Solomon Gursky Was Here

One

One morning—during the record cold spell of 1851—a big menacing black bird, the likes of which had never been seen before, soared over the crude mill town of Magog, swooping low again and again. Luther Hollis brought down the bird with his Springfield. Then the men saw a team of twelve yapping dogs emerging out of the wind and swirling snows of the frozen Lake Memphremagog. The dogs were pulling a long, heavily laden sled at the stem of which stood Ephraim Gursky, a small fierce hooded man cracking a whip. Ephraim pulled close to the shore and began to trudge up and down, searching the skies, an inhuman call, some sort of sad clacking noise, at once abandoned yet charged with hope, coming from the back of his throat.

In spite of the tree-cracking cold a number of curious gathered on the shore. They had come not so much to greet Ephraim as to establish whether or not he was an apparition. Ephraim was wearing what appeared to be sealskins and, on closer inspection, a clerical collar as well. Four fringes hung from the borders of his outermost skin, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands. Frost clung to his eyelids and nostrils. One cheek had been bitten black by the wind. His inky black beard was snarled with icicles. “Crawling with white snakes,” one of them would say too late, remembering that day. But the eyes were hot, hot and piercing. “I say,” he asked, “what happened to my raven?”

“Hollis shot it dead.”

Ebenezer Watson kicked the runners of the long sled. “Hey, what are these dang things made of?” Certainly it wasn’t the usual.

“Char.”

“What’s that?”

“Fish.”

Ephraim stooped to slip his dogs free of their traces.

“Where are you from?”

“The north, my good fellow.”

“Where … north?”

“Far,” he said.

It was forty below on the lake and blowing. The men, knocking their throbbing feet together, their cheeks flaring crimson with cold, turned their backs to the wind. They retired to the warmth of Crosby’s Hotel, to which a first-class livery was attached. A sign posted in the window read:

Ebenezer Watson took a coal-oil lamp to the window and cleared a patch of frost to keep watch.

“What did he mean his raven?”

Ephraim was throwing slabs of bear meat to his leaping dogs, settling them down, and starting to clear snow from a circle of ice with a board, flattening it to his satisfaction. Then he took to stacking goods from his sled on to the ice he had cleared. Animal skins. Pots and pans. A Primus stove. A soapstone bowl or koodlik. A harpoon. Books.

“See that?”

“What?”

“Crazy bastard’s brought reading books with him.”

They watched him pull a rod and what appeared to be a broadsword free of the sled ropes. Then he slipped into his snow-shoes and scrambled up the sloping shore, jumping up and down there, plunging his rod into the snow like one of their wives testing a cake in the oven with a straw from a broom. Finally finding the texture of snow he wanted Ephraim began to carve out large blocks with his sword and carry them back to his flattened circle. He built an igloo with a low entry tunnel facing south. He banked the walls with snow, tended to the seams, and cut more blocks for a windbreak. Then just before he got down on his hands and knees, disappearing inside, he banged a wooden sign into the snow and ice.

The men turned up early the next morning, fully expecting to find Ephraim dead. Frozen stiff. Instead they discovered him squatting over a hole in the ice, taking a perch, setting the eye in the hook, taking another, starting over again. He threw some of the perch to his dogs, some he stacked on the ice, and now and then he nimbly skinned one, filleted it, and gulped it down raw. He also harpooned two landlocked salmon and a sturgeon. But it was something else that troubled the men. Clearly Ephraim had already found the yard in the woods where the deer wintered, walled in by some seven feet of snow into a trap of their own making. A buck hung on a pine pole lodged in the ice. Obviously it had just been dressed. The dogs, their snouts smeared with blood, were tearing into the still-steaming lungs and intestines that had been tossed to them.

“You shouldn’ta told him I kilt his bird,” Luther Hollis said.

“You scared?”

“The hell I am, Mister Man. I figger he’s only passing through.”

“Ask him.”

“You ask him.”

It continued overcast, the fugitive sun no more than a milky stain in a wash of grey sky. The men stopped counting the cracking trees or bunting pipes or exploding bottles. The temperature sank to fifty below. The men checked out Ephraim the next morning and he was still there, and the morning after and he was still there. The fourth morning the men had something else on their minds. Luther Hollis had been found hanging from a rafter in his sawmill. Dead by his own hand, apparently. He hadn’t been robbed, but neither had he left a note. It was baffling. Then, even as the men were deliberating, Crosby’s boy came running up to them. “I talked to him,” he said.

“Wipe your nose.”

But they were impressed.

“He told me he was something called a Four by Two. What’s that?”

Nobody knew.

“He invited me inside, eh, and it’s really cosy, and I got to see some of the stuff he has in there.”

“Like what?”

“Like he has a book by Shakespeare and cutlery in sterling silver with crests of some kind on them and a blanket made of the skin of white wolves and a drawing in an oak frame of a ship with three masts called Erebus.”

The Reverend Columbus Green knew Greek. “Erebus,” he said, “is the name of the place of darkness, between Earth and Hades.”

The cold broke, the wind gathered force, and it began to snow so thick that a man, leaning into the wind, squinting, still couldn’t see more than two feet ahead of him. Overnight the drifting snow buried roads and railway tracks. The blizzard blew for three days and then the sun rose in a blue sky so hard it seemed to be bolted into place. On Friday the men who had waited things out in Crosby’s Hotel found that the only exit was through a second-floor window.

Ephraim was still in place. But now there were three more igloos on the lake, many more yelping dogs, and what Ebenezer Watson described as dark little slanty-eyed men and women everywhere, unloading things. Ebenezer, and some of the others, maintained a watch from the window in Crosby’s Hotel. When the first evening star appeared they saw the little dark men, beating on skin drums, parading their women before them to the entry tunnel of Ephraim’s igloo. Ephraim appeared, wearing a black silk top hat and fringed white shawl with vertical black stripes. Then the little men stepped forward one by one, thrusting their women before them, extolling their merits in an animated manner. Oblivious of the cold, a young woman raised her sealskin parka and jiggled her bare breasts.

“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.

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:

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?”

A messenger was dispatched to Ste.-Agathe with a stinging letter to die Roite Gitel from L.B., quoting Milton, Lenin, Rilke, and of course L.B. himself, and the couples were soon reconciled, if only for the children’s sake.

The children, the children.

The children were everything. Friday nights they were brought along to L.B.’s flat, free to play run-sheep-run in the lane, stuff themselves in the kitchen, and finally flop four to a bed if necessary. They were hugged and kissed and pinched and squeezed and all they were obliged to do in return was to demonstrate, to cries of astonishment, the different ways in which they were bound to dazzle the world. Pudgy Misha Bloomgarten, who would later go into plate-glass windows, had only to scrape out a simple exercise on his violin for the names of Stern and Menuhin to be invoked. Giggly Rifka Schneiderman, who would marry into Kaplan’s Knit-to-Fit, had merely to stand up and sing “The Cloakworkers’ Union Is a No-Good Union”, her voice piercing, for the dining room to rock with applause. Sammy Birenbaum, the future television oracle, had only to recite Sacco’s speech to the court for it to be recalled that Leslie Howard, the quintessential Englishman, was actually a nice Jewish boy, mind you Hungarian. But it was Moses (after all, does the apple fall far from the tree?) who was recognized as the prodigy. L.B. flushing with pleasure, his mother summoned out of the kitchen, he would be called upon to deliver a socialist critique of The Count of Monte Cristo or Treasure Island, or whatever it was he had read that week, or to recite a poem of his own, its debt to Tristan Tzara duly noted.

Moses clung to his father, constantly searching for new ways to earn his love. L.B., he noticed, often delayed his morning departure to the dreaded parochial school, blowing on his pince-nez, wiping the lenses with his handkerchief, as he stood by the front window waiting for the postman to pass. If there was no mail L.B. grunted, something in him welcoming the injustice of it, and hurried into his coat.

“Maybe tomorrow,” his wife would say.

“Maybe, maybe.” Then he would peer into his lunch bag, saying, “You know, Bessie, I’m getting tired of chopped egg. Tuna. Sardines. It’s coming out of my ears.”

Or another day, the postman passing by their flat again, she would say, “It’s a good sign. They must be considering it very, very carefully.”

One ten-below-zero morning, hoping to shave ten minutes off his father’s anxiety time, Moses quit the flat early and lay in wait for the postman at the corner.

“Any mail for my father, sir?”

A large brown envelope. Moses, exhilarated, raced all the way home, waving the envelope at his father who stood watch by the window. “Mail for you!” he cried. “Mail for you!”

L.B., his eyes bulging with rage, snatched the envelope from him, glanced at it, and ripped it apart, scattering the pieces on the floor. “Don’t you ever meddle in my affairs again, you little fool,” he shouted, fleeing the flat.

“What did I do, Maw?”

But she was already on her hands and knees, gathering the pieces together. He kept carbons, Bessie knew that, but these, Gottenyu, were the originals.

L.B. went to Moses that evening, removing his pince-nez and rubbing his nose, a bad sign. “I don’t know what got into me this morning,” he said, and he leaned over and allowed Moses to kiss his cheek. Then L.B. declined supper, retired to his bedroom, and pulled the blinds.

A baffled Moses appealed to his mother. “That envelope was addressed to him in his own handwriting. I don’t get it.”

“Sh, Moishe, L.B. is trying to sleep.”

It would begin with a slight tic of discomfort in the back of his neck, a little nausea, and within an hour it would swell into a hectic pulse, blood pounding through every vein in his head. A towel filled with chopped ice clamped to his forehead, L.B. would lie in the dark, staring at the ceiling, moaning. One day a floodtide of blood, surging into my head, seeking passage, will blow off the top. I will die drenched in fountains of my own blood. Then, on the third day, bloated, his bowels plugged, he would shuffle to the toilet and sit there for an hour, maybe more. Afterward he would stagger back into bed, fall into a deep sleep and wake whole, even chirpy, the next morning, demanding his favourite breakfast: scrambled eggs with lox, potatoes fried with onions, bagels lathered with cream cheese.

Moses adored accompanying L.B. on his rounds. After sufficient funds had been raised by the group, he went with him to Schneiderman’s Spartacus Press on St. Paul Street, present at the creation. Sorting out pages of L.B.’s first collection of poems. Pages of The Burning Bush as they peeled hot off a flat-bed press that usually—much to Nachum Schneiderman’s embarrassment—churned out nothing more socially significant than letterheads, business cards, wedding invitations, and advertising circulars. Commercial chazerai. Schneiderman treating Moses to a Gurd’s ginger ale and a May West, saying, “When he wins the Nobel Prize I’ll say I knew him when …”

Mrs. Schneiderman arriving with a thermos of coffee and her own apple strudel covered with a linen napkin, saying, “If this were Paris or London or even Warsaw in the old days your father would be covered with honours instead of struggling to earn a living.”

The money hadn’t found L.B., not yet, but neither was he really struggling any more. L.B.’s wife had decreed his teaching job souldestroying, obliging him to resign, and she had gone back to work, bending over a sewing machine at Teen Togs. L.B., free at last, slept late most mornings and roamed the streets in the afternoons, usually stopping at Horn’s for a coffee and a Danish, nobody coming to his table if he had his notebook open, his Parker 51 poised. Back home he wrote deep into the night.

“Sh, Moishe, L.B.’s working.”

Poems, stories, and fiery editorials for the Canadian Jewish Herald on the plight of the Jews in Europe. Some nights he would be invited to read from his work at modern synagogues in Outremont, Moses tagging after through the snow, lugging a satchel full of signed copies of The Burning Bush. When his father mounted the podium, Moses would take up a position in the back of the hall, applauding wildly, torn between rising anger and concern, as it became obvious that once again there would be only eighteen or twenty-three poetrylovers in attendance, though folding chain had been provided for a hundred. Most nights Moses was lucky to peddle four or five copies of The Burning Bush, but once he actually succeeded in unloading twelve for three dollars each. No matter how few he sold he always managed to inflate the number by three, nine dollars having been slipped to him by his mother before they left for the synagogue. Sometimes L.B. would crack sour jokes on the way home. “Maybe next time we should fill the satchel with neckties or novelty items.” More often, inconsolable, he cursed the Philistines. “This is a raw land, an empty space, and your poor father is a soul in exile here. Auctor ignotus, that’s me.”

The breakthrough came for L.B. in 1941. Ryerson Press, in Toronto, brought out their own edition of The Burning Bush in their Ethnic Poets of Canada series, with an introduction by Professor Oliver Carson: “Montreal’s Eloquent Israelite”. There was a stunning review by Rabbi Melvin Steinmetz, B.A., in the University of Alberta’s Alumni News, which was immediately enshrined in one of the scrapbooks kept by Bessie.

Not long afterward fame found L.B., fame of a sort, although not the kind he yearned for. His impassioned guest editorials about the plight of the European Jews, published in the Canadian Jewish Herald, led to invitations for him to lecture, not only in Montreal but also in Toronto and Winnipeg. He was, without a doubt, an inspired orator. All that banked anger, those glowing coals of resentment, fanned into flame by his long cherished feelings of being a man wronged, winning him the praise of his dreams so long as he directed the fire at the enemies of the Jews. L.B., thick around the middle now, his greying hair allowed to grow even longer, thumbs hooked into his waistcoat pockets, rocking on his heels, red in the face as he inveighed against the obloquy of the gentiles in phrases that released howls of recognition from his audiences. Audiences that no longer numbered eighteen or twenty-three but that turned up in the hot hundreds, squabbling over folding chairs, sitting on the floor, standing three deep in the back; L.B. gathering in their outrage, orchestrating it, and then letting fly. Understandably he began to strut a little. He acquired a broad-brimmed felt hat, a cape, a foulard. On the road he now refused to sleep on pissy old mattresses in the rabbi’s spare bedroom but demanded a room in the most stylish hotel. Back in Montreal, where invitations to dine with the affluent began to proliferate, he would assure Bessie that she wouldn’t enjoy dinner with materialists like the Bernsteins, starting with the outside fork. He would endure it alone.

