Free The Favorite Game by Leonard Cohen

by gooseflesh, and the whole bright screen enfolds him, lenses and machinery.
    “No, don’t touch me. It’s not so bad then. Don’t move. I’ve never done this to anyone.”
    Her hair was wet on his stomach. His mind broke into postcards.
    Dear Krantz
    What she did what she did what she did
    Dear Bertha
    You must limp like her or maybe even look like I knew nothing was lost
    Dear Hitler
    Take away the torches I’m not guilty I had to have this
    “Will you walk me down to the village? I promised I’d telephone and it must be late.”
    “You’re not going to phone him now?”
    “I said I would.”
    “But after this?”
    She touched his cheek. “You know that I have to.”
    “I’ll wait at the fire.”
    When she was gone he folded his sleeping bag. He couldn’t find his right moccasin but that didn’t matter. Sticking out of her kit-bag he noticed a packet of Ban the Bomb petition forms. He crouched beside the fire and scribbled signatures.
    I. G. Farben
Mister Universe
Joe Hill
Wolfgang Amadeus Jolson
Ethel Rosenberg
Uncle Tom
Little Boy Blue
Rabbi Sigmund Freud.
    He shoved the forms down her sleeping bag and headed for the highway, which was streaked with headlights.
Nothing could help the air
.
    What did she look like that important second?
    She stands in my mind alone, unconnected to the petty narrative. The colour of the skin was startling, like the white of a young branch when the green is thumb-nailed away. Nipples the colour of bare lips. Wet hair a battalion of glistening spears laid on her shoulders.
    She was made of flesh and eyelashes.
    But you said she was lame, perhaps like Bertha would be from the fall?
    I don’t know.
    Why can’t you tell Shell?
    My voice would depress her.
    Shell touched Breavman’s cheek.
    “Tell me the rest of the story.”

7

    T amara had long legs, God knows how long they were. Sometimes at the meetings she used up three chairs. Her hair was tangled and black. Breavman tried to select one coil and follow where it fell and weaved. It made his eyes feel as though he had walked into a closet of dustless cobwebs.
    Breavman and Krantz wore special costumes for hunting Communist women. Dark suits, vests which buttoned high on their shirts, gloves and umbrellas.
    They attended every meeting of the Communist Club. They sat imperially among the open-collared members who were munching their sandwich lunches out of paper bags.
    During a dull speech on American germ-warfare Krantz whispered: “Breavman, why are paper bags full of white bread so ugly?”
    “I’m glad you asked, Krantz. They are advertisements for the frailty of the body. If a junkie wore his hypodermic needle pinned to his lapel you’d feel exactly the same disgust. A bag bulging with food is a kind of visible bowel. Trust the Bolsheviks to wear their digestive systems on their sleeves!”
    “Sufficient, Breavman. I thought you’d know.”
    “Look at her, Krantz!”
    Tamara appropriated another chair for her mysterious limbs. At the same moment the chairman interrupted the speaker and waved his gavel at Krantz and Breavman.
    “If you two jokers don’t shut up you’re getting right out of here.”
    They stood up to make a formal apology.
    “Siddown, siddown, just keep quiet.”
    Korea had swarmed with Yankee insects. They had bombs filled with contagious mosquitoes.
    “Now I have some questions for you, Krantz. What goes on under those peasant blouses and skirts she always wears? How high do her legs go up? What happens after her wrists plunge into her sleeves? Where do her breasts begin?”
    “That’s why you’re here, Breavman.”
    Tamara had gone to his high-school but he didn’t notice her then because she was fat. They took the same route to school, but he never noticed her. Lust was training his eyes to exclude everything he could not kiss.
    But now she was slender and tall. Her ripe lower lip curved over its own little shadow. She moved heavily, though, as if her limbs were still bound with the