LEONARD COHEN
THE FAVOURITE GAME

Copyright

The Borough Press

An imprint of Harper CollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1963

This edition published by Blue Door in 2009

Copyright © Leonard Cohen 1963

Leonard Cohen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007341733

Version: 2015-10-29

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

To my mother

As the mist leaves no scar

On the dark green hill,

So my body leaves no scar

On you, nor ever will.

When wind and hawl encounter,

What remains to keep?

So you and I encounter

Then turn, then fall to sleep.

As many nights endure

Without a moon or star.

So will we endure

When one is gone and far.

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Book I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Book II

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Book III

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Book IV

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

About the Author

Other Books By Leonard Cohen

Credits

About the Publisher

BOOK I

1

Breavman knows a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. The punctures festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair.

A bullet broke into the flesh of his father’s arm as he rose out of a trench. It comforts a man with coronary thrombosis to bear a wound taken in combat.

On the right temple Breavman has a scar which Krantz bestowed with a shovel. Trouble over a snowman. Krantz wanted to use clinkers as eyes. Breavman was and still is against the use of foreign materials in the decoration of snowmen. No woollen mufflers, hats, spectacles. In the same vein he does not approve of inserting carrots in the mouths of carved pumpkins or pinning on cucumber ears.

His mother regarded her whole body as a scar grown over some earlier perfection which she sought in mirrors and windows and hub-caps.

Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.

2

Breavman’s young mother hunted wrinkles with two hands and a magnifying mirror.

When she found one she consulted a fortress of oils and creams arrayed on a glass tray and she sighed. Without faith the wrinkle was anointed.

‘This isn’t my face, not my real face.’

‘Where is your real face, Mother?’

‘Look at me. Is this what I look like?’

‘Where is it, where’s your real face?’

‘I don’t know, in Russia, when I was a girl.’

He pulled the huge atlas out of the shelf and fell with it. He sifted pages like a goldminer until he found it, the whole of Russia, pale and vast. He kneeled over the distances until his eyes blurred and he made the lakes and rivers and names become an incredible face, dim and beautiful and easily lost.

The maid had to drag him to supper. A lady’s face floated over the silver and the food.

3

His father lived mostly in bed or a tent in the hospital. When he was up and walking he lied.

He took his cane without the silver band and led his son over Mount Royal. Here was the ancient crater. Two iron and stone cannon rested in the gentle grassy scoop which was once a pit of boiling lava. Breavman wanted to dwell on the violence.

‘We’ll come back here when I’m better.’

One lie.

Breavman learned to pat the noses of horses tethered beside the Chalet, how to offer them sugar cubes from a flat palm.

‘One day we’ll go riding.’

‘But you can hardly breathe.’

His father collapsed that evening over his map of flags on which he plotted the war, fumbling for the capsules to break and inhale.

4

Here is a movie filled with the bodies of his family.

His father aims the camera at his uncles, tall and serious, boutonnières in their dark lapels, who walk too close and enter into blurdom.

Their wives look formal and sad. His mother steps back, urging aunts to get into the picture. At the back of the screen her smile and shoulders go limp. She thinks she is out of focus.

Breavman stops the film to study her and her face is eaten by a spreading orange-rimmed stain as the film melts.

His grandmother sits in the shadows of the stone balcony and aunts present her with babies. A silver tea-set glows richly in early Technicolor.

His grandfather reviews a line of children but is stopped in the midst of an approving nod and ravaged by a technical orange flame.

Breavman is mutilating the film in his efforts at history.

Breavman and his cousins fight small gentlemanly battles. The girls curtsy. All the children are invited to leap one at a time across the flagstone path.

A gardener is led shy and grateful into the sunlight to be preserved with his betters.

A battalion of wives is squeezed abreast, is decimated by the edge of the screen. His mother is one of the first to go.

Suddenly the picture is shoes and blurred grass as his father staggers under another attack.

‘Help!’

Coils of celluloid are burning around his feet. He dances until he is saved by Nursie and the maid and punished by his mother.

The movie runs night and day. Be careful, blood, be careful.

5

The Breavmans founded and presided over most of the institutions which make the Montreal Jewish community one of the most powerful in the world today.

The joke around the city is: The Jews are the conscience of the world and the Breavmans are the conscience of the Jews. ‘And I am the conscience of the Breavmans,’ adds Lawrence Breavman. ‘Actually we are the only Jews left; that is, super-Christians, first citizens with cut prongs.’

The feeling today, if anyone troubles himself to articulate it, is that the Breavmans are in a decline. ‘Be careful,’ Lawrence Breavman warns his executive cousins, ‘or your children will speak with accents.’

Ten years ago Breavman compiled the Code of Breavman:

We are Victorian gentlemen of Hebraic persuasion.

We cannot be positive, but we are fairly certain that any other Jews with money got it on the black market.

We do not wish to join Christian clubs or weaken our blood through inter-marriage. We wish to be regarded as peers, united by class, education, power, differentiated by home rituals.

We refuse to pass the circumcision line.

We were civilized first and drink less, you lousy bunch of bloodthirsty drunks.

6

A rat is more alive than a turtle.

A turtle is slow, cold, mechanical, nearly a toy, a shell with legs. Their deaths didn’t count. But a white rat is quick and warm in its envelope of skin.

Krantz kept his in an empty radio. Breavman kept his in a deep honey tin. Krantz went away for the holidays and asked Breavman to take care of his. Breavman dropped it in with his.

Feeding rats is work. You have to go down to the basement. He forgot for a while. Soon he didn’t want to think about the honey tin and avoided the basement stairs.

He went down at last and there was an awful smell coming from the tin. He wished it were still full of honey. He looked inside and one rat had eaten most of the stomach of the other rat. He didn’t care which was his. The alive rat jumped at him and then he knew it was crazy.

He held the tin way in front because of the stink and filled it with water. The dead one floated on top with the hole between its ribs and hind legs showing. The alive one scratched the side.

He was called for lunch which began with marrow. His father tapped it out of a bone. It came from inside an animal.

When he went down again both were floating. He emptied the can in the driveway and covered it with snow. He vomited and covered that with snow.

Krantz was mad. He wanted to have a funeral at least, but they couldn’t find the bodies because of some heavy snowfalls.

When Spring began they attacked islands of dirty snow in the driveway. Nothing. Krantz said that seeing things were as they were Breavman owed him money for a white rat. He’d lent his and got nothing back, not even a skeleton. Breavman said that a hospital doesn’t pay anything when someone dies there. Krantz said that when you lend somebody something and that person loses it he has to pay for it. Breavman said that when it’s alive it isn’t a thing and besides he was doing him a favour when he took care of his. Krantz said that killing a rat was some favour and they fought it out on the wet gravel. Then they went downtown and bought new ones.

Breavman’s escaped and lived in a closet under the stairs. He saw its eyes with a flashlight. For a few mornings he put out Puffed Wheat in front of the door and it was nibbled, but soon he didn’t bother.

When summer came and the shutters and screens were being taken out one of the men discovered a little skeleton. It had patches of hair stuck to it. He dropped it in a garbage can.

Breavman fished it out when the man was gone and ran to Krantz’s. He said it was the skeleton of the first rat and Krantz could have a funeral if he wanted. Krantz said he didn’t need a stinky old skeleton, he had a live one. Breavman said that was fine but he had to admit they were quits. Krantz admitted.

Breavman buried it under the pansies, one of which his father took each morning for his buttonhole. Breavman took new interest in smelling them.

7

Come back, stern Bertha, come back and lure me up the torture tree. Remove me from the bedrooms of easy women. Extract the full due. The girl I had last night betrays the man who pays her rent.

That is how Breavman invoked the spirit of Bertha many mornings of his twenties.

Then his bones return to chicken-width. His nose retreats from impressive Semitic prominence to a childhood Gentile obscurity. Body hair blows away with the years like an ill-fated oasis. He is light enough for handbars and apple branches. The Japs and Germans are wrong.

‘Play it now, Bertha?’

He has followed her to precarious parts of the tree.

‘Higher!’ she demands.

Even the apples are trembling. The sun catches her flute, turns the polished wood to a moment of chrome.

‘Now?’

‘First you have to say something about God.’

‘God is a jerk.’

‘Oh, that’s nothing. I won’t play for that.’

The sky is blue and the clouds are moving. There is rotting fruit on the ground some miles below.

