Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Trying to reconstruct Ephraim’s interminable winters in the high Arctic, the sun sinking below the horizon for four months, Moses had to rely on conjecture and the accounts of other nineteenth-century explorers. Then there were the fragments from Solomon’s journals, those tales told by Ephraim on the shores of a glacial lake, man and boy warming themselves by their camp-fire under the shifting arch of the aurora.

  Navigation in the Arctic Archipelago was limited to eight weeks. Then, confronted with the melancholy prospect of yet another winter, the men would either blast or saw their ship’s path into a safe harbour, where they would be held hostage in the pack ice for ten months. They would set to cutting the ice for fresh water and constructing an ice wall around the ship, piling snow against the hull for insulation, and erecting canvas housing on the decks. The officers, intent on maintaining morale, diverted the crews with foot races on the ice, cricket matches, schools, and theatrical performances, the temperature on stage below zero for the Christmas pantomime. “No joke,” the saucy Lieutenant Norton complained, “when you are wearing petticoats.” Cabin boys and the more comely of the able sailors and marines took to demanding exorbitant fees for their favours from smitten officers.

  Solomon noted in his journal that Ephraim attended classes in astronomy, becoming proficient in reading the stars, and never missed a lecture by Mr. Stanley, the surgeon on the Erebus.

  “The science of medicine has now arrived at such perfection in England,” Mr. Stanley said, “that we have almost forgotten the crude beginnings out of which our present knowledge was evolved. But from our pinnacle of learning, it is interesting to observe the darkness in which the wild Esquimaux still tolerates a class of medicine man whose pretensions to perform all kinds of miracles are of the extravagant character. These shamans say they can and do make themselves larger and smaller at will, or change themselves into some other animal, or enter into a piece of wood or stone; that they can walk on water and fly through the air; but there is one indispensible condition—no one must see them.”

  The officers laughed appreciatively.

  “Alas,” Mr. Stanley continued, “the matter is serious. The shamans, to take one example, have absolutely no understanding of the nature of delirium. When a patient becomes delirious, as in severe fevers, they take him to be mad, possessed of an irresistible desire for cannibalism.”

  Franklin, his death foretold, was buried on June 11, 1847 in the British ensign Lady Jane had embroidered for him. And when the longed-for summer dawned at last, its feeble sun was insufficient to free the ships from the ice floes.

  The men, their teeth swimming in their bloodied mouths, were put on even shorter rations, Ephraim told Solomon. Scurvy, Solomon noted in his journal, claimed twenty of them in the winter of 1848. And then the Erebus became the place of darkness between Earth and Hades. Men tore at each other’s faces over a chunk of tainted meat and performed acts abhorrent to them for the sake of a ration of tea or tobacco. Officers wept as they wrote letters of farewell. The captain of the forecastle sat at the organ for hours, playing hymns, praying for deliverance from the sunless frozen sea. A demented, feverish Philip Norton, wearing a wig, his cheeks rouged, his lips painted, paraded below decks in a ball gown, attended by admirers, pausing to pinch Izzy Garber’s cheeks or caress Ephraim’s buttocks, speculating aloud on which one would taste most tender in the pot, warning everybody that it would come to that soon enough. One morning he had Ephraim led forcibly into his tiny cabin where, in spite of the intense cold, he lay on his bunk wearing nothing but a black suspender belt and stockings, singing softly as he combed his pubic hairs with a toothbrush. “The time has come, my dear, to reveal where you and Grant have your secret store of food.”

  Hallucinating crew members, fearful of being butchered, were never without a weapon to hand. Those who had spit out their teeth long ago and were now too weakened to move, ridden with skin ulcers, coughing phlegm and blood, slid in pools of diarrhoea in their hammocks. Those who were still mobile but with gums already livid, their mouths tasting of death, split into rival gangs, each suspecting the other of nourishing themselves on hidden caches of food. On the prowl, armed, they organized flash searches. Officers were openly jeered. An alarmed Crozier and Fitzjames met in the wardroom of the Erebus, two Royal Marines standing guard at the door.

