Solomon Gursky Was Here (20 page)

“I'll have the money right now or I'll sue. In fact I might fight this

in court anyway.”

“But,
yingele,
I signed the papers years ago,” Mr. Morrie said, reaching out to touch him.

“You think it would be difficult to prove that you were mentally incompetent even then?” Barney asked, knocking his father's hands away and fleeing the men's room.

Moses, in the cubicle, heard the door slam and thought both men had left. But when he came out Mr. Morrie was still there, looking dazed.

“Oh, my. You must have heard everything.”

“Sorry about that.”

“Barney's a good boy, the best, he just had too much to drink tonight.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“I'm feeling, well, a little dizzy. You could help me back to my table maybe.”

Moses took his arm.

“Barney's an outstanding person. I want you to know that.”

Six

1973. Following his humiliating altercation with Beatrice at the Ritz, the insufferable Tom Clarkson behaving impeccably, which only exacerbated matters, Moses had gone out on a bender. Ten days later he found himself being shaken awake by a black cleaning lady. He was lying in a puddle of something vile in the bathroom of a sleazy bar in Hull, his hair knotted and caked with blood, his jacket torn, his wallet open on the cracked tiles, emptied of cash and credit cards. Carleton dismissed him.

Idiot. Blind man. Cuckold
. Driving back to the Townships, Moses missed exit 106 and had to continue on the autoroute as far as Magog, backtracking to his cabin, his Toyota riding low, laden with hastily packed suitcases and all the books he had accumulated in Ottawa. A telegram was tacked to his front door. From Henry. The ravens were gathering. Well, the hell with that.

Moses got right back into his car and went to pick up his mail. Legion Hall, who fetched it for him, usually dumped it at The Caboose when he was away.

Legion Hall was an imaginative man. According to Strawberry, Legion Hall and his two brothers, Glen and Willy, had joined the army in the spring of 1940. They were sorting out the barn for their father, shovelling cowshit, black flies feasting on them, blood streaming down their faces, when suddenly Glen threw down his pitchfork. “This guy on the radio this morning said democracy was in peril or some crap like that. He says our way of life is threatened.”

“About time too.”

“I'm joining up.”

“Good thinking. Me too.”

“Mister Man.”

Glen's head was shot off at Dieppe and Willy was blown apart by a land-mine in Italy. Legion Hall, however, saw real action only once, in Holland, and decided it wasn't for him. The next morning a colonel found him on his hands and knees with a hammer and chisel outside the field mess tent. “What are you doing, soldier?”

“What does it look like I'm doing, you prick? I'm cutting the grass.” It was the guardhouse for him. “And then,” Strawberry said, “this bunch of tests he done for a Jew doctor before Legion Hall was discharged with a twenty-five percent mental disability pension. I woulda scored him fifty percent easy.”

Now Legion Hall, wearing his regimental beret at a jaunty angle, worked all the bars on the 243 and 105 on Remembrance Day, selling poppies, possibly even turning in some of the money.

For the most part, Moses's mail was made up of magazines:
The New York Review of Books,
the
TLS,
the
Economist,
the
New Republic,
and so on. He retrieved it, retreated to his cabin, flopped down on his unmade bed, and slept for eighteen hours, wakening at seven the next morning. Following his second pot of black coffee, fortified with cognac, he sat down at his desk. Sorting out papers he stumbled on a letter he had been unable to find for weeks. It was from the lady of the eyes of a different colour. “Having rambled on at such unpardonable length and to no point, let alone catharsis,” Diana McClure's letter concluded, “I have taken the liberty of having Mr. Hobson send you a memento. Consider it compensation for my having been elusive for so long and finally proving such a bore. Are you, perhaps, a reader of detective fiction? Patricia High-smith, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James. I am addicted to their work, but I have always found the mysteries far more compelling than their resolutions, and most assuredly that is also the case with my belated ‘confessions.' The cherry wood table I have arranged to have sent to you (delivery prepaid no matter what they tell you) is the one Solomon finished for me on the Friday that I was unable to pick up the bookcase. Central heating tends to suck the moisture out of the wood. It should be treated regularly with beeswax (available from Eddy's Hardware, 4412 Sherbrooke St. W.).

