Solomon Gursky Was Here

by Mordecai Richler

  That little imp of a Swiss financier, Dr. Otto Raven, was also there. His gleeful smile disconcerting, he said the whole thing reminded him of a meeting of persecuted Christians in the Roman catacombs.

  I thought this bizarre coming from a Jew, but Adam von Trott says he is to be trusted with details of coming events.

  This, of course, was sufficient to propel Moses into a search of publishers’ catalogues, German as well as English, but he came up with only one more reference to Herr Dr. Otto Raven. He found it in the Wiener Library, in the unpublished journals of a Swedish princess who had passed the war years in Berlin, married to one of the Hohenzollerns.

  July 17, 1944

  Lunched yesterday at Gabrielle’s. Started with crab cocktail and vol-auvents filled with caviar. Not a word has been heard of Gabrielle’s Jewish mother since her last arrest—this time for good. Nothing can be done about it and I am desperately sorry. Presumably she has been sent to the ghetto in Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia.

  Today, at Potsdam, Otto Bismarck arranged a shooting party for boar. Only one was shot. Surprisingly the successful hunter was a little Swiss banker, Herr Dr. Otto Raven. He had learned to shoot, he said, on the pampas, south of the Amazon, where he had been raised by a rancher following his father’s death in a duel. He sat down at the piano and played us a number of South American cowboy songs, but Otto Bismarck was not amused. He was, in fact, extremely irritable, disturbed by Churchill’s latest speech, once more demanding “unconditional surrender”.

  “It’s lunacy,” Bismarck said.

  But Herr Dr. Raven assured him the speech was for public consumption, pour encourager les Russes, and that under certain circumstances, anticipated with impatience.…

  Later I heard them quarrelling about Stauffenberg in the library.

  “… wrong man,” Herr Dr. Raven said. “He’s missing two fingers of his left hand, which could be a fatal handicap.”

  “It’s set for the 20th of July at Rastenburg and this time we won’t fail.”

  When Hyman Kaplansky’s name appeared on the King’s New Year’s Honours List some six months later hardly anybody was surprised. He was not the first, nor the last, heavy contributor to the Conservative party chest to be rewarded with a title.

  Three

  One Saturday morning in 1974 a flock of the Faithful gathered at Henry’s house to celebrate the bar mitzvah of the great-great-grandson of Tulugaq. Nialie, who had learned to temper recipes plucked from her Jenny Grossinger cookbook with local produce, served chopped chicken liver moistened with seal shmaltz. Though most of the knishes were filled with mashed potatoes, there were others that were stuffed with minced caribou: In the absence of candy, a platter of succulent seals’ eyes was available for the children. Among Isaac’s gifts, there was a book from his father, a collection of sermons by the Rebbe who reigned over 770 Eastern Parkway, illuminating eternal mysteries, deciphering the code hidden within the holy texts:

  “We can hasten the arrival of the Moshiach by intensifying our simcha or rejoicing. Simcha is obviously connected with the Moshiach or why do both words contain the Hebrew letters ‘shin,’ ‘mem,’ and ‘ches’? Similarly there is an inner link between Moses and Moshiach, as witness the verse, ‘And the sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, until Shiloh come …,’ which is clearly a concealed reference to the Moshiach, as the words ‘yavo Shiloh’ and ‘Moshiach’ are numerically equal. Also equal are the words ‘Shiloh’ and ‘Moses’, proof positive that the coming of the Moshiach is related to Moses. Furthermore, ‘yavo’ is numerically equal to ‘echad’, which means one; therefore we can deduce that the Moshiach = Moses + One.”

  When Isaac was to enroll in the yeshiva a month later, an elated Henry flew down to New York with him. Father and son made directly for Crown Heights. They stopped for a Lubavitch beef burger at Marmelstein’s, on Kingston Avenue, and then went out for a stroll.

  “We’re being stared at,” Isaac said.

  “It’s your imagination.”

  They paused to look in Suri’s window, filled with glamorous wigs for the wives of the faithful who had shaven their heads to render themselves unattractive to men other than their husbands. Reflected in the glass, Isaac saw men across the street pointing him out, whispering together.

