Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Shuffling into court three days after Solomon’s disappearance, Mr. Bernard apologized to Judge Leclerc for being unshaven and for wearing a suit jacket with a torn collar and slippers. It was not, he assured him, out of disrespect for the court, but in deference to the tradition of his people when mourning the death of an immediate family member, in this case a cherished brother, no matter what his sins.

  Five days later, the Gypsy Moth still missing, Judge Gaston Leclerc delivered his verdict to an attentive court:

  “The Crown claims that the accused maintained agencies in Newfoundland and St. Pierre et Miquelon for the purpose of smuggling and that the sales made there were proof of an illegal conspiracy. However, the accused were jolly well within their rights. They were legally entitled to maintain such agencies in such places, and it is no secret that at the time many Canadian distilleries sold as many of their products as they could outside of Canada. These acts, I’m bound to point out, were legal and the vendors were not obliged to verify the destination of the goods they sold, nor was there any obligation upon them to inquire of the buyers what they intended to do with the goods.” The judge concluded, “There is no evidence that the accused committed a criminal act. I am of the opinion that there is not, prima facie, proof of a conspiracy as alleged, and the accused are herewith discharged.” However, he did add that if Solomon Gursky were to be found alive there would be other charges that he would have to answer to in court.

  The next morning an RCMP inspector subpoenaed Judge Leclerc’s bank records and raided his safety-deposit box. No incriminating evidence was found. In any event, Judge Leclerc retired the following year, stopping in Zurich before proceeding to the Cotswolds, where the estate he acquired had a walled rose garden, masses of rhododendrons, a labyrinth and apple and pear trees.

  The long-awaited verdict on the Gurskys didn’t even make page one, because the same day charred pieces of a disintegrated Gypsy Moth were found strewn over a three-mile area in the barrens. Many of the airplane parts were brought in by a wandering band of Eskimos, all of them wearing sealskin parkas with fringes hanging from the corners, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands. One of the Eskimos had found an attaché case embossed with the initials S.G. It contained Solomon’s passport and close on two hundred thousand dollars in American banknotes. Solomon’s body was never found. It was assumed to have been blown apart when the Gypsy Moth exploded, the pieces dragged off and consumed by the white wolves of the barrens.

  The next morning Mr. Bernard summoned Morrie to his house. “Before Solomon ran away,” he said, “he was good enough to sign these new partnership papers.”

  Fifty-five percent of McTavish for Mr. Bernard, thirty percent for Solomon and his descendants, and fifteen percent for Morrie.

  “I thought my share was going to be nineteen percent.”

  “I fought for you like a tiger, but he wouldn’t budge.”

  Mr. Morrie signed.

  “There’s only the two of us left now,” Mr. Bernard said.

  “Yes.”

  “But you mustn’t worry about me. I’ve decided to start having regular check-ups.”

  “Should I do the same you think?”

  “Aw. Why go to the expense? You look terrific.”

  Four

  Becky Schwartz’s name was now a fixture in E.J. Gordon’s Social Notes in the Gazette, most recently in a column celebrating an anniversary of the Beaver Club; Harvey, like the other achievers who had been invited, bedecked in a beaver hat and a tailcoat and sporting a goatee for one of the grandest nights an the city’s high society calendar.

  “Boy, do you ever look like a shmuck,” Becky had said before they started out.

  “I’m not going.”

  “We’re going. But would you please line the inside of that hat with paper or something. It looks like you have no forehead.”

  The Beaver Club was founded in 1959 to recreate the riotous dinners held two centuries earlier by Montreal’s fur traders. “Welcoming the guests,” E.J. Gordon wrote, “were Caughnawaga Indians, clad in doeskins, the men wearing feathered headdresses, standing beside their tepee in an encampment in the lobby of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel.” Seated cross-legged immediately before the tepee, beating the drums, was a fetching young girl, actually a great-great-granddaughter of Ephraim Gursky and Lena Green Stockings, who would later enchant the guests with her rendition of “Hava-negilla”.

