Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  “If it still exists and I manage to get my hands on it, yes, certainly, an enormous help.”

  “Well, if you really haven’t brought me any pages, I do hope you at least remembered to pack your dinner jacket.”

  Sir Hyman and Lady Olivia were expecting something like sixty guests that evening, some arriving by car and others in a bus chartered for the party in honour of a visiting American senator. Sir Hyman, waving his hand, had assembled the usual suspects for the occasion. A lively but potentially vitriolic mix of politicians, film and theatre people, men “who were something in the city,” art dealers, journalists, and any American of consequence who happened to be in London. Included in the latter group, much to Moses’s delight, was Sam Burns, en route to Moscow to cover Vice-President Nixon’s visit for the network.

  Moses, taking Sam by the arm, led him on a private tour of the gardens and then through a basement door, down a winding corridor, into a vast wine cellar. He sat Sam down at a table, fetched a couple of glasses, and cracked open a bottle of vintage champagne.

  “Christ,” Sam said, “are you allowed to do that?”

  “Hymie wouldn’t mind in the least.”

  “You call him that?”

  “Sure.”

  Sam strolled down one of the wine cellar rows, scanning labels. “Not a bottle of Kik Cola anywhere. My luck.”

  “Remember Gurd’s?”

  “Orange Crush.”

  “May Wests.”

  “Cherry Blossoms.”

  “Who centred the Punch Line?”

  “Elmer fucking Lach.”

  “The Razzle Dazzle Line?”

  “Buddy O’Connor.”

  “How come RAF night-fighters can see in the dark?”

  “Because they eat their carrots. Now tell me where your benefactor, if that’s what he is, gets his millions?”

  “This is nothing,” Moses said. “Come. I’ll show you some of the paintings he doesn’t even bother to display upstairs.”

  Moses led him into another room, pressed one of the sequence of buttons under the wall thermostat, and out slid a long rack: a Francis Bacon, a Graham Sutherland, a Sidney Nolan.

  “He’s going to think we’re snooping down here. Let’s go, Moses.”

  A cloth covered a painting leaning against the wall. “Let’s take a peek,” Moses said.

  “I don’t think we ought to.”

  “It’s probably the new Bonnard he bought.”

  Moses lifted the cloth and revealed what appeared to be the most conventional of portraits. A lovely young bourgeois lady seated in a wicker chair. She wore a broadbrimmed straw hat with a pink bow, a multi-layered chiffon dress, also with a pink bow, and held a bouquet of sweet williams in her hands. But there was something quirky about the portrait. The young lady’s eyes were of a different colour. One eye brown, one eye blue.

  “Oh my God,” Moses howled. “Oh Christ!”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Let’s go.”

  “I haven’t finished my drink.”

  “Let’s go, I said.”

  Sir Hyman was chatting with a group in the living room.

  “I’ve got to speak to you,” Moses said.

  “Now?” Sir Hyman asked, eyebrows raised.

  “Right now.”

  “Oh. Well. Yes. Certainly. The library.”

  Moses waited an exasperating five minutes before Sir Hyman joined him there.

  “How come, Sir Hyman Kaplansky, how come, Sir Hyman,” Moses shouted, “that sitting on the floor downstairs there is a portrait of Diana McClure née Morgan?”

  “Ah.” “Have you brought me any pages, dear boy. I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward—”

  “I’d all but given up on you. I was beginning to think you’d never find it,” Sir Hyman said, deflating him with a stroke.

  “Does Lucy know?”

  “Nor Henry. And you are not to say anything to them, now or ever. I want your word on that.”

  “Dear boy.”

  “Yingele.”

  “Bastard.”

  Two couples, carrying champagne glasses, drifted into the library. “Oh dear, are we intruding, Hymie?”

  “Most certainly not. I was just telling Moses about my latest acquisition,” he said, indicating the picture hanging over the fireplace. A raven perched on a half-open sea shell, human beings struggling to emerge from it.

