The Favourite Game

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.

22

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.

23

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 with her false tits, me with my false feet, oh you evil Kleenex Company!

One of the fluorescent lights was flickering. There was disease in the walls. Maybe everyone there, every single person in the bobbing line was wearing a Kleenex prop. Maybe some had Kleenex noses and Kleenex ears and Kleenex hands. Depression seized him.

Now it was his favourite song. He wanted to dance close to Muffin, close his eyes against her hair which had just been washed.

…the girl I call my ownwill wear cotton and laces and smell of cologne.

But he could barely stand up. He had to keep shifting his weight from foot to foot to dole out the pain in equal shares. Often these shifts did not correspond to the rhythm of the music and imparted to his already imperfect dancing an extra jerky quality. As his hobbling became more pronounced he was obliged to hold Muffin tighter and tighter to keep his balance.

‘Not here,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘My parents won’t be home till late.’

Not even this pleasant invitation could assuage his discomfort. He clung to her and manoeuvred into a crowded part of the floor where he could justifiably limit his movements.

‘Oh, Larry!’

‘Fast worker!’

Even by the sophisticated standards of this older group he was dancing adventurously close. He accepted the cavalier role his pain cast, and bit her ear, having heard that ears were bitten.

‘Let’s get rid of the lights,’ he snarled to all men of daring.

They started from the party, and the walk was a forced march of Bataan proportions. By walking very close he made his lameness into a display of affection. On the hills the Kleenex slipped back under his arches.

A fog-horn from the city’s river reached Westmount, and the sound shivered him.

‘I’ve got to tell you something, Muffin. Then you’ve got to tell me something.’

Muffin didn’t want to sit on the grass because of her dress, but maybe he was going to ask her to go steady. She’d refuse, but what a beautiful party that would make it. The confession he was about to offer shortened his breath, and he confused his fear with love.

He tugged off his shoes, scooped out the balls of Kleenex and laid them like a secret in her lap.

Muffin’s nightmare had just begun.

‘Now you take yours out.’

‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded in a voice which surprised her because it sounded so much like her mother’s.

Breavman pointed to her heart.

‘Don’t be ashamed. You take yours out.’

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.

24

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?’

‘Who did that?’

‘Both sides.’

‘That’s nothing, Krantz, they did that in the Bible. “Happy will they be who dash their little ones against the rock.”’

Ten thousand conversations. Breavman remembers about eight thousand of them. Peculiarities, horrors, wonders. They are still having them. As they grow older, the horrors become mental, the peculiarities sexual, the wonders religious.

And while they talked the car shot over the broken country roads and the All Night Record Man spun the disks of longing, and one by one the couples drove away from the Edgewater, the Maple Leaf, the El Paso. The dangerous currents of Lac St. Louis curled over the weekend’s toll of drowned amateur sailors from the yacht clubs, the Montreal pioneer commuters breathed the cool fresh air they had bought into, and the prospect of waiting parents loomed and made the minutes of talk sweeter. Paradoxes, bafflements, problems dissolved in the fascinating dialectic.

Whoosh, there was nothing that couldn’t be done.

25

Suspended from the centre of the ceiling a revolving mirrored sphere cast a rage of pockmarks from wall to wall of the huge Palais D’Or on lower Stanley Street.

Each wall looked like an enormous decayed Swiss cheese on the march.

On the raised platform a band of shiny-haired musicians sat behind heavy red and white music stands and blew the standard arrangements.

There’s but one place for meNear you.It’s like heaven to beNear you

echoed coldly over the sparse dancers. Breavman and Krantz had got there too early. There was not much hope for magic.

‘Wrong dance hall, Breavman.’

By ten o’clock the floor was jammed with sharply dressed couples, and, seen from the upstairs balcony, their swaying and jolting seemed to be nourished directly by the pulsing music, and they muffled it like shock absorbers. The bass and piano and steady brushdrum passed almost silently into their bodies where it was preserved as motion.

Only the tilt-backed trumpeter, arching away from the mike and pointing his horn at the revolving mirrored sphere, could put a lingering sharp cry in the smoky air, coiling like a rope of rescue above the bobbing figures. It disappeared as the chorus renewed itself.

‘Right dance hall, Krantz.’