L.B. continued to write. Ryerson’s edition of The Burning Bush was followed by poems and stories and literary pensées in Canadian Forum, Northern Review, Fiddlehead, and other little magazines. Ryerson brought out a second volume of his poems, Psalms of the Tundra, followed by a first collection of stories, Tales of the Diaspora. He was interviewed by the Montreal Gazette. Herman Yalofsky invited him to sit for his portrait. L.B. in profile pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight. The fingertips of one spidery hand supporting his wrinkled forehead, the other hand holding his Parker 51.

L.B. now began to wander further afield, making forays into gentile bohemia, tippy-toe at first, but soon con brio as he found himself, much to his astonishment, welcomed as an exotic, a garlicky pirate, living proof of the ethnic riches that went into weaving the Canadian cultural tapestry. Soon he was at ease at their soirées, collecting compliments from young ladies who, although educated in Switzerland, now wore Russian peasant blouses and drank beer out of bottles and talked dirty. He became a proficient punster. He found that he was adept at flirting, especially with Marion Peterson (such a trim waist, such nice firm breasts) who trailed a sweet scent of roses. Just a tasteful goyishe hint, mind you, not drenched in it like Gitel Kugelmass. Marion sculpted. “Your head,” she said, cupping it, cool fingers running through his hair.

“What’s wrong with it?” he asked, alarmed.

“You have an Old Testament head.”

Traipsing home through the snow, his scalp was still tingly.

Bessie, as usual, had left the hall light on for him. She sat in a worn robe at the kitchen table, trimming her corns with a knife. The following evening L.B. refused the stuffed derma, a favourite of his, that she had prepared for him. “Didn’t you have a movement this morning?” she asked.

“It’s too fattening.”

L.B. became a regular at evenings in the apartments of dedicated McGill professors who also wrote poetry, swore by the New Statesman, and toiled long hours to save Canada through socialism. They proved a bizarre lot, these gentiles, their intelligentsia. They had not been nourished on Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, the Zohar, Balzac, Pushkin, Goncharov, the Baal Shem Tov. Among them it was G.B.S., the Webbs, H.G. Wells, board-and-brick bookcases red with Gollancz’s Left Book Club editions, New Yorker cartoons pasted on the walls of what they called the loo and, above all, the Bloomsbury bunch. Catty, clever people, L.B. thought. Writers who luxuriated on private incomes and knew the best years for claret. But when he brought back news of the goyim out there to his acolytes who still gathered round the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth on Friday nights, he made it sound like a world of wonders. L.B. now eschewed chopped liver on rye with lemon tea and, instead, nibbled Camembert and sipped Tio Pepe.

Then came the summons from Sinai. L.B. was invited to an audience at Mr. Bernard’s opulent redoubt cut high into the Montreal mountainside, and he descended from those heights, his head spinning, pledged to unheard-of abundance, an annual retainer of ten thousand dollars to serve as speech writer and cultural adviser to the legendary liquor baron.

“And this,” Mr. Bernard had said, leading him into a long room with empty oak shelves running from ceiling to floor, “will be my library. Furnish it with the best. I want first editions. The finest morocco bindings. You have a blank cheque, L.B.”

Then Libby was heard from. “But nothing second-hand.”

“I beg your pardon, Mrs. Gursky?”

“Germs. That’s all I need. We have three children, God bless them.”

L.B., once he had acquiesced to the deal, grasped that he had a lot of fancy footwork to perform. For, as far as his acolytes were concerned, the sly, rambunctious reformed bootlegger, worth untold millions now, was still a grobber, a hooligan who rained shame on Jews cut from a finer cloth. Saddened by the seduction of their mentor, they were as yet unable to rebuke their cherished L.B. to his face. Except for Schneiderman, who beat his fist against the table and cried out, “Ask him why he betrayed his brother.”

“What?”

“Solomon.”

Moses, clearing cups from the table, heard for the first time the name that would become both quest and curse to him.

Solomon. Solomon Gursky.

“There are many versions of that story,” L.B. protested.

“His own brother I’m telling you.”

“Didn’t Jacob slip one over on Esau and isn’t he still one of our fathers?”

“To the Jesuits you would be a real credit, L.B.”

“Artists have always had to dance a jig for their patrons. Mozart, Rousseau. Mahler, that bastard, actually converted. Me, all I have agreed to do is to write speeches for Mr. Bernard about the plight of our brethren in Europe. Coming from me, it’s noise. From Mr. Bernard they will prick up their ears. Gates will open, if only a crack. In this country big money talks.”

“To you maybe,” Schneiderman said, “but not to me.”

“So, chaverim, does anybody else want to put in his two cents?”

Nobody.

“Me, it breaks my heart to have my sweet Bessie go off to Teen Togs every morning. I have a son to educate. Am I not entitled, after all these years of serving my muse, to put some bread on the table?”

Uncertain of themselves, with so much to lose, the group seemed about to forgive, to make amends. L.B. sensed that. Then Shloime Bishinsky, who seldom said a word, surprised everybody by speaking out. “That Mr. Bernard is rich beyond anybody’s dreams, that he is powerful, is not to be denied. The bootlegging was clever—not such a sin—and many who condemn him do it out of envy. Jay Gould and J.P. Morgan or Rockefeller were worse bandits. What I’m trying to say, forgive me, is that such princes in America are entitled to their mansions, a Rolls-Royce, chinchilla coats, yachts, young cuties out of burlesque shows. But a poet they should never be able to afford. It has to do with what? Human dignity. The dead. The sanctity of the word. I’m explaining it badly. But the man I took you for, L.B., you are not. Forgive me, Bessie, but I can’t come here any more. Goodbye.”

Only a trickle of the regulars came to read stories and poems the following Friday night and a month later there was none.

“If those dreamers stop coming here to feed their fat faces and read me their dreck once a week, it’s fine with me. I require solitude for my work.”

The little tic of discomfort started in the back of his neck, the nausea came, and L.B., his pulse hectic, retired to his bed for three days.

“Sh, Moishe, L.B. isn’t well.”

Venturing out among the gentiles, anticipating disapprobation of another kind (they stick together, never mind the class struggle), he was surprised to discover they were impressed. One of the girls, a Morgan, said her aunt had once had a thingee with Solomon Gursky. “He made her a cherry wood table. She still has it.”

L.B. would stand at the back of the hall listening to Mr. Bernard, watching him rake in acclaim for a poet’s unacknowledged eloquence. Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy that’s us, L.B. thought. It stung. But there were compensations. The Bergers moved out of their cold-water flat on Jeanne Mance into a detached house with a garden and ornamental shrubs on a tree-lined street in Outremont, Mr. Bernard guaranteeing the mortgage. There was a proper study for L.B. with an oak desk and a leather armchair and a samovar and Herman Yalofsky’s portrait of him mounted on an easel. LB. in profile pondering the mysteries of the cosmos, enduring its weight.

Three

One afternoon in 1942 L.B. told Moses that they were invited to the Bernard Gursky mansion. Moses was ordered to have his hair cut and he was dressed in a new suit and shoes. L.B. explained, “It’s a thirteenth birthday party for the eldest son, Lionel, and Mr. Bernard said that you would be welcome. You are expected to play with the two younger ones, Anita and Nathan. Say it.”

“Anita and Nathan.”

“When you are presented to Mrs. Gursky you will thank her for inviting you to the party. She has a honor of germs. Polio, typhoid, scarlet fever. So if you have to go to the toilet you ask me and I’ll show you where there is one for the guests.”

“You mean even you,” Moses asked, his cheeks hot, “aren’t allowed to use their toilet?”

“You and that temper of yours. I don’t know where you get it.”

The three Gursky brothers had built neighbouring fieldstone mansions on the Montreal mountainside. Mr. Bernard had three children. Mr. Morrie had two, Barney and Charna. And following Solomon’s death his widow lingered on in her husband’s mansion with her two children, Henry and Lucy. All of the Gursky children, secure behind the tall stone walls of the estate, had been munificently provided for. Once through the wrought-iron gates, an awestruck Moses, totally unprepared by his father, was confronted with undreamed-of splendour.

There was an enormous swimming pool. A heated, multi-level tree house, designed by an architect and furnished by an interior decorator. A miniature railway. A hockey rink, the boards thickly padded. A corner candy store with a real soda fountain tended by a black man who laughed at everything. There was a musical merry-go-round (this actually rented for the party) and a bicycle track running along the perimeter. The railway, the corner candy store, the rink and bicycle track had all been built shortly after the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby. At the same time the chauffeurs entrusted with all the little Gurskys (except for Henry and Lucy), driving them to their private schools, had taken to carrying arms.

Some twenty children, most of them as petrified as Moses, had been invited to Lionel’s birthday party and they stood in line to congratulate him.

“And what’s your name?” Lionel asked.

“Moses Berger.”

“Oh yeah, your father works for us.”

The party was enlivened by clowns who rode around the grounds in a little circus jalopy. The jalopy, given to backfiring explosively, had an outsize klaxon that played the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (which, in Morse code, also stood for “V for Victory” at the time). There were strolling accordion players and saucy French-Canadian fiddlers dressed like the voyageurs of old. There were jugglers. A torch singer, appearing at the Tic-Toc, dropped by to sing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. Four middle-aged midgets dressed like six-year-olds sang “The Lollipop Kids”. A magician was flown in from New York. An Indian from the Caughnawaga reservation, appropriately costumed, performed a war dance and then presented Lionel with a tribal headdress, pronouncing him a chief. Mrs. Gursky immediately removed the headdress and warned Lionel that he had to have a shampoo before going to bed. Then there was a birthday cake, large as a truck tire, the marzipan icing cleverly done up like a Time magazine cover, featuring Lionel Gursky, Boy of the Year.

Moses followed the arrows to the basement GUEST FACILITIES, just in time to collide with a flustered Barney Gursky emerging from the bathroom.

Afterward Moses wandered past the pool to the far side of the estate where he came upon two children seated on a swing. The boy seemed to be his own age. The girl, possibly a few years younger, was sucking her thumb. Popping it free, she said, “Why don’t you go back to the party where you came from?”

Henry introduced himself and his sister, Lucy.

“My name’s Moses Berger.”

Lucy shrugged, as if to say so what, slid off the swing and sauntered back to the fieldstone mansion.

“What school are you at?” Moses asked.

“I don’t g-g-go,” Henry said. “I’m not allowed.”

“But everybody has to go to school.”

“I have a t-t-teacher who comes here. Miss Bradshaw. She’s f-f-from England.”

Not to be outdone, Moses said, “My father’s L.B. Berger. You know, the poet. What does your father do?”

“My f-f-father’s dead. Would you like to see my room?”

“Sure.”

Just as Henry jumped off the swing a lady with tangled hair, black streaked with grey, shuffled out of the French doors of the fieldstone mansion. She was barefoot, wearing no more than a baby-blue nightgown, supported on one side by a stout lady in a starchy white uniform and, on the other, by a young man in a white jacket.

“Who’s that?” Moses asked.

“My m-m-mother isn’t well.”

Then to Moses’s surprise, Henry took his hand and held it tightly, leading him into the house.

The living room, the largest Moses had ever seen, was crammed with paintings lit from above, many of them in heavy gold frames. Moses recognized one of them as a Matisse and another as a Braque. He knew as much because his Folkshule teacher, Miss Levy, used the Book-of-the-Month Club News as a teaching aid and in those days the covers featured work by famous artists. But what caught his eye was a clearly outlined blank space on the wallpaper. Obviously a big picture had once hung there. Dangling wires from a lighting fixture were still in place.

Months later Henry told him that the blank space had once been filled by a portrait of a beautiful young lady. When you looked at it closely you saw that one of her eyes was blue and the other brown. Either the painter had been drunk when he was working on the picture or he was crazy to begin with. Lucy had a theory of her own. “I think the lady wouldn’t pay him for the picture, so he got even by painting her eyes in different colours.” Anyway, shortly after their father’s death the picture had been stolen. Everybody had a good laugh at what real dummies the crooks were. They left behind a Matisse, a Braque, and a Léger, among others, and made off with nothing more than a worthless picture by a local artist.

Enormous teddy bears filled every corner of Henry’s huge bedroom. The bed was unmade and Moses could just make out the outlines of a rubber sheet under the linen one. Then he saw the antique lead soldiers arrayed in ranks on the floor. British grenadiers on one side, French dragoons on the other.

“How old are you?” Moses asked.

“Th-th-thirteen.”

“And you still play with toy soldiers?”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

Actually Moses wanted to, and the two of them settled on the floor, Moses behind the French dragoons.

“They lost,” Henry said, offering him the grenadiers instead.

“What?”

“W-W-Waterloo.”

As the battle developed, incredibly detailed field pieces being brought into play, Moses really began to enjoy himself. Then, suddenly, he leaped to his feet. “Jeez. I’d better get back. My father will be worried.”

“You’re my prisoner now,” Henry said, racing to the bedroom door, blocking it with his outstretched arms.

“Aw, come on. Don’t be such a jerk.”

Henry, biting back tears, let his arms collapse. “Will you come and p-p-p-play with me again?”

“Offer to pay him,” Lucy said, standing in the doorway. She smiled. Her fist curling over her mouth, her cheeks hollow from the strain of sucking.

“I’ll come again.”

Moses ran all the way back to the party, arriving in time to stumble on its closing ceremony. All the kids were gathered in a circle close to the gates, their beaming parents waiting to drive them home. One of their number, a plump redhead called Harvey Schwartz, wearing a ruffled blouse and magenta velvet trousers, skipped forward and presented a bouquet of red roses to Mrs. Gursky. “This is for our gracious hostess,” he said, kissing a stooping Mrs. Gursky on the cheek, “who was kind enough to invite us here for a day we will remember forever and ever.”

“You’re an angel,” Mrs. Gursky said, wiping her cheek with a Kleenex.

“We wish the birthday boy continued good health and success in all his future endeavours,” Harvey continued. “And now, three cheers for Lionel Gursky!”

As everybody but Barney Gursky joined in for three rousing cheers, Harvey Schwartz’s mother descended on Mrs. Gursky. “Harvey’s the rank-one boy at the Talmud Torah. He’s already skipped a grade. I hope he can come again.”