  “This is the raven that stole the light of the world from an old man and then scattered it throughout the skies. After the great flood had receded, he flew to a beach to gorge himself on the delicacies left behind by the water. However, he wasn’t hungry for once.” Looking directly at Moses, a stricken Moses, he went on to say, “But his other appetites—lust, curiosity, and the unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures—these remained unsatisfied. The raven, his wings crossed behind his back, strolled along the beach, his sharp eyes alert for any unusual sight or sound. Taking to the air, he called petulantly to the empty sky. To his delight, he heard an answering cry, a muffled squeak.

  “Scanning the beach something caught his eye. A gigantic clamshell. He landed and found that the shell was fill of little creatures, cowering in the terror of his menacing shadow. So the raven leaned his great head close to the shell, and with his smooth trickster’s tongue that had got him in and out of so many misadventures during his troubled and troublesome existence, he coaxed and cajoled the little creatures to come out and play.”

  Sir Hyman paused as a waiter brought everybody more champagne.

  “As you well know, Moses, the raven speaks in two voices, one harsh and dissembling, and the other, which he used now, seductive. So it wasn’t long before one after another the little shell-dwellers timidly emerged. Bizarre they were. Two-legged like the raven, but without glossy feathers or thrusting beak or strong wings. They were the original humans.”

  Sir Hyman paused again for a sip from his glass and the two couples, more than somewhat bored, took advantage of the break to retreat from the library.

  “I have so many questions,” Moses said.

  “And my house is full of guests. We’ll talk on Wednesday.”

  “Why not tomorrow?”

  “Because tomorrow noon you are flying to Paris. A package to deliver. You are booked into the Crillon for three nights. A certain M. Provost will join you for breakfast on Monday or the very latest Tuesday, and you will hand over the package with my compliments.”

  Provost did not appear on Monday morning. Tuesday morning Moses sat down to breakfast, opened the Times, and read that Sir Hyman Kaplansky, the noted financier, had apparently drowned in stormy seas. Sir Hyman, as was his habit, had set out early Monday morning for his pre-breakfast swim in spite of gale warnings, and did not return. His beach robe, slippers, and the book he was reading, were found abandoned in the sand. Lady Olivia told reporters that Sir Hyman, who suffered from a weak heart, had been cautioned not to swim unaccompanied or in rough seas, but he was an obstinate man. Foul play was not suspected. Fishing trawlers in the area had been alerted and lifeboats were out searching in high seas.

  They needn’t bother, Moses thought, bitterly amused. Obviously the raven with the unquenchable itch was at it again, playing tricks on the world and its creatures. Once by air, he thought, and now by water.

  Provost failed to appear again. A frustrated Moses retired to his room, lit a cigar, and considered the package on his bed for a long time before he tore it open.

  It contained three morocco-bound volumes of the journals of Solomon Gursky and a letter addressed to Moses Berger, Esq. The letter advised him that he was the recipient of an income of thirty thousand dollars a year to be paid quarterly by Corvus Trust, Zurich.

  Moses lay down on the bed, picked up a volume of the journals, and opened it at random.

  “Fort McEwen, Alberta. 1908. Late one winter afternoon I found my grandfather waiting for me on his sled outside the school house. Ephraim sta
nk of rum. His cheek was bruised and his lower lip was swollen.…”

  Two

  A ceiling-to-floor bookcase in the living room of Moses’s cabin in the woods was crammed with books, newspaper and magazine clippings relating to the life of the elusive, obscenely rich Sir Hyman Kaplansky, as he then styled himself.

  The index of the third volume of the celebrated diaries of a British MP with impeccable Bloomsbury bona fides revealed several entries for Sir Hyman Kaplansky.

  May 17, 1944

  Lunch at the Travellers with Gladwyn and Chips. We were joined by Hyman Kaplansky, his cultivated dandyish manner insufficient to conceal the ghetto greaser within. He allowed that he was frightened of the V.11s. I suggested that he ought to think of his loved ones on the battlefield who were at far greater risk than he was.

  Hyman: “That wouldn’t work for me at all, dear boy. I have no loved ones on the battlefield. They are all in firewatching right here. The buggers’ battalions, don’t you know?”

  An earlier entry was dated September 12, 1941.

  Dined at the Savoy with Ivor. When Hyman Kaplansky stopped at our table I told him how triste I felt about the martyred Jews of Poland and how after Eden had read his statement in the House we all stood up as a tribute.