  Becky studied E.J. Gordon’s column in her four-poster bed the next morning, reclining against satin pillows, picking at a bran muffin. She was in a sour mood. Problems with the children. Bernard, into coke and God knows what else, was falling behind with his studies at Harvard. Libby, at Bennington, wouldn’t come home until Harvey divested his shares in any company with holdings in South Africa. And Becky, her outsize donations to the art museum and symphony orchestra notwithstanding, had still failed to crack the right dinner-party lists. She insisted that Harvey take her to dinner at the Ritz.

  “The Moffats are watching our table. Order caviar.”

  “But I don’t like it.”

  “And don’t you dare mash chopped onions into it.” Then she told him what she had decided. “We’re going to redecorate the house and then hold a masked ball and invite le tout Montreal.”

  Becky went after the best that money could buy, the much soughtafter Giorgio Embroli of Toronto and Milan. Giorgio, a master of rectilinear circuitry, did not undertake commissions just like that. He had first to explore the physic boundaries of the three-dimensional space involved and to test the stream of kinetic energy bound to flow between him and his clients. Harvey flew him into town in a Gursky Challenger jet. He and Becky welcomed him to their house by cracking open a bottle of Pouilly-Fumé that came out of a Napa Valley vineyard only recently acquired by McTavish. Giorgio raised his glass to the light, took a sip, swished it around in his mouth and grimaced. “Sadly,” he said, “most Californian wines are completely incapable of producing a sensory shock. They never surprise you. They tell you how they were made, but not how they came into existence.” Then, patting his ruby lips with a handkerchief, he said, “Show me, please, where I can rinse out the palate.”

  Harvey didn’t blink at Giorgio’s fees. He stood by as the interior decorator floated out of the house, pausing at the front door, offering a pale scented cheek to Becky to be kissed. But once he was gone, Harvey threw out the Baccarat wine glass that had touched his lips and the Pratesi towel that he had used in the hall toilet. “I know they say that you can only get it from an exchange of bodily fluids,” he said, “but until they know for sure we’re not taking any chances.”

  Giorgio’s live-in companion, Dov HaGibor, was a talented painter out of Ramat Aviv. He had started out as an abstract impressionist, determined to create work that celebrated a collision of ur-references as well as trapping infinity and assigning a linguistic function to colour. Recently, however, HaGibor had confounded his admirers by converting to high-voltage realism, his pictures interpreting fractured rather than unified space. He found his subjects by seeking out junk shops wherever he travelled, never knowing what he was looking for but recognizing it immediately he found it. An old photograph, discovered in a Salvation Army sale in Montreal, was the causa causans, as Walter Osgood, curator of the Gursky Art Foundation put it in his essay in Canadian Art, of the famous 14 × 8-foot canvas that was to dominate the redecorated Schwartz living room, its value escalating once HaGibor had died of AIDS.

  There had been a barely legible inscription on the back of the original photograph that HaGibor had burnt once his painting was done: “Gloriana, October 10, 1903”. And “Gloriana” is what HaGibor called what came to be recognized as his masterpiece, the title an enigma, a matter of contention. Some critics argued that it made the artist’s satirical intent clear, but others insisted just as forcibly that HaGibor had meant his work to stand as a complaint against la condition humaine, as witness the Hebrew words flying off to the right. The words, translated, read: My day
s are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope.

  In any event, the undeniably striking canvas showed a bewildered couple, the husband dour, the wife looking stricken, standing before a sod hut, the landscape bleak as it was bare. Though the couple in the original photograph had hardly ever seen each other nude in thirty-two years of marriage, they were naked to the world in the painting, the woman’s breasts desiccated and her genitals bald; the man pigeon-chested with a penis like a withered worm.

