Solomon Gursky Was Here (3 page)

“Well, I'll be damned.”

“Whatever them Millenarians is it's sure as shit a lot more fun than what we got.”

Finally Ephraim pointed at one, nodded at another, and they quickly scrambled into his igloo. The men, beating on their drums, led the remaining women back to their igloos, punching and kicking them. An hour later they were back, all of them, and one after another they crawled into Ephraim's igloo. There was a good deal of hollering and singing and clapping and what sounded like dancing. The Reverend Columbus Green, who had been urgently sent for, bundled up and listened by the shore, not going too close or staying too long, a Bible held to his breast. Then he reported to the men waiting in Crosby's Hotel. “I think they are singing in the language of the Lord in there,” he said.

“Don't sound like English to me.”

“Hebrew.”

“That's just bullshit,” Ebenezer Watson said, affronted.

Pressed, the Reverend Columbus Green allowed that he wasn't absolutely sure. The wind had distorted things and it had been a long time since he had studied Hebrew in the seminary.

“What's the Church of the Millenarians?” Ebenezer asked.

“I'm afraid I've never heard of it.”

“Figgers.”

The next evening the little brown men and women were gone, but before they left they had erected a sizeable sailcloth tent on the ice. There was something else. White robes were being aired on lines supported by pine poles, maybe thirty of them exploding like crackers each time they were slapped by the wind. The men in Crosby's Hotel drank several rounds and then descended in a body to Ephraim's igloo on the frozen lake.

“What are them sheets for?”

“Them aren't sheets, my good fellow. Them are ascension robes to be worn for the ascent into heaven. Those among you who can read raise your hands.”

Six of them raised their hands, but Dunlap was only bragging.

“Wait here.”

Ephraim was gobbled up by his entry tunnel then emerged a moment later to distribute pamphlets:
Evidence from the Scriptures of the Second Coming of Christ in the Eastern Townships about the year 1851
.

“It is more difficult,” Ephraim told them, his eyes hot, “for a rich son of a bitch to enter heaven than to piss through the eye of a needle. Do not comfort yourselves, my good fellows, thinking hell is an abstraction. It's a real place just waiting on sinners like you. If you have ever seen a hog on a spit, its flesh crackling and sizzling, squirting fat, well that's how hot it is in hell's coolest regions. The first meeting is tomorrow night at seven in the tent. Bring your womenfolk and your children. I have come to save you.”

Two

1983 it was. Autumn. The season of the sodden partridges, drunk from pecking at fallen, fermented crab apples. One of them wakened Moses Berger with a start, slamming into his bedroom window and sliding to the grass. Responding to the brotherly call of another dipso in trouble, Moses yanked on his trousers and hurried outside. He had turned fifty-two a few months earlier and was not yet troubled by a paunch. It wasn't that he exercised but rather that he ate so sparingly. He was not, as he had once hoped, even unconventionally handsome. A reticent man of medium height with receding brown hair running to grey and large, slightly protuberant brown eyes, their pouches purply. His nose bulbous, his lips thick. But even now some women seemed to find what he sadly acknowledged as his physical ugliness oddly compelling. Not so much attractive as a case to answer.

The partridge hadn't broken its neck. It was merely stunned. Flapping its wings it flew off, barely clearing the woodpile, undoubtedly pledging to avoid fermented crab apples forever.

Some hope.

His own head far from clear, Moses retreated to his cabin high in the woods overlooking Lake Memphremagog and reheated what remained of last night's coffee, lacing it with a shot of Greysac's cognac, now yet another Gursky brand name.

The Gurskys.

Ephraim begat Aaron.

Aaron begat Bernard, Solomon, and Morrie, who then begat children of their own.

Morning rituals. Moses conceded yet again that his wasting life had been drained of potential years ago thanks to his obsession with
the Gurskys. Even so, it could still be retrieved from insignificance, providing he managed, between bouts of fermented crab apples, to complete his biography of Solomon Gursky. Yes, but even in the unlikely event he ever got to finish that unending story, the book could never be published unless he was willing to be carted off in a straitjacket, declared mentally unbalanced.

