Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  Ah.

  There were gasps of pleasure as a huge, wobbly, gleaming mound of beluga caviar was set down on the table. Next came an enormous platter of pleasingly moist smoked salmon. The salmon was followed by a silver salver heavy with baked carp and a surround of golden jelly. Everybody was set to pounce, but Sir Hyman, his smile gleeful, raised a restraining hand. “Wait, please. There is one more protocol of Zion, as it were, to be observed. Before indulging ourselves we are obliged to eat the bread of affliction. The matzoh.”

  “Let’s get on with it, then.”

  “For God’s sake, Hymie, I’m hungry enough to eat a horse.”

  “Hear, hear!”

  Sir Hyman nodded and a servant removed the pewter matzoh platter, piled it high with the bread of affliction, and returned it to the table, covered with a magenta velvet cloth.

  “What we have here,” Sir Hyman said, “are not the tasteless, massproduced matzohs you might expect to find on the tables of tradesmen in Swiss Cottage or Golders Green, their eyes on the main chance. These are the authentic matzohs of ancient and time-honoured tradition. They are called Matzoh Shemurah. Guarded matzoh. Baked behind locked doors, under conditions of the strictest security, according to a recipe first formulated in Babylon. Brought from there to Lyons in the year 1142, of the Christian era, and from there to York. These were made for me by a venerable Polish rabbi I know in Whitechapel.”

  “Come on, Hymie!”

  “Let’s get on with it.”

  “I’m starved!”

  Sir Hyman yanked the magenta cloth free, and revealed was a stack of the most unappetizing-looking biscuits. Coarse, unevenly baked, flecked with rust spots, their surfaces bumpy with big brown blisters.

  “Everybody take one, please,” Sir Hyman said, “but, careful, they’re hot.”

  Once everybody had a matzoh in hand, Sir Hyman stood up and offered a solemn benediction. “Blessed be God, who brings food out of the earth. Blessed be God, who made each mitzvah bring us holiness, and laid on us the eating of matzoh.” Then he indicated that they were free to dig in at last.

  The West End impresario, his eyes on the caviar, was the first to take a bite. Starchy, he thought. Bland. But then he felt a blister in the matzoh burst like a pustule and the next thing he knew a warm fluid was dribbling down his chin. He was about to wipe it away with his napkin when the actress, seated opposite him, took one look and let out a terrifying scream. “Oh, my poor Hugh,” she cried. “Hugh, just look at you!”

  But he was already sufficiently discomfited merely looking at her. A thick reddish substance was splattered over her panting ivory bosom.

  “My God!” somebody wailed, dropping his leaky matzoh shemurah.

  The fastidious Cynthia Cavendish cupped her hands to her mouth, desperate to spit out the warm red sticky stuff, then took a peek at it trickling between her fingers and subsided to the carpet in a dead faint.

  Horace McEwen, smartly avoiding the sinking Cynthia, stared at his rust-smeared napkin, his lips trembling, and then stuck two fingers into his mouth, prying for loose teeth.

  “It’s blood, don’t you know?”

  “Bastard!”

  “We’re all covered in ritual blood!”

  The Rt. Hon. Richard Cholmondeley knocked back his chair and, convinced that he was dying, began to bring up bile and what he also took for blood. “Tell Constance,” he pleaded with nobody in particular, “that the photographs in the bottom left-hand drawer of my desk are not mine. Noddy gave them to me for safekeeping when he got back from Marrakech.”

  The cabinet minister’s plump wife vomited all over his Moss Bros. dinner jacket before he could thrust her clear, sending her reeling backwards. “Now look what you’ve done,” he said. ‘‘Just look.’’

  The sodden novelist slid to the floor. Unfortunately he was clutching the antique Irish lace tablecloth at the time and, consequently, brought down some priceless wine goblets as well as the platter of smoked salmon with him. The impresario, with characteristic presence of mind, grabbed the other end of the tablecloth just in time to secure the sliding tureen of caviar. Torn between anger and appetite, he snatched a soup spoon and lunged at the caviar once, twice, three times before demanding his coat and hat. The Polish count, his face ashen, leaped up and challenged Sir Hyman to a duel.

  Sir Hyman startled him by responding softly in fluent Polish. “Your father was a swindler and your mother was a whore and you, dear boy, are a ponce. Name the time and place.”

