Читать книгу The Favourite Game - Leonard Cohen - Страница 29

He read everything he could on hypnosis. He hid the books behind a curtain and studied by flashlight.

Here was the real world.

There was a long section, ‘How to Hypnotize Animals.’ Terrifying illustration of glassy-eyed roosters.

Breavman pictured himself a militant Saint Francis, commanding the world by means of his loyal herds and flocks. Apes as obedient satraps. Clouds of pigeons ready to commit suicide against enemy planes. Hyena bodyguards. Massed triumphal choruses of nightingales.

Tovarich, named before the Stalin-Hitler pact, slept on the porch in the afternoon sun. Breavman squatted and swung the pendulum he had made out of a drilled silver dollar. The dog opened its eyes, sniffed to assure itself it was not food, returned to sleep.

But was it natural sleep?

The neighbours had a cartoon of a Dachshund named Cognac. Breavman looked for a slave in the gold eyes.

It worked!

Or was it just the lazy, humid afternoon?

He had to climb a fence to get at Lisa’s Fox Terrier which he fixed in a sitting position inches from a bowl of Pard.

You will be highly favoured, dog of Lisa.

After his fifth success the exhilaration of his dark power carried him along the boulevard, running blindly and laughing.

A whole street of dogs frozen! The city lay before him. He would have an agent in every house. All he had to do was whistle.

Maybe Krantz deserved a province.

Whistle, that’s all. But there was no point in threatening a vision with such a crude test. He shoved his hands down his pockets and floated home on the secret of his revolution.