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.”
8
His father decided to rise from his chair.
“I’m speaking to you, Lawrence!”
“Your father’s speaking to you, Lawrence,” his mother interpreted.
Breavman attempted one last desperate pantomime.
“Listen to your father breathing.”
The elder Breavman calculated the expense of energy, accepted the risk, drove the back of his hand across his son’s face.
His lips were not too swollen to practise “Old Black Joe.”
They said she’d live. But he didn’t give it up. He’d be one extra.
9
The Japs and Germans were beautiful enemies. They had buck teeth or cruel monocles and commanded in crude English with much saliva. They started the war because of their nature.
Red Cross ships must be bombed, all parachutists machine-gunned. Their uniforms were stiff and decorated with skulls. They kept right on eating and laughed at appeals for mercy.
They did nothing warlike without a close-up of perverted glee.
Best of all, they tortured. To get secrets, to make soap, to set examples to towns of heroes. But mostly they tortured for fun, because of their nature.
Comic books, movies, radio programmes centred their entertainment around the fact of torture. Nothing fascinates a child like a tale of torture. With the clearest of consciences, with a patriotic intensity, children dreamed, talked, acted orgies of physical abuse. Imaginations were released to wander on a reconnaissance mission from Calvary to Dachau.
European children starved and watched their parents scheme and die. Here we grew up with toy whips. Early warning against our future leaders, the war babies.
10
They had Lisa, they had the garage, they needed string, red string for the sake of blood.
They couldn’t enter the deep garage without red string.
Breavman remembered a coil.
The kitchen drawer is a step removed from the garbage can, which is a step removed from the outside garbage can, which is a step removed from the armadillo-hulked automatic garbage trucks, which are a step removed from the mysterious stinking garbage heaps by the edge of the St. Lawrence.
“A nice glass of chocolate milk?”
He wished his mother had some respect for importance.
Oh, it is a most perfect kitchen drawer, even when you are in a desperate hurry.
Besides the tangled string box there are candle-butts from years of Sabbath evenings kept in thrifty anticipation of hurricanes, brass keys to locks which have been changed (it is difficult to throw out anything so precise and crafted as a metal key), straight pens with ink-caked nibs which could be cleaned if anyone took the trouble (his mother instructed the maid), toothpicks they never used (especially for picking teeth), the broken pair of scissors (the new pair was kept in another drawer: ten years later it was still referred to as “the new pair”), exhausted rubber rings from home preserving bottles (pickled tomatoes, green, evil, tight-skinned), knobs, nuts, all the homey debris which avarice protects.
He fingered blindly in the string box because the drawer can never be opened all the way.
“A little cooky, a nice piece of honey cake, there’s a whole box of macaroons?”
Ah! bright red.
The welts dance all over Lisa’s imaginary body.
“Strawberries,” his mother called like a good-bye.
There is a way children enter garages, barns, attics, the same way they enter great halls and family chapels. Garages, barns and attics are always older than the buildings to which they are attached. They have the dark reverent air of immense kitchen drawers. They are friendly museums.
It was dark inside, smelled of oil and last year’s leaves which splintered as they moved. Bits of metal, the edges of shovels and cans glimmered damply.
“You’re the American,” said Krantz.
“No, I’m not,” said Lisa.
“You’re the American,” said Breavman. “Two against one.”
The ack-ack of Breavman and Krantz was very heavy. Lisa came on a daring manoeuvre across the darkness, arms outstretched.
“Eheheheheheheh,” stuttered her machine guns.
She’s hit.
She went into a spectacular nose dive, bailed out at the last moment. Swaying from one foot to another she floated down the sky, looking below, knowing her number was up.
She’s a perfect dancer, Breavman thought.
Lisa watched the Krauts