  “If my unfortunate brethren only knew it,” he said, “I’m sure they would feel most obliged. Did the Speaker stand up as well?”

  “Yes.”

  “How very moving.”

  The Jewish capacity for cynicism is really insufferable. Although I loathe anti-Semites, I do dislike Jews.

  June 8, 1950

  Lunch at the Reform Club. The beastly Sir Hyman is there with Guy and Tom Driberg. Driberg is carrying on about his favoured “cottages” in Soho.

  “Why municipal vandals,” he said, “should have thought it necessary to destroy so many of them I do not know. I suppose it is one expression of antihomosexual prejudice. Yet no homo, cottage-cruising, ever prevented a hetero from merely having a whiz. While to do one’s rounds of the cottages— the alley by the Astoria, the dog-leg lane opposite the Garrick Club, the one near the Ivy, the one off Wardour Street—provided homos, not all of whom are given to rougher sports, with healthy exercise.”

  June 7,1951

  Dinner at the Savoy. Sir Hyman Kaplansky at another table, entertaining some of the old Tots and Quots. Zuckerman, Bernal, and Haldane. Everybody is discussing the Burgess-Maclean affair. Sir Hyman says, “I know Guy to be a coward and a Bolshie and I’m not surprised he did a bunk.”

  The next entry for Sir Hyman dealt at length with that infamous dinner party in his Cumberland Terrace flat. A Passover seder, of all things, to which Sir Hyman—much to Lady Olivia’s horror—had invited the MP and other noted anti-Semites. Among them, a couple of survivors of the Cliveden set, an unabashed admirer of Sir Oswald Mosley, a famous novelist, a celebrated actress, a West End impresario, a Polish count and a rambunctious cabinet minister who was an adamant opponent of further Jewish settlement in troubled Palestine. Why did they come?

  The novelist, arguably the most gifted of his time, wrote in his diary:

  March 21, 1953

  All in order for our trip to Menton. I am assured that the villa has been furnished to my taste, the servants will be adequate, and there will be no Americans to be seen. We travel in a filthy carriage to Dover and then board the boat. The usual drunken commercial travellers and this time a number of Jews, presumably tax-evaders. This reminds Sybil that we are expected to dine at Sir Hyman Kaplansky’s the evening after our return. The food and wine will be excellent. Certainly no problems with ration coupons in that quarter.

  Another diary, this one kept by the actress, reminded her many admirers of exactly what she was wearing (an outfit especially created for her by Norman Hartnell) on the day the Bomb fell on Hiroshima. On another page she revealed for the first time that her only child lay dying in Charing Cross Hospital on the night theatrical tradition obliged her to open in Peonies for Penelope, a musical that ran for three years at the Haymarket in spite of the posh critics. An entry dated three days before Sir Hyman’s dinner party described a lunch at the Ivy with the West End impresario, a noted sybarite.

  April 12, 1953

  Signs of the times. At one table a loud infestation of newly affluent proles. GI brides, Cockney accents. But I could hardly afford to eat here any more— if not for Hugh’s kindness. Hugh is in a snit about the dinner party at Sir Hyman’s.

  “Will I be expected to put on one of those silly black beanies I’ve seen the men wear in Whitechapel?”

  “Think of the caviar. He gets it from their embassy. Consider the endless bottles of Dom P. I am told there will be a whole baby lamb.”

  “Kosher, I daresay.”

  Hugh confessed how deeply he regretted casting Kitty rather than little me in The Dancing Duchess. Stuff and nonsense, I told him. I wouldn’t hear a word against Kitty. She tries so hard.

  Other diaries, memoirs, letter collections and biographies of the period were rich in details of that disastrous night. There were contradictions, of course, each memoir writer laying claim to the evening’s most memorable bons mots. Other discrepancies related to Lady Olivia, who had been born and raised an Anglican. Some charged that she had treacherously been a party to the insult, but others were equally certain that she was its true victim. Both groups agreed that the Polish count was her lover, but they split again on whether Sir Hyman condoned the relationship, was ignorant of it, or—just possibly—had planned the scandal to avenge himself on both of them. Whatever the case, there was no disputing the main thrust of events, only their interpretation.