Moses spotted L.B. pacing up and down, obviously in a rage. “Where in the hell were you?” he asked, as a smiling Mr. Bernard joined them.

“Over there. With Henry and Lucy.”

L.B., appalled, looked imploringly at Mr. Bernard. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t worry. How would he know.”

“What’s wrong with their mother?”

“Damn it,” L.B. said.

But Mr. Bernard was chuckling. He pointed a stubby finger at his forehead and twirled it like a screwdriver. “She’s as cuckoo as a fruit cake,” he said.

An agitated Mrs. Gursky joined them, propelling little Harvey Schwartz before her. “Tell him,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Bernard, but somebody has written bad words about Lionel on the wall of the guests’ toilet.”

“What are you talking about?”

STROLLING DOWN FROM THE HEIGHTS Moses told L.B. that Henry had invited him back to play again.

“Absolutely out of the question. He’s Solomon’s kid.”

“So?”

“It’s very complicated. Family history. Old quarrels. We don’t want to get involved in that.”

“Why?”

“When you’re older I’ll explain.”

“How much older?”

“Will you stop now please. I’ve had enough for one day.”

They continued down the steep twisting mountainside road in silence.

“Solomon was a bulvon,” L.B. said. “A dreadful man. He came to one of my readings once and he was the first with his hand up in the question period. ‘Can the poet tell me,’ he asked, ‘whether or not he uses a rhyming dictionary?’ I should have socked him one.”

“Yeah,” Moses said, and trying to picture it he giggled and then took his father’s hand. “Let’s go to Horn’s for a coffee.”

“I can’t today. In fact I’ve got to leave you here.”

“Where are you going?”

L.B. sighed, exasperated. “If you really must know I’m late for a sitting with a sculptor.”

“Hey, that’s great! What’s his name?”

L.B. flushed. “Questions questions questions. Don’t you ever stop? Somebody I met at a party. Good enough for you?”

Four

When L.B.’s poem celebrating Mr. Bernard’s twentieth wedding anniversary in 50 was published in Jewish Outlook, it enraged Moses. A committed socialist himself now, he lashed out at his father for having betrayed his old adoring comrades to become an apologist for the Gurskys, one of Mr. Bernard’s lapdogs.

“Calm down. Lower your voice, please. It just so happens,” L.B. protested, “that Mr. Bernard did more for our refugees and the State of Israel than any of those nebbishes.”

But Moses would have none of it, going on to accuse his father of having become a nimmukwallah, somebody who had eaten the king’s salt. They quarrelled, Moses pronouncing L.B. pretentious for keeping carbon copies of all his correspondence. L.B. replied, “I want you to know that the first edition of The Burning Bush, the Spartacus Press folio, now sells for ten dollars, if you are lucky enough to find one. It’s classified as ‘Rare Canadian Judaica’. A real collector’s item.”

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.”

SAM, 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.”

AND 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:

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.”

Ephraim stood up and pissed and threw the dogs some jackfish. “Do you hear that in the hills?” he asked.

“Is it a wolf?”

“The Chipewyans, who will kill anything, just out of spite, even small birds in their nests, never harm the wolf, because they believe it to be an uncommon animal. Me, I’m no Chipewyan. Come,” he said, offering his hand.

But Solomon, sliding free, wouldn’t take it. He was longing to, but he couldn’t.

“I’m going to show you something,” Ephraim said.

Ephraim slid a long knife free of their sled and planted it upright in the snow. He melted honey over the fire and coated the blade with it, the honey freezing immediately. “The wolf will come down later, start to lick the honey and slice his tongue to ribbons. Then the greedy fool will lick the blood off the blade until he bleeds to death. Do you understand?”

“Sure I do.”

“No, you don’t. I’m trying to warn you about Bernard,” Ephraim said, glaring at him. “When the time comes, remember to spread honey on the knife.” Muttering to himself, he heated a kettle of snow to make tea. “There’s gold to be found here. We’re sitting right on it.” Then he reminisced about his boyhood in the coal mines in a manner that assumed Solomon had been right there with him in the pit, also chained to a sledge, sinking to all fours, mindful of scuttling rats as he dragged his load along to the gob. Remembering the pithead girls, Sally of County Clare. Cursing old enemies Solomon had never heard of, obviously put out when the boy failed to pepper the broth with invective of his own, instead looking baffled and just a little scared. “In Minsk,” Ephraim said, “and then in Liverpool, your great-grandfather was a cantor and when he sang Kol Nidre no synagogue was large enough to seat all of his followers.”

Long before they reached their destination, they rode into their first gale. Ephraim sat down on the sled, wrapped himself in skins, and said, “You’d better build us an igloo now.”

“But I don’t know how.”

“Build it,” Ephraim said, tossing him the long knife.

“You do it,” Solomon said, kicking the knife away.

“I’m going to sleep.”

Crazy old bastard, Solomon thought, but he retrieved the knife. Tears freezing against his cheeks, he began to cut snow blocks. When he was done, he shook his grandfather as hard as he dared, waking him. Once inside, Ephraim lit the koodlik. He sat Solomon on his lap warming the bright burning spots on his cheeks with the palms of his hands and then he tucked him in under the skins on the snow platform and sang him to sleep with one of his songs, not a profane song but one of the synagogue songs he had learned at his father’s table.

The boy safely asleep, Ephraim was able to gaze fondly at him. Warming the back of his hands against his chosen grandson’s cheeks and then retreating to a corner to get quietly drunk. I’m ninety-one years old, but I’m not ready to die until I see him face to face.

Standing over his grandson in the igloo, wearing his black silk top hat and talith, Ephraim, soaked in rum, spread hands stiff with age and pronounced the blessing his father used to say over him: “Yeshimecha Elohim keEfrayim vechiMenasheh.”

As far as Solomon was concerned Ephraim was unpredictable, cranky. A quirky companion. On the rare occasion gentle, but for the most part impatient, charged with anger and contradictions. One day he would be full of praise for the Eskimo, an ingenious people, who had learned to survive on a frozen desert, living off what the land had to offer, forging implements and weapons out of animal bone and sinew. The next day he would drunkenly denounce them. “Their notion of how to cure a sick child is for the women to dance around the kid singing aya, aya, aya. They have no written language and the vocabulary of their spoken one is poverty stricken.”

Before slicing frozen meat for breakfast, Ephraim would lick the knife with his tongue, which immediately adhered to the blade, and then he would wait for the heat of his body to warm the knife sufficiently for blade and tongue to separate. If he tried to cut with a cold knife, he explained, the blade would rebound or maybe even break.

Each time they broke camp it was infuriatingly clear to Solomon that rather more food had been consumed than they could possibly have eaten together. Obviously, the selfish old bastard was gorging himself in secret. He was most irascible when unable to remember the names of old friends. He tended to repeat stories spun from his jumbled memories. Even wearing his reading glasses, a curse to him, he had trouble making a sewing needle from a ptarmigan bone and had to fling it away, a bad job. Five hours sleep was enough for him and on occasion he would shake Solomon awake early, claiming he had something urgent to tell him. “Never eat the liver of a polar bear. It drives men mad.”

Ephraim, the first old man Solomon had ever looked at nude, was an astonishing sight. A wreck, a ruin. What remained of his teeth long and loose and the colour of mustard. His jaw receding. Those arms, surprisingly strong, although spindly, the muscles attenuated. His narrow chest a mat of frosty grey hair. His sunken belly slack. A red lump bulging like an apple out of one hip, pulling the flesh taut. “My very own pingo,” he called it. A ruby tracery of veins disfiguring one leg. His disconcertingly large testicles hanging low in a wrinkled sac, his penis flopping out of a snowy nest. Old wounds and scars and purplish places where he had been sloppily sewn together. His back reamed with welts and knots and ridges.

“How did it get like that?” Solomon asked.

“I was a bad boy.”

Some mornings Ephraim wakened frisky, eager to plunge farther into the tundra. On other mornings, complaining of aching bones, he lingered on the sleeping platform, comforting himself with rum. Drunk, he might mock Solomon, listing his inadequacies, or prowl up and down the igloo, unaware of his grandson, arguing with himself and the dead. “How was I to know she would hang herself?”

“Who?”

“Don’t pry into my affairs.”

He made considerable ceremony out of winding his cherished gold pocket watch before retiring each night, a watch that was inscribed:

One night he shook Solomon awake, raging, “I’d like to see him face to face, like Moses at Sinai. Why not? Tell me why not?”

They ate arctic hare and ptarmigan. Ephraim taught him how to handle a rifle and hunt caribou, shaking his head when so many bullets were wasted. But once Solomon had brought down his first bull, shot through the heart, Ephraim astonished him with hugs and tickles and the two of them rolled over together in the snow again and again. Then Ephraim slit the caribou open, careful not to puncture the first stomach. He scooped out hot blood and drank it, and indicated that Solomon was to do the same. Back in the igloo, he cracked some bones and showed Solomon how to suck the marrow from them, then sliced chunks of fat out of the rump for both of them to munch. Afterward Solomon, overcome by nausea, fled the igloo.

A week later they camped on the shores of Point Lake and the Coppermine River. Ephraim told him that so far only five leaders of Israel had lived a hundred and twenty years: Moses, Hillel, Rabbi Yochanon ben Zakai, Rabbi Yehuda HaNassi and Rabbi Akiva. “I’m already ninety-one years old, but if you think I’m ready to die you’re bonkers.”

As they moved further along the Coppermine, Ephraim’s mood seemed to sweeten. There were nights when the old man entertained his grandson with stories, the two of them lying together under the skins, the light dancing in their igloo, but other nights Ephraim drank too much rum.

“How would you find your way back if I died in my sleep?”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Maybe you were a fool to come out here with me. I wouldn’t even be good to eat. I’m just a bag of bones now.”

Solomon withdrew from him under the skins. “I don’t want to be teased any more, zeyda.”

“I could be mistaken in you. Maybe I should have brought Bernard with me. Or Morrie.” He grabbed Solomon and shook him. “Morrie could be the one to watch out for, you know. Damn. You don’t understand anything.”

“If you hate me so much, why did you bring me here?”

Startled, stung, Ephraim wanted to protest, he wished to tell him how much he loved him. But he choked on it. Something in him wouldn’t allow it. “Why did Saul throw that javelin at David?”

Once they reached their destination, the shores of the Polar Sea, the old man and the boy built an igloo together and hung their clothes out to dry on a line stretched over their koodlik; then Ephraim tucked his grandson between the skins spread on the sleeping platform. “It was the dying Orkneyman,” he said, “the boatman I met in Newgate prison, who led me and now you to this shore.”

Ephraim celebrated their safe arrival by drinking a bottle of rum and singing songs for Solomon. Synagogue songs. Then he told him a story. “Long, long ago not only the north, but most of the land was under ice, maybe a mile thick. When the ice melted there was a deluge and the waters swept over the lands of the Eskimos, the Loucheux, the Assiniboines and the Stony people. Many were drowned before Iktoomi took pity on them and decided that he must save some. Iktoomi saved one man and one woman, and one male and one female of each kind of animal. He built a large raft and they floated on it over the flood waters.

“On the seventh day Iktoomi told the beaver that he must try to dive right to the bottom and see if he could bring back a chunk of earth. O, that poor beaver, he dived and dived but he couldn’t reach the bottom. So the next day Iktoomi sent a muskrat into the water to see if he could bring back a bit of mud. The brave muskrat dived very deep and they waited and waited. In the evening the dead body bobbed to the surface of the water near the raft. Iktoomi took it on board and found a little mound of mud in the muskrat’s paw. He brought the rat back to life and took the little bit of mud and moulded it with his fingers and as he did that it grew and grew. Finally he put the mud over the side of the raft, and it went on growing into solid earth so that soon he could land the raft and all the animals. And the land still went on growing and growing from where he had moulded it.

“When all the animals were ashore and the land was still growing, he waited till it was out of sight and then he got hold of the wolf and told him to run round the earth and only to come back and tell him when the earth was big enough to hold all the people. Now the wolf took seven years in his voyage and in all that time he couldn’t complete his tour of the world. He crept back home and fell exhausted at Iktoomi’s feet. Iktoomi then asked the raven to go out and fly over the bit of the world that the wolf hadn’t seen. Now the raven in those days was absolutely white, that’s the way it was with him, and he flew off to do Iktoomi’s bidding. Or so it seemed. But instead of flying as he was told to do, he got hungry, and seeing a corpse floating by, he swooped down and began to pick at it. Then he flew home again and when Iktoomi saw him he knew that he had been eating a dead body because his beak was full of blood. So he seized hold of the raven and said to him: ‘Since you have such a dirty nature, you shall have a dirty colour.’ Right then the raven was turned from white to black and that colour he remains to this day.”

Ephraim slipped between the skins with Solomon, the two of them embracing to keep warm. In the morning he said, “We will wait here until my people find us and then you will no longer have to warm yourself in bed against a bag of bones.”

“How will your people know we’re here?”

“The first man made by the Great Being was a failure,” Ephraim said, “he was imperfect, and therefore was cast aside and called kubla-na or kod-lu-na, which means white man. Then the Great Being made a second try and the result was the perfect man, or Inuit, as the people call themselves. They will find us and they will hide me here until I die.”

“You mean you aren’t taking me home again?”

“You can have the dogs. The sled. One of the rifles and half of the ammunition. When my people come they will also load you down with seal meat.”

“How will I find my way home?”

“I taught you what I know. How to read the stars and how to hunt.

An Eskimo boy could do it.”

“I’m not an Eskimo.”

“I can get two of the people to lead you back as far as the tree line.”

“I should have killed you while I had the chance.”

Ephraim unstrapped a leather bag from the sled, dug into it, and extracted an ancient pistol. “Here,” he said, tossing it to Solomon. “Go ahead.”

HMS Erebus was engraved on the pistol butt.

Six

Moses, still searching for his salmon fly, had to acknowledge that he didn’t need the Silver Doctor. He could buy another one next time he was on the Restigouche. But, on the other hand, if he continued to hunt for it for another hour—say, until eleven A.M.—it would be too late to start work. The day shot, he then might as well retreat to The Caboose to check out his mail and maybe hang in for a drink. Just one, mind you. So he lifted a large cardboard carton out of the hall closet and emptied it on the living-room floor. Out spilled a Hardy reel, his missing cigar cutter, a Regal fly-tying vice, years of correspondence with the Arctic Society, and his collection of notebooks, documents, and maps that dealt with the Franklin expedition.