Slipping on his reading glasses, scanning the faded charts and maps tacked to his wall, Moses had to allow that were he an objective observer he would be the first to endorse such a judgement. The one living-room wall free of ceiling-to-floor bookcases was dominated by an enormous map of Canada, circa 10,000 B.C., when most of the country had still been buried under the Cordilleran and Laurentide Ice Sheets. Alongside there was a smaller 1970 government surveyor's map of the Northwest Territories, Ephraim Gursky's journey out traced in red ink. Moses's Arctic books were stacked here, there, and everywhere, most of them annotated again and again: Franklin, M'Clure, Richardson, Back, Mackenzie, M'Clintock and the rest, but that was not what concerned him right now.

Right now Moses was determined to find his missing salmon fly, a Silver Doctor, which he had misplaced somewhere or other. He knew that he shouldn't waste his morning searching for it. Certainly he had no need of it until next summer. All the same, he turned to his worktable, speculating that it might be buried among his papers there. His work table, made up of an oak door laid on two steel filing cabinets, was strewn with pages from Solomon Gursky's journals, tapes made by his brother Bernard, clippings, file cards and notes. Dipping into the mess, he retrieved his copy of
The Newgate Calendar Improved, Being
INTERESTING MEMOIRS
of
NOTORIOUS CHARACTERS
who have been convicted of offences
AGAINST THE LAWS OF ENGLAND. He opened it, pretending he didn't know that beginning on page 78 he would discover an account of the early years of Solomon Gursky's grandfather.

EPHRAIM GURSKY

Several times convicted—Sentenced once to Coldbath Fields, once to Newgate— And finally on October 19, 1835, transported to Van Diemen's Land.

Moses, who could recite the rest of the calendar entry by heart, poured himself another coffee, enriched by just a squirt of cognac.

Greysac's cognac. Gursky cognac.

Drifting into the bedroom, he raised his glass to the portrait of his father that hung on the wall. L.B. Berger in profile, pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight. Moses turned away, but in his mind's eye, L.B. confronted him at the kitchen table once again. “I've got news for you,” he said. “I didn't make you a drunk. I deserved better.”

If not for his father taking him to that Gursky birthday party when he had been only eleven years old, Moses might never have become enthralled with Solomon. The legendary Solomon. His bane, his spur. Instead he might have enjoyed a life of his own. A wife. Children. An honourable career. No, the booze would have got to him in any event.

Once, enduring the first of his many confinements in the clinic in New Hampshire, there to dry out, Moses had foolishly submitted to prying questions.

“You talk about your father with such rage, even …”

“Contempt?”

“… but when you tell stories of your childhood you make it sound enviable. How did you feel in those days?”

“Cherished.”

“Yesterday you mentioned there were quarrels.”

“Oh yes, over the validity of Nachum Schneiderman's ‘Reply to the Grand Inquisitor'. Or the Stalin-Hitler Pact. Or the question Malraux posed to the Communist Writers' Congress, namely, ‘And what about the man who is run over by a streetcar?'”

“Well?”

“In a perfect socialist transport system, the answer goes, there will be no accidents.”

Those, those were the days before Bernard Gursky had summoned Moses's father—L.B. Berger, the noted Montreal poet and short-story writer—with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. The Bergers had not yet been lifted into tree-lined Outremont, but were still rooted in that cold-water flat on Jeanne Mance Street.
A flat that rocked day and night with the unscheduled comings and goings of loopy, loquacious Russian Jews. Yiddish poets, essayists, playwrights, journalists, actors and actresses. Artists, the lot. Washed on to the shores of a cold country that was as indifferent to them as they were to it. Except, of course, for L.B., who was sustained by larger ambitions and had already seen his poetry published in English-language little magazines in Montreal and Toronto, as well as once in
Poetry Chicago
. L.B. was the sun around which the others spun at a sometimes dizzying speed. Sleep-walking through the day, they grudgingly rendered unto Canada what was Canada's, earning their keep as minor Zionist functionaries, bookkeepers to the needle trade, insurance collectors for the Pru, synagogue secretaries, beneficial loan society officials or, as in the case of L.B., as a parochial school teacher, badgered by pushy parents. But at night they wakened to their real life of the soul. They elbowed for places at the great L.B.'s table in Horn's Cafeteria on Pine Avenue or, more often, at the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth in the cold-water flat on Jeanne Mance. There they consumed gallons of coffee or lemon tea with tray after tray of cinnamon buns, honey cake or
kichelach,
all prepared by L.B.'s wife.

