The Favorite Game Read online

  BOOKS BY LEONARD COHEN

  FICTION

  The Favourite Game (1963)

  Beautiful Losers (1966)

  POETRY

  Let Us Compare Mythologies (1956)

  The Spice-Box of Earth (1961)

  Flowers for Hitler (1964)

  Parasites of Heaven (1966)

  Selected Poems, 1956-1968 (1968)

  The Energy of Slaves (1972)

  Death of a Lady’s Man (1978)

  Book of Mercy (1984)

  Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (1993)

  Book of Longing (2006)

  ALBUMS

  Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967)

  Songs From a Room (1969)

  Songs of Love and Hate (1971)

  Live Songs (1972)

  New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1973)

  The Best of Leonard Cohen (1975)

  Death of a Ladies’ Man (1977)

  Recent Songs (1979)

  Various Positions (1984)

  I’m Your Man (1988)

  The Future (1992)

  Cohen Live (1994)

  More Best of Leonard Cohen (1997)

  Field Commander Cohen (2001)

  Ten New Songs (2001)

  The Essential Leonard Cohen (2002)

  Dear Heather (2004)

  Copyright © 1963 by Leonard Cohen

  First published in England by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1963 Trade paperback edition first published 2000

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher - or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency - is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Cohen, Leonard, 1934- The favourite game / Leonard Cohen.

  First published: England, 1963.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-501-4

  I. Title.

  PS8505.022F3 2003 C813’.54 C2003-905906-5

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  Acknowledgements: the Canada Council and the hospitality at 19B

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  Series logo design: Brian Bean

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  To my mother

  As the mist leaves no scar

  On the dark green hill,

  So my body leaves no scar

  On you, nor ever will.

  When wind and hawl encounter,

  What remains to keep?

  So you and I encounter

  Then turn, then fall to sleep.

  As many nights endure

  Without a moon or star,

  So will we endure

  When one is gone and far.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Book I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Book II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Book III

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Book IV

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Credits

  About the Author

  Book I

  1

  Breavman knows a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. The punctures festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair.

  A bullet broke into the flesh of his father’s arm as he rose out of a trench. It comforts a man with coronary thrombosis to bear a wound taken in combat.

  On the right temple Breavman has a scar which Krantz bestowed with a shovel. Trouble over a snowman. Krantz wanted to use clinkers as eyes. Breavman was and still is against the use of foreign materials in the decoration of snowmen. No woollen mufflers, hats, spectacles. In the same vein he does not approve of inserting carrots in the mouths of carved pumpkins or pinning on cucumber ears.

  His mother regarded her whole body as a scar grown over some earlier perfection which she sought in mirrors and windows and hub-caps.

  Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.

  It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.

  2

  Breavman’s young mother hunted wrinkles with two hands and a magnifying mirror.

  When she found one she consulted a fortress of oils and creams arrayed on a glass tray and she sighed. Without faith the wrinkle was anointed.

  “This isn’t my face, not my real face.”

  “Where is your real face, Mother?”

  “Look at me. Is this what I look like?”

  “Where is it, where’s your real face?”

  “I don’t know, in Russia, when I was a girl.”

  He pulled the
huge atlas out of the shelf and fell with it. He sifted pages like a goldminer until he found it, the whole of Russia, pale and vast. He kneeled over the distances until his eyes blurred and he made the lakes and rivers and names become an incredible face, dim and beautiful and easily lost.

  The maid had to drag him to supper. A lady’s face floated over the silver and the food.

  3

  His father lived mostly in bed or a tent in the hospital. When he was up and walking he lied.

  He took his cane without the silver band and led his son over Mount Royal. Here was the ancient crater. Two iron and stone cannon rested in the gentle grassy scoop which was once a pit of boiling lava. Breavman wanted to dwell on the violence.

  “We’ll come back here when I’m better.”

  One lie.

  Breavman learned to pat the noses of horses tethered beside the Chalet, how to offer them sugar cubes from a flat palm.