  Harvey was determined to dump the canvas as soon as that hysterical Italian faggot was out of their house for good, but he relented once Walter Osgood came to inspect “Gloriana” and clearly coveted it. Then “Gloriana” was photographed for the cover of Canadian Art. Westmount matrons who had cut Becky at the annual museum ball now vied for invitations to view HaGibor’s last statement. The curator of the National Gallery in Ottawa requested permission to exhibit the painting, assuring Becky that a notice mounted alongside would read, “From the private collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Schwartz.” Dealers began to make unsolicited offers that would have enabled Harvey to quadruple his original investment, but he was not prepared to sell. Instead he increased the insurance on “Gloriana” five-fold. A risky move, as far as he was concerned, because if the picture were stolen anti-Semites would whisper that he had arranged it to collect the money. Harvey Schwartz would be blamed. Count on it.

  Eight

  One

  “According to the Haidas, of the unfortunately named Queen Charlotte Islands, more properly Haida Gwai, the Islands of the People,” Sir Hyman once said to Moses, “according to them, before there was anything, before the great flood had covered the earth and receded, before the animals walked the earth or the trees covered the land or the birds flew between the trees, there was the raven. Because the raven had always existed and always would. But he was dissatisfied as, at the time, the whole world was still dark. Inky black. The reason for this was an old man living in a house by the river. The old man had a box which contained a box which contained an infinite number of boxes, each nestled in a box slightly larger than itself until finally there was a box so small all it could contain was all the light in the universe. The raven was understandably resentful. Because of the darkness on the earth he kept bumping into things. He was slowed down in his pursuit of food and other fleshly pleasures and in his constant and notorious need to meddle and change things. And so, inevitably, he took it upon himself to steal the light of the universe from the old man.”

  Moses and Sir Hyman were strolling through Regent’s Park, en route to Prunier’s.

  “But I think I’ll save the rest of the story for lunch, dear boy. A pity Lucy couldn’t join us.”

  “An audition.”

  “In the end she will have to settle for being a producer, putting her inheritance and business acumen to some use. But don’t you dare repeat I suggested as much.”

  From the time Moses first met Sir Hyman in Blackwell’s bookshop, through his turbulent affair with Lucy and after, he had listened to the old necromancer pronounce on many things, but mostly politics. Mind you, they first began to see a lot of each other in an especially febrile year. A watershed year. 1956. Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, hinting that Stalin had been responsible for the murder of Kirov, his licence for the show trials that led to the execution of two more rivals, Zinoviev and Kamenev. After Khrushchev snitched, Nasser grabbed the Suez Canal. Then, in the autumn, Russian tanks rolled into Budapest. The British and the French, in collusion with the Israelis, attacked Suez.

  Moses and Sir Hyman talked at length about these matters, strolling through Regent’s Park or drinking late in Sir Hyman’s library, the old man sitting with a malacca cane clasped between his knees, his chin resting on the handle. Moses also became a fixture at Cumberland Terrace dinner parties, Sir Hyman seated at the head of a dining-room table with an Irish linen tablecloth, lecturing tycoons and cabinet ministers and actresses. Moses was enchanted. He was spellbound. But he also came to feel possessed. He discovered, to his consternation, that he had picked up some of Sir Hyman’s patterns of speech. Moses Berger, a Jeanne Mance boy born and bred, actually addressing people as “dear boy”. Even more chilling, leaning against the bar in The Bale of Hay, he once found himself passing off a witticism of Sir Hyman’s as his own. Another day he discovered himself drifting through the cane shop in New Oxford Street trying out various walking sticks for effect. He fled. He turned down the next invitation to dinner and the one after. Then, inevitably, he was drawn back to the flame.

  Drinking together in the library one night, Moses and Sir Hyman discussed the Khrushchev speech, Moses inveighing against the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, recalling the sense of betrayal round the table with the crocheted cloth. Sir Hyman pounced, holding forth on the history behind that devil’s accord. If not for the Germans, he said, there might never have been a Bolshevik revolution in the first place. They were the ones who slipped the silver bullet on to the sealed train to the Finland Station, counting on Lenin to seize power and take Russia out of the war. Then, in 1922, when the revolution was still in quarantine, the German delegation to the Genoa Conference signed the Rapallo Treaty with the Soviets, effectively ending their isolation. “The consequences of that treaty,” Sir Hyman said, “are not without interest.”

