A short story by Leonard Cohen

In The Jukebox Heart, this posthumously released work, the great singer-songwriter imagines a young romantic courting a mysterious, beautiful woman.

When I was about 13 years old, I did the things my friends did until they went to bed, then I’d walk miles along Ste Catherine Street, a night lover, peeking into marble tabled cafeterias where men wore overcoats even in the summer, stopping for intense minutes in front of novelty shops to catalogue the magic and tricks, rubber cockroaches, handshake buzzers, explosive cigars, and leaking glasses, sometimes choosing a sexy pipe for my future manhood from among the terraces of briar in bright windows of tobacco stores – I’d stop wherever there was an array – newsstands, displays of hardware, skeins of black and blonde hair hung between elaborately wigged wooden heads in beauty salons; I wanted detail to study, but a profusion so I did not have to linger long on anything. Sometimes when I got home, my mother would be on the telephone describing my coat to the police. As I prepared for bed, she’d rage outside my closed door, demanding explanations, reciting the names of children who brought their parents pleasure and honour, calling on my dear father to witness my delinquency, calling on God to witness her ordeal in having to be both a father and a mother to me. I would fall asleep in the torrent, thinking usually of the exhausted school day that awaited me.

I don’t know what it was that drove me downtown two or three nights a week. There were often long dark blocks between the windows I loved. Walking them, hungry for the next array, I had a heroic vision of myself: I was a man in the middle-20s, raincoated, battered hat pulled low above intense eyes, a history of injustice in his heart, a face too noble for revenge, walking the night along some wet boulevard, followed by the sympathy of countless audiences. My creation was derived from the lonely investigations of private eyes into radio or movie crimes, family accounts of racial wandering, Bible glories of wilderness saints and hermits. My creation walked with the trace of a smile on his Captain Marvel lips, he was a master of violence, but he dealt only in peace. He knew 20 languages, all the Chinese dialects, hardly anyone had ever heard him speak. Loved by two or three beautiful women who could never have him, he was so dedicated, every child who ever saw him loved him. He wrote brilliant, difficult books and famous professors sometimes recognised him in streetcars, but he turned away and got off at the next stop.

If we could ever tell it, how it happens, we grow to approximate the vision (minus the nobility, trace of smile, languages, mastery), we get what we wanted, we grow in some way towards the 13-year-old’s dream, training ourselves with sad movies, poems of loss, minor chords of the guitar, folk songs of doomed socialist brotherhood. And soon, we are strolling the streets in a brand new trench coat, hair in careful disarray, embracing the moonlight, all the pity of the darkness in a precious kind of response to the claim of the vision, but then much later when we are tired of indulgence, and despise the attitude, we find ourselves walking the streets in earnest, in real rain, and we circle the city almost to morning until we know every wrought-iron gate, every old mansion, every mountain view. In these compulsive journeys, we become dimly aware of a new vision, we pray that it might be encouraged to grow and take possession, overwhelming the old one, a vision of order, austerity, work, and sunlight. So it was that last week I was moving along Pine Avenue, at four in the morning, wishing myself somewhere else, in a house of my own beside a wife, work prepared for the next day.

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From A Ballet of Lepers by Leonard Cohen (Canongate, £20).