  Moses Berger, his annotated Franklin library all but definitive, found that more than a hundred years later scholars were still puzzled by why the expedition men, having decided to abandon their ships, sickly and inadequately equipped as they were, elected to strike out, by way of Back’s Fish River, for Fort Reliance, some eight hundred miles away. “Certainly only some grave factor or combination of circumstances,” wrote Hudson’s Bay Chief Trader William Gibson, FRGS, in The Beaver (June, 1937), “could have precipitated such a hazardous and daring decision.”

  The grave circumstance, according to Ephraim, was Crozier’s conviction that mutiny was imminent.

  Scholars were even more baffled by the amazing variety of articles strewn about the lifeboat found by Hobson near Victory Point. Silk handkerchiefs, scented soap, sponges, slippers, toothbrushes and hair-combs. That is to say, just about everything required for the toilette of the demented “Dolly” Norton and his entourage. Neither could scholars understand why the lifeboat was pointed in the direction of the abandoned ships.

  Ephraim told Solomon: “Crozier and Fitzjames had departed with the men they ajudged to be loyal or at least sane. They induced Norton and his band to separate from the main body, bribing them with stores of tea and chocolate, and allowing them to take me and Izzy with them. Prisoners for the pot. But as God spared Isaac from the knife at the last moment, providing a ram in his place, so we were saved by that polar bear they shot on the ice. Norton and his bunch immediately set to gobbling the liver raw, sparing not a slice for us, and that was that.”

  Hypervitaminosis, a toxic reaction to an overdose of Vitamin A, its severity heightened by the absence of Vitamins C and E, is acquired by eating the liver of a polar bear or bearded seal. The disease is so rare it is not even listed in Black’s Medical Dictionary. Its symptoms, Moses noted on one of his file cards, are as follows:

  Headaches, vomiting, and diarrhoea, all of which appear promptly. And, within a week, scaling and stripping of skin, loss of hair, splitting of the skin round the mouth, nose, and eyes. This is followed by irritability, loss of appetite, drowsiness, vertigo, dizziness, skeletal pain, loss of weight, and internal disruption from swelling of liver and spleen, including violent dysentery. And, in severe cases, convulsions, delirium, and possible death from intercranial haemorrhage.

  Ephraim told Solomon: “The Eskimos who had been with us for four days had gone, and we were still camped some seventy miles from the ships, unable to move on, the men vomiting and shitting themselves, blaming it all on the seal they had shared with the Eskimos. Izzy was feverish. And Norton, wearing his ball gown in the tent, warmed as it was by a feeble fire, swore he would have me for his catamite. When I began to curse, he ordered his followers to lower me to my knees, arms twisted behind my back. Thrusting himself at me, he raised his skirts and lowered his silk panties, and then it was he saw fragments of his own skin and hair fall into the snow. His privates were red and raw. Crazed now, he lowered his stockings, sobbing as strips of skin peeled off his legs. The other men, determined to examine themselves, let go of me. Oh, there rose such a wailing in that tent, and threats of murder for me and Izzy, who had not been affected. With the greatest of difficulty the quarrelsome, failing men managed to turn the lifeboat round on the sledge, intending to head back to the ship and rest there until they recovered, butchering me and Izzy for food. However, they were so weakened by dysentery by this time that it did not take much for me to leap at Norton from behind, topple him, slit his throat, and retreat from the others with Izzy in the direction the Eskimo band of hunters had gone, dragging our things with us on a makeshift sled.”

  There was a gap in Solomon’s
journal, and when he next took up Ephraim’s tale it was to recount the story of his grandfather’s contest with the shaman in the camp of the hunters. The hunters were Netsiliks. One of their number, Kukiaut, had served on an American whaler for two years and was able to both translate for Ephraim and teach him Inuktituk.

  The contest was over a sickly child, keening women dancing around him in the igloo, crying, “Hi-ya, hi-ya, hi-ya.”

  The boy had fallen through a scalp of ice into freezing water. His cheeks were burning hot, he was delirious, but Ephraim guessed he was suffering from nothing worse than a bad case of the grippe, and offered to treat him with medicines from Izzy’s sea chest. But Inaksak, the wily old shaman, denounced the usurper, a bloodthirsty interloper, who would bring storms and death into their camp. The old man, mocking Ephraim, pranced about him, snarling, flaunting the amulets hanging from his belt: rows of seal and bear teeth, the head of a tern carved in soapstone, the penis of a walrus. The child, he proclaimed, was possessed by an evil spirit, but the mighty Inaksak, with the help of the ghost of Kaormik, would draw it out of his body, curing him.

