My dear son,
Well, here it is, another year. January is always the most unfamiliar month to me, what with the cheques and the taxes and the like, and you find yourself writing down wrong numbers or else some number you can’t believe you’ve lived so long to see. I’m turning seventy-seven this year, son. If it shocks you, you ought to be in these shoes. That number I put down for my age is some dried-up old geezer, sure as hell ain’t me. (That I’ll vouch for — Marie.) I feel forty, you know. You’re damned near forty yourself, you know, and not even married.
Batcha just got back from a four-day stay in Renfrew Hospital where they did all kinds of tests on here, so we’ve got a better idea. She still has none herself, poor dear. At least not officially. But she knows, the way Batcha always knows everything, and that I don’t have to explain to you. (Nor me! — Marie.) She hated it there. Your Uncle Jan and Aunt Sophia and Aunt Jozefa visited every day and I came twice but she wouldn’t even speak to us and us her own flesh and blood! The doctors found leukemia, that’s a blood cancer, and this young dark doctor (he’s Pakistani and very good, I hear — Marie) he says it’s a matter of months is all. Anyways, I’ll keep you posted.
Going down to 45 below Celsius tonight, whatever the hell that means. Damn radio won’t give out the real temperatures at all anymore, since the New Year. But the thermometer on the bait shed darned near disappeared last night and that’s 50 below Fahrenheit, so you have some idea what kind of spell we’re up against. There’s even frost on the north wallpaper and poor Marie’s sitting here in her ski jacket taking notes. (It’s not so bad — Marie.) My secretary, ha, ha. (My boss, ha, ha — Marie.)
Transport made it in through the Park from Vernon the other day. Jazda’s got a new chesterfield from Eaton’s and Marie remembered you were asking for any news about your old coach, so I’ll let her fill you in, okay? (Felix, he’s apparently been in hospital since before Christmas with pneumonia. Mr. Cryderman, the driver, he said he thought your Mr. Bowles was improving. Said he’d been in to see him and asked about you. But Mr. Cryderman didn’t seem too hopeful. — Marie.)
Cryderman? Does she mean Bucky? Old Bucky with his old man’s Edsel that we picked up that Maureen slut in? Is that what he’s doing now? Riding transport? Jesus H. Christ. He’s probably married and feeding six brats, living out on the town line with a Ski-doo, a gun rack, a belly like a tractor tire and no hair. I bet he can’t even skate anymore. Poor old Bucky — he always wanted to be me, the poor bugger. I wouldn’t trade him for a second.
Anyways, we’ve been going pretty well steady on Jaja’s boxes. Nothing else to do. I must say son, I do love this. I’m learning things about our family I’m almost too old to appreciate. Old Jaja used to tell me these things but we’d be working and maybe I didn’t pay too much attention, eh? But now it’s all written down permanent. Like a history book they could study, kind of. And that’s why I’m shipping so much of it off to you, so you’ll have it at an age when it matters to you. You’ll see just how important it is to you to continue Jaja’s good name. Look at your Uncle Jan, just one girl, and you know yourself she took off last year and her only sixteen. Some thanks. She ever comes home she’ll probably marry a Kulas or Betz or Hatoski and our name will be lost forever. It’s like thinning coal oil, eh? — eventually you can’t even get it to light. Now you’ve done all us Batterinskis damn proud, son. Stanley Cup — nothing’ll ever beat that, getting our name put on there with Howe and Apps and Believeau and Armstrong and all them other class gentlemen. But please, don’t let it stop there.
That’s why I was tickled pink to hear about your Kristiina there. Some might call her a D.P. over here, but we were all D.P.’s once. She sounds to me like a very fine person and, knowing you, I’m sure she is. You probably forgot, but you didn’t say whether she was Roman Catholic or not, son. If she isn’t though, it’s not the end of the world as far as I’m concerned. She can always convert.
One thing about your Poppa. I’m not of the old school, eh? Not like Batcha and old Dombrowski and poor dead Father Kulas (prosie zdróvas). There’s a list of old Polish proverbs in Jaja’s notes and one of them says, “A woman must be constantly reminded that she is incapable of ever having any wise or important thoughts or opinions.” He just wrote it down. I doubt he believed in it. But that’s still the way the old fuddies like Dombrowski think, eh? (And — excuse me, please, Felix — old fuddies like your Poppa, eh? — Marie.)
