Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  “Are you ashamed of me?”

  “Maybe for more reasons than one,” Isaac said, fleeing.

  Seated at his rolltop desk with the two bullet holes in it, awash in estimates and brochures, Henry turned to his Pentateuch for solace, rocking over it, reading, “And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping things, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them.”

  Of course that could never happen again. God had established a covenant. He had set his bow in a cloud. But the conditions that prevailed today, the wickedness of man great in the earth, were as bad as those of Noah’s time. God’s punishment, Henry was convinced, would be another ice age. Then there would be floods and a properly equipped ship would be crucial to survival. Meanwhile, Henry continued to study the entrails.

  A CIA report predicted catastrophic changes that would return the world climate to a condition similar to that of one hundred to four hundred years ago. The report, leaked to the Washington Post, anticipated famine in the near future.

  The earth’s cooling will lead to increasingly desperate attempts on the part of the powerful, but hungry, nations to get grain any way they can. Massive migrations, sometimes backed by force, will be a live issue and political and economic instability will be widespread.

  Henry’s file also included a recent item clipped from the Edmonton Journal.

  The proposition that the planet is cooling has been advanced most articulately by Reid Bryson, professor of meteorology and geography at the University of Wisconsin.

  Between 1880 and 1940, the mean global temperature rose about one degree Fahrenheit. Since then it has fallen by about half that amount.

  Bryson argues that the period of 1930–61 was a time of extraordinarily benign weather that has been mistaken for normality. The earth’s declining temperature and the historical evidence persuade him that the weather in the coming years will be more unpredictable than ever—and quite possibly devastating.

  Once his parents had gone to bed, Isaac lit his handrolled cigarette in his own little bedroom, switching on a tape.

  A gale-force wind screamed across the Arctic. “Last week,” the narrator said, “we left Captain Allan Cohol lying in a fish net inches from death. Frightened by the golden-haired stranger’s escape from a coffin of ice after centuries of entombment, the men of the Eskimo village have overcome him and are preparing now to thrust a harpoon through the giant stranger’s heart.”

  “No!” Kirnik cried. “We will take him by sled to Dr. Fantom. The doctor has things to cause sleep. When he sleeps we will send for the police.”

  “So the men of Fish Fiord,” the narrator said, “manhandled the mighty man of muscle onto a dogsled, his fabulous frame still entangled in the coils of the net. Their destination was the sinister quarters of Dr. Fantom, renegade refugee from the world of medicine, practising his nefarious skills in the hiding of the high north. Fantom looked down at the giant in the net.”

  “I am Captain Allan Cohol. Inter-galactic 80321. I demand my rights.”

  Chuckling malevolently, Fantom said, “Come now, relax. My name is Frederick Fantom, MD. You may call me Fred. I will call you Al. Well, isn’t that amusing, gentlemen? Meet our new friend. Al Cohol. What a truly intoxicating pleasure to make your acquaintance. Now then, your arm, my friend. This won’t hurt a bit.”

  “Don’t touch me with that needle, you foul physician. This is medical mayhem,” Captain Al Cohol protested, already in a daze.

  “Let’s get some stimulant into you. Overproof rum. Just what the doctor ordered, Al. Now open your mouth like a good patient.”

  Sounds of struggle. Gurglings, splutterings, liquid being swallowed.

  “Look,” Kirnik cried, alarmed. “Look at his eyes. Look at the way his face is changing.”

  Captain Al Cohol began to roar. “Kill! I’ll kill you all. A-a-rghh-h-h!”

  There now came the terrifying sounds of tearing and rending. The Eskimos shout and scream as Captain Al Cohol hurls himself at them.

  “What is this?” the narrator asked. “Captain Al Cohol, the hero of the inter-galactic fleet, driven into madness by a glass of rum?”

  Then another voice proclaimed, “The ordeals of Captain Al Cohol is a radio adaptation by E.G. Perrault of a comic-book series written by Art Sorensen for the Alcohol Education Program of the Northwest Territories Government.”

