Читать книгу The Favourite Game - Leonard Cohen - Страница 14

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.’