‘Fug God.’

‘Something terribly, horribly dirty, scaredy-cat. The real word.’

‘Fuck God!’

He waits for the fiery wind to lift him out of his perch and leave him dismembered on the grass.

‘Fuck GOD!’

Breavman sights Krantz who is lying beside a coiled hose and unravelling a baseball.

‘Hey, Krantz, listen to this. FUCK GOD!’

Breavman never heard his own voice so pure. The air is a microphone.

Bertha alters her fragile position to strike his cheek with her flute.

‘Dirty tongue!’

‘It was your idea.’

She strikes again for piety and tears off apples as she crashes past the limbs. Nothing of her voice as she falls.

Krantz and Breavman survey her for one second twisted into a position she could never achieve in gym. Her bland Saxon face is further anesthetized by uncracked steel-rimmed glasses. A sharp bone of the arm has escaped the skin.

After the ambulance Breavman whispered.

‘Krantz, there’s something special about my voice.’

‘No, there isn’t.’

‘There is so. I can make things happen.’

‘You’re a nut.’

‘Want to hear my resolutions?’

‘No.’

‘I promise not to speak for a week. I promise to learn how to play it myself. In that way the number of people who know how to play remains the same.’

‘What good’s that?’

‘It’s obvious, Krantz.’

8

His father decided to rise from his chair.

‘I’m speaking to you, Lawrence!’

‘Your father’s speaking to you, Lawrence,’ his mother interpreted.

Breavman attempted one last desperate pantomime.

‘Listen to your father breathing.’

The elder Breavman calculated the expense of energy, accepted the risk, drove the back of his hand across his son’s face.

His lips were not too swollen to practise ‘Old Black Joe.’

They said she’d live. But he didn’t give it up. He’d be one extra.

9

The Japs and Germans were beautiful enemies. They had buck teeth or cruel monocles and commanded in crude English with much saliva. They started the war because of their nature.

Red Cross ships must be bombed, all parachutists machine-gunned. Their uniforms were stiff and decorated with skulls. They kept right on eating and laughed at appeals for mercy.

They did nothing warlike without a close-up of perverted glee.

Best of all, they tortured. To get secrets, to make soap, to set examples to towns of heroes. But mostly they tortured for fun, because of their nature.

Comic books, movies, radio programmes centred their entertainment around the fact of torture. Nothing fascinates a child like a tale of torture. With the clearest of consciences, with a patriotic intensity, children dreamed, talked, acted orgies of physical abuse. Imaginations were released to wander on a reconnaissance mission from Calvary to Dachau.

European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies.

10

They had Lisa, they had the garage, they needed string, red string for the sake of blood.

They couldn’t enter the deep garage without red string.

Breavman remembered a coil.

The kitchen drawer is a step removed from the garbage can, which is a step removed from the outside garbage can, which is a step removed from the armadillo-hulked automatic garbage trucks, which are a step removed from the mysterious stinking garbage heaps by the edge of the St. Lawrence.

‘A nice glass of chocolate milk?’

He wished his mother had some respect for importance.

Oh, it is a most perfect kitchen drawer, even when you are in a desperate hurry.

Besides the tangled string box there are candlebutts from years of Sabbath evenings kept in thrifty anticipation of hurricanes, brass keys to locks which have been changed (it is difficult to throw out anything so precise and crafted as a metal key), straight pens with ink-caked nibs which could be cleaned if anyone took the trouble (his mother instructed the maid), toothpicks they never used (especially for picking teeth), the broken pair of scissors (the new pair was kept in another drawer: ten years later it was still referred to as ‘the new pair’), exhausted rubber rings from home preserving bottles (pickled tomatoes, green, evil, tight-skinned), knobs, nuts, all the homey debris which avarice protects.

He fingered blindly in the string box because the drawer can never be opened all the way.

‘A little cookie, a nice piece of honey cake, there’s a whole box of macaroons?’

Ah! bright red.

The welts dance all over Lisa’s imaginary body.

‘Strawberries,’ his mother called like a good-bye.

There is a way children enter garages, barns, attics, the same way they enter great halls and family chapels. Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached. They have the dark reverent air of immense kitchen drawers. They are friendly museums.

It was dark inside, smelled of oil and last year’s leaves which splintered as they moved. Bits of metal, the edges of shovels and cans glimmered damply.

‘You’re the American,’ said Krantz.

‘No, I’m not,’ said Lisa.

‘You’re the American,’ said Breavman. ‘Two against one.’

The ack-ack of Breavman and Krantz was very heavy. Lisa came on a daring manoeuvre across the darkness, arms outstretched.

‘Eheheheheheheh,’ stuttered her machine guns.

She’s hit.

She went into a spectacular nose dive, bailed out at the last moment. Swaying from one foot to another she floated down the sky, looking below, knowing her number was up.

She’s a perfect dancer, Breavman thought.

Lisa watched the Krauts coming.

‘Achtung. Heil Hitler! You are a prisoner of the Third Reich.’

‘I swallowed the plans.’

‘Vee haf methods.’

She is led to lie face down on the cot.

‘Just on the bum.’

Geez, they’re white, they’re solid white.

Her buttocks were whipped painlessly with red string.

‘Turn over,’ Breavman commanded.

‘The rule was: only on the bum,’ Lisa protested.

‘That was last time,’ argued Krantz the legalist.

She had to take off her top, too, and the cot disappeared from under her and she floated in the autumnal gloom of the garage, two feet above the stone floor.

Oh my, my, my.

Breavman didn’t take his turn whipping. There were white flowers growing out of all her pores.

‘What’s the matter with him? I’m getting dressed.’

‘The Third Reich will not tolerate insubordination,’ said Krantz.

‘Should we hold her?’ said Breavman.

‘She’ll make a lot of noise,’ said Krantz.

Now outside of the game, she made them turn while she put on her dress. The sunlight she let in while leaving turned the garage into a garage. They sat in silence, the red whip lost.

‘Let’s go, Breavman.’

‘She’s perfect, isn’t she, Krantz?’

‘What’s so perfect about her?’

‘You saw her. She’s perfect.’

‘So long, Breavman.’

Breavman followed him out of the yard.

‘She’s perfect, Krantz, didn’t you see?’

Krantz plugged his ears with his forefingers. They passed Bertha’s Tree. Krantz began to run.

‘She was really perfect, you have to admit it, Krantz.’

Krantz was faster.

11

One of Breavman’s early sins was to sneak a look at the gun. His father kept it in a night-table between his and his wife’s bed.

It was a huge .38 in a thick leather case. Name, rank and regiment engraved on the barrel. Lethal, angular, precise, it smouldered in the dark drawer with dangerous potential. The metal was always cold.

The sound of the machinery when Breavman pulled the hammer back was the marvellous sound of all murderous scientific achievement. Click! like the smacking of cogwheel lips.

The little blunt bullets took the scratch of a thumbnail.

If there were Germans coming down the street…

When his father married he swore to kill any man who ever made advances towards his wife. His mother told the story as a joke. Breavman believed the words. He had a vision of a corpse-heap of all the men who had ever smiled at her.

His father had an expensive heart doctor named Farley. He was around so much that they might have called him Uncle if they had been that sort of family. While his father was gasping under the oxygen-tent in the Royal Victoria, Doctor Farley kissed his mother in the hallway of their house. It was a gentle kiss to console an unhappy woman, between two people who had known each other through many crises.

Breavman wondered whether or not he’d better get the gun and finish him off.

Then who’d repair his father?

Not long ago Breavman watched his mother read the Star. She put down the paper and a Chekhovian smile of lost orchards softened her face. She had just read Farley’s obituary notice.

‘Such a handsome man.’ She seemed to be thinking of sad Joan Crawford movies. ‘He wanted me to marry him.’

‘Before or after my father died?’

‘Don’t be so foolish.’

His father was a tidy man, upturned his wife’s sewing basket when he thought it was getting messy, raged when his family’s slippers were not carefully lined under respective beds.

He was a fat man who laughed easily with everybody but his brothers.

He was so fat and his brothers were tall and thin and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, why should the fat one die, didn’t he have enough being fat and breathless, why not one of the handsome ones?

The gun proved he was once a warrior.

His brother’s pictures were in the papers in connection with the war effort. He gave his son his first book, The Romance of the King’s Army, a thick volume praising British regiments.