  Lady Olivia sat rocking her face in her hands, as her guests scattered, raging and cursing.

  “You will pay dearly for this outrage, Hymie.”

  “You haven’t heard the end of it!”

  “Tell it not in Gath,” Sir Hyman said, “publish it not in the streets of Askelon; lest the daughters of the Philistines rejoice.…”

  The last departing guest claimed to have heard a stricken Lady Olivia ask, “How could you humiliate me like this, Hymie?”

  He purportedly replied, “There will be no more assignations with that squalid little Polack. Now let’s eat the lamb before it’s hopelessly overdone.”

  “I despise you,” Lady Olivia shrieked, stamping her foot and fleeing to her bedroom.

  There was only one account, its accuracy dubious, of that infamous evening’s aftermath. It appeared in Through the Keyhole: A Butler Remembers, a truncated version of which was serialized in The News of the World, the full text available only from Olympia Press, Paris. In a steamy chapter about his employment by Sir Hyman, Albert Hotchkins—remembering that Passover seder—wrote:

  “After the Top People had fled faster than an Italian from the battlefront, and a tearful Lady Olivia had retreated to her bedroom, the old cuckold sat alone at the table, happy as a Jew at a fire sale, having himself a proper fit of giggles. Then he summoned the non-U people, including this yobbo, out of the kitchen and insisted we join him in a nosh. We were in there faster than the proverbial fox into a chicken coop. Caviar, smoked salmon, roast lamb. Now I knew Sir Hyman enjoyed his libations, but this is the first time I saw him pickled as a dill in a barrel. He was a veritable one-man Goon Show! He entertained us with side-splitting imitations of every one of his guests. He also did Churchill for us and Gilbert Harding and Lady Docker. He sat down at the piano and sang us one of ye olde time music hall songs. (Pardon me, Queen Victoria, I know you’re not amused!!!)

  I should like to have a youth, who me

  Would in his arms enfold,

  Who would handle me and dandle me

  When my belly it was cold;

  So I will be a mot,

  I shall be a mot,

  I’m so fond of Roger,

  That I will be a mot.

  “Then he sang us some Passover ditties in Hebrew or Yiddish or Rubbish, I’m not sure which, and something else in Chinese. Chinese? Yes. For that was the night Sir Hyman settled a mystery darker than a nigger’s arsehole for us. He wasn’t, as the Telegraph diarist had speculated, of Hungarian extraction. He had been born in Petrograd, as it then was, but had been raised in Shanghai, where his dad had fled to after the revolution had spread through old Mother Russia like wildfire.

  “It was a night to remember! Eventually we rolled up the carpet and, to coin a phrase, danced in the dawn as if there was no tomorrow. If I hadn’t known better I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles that that was the night the sly old nancyboy actually dipped his wick into Mary, the naughtiest lady’s maid ever to come out of County Clare, as keen for a taste of roger any time as a Chinaman is for chop suey. (See Chapter Seven: ‘Eat Your Heart Out, Fanny Hill!!’) Certainly we didn’t see hide nor hair of them for a couple of hours and when they rejoined us he was as quiet as a burglar and she looked as innocent as the cat who had just swallowed the canary, but it was his spunk more likely!”

  It was generally assumed that Sir Hyman was a homosexual, but one of the most celebrated beauties of the era, Lady Margaret Thomas, didn’t agree. Her biographer reproduced the
following diary entry in full.

  April 8, 1947

  Dinner with the Kerr-Greenwoods in Lowndes Square. Everybody most simpatico when I tell them what an awkward customer Jawaharlal had turned out to be and that poor Harold is having a devil of a time trying to help Dickie sort things out and that he won’t be back from India for at least another fortnight. Hymie Kaplansky, who is also there alone, is full of jeu d’esprit, very droll, enchanting us with tales of his South African boyhood. He was educated at their pathetic notion of Eton. The headmaster had the boys in several weeks before they were confirmed to tell them about sex. They were warned that masturbation would destroy the body and drive the sinner into the madhouse. For all that, he said, the most observant of the boys might have noticed the little tube dangling between their legs with the jaunty little cap at the tip. It was very flexible. In the bath, for instance, it was inclined to shrivel or retract. But, depending on a boy’s proclivities, it would harden and elongate in response to certain stimuli, proving something of a nuisance.