Moses had been a member of the Arctic Society until his disgraceful behaviour at a meeting in 1969 had led to his being declared persona non grata.

The first item he retrieved from his Franklin papers was an interview, published in The Yellowknifer, with a granddaughter of Jock Roberts. Roberts had sailed into the Arctic in 1857 with Captain Francis Leopold M’Clintock. M’Clintock was seeking survivors of the lost Sir John Franklin expedition, a search that engaged the attention of the British Admiralty, the President of the United States, the Czar of Russia and, above all, Lady Jane Franklin. A ballad, popular in London at the time, ran:

Poor Franklin.

In 1845, only days before he set sail for the Polar Sea in quest of the Northwest Passage, the fifty-nine-year-old veteran of the Battle of Trafalgar was stricken with a premonition of the icy grave that awaited him. While he was napping on a sofa, Lady Franklin, thinking to warm him, spread over his legs the British Ensign which she was embroidering. Franklin promptly leapt to his feet. “There’s a flag thrown over me! Don’t you know they lay the Union Jack over a corpse?”

A complement of 134 officers and men and two stout, three-masted vessels of the bomb-ketch type were put at Franklin’s disposal. Both ships, rigged as barks, were fortified for their Arctic ordeal, their planking doubled, their bows and sterns bolstered to a thickness of eight feet. Crowds flocked to the dock when the Erebus and the Terror were scheduled to depart from the Thames. The officers were turned out smartly in tailcoats, round jackets, monkey jackets and greatcoats. For the voyage to circumnavigate the globe through the Northwest Passage they also took with them double-breasted waistcoats, stick-up collars, black silk neck handkerchiefs, and other fashionable items becoming to gentlemen at sea. Stout, jowly Franklin read his crew a sermon, taking the text from the seventeenth chapter of 1 Kings, wherein Elijah the Tishbite told how he hid himself by the brook Cherith, that was before Jordan, and how the ravens were commanded to feed him there, bringing him bread and flesh in the morning and again in the evening.

Among the supplies that had been loaded on to the ships were thousands of cans filled with preserved meat, soups, vegetables, flour, chocolate, tea, tobacco and, as proof against scurvy, lemon juice. Even so, some of the more fastidious members of the ships’ company thought it prudent to look to their needs. One officer, for instance, took on board assorted bonbons especially ordered from Fortnum & Mason. And then on the dark night before they sailed out of Stromness Harbour, in the Orkneys, their last home port, there was the curious case of the assistant surgeon of the Erebus boarding with a cabin boy wearing a silk top hat, the two of them lugging sacks of personal provisions. Six coils of stuffed derma, four dozen kosher salamis, a keg of schmaltz herring and uncounted jars of chicken fat, their pockets bulging with garlic cloves. The assistant surgeon and the cabin boy were jabbering in some guttural tongue, which the third lieutenant, whose watch it was, took to be a German dialect. On inquiry, however, the cabin boy insisted it was a patois that he and the assistant surgeon had picked up on a voyage to the South Seas.

Concern for Franklin did not surface until 1847. The Admiralty sent out three relief expeditions, unavailingly. By 1850, fleets of ships were searching the Arctic. One of them found three graves marked by head-boards. They were the tombs of two sailors from the Erebus and one from the Terror. The three men had been buried in 1846.

The quest for Franklin continued. In 1854, John Rae, surveying the Boothia Peninsula, met with a band of Eskimos who told him that Franklin’s party had starved to death after the loss of their ships, leaving accounts of their suffering in the mutilated corpses of some who had evidently furnished food for their unfortunate companions. Rae’s story was published in the Toronto Globe.

The fact that a Christian would accept the word of the natives on such an insidious matter inflamed not only Lady Franklin, but also other Britons, among them Charles Dickens. The source of these stories, Dickens wrote, was a covetous, treacherous and cruel people, with a proven taste for blood and blubber. Members of the Franklin expedition represented the “flower of the trained English navy,” and, therefore “it is in the highest degree improbable that such men would, or could, in any extremity of hunger, alleviate the pains of starvation by this horrible means.”

Three years later Jock Roberts joined the continuing search, sailing with M’Clintock on the Fox. In April 1859 M’Clintock reached King William Island, where he found a lifeboat from the Erebus on the western shore, some sixty-five miles from the last position of Franklin’s ships. It lay partially out of its cradle on a sledge and had neither oars nor paddle. M’Clintock calculated the total weight of the sledge to be 1,400 pounds, a ridiculously heavy burden for sailors ridden with scurvy and close to starvation. The only provisions in sight were 40 pounds of tea, a quantity of chocolate, and a small jar of animal fat, probably walrus, that surprisingly enough tasted of chicken and burnt onions. For the rest, the boat was laden with an amazing amount of dead weight. Towels, scented soap, sponges, silver spoons and forks, twenty-six pieces of plate with Sir John Franklin’s crest, and six books, all of them scriptural or devotional works. Two skeletons lay in the boat, both of them without their skulls. The skeleton in the bow, M’Clintock wrote, obviously considerate of Lady Franklin’s feelings, had been disturbed “by large and powerful animals, probably wolves.”

A BORN JACKDAW, Jock Roberts had brought back mementos from his long and arduous voyage with M’Clintock. A silk handkerchief, two buttons from an officer’s greatcoat, a hair-comb and, most baffling, a black satin skullcap with curious symbols embroidered on it both inside and out. Clearly the skullcap was not standard Royal Navy issue and was unlikely to have belonged to any member of the expedition. So it was immediately assumed that it had been left behind by native scavengers of the site and was probably the property of a shaman. This, however, led to the intriguing conjecture that, contrary to popular belief, there was at least one wandering band of Eskimos sufficiently advanced to have a rudimentary form of a written language. Then one day Jock Roberts, hard-pressed for cash to support his drinking habit, took the satin skullcap to the curator of the northern museum in Edmonton, rambled on at length about its origins, and speculated that such a rare Eskimo artifact was worth plenty. The curator, who happened to be a doctor of divinity, denounced Roberts as a lying drunkard. “Don’t take us for fools here,” he said. “These so-called symbols embroidered into the fabric are not Eskimo, but Hebrew. For your information the inscription on the outside says, ‘Observe the Sabbath, to keep it Holy’ and inside we have what I take to be the rightful owner’s name. ‘Yitzchak ben Eliezer.’ I suggest that you return it to him immediately. Good day to you, sir.”

That was not the end of it, however. For the skullcap, soon to be celebrated as “The Jock Roberts Yarmulke”, was not the only Hebraic artifact to be found in the Arctic. Another was discovered by Waldo Logan of Boston, captain of the whaling barque Determination, who landed at Pelly Bay in 1869. Logan was met by a friendly band of Netsilik Eskimos. One of them, In-nook-poo-zhee-jook by name, claimed to have found a second lifeboat on King William Island with a large number of skeletons strewn about. Some of the bones had been severed with a saw and many of the skulls had been punctured the easier to suck out the brains. He had taken a book back with him from the site for his children to play with and it was the remnants of this book, later established to be a siddur or Hebrew prayer book, that Logan would bring out of the Arctic.

Logan, an observant man, noted that the parkas worn by this band of Netsiliks differed in one significant detail from the usual. Four fringes hung from the outermost skin of each one, the fringes made up of twelve silken strands. One of their number, Ugjuugalaaq, told him, “We were on King William Island to hunt seals when we met a small party of whites pulling a boat on a sledge. They all looked starved and cold. Except for the young man called Tulugaq, and his older friend, Doktuk, none of them wore furs.”

Here, in Life With The Esquimaux, A Narrative of an Arctic Quest in Search of Survivors of Sir John Franklin’s Expedition, Logan noted in parenthesis that tulugaq meant raven in Inuktituk.

“We camped together for four days and shared a seal with the whites. Tulugaq was short and strongly built with a black beard and was most concerned about Doktuk who seemed very sick.”

Ugjuugalaaq was careful not to say anything about Tulugaq’s struggle to the death with the officer who dressed like a woman or about the miracles wrought by him. Neither did he mention the death of Doktuk, who was buried beneath a wooden head-board that read:

A hundred years later academics were still squabbling over the enigma of the Hebraic artifacts, ventilating their theories in learned essays that appeared in The Beaver, Canadian Heritage, and The Journal of Arctic Studies.

Professor Knowlton Hardy, president of the Arctic Society, put forward his hypothesis at the meeting in the spring of 1969 that led to Moses’s expulsion. The so-called Jock Roberts Yarmulke, he said, was not a bona fide Franklin clue but a red herring. Or, he added, looking directly at Moses, more properly, perhaps, a schmaltz herring. It was inconceivable that it had ever belonged to any member of the Franklin expedition or even a native. Most likely it had been the property of a Jew on board an American whaler.

“Possibly,” Moses said, “the keeper of the ship’s ledgers.” Then, improvising on a bellyful of Scotch, he advanced a proposition of his own. One or more members of the Franklin expedition had been of Jewish extraction and the artifacts had been among their personal possessions.

“Fiddlesticks!” Hardy said.

Moses, acknowledging Hardy with a lopsided smile, pointed out that more bizarre objects than a yarmulke, or a siddur, had belonged to certain of the officers or crew. This was proven by understandably unpublished but meticulously itemized accounts (available to serious scholars at Admiralty House) of articles found in searches of Beechey and King William Islands. They included a filigreed black suspender belt, several pairs of frothy garters, some silk panties, three corsets, two female wigs, and four diaphanous petticoats.

“I don’t have to sit here and listen to this drivel,” Hardy shouted, slamming his fist against the table. The latter items, he protested, catalogued with such a typical drunken smirk by Berger—casting doubts on the sexual proclivities of brave officers and men—impugning the honour of the dead—were in fact absolutely innocent. They would have been the property of either Lieutenant Philip Norton or Purser John Hoare. Both of them had been to the Arctic with Parry, on the HMS Hecla, and had distinguished themselves on the boards of the Royal Arctic Theatre that had been set up in Winter Harbour in 1819. Norton had played a saucy young lady in a number of farces and harlequinades and Hoare’s interpretation of Viola had earned him five curtain calls as well as the sobriquet Dolly. “As for Jews having signed on with Franklin,” Hardy charged, “nonsense!”

“And why not?” Moses asked.

“Let me be direct with you, Berger. It is a well-known fact that Jews who immigrated to this great country in the nineteenth century did not risk the Arctic Circle, but tended to settle in cities where there was the most opportunity for trade and advancement.”

Rising uncertainly to his feet, Moses drifted over to Hardy’s place at the U-shaped table, picked up a jug of water, and attempted to empty it over his head. Hardy, leaping free, knocked it out of his hand.

IN THE SUMMER of 1969 a scientific expedition was flown out to the Isaac Grant gravesite on King William Island. The expedition, led by Professor Hardy, included a forensic scientist and an anthropologist, as well as a support group of technicians armed with the latest in mobile X-ray equipment. They lifted the body of Isaac Grant, undisturbed for more than a century, out of its resting place and defrosted it. Grant had been buried in a narrow plank coffin. But his body, unlike the other three previously exhumed, was wrapped in a curious shroud. The anthropologist pronounced the shroud disconcertingly similar to the sort of shawl that had once been the everyday outer garment of ancient nomads and farmers in the Near East. The shroud or shawl was made of fine woven wool with occasional black bands, its corners pierced and reinforced to take knotted tassels or fringes. When photographs of the shawl, taken from every possible angle, were later distributed among Arctic buffs, Moses Berger pounced. He wrote to the Arctic Society, identifying the garment as a talith, the traditional prayer shawl common to the Ashkenazi Jews of Northern Europe.

Professor Hardy was outraged. Moses’s letter seemed to confirm his outlandish theory that one or maybe even more members of the Franklin expedition had been Jewish. However, an examination of the startling documents buried with Grant belied that notion. There was, for instance, a letter from a vicar, addressed to the Reverend Isaac Grant, praising him for his diligent work on behalf of a mission to the savages of the Gold Coast, and beseeching other Christians to heed his plea for charitable contributions. Other documents and letters, tied with ribbon, were even more impressive. There was a letter, uncharacteristically effusive, commending Grant for his medical acumen, signed by Mr. Gladstone. Another letter, this one from Sir Charles Napier, celebrated his unequalled skills as a bone-setter, and thanked him for mending a leg that had been broken by a French musket ball. Other letters, signed by still more dignitaries, recommended Grant as a devout Christian and a surgeon blessed with unsurpassed talents. Confirming these panegyrics, Grant’s medical degree, also buried with him, showed that he had graduated from the College of Surgeons in Edinburgh summa cum laude in 1838. Folded between two of the letters was an old theatre bill from Manchester, announcing:

Alongside Grant’s corpse, secured to his trouser belt, was what appeared to be a ceremonial Indian hatchet or tomahawk. On close examination the blade was seen to be impressed with the logo of its Birmingham manufacturer.

The deep scars on Grant’s back proved that he had been flogged more than once, but Franklin was known to consider the practice abhorrent. Furthermore, such punishment seemed inconsistent with the sterling character described in the letters buried with the assistant-surgeon.

Finally, there was consternation.

A researcher who had the wit to write to the College of Surgeons in Edinburgh discovered they had no record of a student named Isaac Grant, never mind one who had graduated summa cum laude. The archives of the British Medical Registry had no intelligence of a surgeon with that name and a search at Somerset House yielded no Grant born on October 5, 1807.

Put plainly, except for the evidence of his corpse, it seemed that Isaac Grant, MD, had never existed.