  Sleek black hair. Brown skin. “They’re going to take me for some kind of freak of nature here,” Isaac said.

  “Narishkeit. We’re among good people,” Henry said, taking him by the hand and leading him into the Tzivos Hashem store.

  Garishly coloured portraits of the Rebbe, similar to the pictures of saints peddled at the kiosks outside provincial cathedrals in Europe, were on display everywhere, framed in plastic pressed and burnished to resemble pine. The Rebbe’s graven image was also available in postcard and wallet-window size or embossed on canvas tote bags. Isaac overheard a bearded man say, “Don’t look now, but it’s the rich meshuggena from the northland.”

  “What can I buy for you?” Henry asked.

  “Nothing,” Isaac said, glaring right back at a couple of pimply boys of his own age. “Let’s go.”

  Next Henry took Isaac to the yeshiva to sit in on a study session with one of the Rebbe’s younger acolytes, swaying over his text:

  “We look into the mirror,” he asked the men gathered at the long table, “and what do we see? The self, of course. You see yourself, I see myself, and so forth and so on. If we have a clean face, we see a clean face in the mirror. If we have a dirty face, that is what the mirror reflects back on us. So when we see bad in another person we know that we too have this bad.

  “Now looking up into the mirror, we see the face, but looking down, what? The feet. You see your feet, I see my feet, and so forth and so on. The Rebbe has pointed out to us that on Simchas Torah one does not dance with his head—he dances with his feet. From this our beloved teacher has deduced that a person’s intellectual capacities make no difference on Simchas Torah and this is equally true for every Jew worldwide.

  “Looking into the mirror you should also note that the higher is contained in the lower and the lower in the higher. But the reverse is also true. Chassidus teaches us that the lower is revealed in the higher and the higher in the lower.”

  Isaac yawned. He yearned to see Broadway. The Felt Forum. A hockey game in Madison Square Garden. The offices where Screw was published. The McTavish building on Fifth Avenue.

  “Are we going to visit Uncle Lionel?”

  “I think not.”

  But Henry, carrying charts, did take him to Columbia University. While Henry conferred with a climatologist, Isaac sat on a bench in the outer office. Bored, he dipped into the Mishneh Torah Henry had bought him at Merkaz Stam. The Messianic King, he read, will be a descendant of the House of David. “Anyone who does not believe in him or does not wait for his coming, denies not only the statements of the other prophets, but those of the Torah and Moses, our teacher. The Torah testified …”

  Finally Henry emerged from the climatologist’s office, looking chastened. “Tell me, yingele, do you think your father is nuts?”

  They made another stop, this time at an address on W. 47th Street, where Henry had to see somebody about a pair of diamond earrings, a gift for Nialie.

  “How long will you be?” Isaac asked.

  “A half-hour maybe.”

  “I’ll wait outside.”

  Bearded men in bobbing black hats seemed to be everywhere, flying past, briefcases chained to their wrists. Sirens wailed somewhere. The traffic stalled. Isaac, moving along, caught up with a bunch of people gathered in a semi-circle at the corner of Eighth Avenue. Thrusting through to the front, he came upon a ragged black boy turning cartwheels, two of his chums dancing on their heads. Then he was accosted by a girl wearing a see-through blouse and a silver miniskirt. Her hair was dyed orange and purple. Isaac, frightened, started back.

  Crossing Seventh Avenue, he made out Henry in the distance, pacing up and down, searchin
g, sidecurls bobbing. On impulse, Isaac retreated into a doorway. Look at him, he thought. With his millions, we could be living in a penthouse here. He wouldn’t have to keep dirty photographs of a skinny girl in his bottom desk drawer, he could afford the real thing, but, no, it had to be Tulugaqtitut. Shit. Fuck.

  Henry, increasingly frantic, was stopping passers-by, obviously describing Isaac to them, asking if they had seen him. Five minutes passed before Isaac, taking pity on him, emerged from his hiding place. The instant Henry spotted him striding down the street he raced forward to embrace him. “Thank Hashem you’re safe,” he cried, even as Isaac wiggled free, embarrassed.

