Solomon Gursky Was Here (6 page)

Seething, Moses fled the flat on the tree-lined street in Outremont and turned to Sam Birenbaum for solace. He phoned him from a downtown bar. “Meet me for a drink,” he said.

“Well …”

“Oh, come on, Molly will be glad to have you out of the apartment for once.”

S
AM, WHO HAD ONCE ENCHANTED
L.B.'s group by reciting Sacco's speech to the court, had been the first of the children to disappoint them. An ironic turn of events, because no sooner did Sam become a teenager than he was the one the group came to depend on for one
thing or another. Oh my God, one of the women would sob over the phone to Birenbaum's Best Fruit, send Sam over right away, all the lights have gone out. Or the toilet's blocked. Or the kitchen sink faucet is going drip drip drip all night. Or no heat is coming through the radiators. Or my sister-in-law's car won't start.

So Sam would hurry over to replace the burnt-out fuses or pump something unspeakable out of a toilet or change a washer or bleed the radiators or fill dry battery cells with distilled water or whatever. And then, though they were grateful, sometimes effusively so, he sensed each time that he was somehow diminished in their eyes for being proficient in such plebeian matters.

L.B. had not approved when Sam and Moses became inseparable in high school, always picking on Sam when he came to the house. “Could that be a book you are reading, Sam, or do my eyes deceive me?”

“It's a magazine.
Black Mask
.”

“Trash.”

Then Sam and Moses were at McGill together. Sam, some three years older than Moses, was editor of the
McGill Daily
until he dropped out in his final year and took a job on the
Gazette,
because his girlfriend was pregnant. Molly, who had wanted him to continue with his studies, enabling him eventually to tackle serious writing even while he taught, had offered to have an abortion. Sam wouldn't hear of it. Ever since he and Molly had started dating in high school, he had feared she would find somebody more intelligent and less rolypoly than he was, but now she had to marry him. Moses recalled the day an exuberant Sam had broken the news. “Molly Sirkin my wife. Imagine.”

They went to the Chicken Coop for lunch to celebrate.

“Don't look now,” Sam said, “but there's Harvey Schwartz, who never met a rich man he didn't like.”

Harvey came over to introduce his fiancée, Miss Rebecca Rosen; who was wearing a gardenia corsage. “We're just coming from Mr. Bernard's,” Harvey said, letting it drop that he was going to join McTavish Distillers as soon as he graduated. “I consider it a great personal challenge.”

“I want to ask you a question of an intimate nature,” Moses said. “When you are visiting Mr. Bernard's mansion and you have to piss which toilet do you get to use?”

“Let's go, buttercup,” Becky said. “They're just being silly.”

A
ND NOW SAM
, not yet twenty-three, was the father of a two-year-old boy vulnerable to earache, measles, diaper rash, kidnappers, child molesters, crib death, and only Sam could guess how much more.

The two friends met at the Café André. Moses told Sam about his quarrel with L.B. and inveighed against the Gurskys, the new Jewish royalty in America, America. “From the Rambam to the rum-runner. We've come a long way, don't you think?”

“I thought you were friendly with the Gurskys.”

“Only with Henry.”

They drifted over to Rockhead's Paradise, where Sam immediately phoned home. “Don't look at me like that. I always like her to know exactly where I am, just in case …”

“Just in case what?”

“Okay, okay. Now I've got something to tell you, but this is strictly between us. I submitted some of my stuff to
The New York Times
. They've invited me down for an interview, but even if they offer me a job I'm not going to take it.”

“Why not?”

“Molly wants to go back to work next year. Her mother could take care of Philip during the day and I could quit the
Gazette
and try my hand at some real writing.”

Hours later Sam, driving his father's car, managed it back to the Berger house in Outremont without incident. Moses had considerable difficulty with the front-door key. Sinking to his knees, the better to concentrate on threading the key through the slot, he began to giggle foolishly. “Sh,” he cautioned himself, “L.B.'s sleeping.”

“Dreaming of unstinting praise,” Sam said.

“… Pulitzers …”

“… Nobels …”

“Statues raised in his honour.”

