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.