  After his father died in the siege of Mafeking, the family was left destitute. Hymie was obliged to leave school and his mother had to take in boarders until Hymie restored the family fortunes and then some, I daresay. Everybody joined in when Hymie sat down to the piano and played and sang, “We are Marching to Pretoria.” Then Hymie offered to escort me home, pointing out that I would be safe with him and he owed it to dear Harold to protect me.

  I invited him in for a nightcap. We gossiped shamelessly about the affaire Delaney and he speculated about Lady ______ and Lord ______, which I assured him was all rot. Then he told me in detail about an awful evening he had spent with the wicked Duchess of ______, who behaved so badly that night at ______’s birthday party. This, in turn, got us started on the disgusting ______ and ______ . We were well into our second bottle of champagne when Hymie actually burst into tears and confessed how wretched he felt about the nature of his private life. Reminiscing about his school days again, he recalled, with particular pain, being “bum-shaved” by his prefect, who was eventually sent down for buggery and for producing a bastard with a servant girl. “He was rather a lusty fellow,” Hymie said.

  For bum-shaving, he explained, two boys were set back to back, bare bottoms touching, and then the prefect began to make cuts with a cane.

  Hymie wished he were capable of loving a woman as ravishing and remarkably intelligent as I was, he said, but unfortunately he was unable to achieve tumescence with a member of the opposite sex. Hormone injections taken in a Zurich clinic hadn’t helped and neither had his analyst in Hampstead. Poor, dear boy. I always thought he was awfully plucky for a pansy, but now he was desolate. There was nothing for it but to take him in my arms, my intention being to console. Soon we had arrived at a state of deshabillé and his hitherto perfunctory kisses and caresses took on a certain clumsy urgency. Unfortunately he was unfamiliar with the terrain, as it were. I was obliged to guide and instruct. And then, eureka! To his astonishment, we stumbled on indisputable physical evidence of his ardour.

  “Whatever are we going to do?” Hymie asked.

  In for a penny, in for a pound.

  “You are a miracle-worker,” Hymie said later, overcome with gratitude. “My saviour.”

  But the next morning he professed to be troubled by doubts. “What,” he asked, “if it was only a one-time thing?”

  We laid that ghost to rest most satisfactorily more than once, but then we had to cope with the inconvenience of dear Harold’s return from India. Happily it turned out that Hymie kept a darling little bijou flat in Shepherd’s Market. Strictly for business affairs, he said.

  One afternoon I discovered an antique gold brooch, inlaid with pearls, staring at me from a glass shelf in the bathroom. I knew it well. I had been with Peter when he had bought it at Asprey’s for Di.

  “Hymie, my sweet, I thought your people had but one saviour.”

  “Whatever do you mean?”

  I held out the brooch.

  “Oh that,” he said, “thank God you found it. Di is in such a state. She must have left it here when she came to tea with Peter yesterday.”

  “Peter just happens to be at Cowes now.”

  Sir Hyman was mentioned again in the salacious diaries of Dorothy Ogilvie-Hunt, which were introduced as evidence in the notorious man-in-the-black-apron trial. It seems that the lovely but promiscuous Dorothy not only accommodated many lovers, but graded their performance from delta-minus to alpha-plus, the latter accolade seldom awarded. The events leading up to her initial tryst with Sir Hyman were described in some detail.

  March 2, 1944

  Dreary day wasted in the records office at Wormwood Scrubs. What we’re doing here is supposed to be terribly hush-hush, but on my way out the bus conductor on the no. 72 clearly said, “All change for MI5.”

  Then drinks at the Gargoyle with Brian Howard and Goronwy. Guy is there, reeking of garlic as usual, and so are Davenport, McLaren-Ross, and that young Welsh poet cadging drinks again. Everybody blotto. Some of us move on to the Mandrake, and then I leave them, hurrying home to change, bound for dinner at the Fitzhenry’s, which promised to be a frightful bore. As might be expected, given Topsy’s proclivities, two of the Apostles were there as well as one of the Queen’s “knitting brigade”. The evening was saved by Hymie Kaplansky, of all unlikely people. His tales of his formative years in Australia were absolutely enchanting. His grandfather, it seems, had been an early settler. Hymie’s father died at Gallipoli, leaving the family without a penny. Hymie’s mother, once a principal dancer at the Bolshoi, had to work as a seamstress until her resourceful son went to Bombay, where he made his fortune. We all joined in when Hymie sat down at the piano and sang “Waltzing Matilda” and other songs of the outback, some of them very salty. When the party finally broke up at two A.M. it was too late for me to return to the country. I decided to check into the Ritz. But the gallant Hymie offered me the use of his flat in Shepherd’s Market instead. “You’ll be perfectly safe with me, my dear.”

