The Favourite Game. Leonard Cohen
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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.
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.
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.
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