The Favorite Game

by Leonard Cohen

  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 candle-butts 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 cooky, 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.

&n
bsp; 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 Birds

  How To Tell Trees

  How To Tell Insects

  How 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 Ca
nadian 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.