Читать книгу The Favourite Game - Leonard Cohen - Страница 28

After that distinguished summer of yellow dresses and green pants Lisa and Breavman rarely met. But once, during the following winter, they wrestled in the snow.

That episode has a circumference for Breavman, a kind of black-edged picture frame separating it from what he remembers of her.

It was after Hebrew school. They found themselves starting home together. They cut up through the park. There was almost a full moon and it silvered the snow.

The light seemed to come from under the snow. When they broke the crust with their boots the powdered snow beneath was brighter.

They tried to walk on the crust without breaking it. Both carried their Hebrew books, particular sections of the Torah which they were studying at the time.

Competition in crust-walking led to other trials: snowballing, tests of balance on the icy parts, pushing, and finally personal combat which began jovially but ended in serious struggle.

This was on the slope of the hill, near a line of poplar trees. Breavman recalls it as like a Brueghel: two small bulky-coated figures entwined, their limited battle viewed through icy branches.

At a certain point Breavman discovered he wasn’t going to win. He strained to topple her, he could not. He felt himself slipping. They were still holding their Hebrew books. He dropped his in a last-ditch effort at an offensive but it failed and he went down.

The snow was not cold. Lisa stood above him in strange female triumph. He ate some snow.

‘And you have to kiss the Sidur.’

It was mandatory to kiss a holy book which had fallen to the ground.

‘Like hell I do!’

He crawled to his books, gathered them contemptuously and stood up.

What Breavman remembers most clearly of that struggle is the cold moonlight and the crisp trees, and the humiliation of a defeat which was not only bitter but unnatural.