  His tape done, Isaac reached under his mattress to dig out his folder of New York photographs, cut from the pages of Time, Newsweek and People. Photographs of the world out there where the main event wasn’t the arrival of an Otter from Yellowknife and the sun didn’t sink below the horizon for month after chilling month. Photographs of film stars and tycoons and fashion models. He had written to his Uncle Lionel, reminding him of his visit and inviting him to come again, signing himself, “Your admirer, Isaac.” In response, he had been sent an electric train set with a card signed by Lionel’s private secretary.

  The next evening a resolute Isaac delighted Henry at the dinner table, joining him in saying grace and asking if they might resume their Talmud studies. They had only been at it a week when Isaac burst into tears at the table.

  “What is it, yingele?”

  “Please don’t send me to school in Yellowknife. I want to attend the Rebbe’s yeshiva in Brooklyn.”

  Henry, his eyes sparkling, danced his son around the room, singing, “Shteht oif shteht oif, l’avoidas haBoiray.” Wakeup, wake up, to do the work of the Creator.

  Nialie watched without expression, frightened for both of them.

  Three

  September 1916. Solomon, seventeen years old now, short for his age, wiry, his skin burnt nut-brown by the prairie sun, was perched on the corral fence behind the Queen Victoria Hotel with Bernard and Morrie. Plump Bernard, who parted his hair in the middle and already owned a three-piece grey serge suit and a homburg and spats, sucked on a caramel. Morrie, whittling away on a chunk of wood as usual, was apprehensive as Solomon had joined them on the fence for once, familiar as he was with Solomon’s need to bring Bernard to the boil. Slapping at flies, squinting against the sun, the Gursky brothers were waiting for the sale to start. Aaron had bought a snorting, restive herd of wild mustangs from Hardy, overpaying again, and now hoped to sell to the farmers, most of whom were already in debt to him at the store. By this juncture the Gurskys had moved into town, living above

  A. GURSKY & SONS

  GENERAL MERCHANTS

  Importers of Stable and Fancy

  DRY GOODS

  Sole Distributors of

  DR. COLBY’S celebrated ANTI-COSTIVE

  and TONIC PILLS, unequalled in the

  Promotion of Regular Evacuation.

  Cajoling, sweaty, Aaron bantered with the farmers at the corral, laughing too hard at their inane jokes. The farmers feigning indifference, most of them waiting for sundown when the jumpy Jew’s prices would drop.

  No sooner did Aaron cut a deal on a horse, realizing a small profit, than he would invite the buyer into the hotel bar for a ceremonial drink. The farmer would not order a beer like Aaron, but would spit on the sawdust-covered floor, wink at the bartender, and demand a double shot of the hard stuff, saying, “Both of my boys have already enlisted, but I suppose yours will be staying put.”

  Then a breathless Aaron would zip out to the corral again, counting the shiny rumps of the remaining horses, calculating likely losses in his head, mingling with the other farmers, thrusting gifts of coloured hair ribbons at their wives and children. Panicky at sundown, he would drop prices drastically.

  Solomon prodded Bernard with his elbow. “Now that you’re such a man of affairs, a student of correspondence courses, what do you make of all this?”

  “Whatever I make of it is strictly my own business.”

  “Why can’t we be like the three musketeers,” Morrie asked, “all for one and one for all? The Gursky brothers.”

  “We
ll,” Solomon said, “I’ll tell you what I think. The bar’s turning over a bigger profit than Paw is sucking up to that bunch of farmers. What Paw ought to do is buy the hotel and sell drinks and let somebody else worry about the horses.”

  And then Solomon, terrifying Morrie, jumped down from the fence right into the flow of wild nervy horses in the corral. Solomon, Ephraim’s anointed one.

  Bernard didn’t credit most of his brother’s tales about his trek to the Polar Sea with their grandfather. But whatever had really happened out there, Solomon had returned blessed with a certain grace, an inner stillness. And watching him now, at ease with the wild mustangs, Bernard grasped that had he been the one to jump into the corral, probably stumbling in the dust, they would have smelled his fear and reared up on their hind legs, snorting, looking to take a chomp out of him. Bernard understood for the first time that he was a coarse, tubby little man with wet fishy eyes, and that he would have to scratch and bite and cheat to get what he wanted out of life, which was plenty, but that Solomon would sit, expecting the world to come to him, and he would be served. He watched Solomon crossing that corral, he watched choking on envy and hatred, and yet, for all that, he yearned for Solomon’s approval. Then Solomon spoiled it by pausing to taunt him, calling back, “Follow me, Bernie, and I’ll buy you a beer.”

