The Favorite Game Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 only they could find the right girls. Then they could fight their way out of the swamp. Not Kleenex girls.
    Breavman wonders how many miles through Montreal streets he and Krantz have driven and walked, on the look-out for the two girls who had been chosen cosmically to be their companion-mistresses. Hot summer evenings casing the mobs in Lafontaine Park, looking searchingly into young female eyes, they knew that at any moment two beauties would detach themselves from the crowd and take their arms. Krantz at the wheel of his father’s Buick, steering between hedges of snow piled on either side of the narrow back streets in the east end, at a crawling speed because there was a blizzard going on, they knew that two shivering figures would emerge from a doorway, tap timidly on the frosted windows of the car, and it would be they.
    If they had the right seats on the loop-the-loop the girls’ hair would blow against their faces. If they went up north for a ski weekend and stayed at the right hotel they would hear the beautiful sound of girls undressing in the room next door. And if they walked twelve miles along St. Catherine Street, there was no telling whom they’d meet.
    “I can get the Lincoln tonight, Breavman.”
    “Great. It’ll be packed downtown.”
    “Great. We’ll drive around.”
    So they would drive, like American tourists on the make, almost lost in the front seat of one of the huge Krantzstone automobiles, until everyone had gone home and the streets were empty. Still they continued their prowl because the girls they wanted might prefer deserted streets. Then when it was clear that they weren’t coming that particular night they’d head out to the lake shore, and circle the black water of Lac St. Louis.
    “What do you think it’s like to drown, Krantz?”
    “You’re supposed to black out after you take in a fairly small amount of water.”
    “How much, Krantz?”
    “You’re supposed to be able to drown in a bathtub.”
    “In a glass of water, Krantz.”
    “In a damp rag, Breavman.”
    “In a moist Kleenex. Hey, Krantz, that would be a great way to kill a guy, with water. You get the guy and use an eyedropper on him, a squirt at a time. They find him drowned in his study. Big mystery.”
    “Wouldn’t work, Breavman. How would you hold him still? There’d be bruise marks or rope marks on him.”
    “But if it could work. They find the guy slumped over his desk and nobody knows how he died. Coroner’s inquest: death by drowning. And he hasn’t been to the sea-shore in ten years.”
    “Germans used a lot of water in their tortures. They’d shove a hose up a guy’s arse-hole to make him talk.”
    “Great, Krantz. Japs had something like that. They’d make a guy eat a lot of uncooked rice then he’d have to drink a gallon of water. The rice would swell and —”
    “Yeah, I heard that one.”
    “But, Krantz, want to hear the worst one? And it was the Americans who did it. Listen, they catch a Jap on the battlefield andmake him swallow five or six rifle cartridges. Then they’d make him run and jump. The cartridges’d rip his stomach apart. He’d die of internal haemorrhage. American soldiers.”
    “How about tossing babies in the air for bayonet practice?”
    “Who did that?”
    “Both sides.”
    “That’s nothing, Krantz, they did that in the Bible. ‘Happy will they be who dash