Anyway, enough of that. You’ll mind we left off your grandfather’s memoirs with the tragic death of your great-grandfather in Warsaw on February 27, 1861, killed by the cursed Russians. After that, Jaja wrote 468 pages of history before he once got back to the family proper. I’m not going to bother you much with that, but Marie and I have worked through it steadily, but it’s all here for the day you or your children want to know what it was the Batterinskis experienced.
Your Jaja went into incredible detail, page after page after page on the martial law the Russians forced their phoney Polish government to impose in October, the hanging of Romkuald Traugutt on August 5, 1864. (Traugutt was young, like Lech Walesa, and had the same following — God forbid the same fate awaits Walesa, eh?) Jaja even gives a full chapter to the Polish philosophy of Positivism, which managed to bore even your old Poppa.
That reminds me of something Hatoski was saying down at the barber shop Friday, son. He says the only country in Europe where they aren’t marching against nuclear weapons is Poland. Hatkoski’s convinced there they pray for such a war. It’s the only sure way they can see of clearing out the Russians. In a way, I guess, that’s Positivism.
You know what the so-called great “friend” of the Poles, Tsar Alexander II, said in 1865, son? “Pas de rêveries.”
No more dreaming, according to Jaja’s translation.
He said that 118 years ago and look what’s happening right now in Poland, eh? We are truly either God’s chosen people or else the biggest bunch of fools the earth has ever seen. What do you think?
That’s about it, Felix. Marie is including some of Jaja’s work here and it’s all stuff you should be interested in, I hope.
One last thing. There’s talk on the television that this Gretzky could score one hundred goals this season. Can you imagine that? What does it mean for the NHL? Is he that good or has it gotten that bad? Do take care and remember that we love you and pray for you.
Your father,
Poppa.
One hundred goals in a season ... Gretzky makes me puke.
I have a dream about Gretzky. He develops early as an athlete, late as an adult; working on his seventh straight Hart Trophy he mysteriously becomes afflicted with pimples; 7-Up dumps him because he is suddenly living proof that the carbonation in pop eventually bubbles to the surface; Levi’s buys out his promotional contract because someone who looks like that is not likely to get into anyone’s pants; skate manufacturers drop off, stick manufacturers aren’t interested; garbage collectors throughout North America report a dramatic increase in discarded posters; and in the final game of the season Gretzky tries to split the Islanders’ defence and Potvin and Morrow wedge him so perfectly that the Kid — now nothing so much as a white head on a red blister— bursts. Gretzky’s final play is etched forever in hardened pus on the roof of the Northlands Coliseum. They burn his sweater.
Dream on, Batterinski. I am as much a fool as old Jaja, only I dream about what might happen while he imagined what might have happened. I am forever proving myself in the future, getting back, suckering, nailing, shafting, shouting the magnificent comeback I couldn’t find at the time of the insult. Jaja’s proof is behind him. He looked forward and saw nothing more than another spring of knocking pipes together to break off the soot, more cedar to cut for kindling, pulp to cut in another swamp, two dozen more identical brown and green crappers for the city bastards who can’t manage a single day in the wilderness without Delsey Super Soft. No wonder he turned to this ridiculous reinvention of himself. Only in the past can things not get
any worse then they are right now — the perfect philosophy of a beaten-down Pole.
But such a lovely man. When I think of him I do not see his face, but I smell him. Jaja is gasoline and kerosene and coal oil and lime and ashes and spruce pitch and cedar chips and chicken molt and sow slop and rotten worms and rolled oats. I see the mole on the back of his neck as I hang on from behind, feel the squeeze of his thighs as he tricks me nearer the desk where he works, trapping me for a quick tickle.
Where have those nights gone when I lie full out on the back seat of his old Plymouth, his coat over me, the rare headlights of an oncoming car sliding along the telephone lines to warn us, the honk of a horn at a tight corner, the feel of the floating shocks on the potholes, the soft voices of Jaja and Poppa and Ig in the front seat going over the bingo calls as if they were baseball plays and might have been different if only...? Where are those nights? They are not here. They are not the nights of Batterinski, where too often the glass goes up until the eyelids go down.