K-K-K-Katy, he sang when he could.

What he really loved was machinery. He would go miles to see a machine which cut a pipe this way instead of that. His family thought him a fool. He lent money to his friends and employees without question. He was given poetry books for his bar mitzvah. Breavman has the leather books now and startles at each uncut page.

‘And read these, too, Lawrence.’

How To Tell BirdsHow To Tell TreesHow To Tell InsectsHow To Tell Stones

He looked at his father in the crisp, white bed, always neat, still smelling of Vitalis. There was something sour inside the softening body, some enemy, some limpness of the heart.

He tore the books as his father weakened. He didn’t know why he hated the careful diagrams and coloured plates. We do. It was to scorn the world of detail, information, precision, all the false knowledge which cannot intrude on decay.

Breavman roamed his house waiting for a shot to ring out. That would teach them, the great successes, the eloquent speakers, the synagogue builders, all the grand brothers that walked ahead into public glory. He waited for the blast of a .38 which would clean the house and bring a terrible change. The gun was right beside the bed. He waited for his father to execute his heart.

‘Get me the medals out of the top drawer.’

Breavman brought them to the bed. The reds and golds of the ribbons ran into each other as in a watercolour. With some effort his father pinned them on Breavman’s sweater.

Breavman stood at attention ready to receive the farewell address.

‘Don’t you like them? You’re always looking at them.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘Stop stretching yourself like a damn fool. They’re yours.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Well, go out and play with them. Tell your mother I don’t want to see anyone and that includes my famous brothers.’

Breavman went downstairs and unlocked the closet which held his father’s fishing equipment. He spent hours in wonder, putting the great salmon rods together, winding and unwinding the copper wire, handling the dangerous flies and hooks.

How could his father have wielded these beautiful, heavy weapons, that swollen body on the crisp, white bed?

Where was the body in rubber boots that waded up rivers?

12

Many years later, telling all this, Breavman interrupted himself:

‘Shell, how many men know of those little scars in your earlobes? How many besides me, the original archaeologist of earlobes?’

‘Not as many as you think.’

‘I don’t mean the two or three or fifty that kissed them with their everyday lips. But in your fantasies, how many did something impossible with their mouths?’

‘Lawrence, please, we’re lying here together. You’re trying to spoil the night somehow.’

‘I’d say battalions.’

She did not reply and her silence removed her body from him a little distance.

‘Tell me some more about Bertha, Krantz and Lisa.’

‘Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else.’

‘Then let’s be quiet together.’

‘I saw Lisa before that time in the garage. We must have been five or six.’

Breavman stared at Shell and described Lisa’s sunny room, dense with expensive toys. Electric hobby-horse which rocked itself. Life-sized walking dolls. Nothing that didn’t squeak or light up when squeezed.

They hid in the shade of under-the-bed, their hands full of secrets and new smells, on the look-out for servants, watching the sun slide along the linoleum with the fairy tales cut in it.

The gigantic shoes of a housemaid paddled close by.

‘That’s lovely, Lawrence.’

‘But it’s a lie. It happened, but it’s a lie. Bertha’s Tree is a lie although she really fell out of it. That night after I fooled with my father’s fishing rods I sneaked into my parents’ room. They were both sleeping in their separate beds. There was a moon. They were both facing the ceiling and lying in the same position. I knew that if I shouted only one of them would wake up.’

‘Was that the night he died?’

‘It doesn’t matter how anything happens.’

He began to kiss her shoulders and face and although he was hurting her with his nails and teeth she didn’t protest.

‘Your body will never be familiar.’

13

After breakfast six men entered the house and set the coffin down in the living-room. It was surprisingly huge, made of dark-grained wood, brass-handled. There was snow on their clothes.

The room was suddenly more formal than Breavman had ever known it. His mother squinted.

They placed it on a stand and began to open the cabinet-like cover.

‘Close it, close it, we’re not in Russia!’

Breavman shut his eyes and waited for the click of the cover. But these men who make their living among the bereaved move noiselessly. They were gone when he opened his eyes.

‘Why did you make them close it, Mother?’

‘It’s enough as it is.’

The mirrors of the house were soaped, as if the glass had become victim to a strange indoor frost corresponding to the wide winter. His mother stayed alone in her room. Breavman sat stiffly on his bed and tried to fight his anger with a softer emotion.

The coffin was parallel to the chesterfield.

Whispering people began to congregate in the hall and on the balcony.

Breavman and his mother descended the stairs. The afternoon winter sun glimmered on his mother’s black stockings and gave to the mourners in the doorway a gold outline. He could see parked cars and dirty snow above their heads.

They stood closest, his uncles behind them. Friends and workers from the family factory thronged the hall, balcony, and path. His uncles, tall and solemn, touched his shoulders with their manicured hands.

But his mother was defeated. The coffin was open.

He was swaddled in silk, wrapped in a silvered prayer-shawl. His moustache bloomed fierce and black against his white face. He appeared annoyed, as if he were about to awaken, climb out of the offensively ornate box, and resume his sleep on the more comfortable chesterfield.

The cemetery was like an Alpine town, the stones like little sleeping houses. The diggers looked irreverently informal in their working clothes. A mat of artificial grass was spread over the heaps of exhumed frozen mud. The coffin went down in a system of pulleys.

Bagels and hard-boiled eggs, shapes of eternity, were served back at the house. His uncles joked with friends of the family. Breavman hated them. He looked under his great-uncle’s beard and asked him why he didn’t wear a tie.

He was the oldest son of the oldest son.

The family left last. Funerals are so neat. All they left behind were small gold-rimmed plates flecked with crumbs and caraway seeds.

The yards of lace curtain held some of the light of the small winter moon.

‘Did you look at him, Mother?’

‘Of course.’

‘He looked mad, didn’t he?’

‘Poor boy.’

‘And his moustache really black. As if it was done with an eyebrow pencil.’

‘It’s late, Lawrence…’

‘It’s late, all right. We’ll never see him again.’

‘I forbid you to use that voice to your mother.’

‘Why did you make them close it? Why did you? We could have seen him for a whole extra morning.’

‘Go to bed!’

‘Christ you, christ you, bastardess, witch!’ he improvised in a scream.

All night he heard his mother in the kitchen, weeping and eating.

14

Here is a colour photograph, largest picture on a wall of ancestors.

His father wears an English suit and all the English reticence that can be woven into cloth. A wine tie with a tiny, hard knot sprouts like a gargoyle. In his lapel a Canadian Legion pin, duller than jewellery. The double-chinned face glows with Victorian reason and decency, though the hazel eyes are a little too soft and staring, the mouth too full, Semitic, hurt.

The fierce moustache presides over the sensitive lips like a suspicious trustee.

The blood, which he died spitting, is invisible, but forms on the chin as Breavman studies the portrait.

He is one of the princes of Breavman’s private religion, double-natured and arbitrary. He is the persecuted brother, the near poet, the innocent of the machine toys, the sighing judge who listens but does not sentence.

Also he is heaving Authority, armoured with Divine Right, doing merciless violence to all that is weak, taboo, un-Breavmanlike.

As Breavman does him homage he wonders whether his father is just listening or whether he is stamping the seal on decrees.

Now he is settling more passively into his gold frame and his expression has become as distant as those in the older photographs. His clothes begin to appear dated and costume-like. He can rest. Breavman has inherited all his concerns.

The day after the funeral Breavman split open one of his father’s formal bow ties and sewed in a message. He buried it in the garden, under the snow beside the fence where in summer the neighbour’s lilies-of-the-valley infiltrate.

15

Lisa had straight black Cleopatra hair that bounced in sheaves off her shoulders when she ran or jumped. Her legs were long and well-formed, made beautiful by natural exercise. Her eyes were big, heavy-lidded, dreamy.

Breavman thought that perhaps she dreamed as he did, of intrigue and high deeds, but no, her wide eyes were roaming in imagination over the well-appointed house she was to govern, the brood she was to mother, the man she was to warm.

They grew tired of games in the field beside Bertha’s Tree. They did not want to squeeze under someone’s porch for Sardines. They did not want to limp through Hospital Tag. They did not want to draw the magic circle and sign it with a dot. Ildish-chay. Ets-lay o-gay, they whispered. They didn’t care who was It.

