Читать книгу The Favourite Game - Leonard Cohen - Страница 21

Here is a colour photograph, largest picture on a wall of ancestors.

His father wears an English suit and all the English reticence that can be woven into cloth. A wine tie with a tiny, hard knot sprouts like a gargoyle. In his lapel a Canadian Legion pin, duller than jewellery. The double-chinned face glows with Victorian reason and decency, though the hazel eyes are a little too soft and staring, the mouth too full, Semitic, hurt.

The fierce moustache presides over the sensitive lips like a suspicious trustee.

The blood, which he died spitting, is invisible, but forms on the chin as Breavman studies the portrait.

He is one of the princes of Breavman’s private religion, double-natured and arbitrary. He is the persecuted brother, the near poet, the innocent of the machine toys, the sighing judge who listens but does not sentence.

Also he is heaving Authority, armoured with Divine Right, doing merciless violence to all that is weak, taboo, un-Breavmanlike.

As Breavman does him homage he wonders whether his father is just listening or whether he is stamping the seal on decrees.

Now he is settling more passively into his gold frame and his expression has become as distant as those in the older photographs. His clothes begin to appear dated and costume-like. He can rest. Breavman has inherited all his concerns.

The day after the funeral Breavman split open one of his father’s formal bow ties and sewed in a message. He buried it in the garden, under the snow beside the fence where in summer the neighbour’s lilies-of-the-valley infiltrate.