“His hair, for Christ's sake. Beethoven.”

“Knock it off.”

They sat down together on the porch steps and Moses started in on the Gurskys again. “I'm told the real bastard was Solomon, who died in the thirties.”

“Molly will be waiting up for me.”

“Can you arrange for me to go through the Solomon Gursky file at the
Gazette
?”

“Why are you so interested?”

“Remember Shloime Bishinsky?”

“Of course I do. What about him?”

No answer.

“You want to shove it to L.B., right, comrade?”

“Can you arrange for me to go through the Solomon Gursky file or not?”

“Yeah, sure.”

But the file had been stolen. The large manilla envelope in the library was empty. And when Moses dragged out the old newspapers that dealt with the trial, he discovered that somebody had cut out the relevant stories with a razor blade.

He was hooked.

Five

Late one winter afternoon in 1908 Solomon Gursky tumbled out of school into the thickly falling snow in Fort McEwen, Saskatchewan, to find his grandfather waiting on the stern of his long sled. Solomon was a mere nine-year-old at the time. Ephraim, whom the Indians called Mender-of-Bones, was ninety-one and running short of time. He was rooted in a tarpaper shack out on the reservation, living with a young woman called Lena. A team of ten yapping dogs was harnessed to the sled. Ephraim, his eyes hot, stank of rum. His cheek was bruised and his lower lip was swollen.

“What happened?” Solomon asked.

“Not to worry. I slipped and fell on the ice.”

Ephraim tucked his grandson under the buffalo robes, laid his rifle within reach, and cracked his whip high, urging on the dogs.

“What about Bernie and Morrie?” Solomon asked.

“They're not coming with us.”

George Two Axe was waiting for them, pacing up and down in the failing light of the platform behind his general store. He hastily loaded large quantities of pemmican, sugar, bacon, tea, and rum on to the sled. “Go now,” he pleaded.

But Ephraim wouldn't be hurried. “George, I want you to send somebody to my son's house to tell him that the lad is spending the night with the Davidsons.”

“You can't take the kid.”

“Steady on, George.”

“Anything happens to you out there he hasn't got a chance.”

“I'll write to you from Montana.”

“I don't want to know where you're heading for.”

“I trust you,” Ephraim said. His eyes glittering with menace, he thrust a wad of bills at George Two Axe. “Make him a proper pine coffin and the rest is for the family.”

“You are crazy in the head, old man.”

Instead of turning right at the railroad tracks, Ephraim took a left fork on the trail leading out to the prairie.

“I thought we were going to Montana.”

“We're heading north.”

“Where?”

“Far.”

“Are you drunk again,
zeyda?
”

Ephraim laughed and sang him one of his sailor songs:

And when we get to London docks,

There we'll see the cunt in flocks!

One to another they will say,

O, welcome Jack with three years' pay!

For he is homeward bound,

For he is homeward bound!

They travelled all through the night, Solomon snug under the buffalo robes. Ephraim didn't waken his grandson until he had already built their first igloo, warmed by a stone lamp. Then he asked Solomon to help him sort out their things. “But mind how you go,” he said.

Surprisingly, among the supplies that had to be unloaded, there were a number of books, including a Latin grammar. “Right after breakfast,” Ephraim said, “we're going to start in on some verbs.”

“Miss Kindrachuk says Latin is a dead language.”

“That school of yours is no bloody good.”

“I don't have to stay here with you. I'm going home.”

Ephraim tossed snowshoes and his compass at him. “Then you're going to need these, my good fellow. Oh, and no matter how tired you get don't lie down out there or you could freeze to death.”

Outside, an indignant Solomon wandered in a sea of swirling snow. He was back within the hour, his teeth chattering. “The Mounties came to our school yesterday,” he said, testing.

“Have a cup of char. I'll make bacon.”

“They came to get André Clear Sky. There was a big fight on the reservation.”