  “Gottenyu,” Izzy said, “have they got dybbuks even here?”

  Crouching, covering himself with a caribou skin, Inaksak went into a trance. Then he advanced on the boy, rolling his eyes, groaning, flashing his snow knife.

  Izzy, recognizing another professional, nudged Ephraim. “Careful, old son. He’s bloody good he is.”

  Sucking at the feverish boy’s stomach, Inaksak reeled backwards as the evil spirit struck him. Staggering about the igloo—thrashing— thrusting with his snow knife—he wrestled with the spirit. Finally, blood trickling down his chin, he spit out a stone at Ephraim’s feet, pronouncing the boy freed, and fell down in a swoon. But, within hours, the boy was worse, and a rueful Inaksak declared that he was possessed by too many tupiliqs for him to vanquish, the evil spirits having come with the kublanas. He ordained that the hunters must now build a small igloo and abandon the boy and the intruders there to freeze to death, lest the blight overwhelm everybody in the camp.

  Once the sentence was translated, an outraged Izzy had to be restrained from leaping at the shaman. He appealed to Ephraim. “Explain to the silly buggers that the old fart drew the blood from his mouth by lancing his gums with the stone.”

  Instead Ephraim said that he and Izzy would be pleased to accompany the boy to the igloo, providing they were allowed a stone lamp and fuel and food for a week, and in that time Ephraim would cure the boy, proving that he could perform greater magic than Inaksak.

  Ephraim told Solomon: “Worse luck. The day I brought the boy back, shaky on his feet, but obviously on the mend, our return was followed hard by a blizzard. Inaksak, that cunning old bastard, danced up and down, saying my magic was bad. I had angered Narssuk, god of the wind, rain and snow.”

  Narssuk’s father, a huge double-toothed monster, had been slain in a battle with another giant. His mother had also been killed. When still an infant, Narssuk was already so large that four women could sit on his prick. He flew into the sky and became an evil spirit, hating mankind, restrained from mischief only by the thongs that held his caribou skins in place. However, if women kept silent about their menses or other taboos were broken, Narssuk’s thongs loosened, he was free to move about, and tormented the people with blizzards.

  “Now, because of the kublanas, I will have to fly into the sky,” Inaksak said, “and fight Narssuk, tightening his thongs, or there will be no good weather for the hunt and we shall all starve.”

  But once the hunters and their women and children had gathered outside it became clear that Inaksak’s flight had become unnecessary. The storm had abated as suddenly as it had started. Ephraim then noted the position of the moon bobbing on the horizon. Hoping against hope that his calculations were right, he said, “I am more powerful than this foolish old man, or even Narssuk, and to prove it to you I will soon raise my arms and lead the moon, who is my servant, between you and the sun, bringing darkness in the season of light, and then, unless you obey my smallest wish, I will turn myself into a raven and pluck your eyes out one by one.”

  Once this was translated by Kukiaut, the Eskimos, vastly amused to have such a braggart in their midst, sat down to wait.

  Ephraim disappeared into his igloo and emerged again wearing his silk top hat and his talith. He sang: “Who knows one? I know One: One is God in Heaven and Earth. Who know Two? I know Two: Two is the Tablets, One is God in Heaven and Earth.”

  He rolled over in the snow, simulating convulsions, froth bubbling from his lips. Then he stood up, and at the rising of the moon he lifted his arms and the eclipse began. The astonished Eskimos cried out, falling to their knees, pleading with Ephraim not to become a raven and pluck out their eyes.

  And Ephraim said unto them:

  “I am Ephraim, the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other gods before me.

  “Thou shalt not bow down to Narssuk, whose prick I have shrivelled, or to any other gods, you ignorant little fuckers. For the Lord thy God is a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”

  He enjoined them not to steal or kill, unless ordered to do so by Ephraim, and instructed them not to take his name in vain. “Six days shalt thou hunt, providing meat for me and Izzy, and on the evening of the sixth day thou shalt wash thy women and bring them to me, an offering—”

  Izzy stamped his foot.