  Including Sir Hyman and Lady Olivia, there were thirteen at the refectory table, which made for much light-hearted bantering, the mood darkening only when Sir Hyman—insensitive or vindictive, depending on the witness—pointed out that that had been the precise number gathered at the most famous of all Passover noshes.

  Every diary and memoir writer mentioned the table setting, describing it either as opulent or all too typically reeking of Levantine ostentation. The wine goblets and decanters were made of late-Georgian flint glass, their hue Waterford blue. The seventeenthcentury candelabra were of a French design, with classic heads and overlapping scales and foliated strapwork. The heavy, ornate silverware was of the same period. Other artifacts were of Jewish origin. There was, for instance, a silver Passover condiment set, its style German Baroque, stamped with fruit and foliage. The seder tray itself, the platter on which the offending matzohs would lie, was made of pewter. It was eighteenth-century Dutch in origin, unusually large, engraved with Haggadah liturgies, artfully combining the pictorial and calligraphic.

  An ebullient Sir Hyman welcomed his guests to the table with a prepared little speech that some would later condemn as grovelling and others, given the shocking turn of events, as a damned impertinence. In the first place, he said, he wished to say how grateful he was that everyone had accepted his invitation, because he knew how prejudiced they were against some of his kind. He hardly blamed them. Some of his kind, especially those sprung from eastern Europe, were insufferably pushy and did in fact drive a hard bargain, and to prove his point he quoted some lines of T.S. Eliot:

  And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,

  Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,

  Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.…

  Such people, Sir Hyman said, embarrassed him and other gentlemen of Hebraic origin even more than they were an affront to decent Christians. In a lighter vein, Sir Hyman went on to say that he hoped his guests would find the rituals essential to the Passover feast a welcome little frisson. Each of them would find a little book at their place. It was called a Haggadah and they should think of it as a libretto. We should tell—that is to say, “hagged”—of our exodus from Egypt, not the last time the Jews did a midnight flit. The Haggadah— like the libretto of any musical in trouble in Boston or Manchester— was being constantly revised t
o keep pace with the latest Jewish bad patch. He had seen one, for instance, that included a child’s drawing of the last seder held in Theresienstadt. The drawing, alas, was without any artistic merit, but—it could be argued—did have a certain maudlin charm. He had seen another one that made much of the fact that the Nazi all-out artillery attack on the grouchy Jews of the Warsaw ghetto had begun on the eve of Passover. A man who had survived that kerfuffle only to perish in a concentration camp later on had written, “We are faced with a Passover of hunger and poverty, without even ‘the bread of affliction’. For eating and drinking there is neither matzoh nor wine. For prayer there are no synagogues or houses of study. Their doors are closed and darkness reigns in the dwelling-places of Israel.” However, Sir Hyman hastily pointed out, we have come here not to mourn but to be jolly. He beamed at Lady Olivia, who responded by jiggling a little bell. Servants refilled the champagne glasses at once.

  Seder, Sir Hyman informed his captive audience, seemingly indifferent to their growing restiveness, literally means programme, which applies to the prescribed ceremonies of the Passover ritual. Raising the pewter matzoh platter, he proclaimed first in Hebrew and then in English: “This is the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat.”

  “Hear, hear!”

  “Goodo!”

  It was now nine P.M., and though Sir Hyman’s guests had begun to arrive as early as six, there had—much to their chagrin—been no hors-d’oeuvres served. Not so much as a wizened olive or peanut or blade of celery. Stomachs were rumbling. Appetites were keen. Sensing his guests’ impatience, Sir Hyman hurried through the reading of the Haggadah that necessarily preceded the feast, skipping page after page. Even so, he had to be aware of the shifting of chairs, the fidgeting that verged on the hostile, the raising of eyebrows, the dark looks. It did not help matters that each time the kitchen doors swung open the dining room was filled with the most tantalizing aromas. Steaming chicken broth. Lamb on the sizzle. Finally, at ten P.M., Sir Hyman nodded at an increasingly distressed Lady Olivia, who promptly jiggled her little bell.