The Favourite Game

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

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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.’

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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.

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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.