Better games of flesh, love, curiosity. They walked away from Run-Sheep-Run over to the park and sat on a bench near the pond where nurses gossip and children aim their toy boats.

He wanted to know everything about her. Was she allowed to listen to The Shadow (‘The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows, heheheheheheheh’)? Wasn’t Alan Young terrific? Especially the character with the flighty voice, ‘I’m hyah, I’m hyah, come gather rosebuds from my hair.’ Wasn’t the only decent part of the Charlie McCarthy programme when Mortimer Snerd came on? Could she get Gangbusters? Did she want to hear him imitate the Green Hornet’s car, driven by his faithful Filipino valet, Cato, or the Whistler? Wasn’t that a beautiful tune?

Had she ever been called a Dirty Jew?

They fell silent and the nurses and their blond babies reasserted their control of the universe.

And what was it like to have no father?

It made you more grown-up. You carved the chicken, you sat where he sat.

Lisa listened, and Breavman, for the first time, felt himself dignified, or rather, dramatized. His father’s death gave him a touch of mystery, contact with the unknown. He could speak with extra authority on God and Hell.

The nurses gathered their children and their boats and went away. The surface of the pond became smooth. The hands of the clock on the Chalet wound towards supper-time, but they kept on talking.

They squeezed hands, kissed once when the light was low enough, coming golden through the prickly bushes. Then they walked slowly home, not holding hands, but bumping against each other.

Breavman sat at the table trying to understand why he wasn’t hungry. His mother extolled the lamb chops.

16

Whenever they could they played their great game, the Soldier and the Whore. They played it in whatever room they could. He was on leave from the front and she was a whore of DeBullion Street.

Knock, knock, the door opened slowly.

They shook hands and he tickled her palm with his forefinger.

Thus they participated in that mysterious activity the accuracies of which the adults keep so coyly hidden with French words, with Yiddish words, with spelledout words; that veiled ritual about which night-club comedians construct their humour; that unapproachable knowledge which grownups guard to guarantee their authority.

Their game forbade talking dirty or roughhouse. They had no knowledge of the sordid aspect of brothels, and who knows if there is one? They thought of them as some sort of pleasure palace, places denied them as arbitrarily as Montreal movie theatres.

Whores were ideal women just as soldiers were ideal men.

‘Pay me now?’

‘Here’s all my money, beautiful baby.’

17

Seven to eleven is a huge chunk of life, full of dulling and forgetting. It is fabled that we slowly lose the gift of speech with animals, that birds no longer visit our windowsills to converse. As our eyes grow accustomed to sight they armour themselves against wonder. Flowers once the size of pine trees, return to clay pots. Even terror diminishes. The giants and giantesses of the nursery shrink to crabby teachers and human fathers. Breavman forgot everything he learned from Lisa’s small body.

Oh, how their lives had emptied from the time they crawled out from under the bed and stood up on their hind legs!

Now they longed for knowledge but undressing was a sin. Therefore they were an easy touch for the postcards, pornographic magazines, home-made erotica peddled in school cloakrooms. They became connoisseurs of sculpture and painting. They knew all the books in the library which had the best, most revealing reproductions.

What did bodies look like?

Lisa’s mother presented her with a careful book and they searched it in vain for straight information. There were phrases like ‘the temple of the human body,’ which may be true, but where was it, with its hair and creases? They wanted clear pictures, not a blank page with a dot in the centre and a breathless caption: ‘Just think! the male sperm is 1,000 times smaller than this.’

So they wore light clothing. He had a pair of green shorts which she loved for their thinness. She had a yellow dress which he preferred. This situation gave birth to Lisa’s great lyric exclamation:

‘You wear your green silk pants tomorrow; I’ll wear my yellow dress, so it’ll be better.’

Deprivation is the mother of poetry.

He was about to send for a volume advertised in a confession magazine which promised to arrive in a plain, brown wrapper, when, in one of the periodic searches through the maid’s drawers, he found the viewer.

It was made in France and contained a two-foot strip of film. You held it to the light and turned the little round knob and you saw everything.

Let us praise this film, which has disappeared with the maid into the Canadian wilderness.

It was titled in English, with beguiling simplicity, ‘Thirty Ways to Screw.’ The scenes were nothing like the pornographic movies Breavman later witnessed and attacked, of naked, jumpy men and women acting out the contrived, sordid plots.

The actors were handsome humans, happy in their film career. They were not the scrawny, guilty, desperately gay cast-offs who perform for gentlemen’s smokers. There were no lecherous smiles for the camera, no winking and lip-licking, no abuse of the female organ with cigarettes and beer bottles, no ingenious unnatural arrangement of bodies.

Each frame glowed with tenderness and passionate delight.

This tiny strip of celluloid shown widely in Canadian theatres might revitalize the tedious marriages which are reported to abound in our country.

Where are you, working girl with supreme device? The National Film Board hath need of you. Are you growing old in Winnipeg?

The film ended with a demonstration of the grand, democratic, universal practice of physical love. There were Indian couples represented, Chinese, Negro, Arabian, all without their national costumes on.

Come back, maid, strike a blow for World Federalism.

They pointed the viewer to the window and solemnly traded it back and forth.

They knew it would be like this.

The window gave over the slope of Murray Park, across the commercial city, down to the Saint Lawrence, American mountains in the distance. When it wasn’t his turn Breavman took in the prospect. Why was anybody working?

They were two children hugging in a window, breathless with wisdom.

They could not rush to it then and there. They weren’t safe from intrusion. Not only that, children have a highly developed sense of ritual and formality. This was important. They had to decide whether they were in love. Because if there was one thing the pictures showed, you had to be in love. They thought they were but they would give themselves a week just to make sure.

They hugged again in what they thought would be among their last fully clothed embraces.

How can Breavman have regrets? It was Nature herself who intervened.

Three days before Thursday, maid’s day off, they met in their special place, the bench beside the pond in the park. Lisa was shy but determined to be straight and honest, as was her nature.

‘I can’t do it with you.’

‘Aren’t your parents going away?’

‘It’s not that. Last night I got the Curse.’

She touched his hand with pride.

‘Oh.’

‘Know what I mean?’

‘Sure.’

He hadn’t the remotest idea.

‘But it would still be O.K., wouldn’t it?’

‘But now I can have babies. Mummy told me about everything last night. She had it all ready for me, too, napkins, a belt of my own, everything.’

‘No guff?’

What was she talking about? The Curse sounded like a celestial intrusion on his pleasure.

‘She told me about all the stuff, just like the camera.’

‘Did you tell her about the camera?’

Nothing, the world, nobody could be trusted.

‘She promised not to tell anyone.’

‘It was a secret.’

‘Don’t be sad. We had a long talk. I told her about us, too. You see, I’ve got to act like a lady now. Girls have to act older than boys.’

‘Who’s sad?’

She leaned back in the bench and took his hand.

‘But aren’t you happy for me?’ she laughed, ‘that I got the Curse? I have it right now!’

18

Soon she was deep in the rites of young womanhood. She came back from camp half a head taller than Breavman, with breasts that disturbed even bulky sweaters.

‘Hiya, Lisa.’

‘Hello, Lawrence.’

She was meeting her mother downtown, she was flying to New York for clothes. She was dressed with that kind of austerity which can make any thirteen-yearold a poignant beauty. None of the uglifying extravagance to which Westmount Jews and Gentiles are currently devoted.

Good-bye.

He watched her grow away from him, not with sadness but with wonder. At fifteen she was a grand lady who wore traces of lipstick and was allowed an occasional cigarette.

He sat in their old window and saw the older boys call for her in their fathers’ cars. He marvelled that he had ever kissed the mouth that now mastered cigarettes. Seeing her ushered into these long cars by young men with white scarves, seeing her sitting like a duchess in a carriage while they closed the door and walked briskly in front of the machine and climbed importantly into the driver’s seat, he had to convince himself that he had ever had a part in that beauty and grace.

Hey, you forgot one of your little fragrances on my thumb.

19

Fur gloves in the sun-room.

Certain years the sun-room, which was no more than an enclosed balcony attached to the back of the house, was used to store some of the winter clothes.

Breavman, Krantz and Philip came into this room for no particular reason. They looked out of the windows at the park and the tennis players.

There was the regular sound of balls hit back and forth and the hysterical sound of a house fly battering a window pane.