They scorned many public demonstrations in those prowling days but they didn’t scorn the Palais D’Or. It was too big. There was nothing superficial about a thousand people deeply engaged in the courting ritual, the swinging fragments of reflected light sweeping across their immobile eye-closed faces, amber, green, violet. They couldn’t help being impressed, fascinated by the channelled violence and the voluntary organization.

Why are they dancing to the music, Breavman wondered from the balcony, submitting to its dictation?

At the beginning of a tune they arranged themselves on the floor, obeyed the tempo, fast or slow, and when the tune was done they disintegrated into disorder again, like a battalion scattered by a land mine.

‘What makes them listen, Krantz? Why don’t they rip the platform to pieces?’

‘Let’s go down and get some women.’

‘Soon.’

‘What are you staring at?’

‘I’m planning a catastrophe.’

They watched the dancers silently and they heard their parents talking.

The dancers were Catholics, French-Canadian, anti-Semitic, anti-Anglais, belligerent. They told the priest everything, they were scared by the Church, they knelt in wax-smelling musty shrines hung with abandoned dirty crutches and braces. Everyone of them worked for a Jewish manufacturer whom he hated and waited for revenge. They had bad teeth because they lived on Pepsi-Cola and Mae West chocolate cakes. The girls were either maids or factory help. Their dresses were too bright and you could see bra straps through the flimsy material. Frizzy hair and cheap perfume. They screwed like jack rabbits and at confession the priest forgave them. They were the mob. Give them a chance and they’d burn down the synagogue. Pepsies. Frogs. Fransoyzen.

Breavman and Krantz knew their parents were bigots so they attempted to reverse all their opinions. They did not quite succeed. They wanted to participate in the vitality but they felt there was something vaguely unclean in their fun, the pawing of girls, the guffaws, the goosing.

The girls might be beautiful but they all had false teeth.

‘Krantz, I believe we’re the only two Jews in the place.’

‘No, I saw some BTOS on the make a couple of minutes ago.’

‘Well, we’re the only Westmount Jews around.’

‘Bernie’s here.’

‘O.K. Krantz. I’m the only Jew from Wellgreen Avenue. Do something with that.’

‘O.K. Breavman, you’re the only Jew from Wellgreen Avenue at the Palais D’Or.’

‘Distinctions are important.’

‘Let’s get some women.’

At one of the doors in the main hall there was a knot of young people. They argued jovially in French, pushing one another, slapping back-sides, squirting Coke bottles.

The hunters approached the group and instantly modified its hilarity. The French boys stepped back slightly and Krantz and Breavman invited the girls they’d chosen. They spoke in French, fooling no one. The girls exchanged glances with each other and members of the party. One of the French boys magnanimously put his arm around the shoulder of the girl Breavman had asked and swept her to him, clapping Breavman on the back at the same time.

They danced stiffly. Her mouth was full of fillings. He knew he’d be able to smell her all night.

‘Do you come here often, Yvette?’

‘You know, once in a while, for fun.’

‘Me too. Moi aussi.’

He told her he was in high school, that he didn’t work.

‘You are Italian?’

‘No.’

‘English?’

‘I’m Jewish.’

He didn’t tell her he was the only one from Wellgreen Avenue.

‘My brothers work for Jew people.’

‘Oh?’

‘They are good to work for.’

The dance was unsatisfying. She was not attractive, but her racial mystery challenged investigation. He returned her to her friends. Krantz had finished his dance, too.

‘What was she like, Krantz?’

‘Don’t know. She couldn’t speak English.’

They hung around for a little while longer, drinking Orange Crush, leaning on the balcony rail to comment on the swaying mob below. The air was dense with smoke now. The band played either frantic jitterbug or slow fox trot, nothing between. After each dance the crowd hovered impatiently for the next one to begin.

It was late now. The wallflowers and the stag-line expected no miracles any more. They were lined along three walls watching the packed charged dancers with indifferent fixed stares. Some of the girls were collecting their coats and going home.

‘Their new blouses were useless, Krantz.’

Seen from above, the movement on the floor had taken on a frantic quality. Soon the trumpeter would aim his horn into the smoke and give the last of Hoagy Carmichael and it would be all over. Every throb of the band had to be hoarded now against the end of the evening and the silence. Soak it through pressed cheeks and closed eyes in the dreamy tunes. In the boogiewoogie gather the nourishment like manna and knead it between the bodies drawing away and towards each other.