Solomon Gursky Was Here (63 page)

Moses and Sir Hyman were strolling through Regent's Park, en route to Prunier's.

“But I think I'll save the rest of the story for lunch, dear boy. A pity Lucy couldn't join us.”

“An audition.”

“In the end she will have to settle for being a producer, putting her inheritance and business acumen to some use. But don't you dare repeat I suggested as much.”

From the time Moses first met Sir Hyman in Blackwell's bookshop, through his turbulent affair with Lucy and after, he had
listened to the old necromancer pronounce on many things, but mostly politics. Mind you, they first began to see a lot of each other in an especially febrile year. A watershed year. 1956. Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin in a speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party, hinting that Stalin had been responsible for the murder of Kirov, his licence for the show trials that led to the execution of two more rivals, Zinoviev and Kamenev. After Khrushchev snitched, Nasser grabbed the Suez Canal. Then, in the autumn, Russian tanks rolled into Budapest. The British and the French, in collusion with the Israelis, attacked Suez.

Moses and Sir Hyman talked at length about these matters, strolling through Regent's Park or drinking late in Sir Hyman's library, the old man sitting with a malacca cane clasped between his knees, his chin resting on the handle. Moses also became a fixture at Cumberland Terrace dinner parties, Sir Hyman seated at the head of a dining-room table with an Irish linen tablecloth, lecturing tycoons and cabinet ministers and actresses. Moses was enchanted. He was spellbound. But he also came to feel possessed. He discovered, to his consternation, that he had picked up some of Sir Hyman's patterns of speech. Moses Berger, a Jeanne Mance boy born and bred, actually addressing people as “dear boy”. Even more chilling, leaning against the bar in The Bale of Hay, he once found himself passing off a witticism of Sir Hyman's as his own. Another day he discovered himself drifting through the cane shop in New Oxford Street trying out various walking sticks for effect. He fled. He turned down the next invitation to dinner and the one after. Then, inevitably, he was drawn back to the flame.

Drinking together in the library one night, Moses and Sir Hyman discussed the Khrushchev speech, Moses inveighing against the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, recalling the sense of betrayal round the table with the crocheted cloth. Sir Hyman pounced, holding forth on the history behind that devil's accord. If not for the Germans, he said, there might never have been a Bolshevik revolution in the first place. They were the ones who slipped the silver bullet on to the sealed train to the Finland Station, counting on Lenin to seize power and take Russia out of the war. Then, in 1922, when the revolution was still in
quarantine, the German delegation to the Genoa Conference signed the Rapallo Treaty with the Soviets, effectively ending their isolation. “The consequences of that treaty,” Sir Hyman said, “are not without interest.”

It enabled the Germans to evade the arms clauses of the Versailles Treaty, sending air and tank officers to Russia for training. In return, the Germans built airfields for the Bolsheviks and tutored them in the military arts. “With hindsight,” Sir Hyman said, “we can say that the Wehrmacht that all but conquered Russia was trained there between 1922 and 1933, and instructed the army that destroyed them.”

Each time they met, Sir Hyman inquired about Moses's progress with his study of the Beveridge Plan. Finally Moses confessed that he had put it aside. Instead he was thinking of writing something about Lucy's father, Solomon Gursky.

“Ah.”

Sir Hyman, he allowed, had inadvertently led him to a great discovery. While cataloguing Sir Hyman's Arctic library, he had accidently stumbled on an unmistakable reference to Solomon's grandfather Ephraim Gursky, and now he suspected that Ephraim might have been a survivor of the Franklin expedition.

“But there were no survivors,” Sir Hyman said.

“Certainly that would appear to be the case,” Moses agreed, adding that he would soon be returning to Canada to pursue his researches.

“And will the Gursky family finance such mischief?”

Moses laughed.

“How will you manage, then?”

“I suppose I'll have to teach.”

“I'll put you on an allowance, my dear boy.”

“I couldn't,” Moses blurted out.

“Why not?”

“I'm not sure.”

“Coyness doesn't become you, Moses. Neither are you a bore. Yes or no. I haven't the patience to twist your arm before you condescend to accept a stipend from an indecently rich old man.”

“Let me think about it.”