Breavman’s father was dead, Krantz’s was away most of the time, but Philip’s was strict. He did not let Philip wear his hair with a big pompadour in front. He had to slick it down to his scalp with some nineteenth-century hair tonic.

That historic afternoon Philip looked around and what did he spy but a pair of fur gloves.

He pulled on one of them, sat himself down on a pile of blankets.

Breavman and Krantz, who were perceptive children, understood that the fur glove was not an integral part of the practice.

They all agreed it smelt like Javel water. Philip washed it down the sink.

‘Catholics think it’s a sin,’ he instructed.

20

Breavman and Shell were beside the lake. The evening mist was piling up along the opposite shore like dunes of sand. They lay in a double sleeping bag beside the fire, which was built of driftwood they had gathered that afternoon. He wanted to tell her everything.

‘I still do.’

‘Me too,’ she said.

‘I read that Rousseau did right to the end of his life. I guess a certain kind of creative person is like that. He works all day to discipline his imagination so it’s there he’s most at home. No real corporeal woman can give him the pleasure of his own creations. Shell, don’t let me scare you with what I’m saying.’

‘But doesn’t it separate us completely?’

They held hands tightly and watched the stars in the dark part of the sky; where the moon was bright they were obliterated. She told him she loved him.

A loon went insane in the middle of the lake.

21

After that distinguished summer of yellow dresses and green pants Lisa and Breavman rarely met. But once, during the following winter, they wrestled in the snow.

That episode has a circumference for Breavman, a kind of black-edged picture frame separating it from what he remembers of her.

It was after Hebrew school. They found themselves starting home together. They cut up through the park. There was almost a full moon and it silvered the snow.

The light seemed to come from under the snow. When they broke the crust with their boots the powdered snow beneath was brighter.

They tried to walk on the crust without breaking it. Both carried their Hebrew books, particular sections of the Torah which they were studying at the time.

Competition in crust-walking led to other trials: snowballing, tests of balance on the icy parts, pushing, and finally personal combat which began jovially but ended in serious struggle.

This was on the slope of the hill, near a line of poplar trees. Breavman recalls it as like a Brueghel: two small bulky-coated figures entwined, their limited battle viewed through icy branches.

At a certain point Breavman discovered he wasn’t going to win. He strained to topple her, he could not. He felt himself slipping. They were still holding their Hebrew books. He dropped his in a last-ditch effort at an offensive but it failed and he went down.

The snow was not cold. Lisa stood above him in strange female triumph. He ate some snow.

‘And you have to kiss the Sidur.’

It was mandatory to kiss a holy book which had fallen to the ground.

‘Like hell I do!’

He crawled to his books, gathered them contemptuously and stood up.

What Breavman remembers most clearly of that struggle is the cold moonlight and the crisp trees, and the humiliation of a defeat which was not only bitter but unnatural.

22

He read everything he could on hypnosis. He hid the books behind a curtain and studied by flashlight.

Here was the real world.

There was a long section, ‘How to Hypnotize Animals.’ Terrifying illustration of glassy-eyed roosters.

Breavman pictured himself a militant Saint Francis, commanding the world by means of his loyal herds and flocks. Apes as obedient satraps. Clouds of pigeons ready to commit suicide against enemy planes. Hyena bodyguards. Massed triumphal choruses of nightingales.

Tovarich, named before the Stalin-Hitler pact, slept on the porch in the afternoon sun. Breavman squatted and swung the pendulum he had made out of a drilled silver dollar. The dog opened its eyes, sniffed to assure itself it was not food, returned to sleep.

But was it natural sleep?

The neighbours had a cartoon of a Dachshund named Cognac. Breavman looked for a slave in the gold eyes.

It worked!

Or was it just the lazy, humid afternoon?

He had to climb a fence to get at Lisa’s Fox Terrier which he fixed in a sitting position inches from a bowl of Pard.

You will be highly favoured, dog of Lisa.

After his fifth success the exhilaration of his dark power carried him along the boulevard, running blindly and laughing.

A whole street of dogs frozen! The city lay before him. He would have an agent in every house. All he had to do was whistle.

Maybe Krantz deserved a province.

Whistle, that’s all. But there was no point in threatening a vision with such a crude test. He shoved his hands down his pockets and floated home on the secret of his revolution.

23

In those dark ages, early adolescence, he was almost a head shorter than most of his friends.

But it was his friends who were humiliated when he had to stand on a stool to see over the pulpit when he sang his bar mitzvah. It didn’t matter to him how he faced the congregation: his great-grandfather had built the synagogue.

Short boys were supposed to take out shorter girls. That was the rule. He knew the tall uneasy girls he wanted could easily be calmed by stories and talk.

His friends insisted that his size was a terrible affliction and they convinced him. They convinced him with inches of flesh and bone.

He didn’t know their mystery of how bodies were increased, how air and food worked for them. How did they cajole the universe? Why was the sky holding out on him?

He began to think of himself as The Tiny Conspirator, The Cunning Dwarf.

He worked frantically on a pair of shoes. He had ripped off the heels of an old pair and tried to hammer them on to his own. The rubber didn’t hold the nails very well. He’d have to be careful.

This was in the deep basement of his house, traditional workshop of bomb-throwers and confusers of society.

There he stood, an inch taller, feeling a mixture of shame and craftiness. Nothing like brains, eh? He waltzed round the concrete floor and fell on his face.

He had completely forgotten the desperation of a few minutes before. It came back to him as he sat painfully on the floor, looking up at a naked bulb. The detached heel which had tripped him crouched like a rodent a couple of feet away, nails protruding like sharpened fangs.

The party was fifteen minutes away. And Muffin went around with an older, therefore taller, group.

Rumour had it that Muffin stuffed her bra with Kleenex. He decided to apply the technique. Carefully he laid a Kleenex platform into each shoe. It raised his heels almost to the rims of the leather. He let his trousers ride low.

A few spins around the concrete and he satisfied himself that he could manoeuvre. Panic eased. Science triumphed again.

Fluorescent lights hid in a false moulding lit the ceiling. There was the usual mirrored bar with miniature bottles and glass knick-knacks. An upholstered seat lined one wall, on which was painted a pastel mural of drinkers of different nationalities. The Breavmans did not approve of finished basements.

He danced well for one half hour and then his feet began to ache. The Kleenex had become misshapen under his arches. After two more jitterbug records he could hardly walk. He went into the bathroom and tried to straighten the Kleenex but it was compressed into a hard ball. He thought of removing it altogether but he imagined the surprised and horrified look of the company at his shrunken stature.

He slipped his foot half-way into the shoe, placed the ball between his heel and the inside sole, stepped in hard, and tied the lace. The pain spiked up through his ankles.

The Bunny Hop nearly put him away. In the middle of that line, squashed between the girl whose waist he was holding and the girl who was holding his waist, the music loud and repetitive, everyone chanting one, two, one-two-three, his feet getting out of control because of the pain, he thought: this must be what Hell is like, an eternal Bunny Hop with sore feet, which you can never drop out of.

She with her false tits, me with my false feet, oh you evil Kleenex Company!

One of the fluorescent lights was flickering. There was disease in the walls. Maybe everyone there, every single person in the bobbing line was wearing a Kleenex prop. Maybe some had Kleenex noses and Kleenex ears and Kleenex hands. Depression seized him.

Now it was his favourite song. He wanted to dance close to Muffin, close his eyes against her hair which had just been washed.

…the girl I call my ownwill wear cotton and laces and smell of cologne.

But he could barely stand up. He had to keep shifting his weight from foot to foot to dole out the pain in equal shares. Often these shifts did not correspond to the rhythm of the music and imparted to his already imperfect dancing an extra jerky quality. As his hobbling became more pronounced he was obliged to hold Muffin tighter and tighter to keep his balance.

‘Not here,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘My parents won’t be home till late.’

Not even this pleasant invitation could assuage his discomfort. He clung to her and manoeuvred into a crowded part of the floor where he could justifiably limit his movements.

‘Oh, Larry!’

‘Fast worker!’

Even by the sophisticated standards of this older group he was dancing adventurously close. He accepted the cavalier role his pain cast, and bit her ear, having heard that ears were bitten.

‘Let’s get rid of the lights,’ he snarled to all men of daring.

They started from the party, and the walk was a forced march of Bataan proportions. By walking very close he made his lameness into a display of affection. On the hills the Kleenex slipped back under his arches.