  Two days later Henry returned to Tulugaqtitut, laden with books. Isaac didn’t see him again until he flew home, two weeks before Passover, and the two of them set out on the journey that led to Henry’s death only a hundred miles short of Tuktuyaktuk.

  Four

  The first thing Isaac noticed when he flew home for Passover was the new ship with three masts locked into the ice in the bay. Damn. Just what he needed, in case the gang in the Sir Igloo Inn Café didn’t already have enough to tease him about. The ship, which had been built in Holland, had its planking doubled, the bow and stern bolstered with steel plates. It was provisioned with sacks of grain and rice and dried vegetables, the immense freezer stocked by the Nôtre Dame de Grace Kosher Meat Mart. Crazy Henry’s Ark, they called it.

  “You just got home,” Nialie said, “and already you are in a bad mood.”

  “Forget it.”

  Nialie soon had more to worry about. The night before Henry was to start on his journey a big menacing black raven pecked at their bedroom window, wakening Nialie with a start. She clung to Henry, pleading with him not to go, but he insisted. The trip was traditional. Every spring, two weeks before Passover, he and Pootoogook set out for a hunting camp of the Faithful, some 250 miles east along the Arctic shore. The Faithful counted on Henry to bring them boxes filled with the bread of affliction and wine appropriate to the feast days. Furthermore, Henry pointed out, this Passover’s journey would be a special pleasure for him. Pootoogook, troubled by arthritis, would not be coming. Instead Henry would be taking Pootoogook’s fifteen-year-old grandson Johnny and, for the first time ever, Isaac, whom he counted on to continue the tradition in later years.

  A gleeful Henry roused Isaac out of bed early. “Wake up, wake up, to do the work of the Creator!”

  To please Isaac, they were not taking the dogs with them this year. For a change, the sleds laden with supplies would be pulled by three red snowmobiles, the third snowmobile lugging a sled with sufficient fuel for the journey there and home again.

  Given reasonable weather conditions, Henry was usually five days out, a day in camp, five days back. This enabled him to be home a couple of days before the first seder, in good time to search his pre-fab for any trace of Bedikat Chametz, leavened bread, and to observe the mitzvah of Tzedakah, distributing money among the poor. But this year, as Nialie watched Henry start out with Johnny and Isaac, she doubted that she would ever see her husband again in this world. So she was hardly surprised when Henry failed to turn up in time for the first seder and she did what he would have expected. She went through the house, covering all the mirrors with towels, and then took to a low stool, holding her head in her hands, rocking to and fro, keening.

  Henry’s party was five days overdue when Moses, gone to collect his mail at The Caboose, read in the Gazette:

  GURSKY HEIRS

  MISSING

  IN ARCTIC

  The story noted that Henry, a Hassidic Jew, the eccentric son of Solomon Gursky, had been rooted in the Arctic for years, married to a native woman. It was illustrated by a photograph of the ship with three masts locked in the ice. A vessel, the reporter wrote, that the locals called Crazy Henry’s Ark, its estimated cost three million dollars.

  Moses threw things into a suitcase, drove to Dorval airport, the other side of Montreal, and caught the first flight to Edmonton. He had to wait three maddening hours before he could make a connection to Yellowknife, where he immediately set out for the Canadian Armed Forces search-and-rescue headquarters, volunteering to serve as a spotter. The search master, adding his name to the list, told him that two long-range Hercules transports had already been crisscrossing the area of the highest probability for three days, flying a mile apart at a height of 1,000 feet. The area of the highest probability was calculated to be 350 miles long and 250 miles wide. In the event of a siting, para-rescuers were standing by equipped with a long-range Labrador helicopter, prepared to take off immediately. The good news was that Henry’s party had certainly reached their destination, remained in camp for a day, and then started back with sufficient food and fuel to get them home. A land search was also underway, Eskimos fanning out over Henry’s most likely route home.

  The next morning a whiteout grounded the search planes and Moses passed most of the day in The Trapline with Sean Riley.

  “He should have taken his dogs,” Riley said, “not those goddamn snowmobiles. You can’t eat snowmobiles.”

  “What are their chances, Sean?” “They’re crossing some damn unforgiving country, but if Henry’s okay, they’re okay. If not, not. Henry knows the terrain, but Isaac’s no damn good and Johnny’s a druggie. If Henry’s out of it, those kids could head off any which way, providing the snowmobiles haven’t broken down.”