  It enabled the Germans to evade the arms clauses of the Versailles Treaty, sending air and tank officers to Russia for training. In return, the Germans built airfields for the Bolsheviks and tutored them in the military arts. “With hindsight,” Sir Hyman said, “we can say that the Wehrmacht that all but conquered Russia was trained there between 1922 and 1933, and instructed the army that destroyed them.”

  Each time they met, Sir Hyman inquired about Moses’s progress with his study of the Beveridge Plan. Finally Moses confessed that he had put it aside. Instead he was thinking of writing something about Lucy’s father, Solomon Gursky.

  “Ah.”

  Sir Hyman, he allowed, had inadvertently led him to a great discovery. While cataloguing Sir Hyman’s Arctic library, he had accidently stumbled on an unmistakable reference to Solomon’s grandfather Ephraim Gursky, and now he suspected that Ephraim might have been a survivor of the Franklin expedition.

  “But there were no survivors,” Sir Hyman said.

  “Certainly that would appear to be the case,” Moses agreed, adding that he would soon be returning to Canada to pursue his researches.

  “And will the Gursky family finance such mischief?”

  Moses laughed.

  “How will you manage, then?”

  “I suppose I’ll have to teach.”

  “I’ll put you on an allowance, my dear boy.”

  “I couldn’t,” Moses blurted out.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Coyness doesn’t become you, Moses. Neither are you a bore. Yes or no. I haven’t the patience to twist your arm before you condescend to accept a stipend from an indecently rich old man.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  Moses had only been back in Montreal for a month, filling in at McGill for a friend on a sabbatical, when he wrote to Sir Hyman, thanking him for his generosity, but turning down his offer of a stipend. Actually he was longing to take the money, but he suspected the offer was more in the nature of a test. If he accepted, he would be diminished in Sir Hyman’s estimation, and what he wanted, above all, was for the old man to love him. For the old man to look upon him as a son.

  Moses’s letter went unanswered for months of anguish, convincing him that he had blundered yet again, offending Sir Hyman when his real intention, he acknowledged, had been to ingratiate himself. Then Sir Hyman was heard from at last. A letter from Budapest. Would Moses consider coming over for the summer to help with some unspecified chores, while Lady Olivia was cruising the Greek islands with some old friends? Moses leaped at the opportunity.

 
“And how is the work progressing?” Sir Hyman asked.

  “By fits and starts.”

  “I was hoping you had brought me some pages to read.”

  Moses was put up in a spare bedroom in the flat on Cumberland Terrace, his initial chore to compile another catalogue, this time of Sir Hyman’s collection of Judaica. He was sent to antiquarian book dealers in Dublin and Inverness to inspect and acquire specific Arctic titles, the price of no consequence. He flew to Rome and Athens to deliver packets that could not be entrusted to the mail. Most weekends he joined Sir Hyman at his estate on the Sussex coast, accompanying him for a swim before breakfast, and encouraged to roam at will through the rambling house and grounds.

  Moses did not get over the following summer, but, instead, flew out to the Northwest Territories, ostensibly to visit Henry and Nialie, but actually to seek out Eskimos named Gor-ski, Girskee, or Gur-ski. However, he did keep in touch with Sir Hyman. Moses’s letters, polished again and again before he dared send them off, instantly regretted as too familiar or not sufficiently entertaining, were acknowledged by the occasional postcard from Havana or Amman or Saigon. And Moses was back in the summer of 1959, met by a Bentley at Heathrow and driven directly to Sussex. Sir Hyman welcomed him with champagne. “I can’t tell you,” he said, “how much I’m looking forward to reading the pages you brought me.”

  ‘‘Not yet.’’

  “But you are making progress?”

  Moses told him that he had acquired transcripts of the trial. He had been out west twice. He had spoken with Mr. Morrie again. “According to Lucy, her father kept a journal.”

  “And that would be a big help, would it?”