Читать книгу The Favourite Game - Leonard Cohen - Страница 20

After breakfast six men entered the house and set the coffin down in the living-room. It was surprisingly huge, made of dark-grained wood, brass-handled. There was snow on their clothes.

The room was suddenly more formal than Breavman had ever known it. His mother squinted.

They placed it on a stand and began to open the cabinet-like cover.

‘Close it, close it, we’re not in Russia!’

Breavman shut his eyes and waited for the click of the cover. But these men who make their living among the bereaved move noiselessly. They were gone when he opened his eyes.

‘Why did you make them close it, Mother?’

‘It’s enough as it is.’

The mirrors of the house were soaped, as if the glass had become victim to a strange indoor frost corresponding to the wide winter. His mother stayed alone in her room. Breavman sat stiffly on his bed and tried to fight his anger with a softer emotion.

The coffin was parallel to the chesterfield.

Whispering people began to congregate in the hall and on the balcony.

Breavman and his mother descended the stairs. The afternoon winter sun glimmered on his mother’s black stockings and gave to the mourners in the doorway a gold outline. He could see parked cars and dirty snow above their heads.

They stood closest, his uncles behind them. Friends and workers from the family factory thronged the hall, balcony, and path. His uncles, tall and solemn, touched his shoulders with their manicured hands.

But his mother was defeated. The coffin was open.

He was swaddled in silk, wrapped in a silvered prayer-shawl. His moustache bloomed fierce and black against his white face. He appeared annoyed, as if he were about to awaken, climb out of the offensively ornate box, and resume his sleep on the more comfortable chesterfield.

The cemetery was like an Alpine town, the stones like little sleeping houses. The diggers looked irreverently informal in their working clothes. A mat of artificial grass was spread over the heaps of exhumed frozen mud. The coffin went down in a system of pulleys.

Bagels and hard-boiled eggs, shapes of eternity, were served back at the house. His uncles joked with friends of the family. Breavman hated them. He looked under his great-uncle’s beard and asked him why he didn’t wear a tie.

He was the oldest son of the oldest son.

The family left last. Funerals are so neat. All they left behind were small gold-rimmed plates flecked with crumbs and caraway seeds.

The yards of lace curtain held some of the light of the small winter moon.

‘Did you look at him, Mother?’

‘Of course.’

‘He looked mad, didn’t he?’

‘Poor boy.’

‘And his moustache really black. As if it was done with an eyebrow pencil.’

‘It’s late, Lawrence…’

‘It’s late, all right. We’ll never see him again.’

‘I forbid you to use that voice to your mother.’

‘Why did you make them close it? Why did you? We could have seen him for a whole extra morning.’

‘Go to bed!’

‘Christ you, christ you, bastardess, witch!’ he improvised in a scream.

All night he heard his mother in the kitchen, weeping and eating.