Seven

Sean Riley was the first person Moses Berger looked for whenever his research obliged him to pass through Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories. Riley had gone right from Spitfires over Malta during World War II into three years of crop dusting in Kenya. Then, back in Canada, he had enrolled in a Trans-Canada Airlines school, emerging as a Viscount pilot in 1951, a tour of duty that ended in ignominy. One day, before setting out on a run from Montreal to Halifax, Riley read aloud to his passengers a head-office edict that cited the variegated role of a Cunard liner’s captain and enjoined TCA pilots to be entertaining hosts as well as fliers of unrivalled skill. “I am now,” he said, yanking a harmonica out of his pocket, “going to play ‘Kisses Sweeter Than Wine’ and will accept two more requests before taking off into the wild blue yonder.”

Inevitably Riley, like so many free spirits or undischarged bankrupts, runaway husbands, unredeemed drunks and other drifters, retreated to North of Sixty, flying DC-3s, Cessnas and Otters out of Yellowknife. He became the favourite pilot of the NWT’s Superior Court Justice, flying him over the barrens on the court circuit again and again. One night in 1969, drinking late with Moses in The Trapline, Riley told him that he was flying the court party, as well as a few reporters, out on the circuit in the morning. Moses, who was bound for Tulugaqtitut, the settlement on the Beaufort Sea where Henry Gursky had been rooted for years, could hitch a ride with them.

The court party was comprised of the judge, a crown prosecutor, two defence lawyers, and a clerk. They were joined by three reporters, two of them from “the outside”. The two men from “the outside” represented the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun. The third reporter, a girl named Beatrice Wade, was a native of Yellowknife, then with the Edmonton Journal. A raven-haired beauty, with breasts too rudely full for such a trim figure and coal-black eyes that shone with too much appetite.

Riley, assembling the passengers on the runway, couldn’t resist performing for the reporters from “the outside”. “This old heap, held together with bobby pins and glue, is a DC-3, which some call the workhorse of the north, our own Model-T, but what more experienced northerners refer to as the widowmaker. Anybody want to take a picture of your intrepid flyboy before we take off?”

One of the reporters obliged.

“Now, hold on a minute, this may not be O’Hare or Kennedy, but safety is our first consideration. We’ve got to have this baby de-iced.”

Riley gave Beatrice the nod. She promptly slipped two fingers into her mouth, whistled, and an Eskimo boy arrived on the trot, clearing the wings of snow with a kitchen broom.

Moses, who had hoped to sit next to Beatrice on the flight, was outmanoeuvred by Roy Burwash, the tall sallow Englishman from the Vancouver Sun, and had to settle for a seat across the aisle.

“Oh, Vancouver’s all right,” Burwash allowed, “but something of a cultural desert, and journalistic standards aren’t what I was used to in London.”

“Who did you work for on Fleet Street?” Moses asked.

“I have been published in Lilliput and Woman’s Own.”

“Who did you work for is what I asked.”

“The Daily Sketch.”

“And what do you miss most in Vancouver? The gas fire in your bed-sitter in Kentish Town, luncheon vouchers, or your weekly night out with the lads at Raymond’s Revue Bar?”

Beatrice, seated by the window, leaned forward for a better look at Moses. “You’re bad,” she said.

Light snow began to fall as the DC-3 lowered into the first settlement on the court circuit. Moses, taking advantage of the stop, slipped away to seek out aged Eskimos who might remember tales told to them by their grandparents about the man with the hot eyes who had come on the ship with three masts. He also looked out for any Eskimo who had four fringes hanging from his parka, each fringe made up of twelve silken strands.

After lunch Riley took off in a partial whiteout, soon rose above it, and a couple of hours later found a hole in the clouds, plunged through it, and skittered to a stop just short of a signpost thrust into the ice.

A party of bemused Eskimos greeted the DC-3. “You guys bring the mail?” one of them asked.

“We haven’t got your bloody welfare cheques,” Riley said. “We’re the court party, come to fill your jail, and standing right over there, well that’s the hanging judge.”

The Canadian flag was planted in the snow outside the community hall even as the judge hurried into his robes. The first defendant was a surly, acne-ridden Dogrib sporting a Fu Manchu moustache, FUCK inked immediately above the knuckles of one hand and YOU on the other. Charged with breaking and entering he stood before the judge, swaying on his feet.

“Did you heave a rock through the window of the Mad Trapper’s Café in order to gain access?” the judge asked.

“It was closed and I was hungry.”

MOSES SAT NEXT TO BEATRICE on the flight into Inuvik and that night they became lovers, Moses apologizing for his inadequacy. “Sorry. I’m afraid I’ve had too much to drink.”

“How long have you known Henry Gursky?”

“Ever since I was a child. Why?”

“Are you also filthy rich?”

Unwilling to tell her about his legacy, he said, “I’m just a stop-gap teach filling in here and there until they find out about me.”

“Find out what?”

“That I’m a drunk.”

“Why?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“But there has to be a reason.”

“Why are you left-handed?”

“That’s not a proper analogy.”

“Isn’t it?”

“Have you ever tried stopping?”

“Christ.”

“Have you?”

“Regularly.”

“What gets you started again?”

“Enduring other people mostly.”

“Nosey ones like me?”

“Like that bloody Burwash.”

“But he’s no worse than you. Or didn’t you also want to get me in the sack the minute you saw me on the plane?”

“That’s not fair.”

“I don’t mean that I’m special. I mean that I was there, that’s all, which is enough for most of you.”

“Let’s go to sleep.”

“But we can’t yet. We still haven’t reached the apogee of the evening, you know, the point where you show me a picture of your wife and tell me what a terrific gal she is, and you don’t know what got into you, maybe it was those northern lights, maybe it was the booze, but would I please not ever write or phone you at home, now there’s a good girl.”

“I’m not married.”

“That’s difficult to credit. I mean a guy like you. Such an obvious barrel of fun,” she said, making him laugh for the first time.

“You’re nice,” he said.

“No hyperbole, please. My head will swell.”

“Beautiful?”

“I’m thirty years old.”

“Now you know that I’m not married,” he said, “but surely a girl like you—”

“—as talented and intelligent as you—”

“—must have a boy friend?”

“The men around here are afraid of women, especially talky ones.

They like huntin’ and fishin’ and watching ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ on TV and talking dirty about us in The Trapline,” she said, reaching out for him.

“I’m afraid I’ve had too much to drink to be of any more use tonight.”

“You’re not sitting for an exam, Moses. Relax. Give it a try.”

When he wakened in the morning, he found that she was already up, reading in bed. A paperback edition of One Hundred Years of Solitude. “Surprise, surprise,” she said, “I’m not just a sensational lay.”

THE FOLLOWING SPRING the ebullient commissioner of the Northwest Territories convened his council, declared 1970 Centennial Year, and invited Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Prince Charles and Princess Anne for the revels.

Beatrice, recently appointed to handle the commissioner’s public relations, slipped into his office one afternoon and surreptitiously added Moses’s name to the guest list for the royal banquet.

“Who’s Berger?” the commissioner asked, going through the list the next morning.

“Why, the distinguished Arctic scholar,” Beatrice said, simulating surprise.

Moses, who was lecturing at NYU at the time, his status shaky, flew in from New York a few days early, bringing everything Beatrice had forgotten in his apartment on her last visit, as well as a gift, a black silk negligee. Beatrice met him at the airport and they proceeded directly to her place. They were still in bed together when she made him promise that he would turn up sober for the banquet. So going about his rounds in Yellowknife the morning in question, Moses drank nothing but coffee. However, once he caught up with Sean Riley at noon in The Gold Range, he saw no harm in joining him for two and a juice, providing he sipped his beer slowly.

“Right now,” Riley said, “I’m being pursued by a publisher in town for the banquet, one of your brethren out of Edmonton. A smiler born, awfully fancy, he sits down at your table and you’re surrounded. He wants me to write a book about my thrilling adventures in the Land of the Midnight Sun.”

True to his pledge, Moses turned up sober and properly attired in black tie for the royal banquet in the Elks Hall. Then he caught a glimpse of Professor Knowlton Hardy, surrounded by admirers, and hastened over to the bar for just one, a quick one, a double.

Before dinner the royal couple was entertained by a group of outstanding Inuit artists, flown in from remote settlements for the occasion. Professor Hardy rose to introduce the first poet. He explained that unimaginable hardship was the coin of the Inuit’s daily existence, but, reflecting on the woof and warp of their lives, they made ecstasy the recurring theme of their anacreontic salute to the world. This remarkable people plucked odes of joy, pace Beethoven, out of the simplest blessings enshrining them in their own form of haiku. Then Oliver Girskee stood up and recited:

Following the traditional drum dancers, there was a demonstration, rare as it was lively, by the Keewatin and High Arctic champions of the mouth-pull, a contest wherein the two opponents hook their fingers into each other’s mouths and pull away until one of them faints or admits defeat. Then Minni Altakarilatok and Timangiak Gor-ski, the justifiably celebrated Cape Dorset throat-singers, were heard from.

“The distinctive sounds of throat-singing,” Professor Hardy explained to the royal family and their entourage, “part of a time-honoured native tradition, are made by producing guttural nasal and breathing sounds, rather like dry gargling. The art cannot be described, but it can be likened to the sounds of great rivers … the gentle glide of the gull … the crumbling of the crisp white snow of the mighty gale of the Arctic.”

Once the performers were done, Professor Hardy stood up to announce that the evening’s artistic events, which had displayed the many-faceted face of Inuit culture to such advantage, were now over. Next a beaming Moses—terrifying Beatrice—rose to say a few unscheduled words. He expressed the hope that this prized part of the Canadian mosaic would never be contaminated by the introduction of mindless American television into the pristine northland, and sank back into his seat, acknowledging applause with a blissful smile and calling for another drink.

Then it was time to eat. Smoked Arctic char and cream of tomato soup followed by caribou steak. Vanessa Hotdog, who was serving Prince Philip, hesitated before removing his steak plate. “Darn it, Dook, hold on to your knife and fork, there’s dessert coming.”

For years the Eskimos of the Keewatin, the Central and High Arctic and Baffin regions, were known to Ottawa only by the numbers on the identification discs they wore around their necks. Then, in 1969, they were granted surnames. Many chose traditional Inuktituk names, say Angulalik or Pekoyak. More rambunctious spirits insisted on invented surnames such as Hotdog, Coozycreamer or Turf’n’Surf. One name that recurred among a roving band of natives out of King William Island was Gursky or variations thereof including Gor-ski, Girskee, Gur-ski and Goorsky.

Moses had found what he believed to be the first mention of the name Gursky, in this case spelled Gor-ski, in the diaries of Angus McGibbon, the Hudson’s Bay Company chief factor of the Prince of Wales’s Fort. The entry was dated May 29, 1849.

“The weather continues extremely cold. Severe frost again last night. Jos. Arnold has taken very ill with considerable pain across his body from his back to his breasts. The ignorant natives who are wintering with us have offered all manner of herbs and potions for a cure, but I will have none of it. Ordered some blood taken from Arnold, after which he found the pain somewhat easier.

“McNair and his party arrived before dinner from Pelly Bay by way of Chesterfield Inlet with the most astonishing tale, if true.”

McNair’s tale:

“A young white man who is unknown to the Compy. or opposition is living with a wandering band of Esquimaux in Pelly Bay and appears to be worshipped by them as a manner of faith-healer or shaman. He goes by the name of Ephrim Gor-ski, but possibly because of his dark complexion and piercing eyes the Esquimaux call him Tulugaq, which means raven in their lingo. McNair, hardly averse to claiming the reward, dared to conjecture that the young man might prove to be a survivor of the Franklin expedition but this vain hope was soon dashed. Gor-ski had no intelligence of either the Terror or Erebus. He claimed to be a runaway off an American whaler out of Sag Harbour, but was not in want of rescue. Gor-ski was obviously at ease with the Esquimaux in a snow house and when one of them brought in freshly killed seal he partook with them of the soup of hot blood and invited McNair and his party to share in that disgusting broth.

“McNair lingered for two days in camp, his curiosity aroused by this man who claimed to be an American yet spoke with a Cockney accent, and who lived as a native, but was proficient in Latin and had a Bible with him. On the eve of the second day McNair witnessed an odd ceremony. Gor-ski emerged out of the entry tunnel of his snow house wearing a silk top hat and a fringed white shawl with vertical black stripes: and then the native women did disport themselves before him.

“McNair: ‘Eight of them exhibited some most curious dances and contortions, till at length their gestures became indecent and wanton in the highest degree, and we turned away from the display.’

“Of course McNair is a low, superficial creature, who lies more frequently than he speaks the truth and can take more than a glass of Grog. He fell into the habit of intemperance after he got into Disgrace in consequence of employing one of the Compy.’s Servants in cutting off the Ears of an Indian who had had an intrigue with his Woman, but which would not have been thought so much of had it been done by himself in the heat of passion or as a punishment for Horse Stealing. Quite possibly there is more bibulous fancy than truth to McNair’s tale.

“Had Jos. Arnold bled again tonight, but he continues to complain of dizziness and a general weakness of the limbs. He is a born malingerer.”

McNair’s tale and its possible connection with Sir John Franklin’s fate—not to mention the reward and glory waiting on the man who solved the riddle—must have worried McGibbon, for six weeks later he sent a party out to Pelly Bay to investigate. They found that the Esquimaux had long gone, and the white man with them, if he had ever existed. All that remained of their camp was seal bones, other animal scraps, a discarded ulu, a tent ring, and that celebrated soapstone carving that is still on display at Hudson’s Bay House in Winnipeg. Another northern enigma. For while small soapstone carvings of seals, walruses, whales, and other mammals indigenous to the Arctic are far from uncommon, “The McGibbon Artifact”, as it has become known, remains the only Eskimo carving of what was clearly meant to represent a kangaroo.

Eight

Beatrice had never cared for his cabin in the woods. His Gurskyiana mausoleum. The first time he had driven her out there, she said, “But I come from the backwoods, Moses, and couldn’t wait to get out. Why would you bring me here?”

1971 that was, shortly after he had been fired by NYU for “moral turpitude”. They were living together in Montreal, Moses idle, Beatrice working for an ad agency, hating it. After work she joined him in one downtown bar or another, usually finding him already sodden, his grin silly.

“Weekends,” he said, pouring himself a drink. “It’s not that long a drive.”

“I suppose.”

