Solomon Gursky Was Here (14 page)

Glug, glug, glug.

“The valiant wanderer from outer space may have stepped out of the frying pan into the fire. Keep your fingers crossed and wait 'til the next episode in the ordeals of Captain Al Cohol, the hapless nomad of the high north.”

The episode was followed by the usual warning that alcohol can make you a different man, and that once hooked on liquor it was a hard habit to break. Like God, Henry thought, surprised by his own irreverence.

“So if you can't help yourself, call on someone who can, Alcohol Education, Government of the Northwest Territories, NWT.”

Henry switched off the radio but continued to sit by the window, searching the heavens from time to time, a Bible open on his lap.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.

We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof.

For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion.

How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?

It was past one
A.M
. when he saw a dot in the distance. Gradually it sprouted wings, it grew a tail, both with blinking red lights attached. Lowering, it bounced in the wind, the wings fluttering. The Otter finally circled the bay—swinging out—banking—seemingly consumed by the blazing sun before it was miraculously there again, sinking, settling into the freezing water, kicking up skirts of spray.

Henry Gursky slipped into his parka and mukluks and started for the dock, wheeling a porter's cart before him. Henry, in his early forties, was a sinewy man with an inky black beard and long dancing sidecurls; he was knobby, with a gleeful face. Solomon's face. A knitted
yarmulke
was fastened like a stopper to his thin black hair. He waved at the settlement children and the hunters who had already gathered in the bay, happy for a diversion. Two grey seals, freshly killed, lay gleaming on the rocks, their eyeballs torn out, the sockets bleeding, festooned with black flies already feasting there.

The pilot, new to North of Sixty, had heard enough gossip in The Gold Range Bar in Yellowknife to inquire after the settlement nurse. “Tell her I have a surprise for her,” he said.

Henry greeted the pilot with a smile.
“Baroch ha'bo,”
he called out.

Squinting, suspicious, the pilot demanded, “What's that mean?”

“Translated loosely it means ‘blessed be the arrival.'”

“You must be Gursky.”

“Indeed I am. Did you bring it?”

“You bet.”

It was the familiar zinc half-trunk, battered, but the locks intact.

When the oil drillers of Inuvik, largely southern flotsam, had begun to move marijuana and even more lethal stuff through the territory, an alert RCMP corporal, unfamiliar with Henry, had asked him, his manner correct but firm, to unlock the half-trunk right there. Henry had obliged and the corporal, probing the contents, peering quizzically at the bill of lading, had shaken his head, incredulous.

“I never expected to find a Jew in such rough country,” the pilot said.

“We're an astonishing people. Dandelions, my father used to say. Dig us out here and riding the wind and the rain we take root there. Any mail for me?”

There was a copy of
Newsweek,
a pensive John Dean filling the cover; two back issues of
The Beaver;
a quarterly report from James McTavish Distillers Ltd. and a cheque for $2,114,626.17; a gun catalogue from Abercrombie & Fitch; a copy of
The Moshiach
(or Messiah)
Times
for Isaac; a letter from the Rebbe at 770 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn; another letter from the Crédit-Suisse; a parcel of books from Hatchards, but not a word from his sister Lucy in London nor from Moses Berger.

The pilot watched Henry heave the half-trunk on to the cart and trundle off, past the Co-op, toward the settlement, oblivious of the swarming mosquitoes. The settlement was comprised of fifty pre-fab cubes, known as 512s because they each measured 512 square feet. The 512s were laid out in neat rows, huddling tight to a fire station, a meeting hall and school, a nursing station, the Co-op, and the Sir Igloo Inn Café, which was run by the local bootlegger. There was also a Hudson's Bay trading post with living quarters for the factor, a taciturn young man called Ian Campbell. Campbell had been recruited to North of Sixty directly from Stornoway, on the Isle of Lewis. A wool-dyer's boy, he now found himself master of credit and provisions, a keeper of ledgers, with something like the powers of a thane over the hunters in the community. He avoided the school-teaching couple from Toronto, who pandered to the natives, and he was no more than polite to the sluttish nurse who swam through his dreams, making him thrash about in bed at night. On occasion loneliness drove him to playing chess with the unbelievably rich crazy Jew, but, for the most part, he favoured drinking with the grey pulpy denizens of the overheated DEW line station, some eight miles from the settlement.