Moses had only been back in Montreal for a month, filling in at McGill for a friend on a sabbatical, when he wrote to Sir Hyman, thanking him for his generosity, but turning down his offer of a stipend. Actually he was longing to take the money, but he suspected the offer was more in the nature of a test. If he accepted, he would be diminished in Sir Hyman's estimation, and what he wanted, above all, was for the old man to love him. For the old man to look upon him as a son.

Moses's letter went unanswered for months of anguish, convincing him that he had blundered yet again, offending Sir Hyman when his real intention, he acknowledged, had been to ingratiate himself. Then Sir Hyman was heard from at last. A letter from Budapest. Would Moses consider coming over for the summer to help with some unspecified chores, while Lady Olivia was cruising the Greek islands with some old friends? Moses leaped at the opportunity.

“And how is the work progressing?” Sir Hyman asked.

“By fits and starts.”

“I was hoping you had brought me some pages to read.”

Moses was put up in a spare bedroom in the flat on Cumberland Terrace, his initial chore to compile another catalogue, this time of Sir Hyman's collection of Judaica. He was sent to antiquarian book dealers in Dublin and Inverness to inspect and acquire specific Arctic titles, the price of no consequence. He flew to Rome and Athens to deliver packets that could not be entrusted to the mail. Most weekends he joined Sir Hyman at his estate on the Sussex coast, accompanying him for a swim before breakfast, and encouraged to roam at will through the rambling house and grounds.

Moses did not get over the following summer, but, instead, flew out to the Northwest Territories, ostensibly to visit Henry and Nialie, but actually to seek out Eskimos named Gor-ski, Girskee, or Gur-ski. However, he did keep in touch with Sir Hyman. Moses's letters, polished again and again before he dared send them off, instantly regretted as too familiar or not sufficiently entertaining, were acknowledged by the occasional postcard from Havana or Amman or Saigon. And Moses was back in the summer of 1959, met by a Bentley at Heathrow and driven directly to Sussex. Sir Hyman welcomed him
with champagne. “I can't tell you,” he said, “how much I'm looking forward to reading the pages you brought me.”

‘‘Not yet.''

“But you are making progress?”

Moses told him that he had acquired transcripts of the trial. He had been out west twice. He had spoken with Mr. Morrie again. “According to Lucy, her father kept a journal.”

“And that would be a big help, would it?”

“If it still exists and I manage to get my hands on it, yes, certainly, an enormous help.”

“Well, if you really haven't brought me any pages, I do hope you at least remembered to pack your dinner jacket.”

Sir Hyman and Lady Olivia were expecting something like sixty guests that evening, some arriving by car and others in a bus chartered for the party in honour of a visiting American senator. Sir Hyman, waving his hand, had assembled the usual suspects for the occasion. A lively but potentially vitriolic mix of politicians, film and theatre people, men “who were something in the city,” art dealers, journalists, and any American of consequence who happened to be in London. Included in the latter group, much to Moses's delight, was Sam Burns, en route to Moscow to cover Vice-President Nixon's visit for the network.

Moses, taking Sam by the arm, led him on a private tour of the gardens and then through a basement door, down a winding corridor, into a vast wine cellar. He sat Sam down at a table, fetched a couple of glasses, and cracked open a bottle of vintage champagne.

“Christ,” Sam said, “are you allowed to do that?”

“Hymie wouldn't mind in the least.”

“You call him that?”

“Sure.”

Sam strolled down one of the wine cellar rows, scanning labels. “Not a bottle of Kik Cola anywhere. My luck.”

“Remember Gurd's?”

“Orange Crush.”

“May Wests.”

“Cherry Blossoms.”

“Who centred the Punch Line?”

“Elmer fucking Lach.”

“The Razzle Dazzle Line?”

“Buddy O'Connor.”

“How come RAF night-fighters can see in the dark?”

“Because they eat their carrots. Now tell me where your benefactor, if that's what he is, gets his millions?”

“This is nothing,” Moses said. “Come. I'll show you some of the paintings he doesn't even bother to display upstairs.”

Moses led him into another room, pressed one of the sequence of buttons under the wall thermostat, and out slid a long rack: a Francis Bacon, a Graham Sutherland, a Sidney Nolan.

“He's going to think we're snooping down here. Let's go, Moses.”

