“To this day I still vacillate between considering my failure to appear for tea with Solomon that Friday as most unfortunate or, conversely, a blessing for both of us. Of course this is all idle conjecture, quite useless now, but seated in my wheelchair overlooking the garden I can no longer tend, I am much given to it. The roses are badly in need of deadheading, the pods swollen. A boy with a fishing pole has just passed on his way to the brook, his eyes understandably averted. Dr. McAlpine says my hair will grow in again, but I doubt that there will be time enough. I must stop this rambling right away. Goodbye, Moses Berger, and do please remember to treat the table as instructed. Perhaps you could make a note in your desk diary or wall calendar.”
Moses continued to rummage through his desk. In a bottom drawer filled with angry letters-to-the-editor he had written but never mailed, he came across his silver cognac flask and a cheque for one hundred pounds from the TLS, payment for a book review that he had given up for lost. Then, under everything else, he found Mr. Morrie’s handwritten memoir. Getting him to compose it, Moses recalled, had required some fancy footwork. The result was pathetic, a masterpiece of evasion. But things could still be learned from it, even as Kremlinologists pried the occasional pearl of truth out of Pravda. The analogy pleased Moses. For after all was said and done what he had become, if anything, beyond a degenerate drunk and cuckold, was a Gurskyologist. The only one armed with flint among all the hagiographers in the woodpile.
Moses moved to the cherry wood table, his most prized possession, shook the pages free of mouse droppings and began to skim through them. Mr. Morrie, in his opening paragraph, ventured that it was his intention to hit the high spots in his history of the development of the Gursky empire, begging indulgence in advance for any omissions, which could be blamed on an old man’s faulty memory. So in 122 closely written pages there was not a single mention of Bert Smith. Mr. Morrie started out by saying that his father, Aaron Gursky, had decided to emigrate to Canada in 1897 (with his wife, Fanny, who was five months pregnant with Bernard) “so that he could raise his family under the British flag, which was famous for fair play.” But in fact that wasn’t exactly how it happened.
Raw, illicit whisky was not only the well-head of the Gursky billions, it was also what indirectly floated Ephraim’s legal descendants to Canada in the first place. Moses was able to establish as much through a close study of the Royal Commission Report on the Liquor Trade, circa 1860–70, and by chasing down every available history of the formative years of the North West Mounted Police. This led him to RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, where he sweettalked his way into the archives by flaunting his Rhodes scholarship, his First in History at Balliol, and pretending that he was researching an essay on Fort Whoop-Up for History Today.
Sorting through old diaries, journals, and charge sheets until his eyes ached, Moses had been rewarded by the discovery that, in 1861, Ephraim was ensconced in a log cabin in the foothills of the Rockies with a Peigan squaw and three children. He turned his hand to making Whoop-Up Bug Juice from a recipe that called for a handful or two of red pepper, a half-gallon of Jamaica ginger, a quart of molasses, say a pound of chewing tobacco, and a quart of whisky. This lethal brew was then diluted with creek water, heated to the boiling point, and carted off to a tent outside Fort Whoop-Up, hard by the Montana border. Ephraim peddled it by the cupful to Blackfoot Indians in exchange for fur and horses. It was the unhappy combination of unquenchable Blackfoot thirst and an endless need for horses to satisfy it that led to a problem. The Indians were driven to stealing horses from settlers and Hudson’s Bay forts. Crazy drunk they also burned down a trading post or two for sport. They robbed and they raped, and Ephraim, according to one report, had to shoot a couple of them as an example when they had the effrontery to demand undiluted whisky, that is to say firewater that could be ignited by a match.
There were other skirmishes, more shootings and burnings, and eventually news of the unrest reached Canada’s first prime minister in faraway Ottawa. Sir John A. Macdonald, a prodigious drinker himself, created something called the Mounted Rifles to cope with the trouble. However, Washington took umbrage at the aggressive Canadians imposing an armed force of three hundred men so close to the border. The resourceful Sir John A. reached for his pen and renamed the force the Mounted Police. The fabled riders of the plain were born:
Before the North West Mounted Police ever finished their punishing eight-hundred-mile-long march to Fort Whoop-Up, rampaging American whisky-runners slaughtered a band of Assiniboines at Battle Creek. Ephraim, at this point, was being supplied with rotgut whisky out of Fort Benton. Rather than wait to explain himself to the newly formed police corps, possibly being required to answer for the death of two Blackfoot, he obviously thought it more politic to skedaddle. And then, for a long while, Moses lost him, unaware of where he went next.
An enigma that was resolved when Moses came by the journal wherein Solomon recounted the tales he had been told by his grandfather on their journey to the Polar Sea. Tales filtered through an old man’s faulty memory and written down by Solomon many years later. Tales that Moses suspected had been burnished in the service of not one, but two outsized egos.
In any event, according to Solomon, his grandfather next ventured as far as Russia, disposing of a cargo of beaver pelts in St. Petersburg, and then carrying on to Minsk, where his parents had escaped from. Walking out, early in the reign of Nicholas I, when among other decrees it was ruled that Jewish children should be forcibly taken from their parents at the age of twelve and be compelled to serve in the czar’s army for as long as twenty-five years.
Ephraim, wandering into the synagogue in Minsk in time for the Friday evening service, discovered that his father was still remembered fondly. “The best cantor we ever had,” an old man told him.
A week later Ephraim served as cantor for the sabbath services, the congregation amazed by the soaring golden voice of this Jew who didn’t wear a capot, but dressed like a Russian prince and was rumoured to frequent their taverns, demanding service. Wary of his reckless behaviour, they nevertheless offered him his father’s old post in the synagogue. Ephraim declined the honour, but lingered in Minsk long enough to impulsively marry a certain Sarah Luchinsky, who bore him a son called Aaron. Then there was an incident in a tavern and Ephraim was obliged to flee again. He settled his wife and child in reasonable style in a shtetl in the Pale of Settlement and soon, bored with both of them, left the country, but continued to send them funds from France and England and finally Canada.