Leonard Cohen - The Favourite Game

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.

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?’