Whatever became of Jaja’s big coat? If I had it now I would curl until it fit over me. I would raise my knees to my chin and fold my hands in the warm muff of my own body. I would close my eyes and call out the bingo ... four corners ... elimination ... under the “B” 13 ... “B” for Batterinski ...
The Batterinski History
by Karol Batterinski
I cannot remember my valiant father. I have not so much as a picture of this great hero of Poland, thought it may be that one existed. Daguerre’s invention was to be found in Warsaw as early as 1839 and there were more than a dozen photographic studios in the city by 1861, the year of his death. I have always had a feeling a picture of him did exist, but I have also always had a fear that the picture of him was of his death and that perhaps it served to warn other Poles what they could expect for denying the Russians. I prefer to think of him alive, even if I cannot see him. I see easily what he stood for, and that is enough.
My mother I certainly remember. She was a melancholy good-hearted woman with thick black hair severely parted down the middle. I have her nose, slightly hooked, but not her face. It was round and grew ever rounder, a characteristic I seem somehow to have passed on to my beloved second son, Ignace.
That she was tough of mind there can be no question. With the revolution squashed there was a great exodus from Poland and her family pressed her hard to leave. We stayed, however, because the movement, what there was left of it, felt responsible for Father’s death. In any other circumstances a thirty-year-old woman with a small child might have starved or barely survived by begging, only by incredible luck being taken in by another family as kitchen servants. But not the family of the hero Batterinski. We were taken in by the Mickiewicz family, cousins of the great poet, and they put us up in a comfortable home with a slight view of the west harbour in Gdansk. I still very well remember important men coming around and the sounds of argument and serious talk from below. Always there would follow a summoning of Mother and me from the third-floor attic. I would be questioned and tested by gruff, cigar-smoking men in work clothes but who were always to be called General or Colonel or Captain whenever I spoke to them. I remember them all not for their beards or walking sticks or the strong smell of drink, but for their eyes. They had tired eyes with sad, sad messages in them. I never seemed an intrusion to them; it was more like I was being sized up in some way.
Scouts. Jaja and I are not so far apart. I remember the Bantam “A” finals in Collingwood when Sugar came in and closed the door and spoke like Father Schula about the scouts who were coming to the final round-robin. You would think the Holy Ghost himself was coming down with a clipboard and plus-minus figures to see if you were worthy of the call. Sugar’s good eye shifted between Powers and me, and though he spoke to the whole team the words couldn’t hold a candle to the stare.
His voice said: “Just forget they’re there. Play your game as you know it. If anything comes of it, it was meant to be. Nothing you can do out there today will change all that, okay? So just forget they’re there watching.”
His eye said: “Batterinski! Powers! You two bust your asses out there like your life depended on it. If the scouts don’t say anything to you, then neither will I — ever again. So don’t fuck up, understand?”
We lost in the finals to, naturally, Parry Sound. But after the scouts were through sucking around the kid Orr — Christ, he wasn’t even legally a bantam yet! — two of them, Bob Davidson from the Leafs and an old fart from the Boston organization named Dempsey, came and asked Powers and me to come to this little room for a chat. It turned out to be the room for the skating club, and we sat in a perfumed dressing room surrounded by crinoline and tutus and a glassed-in portrait of Barbara Ann Scott side by side with a glassed-in portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.
“How old are you, son?” Davidson asked me.
“Fifteen.”
“How much you weigh?”
“One-seventy.”
“You ever go to hockey school, son?”
“No.”
“You should, son. Your skating needs a lot of work.”
They did not ask what number I wanted on the Leafs or Bruins. They did not ask who I’d like for my defence partner. There was no mention of junior, of the minor leagues, of anything. Same for Powers. They did not ask whether we had any interest in playing professional hockey. It was a given. They did not once mention school. In its own way, I would later realize, it was also a given.
Sugar was delighted. All the way home he kept slapping our backs with his knobby hands and calling us “prospects.” I sat with him later and tried to explain that it wasn’t that big a deal, but he cut me off with a stab of the eye.
