Solomon Gursky Was Here by Mordecai Richler Page B

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.”
    â€œBut I don’t know how.”
    â€œBuild it,” Ephraim said, tossing him the long knife.
    â€œYou do it,” Solomon said, kicking the knife away.
    â€œI’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 cheeksand 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