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‘So long, Breavman.’
Breavman followed him out of the yard.
‘She’s perfect, Krantz, didn’t you see?’
Krantz plugged his ears with his forefingers. They passed Bertha’s Tree. Krantz began to run.
‘She was really perfect, you have to admit it, Krantz.’
Krantz was faster.
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One of Breavman’s early sins was to sneak a look at the gun. His father kept it in a night-table between his and his wife’s bed.
It was a huge .38 in a thick leather case. Name, rank and regiment engraved on the barrel. Lethal, angular, precise, it smouldered in the dark drawer with dangerous potential. The metal was always cold.
The sound of the machinery when Breavman pulled the hammer back was the marvellous sound of all murderous scientific achievement. Click! like the smacking of cogwheel lips.
The little blunt bullets took the scratch of a thumbnail.
If there were Germans coming down the street…
When his father married he swore to kill any man who ever made advances towards his wife. His mother told the story as a joke. Breavman believed the words. He had a vision of a corpse-heap of all the men who had ever smiled at her.
His father had an expensive heart doctor named Farley. He was around so much that they might have called him Uncle if they had been that sort of family. While his father was gasping under the oxygen-tent in the Royal Victoria, Doctor Farley kissed his mother in the hallway of their house. It was a gentle kiss to console an unhappy woman, between two people who had known each other through many crises.
Breavman wondered whether or not he’d better get the gun and finish him off.
Then who’d repair his father?
Not long ago Breavman watched his mother read the Star. She put down the paper and a Chekhovian smile of lost orchards softened her face. She had just read Farley’s obituary notice.
‘Such a handsome man.’ She seemed to be thinking of sad Joan Crawford movies. ‘He wanted me to marry him.’
‘Before or after my father died?’
‘Don’t be so foolish.’
His father was a tidy man, upturned his wife’s sewing basket when he thought it was getting messy, raged when his family’s slippers were not carefully lined under respective beds.
He was a fat man who laughed easily with everybody but his brothers.
He was so fat and his brothers were tall and thin and it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair, why should the fat one die, didn’t he have enough being fat and breathless, why not one of the handsome ones?
The gun proved he was once a warrior.
His brother’s pictures were in the papers in connection with the war effort. He gave his son his first book, The Romance of the King’s Army, a thick volume praising British regiments.
K-K-K-Katy, he sang when he could.
What he really loved was machinery. He would go miles to see a machine which cut a pipe this way instead of that. His family thought him a fool. He lent money to his friends and employees without question. He was given poetry books for his bar mitzvah. Breavman has the leather books now and startles at each uncut page.
‘And read these, too, Lawrence.’
How To Tell BirdsHow To Tell TreesHow To Tell InsectsHow To Tell Stones
He looked at his father in the crisp, white bed, always neat, still smelling of Vitalis. There was something sour inside the softening body, some enemy, some limpness of the heart.
He tore the books as his father weakened. He didn’t know why he hated the careful diagrams and coloured plates. We do. It was to scorn the world of detail, information, precision, all the false knowledge which cannot intrude on decay.
Breavman roamed his house waiting for a shot to ring out. That would teach them, the great successes, the eloquent speakers, the synagogue builders, all the grand brothers that walked ahead into public glory. He waited for the blast of a .38 which would clean the house and bring a terrible change. The gun was right beside the bed. He waited for his father to execute his heart.
‘Get me the medals out of the top drawer.’
Breavman brought them to the bed. The reds and golds of the ribbons ran into each other as in a watercolour. With some effort his father pinned them on Breavman’s sweater.
Breavman stood at attention ready to receive the farewell address.
‘Don’t you like them? You’re always looking at them.’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Stop stretching yourself like a damn fool. They’re yours.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Well, go out and play with them. Tell your mother I don’t want to see anyone and that includes my famous brothers.’
Breavman went downstairs and unlocked the closet which held his father’s fishing equipment. He spent hours in wonder, putting the great salmon rods together, winding and unwinding the copper wire, handling the dangerous flies and hooks.
How could his father have wielded these beautiful, heavy weapons, that swollen body on the crisp, white bed?
Where was the body in rubber boots that waded up rivers?
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Many years later, telling all this, Breavman interrupted himself:
‘Shell, how many men know of those little scars in your earlobes? How many besides me, the original archaeologist of earlobes?’
‘Not as many as you think.’
‘I don’t mean the two or three or fifty that kissed them with their everyday lips. But in your fantasies, how many did something impossible with their mouths?’
‘Lawrence, please, we’re lying here together. You’re trying to spoil the night somehow.’