“You wouldn’t know,” he said.’
Same with Jaja, I suppose.
In 1875, when I was fourteen, I went through an experience that has stayed with me to the present. One of the bearded generals who came to dinner at the Mickiewiczes’ convinced my patrons that I should be sent on a pilgrimage to the Jasna Gora basilica in Czestochowa. I was sent alone, and how I made it I can barely believe, now so many years later. The distance must be well over one hundred miles, and while I do remember rides from other pilgrims in mule drawn carts, I also remember frost in the beginning and then the sound of crickets so loud at time I could not think. So I must have walked from early June until sometime in August.
I slept in barns and fields and trees and wagons. Because I was a pilgrim and also because I had a letter of introduction from the general of that night, I never went hungry, and most farms I left in the morning with my sack heavy with kielbasa or some sweet paczki for lunch.
When I arrived in Czestochowa the village was filled with pilgrims and I had to wait three days just for a place at a pew to pray. I waited, was admitted, but I could not pray. I could only stare. It is the same face we have in our beloved St. Martin’s here in Pomerania, but I cannot possibly explain the difference between the real thing and an imitation, even if our imitation is still something to be proud of. But there, the painting of Our Lady looks down on you with a power so unnatural that I feel it still, just writing about it. She had the same long and sad eyes that I had come to believe was the secret code of the movement. And of course she was wounded, twice slashed on the right cheek by a man who, it is said, fell instantly dead when his blasphemous deed was done.
Before I came to Jasna Gora I had trouble believing what I was taught. The historian in me said it was not likely. But now, in the church, the believer in me argued that it was indeed true. Sitting there, caught in her stare, I knew absolutely that 330 Poles had repelled 4,000 Swedish soldiers in the year 1655. How? Simple: Our Lady fought with them. If the Swedes felt half the power I felt, they would have dug their own graves and lain down in them to help the Poles out.
No, I did not pray, but I carry no shame for that. When I stood to make room for other pilgrims I felt myself different from them. I felt that because of my father and Our Lady’s stare that I, Karol Batterinski,
had been chosen to do something for Poland.
But what? When I arrived back in Gdansk I felt different, no longer the child living in the attic with his mother. I had no one to talk to in the family. Not mother, not the Mickiewiczes, not the men who came to dine. I had only poor nervous, nearsighted Mr. Kopernick, the tutor the family retained for their eldest son, Casimir, and who was allowed to teach me in the afternoons. The poor man claimed he was a descendant of Poland’s greatest scientist, Copernicus. He used to read aloud from De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and he had an irritating habit of tying all knowledge and thought to Copernicus’s theory. I should have known that he would twist my feelings of Czestochowa to suit this purpose. When I told him how I had felt chosen, somehow more special than the other pilgrims, Mr. Kopernick argued that it was evident from Copernicus’s teachings that man is incapable of perceiving correctly. Man’s eyes tell him that the sun revolves around the Earth. And each day this self-evident truth is repeated as the sun begins in the east and rises into the sky and falls in the west. The actual truth, as Copernicus proved, is precisely the opposite of what man naturally believes. Man revolves around the sun.
We are part of the plan, Mr. Kopernick argued, not the planner. As a true believer, then, what I felt in front of Our Lady was her power, not mine, but since the sensation was within it was only natural I should mistake it for my own creation. He seemed mildly amused at my arrogance.
We had this discussion in the late fall of that year, 1875. It was a wet, cold fall with no snow and no wind to dry up the rainfall, and everyone came down with severe colds which we were several weeks shaking. And one day Mr. Mickiewicz called on Casimir and me to join him in his study, where he told us Mr. Kopernick would no longer be tutoring us. He had been found dead in his bed that morning.
It left me with the most peculiar sensation. I was sad because I had been fond of him, but I was also all the more puzzled now. Was Mr. Kopernick right? Are we merely part of the overall plan and not the planner, and that luck of the draw had felled him? Or was I perhaps closer to the truth and was it his denying of the power of Our Lady that had caused his own weakness? By not being a solid believer, as I was, he wasn’t fully armed.
The Last Season Page 23