Ephraim undid a canvas bag and laid out fresh clothes for Solomon. “This,” he said, indicating a parka with a hood attached, “is an
attigik
. And these,” he added, holding up wide pants, reaching only to the knee, “are called
qarliiq
.” Both garments, he explained, were made of caribou hide and were to be worn with the skin side against the body. There were also two pairs of stockings, the inner pair to be worn with the animal hair inside, the outer pair the other way round; and a pair of caribou-hide boots.

“Where are we going?” Solomon asked.

“To the Polar Sea.”

George Two Axe was right. He
is
crazy in the head.

“Now you eat your bacon and then we'll get some kip.”

“How long will we be gone?”

“If you are such a baby and want to go home that badly, take the dogs before I wake and beat it.”

Ephraim propped his rifle beside the sleeping platform and drifted off, his mouth agape, the igloo resounding with his snores. Solomon briefly considered knocking him out with the rifle butt and making his escape, but he doubted that he could manage the dogs, and he didn't want to go out into the cold again. Tomorrow maybe.

“You still here?” Ephraim asked, wakening. He didn't seem pleased.

“So what?”

“Maybe you were worried about how I would manage without the dogs.”

“I've never seen the Polar Sea.”

Ephraim brightened. He actually smiled. They travelled through the night again, conjugating Latin verbs, Ephraim taunting him, “Now I'm stuck with you, and I don't even know that I brought along enough food for two.”

The next evening on the trail Ephraim said, “Why don't I keep warm under the buffalo robes tonight and you run the dogs for a change?”

“What if I took the wrong direction?”

“You see that big diamond there, low in the sky, well you just keep heading right for it.”

After the first week they no longer travelled by night. Neither did Ephraim bother to destroy all evidence of their igloo before they broke camp. He taught Solomon how to harness the dogs, looping the shortest traces through those of the laziest ones stationed closest to the whip. Before chopping their food with an axe, Ephraim made a point of overturning the sled, securing it as tightly as possible to the slavering dogs so that they couldn't run off with it in their excitement. Then he hurled the meat at the pack, laughing as the strongest ones, a couple of them with their ears already torn, lunged at the biggest chunks. “From now on,” Ephraim said, “this is going to be your job.”

Ephraim understood that the boy enjoyed handling the dogs, but he continued to watch him closely, annoyed by his churlish manner, the grudging way he undertook other chores and his Latin studies. He began to wonder if he had been wrong about him, just as he had been mistaken about so many other people over the wasting years. Then he discovered that Solomon had been surreptitiously filling the pages of one of his exercise books with a map of their progress, landmarks carefully drawn. He noted with even more satisfaction that each time he had apparently dozed off, Solomon would sneak out of the igloo, hatchet in hand, marking a tree in every one of their camps with a deep gash.

Their first real quarrel followed hard on a Latin lesson.

“You're eating while I'm asleep,” Solomon said. “I can tell when I pack the supplies.”

“Cheek.”

“I think we should split the food in two right now and if you run out before we get there, well …”

“You don't even know how to hunt yet. At your age I was reading Virgil. Go harness the dogs.”

“So that you can complain I did it wrong just like everything else?”

“Hop to it.”

“You do it.”

“I'm going back to sleep.”

They lingered in the camp for three days, not speaking, until Solomon finally went out and harnessed the dogs. Ephraim followed after. Solomon had done it well and Ephraim intended to compliment him, warming things between them, but, old habits dying hard, he stifled the impulse. All he said was, “You managed not to bungle it for a change.”

It took them many days of hard sledding to reach the shores of Great Slave Lake.

Elsewhere Tsu-Hsi, the Dowager Empress of China had died; Ephraim's old friend Geronimo was ailing and would soon expire as well; Einstein surfaced with the quantum theory of light; and the first Model-T rolled off an assembly line in Detroit. But on the shores of that glacial lake, Ephraim—not so much shrunken now as distilled to his very essence—squatted with his chosen grandson, man and boy warming themselves by their camp-fire under the shifting arch of the aurora. A raven was perched on Ephraim's shoulder. “One of the gods of the Crees,” he said, “can converse with all kinds of birds and beasts in their own language, but I can only make myself understood to the bird that failed Noah.”