“To this day I still vacillate between considering my failure to appear for tea with Solomon that Friday as most unfortunate or, conversely, a blessing for both of us. Of course this is all idle conjecture, quite useless now, but seated in my wheelchair overlooking the garden I can no longer tend, I am much given to it. The roses are badly in need of deadheading, the pods swollen. A boy with a fishing pole has just passed on his way to the brook, his eyes understandably averted. Dr. McAlpine says my hair will grow in again, but I doubt that there will be time enough. I must stop this rambling right away. Goodbye, Moses Berger, and do please remember to treat the table as instructed. Perhaps you could make a note in your desk diary or wall calendar.”

Moses continued to rummage through his desk. In a bottom drawer filled with angry letters-to-the-editor he had written but never mailed, he came across his silver cognac flask and a cheque for one hundred pounds from the
TLS,
payment for a book review that he had given up for lost. Then, under everything else, he found Mr. Morrie's handwritten memoir. Getting him to compose it, Moses recalled, had required some fancy footwork. The result was pathetic, a masterpiece of evasion. But things could still be learned from it, even as Kremlinologists pried the occasional pearl of truth out of Pravda. The analogy pleased Moses. For after all was said and done what he had become, if anything, beyond a degenerate drunk and cuckold, was a Gurskyologist. The only one armed with flint among all the hagiographers in the woodpile.

Moses moved to the cherry wood table, his most prized possession, shook the pages free of mouse droppings and began to skim through them. Mr. Morrie, in his opening paragraph, ventured that it was his intention to hit the high spots in his history of the development of the Gursky empire, begging indulgence in advance for any omissions, which could be blamed on an old man's faulty memory. So in 122 closely written pages there was not a single mention of Bert Smith. Mr. Morrie started out by saying that his father, Aaron Gursky, had decided to emigrate to Canada in 1897 (with his wife, Fanny, who was five months pregnant with Bernard) “so that he could raise his family under the British flag, which was famous for fair play.” But in fact that wasn't exactly how it happened.

Raw, illicit whisky was not only the well-head of the Gursky billions, it was also what indirectly floated Ephraim's legal descendants to Canada in the first place. Moses was able to establish as much through a close study of the Royal Commission Report on the Liquor Trade, circa 1860–70, and by chasing down every available history of the formative years of the North West Mounted Police. This led him to RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, where he sweettalked his way into the archives by flaunting his Rhodes scholarship, his First in History at Balliol, and pretending that he was researching an essay on Fort Whoop-Up for
History Today
.

Sorting through old diaries, journals, and charge sheets until his eyes ached, Moses had been rewarded by the discovery that, in 1861, Ephraim was ensconced in a log cabin in the foothills of the Rockies with a Peigan squaw and three children. He turned his hand to making Whoop-Up Bug Juice from a recipe that called for a handful or two of red pepper, a half-gallon of Jamaica ginger, a quart of molasses, say a pound of chewing tobacco, and a quart of whisky. This lethal brew was then diluted with creek water, heated to the boiling point, and carted off to a tent outside Fort Whoop-Up, hard by the Montana border. Ephraim peddled it by the cupful to Blackfoot Indians in exchange for fur and horses. It was the unhappy combination of unquenchable Blackfoot thirst and an endless need for horses to satisfy it that led to a problem. The Indians were driven to stealing horses from settlers and Hudson's Bay forts. Crazy drunk they also burned down a trading post or two for sport. They robbed and they raped, and Ephraim, according to one report, had to shoot a couple of them as an example when they had the effrontery to demand undiluted whisky, that is to say firewater that could be ignited by a match.

There were other skirmishes, more shootings and burnings, and eventually news of the unrest reached Canada's first prime minister in faraway Ottawa. Sir John A. Macdonald, a prodigious drinker himself, created something called the Mounted Rifles to cope with the trouble. However, Washington took umbrage at the aggressive Canadians imposing an armed force of three hundred men so close to the border. The resourceful Sir John A. reached for his pen and
renamed the force the Mounted Police. The fabled riders of the plain were born:

We muster but three hundred

In all this Great Lone Land

Which stretches from Superior's shore

To where the Rockies stand;

But not one heart doth falter,

No coward voice complains,

Tho' all too few in numbers are

The Riders of the Plains.

Our mission is to raise the Flag

Of Britain's Empire here,

Restrain the lawless savage,

And protect the Pioneer;

And 'tis a proud and daring trust,

To hold these vast Domains,

With but three hundred Mounted Men,

The Riders of the Plains.