  “One day we’ll go riding.”

  “But you can hardly breathe.”

  His father collapsed that evening over his map of flags on which he plotted the war, fumbling for the capsules to break and inhale.

  4

  Here is a movie filled with the bodies of his family.

  His father aims the camera at his uncles, tall and serious, boutonnières in their dark lapels, who walk too close and enter into blurdom.

  Their wives look formal and sad. His mother steps back, urging aunts to get into the picture. At the back of the screen her smile and shoulders go limp. She thinks she is out of focus.

  Breavman stops the film to study her and her face is eaten by a spreading orange-rimmed stain as the film melts.

  His grandmother sits in the shadows of the stone balcony and aunts present her with babies. A silver tea-set glows richly in early Technicolor.

  His grandfather reviews a line of children but is stopped in the midst of an approving nod and ravaged by a technical orange flame.

  Breavman is mutilating the film in his efforts at history.

  Breavman and his cousins fight small gentlemanly battles. The girls curtsy. All the children are invited to leap one at a time across the flagstone path.

  A gardener is led shy and grateful into the sunlight to be preserved with his betters.

  A battalion of wives is squeezed abreast, is decimated by the edge of the screen. His mother is one of the first to go.

  Suddenly the picture is shoes and blurred grass as his father staggers under another attack.

  “Help!”

  Coils of celluloid are burning around his feet. He dances until he is saved by Nursie and the maid and punished by his mother.

  The movie runs night and day. Be careful, blood, be careful.

  5

  The Breavmans founded and presided over most of the institutions which make the Montreal Jewish community one of the most powerful in the world today.

  The joke around the city is: The Jews are the conscience of the world and the Breavmans are the conscience of the Jews. “And I am the conscience of the Breavmans,” adds Lawrence Breavman. “Actually we are the only Jews left; that is, super-Christians, first citizens with cut prongs.”

  The feeling today, if anyone troubles himself to articulate it, is that the Breavmans are in a decline. “Be careful,” Lawrence Breavman warns his executive cousins, “or your children will speak with accents.”

  Ten years ago Breavman compiled the Code of Breavman:

  We are Victorian gentlemen of Hebraic persuasion.

  We cannot be positive, but we are fairly certain that any other Jews with money got it on the black market.

  We do not wish to join Christian clubs or weaken our blood through inter-marriage. We wish to be regarded as peers, united by class, education, power, differentiated by home rituals.

  We refuse to pass the circumcision line.

  We were civilized first and drink less, you lousy bunch of bloodthirsty drunks.

  6

  A rat is more alive than a turtle.

  A turtle is slow, cold, mechanical, nearly a toy, a shell with legs. Their deaths didn’t count. But a white rat is quick and warm in its envelope of skin.

  Krantz kept his in an empty radio. Breavman kept his in a deep honey tin. Krantz went away for the holidays and asked Breavman to take care of his. Breavman dropped it in with his.

  Feeding rats is work. You have to go down to the basement. He forgot for a while. Soon he didn’t want to think about the honey tin and avoided the basement stairs.

  He went down at last and there was an awful smell coming from the tin. He wished it were still full of honey. He looked inside and one rat had eaten most of the stomach of the other rat. He didn’t care which was his. The alive rat jumped at him and then he knew it was crazy.

  He held the tin way in front because of the stink and filled it with water. The dead one floated on top with the hole between its ribs and hind legs showing. The alive one scratched the side.

  He was called for lunch which began with marrow. His father tapped it out of a bone. It came from inside an animal.

  When he went down again both were floating. He emptied the can in the driveway and covered it with snow. He vomited and covered that with snow.

  Krantz was mad. He wanted to have a funeral at least, but they couldn’t find the bodies because of some heavy snowfalls.

