The Favourite Game

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 (#ulink_0754a9fa-db0d-5d09-84c7-f982c51441c0)

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.’