A fog-horn from the city’s river reached Westmount, and the sound shivered him.

‘I’ve got to tell you something, Muffin. Then you’ve got to tell me something.’

Muffin didn’t want to sit on the grass because of her dress, but maybe he was going to ask her to go steady. She’d refuse, but what a beautiful party that would make it. The confession he was about to offer shortened his breath, and he confused his fear with love.

He tugged off his shoes, scooped out the balls of Kleenex and laid them like a secret in her lap.

Muffin’s nightmare had just begun.

‘Now you take yours out.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded in a voice which surprised her because it sounded so much like her mother’s.

Breavman pointed to her heart.

‘Don’t be ashamed. You take yours out.’

He reached for her top button and received his balls of Kleenex in the face.

‘Get away!’

Breavman decided to let her run. Her house wasn’t that far away. He wiggled his toes and rubbed his soles. He wasn’t condemned to a Bunny Hop after all, not with those people. He pitched the Kleenex into the gutter and trotted home, shoes in hand.

He detoured to the park and raced over the damp ground until the view stopped him. He set down his shoes like neat lieutenants beside his feet.

He looked in awe at the expanse of night-green foliage, the austere lights of the city, the dull gleam of the St. Lawrence.

A city was a great achievement, bridges were fine things to build. But the street, harbours, spikes of stone were ultimately lost in the wider cradle of mountain and sky.

It ran a chill through his spine to be involved in the mysterious mechanism of city and black hills.

Father, I’m ignorant.

He would master the rules and techniques of the city, why the one-way streets were chosen, how the stock-market worked, what notaries did.

It wasn’t a hellish Bunny Hop if you knew the true names of things. He would study leaves and bark, and visit stone quarries as his father had done.

Good-bye, world of Kleenex.

He gathered his shoes, walked into the bushes, climbed the fence which separated his house from the park.

Black lines, like an ink drawing of a storm, plunged out of the sky to help him over, he could have sworn. The house he entered was important as a museum.

24

Krantz had a reputation for being wild, having been spotted from time to time smoking two cigarettes at once on obscure Westmount streets.

He was small and wiry, his face triangular, with almost Oriental eyes. A portrait in the dining-room of his house, painted, as his mother is fond of informing people, by the artist who ‘did the Governor General’s,’ shows an elfish boy with pointed ears, black, curly hair, butterfly lips as in a Rossetti, and an expression of goodnatured superiority, an aloofness (even at that age) which is so calm that it disturbs no one.

They sat one night on someone’s lawn, two Talmudists, delighting in their dialectic, which was a disguise for love. It was furious talk, the talk of a boy discovering how good it was not to be alone.

‘Krantz, I know you hate this kind of question, but if you’d care to make an off-hand statement, it would be appreciated. To your knowledge, that is, the extent of your information, is there anyone on this planet who approaches the dullness of the Canadian Prime Minister?’

‘Rabbi Swort?’

‘Krantz, do you honestly submit that Rabbi Swort, who, as the world knows, is not exactly the Messiah or even a minor messenger of the Redemption, do you seriously suggest that Rabbi Swort challenges the utter and complete boringness of our national leader?’

‘I do, Breavman, I do.’

‘I suppose you have your reasons, Krantz.’

‘I do, Breavman, you know I do.’

There were once giants on the earth.

They swore not to be fooled by long cars, screen love, the Red Menace, or The New Yorker magazine.

Giants in unmarked graves.

All right, it’s fine that people don’t starve, that epidemics are controlled, that the classics are available as comics, but what about the corny old verities, truth and fun?

The fashion model was not their idea of grace, the Bomb not their idea of power, Sabbath Service not their idea of God.

‘Krantz, is it true that we are Jewish?’

‘So it has been rumoured, Breavman.’

‘Do you feel Jewish, Krantz?’

‘Thoroughly.’

‘Do your teeth feel Jewish?’

‘Especially my teeth, to say nothing of my left ball.’

‘We really shouldn’t joke, what we were just saying reminds me of pictures from the camps.’

‘True.’

Weren’t they supposed to be a holy people consecrated to purity, service, spiritual honesty? Weren’t they a nation set apart?

Why had the idea of a jealously guarded sanctity degenerated into a sly contempt for the goy, empty of self-criticism?

Parents were traitors.

They had sold their sense of destiny for an Israeli victory in the desert. Charity had become a social competition in which nobody gave away anything he really needed, like a penny-toss, the prizes being the recognition of wealth and a high place in the Donor’s Book.

Smug traitors who believed spiritual fulfilment had been achieved because Einstein and Heifetz are Jews.

If only they could find the right girls. Then they could fight their way out of the swamp. Not Kleenex girls.

Breavman wonders how many miles through Montreal streets he and Krantz have driven and walked, on the look-out for the two girls who had been chosen cosmically to be their companion-mistresses. Hot summer evenings casing the mobs in Lafontaine Park, looking searchingly into young female eyes, they knew that at any moment two beauties would detach themselves from the crowd and take their arms. Krantz at the wheel of his father’s Buick, steering between hedges of snow piled on either side of the narrow back streets in the east end, at a crawling speed because there was a blizzard going on, they knew that two shivering figures would emerge from a doorway, tap timidly on the frosted windows of the car, and it would be they.

If they had the right seats on the loop-the-loop the girls’ hair would blow against their faces. If they went up north for a ski weekend and stayed at the right hotel they would hear the beautiful sound of girls undressing in the room next door. And if they walked twelve miles along St. Catherine Street, there was no telling whom they’d meet.

‘I can get the Lincoln tonight, Breavman.’

‘Great. It’ll be packed downtown.’

‘Great. We’ll drive around.’

So they would drive, like American tourists on the make, almost lost in the front seat of one of the huge Krantzstone automobiles, until everyone had gone home and the streets were empty. Still they continued their prowl because the girls they wanted might prefer deserted streets. Then when it was clear that they weren’t coming that particular night they’d head out to the lake shore, and circle the black water of Lac St. Louis.

‘What do you think it’s like to drown, Krantz?’

‘You’re supposed to black out after you take in a fairly small amount of water.’

‘How much, Krantz?’

‘You’re supposed to be able to drown in a bathtub.’

‘In a glass of water, Krantz.’

‘In a damp rag, Breavman.’

‘In a moist Kleenex. Hey, Krantz, that would be a great way to kill a guy, with water. You get the guy and use an eyedropper on him, a squirt at a time. They find him drowned in his study. Big mystery.’

‘Wouldn’t work, Breavman. How would you hold him still? There’d be bruise marks or rope marks on him.’

‘But if it could work. They find the guy slumped over his desk and nobody knows how he died. Coroner’s inquest: death by drowning. And he hasn’t been to the sea-shore in ten years.’

‘Germans used a lot of water in their tortures. They’d shove a hose up a guy’s arse-hole to make him talk.’

‘Great, Krantz. Japs had something like that. They’d make a guy eat a lot of uncooked rice then he’d have to drink a gallon of water. The rice would swell and-’

‘Yeah, I heard that one.’

‘But, Krantz, want to hear the worst one? And it was the Americans who did it. Listen, they catch a Jap on the battlefield and make him swallow five or six rifle cartridges. Then they’d make him run and jump. The cartridges’d rip his stomach apart. He’d die of internal haemorrhage. American soldiers.’

‘How about tossing babies in the air for bayonet practice?’

‘Who did that?’

‘Both sides.’

‘That’s nothing, Krantz, they did that in the Bible. “Happy will they be who dash their little ones against the rock.”’

Ten thousand conversations. Breavman remembers about eight thousand of them. Peculiarities, horrors, wonders. They are still having them. As they grow older, the horrors become mental, the peculiarities sexual, the wonders religious.

And while they talked the car shot over the broken country roads and the All Night Record Man spun the disks of longing, and one by one the couples drove away from the Edgewater, the Maple Leaf, the El Paso. The dangerous currents of Lac St. Louis curled over the weekend’s toll of drowned amateur sailors from the yacht clubs, the Montreal pioneer commuters breathed the cool fresh air they had bought into, and the prospect of waiting parents loomed and made the minutes of talk sweeter. Paradoxes, bafflements, problems dissolved in the fascinating dialectic.

Whoosh, there was nothing that couldn’t be done.