Except for his mother, Moses remembered, the women were glamorous beyond compare. They wore big floppy hats pricked by peacock plumes, and flowing black capes, never mind the patches. They favoured ivory cigarette holders. Zipora Schneiderman, Shayndel Kronitz and, above all, Gitel Kugelmass, Moses's first unrequited love. The voluptuous Gitel, who usually wore an ostrich boa or a fox biting its own tail, missing either clumps of feather or fur. Chiffons, silks. The celebrated
Roite Gitel,
who had led the millinery workers out against Fancy Finery. Perfumed and powdered she was, her eyes kohled, her lips scarlet, her hands heavy with antique rings. Occasionally she sipped apricot brandy in a sticky shot glass to warm her
kishkas
in winter. Moses, anticipating her every need—emptying her ashtray—fetching her coffee—was rewarded from time to time with a perfume-laden hug or a pinch of his cheek.

Except for his mother, the women, who had never heard of inequality, poured oil onto the flames of every dispute ignited by the
men, arguing along with them far into the night about the show trials that had been held in a faraway city as cold as their own, pitching into quarrels over the merits of Osip Mandelstam, Dali, Malraux, Eisenstein, Soutine, Mendele Moykner Sforim, Joyce, Trotsky, Buñuel, Chagall, and Abraham Reisen, who had written:

Future generations,

Brothers still to come,

Don't you dare

Be scornful of our songs.

Songs about the weak,

Songs of the exhausted

In a poor generation,

Before the world's decline.

Shloime Bishinsky, a latecomer to the group, was an interesting case. Slight, droopy, seemingly the most mild of men, he was a fur dyer cursed with catarrh, a hazard of his trade. When Poland was about to be partitioned, he was caught in Bialystok, in the Russian zone. More politically informed aunts and cousins fled to the other zone. They knew, say what you like, that the Germans were a civilized people. But Shloime's family, too late for the last train out, failed to escape to Auschwitz. Instead they were transported to Siberia, a journey of two weeks. From there, Shloime slipped into the Middle Kingdom and then Harbin, in the puppet state of Manchuko, where once grand White Russian ladies now stripped in cabarets. Eventually he reached Japan itself, sailing as a stoker from Yokohama to Vancouver.

“What was it like in Siberia?” Moses once asked.

“Like Canada,” Shloime Bishinsky said, shrugging, “what else?”

For them Canada was not yet a country but the next-door place. They were still this side of Jordan, in the land of Moab, the political quarterlies as well as the Yiddish newspapers they devoured coming out of New York.

Friday nights the men read each other their poems or stories in thundering voices, moving the group to outcries of approval or disdain. Quarrels ensued. Men, who deferred to
goyishe
bank tellers,
addressing them as “sir”, who bowed their heads to the health inspector, on the boil over a clunky rhyme, a slipshod thought, a phrase like a splinter under a fingernail, slamming their fists against the table, rattling the teacups. Insulted ladies fleeing to the toilet, tears flying from them. Each poem, every story or essay, generating a morningafter of hand-delivered letters that provoked even thicker envelopes filled with rebuttal.

In principle the group endorsed racial brotherhood, burning both ends of the candle, an end to private property and all religious hocuspocus, free love, et cetera. But in practice they feared or scorned gentiles, seldom touched anything but apricot brandy, dreamed of owning their own duplex, paid Kronitz fifty cents a week for insurance policies from the Pru, and were constant husbands and loving parents. Mind you, eavesdropping from behind his bedroom door, an enthralled Moses learned that some hanky-panky was not unknown. Take, for instance, what became celebrated as the Kronitz-Kugelmass scandal. One morning Myer Kugelmass, fishing through his wife's handbag for a streetcar ticket, blundered on a red-hot billet-doux from Simcha Kronitz, peppered with obviously filthy phrases in French, and invoking celebrated lovers from Héloïse and Abelard to Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. A triumphant Gitel Kugelmass, her illicit
affaire de coeur
revealed, packed her balalaika and her musical compositions and fled to a boarding house in Ste.-Agathe, dragging a terrified Simcha Kronitz with her. Myer Kugelmass, abandoned by his wife, betrayed by his best friend, wept at L.B.'s dining-room table. “Who will I play chess with now that Simcha has dishonoured me?”