of the fluorescent lights was flickering. There was disease in the walls. Maybe everyone there, every single person in the bobbing line was wearing a Kleenex prop. Maybe some had Kleenex noses and Kleenex ears and Kleenex hands. Depression seized him.
Now it was his favourite song. He wanted to dance close to Muffin, close his eyes against her hair which had just been washed.
…the girl I call my ownwill wear cotton and laces and smell of cologne.
But he could barely stand up. He had to keep shifting his weight from foot to foot to dole out the pain in equal shares. Often these shifts did not correspond to the rhythm of the music and imparted to his already imperfect dancing an extra jerky quality. As his hobbling became more pronounced he was obliged to hold Muffin tighter and tighter to keep his balance.
‘Not here,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘My parents won’t be home till late.’
Not even this pleasant invitation could assuage his discomfort. He clung to her and manoeuvred into a crowded part of the floor where he could justifiably limit his movements.
‘Oh, Larry!’
‘Fast worker!’
Even by the sophisticated standards of this older group he was dancing adventurously close. He accepted the cavalier role his pain cast, and bit her ear, having heard that ears were bitten.
‘Let’s get rid of the lights,’ he snarled to all men of daring.
They started from the party, and the walk was a forced march of Bataan proportions. By walking very close he made his lameness into a display of affection. On the hills the Kleenex slipped back under his arches.
A fog-horn from the city’s river reached Westmount, and the sound shivered him.
‘I’ve got to tell you something, Muffin. Then you’ve got to tell me something.’
Muffin didn’t want to sit on the grass because of her dress, but maybe he was going to ask her to go steady. She’d refuse, but what a beautiful party that would make it. The confession he was about to offer shortened his breath, and he confused his fear with love.
He tugged off his shoes, scooped out the balls of Kleenex and laid them like a secret in her lap.
Muffin’s nightmare had just begun.
‘Now you take yours out.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded in a voice which surprised her because it sounded so much like her mother’s.
Breavman pointed to her heart.
‘Don’t be ashamed. You take yours out.’
He reached for her top button and received his balls of Kleenex in the face.
‘Get away!’
Breavman decided to let her run. Her house wasn’t that far away. He wiggled his toes and rubbed his soles. He wasn’t condemned to a Bunny Hop after all, not with those people. He pitched the Kleenex into the gutter and trotted home, shoes in hand.
He detoured to the park and raced over the damp ground until the view stopped him. He set down his shoes like neat lieutenants beside his feet.
He looked in awe at the expanse of night-green foliage, the austere lights of the city, the dull gleam of the St. Lawrence.
A city was a great achievement, bridges were fine things to build. But the street, harbours, spikes of stone were ultimately lost in the wider cradle of mountain and sky.
It ran a chill through his spine to be involved in the mysterious mechanism of city and black hills.
Father, I’m ignorant.
He would master the rules and techniques of the city, why the one-way streets were chosen, how the stock-market worked, what notaries did.
It wasn’t a hellish Bunny Hop if you knew the true names of things. He would study leaves and bark, and visit stone quarries as his father had done.
Good-bye, world of Kleenex.
He gathered his shoes, walked into the bushes, climbed the fence which separated his house from the park.
Black lines, like an ink drawing of a storm, plunged out of the sky to help him over, he could have sworn. The house he entered was important as a museum.
Krantz had a reputation for being wild, having been spotted from time to time smoking two cigarettes at once on obscure Westmount streets.
He was small and wiry, his face triangular, with almost Oriental eyes. A portrait in the dining-room of his house, painted, as his mother is fond of informing people, by the artist who ‘did the Governor General’s,’ shows an elfish boy with pointed ears, black, curly hair, butterfly lips as in a Rossetti, and an expression of goodnatured superiority, an aloofness (even at that age) which is so calm that it disturbs no one.
They sat one night on someone’s lawn, two Talmudists, delighting in their dialectic, which was a disguise for love. It was furious talk, the talk of a boy discovering how good it was not to be alone.
‘Krantz, I know you hate this kind of question, but if you’d care to make an off-hand statement, it would be appreciated. To your knowledge, that is, the extent of your information, is there anyone on this planet who approaches the dullness of the Canadian Prime Minister?’
‘Rabbi Swort?’
‘Krantz, do you honestly submit that Rabbi Swort, who, as the world knows, is not exactly the Messiah or even a minor messenger of the Redemption, do you seriously suggest that Rabbi Swort challenges the utter and complete boringness of our national leader?’
‘I do, Breavman, I do.’
‘I suppose you have your reasons, Krantz.’
‘I do, Breavman, you know I do.’
There were once giants on the earth.
They swore not to be fooled by long cars, screen love, the Red Menace, or The New Yorker magazine.
Giants in unmarked graves.
All right, it’s fine that people don’t starve, that epidemics are controlled, that the classics are available as comics, but what about the corny old verities, truth and fun?
The fashion model was not their idea of grace, the Bomb not their idea of power, Sabbath Service not their idea of God.
‘Krantz, is it true that we are Jewish?’
‘So it has been rumoured, Breavman.’
‘Do you feel Jewish, Krantz?’
‘Thoroughly.’
‘Do your teeth feel Jewish?’
‘Especially my teeth, to say nothing of my left ball.’
‘We really shouldn’t joke, what we were just saying reminds me of pictures from the camps.’
‘True.’
Weren’t they supposed to be a holy people consecrated to purity, service, spiritual honesty? Weren’t they a nation set apart?
Why had the idea of a jealously guarded sanctity degenerated into a sly contempt for the goy, empty of self-criticism?
Parents were traitors.
They had sold their sense of destiny for an Israeli victory in the desert. Charity had become a social competition in which nobody gave away anything he really needed, like a penny-toss, the prizes being the recognition of wealth and a high place in the Donor’s Book.
Smug traitors who believed spiritual fulfilment had been achieved because Einstein and Heifetz are Jews.
If