In the winter you could distinguish Henry's pre-fab from the rest, as it was the only one without quarters of frozen caribou or seal ribs stacked on the roof. It was also larger than the other pre-fabs, made up of three 512s joined together. Henry kept dogs. He could afford to feed them. Twice a week a wagon passed and filled everybody's household tank with fresh drinking water that had been siphoned through a hole in the ice of a nearby lake. Once a day the honey wagon stopped at each pre-fab to pick up the Glad bags filled with
human waste. These were dumped on the ice only three miles out to sea in spite of the hunters' complaints. The problem was that following spring breakup the bags floated free and many a seal brought in was covered in excrement, an inconvenience.

During the long dark winter there was a ploughed airstrip illuminated by lighted oil drums, but in summer only float planes serviced the settlement.

A Greek immigrant, the pilot had been told in Yellowknife about Henry. He had thought, understandably, that they were pulling his leg. He had been seated in the sour-smelling Gold Range, knocking back two and a juice with some of the other bush pilots and miners when a Yugoslav foreman from the Great Con had said, “He's been all the way to Boothia with a dog team and he knows King William like the palm of his hand.”

“What's he looking for?” the Greek asked, soliciting laughter. “Oil?”

“Brethren of his who have strayed too far from the sun.”

“I don't understand.”

“You're not expected to.”

The nurse was there. Thinner than he liked, older than he had been told. “I brought you something,” he said.

“Yes,” Agnes said, “they usually do,” and she turned and walked away from him. If he followed, all right, if he didn't, all right. It wasn't in her hands.

Henry, approaching the Sir Igloo Inn Café, a corrugated hut, saw a tangle of kids cavorting in the dust. As he drew nearer one of the kids squirted free, black hair flying, and disappeared behind an aluminum shed. “Isaac!” Henry called after him, abandoning his cart to pursue his son. “Isaac!”

He found him hidden behind an oil drum, chewing greedily on a raw seal's eye, sucking the goodness out of it. “You mustn't,” Henry chided him, tenderly wiping the blood off his chin with a handkerchief. “It's not kosher. It's unclean,
yingele. Trayf.
”

Isaac, giggly, his coal-black eyes bright, accepted an orange instead.
“Aleph,”
Henry said.

“Aleph.”

“Beth.”

“Beth.”

“And next?” Henry asked, pausing to pull his ear.

“Gimel.”

“Bravo,” Henry exclaimed, pushing open the door to his pre-fab.

“Nialie,” he sang out, “it's here.”

His wife, an uncommonly slender Netsilik out of Spence Bay, smiled broadly.
“Kayn anyhoreh,”
she said.

Together they lowered the zinc half-trunk to the floor, Henry unlocking it, taking only the bill of lading from the Nôtre Dame de Grace Kosher Meat Market, in Montreal, to the rolltop desk that had once belonged to his father. There were two bullet holes in it. “We've got a new pilot today. A Greek. Agnes came out to meet him.”

“Then he will find something wrong with his engine and he will stay the night.”

“That's enough, Nialie.”

At three
A.M
. the lowering sun bobbed briefly on the world's rim.

Henry, who had only ten minutes before it would start to climb again, stood and turned to the east wall, the one that faced Jerusalem, and began his evening prayers.
Unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul
.

Henry's faith, conceived on the shores of another sea, nurtured in Babylon, burnished in Spain and the Pale of Settlement, seemingly provided for all contingencies save those of the Arctic adherent. So Henry, a resourceful man in some matters, usually improvised, his religious life governed not by the manic sun of the Beaufort Sea, but instead by a clock attuned to a saner schedule. A southern schedule.

Henry slept for six hours, waking the next morning, Friday, to find Nialie salting a brisket that had defrosted during the night. She allowed the blood to drain into the sink, even as her grandmother had learned to do it as a child during the season of Tulugaq who had come on the wooden ship with three masts. The sabbath chicken lay trussed in a pot, the braided bread was ready for the oven.

His morning prayers done, Henry shed his
talith,
folded it neatly, and removed his phylacteries. Immediately after breakfast he sat down at his desk to write a letter to Moses Berger.