They separated for the first time the following summer and ten days later Moses was back in the clinic in New Hampshire. Discharged in the autumn, he first had to endure the traditional farewell meeting in the doctor’s office. “So tell me,” the doctor said, glancing at the fat file on his desk, “it’s 3:30 A.M., August 5, 1962. They break in and find Marilyn Monroe lying face down on the bed, bare shoulders exposed, the phone clutched in her right hand. Who was trying to reach her just before she died?”

“How would I know?”

“Clever clever. Now turn over your hands and let the nice doctor have a look.”

His fingernails had driven deep cuts into the palms.

“Be well, old friend. Please stay well this time.”

Moses immediately struck out for the 91. He drove through New Hampshire and Vermont to Quebec’s Eastern Townships, crossing the border at Highwater. Wet slippery leaves lay scattered everywhere on the Quebec side, the bare trees already black and brittle. BIENVENUE. Even if the border had been unmarked Moses would have known that he was back in the Townships. Penury advertised. Suddenly the road was rippled and cracked and he had to swerve to avoid potholes. Rusting pickup trucks, bashed and abandoned, cannibalized years ago, lay in the tall grass and goldenrod here and there. Sinking barns rotted in the fields. Small mills, which had once manufactured bobbins—employing eight of the locals—chewing their fingers—were shuttered. In lieu of elegant little signs directing you toward the ivy-covered Inn on Crotched Mountain or the Horse and Hound, originally built as a farmhouse in 1880, there were roadside CANTINES with tarpaper roofs, proclaimed by a stake banged into the dirt, OPEN/OUVERT, and offering Hygrade hotdogs and limp greasy pommes frites made of frozen potatoes. There were no impeccably appointed watering holes, where the aging bartender, once Clean for Gene, would offer you a copy of Mother Jones with your drink. However, you could pull in at “Mad Dog” Vachon’s and knock back a Molson, maybe stumbling on a three-week-old copy of ’Allo Police. Or the Venus di Milo, where scantily clad pulpy waitresses out of Chicoutimi or Sept-Iles stripped and then sank to a bare stage to simulate masturbation, protected against splinters by a filthy flannel sheet.

Before turning off on the old logger’s track to his cabin in the woods on the other side of Mansonville, Moses stopped at The Caboose, where he found Strawberry exactly as he had left him a month ago, brooding over a quart of Molson.

“It’s good to see you, Straw.”

“That’s not what my wife said the last time I seen her. She said would I be wanting some of the same when I’m eighty. Not from you I ain’t is what I told her. Besides I’m thinking of divorcing her for being so unsanitary. Every time I want to pee in the sink it’s fill of dirty dishes.” He guffawed and slapped his knee. “You look like I feel.”

“Have you been taking care of my cabin?”

“You only just got here, Mister Man, and you’re starting to put the pressure on. Nobody’s gonna break into your place because they know you got nothing there but all those damn books and maps and empty bottles and salmon flies that ain’t no good here. Whatever you’re drinking will be good enough for me.”

“I’m not.”

“Again?” Strawberry asked, amused.

If Canada had a soul (a doubtful proposition, Moses thought) then it wasn’t to be found in Batoche or the Plains of Abraham or Fort Walsh or Charlottetown or Parliament Hill, but in The Caboose and thousands of bars like it that knit the country together from Peggy’s Cove, Nova Scotia, to the far side of Vancouver Island. Signs over the ancient cash register reading NO CREDIT or TIP-PING ISN’T A CITY IN CHINA. A jar of rubbery pickled eggs floating in a murky brine, bags of Humpty Dumpty potato chips hanging on a spike. A moose head or a buck’s antlers mounted on the wall, the tractor caps hanging from it advertising GULF or JOHN DEERE or O’KEEFE ALE. The rip in the felt of the pool table mended with black tape. Toilet doors labelled BRAVES and SQUAWS or POINTERS and SETTERS. A Hi-Lo Double-Up JOKER POKER machine in one corner, a juke box in another, and the greasy sign over the kitchen door behind the bar reading EMPLOYES ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT.

The Caboose had a notice board.

The board listed a cottage for sale on Trouser Lake, last month’s Slo-Ball League schedule and a HONDA MOTORCYCLE LIKE BRAN NEW FOR SALE.

The Caboose was a clapboard box mounted on cinder blocks, more flies inside than out. Tractors and dump trucks and pickups began to bounce into the parking lot around five P.M., uniformly rust-eaten, dented badly here, taped together there, often an old coat hanger twisted to hold a rattling or leaky muffler in place. Once the men settled in they began to mull over the day’s events. Who had been found out by the welfare office and who was the latest to be caught putting it to Sneaker’s wife, Suzy, and was it Hi-Test again who was stealing those big outboards on the lake. Whether the new barmaid at Chez Bobby was worth the cost of a dinner first or if she was only trying it on because she had graduated from high school in Ontario, she said. Where you could get the best deal across the border on used tires for a grader and at the bottom of which hill were the fucken provincial police lying in wait right now.

The lot outside The Caboose, punctured with potholes, overlooked a lush meadow lined with cedars. There were picnic tables out there as well as an enormous barbecue, the engine a salvage job done on an abandoned four-stroke lawn mower. Sundays in summer the truculent and hungover Rabbit would turn up at seven A.M. to begin roasting a pig or a couple of shoulders of beef for the community dinner, all you could eat for five bucks, proceeds to The Old Folks Home in Rock Island. The Rabbit was once dismissed for pissing in the fire. “People was looking and it puts them off their feed.” He was fired again for falling asleep in the grass after guzzling his umpteenth Molson and failing to notice that the spit hadn’t been revolving properly for more than an hour. Then he beat up an inspector from the Commission de la Langue Française outside The Thirsty Boot on the 243. According to reports the inspector had ordered The Thirsty Boot to take down their sign and replace it with a French one. “Sure thing,” the Rabbit had said, kneeing the inspector in the groin, just to cut him down to his own height before laying into him. “We’re gonna put up a pepper sign all right. Only it’s gonna read ‘De Tirsty Boot’.” After that he could do no wrong.

Behind The Caboose there was a gravel pit and a fished-out pond and beyond that the mountains that had been lumbered twice too often, the cherry and ash and butternut long gone. Bunk, who also trapped during the winter, had a shack somewhere up there. He took the odd fisher, some fox and racoons and beaver. The deer were everywhere.

Moses had stopped at The Caboose in the first place by accident. Late one afternoon six years earlier, having spent two days sifting through historical society files in Sherbrooke, searching for references to Brother Ephraim, he went out for a drive and got lost in the back roads. Desperate for a drink, he pulled in at The Caboose and considered not getting out of his Toyota because two men, Strawberry and Bunk, were fighting in the parking lot. Then he grasped that they were both so blind drunk that none of their punches were landing. Finally Strawberry reached back and put all he had into a roundhouse, sliding, collapsing in a mud puddle, and just lying there. A gleeful Bunk reeled over to his pickup, climbed in, the piglets in the back squealing as he gunned his motor, aiming himself at the prone Strawberry.

“Hey,” Moses yelled, leaping out of his car, “what in the hell are you trying to do?”

“Run the fucker over.”

“He’ll bite a hole in your tires.”

Bunk pondered. He scratched his jaw. “Good thinking,” he said, reversing into a cedar, jolting the protesting piglets, then charging forward, swerving into the 243.

Moses helped Strawberry to his feet and led him back into The Caboose.

“Whatever you’re drinking will be good enough for me, Mister Man.”

Strawberry, blue-eyed, tall and stringy, all jutting angles, was missing two fingers, a souvenir of his days in the bobbin mill, and had no upper teeth. Moses drank with him and the others until two A.M. Then Strawberry, insisting that Moses was now too drunk to drive, settled him into his Ford pickup and took him to his house on the hill to spend the night on the sofa. No sooner had they staggered inside than Strawberry dug out his shotgun, rolled back out on to his rotting porch and fired a couple of rounds into the air.

“What are you shooting at?” Moses asked, startled.

“If I lived in some big-shot apartment building in the city like you probably do, Mister Man, all I’d have to do is drop my boots on the floor and the neighbours would know I was home safe. Here I fire my shotgun so’s they know I’m back and they don’t need to worry no more. I may be stupid, but I ain’t crazy.”

The next morning Strawberry’s wife made them bacon and eggs and then they moved on to Chez Bobby, having agreed to have just one for the ditch before Moses proceeded to Montreal. Three hours passed before Strawberry suddenly leaped to his feet. “Shit,” he said, “we got to get to Cowansville.”

Strawberry, charged with drunken driving a month earlier, was due to appear in court that afternoon. First, however, he took Moses to The Snakepit, a bar around the corner from the courthouse, where Bunk, Sneaker, Rabbit, Legion Hall, and some of the others were already waiting. By the time Strawberry’s supporters, Moses still among them, drifted into the courtroom, they were quarrelsome drunk. They waved and whistled and hollered imprecations at the first sight of Strawberry standing there, grinning.

“Order, order in the court,” the judge called out.

“I’ll have a hamburger,” Strawberry said.

“I could give you ninety days for that.”

“That’s nothing.”

“How about a hundred and twenty?”

Fortunately, Strawberry’s lawyer intervened at this point. He was the judge’s nephew and the local Liberal party bagman. Strawberry got off with a suspended sentence and everybody repaired to Gilmore’s Corner to celebrate. They made three more pit stops before they ended up at The Beaver Lodge in Magog. “My great-grandaddy Ebenezer used to drink here,” Strawberry told Moses, pointing out a sign over the bar that had been salvaged from the original hotel, destroyed by fire in 1912.

The next afternoon Moses phoned Henry Gursky, in the Arctic, and borrowed enough money to buy the cabin high in the woods overlooking Lake Memphremagog.

Strawberry, Moses discovered, painted houses between drinks. He could also be driven to cut wood or plough snow. But, for the most part, he was content to hibernate through the winter on the fat of his welfare cheque. “Hey, I coulda been rich, a big landowner,” Strawberry once said, “if not for what my crazy great-grandaddy done. Old Ebenezer Watson gave up the bottle for God, a big mistake, joining up with a bunch of religious nuts called the Millenarians. Eb lost just about everything, his life included. All that was left was some ninety acres of the old family farm. It went to Abner, my grandaddy.”

Strawberry failed to turn up the next afternoon. Moses was seated alone when one of the rich cottagers stumbled into The Caboose. Clearly distressed, he held a slip of paper before him like a shield to guard against contagious diseases. “Pardonnez moi,” he said, “mais je cherche—”

“We speak English here,” Bunk said.

“I’m looking for Mr. Strawberry Watson, the house painter. I was told he lived up on the hill, just past Maltby’s Pond, but the only house I could see there is obviously abandoned. It’s unpainted, the grass hasn’t been cut, and the yard is full of rusting automobile parts.”

“You found it, mister.”

THE DAY MOSES DROVE IN from the clinic in New Hampshire, Gord, who owned The Caboose, was tending bar. He wore a black T-shirt embossed with a multi-coloured dawn. A slogan was stencilled over it:

After a hard Saturday night Gord’s first wife, Madge, had died in a head-on collision on the 105, totalling their brand new Dodge pickup in the bargain, and ever since Gord wouldn’t hear of buying another new truck. “I mean, shit, you drive it out of the dealer’s lot and five minutes later it’s already second-hand, ain’t it? Like my new wife.”

His new wife was the widow Hawkins. The courtship had been brief. One afternoon, only a couple of months after he had buried Madge, Gord got into a bad fight in The Thirsty Boot with Sneaker over his wife, Suzy. Actually Sneaker wasn’t living with his wife at the time, but was shacked up with a hooker from the Venus di Milo in a trailer tucked into the woods off the 112 Still, he resented anybody else cutting his grass. Gord made the mistake of saying, “I don’t know why you ever left her. As far as I’m concerned, she’s still awful good fucking, eh?”

Gord, nursing a sore jaw and a couple of loose teeth, carried on to The Snakepit, Crystal Lake Inn, Chez Bobby, and the Brome Lake Hotel, stopping somewhere along the line to buy supplies at a dépanneur. Tins of baked beans and soups, a bag of frozen fries, some TV dinners, and a big bag of Fritos. He also bought a chicken and made straight for the widow Hawkins’s cabin in South Bolton, kicking in the door at two A.M. “I’m tired of eatin’ shit. So this here is a chicken,” he said. “Got it at a dépanneur. You cook it good for my dinner tomorrow night and I’ll fucken marry you. But if it’s tough, forget it, eh?”

Gord liked to post items clipped from the Gazette on his notice board. Once it was the news that troopers in Vermont had arrested a man wanted for the serial murders of thirty-two women within the past five years.

“He sure as hell shouldn’ta done that,” Strawberry said. “There ain’t enough of them to go around as it is.”

One of the men who frequented The Caboose ran a gravel pit, another owned a dairy farm, others picked up carpentry jobs here and there, and still more worked as caretakers or handymen for the rich cottagers on the lake. For most of them it was a matter of stitching twenty weeks of summer work together in order to qualify for unemployment insurance in the winter. Failing that they went on welfare, bolstering their take on the barter system. If Sneaker painted Gord’s barn he came away with a side of beef. If Legion Hall retiled Mike’s roof he could have the hay from the field across the road and sell it in Vermont for $2.50 a bundle. The men owned their own cottages, cut their own winter wood, and counted on shooting a deer in November. Some of the wives worked on the assembly line in the Clairol factory in Knowlton and others served as cleaning ladies for the cottagers on the lake. The wives, who usually gathered at their own tables in The Caboose, ran to fat, bulging out of tank tops and stretchy pink polyester slacks.

Moses usually avoided The Caboose on Friday night, Band Night, which brought out the noisy younger crowd, who were quickly herded into the basement, where—according to Strawberry—they smoked Hi-Test. “You know, whacky tobaccy.” But he seldom failed to turn up for the Sunday night steak dinner because Gord’s father, old Albert Crawley, was always there. Albert remembered Solomon Gursky from the days, during Prohibition, when he used to run convoys of the booze into Vermont through the old Leadville road. More than once, Albert said, the word out, the road bristling with customs men or hijackers, they had hidden the stuff in the old talc mine, which had been in the Gursky family since 1852. Other times they had unloaded the shipment at Hector Gagnon’s farm, which straddled the border, packed it in saddlebags that were strapped to the backs of cattle, and drove the herd into Vermont at three A.M.