A cloth covered a painting leaning against the wall. “Let's take a peek,” Moses said.

“I don't think we ought to.”

“It's probably the new Bonnard he bought.”

Moses lifted the cloth and revealed what appeared to be the most conventional of portraits. A lovely young bourgeois lady seated in a wicker chair. She wore a broadbrimmed straw hat with a pink bow, a multi-layered chiffon dress, also with a pink bow, and held a bouquet of sweet williams in her hands. But there was something quirky about the portrait. The young lady's eyes were of a different colour. One eye brown, one eye blue.

“Oh my God,” Moses howled. “Oh Christ!”

“What's wrong?”

“Let's go.”

“I haven't finished my drink.”

“Let's go, I said.”

Sir Hyman was chatting with a group in the living room.

“I've got to speak to you,” Moses said.

“Now?” Sir Hyman asked, eyebrows raised.

“Right now.”

“Oh. Well. Yes. Certainly. The library.”

Moses waited an exasperating five minutes before Sir Hyman joined him there.

“How come, Sir Hyman Kaplansky, how come, Sir Hyman,” Moses shouted, “that sitting on the floor downstairs there is a portrait of Diana McClure née Morgan?”

“Ah.” “Have you brought me any pages,
dear boy
. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward—”

“I'd all but given up on you. I was beginning to think you'd never find it,” Sir Hyman said, deflating him with a stroke.

“Does Lucy know?”

“Nor Henry. And you are not to say anything to them, now or ever. I want your word on that.”

“Dear boy.”

“Yingele.”

“Bastard.”

Two couples, carrying champagne glasses, drifted into the library. “Oh dear, are we intruding, Hymie?”

“Most certainly not. I was just telling Moses about my latest acquisition,” he said, indicating the picture hanging over the fireplace. A raven perched on a half-open sea shell, human beings struggling to emerge from it.

“This is the raven that stole the light of the world from an old man and then scattered it throughout the skies. After the great flood had receded, he flew to a beach to gorge himself on the delicacies left behind by the water. However, he wasn't hungry for once.” Looking directly at Moses, a stricken Moses, he went on to say, “But his other appetites—lust, curiosity, and the unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures—these remained unsatisfied. The raven, his wings crossed behind his back, strolled along the beach, his sharp eyes alert for any unusual sight or sound. Taking to the air, he called petulantly to the empty sky. To his delight, he heard an answering cry, a muffled squeak.

“Scanning the beach something caught his eye. A gigantic clamshell. He landed and found that the shell was fill of little creatures, cowering in the terror of his menacing shadow. So the raven leaned his great head close to the shell, and with his smooth trickster's tongue that had got him in and out of so many misadventures
during his troubled and troublesome existence, he coaxed and cajoled the little creatures to come out and play.”

Sir Hyman paused as a waiter brought everybody more champagne.

“As you well know, Moses, the raven speaks in two voices, one harsh and dissembling, and the other, which he used now, seductive. So it wasn't long before one after another the little shell-dwellers timidly emerged. Bizarre they were. Two-legged like the raven, but without glossy feathers or thrusting beak or strong wings. They were the original humans.”

Sir Hyman paused again for a sip from his glass and the two couples, more than somewhat bored, took advantage of the break to retreat from the library.

“I have so many questions,” Moses said.

“And my house is full of guests. We'll talk on Wednesday.”

“Why not tomorrow?”

“Because tomorrow noon you are flying to Paris. A package to deliver. You are booked into the Crillon for three nights. A certain M. Provost will join you for breakfast on Monday or the very latest Tuesday, and you will hand over the package with my compliments.”

Provost did not appear on Monday morning. Tuesday morning Moses sat down to breakfast, opened the
Times,
and read that Sir Hyman Kaplansky, the noted financier, had apparently drowned in stormy seas. Sir Hyman, as was his habit, had set out early Monday morning for his pre-breakfast swim in spite of gale warnings, and did not return. His beach robe, slippers, and the book he was reading, were found abandoned in the sand. Lady Olivia told reporters that Sir Hyman, who suffered from a weak heart, had been cautioned not to swim unaccompanied or in rough seas, but he was an obstinate man. Foul play was not suspected. Fishing trawlers in the area had been alerted and lifeboats were out searching in high seas.