By the Grace of G-d,

15 Nissan, 5734

Tulugaqtitut, NWT

Dear Moses,

Have you heard that since February photographs taken from a satellite have revealed fractures in the Tweedsmuir Glacier? My charts show the Tweedsmuir to be 44 miles long and 8 miles wide. Since February it has stepped up its pace as it marches across the Alsek River Valley. In fact the glacier, which has been creeping southeast at a rate of less than 2 ft. 3 in. a day, is now heaving forward about 13 feet daily. At peak periods last winter Tweedsmuir was moving an astonishing 288 ft. a day. I realize this sudden restlessness is not without precedent and could be an isolated, freakish matter. But I would be grateful if the next time you see Conway at the Institute you had a word with him and checked out the movement of the other glaciers. I am particularly interested in any changes in the habits of the Barnes Ice Cap where, all things considered, it might begin again.

Conway, as you know, has no time for loonies like me, but you might point out to him that in the last 15 years there has been a marked increase in precipitation on the Barnes Ice Cap, especially in winter.

Nialie sends hugs to you and Beatrice and so does Isaac. Isaac (somewhat late in the day, it's true) is making gratifying progress with his
aleph beth
. I would be grateful if you would write soon. We worry about you.

Love,

HENRY

The last time Henry had seen Moses was just after he had been fired by NYU. Henry, in New York to consult with the Rebbe at 770 Eastern Parkway, had gone to visit Moses in his apartment. A fetid basement hole on Ninth Avenue. Furniture you couldn't unload on
the Salvation Army. Empty Scotch bottles everywhere. On the bathroom sink a bar of soap resting in slime with indentations made by the teeth marks of mice.

Four o'clock in the afternoon it was and Moses was still lying in bed, his face puffy and bruised, a purple bloom on his forehead. “What's today?” he asked.

“Wednesday.”

Henry rented a car and drove Moses to the clinic in New Hampshire.

“He looks like he ran into a wall,” the doctor said. “Who did he get into a fight with this time?”

“That's unfair. He was mugged. Look here, Moses has never been violent.”

The doctor extracted a typed sheet from a file on his desk. “On a flight to New York a couple of years ago—unprovoked, according to eyewitnesses—he tried to punch out a couple of furriers and had to be forcibly restrained by crew members. Your friend is filled with bottled-up rage. Shake the bottle hard enough and the cork pops.”

Moses's last letter to Henry had been bouncy, even joyous, which was worrying, because in the past that had always been an alarm signal. He and Beatrice were living together again, this time in Ottawa. Moses, who was lecturing at Carleton, didn't dare disgrace himself again, but he seemed well aware of that.

… and I haven't had a drink or even risked anything as intoxicating as
coq au vin
for six months, two weeks, three days and four hours. Bite your tongue, Henry, I may have been through that revolving clinic door for the last time.

Beatrice is in Montreal this week, writing an ode-to-Canada introduction to the annual report for Clarkson, Wiggin, Delorme. It's a grind, but surprisingly well paid. She says Tom Clarkson (LCC, Bishop's, Harvard MBA) is an insufferable bore, but, hell, he's putting her up at El Ritzo. For all that she's lonely, so I just might surprise her and fly into Montreal one of these nights in time to take her to dinner.…

Henry hesitated before sealing his letter. Should he add a postscript about his cousin Lionel's perplexing visit? No, he wouldn't, because he was ashamed and had already been rebuked by Nialie for his meek behaviour. Mr. Milquetoast, that's me.

Lionel's visit would have been a trial at the best of times, but as his cousin came during
Aseret Yemai Tushuvah,
the Ten Days of Repentance, it was a
mitzvah
to be reconciled with a family member who had wronged you, even as it was written: “A person should be pliant as a reed and not hard like a cedar in granting forgiveness.”

Lionel, his sister Anita, and his younger brother Nathan were the heirs apparent to McTavish Distillers Ltd., Jewel Investment Trust, Acorn Properties, Polar Energy, and the rest of the increasingly diversified Gursky empire. Lionel, Henry remembered, had been the boldest of the Gursky brood even as a child. Grabbing maids where he shouldn't. Propelling his bicycle into whatever new boys had been screened to play with him, knowing that their palpitating mothers wouldn't dare complain.