The Favourite Game & Beautiful Losers Read online

  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 (1997)

  Field Commander Cohen (2001)

  Ten New Songs (2001)

  The Essential Leonard Cohen (2002)

  Dear Heather (2004)

  Live in London (2009)

  CONTENTS

  The Favourite Game

  Beautiful Losers

  THE FAVOURITE GAME

  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.

  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. Thei
r 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.

  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 n
ibs 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 cookie, 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.”