  “Go straight to hell.”

  “Aw, you two,” Morrie groaned. “Hey, you’re crying.”

  “I am not. He’s going to shtupp Minnie Pryzack now.”

  Minnie, comfortably ensconced in the Queen Victoria Hotel for years, was only seventeen when she first went west, working the first-class carriages on the train from Winnipeg to the coast and back again.

  “He’s going to shtupp Minnie and then he’s going to join the poker game.”

  “They’d never let him play in the big autumn game. Besides, he’s busted.”

  “I wasn’t afraid of jumping into the corral, but then you would have had to come after and you could have been hurt. Is he really broke?”

  “They cleaned him out last Thursday.”

  Aaron, sprawled at the kitchen table, smelling of manure, his ears and nose clogged with dust, his back aching, counted out his money twice, calculating that he had turned a profit of fifty-five dollars, provided two of the farmers honoured their notes.

  Morrie stooped to remove his father’s boots and then brought him a glass of lemon tea and a bowl of stewed prunes.

  “Paw,” Bernard said, “if you ask me, you work too hard for too little.”

  “You’re a good boy,” Aaron said. “Morrie too.”

  RATHER THAN RISK throwing everything into the pot in the heat of the game, Solomon gave Minnie. his valise, as well as his railroad ticket out and five ten-dollar bills, which would see him through, if things turned out badly. Then he drifted through the kitchen of the Queen Victoria Hotel, climbed the back stairs to the third floor, and rapped three long, two short, and one long on the attic door.

  McGraw shot the bolts. “You can’t play. Not tonight.”

  Solomon didn’t budge.

  “It’s different rules tonight, kid. You know that.”

  Not including Solomon, there were five of them gathered together for the big autumn game, the betting soaring so high it could only be risked once a year. McGraw, the owner of the hotel and the blacksmith’s shop, a recent acquisition; George Kouri, the Lebanese, who had owned the five-and-ten-cent store and a shop that sold buggies and wagons; Ingram, Sifton’s man, who dealt railroad land to the Slavs in their sheepskin coats; Charley Lin, who had owned the laundry and the butchershop, but since last autumn’s big game only a couple of bedbug-ridden rooming houses; and Kozochar, the barber and fire chief. A side table was stacked with cold cuts, potato salad, and bottles of whisky and vodka. There were two cots in an adjoining room, in case anybody needed to take a nap or wanted to send down for one of the girls, maybe changing his luck.

  Last year’s big game had ended acrimoniously after forty-eight hours, one of Charley Lin’s rooming houses, the blacksmith’s shop, two cow pastures, six heifers, three Polish whores and one Indian one and $4,500 changing hands. The men involved in the big game enjoyed the status it conferred on them by dint of the enormity of their winnings or losses. The game, a curse on the wives, had once been broken up by three of them marching on the tables. Since then it convened at a different place every year. The basement of Kouri’s five-and-ten. The back room in the fire station. And this year the attic of the Queen Victoria Hotel. Weeks before the men sat down to the table, the game was the subject of speculation in town, and was denounced from the pulpit by the Reverend Ezekiel Shipley, who blamed it all on the harlots of the town.

  McGraw was adamant. “It just wouldn’t be right to deal you in,” he said.

  McGraw had been against allowing Solomon into the weekly game in the first place. He was hardly a man of substance, like the rest of them, but merely a snooty kid. Besides McGraw liked Aaron, a dummy maybe, but an honest and hardworking Jew. Kouri had been indifferent, but Ingram was also opposed and Kozochar dead against it. “It would be like taking candy from a baby.”

  “His money’s as good as yours or mine,” Charley Lin said with appetite.

  Ostensibly it was the need to teach Solomon a lesson that was his ticket of admission, because the men resented him without knowing exactly why. But there was another consideration. They wanted to impress him with their money and their moxie. That little son of a bitch.