25

Suspended from the centre of the ceiling a revolving mirrored sphere cast a rage of pockmarks from wall to wall of the huge Palais D’Or on lower Stanley Street.

Each wall looked like an enormous decayed Swiss cheese on the march.

On the raised platform a band of shiny-haired musicians sat behind heavy red and white music stands and blew the standard arrangements.

There’s but one place for meNear you.It’s like heaven to beNear you

echoed coldly over the sparse dancers. Breavman and Krantz had got there too early. There was not much hope for magic.

‘Wrong dance hall, Breavman.’

By ten o’clock the floor was jammed with sharply dressed couples, and, seen from the upstairs balcony, their swaying and jolting seemed to be nourished directly by the pulsing music, and they muffled it like shock absorbers. The bass and piano and steady brushdrum passed almost silently into their bodies where it was preserved as motion.

Only the tilt-backed trumpeter, arching away from the mike and pointing his horn at the revolving mirrored sphere, could put a lingering sharp cry in the smoky air, coiling like a rope of rescue above the bobbing figures. It disappeared as the chorus renewed itself.

‘Right dance hall, Krantz.’

They scorned many public demonstrations in those prowling days but they didn’t scorn the Palais D’Or. It was too big. There was nothing superficial about a thousand people deeply engaged in the courting ritual, the swinging fragments of reflected light sweeping across their immobile eye-closed faces, amber, green, violet. They couldn’t help being impressed, fascinated by the channelled violence and the voluntary organization.

Why are they dancing to the music, Breavman wondered from the balcony, submitting to its dictation?

At the beginning of a tune they arranged themselves on the floor, obeyed the tempo, fast or slow, and when the tune was done they disintegrated into disorder again, like a battalion scattered by a land mine.

‘What makes them listen, Krantz? Why don’t they rip the platform to pieces?’

‘Let’s go down and get some women.’

‘Soon.’

‘What are you staring at?’

‘I’m planning a catastrophe.’

They watched the dancers silently and they heard their parents talking.

The dancers were Catholics, French-Canadian, anti-Semitic, anti-Anglais, belligerent. They told the priest everything, they were scared by the Church, they knelt in wax-smelling musty shrines hung with abandoned dirty crutches and braces. Everyone of them worked for a Jewish manufacturer whom he hated and waited for revenge. They had bad teeth because they lived on Pepsi-Cola and Mae West chocolate cakes. The girls were either maids or factory help. Their dresses were too bright and you could see bra straps through the flimsy material. Frizzy hair and cheap perfume. They screwed like jack rabbits and at confession the priest forgave them. They were the mob. Give them a chance and they’d burn down the synagogue. Pepsies. Frogs. Fransoyzen.

Breavman and Krantz knew their parents were bigots so they attempted to reverse all their opinions. They did not quite succeed. They wanted to participate in the vitality but they felt there was something vaguely unclean in their fun, the pawing of girls, the guffaws, the goosing.

The girls might be beautiful but they all had false teeth.

‘Krantz, I believe we’re the only two Jews in the place.’

‘No, I saw some BTOS on the make a couple of minutes ago.’

‘Well, we’re the only Westmount Jews around.’

‘Bernie’s here.’

‘O.K. Krantz. I’m the only Jew from Wellgreen Avenue. Do something with that.’

‘O.K. Breavman, you’re the only Jew from Wellgreen Avenue at the Palais D’Or.’

‘Distinctions are important.’

‘Let’s get some women.’

At one of the doors in the main hall there was a knot of young people. They argued jovially in French, pushing one another, slapping back-sides, squirting Coke bottles.

The hunters approached the group and instantly modified its hilarity. The French boys stepped back slightly and Krantz and Breavman invited the girls they’d chosen. They spoke in French, fooling no one. The girls exchanged glances with each other and members of the party. One of the French boys magnanimously put his arm around the shoulder of the girl Breavman had asked and swept her to him, clapping Breavman on the back at the same time.

They danced stiffly. Her mouth was full of fillings. He knew he’d be able to smell her all night.

‘Do you come here often, Yvette?’

‘You know, once in a while, for fun.’

‘Me too. Moi aussi.’

He told her he was in high school, that he didn’t work.

‘You are Italian?’

‘No.’

‘English?’

‘I’m Jewish.’

He didn’t tell her he was the only one from Wellgreen Avenue.

‘My brothers work for Jew people.’

‘Oh?’

‘They are good to work for.’

The dance was unsatisfying. She was not attractive, but her racial mystery challenged investigation. He returned her to her friends. Krantz had finished his dance, too.

‘What was she like, Krantz?’

‘Don’t know. She couldn’t speak English.’

They hung around for a little while longer, drinking Orange Crush, leaning on the balcony rail to comment on the swaying mob below. The air was dense with smoke now. The band played either frantic jitterbug or slow fox trot, nothing between. After each dance the crowd hovered impatiently for the next one to begin.

It was late now. The wallflowers and the stag-line expected no miracles any more. They were lined along three walls watching the packed charged dancers with indifferent fixed stares. Some of the girls were collecting their coats and going home.

‘Their new blouses were useless, Krantz.’

Seen from above, the movement on the floor had taken on a frantic quality. Soon the trumpeter would aim his horn into the smoke and give the last of Hoagy Carmichael and it would be all over. Every throb of the band had to be hoarded now against the end of the evening and the silence. Soak it through pressed cheeks and closed eyes in the dreamy tunes. In the boogiewoogie gather the nourishment like manna and knead it between the bodies drawing away and towards each other.

‘Let’s get one more dance in, Breavman?’

‘Same girls?’

‘Might as well.’

Breavman leaned over the rail one more second and wished he were delivering a hysterical speech to the thick mob below.

…and you must listen, friends, strangers, I am bind ing the generations one to another, o, little people of numberless streets, bark, bark, hoot, blood, your long stairways are curling around my heart like a vine…

They went downstairs and found the girls with the same group. It was a mistake, they knew instantly. Yvette stepped forward as if to tell Breavman something but one of the boys pulled her back.

‘You like the girls, eh?’ he said, the swaggerer of the party. His smile was triumphant rather than friendly.

‘Sure we like them. Anything wrong with that?’

‘Where you live, you?’

Breavman and Krantz knew what they wanted to hear. Westmount is a collection of large stone houses and lush trees arranged on the top of the mountain especially to humiliate the underprivileged.

‘Westmount,’ they said with one voice.

‘You have not the girls at Westmount, you?’

They had no chance to answer him. In the very last second before they fell backwards over the kneeling accomplices stationed behind them they detected a signalling of eyes. The ring-leader and a buddy stepped forward and shoved them. Breavman lost his balance and as he fell the stoolie behind him raised himself up to turn the fall into a flip. Breavman landed hard in a belly-flop, a couple of girls that he had crashed into squealing above him. He looked up to see Krantz on his feet, his left fist in someone’s face and his right cocked back ready to fly. He was about to get up when a fat boy decided he shouldn’t and dived at him.

‘Reste là, maudit juif!’

Breavman struggled under the blankets of flesh, not trying to defeat the fat boy but merely to get out from under him so he could do battle from a more honourable upright position. He managed to squeeze away. Where was Krantz?

There must have been twenty people fighting. Here and there he could see girls on their tiptoes as though in fear of mice, while boys wrestled on the floor between them.

He wheeled around, expecting an attack. The fat boy was smothering someone else. He threw his fist at a stranger. He was a drop in the wave of history, anonymous, exhilarated, free.

‘O, little friends, hoot, blooey, dark fighters, shazam, bloop!’ he shouted in his happiness.

Racing down the stairs were three bouncers of the management’s and what they feared most began to happen. The fighting spread to the dance floor. The band was blowing a loud dreamy tune but a disorganized noise could already be heard in opposition to the music.

Breavman waved his fist at everyone, hitting very few. The bouncers were in his immediate area, breaking up individual fights. At the far side of the hall the couples still danced closely and peacefully, but on Breavman’s side their rhythm was disintegrating into flailing arms, blind punches, lunges, and female squeals.

The bouncers pursued the disruption like compulsive housekeepers after an enormous spreading stain, jerking fighters apart by their collars and sweeping them aside as they followed the struggle deeper into the dance floor.

A man rushed onto the bandstand and shouted something to the bandleader, who looked around and shrugged his shoulders. The bright lights went on and the curious coloured walls disappeared. The music stopped.

