Breavman 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.
Breavman’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.
His 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.
‘One day we’ll go riding.’
‘But you can hardly breathe.’
His father collapsed that evening over his map of flags on which he plotted the war, fumbling for the capsules to break and inhale.
Here is a movie filled with the bodies of his family.
His father aims the camera at his uncles, tall and serious, boutonnières in their dark lapels, who walk too close and enter into blurdom.
Their wives look formal and sad. His mother steps back, urging aunts to get into the picture. At the back of the screen her smile and shoulders go limp. She thinks she is out of focus.
Breavman stops the film to study her and her face is eaten by a spreading orange-rimmed stain as the film melts.
His grandmother sits in the shadows of the stone balcony and aunts present her with babies. A silver tea-set glows richly in early Technicolor.
His grandfather reviews a line of children but is stopped in the midst of an approving nod and ravaged by a technical orange flame.
Breavman is mutilating the film in his efforts at history.
Breavman and his cousins fight small gentlemanly battles. The girls curtsy. All the children are invited to leap one at a time across the flagstone path.
A gardener is led shy and grateful into the sunlight to be preserved with his betters.
A battalion of wives is squeezed abreast, is decimated by the edge of the screen. His mother is one of the first to go.
Suddenly the picture is shoes and blurred grass as his father staggers under another attack.
‘Help!’
Coils of celluloid are burning around his feet. He dances until he is saved by Nursie and the maid and punished by his mother.
The movie runs night and day. Be careful, blood, be careful.
The Breavmans founded and presided over most of the institutions which make the Montreal Jewish community one of the most powerful in the world today.
The joke around the city is: The Jews are the
