The Favourite Game. Leonard Cohen
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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.
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.’
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.
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.
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