  Mr. Justice Horner ruled the next four pages inadmissible evidence, but allowed that they concluded with the encomium ALPHA PLUS followed by four exclamation marks.

  Many wartime diaries and journals, published thirty years later, were rich in references to Sir Hyman, a notable entry appearing in the diaries of the Duc de Baugé. The Duc, whose château was in Maine-et-Loire, had been a fixture at Hymie’s celebrated dinner parties in his own château, just outside of Angers, also on the banks of the Maine. Hymie’s château, surrounded by vineyards and parkland, had originally been built by a military family in 1502. Badly damaged during the revolution, left to crumble for more than a century, it had been lovingly restored by Hymie in the thirties. During the occupation it was the official residence of SS Obergruppenführer Klaus Gehrbrandt, something of a sybarite.

  June 27, 1945

  The charming Sir Hyman, whom we haven’t seen since the occupation, is with us again. Nicole is delighted to see him. So am I. His château, he said, had suffered only negligible damage, but there had been some serious thefts. A precious wall tapestry was missing and so was the portrait of Françoise d’Aubigné, who became Louis XIV’s mistress—Madame de Maintenon. Sir Hyman told us that Henri, his wine steward, had assured him that he had managed to keep the best bottles in his cellar out of the hands of Gehrbrandt, during his many dinner parties.

  “As a matter of interest,” Sir Hyman asked Henri, “who came to the obergruppenführer’s dinner parties?”

  “Oh, the same people who used to attend your dinners, Sir Hyman.”

  Nicole burst into tears. “We had no choice but to accept his invitations. It was awful. His father was a pork butcher. He had no manners. He didn’t even know that Pouilly-Fumé is not a dessert wine.”

  Sir Hyman, gracious as always, took her hand and kissed it. “Of course, my dear, we have no idea of what you went through here.”

  Cross-checking, Moses came upon an interesting gap. Sir Hyman, or
plain Hymie as he then was, seemingly dropped out of sight in June 1944 and was not mentioned again, and then only in passing, until August of the same year. His name surfaced in the diaries of a Labour MP, a noted Fabian pamphleteer who had served as a junior minister in the coalition government but had been forced to resign his seat in disgrace in 1948. Apparently he had taken too keen an interest in discipline at a hospice for distressed young ladies that was the pride of his constituency; the so-called spanking soirées that The News of the World made so much of at the time, publishing a photograph of the MP in a gym slip.

  Aug. 21, 1944

  Dinner at Lyon’s Corner House with a representative of the Anti-Vivisectionist League who is concerned about the damage to marine life by the wanton use of mines in the pursuit of U-boats. I take her point, but I am bound to remind her that innocent animals are often the first casualties of war. SS death squads have murdered all the animals in the Berlin zoo. Mindless, gum-chewing American pilots have been known to drop their bombs over grazing herds of cattle rather than risk the flak over Cologne or Dusseldorf.

  Strolling back to the House I had to cross Whitehall hastily in order to avoid running into Hyman Kaplansky, looking unashamedly tanned and well fed. I understand that he has just returned from a holiday in Bermuda. Actually I’m surprised that one hadn’t fled London earlier, during the worst of the Blitz.

  Then, quite by chance, reading The Berlin Diaries of Baron Theodor von Lippe, Moses was startled to come across the following entry.

  May 18, 1944

  Berlin is being methodically destroyed by Bombenteppich or what the Allies call “saturation” bombing. People have taken to chalking inscriptions on the blackened walls of crumbling buildings. “Liebste Herr Kunster, Lebst du noch. Iche suche Sie uberall. Clara.” “Mein Engelein, wo bleist Du? Ich bin in grosser Sorge. Dein Helmut.” All that remains of the Hotel Eden is the outside shell.

  Last night, even as the bombs fell, Count Erich von Oberg gave a small dinner party in his wine cellar, attended by Elena Hube, Felicita Jenisch, Baron Claus von Helgow, Prince Hermann von Klodt, and Countess Katia Ingelheim. The goose was excellent. We talked about nothing but the raids.