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.’
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.
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.
The blood, which he died spitting, is invisible, but forms on the chin as Breavman studies the portrait.
He is one of