After Albert was badly wounded one night, taking it in the gut, Solomon set him up in a hotel in Abercorn, and weekends couples drove in from as far away as Boston and New York. W.C. Fields had slept there. So had Fanny Brice. Once Dutch Schultz, accompanied by Charles “the Bug” Workman, had come to look over the hotel, but Albert had sent for Solomon, who had hurried out from Montreal with some girls from the Normandy Roof Bar, smoothing everything out nicely. Then along came Repeal, rendering the hotel redundant, and it became necessary to burn it down for the insurance money.

Whenever Moses turned up at The Caboose after a long absence Gord would send somebody to fetch his father. He would also, as he did the day Moses drove back from New Hampshire, unlock a cabinet under the bar and fish out a bottle of Glenlivet, which Albert and Moses, in a joke they never tired of, would call Glen Levitt. This in remembrance of the time Mr. Bernard, never a great speller, had ordered the wrong labels for a shipment, endearing himself to Solomon for once.

“Legion Hall has a pile of mail for you,” Strawberry said.

“Let the man enjoy his drink,” Albert said.

“Hold the phone, he don’t any more.”

“Again?”

“Yeah.”

Albert Crawley’s head bobbed upright. He began to laugh and cough at the same time, heaving, spilling tears and phlegm. “If I could drink with Solomon Gursky just one more time they could plant me happy tomorrow.” Then his head slumped forward and in his mind’s eye Albert Crawley was out there with Solomon again, standing in the dark of Hector Gagnon’s farm on this side of the border, waiting for the long overdue blinking headlights from the other side, a perplexed Solomon digging out his cherished gold pocket watch again, the watch that had once belonged to his grandfather and was engraved:

Albert had held his cigarette lighter to Solomon’s watch and the instant it had flared the firing had started and Solomon had pulled Albert down into the tall grass with him, but too late.

“Pour me another one of them Glen Levitts, will you, Moses?”

Nine

Moses was wakened the next morning by a phone call from Gitel Kugelmass’s daughter. Gitel had been arrested for shop-lifting at Holt Renfrew. Other ladies, Moses reflected, might be caught pilfering at Miracle Mart, even Eaton’s, but for die Roite Gitel it had to be Montreal’s classiest emporium. Moses agreed to drive into Montreal and take Gitel to lunch at the Ritz “for a talk,” something he hadn’t done for several years.

In her late seventies, somewhat shrunken but unbent, Gitel still favoured a big floppy hat, a fox collar more moth-eaten than ever, antique rings. But her startling makeup, more suitable to a harlequin, was applied with a tremulous hand now, an unsure eye. A nimbus of too-generously applied powder trailed after her. Cheeks burning bright with rouge suggested fever more readily than femme fatale.

“I realize,” Moses said, “that you meant to pay for the perfume, you forgot, but please be careful in the future, Gitel, now that you have been charged once.”

She thought it best not to correct him. Instead she said, “Isn’t all property theft?”

“Yes, certainly, but there are still some unenlightened running dogs of capitalism about who see things differently.”

They fell to reminiscing about the dining-room table with the crocheted tablecloth, L.B. reading one of his stories aloud.

“Were you too young to remember, Moishe, when Kronitz carried me off to the mountains to take his pleasure with me?”

Bits of green pasta adhered to her feathery moustache and clacky dentures.

“Too young to remember? Gitel, it broke my heart.”

Kronitz had been carried off by cancer long since. Kugelmass, hopelessly dotty, was wasting in the Jewish Old People’s Home. Gitel dabbed at her tears with a black lace handkerchief, an Ogilvy’s price tag dangling from one of its corners. “Does anybody care about our stories now? Who will sing our songs, Moishe, or remember me when my breath was still sweet?” Die Roite Gitel fumbled in her handbag and brought out a sterling silver compact. “Birks,” she said. “Now tell me how come a handsome boy like you, such a catch, isn’t married yet with children?”

“Well, Gitel, if only I had been somewhat older and you just a little younger,” he said, reaching out to squeeze her knee, frail as a chicken bone.

“Oh you’re such a devil you. So why did you ever break up with Solomon Gursky’s daughter? What’s her name? Remind me.”

“Lucy.”

“Lucy. Of course. Everything she touches on Broadway turns to gold. If it’s a hit, she’s got a piece of it. And her dacha in Southampton, it was featured in People, you could die. She collects those paintings, you know the kind I mean, they look like blow-ups from comic books. Oy, what a world we live in today. Did you know that the Chinese now rent out railway crews and construction gangs to richer Asian countries? Fifty years after the Long March they’re back in the coolie business.”

“And die Roite Gitel reads People.”

“Moishe, you could have been living on easy street.”

“Like father, like son.”

“Shame on you. I never blamed L.B. for writing those speeches for Mr. Bernard. As for the others, with the exception of Shloime Bishinsky and maybe Schneiderman, it was envy pure and simple. Those days. My God, my God. Before you were even a bar mitzvah boy, the Gurskys were mobsters as far as our group was concerned. Capitalism’s ugliest face, as we used to say. Then when I led the girls out against Fancy Finery during that terrible heat wave you could die, certainly nobody could sleep, and there was bupkes left in our pathetic strike fund, guess what? Knock knock at my door. Who’s there? Not the RCMP this time. Not the provincials again. But Solomon’s man, your buddy Tim Callaghan with a satchel and in it there is twenty-five thousand dollars in hard cash and that isn’t the best of it. Buses will pick up the strikers and their kids on Friday afternoon to take them to the mountains for a week. Everybody’s invited. What are you talking about, I say? Even Solomon Gursky can’t have a big enough house in the mountains for that bunch. They’re going to Ste.-Adèle, Callaghan says, and there will be rooms for everybody. Tell them to bring bathing suits. Hey, hey there, I say, Ste.-Adèle’s restricted, no Jews or dogs on the beach. Just make sure, Callaghan says, that everybody’s gathered outside here by four o’clock.

“So when they finally put Solomon on trial I naturally had to get to see our benefactor up close. It wasn’t easy. Listen, you’d think it was John Barrymore playing His Majesty’s Theatre, or today say one of those rockers who dress like girls singing at the Forum, you had to line up for hours before the courtroom opened. Not only Jews waiting to get in, but mafiosi from the States. And big-shot goyishe lawyers there to take notes if one of their bosses’ names is taken in vain. And all those debutantes of his, mooning over him. I didn’t blame them one bit. If Solomon Gursky had curled his little finger at me, I would have quit the Party. Anything. But it wasn’t me he had eyes for. It was obviously somebody who never turned up.”

Yes, Moses thought, one eye brown, one eye blue.

“Every time the courtroom door opened he looked up from the table, but it was never whoever he was waiting for.”

“Were you in court when the customs inspector testified?” This country, Solomon had written in his journal, has no tap root. Instead there’s Bert Smith. The very essence.

“Who?”

“Bert Smith.”

“No. I was there the day of the fat Chinaman, you know the one who was supposed to have known plenty. Well let me tell you he waddled up to the witness stand and he couldn’t even button his suit jacket over his belly, but then he stopped and looked at Solomon and Solomon smiled and said something to him in Chinese, and I’ve never seen anything so amazing in my life. By the time the fat Chinaman sat down in the box his suit seemed too large for him, he was swimming in it, and he couldn’t remember a thing.”

“I’ll tell you what he said to him. ‘Tiu na xinq’, which means ‘Fuck your name’,” Moses said, and then he asked Gitel if she would like a liqueur with her coffee.

“What about you?” she asked, fishing.

“I don’t these days.”

“Thank God for that much.” She ordered a B & B. “And what are you living on now that you can afford to invite me to the Ritz for a flirt?”

“This and that.”

“And what do you do out there, buried in that cabin in the woods?”

If he told her the truth her manner would change, she would begin to humour him, an unredeemed nut-case, obsessed with delusions about Solomon Gursky. Moses lit a cigar. “I go to A.A. meetings. I read. I watch hockey games on TV.”

“Oy, Moishe, Moishe, we all had such hopes for you. What kind of life is that?”

“Enough personal questions for one day.”

Gitel refused to let him put her in a taxi, saying, “You sit here and drink your coffee. I’ve got some shopping to do.”

“Gitel, for Christ’s sake!”

Outside, maybe a half hour later, Moses found her wandering down Sherbrooke Street, looking stricken. “It’s my address,” she said, tumbling into his arms. “I know I’m staying with my daughter, but sometimes I just can’t remember …”

Moses drove Gitel home, out to the suburban barrens of Côte St. Luc, then he made right for the Eastern Townships Autoroute, peeling off at exit 106. Back in his cabin, he flicked on the TV and Sam Birenbaum’s face filled the screen. Sam, who had fallen out with the network years ago, now pontificated on PBS.

My God, Moses thought, lighting a Monte Cristo, how many years was it since Sam had taken him to that lunch at Sardi’s? Twenty-five at least. “I’ve got something absolutely ridiculous to tell you,” Sam had said. “CBS wants to hire me for more than twice what I’m earning now and send me to London. But if I leave the Times I could freelance. Molly thinks it’s time I got some real writing done.”

“Ah ha.”

“What are you ah-ha-ing me for? I hate TV and everybody associated with it. It’s out of the question.”

Moses flicked off the TV, poured himself a Perrier, and resolved once more to sort out the clutter in his cabin, starting tomorrow.

There was a shelf laden with material on Marilyn Monroe, including a photograph taken at Peter Lawford’s beach house and Dr. Noguchi’s autopsy report. The photograph, taken in July 1962, showed a group sipping cocktails at Lawford’s poolside: Marilyn Monroe, President Kennedy, and several unidentified figures, among them an old man seated in a chair, a malacca cane held between his knees, his hands clasped over the handle, his chin resting on his hands. Dr. Noguchi’s autopsy notes described Marilyn as a “36-year-old, well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female weighing 117 pounds and measuring 65 ½ inches in height.” He ascribed the cause of death to “acute barbiturate poisoning due to ingestion of overdose.” Moses had attached a file card and a telegram to the report with a paper clip. The file card noted that the FBI had impounded the tapes of the phone numbers Marilyn had dialled on her last day. The telegram, sent to Moses from Madrid and of course unsigned, read: I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING BUT THE LAST PHONE CALL WAS NOT FROM ME. I TRUST THE WORK GOES WELL.

Moses’s work table was strewn with xeroxed pages from Solomon’s journals, tantalizing segments mailed to him when least expected from Moscow, Antibes, Saigon, Santa Barbara, Yellowknife, and Rio de Janeiro. The pages sent from Rio de Janeiro began with a description of the dragon’s chair:

“The accused was obliged to sit in a chair, like one in a barber shop, to which he was tied with straps covered over with foam rubber, while other foam rubber strips covered his body; they tied his fingers with electric wires, and his toes also, and began administering a series of electric shocks; at the same time, another torturer with an electric stick gave him shocks between the legs and on the penis.”

An earlier volume was introduced with lines from Milton’s Samson Agonistes:

The margins of each page of the journals were crammed with notes and queries and cross-references in Moses’s untidy scrawl. See Otto Braun, A Comintern Agent in China, 1932–39. Check Li Chuang on Snowy Mountains and Marshy Grasslands. Smedley and Snow contradict each other here. Consult Liu Po-cheng, Recalling the Long March, Eyewitness Accounts.

Solomon’s Chinese journals luxuriated in detailed descriptions of barbarism. A Twenty-fifth Army scout, captured by the KMT, suffers the death of a thousand cuts. A weeping KMT spy is buried alive in the sand. A landlord’s head is lopped off in Hadapu, his last words, Tiu na xinq. There were acid portraits of Braun, the womanizer; Manfred Stern, later celebrated as General Kleber in Spain; Steve Nelson and Earl Browder in Shanghai; Richard Sorge’s arrival. There was also an unflattering sketch of a forty-year-old Mao, long before he took charge. Gaunt, eyes burning, suffering from malaria.

Other pages dealt with the crossing of the Great Grasslands, that treacherous plateau, eleven thousand feet high, between the watersheds of the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers. Late August 1935 that was, and the journey, which took six days and many lives, was undoubtedly the worst ordeal of the Long March. There were no signposts, no trails, no food, no yaks, no herdsmen. Solomon, who claimed that he was with the Fourth Regiment of the First Army Corps, calculating that they were the first human beings in three thousand years to pass through the tall, sometimes poisonous grass.

Rain, sleet, hail, wind, fog, and frost. For the most part the men chewed raw unmilled wheat. It ripped their intestines, bloodied their bowels. Some died of dysentery, others of diarrhoea. The Tibetan muck, Solomon wrote, reminded him of Vimy Ridge. Men being sucked into the bog, disappearing. Unfortunately there were no fat corpse rats to roast. When they did find sufficient twigs for a fire, the men boiled leather belts and harnesses. The starving and feverish soldiers of the rear guard were driven to searching through the feces of fallen comrades for undigested grains of corn or wheat. Then, on the fifth day, Solomon’s bunch was lost in fog and frost. What appeared to be a trail made by the advance guard led them to a ditch filled with stagnant water. Late the next morning, a fierce wind blew the fog away. Then a raven appeared out of nowhere, soaring and swooping, and the men followed it to the banks of the Hou River. On the far bank, where there was dry ground and some wood to be found, they built a camp-fire and roasted their few remaining grains of unmilled wheat.

Chang-feng Chen, Moses had scribbled in a margin, mentioned the raven. So did Hi Hsin, who wrote that just before the appearance of the big black bird Solomon had tramped up and down, searching the skies, some sort of sad clacking noise, an inhuman call, coming from the back of his throat.

Ten

Bert Smith had been living in Montreal for ten years now, since 1963, renting a room with kitchen privileges from a Mrs. Jenkins. He was used to being laughed at. Striding back from the meeting in the church basement in his scout master’s uniform, a scrawny seventy-year-old, his snaggle teeth still in place, he had to endure the oily Greeks nudging each other on their stoops, setting down their cans of Molson to belch. He was obliged to tolerate the whistles of French-Canadian factory girls with curlers in their hair. Street urchins with scraped knees were sent out to torment him, buzzing him on their skateboards. “Hey, sir, you want to ‘be prepared’, wear a safe.”