‘I’d say battalions.’
She did not reply and her silence removed her body from him a little distance.
‘Tell me some more about Bertha, Krantz and Lisa.’
‘Anything I tell you is an alibi for something else.’
‘Then let’s be quiet together.’
‘I saw Lisa before that time in the garage. We must have been five or six.’
Breavman stared at Shell and described Lisa’s sunny room, dense with expensive toys. Electric hobby-horse which rocked itself. Life-sized walking dolls. Nothing that didn’t squeak or light up when squeezed.
They hid in the shade of under-the-bed, their hands full of secrets and new smells, on the look-out for servants, watching the sun slide along the linoleum with the fairy tales cut in it.
The gigantic shoes of a housemaid paddled close by.
‘That’s lovely, Lawrence.’
‘But it’s a lie. It happened, but it’s a lie. Bertha’s Tree is a lie although she really fell out of it. That night after I fooled with my father’s fishing rods I sneaked into my parents’ room. They were both sleeping in their separate beds. There was a moon. They were both facing the ceiling and lying in the same position. I knew that if I shouted only one of them would wake up.’
‘Was that the night he died?’
‘It doesn’t matter how anything happens.’
He began to kiss her shoulders and face and although he was hurting her with his nails and teeth she didn’t protest.
‘Your body will never be familiar.’
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After breakfast six men entered the house and set the coffin down in the living-room. It was surprisingly huge, made of dark-grained wood, brass-handled. There was snow on their clothes.
The room was suddenly more formal than Breavman had ever known it. His mother squinted.
They placed it on a stand and began to open the cabinet-like cover.
‘Close it, close it, we’re not in Russia!’
Breavman shut his eyes and waited for the click of the cover. But these men who make their living among the bereaved move noiselessly. They were gone when he opened his eyes.
‘Why did you make them close it, Mother?’
‘It’s enough as it is.’
The mirrors of the house were soaped, as if the glass had become victim to a strange indoor frost corresponding to the wide winter. His mother stayed alone in her room. Breavman sat stiffly on his bed and tried to fight his anger with a softer emotion.
The coffin was parallel to the chesterfield.
Whispering people began to congregate in the hall and on the balcony.
Breavman and his mother descended the stairs. The afternoon winter sun glimmered on his mother’s black stockings and gave to the mourners in the doorway a gold outline. He could see parked cars and dirty snow above their heads.
They stood closest, his uncles behind them. Friends and workers from the family factory thronged the hall, balcony, and path. His uncles, tall and solemn, touched his shoulders with their manicured hands.
But his mother was defeated. The coffin was open.
He was swaddled in silk, wrapped in a silvered prayer-shawl. His moustache bloomed fierce and black against his white face. He appeared annoyed, as if he were about to awaken, climb out of the offensively ornate box, and resume his sleep on the more comfortable chesterfield.
The cemetery was like an Alpine town, the stones like little sleeping houses. The diggers looked irreverently informal in their working clothes. A mat of artificial grass was spread over the heaps of exhumed frozen mud. The coffin went down in a system of pulleys.
Bagels and hard-boiled eggs, shapes of eternity, were served back at the house. His uncles joked with friends of the family. Breavman hated them. He looked under his great-uncle’s beard and asked him why he didn’t wear a tie.
He was the oldest son of the oldest son.
The family left last. Funerals are so neat. All they left behind were small gold-rimmed plates flecked with crumbs and caraway seeds.
The yards of lace curtain held some of the light of the small winter moon.
‘Did you look at him, Mother?’
‘Of course.’
‘He looked mad, didn’t he?’
‘Poor boy.’
‘And his moustache really black. As if it was done with an eyebrow pencil.’
‘It’s late, Lawrence…’
‘It’s late, all right. We’ll never see him again.’
‘I forbid you to use that voice to your mother.’
‘Why did you make them close it? Why did you? We could have seen him for a whole extra morning.’
‘Go to bed!’
‘Christ you, christ you, bastardess, witch!’ he improvised in a scream.
All night he heard his mother in the kitchen, weeping and eating.
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Here is a colour photograph, largest picture on a wall of ancestors.
His father wears an English suit and all the English reticence that can be woven into cloth. A wine tie with a tiny, hard knot sprouts like a gargoyle. In his lapel a Canadian Legion pin, duller than jewellery. The double-chinned face glows with Victorian reason and decency, though the hazel eyes are a little too soft and staring, the mouth too full, Semitic, hurt.
The fierce moustache presides over the sensitive lips like a suspicious trustee.
