The Favorite Game
FICTION
The Favourite Game
(1963)
Beautiful Losers
(1966)
POETRY
Let Us Compare Mythologies
(1956)
The Spice-Box of Earth
(1961)
Flowers for Hitler
(1964)
Parasites of Heaven
(1966)
Selected Poems, 1956-1968
(1968)
The Energy of Slaves
(1972)
Death of a Lady’s Man
(1978)
Book of Mercy
(1984)
Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs
(1993)
Book of Longing
(2006)
ALBUMS
Songs of Leonard Cohen
(1967)
Songs From a Room
(1969)
Songs of Love and Hate
(1971)
Live Songs
(1972)
New Skin for the Old Ceremony
(1973)
The Best of Leonard Cohen
(1975)
Death of a Ladies’ Man
(1977)
Recent Songs
(1979)
Various Positions
(1984)
I’m Your Man
(1988)
The Future
(1992)
Cohen Live
(1994)
More Best of Leonard Cohen
(1997)
Field Commander Cohen
(2001)
Ten New Songs
(2001)
The Essential Leonard Cohen
(2002)
Dear Heather
(2004)
Copyright © 1963 by Leonard Cohen
First published in England by Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., 1963 Trade paperback edition first published 2000
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher - or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency - is an infringement of the copyright law.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Cohen, Leonard, 1934- The favourite game / Leonard Cohen.
First published: England, 1963.
eISBN: 978-1-55199-501-4
I. Title.
PS
8505.022
F
3 2003
C
813’.54
C
2003-905906-5
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.
Acknowledgements: the Canada Council and the hospitality at 19B
SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN
Series logo design: Brian Bean
EMBLEM EDITIONS
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v3.1
To my mother
As the mist leaves no scar
On the dark green hill,
So my body leaves no scar
On you, nor ever will.
When wind and hawl encounter,
What remains to keep?
So you and I encounter
Then turn, then fall to sleep.
As many nights endure
Without a moon or star,
So will we endure
When one is gone and far.
B
reavman knows a girl named Shell whose ears were pierced so she could wear the long filigree earrings. The punctures festered and now she has a tiny scar in each earlobe. He discovered them behind her hair.
A bullet broke into the flesh of his father’s arm as he rose out of a trench. It comforts a man with coronary thrombosis to bear a wound taken in combat.
On the right temple Breavman has a scar which Krantz bestowed with a shovel. Trouble over a snowman. Krantz wanted to use clinkers as eyes. Breavman was and still is against the use of foreign materials in the decoration of snowmen. No woollen mufflers, hats, spectacles. In the same vein he does not approve of inserting carrots in the mouths of carved pumpkins or pinning on cucumber ears.
His mother regarded her whole body as a scar grown over some earlier perfection which she sought in mirrors and windows and hub-caps.
Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.
B
reavman’s young mother hunted wrinkles with two hands and a magnifying mirror.
When she found one she consulted a fortress of oils and creams arrayed on a glass tray and she sighed. Without faith the wrinkle was anointed.
“This isn’t my face, not my real face.”
“Where is your real face, Mother?”
“Look at me. Is this what I look like?”
“Where is it, where’s your real face?”
“I don’t know, in Russia, when I was a girl.”
He pulled the huge atlas out of the shelf and fell with it. He sifted pages like a goldminer until he found it, the whole of Russia, pale and vast. He kneeled over the distances until his eyes blurred and he made the lakes and rivers and names become an incredible face, dim and beautiful and easily lost.
The maid had to drag him to supper. A lady’s face floated over the silver and the food.
H
is father lived mostly in bed or a tent in the hospital. When he was up and walking he lied.
He took his cane without the silver band and led his son over Mount Royal. Here was the ancient crater. Two iron and stone cannon rested in the gentle grassy scoop which was once a pit of boiling lava. Breavman wanted to dwell on the violence.
“We’ll come back here when I’m better.”
One lie.
Breavman learned to pat the noses of horses tethered beside the Chalet, how to offer them sugar cubes from a flat palm.