Before the North West Mounted Police ever finished their punishing eight-hundred-mile-long march to Fort Whoop-Up, rampaging American whisky-runners slaughtered a band of Assiniboines at Battle Creek. Ephraim, at this point, was being supplied with rotgut whisky out of Fort Benton. Rather than wait to explain himself to the newly formed police corps, possibly being required to answer for the death of two Blackfoot, he obviously thought it more politic to skedaddle. And then, for a long while, Moses lost him, unaware of where he went next.

An enigma that was resolved when Moses came by the journal wherein Solomon recounted the tales he had been told by his grandfather on their journey to the Polar Sea. Tales filtered through an old man's faulty memory and written down by Solomon many years later. Tales that Moses suspected had been burnished in the service of not one, but two outsized egos.

In any event, according to Solomon, his grandfather next ventured as far as Russia, disposing of a cargo of beaver pelts in St. Petersburg,
and then carrying on to Minsk, where his parents had escaped from. Walking out, early in the reign of Nicholas I, when among other decrees it was ruled that Jewish children should be forcibly taken from their parents at the age of twelve and be compelled to serve in the czar's army for as long as twenty-five years.

Ephraim, wandering into the synagogue in Minsk in time for the Friday evening service, discovered that his father was still remembered fondly. “The best cantor we ever had,” an old man told him.

A week later Ephraim served as cantor for the sabbath services, the congregation amazed by the soaring golden voice of this Jew who didn't wear a capot, but dressed like a Russian prince and was rumoured to frequent
their
taverns, demanding service. Wary of his reckless behaviour, they nevertheless offered him his father's old post in the synagogue. Ephraim declined the honour, but lingered in Minsk long enough to impulsively marry a certain Sarah Luchinsky, who bore him a son called Aaron. Then there was an incident in a tavern and Ephraim was obliged to flee again. He settled his wife and child in reasonable style in a
shtetl
in the Pale of Settlement and soon, bored with both of them, left the country, but continued to send them funds from France and England and finally Canada.

Ephraim continued to wander, running guns to New Orleans during the American Civil War, he told Solomon, and then dropping out of sight until 1881, the year a swirl of pogroms followed the assassination of Alexander II by terrorists. Ephraim, his nagging wife safely dead, his son now married, eventually sent the feckless Aaron steamship tickets and enough money to come to Canada with Fanny. But Ephraim did not care for the adult Aaron any more than he had for the simpering child, and neither did he warm to Fanny. So he dumped them on a homestead he had acquired on the prairie and disappeared again.

“My dear father,” Mr. Morrie wrote, “had been poorly advised about the Canadian climate and brought cherry and peach tree saplings and tobacco seeds with him.”

They arrived in April, greeted by snow and frost, obliged to retreat to a hotel in the nearest railway town until the thaw. Then Aaron built himself a sod hut, acquired a team of oxen and a cow, and planted his
first wheat crop. It froze in the field. So Aaron bought pots and pans, tea, kerosene and patent medicines from a wholesaler and peddled to the farmers. Bernard was born, and then Solomon and Morrie.

Meanwhile Ephraim scaled the Chilkoot Pass into the Klondike. “He told me,” Solomon wrote in his journal, “that he found work as a piano player in a saloon in Dawson, doubling as a cashier. The drunken prospectors paid for their booze and girls with gold dust, Ephraim usually the one to handle the scales, joshing the men, distracting them, even as he ran his fingers through his Vaselined pompadour. Then, before going to bed every night, Ephraim washed the gold dust out of his hair. Eventually he put together a stake of $25,000, most of which he lost in a poker game in the Dominion Saloon.”

It was spring before Ephraim returned to the prairie and settled down in a tarpaper shack on the reservation with Lena Green Stockings. From time to time he looked in on Aaron and his family, mocking him, a Jew peddler; needling Fanny; and teasing the children. His visits, Solomon noted in his journal, were dreaded. But Mr. Morrie wrote, “My grandfather was a very colourful man, more interesting than many you've read about in my favourite
Reader's Digest
feature, The Most Unforgettable Character I've Ever Met. How we looked forward to his joining us at the sabbath table! His had been a very hard life, filled with adversity. The poor man lost his beloved wife while he was still in his prime and never found anybody to replace her in his heart. He could speak Indian and Eskimo and set bones better than any doctor. Sadly, though he lived to a very ripe old age, he didn't last long enough to see his grandchildren succeed beyond his wildest dreams. He would have been very proud for sure.”