  His grandfather had been a squaw man, his father was a peddler, and, for all that, the boy, a mere seventeen-year-old, a squirt, a Jew, strode through the streets of town as if he were a prince-in-waiting, destined for great things. Unfailingly polite, considerate, it was difficult to fault him. If a fire broke out at four o’clock of a sub-zero morning, he was there at once to join the bucket brigade. When Miss Thomson was poorly, laid low with one of those feminine ailments, he took over the schoolhouse, enchanting the children. The Reverend Shipley, who could sniff evil in a year-old babe born to fornicate, sought out Solomon for discussions of the Holy Scripture. He was also more welcome on the reservation than any one of them, and could be gone with the Indians, God knows where, for ten days at a time. But there was something about him that riled the men and made them want to rub his nose in fresh dog shit.

  Unlike pushy Bernard or Morrie (a really nice, polite kid), he didn’t deign to serve in his father’s store. But it was because he could be found there on occasion that the daughters were drawn to A. Gursky & Sons in swarms, blushing if he greeted them, the one he picked out for a buggy ride all but swooning on the spot. And, remarkably, the other young men in town, far from being jealous, vied for his favour, competing to recruit him as a hunting or drinking partner.

  Once Solomon just happened to be passing in his buggy when McGraw’s wagon was stuck in the mud. Immediately he jumped down and offered help. “No, no,” McGraw protested, kneeling in themuck, his own shoulder to the wheel, “you’ll only get dirty.” Then McGraw turned pale, amazed at himself, because he would not have said such a thing to anybody else in town.

  Solomon brought two hundred dollars to his first game, his pool-room earnings, and was promptly stripped of it. But he didn’t sulk. He didn’t complain. Instead he joked about it. “My initiation fee,” he said.

  So when he turned up again he was made welcome, the men digging deep for old hunting stories and gilding tales of past sexual triumphs, determined to prove to him that far from being a bunch of big-bellied hicks they were, if the truth were known, a band of hellraisers.

  Solomon did reasonably well in his second game until he foolishly tried to bluff Kouri, showing three ladies, with what turned out to be no better than eights over deuces. He lost a third time and a fourth and now he was back, demanding a seat at the autumn game. McGraw didn’t like it one bit. If they cleaned him out people would say they had taken advantage of a kid, but if he won it would be even more embarrassing.

  “I must have dropped fiv
e hundred bucks at this table,” Solomon said. “You owe me a chair.”

  “We don’t owe you shit,” Ingram said.

  “No IOUs tonight. You want to sit down,” McGraw said, sure that would be the end of it, “you got to show us at least a thousand dollars.”

  Solomon laid out his money on the table like bait immediately before Charley Lin.

  “What can I get you to drink, kid?” Charley Lin asked.

  BERNARD BROUGHT HIS FATHER a slice of honey cake. “Paw, I’ve got an idea.”

  Aaron, dazed by fatigue, itchy everywhere from horsefly bites, only half-listened.

  “We could bring in a fiddler on Friday nights. Salt the pretzels more. Start a darts league. I know where we can get mugs with bottoms an inch thicker for the draft beer. Morrie could handle the cash register.”

  “And how would we raise the down payment?”

  “McGraw buys his beer from Faulkner’s. If we switched to Langham, signing a contract with them, they’d lend us some money. So would the bank.”

  “Sure. The bank.”

  “This isn’t Russia, Paw.”

  “Neither is it Gan Eden.”

  Aaron, his money in hand, shuffled over to a corner of the kitchen, lifted a plank floorboard, dug out his strongbox, unlocked it, and howled and stumbled backward, a stricken man. Fanny, who had been tending to the pots simmering on the wood stove, was instantly by his side. “Aaron!”

  His eyes had gone flat. All he could manage was a croak. “It’s gone. The money.”

  “Some of that money’s mine,” Bernard yelled, seizing the box, turning it upside down and shaking it.

  Out tumbled citizenship papers, a marriage licence, birth certificates, but no cash and no deed to the general store.

  “Should I go to the police?” Aaron asked in a failing voice.

  “Only if you want to put your son in prison,” Bernard said.

  “How can you be sure it was him?” Morrie asked.

  “I’ll kill him for this,” Bernard said. And he was off and running, pursued by Morrie. Bernard didn’t stop before he stood red and panting before Boyd, the porcine clerk in the Queen Victoria Hotel. “Where’s the fucken poker game?” he demanded.