Narssuk’s father, a huge double-toothed monster, had been slain in a battle with another giant. His mother had also been killed. When still an infant, Narssuk was already so large that four women could sit on his prick. He flew into the sky and became an evil spirit, hating mankind, restrained from mischief only by the thongs that held his caribou skins in place. However, if women kept silent about their menses or other taboos were broken, Narssuk’s thongs loosened, he was free to move about, and tormented the people with blizzards.
“Now, because of the kublanas, I will have to fly into the sky,” Inaksak said, “and fight Narssuk, tightening his thongs, or there will be no good weather for the hunt and we shall all starve.”
But once the hunters and their women and children had gathered outside it became clear that Inaksak’s flight had become unnecessary. The storm had abated as suddenly as it had started. Ephraim then noted the position of the moon bobbing on the horizon. Hoping against hope that his calculations were right, he said, “I am more powerful than this foolish old man, or even Narssuk, and to prove it to you I will soon raise my arms and lead the moon, who is my servant, between you and the sun, bringing darkness in the season of light, and then, unless you obey my smallest wish, I will turn myself into a raven and pluck your eyes out one by one.”
Once this was translated by Kukiaut, the Eskimos, vastly amused to have such a braggart in their midst, sat down to wait.
Ephraim disappeared into his igloo and emerged again wearing his silk top hat and his talith. He sang: “Who knows one? I know One: One is God in Heaven and Earth. Who know Two? I know Two: Two is the Tablets, One is God in Heaven and Earth.”
He rolled over in the snow, simulating convulsions, froth bubbling from his lips. Then he stood up, and at the rising of the moon he lifted his arms and the eclipse began. The astonished Eskimos cried out, falling to their knees, pleading with Ephraim not to become a raven and pluck out their eyes.
And Ephraim said unto them:
“I am Ephraim, the Lord thy God, and thou shalt have no other gods before me.
“Thou shalt not bow down to Narssuk, whose prick I have shrivelled, or to any other gods, you ignorant little fuckers. For the Lord thy God is a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”
He enjoined them not to steal or kill, unless ordered to do so by Ephraim, and instructed them not to take his name in vain. “Six days shalt thou hunt, providing meat for me and Izzy, and on the evening of the sixth day thou shalt wash thy women and bring them to me, an offering—”
Izzy stamped his foot.
“—and to my priest here. And on the seventh day, which is my sabbath, thou shalt rest.”
In the days that followed, the women lying with him under caribou skins on the snow platform, the men gathered round, Ephraim told them, “In the beginning I created the heaven and the earth.”
Ephraim enchanted them with stories of the flood, Joseph’s coat of many colours, and his ten plagues, the latter tale a favourite of the hunters.
Ephraim set and mended their broken bones, he tended to their sick, and when a female child was born he would not allow them to strangle and then eat it, and when a male child was born he showed them how he was to be circumcised.
Ephraim promised them that their seed would be as numerous as the stars above. He told them that one day he would have to leave them, but, if they continued to behave themselves, he would send them a Messiah in another generation. The Messiah, a descendant of Ephraim, would return their ancestors to them and make the seal and caribou so plentiful that nobody would starve again.
Ephraim also bestowed on his followers a version of Yom Kippur, telling them that this was his holiest of holy days, and that from the time the sun went down, until it rose and went down again, any of his flock who was thirteen years old or older was not to fuck or eat any food, but instead must pray to him for forgiveness of his sins. He laid down this law in a foolish and absent-minded moment, overlooking the fact that his faith provided for all contingencies save that of the Arctic adherent.
In the years to come, followers of Ephraim who wandered too far north in search of seal in October soon discovered that they were in bad trouble. Once the sun went down they were obliged to remain celibate and fast until it rose once more several months later, not sinking below the horizon again for many more months. As a consequence, some sinned against Ephraim, the men stealing out of camp to eat, their women seeking satisfaction among the unclean. But most stayed in place to starve, dying devout, unless Henry, that good shepherd, found them, and hurried them south to the sun and deliverance.
Five
“You’re taking it wrong, Bert. Nobody’s asking you to leave. But as I now have a professional to handle all the repairs and you can’t afford the going rent, it’s only fair you should move into the small room in back.” Mrs. Jenkins, standing on the throw rug, shifted her weight from one foot to another, her ear cocked to the floorboard’s answering squeak. “Loose board,” she said.
“I’ll take care of it,” Smith said.
“I’ve got a couple would take this room on Monday and pay me forty dollars a week in advance.”
Quitting the house in a rage, Smith hurried down the street, passing neighbours, not one of whom greeted him with a wave or even a smile. Grabby cheeky foreigners. Bloody ungrateful, that lot. If one of their women got on the same bus as he did, never mind she was merely an ignorant cleaning lady, pilfering from her betters, he immediately offered her his seat. Why, once he had even carried parcels home from the Metro for Mrs. Donanto. But if he ever slipped on the ice, breaking an ankle, the neighbours would probably cheer. Certainly they would leave him lying there with the poo from the Reginelli dog who did his business anywhere.
Smith went to the bank, withdrew his weekly two hundred dollars, and then treated himself to coffee and a blueberry muffin at Miss Westmount. He had his pride. He would not submit to the indignity of that two-by-four room with a slit of a window overlooking the rats feasting on the garbage in the back lane. Instead he popped in on Mrs. Watkins and inquired about the vacant room in her house. Then he splurged on lunch at Ogilvy’s and went home for a nap.
“Thinking of moving out, are we, old buddy of mine?”
Smith, startled, felt the room begin to sway.
“Go ahead. Make my day. The reason Mrs. Watkins has a vacant room is an old guy conked out in bed. Probably froze to death. Or didn’t you know she sets her thermostat at sixty-five?”
“I have no interest in your back room.”
“Guessy guessy why Mrs. Watkins phoned the minute you left her cockroachy place? Because she’s put up with old fusspots got one foot in the grave before and she wanted to know did you pee in bed?”
“Have you quite finished, Mrs. Jenkins?”
“Mrs. Jenkins is it now? Ha! I found an empty Laura Secord box in your wastepaper basket last week as well as a takeout bag from the Shangri-la and three Lowney’s Nut Milk wrappers. Where did you get the do re me, Bert?”
“None of your business.”
“Well it’s my bee’s-wax if you’re shop-lifting or maybe peddling dope to school kids in the Alexis Nihon Plaza and the cops will be coming to my door to make inquiries.”
Smith didn’t emerge from his room until noon the next day. After looking at a number of places, he settled on something in N.D.G. in a rambling old house that had been converted into self-contained one-room flatlets, each with its own bathroom and a cupboard kitchenette with a two-plate electric burner. Feeling sinful, he bought a small refrigerator and a colour TV and an electric blanket. Then, exhausted, he took a taxi home, slipping out at the corner, only to be totally undone when he discovered that his key no longer fit the lock to his room. Worse news. His increasingly frantic struggling with what was obviously a new lock wakened somebody inside. A whining feminine voice. “Is that you, Herb?”