Their ridicule, far from being humiliating, was fortifying. His crown of thorns. Rome was laid waste by the vandals and Canada, corrupt beyond salvation, would fall to the mongrels. The native-born young of the once True North, Strong and Free undone by jungle music, rampaging sex and the sloth licensed by a Judas state.

Case in point.

Last summer there had been two able-bodied men sharing the room next to his own in Mrs. Jenkins’s house. Both white, both Christian. They slept in until noon, then caught the latest porn movie at The Pussycat, subsisting on welfare, leaving instructions for their cheques to be forwarded to Fort Lauderdale during the winter. One day an indignant Smith invited them into his room and showed them a faded photograph of his parents taken in front of their sod hut in Gloriana. His father pale and wasted, his mother, who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, looking more washed out than her calico dress. “Theirs was the indomitable spirit that tamed the wilderness,” Smith said. “Look at Saskatoon now. Or Regina.”

“I been there, Smitty, and they’re so far behind the times there’s still dinosaur shit on the sidewalks.”

“Where would this country be today had it been left to your sort to pioneer the west?”

One of the men asked if he could borrow a ten spot until Monday.

“No way,” Smith said.

Mrs. Jenkins, a good sort, was blessed with a lively sense of humour.

Question: What is a nigger carpenter’s favourite tool?

Answer: A jigsaw.

He did not have to worry about Jews on the street that he lived on in lowest Westmount, just this side of the railroad tracks. The street of peeling rooming houses with rotting, lopsided porches was altogether too poor for that lot. Even so, there was no shortage of trash. Noisy Greek immigrants cultivating tomato plants in rock-hard back yards. Swarthy, fart-filled Italians. Forlorn French-Canadian factory girls spilling over $4.99 plastic chairs from Miracle Mart, yammering each to each. West Indians with that arrogant stride that made you want to belt them one. Polacks, Portuguese. “Happily,” he once said to Mrs. Jenkins, “we will not live long enough to see Canada become a mongrelized country.”

The concern, deeply felt, came naturally to Smith, an Anglo-Saxon westerner, born and bred.

Back in 1907, the legendary Canadian journalist John Dafoe wrote an article aimed at enticing American immigrants to the prairie, assuring them there was no chance of a mongrel race or civilization taking hold in western Canada. Yes, there had been an influx of land-hungry foreigners, but most of them were of Teutonic and Scandinavian stock. The only alien race present in numbers in the west, the Slavs, were being rapidly Anglicized. Mind you, among more fastidious westerners there was also considerable concern about the quality of British immigrants. J.S. Woodsworth, who would become a saint in the Canadian socialist pantheon, a founder of the CCF party, worried in Strangers Within Our Gates or Coming Canadians, published in 1909, about the immigration of Dr. Barnardo’s urchins with their inherited tendencies to evil. He liked to tell the story of how an English magistrate had chastised a young offender: “You have broken your mother’s heart, you have brought down your father’s grey hairs in sorrow to the grave. You are a disgrace to your country. Why don’t you go to Canada?”

The British, Woodsworth protested, were dumping the effluvium of their slums on the prairie. A case in point, certainly, was Bert Smith’s father, Archie. A child of Brixton’s Cold Harbour Lane, apprenticed to a butcher at the age of twelve, he married Nancy, the dim daughter of a neighbouring greengrocer ten years later, and then in 1901 had the misfortune to attend a free lecture by the Reverend Ishmael Horn. Short of stature, this obviously worthy greybeard with the hot black eyes was a compelling figure, eloquent as well, extolling the virtues of Gloriana, his projected all-British colony in the Canadian west. To begin with, however, the Reverend Horn ridiculed the wretched circumstances under which his audience lived now. “Look at you,” he said, “packed like sardines in stinking hovels, enduring the rich man’s contumely, your bairns prey to pulmonary consumption and rickets.” His voice soaring, he told them about the fertile land with the invigorating climate that awaited them; a land where they could sow wheat and grow apple and pear trees; a veritable parkland rich in game of all kinds; a land of sweet grass and sparkling streams and brooks filled with leaping trout. Two hundred acres of their own choosing were there for the asking, he said. A manner of homestead that only the toffs could afford on this blighted island.

So Archie and Nancy Smith joined the queue, filling out the necessary forms for the Reverend Horn’s secretary, the fetching Miss Olivia Litton, whom some would later remark had reeked suspiciously of spirituous liquors at the time. They signed the forms and pledged to pay a deposit against passage money within the week.

Some months before, the Reverend Horn had been to see an official of the Canadian Immigration Department in Ottawa.

“Sir, I cannot tell you how it grieves me to see the pristine prairie, the fine British province of Saskatchewan, polluted by dirty, ignorant Slavs in their lice-ridden sheepskin coats, and by the mad followers of Prince Kropotkin and Count Leo Tolstoy, the latter a novelist who celebrates adultery. Why are we welcoming these peasants when stout British yeomen, men of valour who held the thin red line against the Dervishes at Omdurman and marched through the Transvaal with Kitchener, are crying out for land?”

The Reverend Horn promised to deliver four thousand skilled farmers, the flower of the sceptr’d isle, to the prairie at five dollars a head. In exchange he was granted an option on homesteads in twelve townships in Northern Saskatchewan, the wilderness where he was to establish the all-British colony of Gloriana. He was also provided with a Boer War troopship, the Dominion Line’s Excelsior, at Liverpool dock. The Excelsior, later to be dubbed the Excrement by its discontented passengers, was originally built to accommodate seven hundred cavalrymen and their horses. But on March 10, 1902, some two thousand emigrants were caught in the scrimmage on the gangway, the first of the settlers bound for the promised land of Gloriana. Among them was a terrified Archie with Nancy bearing her budgerigar in a cage. There were scrofulous Cockneys, Welsh miners spitting coal dust, and navvies from the Gorbals already staggering drunk. There were women with howling babes in their arms and children scurrying here, there, and everywhere, out to steal anything that wasn’t nailed down. There were parrots and canaries and yelping dogs and a pet goat that would be roasted long before they reached Halifax.

Standing on the dock, acknowledging cheers, the Reverend Horn called out, “We are bound for the land of milk and honey,” and then disappeared into his cabin, Miss Litton following after.

The settlers were far out to sea, sliding in vomit, before they grasped that there was no bread and that the potatoes were rotten and the meat crawling with maggots and the walls of the hold they were crammed into thick with manure, the pitching deck awash with overflow from the bilges, rats everywhere.

In two weeks at sea the Reverend Horn, secure in his cabin, was seen below decks only twice. On the fourth day out a miner had his arm broken in a drunken brawl and it was the Reverend Horn who set the bone and fixed it with a splint. He was seen again after another fight, this one with knives, come to stitch the men’s wounds. But a certain Mrs. Bishop swore she had seen him striding up and down the bridge the night of the gale, the puny Excelsior scaling twenty-foot waves before plunging into a trough, sliding trunks smashing into walls, splinters flying, the ship’s fracturing surely imminent. Barechested he was, drunken, howling into the lashing wind and rain. “Face to face, I want to see you face to face just once.”

Finally they docked at Halifax and were promptly bundled into a train for the endless journey to Saskatoon, from where they were supposed to trek by ox-cart a hundred and fifty miles to Gloriana. Saskatoon, a smudge on the prairie, had no common or shade trees or hedgerows or high street or vicarage or public house. Instead there were mosquitoes and mud, rude shacks, two hotels, a general store, a grain elevator, and a railroad station.

The Reverend Horn had promised them that all manner of necessities would be waiting for them at the station: oxen and wagons, tents, farming tools, seed bags, and provisions. They saw little enough of that and beyond, not a knoll, not a tree, but a flat empty land extending to the horizon. The women sat down on their scattered belongings, kitbags eaten by salt water, trunks split and leaking cutlery, and wept for the warrens they had left behind. The men, armed with clubs and knives, a few of them with shotguns, demanded an audience with the Reverend Horn. And when he appeared, mounting an ox-cart and calling for silence, they surged forward, jeering, shaking their fists. The Reverend Horn, unconcerned, paced up and down the ox-cart, searching the skies, some sort of sad clacking noise, an inhuman call, coming from the back of his throat. A raven flew out of the clouds, swooped, and lighted on his shoulder, which silenced the mob. The Reverend Horn, his eyes hot, reminded them of the ingratitude the children of Israel had shown Moses, their deliverer, rebelling against him. “‘Would to God we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat down by the flesh pots and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.’” Then the reverend said, “If any of you are so fainthearted as to want to turn back after all you have endured, board the train. I will stand your return fare to England. But rest assured that those who stay with me are visionaries, the first of the millions who will settle these rich fertile plains. I cannot provide you with manna. But within the hour those among you who are bound with me for Gloriana will be served hot soup and freshly baked bread. There will also be a keg of rum to celebrate our safe passage over stormy seas. Then it’s westward ho to Gloriana, my good fellows!”

The Smiths survived but one year in Gloriana, fighting grass fires in the heat of summer and the bitter cold in winter, their only commercial crop buffalo bones for which they were paid six dollars a ton.

Following their flight from the colony, the Smiths moved back to Saskatoon, a town prone to drought and grasshopper plagues and early frost, founded by a group of liquor-hating Methodists out of Ontario intent on establishing a settlement where temperance would be the unbroken rule. Then the Smiths retreated to an even smaller railroad town. Archie found employment in a butchershop, stuffing sausages for a Galician; and Nancy as a dishwasher in McGraw’s Queen Victoria Hotel, until she discovered exactly what was going on there and fled, taking another job, this one as a waitress in Mrs. Kukulowicz’s Regal Perogie House.

Bert, born in 1903, had a strict upbringing. When he wet his bed, his father clipped a clothespin to his penis, and Bert was soon cured of that habit. His mother, horrified to discover that he was left-handed, tied the offending arm behind his back at mealtimes until he learned to behave properly. If she caught him reading a cowboy novel or daydreaming on the sofa, she immediately set him to doing chores. “Every day, every hour,” she reminded him on his twelfth birthday, “you are drawing closer to the grave and the final judgement. See to it that sloth is not numbered among the sins you must answer for.”

Ordered to bathe once a week in a galvanized tub, Bert was instructed never to wash his face in the same water in which he had scrubbed his privates, but to do that in untainted water in the sink, a habit that survived into his seventies. Sheets stained during the night required him to lower his trousers and submit to a thrashing from his father.

Bert Smith’s father refused to chip in with the barbershop layabouts, a bunch of get-rich-quickers, risking his meagre savings when land fever struck the town in 1910, prices soaring. He was proved right when the boom collapsed so suddenly in 1913. “What you want to learn,” he told Bert again and again, “is never to take foolish risks, the devil’s temptations, but to get your schooling right and to qualify for a desk job in government service, the pay regular, the position proof against hard times, a pension guaranteed.”

WHEN SMITH AND MRS. JENKINS sat down to their Sugar Pops with milk in the morning, he often amused her by reading items aloud from the Gazette. At a time, for instance, when unemployment was running at twelve percent, he came across something interesting in E.J. Gordon’s social column. “‘Pot O’ Gold, a unique wine-and-cheese party will be held by the Montreal section of the National Council of Jewish Women on Wednesday, February 4, from six to eight P.M. in Victoria Hall, Westmount. A pot of $10,000 will be won by a lucky ticket holder who paid $100 for a chance to win. Ticket sales are limited to three hundred and fifty.’”

“Drat it,” Mrs. Jenkins said, “I suppose we’re too late to buy.”

“‘“The idea originated with our co-president, Mrs. Ida Gursky,” said publicity chairperson Mrs. Jewel Pinsky. “We thought that offering a car as a prize was quite simply too blah. As a gimmick it has been used too often. Then Mrs. Gursky had an inspiration. Why not a bar of gold?”’”

As soon as she read the funny page and her horoscope, Mrs. Jenkins passed the Gazette on to Smith, who retired to his room with it. There was no respite. No solace. Not even on the sports pages, where he read of a nigger, freaky tall, who was paid better than a million a year for dumping balls into a basket, and of another nigger, earning even more, because he could strike a ball with a stick one time out of three. The latter’s manager said, “Elroy comes to play every day. He always gives 110 percent.”

Once, watching a baseball game with Mrs. Jenkins, they saw Elroy come to bat. “Look at him,” Mrs. Jenkins said, “he never steps up to the plate he doesn’t fondle his crown jewels. Rocky Colavito came up to bat he used to cross himself. Those were the days, eh, Bert?”

Whenever he was invited to watch TV with Mrs. Jenkins, her hair done in sausage curls, she provided the Kool-Aid and he contributed the Hostess Twinkies. On occasion Smith found her distressingly coarse. Once, for instance, exploding with mirth at a “Laugh-In” outrage, she shot him a sidelong glance, decidedly coquettish, and asked, “Hey, do you know the definition of an Eskimo with a hard-on?”

“Certainly not.”

“A frigid midget with a rigid digit. Whoops. Sorry. I know you don’t enjoy the off-colour.”

Another night she was watching “Wagon Train” with Smith when a young man came to the door and asked to see the room she had for rent. His hair was blond but his eyebrows were black and he was wearing an earring. So she sent him away. Then she came mincing back into the parlour, her wrists hanging limp, and asked, “Do you know why there won’t be any homos left after the year 2000?”

No answer.

“Because they don’t reproduce and they eat each other.”

Smith groaned.

“Oh, come off it, Bert. I think that was very cute.”

Trying to make amends the next morning she passed him, along with the Gazette, the only hardback book she had ever bought: Rod McKuen’s Listen to the Warm. Smith didn’t bother with it, but he did look at the Gazette. Mr. Bernard was going to be seventy-five. A huge banquet in his honour would be held in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. An indignant Smith crumpled the newspaper, dropped it to the floor, and reached for his bedside Bible.

Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, are mighty in power?

Their seed is established in their sight with them, and their offspring before their eyes.

Their houses are safe from fear, neither is the rod of God upon them.