  “—and to my priest here. And on the seventh day, which is my sabbath, thou shalt rest.”

  In the days that followed, the women lying with him under caribou skins on the snow platform, the men gathered round, Ephraim told them, “In the beginning I created the heaven and the earth.”

  Ephraim enchanted them with stories of the flood, Joseph’s coat of many colours, and his ten plagues, the latter tale a favourite of the hunters.

  Ephraim set and mended their broken bones, he tended to their sick, and when a female child was born he would not allow them to strangle and then eat it, and when a male child was born he showed them how he was to be circumcised.

  Ephraim promised them that their seed would be as numerous as the stars above. He told them that one day he would have to leave them, but, if they continued to behave themselves, he would send them a Messiah in another generation. The Messiah, a descendant of Ephraim, would return their ancestors to them and make the seal and caribou so plentiful that nobody would starve again.

  Ephraim also bestowed on his followers a version of Yom Kippur, telling them that this was his holiest of holy days, and that from the time the sun went down, until it rose and went down again, any of his flock who was thirteen years old or older was not to fuck or eat any food, but instead must pray to him for forgiveness of his sins. He laid down this law in a foolish and absent-minded moment, overlooking the fact that his faith provided for all contingencies save that of the Arctic adherent.

  In the years to come, followers of Ephraim who wandered too far north in search of seal in October soon discovered that they were in bad trouble. Once the sun went down they were obliged to remain celibate and fast until it rose once more several months later, not sinking below the horizon again for many more months. As a consequence, some sinned against Ephraim, the men stealing out of camp to eat, their women seeking satisfaction among the unclean. But most stayed in place to starve, dying devout, unless Henry, that good shepherd, found them, and hurried them south to the sun and deliverance.

  Five

  “You’re taking it wrong, Bert. Nobody’s asking you to leave. But as I now have a professional to handle all the repairs and you can’t afford the going rent, it’s only fair you should move into the small room in back.” Mrs. Jenkins, standing on the throw rug, shifted her weight from one foot to another, her ear cocked to the floorboard’s answering squeak. “Loose board,” she said.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Smith said.

  “I’ve got a couple would
take this room on Monday and pay me forty dollars a week in advance.”

  Quitting the house in a rage, Smith hurried down the street, passing neighbours, not one of whom greeted him with a wave or even a smile. Grabby cheeky foreigners. Bloody ungrateful, that lot. If one of their women got on the same bus as he did, never mind she was merely an ignorant cleaning lady, pilfering from her betters, he immediately offered her his seat. Why, once he had even carried parcels home from the Metro for Mrs. Donanto. But if he ever slipped on the ice, breaking an ankle, the neighbours would probably cheer. Certainly they would leave him lying there with the poo from the Reginelli dog who did his business anywhere.

  Smith went to the bank, withdrew his weekly two hundred dollars, and then treated himself to coffee and a blueberry muffin at Miss Westmount. He had his pride. He would not submit to the indignity of that two-by-four room with a slit of a window overlooking the rats feasting on the garbage in the back lane. Instead he popped in on Mrs. Watkins and inquired about the vacant room in her house. Then he splurged on lunch at Ogilvy’s and went home for a nap.

  “Thinking of moving out, are we, old buddy of mine?”

  Smith, startled, felt the room begin to sway.

  “Go ahead. Make my day. The reason Mrs. Watkins has a vacant room is an old guy conked out in bed. Probably froze to death. Or didn’t you know she sets her thermostat at sixty-five?”

  “I have no interest in your back room.”

  “Guessy guessy why Mrs. Watkins phoned the minute you left her cockroachy place? Because she’s put up with old fusspots got one foot in the grave before and she wanted to know did you pee in bed?”

  “Have you quite finished, Mrs. Jenkins?”

  “Mrs. Jenkins is it now? Ha! I found an empty Laura Secord box in your wastepaper basket last week as well as a takeout bag from the Shangri-la and three Lowney’s Nut Milk wrappers. Where did you get the do re me, Bert?”