Solomon Gursky Was Here

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

  “What about Bernie and Morrie?” Solomon asked.

  “They’re not coming with us.”

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

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

  “You can’t take the kid.”

  “Steady on, George.”

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

  “I’ll write to you from Montana.”

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

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

  “You are crazy in the head, old man.”

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

  “I thought we were going to Montana.”

  “We’re heading north.”

  “Where?”

  “Far.”

  “Are you drunk again, zeyda?”

  Ephraim laughed and sang him one of his sailor songs:

  And when we get to London docks,

  There we’ll see the cunt in flocks!

  One to another they will say,

  O, welcome Jack with three years’ pay!

  For he is homeward bound,

  For he is homeward bound!

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

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

  “Miss Kindrachuk says Latin is a dead language.”

  “That school of yours is no bloody good.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Where are we going?” Solomon asked.

  “To the Polar Sea.”

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

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

  “How long will we be gone?”

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

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

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

  “So what?”

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

  “I’ve never seen the Polar Sea.”

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

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

  “What if I took the wrong direction?”

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

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

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

  Their first real quarrel followed hard on a Latin lesson.

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

  “Cheek.”

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

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

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

  “Hop to it.”

  “You do it.”

  “I’m going back to sleep.”

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

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

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

  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.

  Strong and Never Wrong is He,

  Worthy of our Song is He,

  Never failing,

  All prevailing.

  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:

  From W.N. to E.G.

  de bono et malo.

  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.”