbing him as he was about to enter his lodging house. Even so, Ephraim might have got off with another six-month sentence, but the detective insisted on a visit to his rooms.

  “You don’t understand, sir,” Ephraim said. “I don’t live here among the Ikey Pigs and I had no idea that those girls had slipped that gentleman’s purse into my pocket.”

  “Why did you stop here, then?”

  “You will think badly of me, sir, but I had come to await those wicked girls in their rooms. My father was taken from us at Trafalgar and now my poor widowed mother will be undone. I am a victim of my own lust.”

  But a closer search of Ephraim’s waistcoat yielded one of the calling cards he had foolishly had printed and the address was the same. The detective and Ephraim proceeded to his attic rooms, where the work table was strewn with begging letters awaiting pick-up by clients. Burglar’s tools, actually not Ephraim’s but held by him for a ticket-of-leave man of his acquaintance, were discovered in the closet. A brace and bit fitted with a large, adjustable cutting head; a jemmy; a set of pick-locks and a peter-cutter. A desk drawer turned out to be filled with forged official seals. Another drawer contained a harvest of silk handkerchiefs, the property of the Sullivan sisters, but no matter. As the detective began to make notes, Ephraim lunged at him, knocking him off his feet, and flew down the stairs right into the waiting arms of the other detective, who had just entered the lodging house with the Sullivan sisters in tow.

  “There he is,” Dotty squealed, “the fancyman who forced us into a life of sin.”

  “He takes all our money,” Kate hollered.

  Two

  The fat pulpy man from the DEW line station offered him twenty dollars, but Isaac wouldn’t do it. Instead he continued as before. For five dollars he met the man once a week in the toilet of the Sir Igloo Inn Café and pumped his thing until it squirted. This time, however, the man gave him two hand-rolled cigarettes as well. “It’s a special kind of tobacco, kid. If you like it, and you want more, maybe we can talk again about the other deal.”

  Isaac couldn’t spend his earnings going to a movie because they didn’
t have one. They didn’t have anything in Tulugaqtitut. Bored, an irritated Isaac drifted through the settlement, cursing it. He paused at his customary vantage point, the one that offered him a view of Agnes McPhee’s bedroom. She seldom drew the curtains, and more than once he had seen Agnes going at it with one of the bush pilots, her quivering naked legs reaching for the ceiling. But today he couldn’t even catch her undressing. So Isaac wandered into the Hudson’s Bay trading post, Ian Campbell instantly alert, setting aside his ledgers to watch him. “Hey, Isaac,” Campbell called out, playing to the other customers, “has your father decided on which kind of boat yet?”

  Everybody, but Nialie, knew Henry was crazy. “Mind your own business,” Isaac hollered.

  “Just asking, kid, because it looks like rain.”

  Each mail plane would bring Henry elegant packages from boatbuilders. C. vanLent & Zonen Kaag, Abeking & Rasmussen, S.E. Ward & Co., Hitachi Zosen. Each package came with encomiums from satisfied sheiks and international arms dealers and Hollywood moguls. There were colour photographs, elaborate deck plans, and, invariably, a personal letter from the designer.

  None of them understood. Henry was not unreasonable. He didn’t expect a boat built of gopher-wood, or that the length would be three hundred cubits, the breadth fifty cubits, and the height thirty cubits. But he was not interested in Twin MTU main engines or U25 HP Caterpillar D-353s. When the time came he was not so foolish as to think his descendants would send forth a dove—or, more appropriate to the generations of Ephraim, a raven—but neither would a pad for a Bell Jet Ranger III helicopter be required. The likelihood was that there would be no fuel and they would be dependent on the wind in their sails for power. So Henry was thinking of a three-masted ship modelled on turn-of-the-century schooners or possibly a windjammer or the sort of square-rigger that had once been built in the Maritimes.

  “Please don’t do it,” Isaac said.

  “Why not, yingele?”

  “Don’t do it!”

  “Give me a reason.”

  “Everybody is laughing at us already. Is that reason enough for you?”