  “All three of them?”

  “Bloody unlikely I know, but there’s been an accident for sure. Somebody overturned or went over a cliff or into a crevice or how the hell do I know what, and maybe they’ve set up camp and they’re waiting to be rescued.”

  “Didn’t they take flares with them?”

  “If I had to guess I’d say they lost the sled with the flares and what we got to hope is that it wasn’t also the one with the food and the fuel. Look, Moses, they’re good for ten days out there, maybe two weeks, before we have to worry.”

  Another two days passed before the search planes were able to take off again, this time flying at five hundred feet only a half-mile apart. Moses, like the rest of the volunteers, was only capable of logging ten minutes at a stretch as a spotter, harnessed into the open loading hatch at the rear of the Hercules, squinting at the ice and snow skidding past in temperatures that ran to forty below.

  They flew out day after day, weather permitting. Then, on the twenty-third day, the camp was sited, a solitary figure scrambling out of a tent to wave frantically. The Hercules swooped low, dropping a survival pack, and the para-rescuers started out in their helicopter. Security was thick at Yellowknife airport, but Sean Riley managed to have a word with the helicopter pilot shortly after he landed, and then he hurried off to The Trapline to meet with Moses. “Henry’s dead. A broken neck. Johnny starved to death. They’ve brought in Isaac and they’ve got him in the hospital now. The RCMP are guarding his room.”

  “Why?”

  “They lost the sled with the food. Isaac survived by slicing chunks out of Henry’s thighs,” Riley said, ordering double Scotches for both of them.

  “What about Johnny?”

  “He refused to nosh on the great-grandson of Tulugaq, but what did he know? Little prick was just a savage. Are you going to be sick?”

  “No.”

  “Look here, Moses, Henry was already dead. You might have done the same. Certainly I would have.”

  Moses ordered another round.

  “Isaac swears he didn’t dig in until the tenth day out there,” Riley said, “but the helicopter crew told the RCMP they found little bags filled with cubes of meat hanging from his tent. If Isaac had waited ten days, like he said, Henry’s body would have been harder than a frozen log. Splinters is what he would have got, not boeuf bourgignon. Something else. Bizarre, if it’s true.”

  ‘‘Let’s have it.”

  “Isaac says he was attacked by ravens one morning. Maybe he was delirious or he dreamt it.”

  Rumours of cannibalism were all over town. Reporte
rs, attracted by the Gursky name, flew in from Toronto, London, and New York. Convening in The Trapline, they concocted a verse to commemorate the event:

  There are strange things done ’neath the Midnight Sun,

  but the thing that made us quail

  was the night the Jew

  in want of a stew

  braised his father in a pail.

  Moses decided not to stay on for THE CORONER’S COURT INQUIRY INTO THE MATTER TOUCHING UPON THE DEATHS OF:

  HENRY GURSKY, and

  JOHNNY POOTOOGOOK.

  However, he was still in Yellowknife the morning they released Isaac from the hospital, flanked by lawyers. “My client,” one of them said, “is still suffering from bereavement overload and has nothing to say to the press at this point in time.”

  Five

  Considering the nature of Isaac’s sin, there were lengthy deliberations before the yeshiva agreed to take him back, and then only on sufferance.

  “How could you do such a thing?” one rebbe asked.

  Another rebbe said, “The other one maybe. But your own father, alav ha-sholem?”

  “The other one was trayf,” Isaac responded, glaring at them.

  He had come home only once since he had been acquitted by the coroner’s inquiry, grudgingly come to spend the Aseret Yemei Tushuvah, the ten days of repentance from Rosh Hashana through Yom Kippur, with his mother, avoiding the Sir Igloo Inn Café and the Hudson’s Bay trading post, where the teasing was relentless.

  “Have you come back to roast your mother for dinner?”

  No answer.

  “Nurse Agnes likes men to eat her. Try her.”

  Friday evening, he stood defiantly at the door of his father’s house, waiting for the Faithful camped on the edge of the settlement to appear, beating on their skin drums, parading their traditional offerings before them, but nobody came.