Everyone woke up. A noise like a wail of national mourning rose up and at the same time fighting swept over the hall like released entropic molecules. To see the mass of dancers change to mass of fighters was like watching a huge highly organized animal succumb to muscular convulsions.

Krantz grabbed Breavman.

‘Mr. Breavman?’

‘Krantzstone, I presume.’

They headed for the front exit, which was already jammed with refugees. No one cared about his coat.

‘Don’t say it, Breavman.’

‘O.K. I won’t say it, Krantz.’

They got out just as the police arrived, about twenty of them in cars and the Black Maria. They entered with miraculous ease.

The boys waited in the front seat of the Lincoln. Krantz’s jacket was missing a lapel. The Palais D’Or began to empty of its victims.

‘Pity the guys in there, Breavman-and don’t say it,’ he added quickly when he saw Breavman put on his mystical face.

‘I won’t say it, Krantz, I won’t even whisper that I planned the whole thing from the balcony and executed it by the simple means of mass-hypnosis.’

‘You had to say it, eh?’

‘We were mocked, Krantz. We seized the pillars and brought down the temple of the Philistines.’

Krantz shifted into second with exaggerated weariness.

‘Go on, Breavman. You have to say it.’

26

He would love to have heard Hitler or Mussolini bellow from his marble balcony, to have seen partisans hang him upside down; to see the hockey crowds lynch the sports commissioner; to see the black or yellow hordes get even with the small outposts of their colonial enemies; to see the weeping country folk acclaim the strong-jawed road-builders; to see football fans rip down goal-posts; to have seen the panicking movieviewers stampede Montreal children in the famous fire; to see five hundred thousand snap into any salute at all; to see a countless array of Arabian behinds pointing west; to see the chalices on any altar tremble with the congregational Amen.

And this is where he would like to be:

in the marble balcony

the press-box

the projection-room

the reviewing stand

the minaret

the Holy of Holies

And in each case he wants to be surrounded by the best armed, squint-eyed, ruthless, loyal, tallest, leatherjacketed, technical brain-washed heavy police guard that money can buy.

27

Is there anything more beautiful than a girl with a lute?

It wasn’t a lute. Heather, the Breavmans’ maid, attempted the ukulele. She came from Alberta, spoke with a twang, was always singing laments and trying to yodel.

The chords were too hard. Breavman held her hand and agreed that the strings were tearing her fingers to pieces. She knew all the cowboy stars and traded their autographs.

She was a husky, good-looking girl of twenty with high-coloured cheeks like a porcelain doll. Breavman chose her for his first victim of sleep.

A veritable Canadian peasant.

He tried to make the offer attractive.

‘You’ll feel wonderful when you wake up.’

Sure, she winked and settled herself on the couch in the crammed basement store-room. If only it would work.

He moved his yellow pencil like a slow pendulum before her eyes.

‘Your eyelids will feel heavy as lead on your cheeks…’

He swung the pencil for ten minutes. Her large eyelids thickened and slowed down. She followed the pencil with difficulty.

‘And your breathing heavy and regular…’

Soon she let out a sigh, took in a deep breath, and breathed like a drunkard, laboured and exhausted.

Now the eyelashes barely flickered. He couldn’t believe that he had ordered the changes in her. Maybe she was joking.

‘You’re falling backwards, you’re a tiny body falling backwards, getting smaller and smaller, and you can hear nothing but my voice…’

Her breath was soft and he knew it would smell like wind.

He felt as though he had got his hands under her sweater, under her skin and ribs, and was manipulating her lungs, and they felt like balloons of silk.

‘You are asleep,’ he commanded in a whisper.

He touched her face in disbelief.

Was he really a master? She must be joking.

‘Are you asleep?’

The yes came out the length of an exhalation, husky, unformed.

‘You can feel nothing. Absolutely nothing. Do you understand?’

The same yes.

He drove a needle through the lobe of her ear. He was dizzy with his new power. All her energy at his disposal.

He wanted to run through the streets with a bell and summon the whole cynical city. There was a new magician in the world.

He had no interest in ears pierced by needles.

Breavman had studied the books. A subject cannot be compelled to anything which he would consider indecent while awake. But there were ways. For instance, a modest woman can be induced to remove her clothes before an audience of men if the operator can suggest a situation in which such an act can be performed quite naturally, such as taking a bath in the privacy of her own home, or a naked rest under the sun in some humid deserted place.

‘It’s hot, you’ve never been so hot. Your sweater weighs a ton. You’re sweating like a pig…’

As she undressed Breavman kept thinking of the illustrations in the pulp-paper Hypnotism for You manuals he knew by heart. Line drawings of fierce men leaning over smiling, sleeping women. Zigzags of electricity emanate from under the heavy eyebrows or from the tips of their piano-poised fingers.

Oh, she was, she really was, she was so lovely.

He had never seen a woman so naked. He ran his hand all over her body. He was astonished, happy, and frightened before all the spiritual authorities of the universe. He couldn’t get it out of his mind that he was performing a Black Mass. Her breasts were strangely flat because she was lying on her back. The mound of her delta was a surprise and he cupped it in wonder. He covered her body with two trembling hands like minedetectors. Then he sat back to stare, like Cortez over his new ocean. This was what he had waited for so long to see. He wasn’t disappointed and never has been. The tungsten light was the same as the moon.

He unbuttoned his fly and told her she was holding a stick. His heart pounded.

He was intoxicated with relief, achievement, guilt, experience. There was semen on his clothes. He told Heather that the alarm clock had just rung. It was morning, she had to get up. He handed her her clothes and slowly she got dressed. He told her that she would remember nothing. Hurriedly he took her out of the sleep. He wanted to be alone and contemplate his triumph.

Three hours later he heard laughter from the basement and thought that Heather must be entertaining friends down there. Then he listened more carefully to the laughter and realized that it wasn’t social.

He raced down the stairs. Thank God his mother was out. Heather was standing in the centre of the floor, legs apart, convulsed with frightened, hysterical laughter. Her eyes were rolled up in her head and shone white. Her head was thrown back and she looked as if she was about to fall over. He shook her. No response. Her laughter became a terrible fit of coughing.

I’ve driven her insane.

He wondered what the criminal penalty was. He was being punished for his illegal orgasm and his dark powers. Should he call a doctor, make his sin public right away? Would anyone know how to cure her?

He was close to panic as he led her to the couch and sat her down. Perhaps he should hide her in a closet. Lock her in a trunk and forget about everything. Those big steamers with his father’s initials stencilled in white paint.

He slapped her face twice, once with each side of his hand, like a Gestapo investigator. She caught her breath, her cheeks reddened and faded like a blush, and she spluttered again into cough-laughing. There was saliva on her chin.

‘Be quiet, Heather!’

To his absolute surprise she stifled her cough.

It was then he realized that she was still hypnotized. He commanded her to lie down and close her eyes. He re-established contact with her. She was deep asleep. He had tried to bring her out too quickly and it hadn’t taken. Slowly he worked her back to full wakefulness. She would be refreshed and gay. She would remember nothing.

This time she came round correctly. He chatted with her a while just to make sure. She stood up with a puzzled look and patted her hips.

‘Hey! My pants!’

Wedged between the couch and wall were her pink elastic-bottomed panties. He had forgotten to hand them to her when she was dressing.

Skilfully and modestly she slipped into them.

He waited for the unnatural punishment, the humiliation of the master, the collapse of his proud house.

‘What have you been doing?’ she said slyly, chucking him under the chin. ‘What went on while I was asleep? Eh? Eh?’

‘What do you remember?’

She put her hands on her hips and smiled broadly at him.

‘I’d never of thought it could be done. Never of thought.’

‘Nothing happened, Heather, I swear.’

‘And what would your mother say? Be looking for a job, I would.’

She surveyed the couch and looked up at him with genuine admiration.

‘Jewish people,’ she sighed. ‘Education.’

Soon after his imaginary assault she ran off with a deserting soldier. He came alone for her clothes and Breavman watched with envy as he carried off her cardboard suitcase and unused ukulele. A week later Military Police visited Mrs. Breavman but she didn’t know anything.

Where are you, Heather, why didn’t you stay to introduce me into the warm important rites? I might have gone straight. Poemless, a baron of industry, I might have been spared the soft-cover books on rejection-level stabilization by wealthy New York analysts. Didn’t you feel good when I brought you out?

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