The Favourite Game. Leonard Cohen
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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.
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.
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.’
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