  When Spring began they attacked islands of dirty snow in the driveway. Nothing. Krantz said that seeing things were as they were Breavman owed him money for a white rat. He’d lent his and got nothing back, not even a skeleton. Breavman said that a hospital doesn’t pay anything when someone dies there. Krantz said that when you lend somebody something and that person loses it he has to pay for it. Breavman said that when it’s alive it isn’t a thing and besides he was doing him a favour when he took care of his. Krantz said that killing a rat was some favour and they fought it out on the wet gravel. Then they went downtown and bought new ones.

  Breavman’s escaped and lived in a closet under the stairs. He saw its eyes with a flashlight. For a few mornings he put out Puffed Wheat in front of the door and it was nibbled, but soon he didn’t bother.

  When summer came and the shutters and screens were being taken out one of the men discovered a little skeleton. It had patches of hair stuck to it. He dropped it in a garbage can.

  Breavman fished it out when the man was gone and ran to Krantz’s. He said it was the skeleton of the first rat and Krantz could have a funeral if he wanted. Krantz said he didn’t need a stinky old skeleton, he had a live one. Breavman said that was fine but he had to admit they were quits. Krantz admitted.

  Breavman buried it under the pansies, one of which his father took each morning for his buttonhole. Breavman took new interest in smelling them.

  7

  Come back, stern Bertha, come back and lure me up the torture tree. Remove me from the bedrooms of easy women. Extract the full due. The girl I had last night betrays the man who pays her rent.

  That is how Breavman invoked the spirit of Bertha many mornings of his twenties.

  Then his bones return to chicken-width. His nose retreats from impressive Semitic prominence to a childhood Gentile obscurity. Body hair blows away with the years like an ill-fated oasis. He is light enough for handbars and apple branches. The Japs and Germans are wrong.

  “Play it now, Bertha?”

  He has followed her to precarious parts of the tree.

  “Higher!” she demands.

  Even the apples are trembling. The sun catches her flute, turns the polished wood to a moment of chrome.

  “Now?”

  “First you have to say something about God.”

  “God is a jerk.”

  “Oh, that’s nothing. I won’t play for that.”

  The sky is blue and the clouds are moving. There is rotting fruit on the ground some miles below.

  “Fug God.”

  “Something terribly, horribly dirty, scaredy-cat. The real word.”

  “Fuck God
!”

  He waits for the fiery wind to lift him out of his perch and leave him dismembered on the grass.

  “Fuck GOD!”

  Breavman sights Krantz who is lying beside a coiled hose and unravelling a baseball.

  “Hey, Krantz, listen to this. FUCK GOD!”

  Breavman never heard his own voice so pure. The air is a microphone.

  Bertha alters her fragile position to strike his cheek with her flute.

  “Dirty tongue!”

  “It was your idea.”

  She strikes again for piety and tears off apples as she crashes past the limbs. Nothing of her voice as she falls.

  Krantz and Breavman survey her for one second twisted into a position she could never achieve in gym. Her bland Saxon face is further anesthetized by uncracked steel-rimmed glasses. A sharp bone of the arm has escaped the skin.

  After the ambulance Breavman whispered.

  “Krantz, there’s something special about my voice.”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “There is so. I can make things happen.”

  “You’re a nut.”

  “Want to hear my resolutions?”

  “No.”

  “I promise not to speak for a week. I promise to learn how to play it myself. In that way the number of people who know how to play remains the same.”

  “What good’s that?”

  “It’s obvious, Krantz.”

  8

  His father decided to rise from his chair.

  “I’m speaking to you, Lawrence!”

  “Your father’s speaking to you, Lawrence,” his mother interpreted.

  Breavman attempted one last desperate pantomime.

  “Listen to your father breathing.”

  The elder Breavman calculated the expense of energy, accepted the risk, drove the back of his hand across his son’s face.

  His lips were not too swollen to practise “Old Black Joe.”

  They said she’d live. But he didn’t give it up. He’d be one extra.

  9

  The Japs and Germans were beautiful enemies. They had buck teeth or cruel monocles and commanded in crude English with much saliva. They started the war because of their nature.