But we were not bitter. What we saw, only the Poles would like. To the east, west, north and south there was only more bush and more hills and more swamps and more mosquitoes. No Germans. No Prussians. No Russians. No false promises from other Europeans. Poles stand alone, and here we would be allowed to stand just that way, forever. We chose the highest hill for the church, so no matter where we were in the bush we could see the steeples and pray and be thankful....
Thankful. Thankful for what, Jaja? For a lifelong chance to work for the Scots and the Irish lumber barons? For a chance to just maybe get on with the highways and paint shithouses for the tourists all summer and then be shit on all winter when they lay you off? For the chance to end up like Danny Shannon, the envy of the village because he got himself an $18,000 house that fits together like Tinkertoys?
... which I personally consider to be the most emotional moment of my life. Ignace Jan Paderewski was to play at Toronto’s Massey Hall on Wednesday, April 26, 1905. I determined I would go somehow and saved for six months. Everyone knew all about Paderewski and about how the previous spring he had stood up to the Tsar himself in the Russian court. “I beg your majesty’s pardon,” Paderewski had said, following the Tsar’s silly delight in finding such a great talent in the Russian Empire. “I am a Pole!” The Russians gave him twenty-four hours to get out of the country and never return. His concerts at St. Petersburg were cancelled. His name was forgotten.
But not by the Poles. Not in Europe. And not in Canada. To us he was Poland’s greatest hero, not just the world’s leading interpreter of Chopin. I had to see him.
By the end of March I had saved ten dollars from winter hauling and the previous fall’s roadwork. I boarded the Canadian Atlantic when it stopped for water and switched trains twice more, once in Ottawa, once in Kingston, arriving in Toronto on the afternoon of April 26th. I walked up to Shuter Street and found this Massey Hall and was told the concert had been sold out for a month. I turned away, near tears, when the old man at the ticket office simply said: “Don’t go far. Wait until the concert begins.” He would tell me no more. I figured he meant that I might get to see the great man, anyway.
I stayed all through the day, no lunch, no supper, and felt like a common criminal when the people began to flood in off the main street in their fancy clothes and big hats and chauffeured cars. Not one of them was even a proper Pole.
When the crowd began to clap and cheer I was certain the great pianist himself had come. But the man that descended from the buggy had a huge top hat on, with bare wisps of white hair showing. I knew it could not be Paderewski. Where was the lion’s mane of hair? Where was the moustache? I asked a man beside me. “There’s the governor general,” he said.
“That be Lord Grey himself, come all the way from Ottawa for this.” I told him I, too, had come from a long way, further even than Ottawa, but he just laughed in disbelief.
I was ready to go when the old man who’d been selling the tickets came out and announced that Paderewski himself had arranged that two hundred tickets be held and now released.
I got one of the first for only $1.50, and thirty minutes later found myself in the third balcony staring down past a pillar and from the side, but at least seeing Ignace Jan Paderewski himself walk out. I felt exactly as I had when I looked on the Black Madonna at Czestochowo. This wasn’t a man anymore than she was a painting. This was Poland!
I remember every note of music he played. Bach, Liszt, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, then what I had come for: Frederic Chopin. I still have the program. Nocturne, op. 62, in B Major; Etudes no. 12, 7, 30; Prelude no. 17; Valse, op. 42.
I do not remember his encores. I do not remember coming down the stairs or going out into the night. I do remember that Paderewski came out and spoke to me and other immigrants who had gathered there. He told us not to give up, to pray.
A woman gave him flowers. Roses, they were, and at that time of year! Once, his grey eyes swept across my own and I felt I was finally seeing what my father looked like, but I now know it was just wishful thinking.
It is hard for me even today, April 21, 1951, to believe what came to pass for this great man. It was Ignace Paderewski alone who persuaded President Wilson to fight for Poland after the Great War, and it was Paderewski who was the new state’s first prime minister in 1919, as was only fitting.
It was Paderewski who, never forgetting for a moment the monstrous abuse Poland has suffered at the hands of Russia, refused to allow the Russian troops access to Polish land during the years immediately after the Revolution. He refused to permit the easy flow of Russians. He refused to comply whatsoever with the Russians. And in my opinion he, more than any other man, stopped the Communist Revolution from sweeping down through Europe as all the fashionable Marxists in Canada were praying.
In 1951, in Pomerania, Ontario, there is one tired old man who never, ever goes to bed without saying a prayer of thanks to Ignace Jan Paderewski through the Holy Virgin, Our Lady of Czestochowa.
I want my children to know I, Karol Batterinski, saw Paderewski play and heard him speak....
Jesus H. Christ! Jaja certainly had no trouble squeezing the Kleenex. I want my children to know I, Felix Batterinski, saw Howe play and my own ears heard his elbows land. My children? Where are they hiding?
I fold the letter back into the envelope and stuff it back in the bag, half wishing I’d never started it. What is this shit supposed to mean to me? Does poppa actually think I spend every waking moment worrying about Poland? Who cares about all that? I truly doubt I will ever even bother to sit down and go through all of Jaja’s story — all of it, piss, just what I’ve been sent — and not because I don’t have fond memories of him, but because I’d rather think of Jaja hunched over the radio and waiting for Foster Hewitt than making a fool of himself in a fancy theatre with a lot of phoney stuffed shirts.
What is the value in a family history anyway? So it begins, so it ends. What if it could be sent in reverse, so that rather than me receiving all these notes, how about great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather being sent one of my O-Pee-Chee bubblegum cards — say the idiotic one from ’79 that listed all my nicknames on the back: Frankenstein, Goon, The Bat, Canucklehead, every fucking one of them. Would they hang it on the mantel and say that knowing this about Felix somehow made all their hardships worthwhile? Bullshit they would.
Poppa and Jaja both go on too much about family history. Heritage, pride, heroes — shit, all I am is a package of hand-me-down chemicals, bubbling along as best I know how.
Christ, what an airport! I thought I had seen them all — squeezed in Edmonton, ignored in L.A., lost in Toronto, cowed in Chicago — but Leningrad makes a trip through any of them seem like a three-on-one break. We’re packed tighter then cigarettes into a foyer leading up several steps to large glass doors, and Russia is presumably somewhere beyond. We’re given forms to fill out, swearing we have no drugs, weapons, printed material or thoughts that might be considered ill toward the Soviet Union. Finally, after forty minutes, I am in line to pass a booth. Inside, two boy soldiers scowl at my passport, scowl at me, scowl at the passport, at me, at the passport, at me, and then talk together in a strange, angry language and the boy sitting down scribbles a single letter or number on my passport and then hands it back to me. I go to the next booth where a team of boy soldiers goes through the same wasted effort, tears off a portion of the visa and stamps the remaining portion. Then, with Timo whistling happily behind me, I pass on into a much larger room where our hockey equipment and luggage is piled haphazardly on carts. I find my bags and then yet another line, where adolescent soldiers, a trifle older and a lot unhappier, go through the luggage as if panning for gold.
My man looks more like a Pomeranian potato-farm boy than a Communist. He has the flat, expressionless face of a Slav, pink cheeks and eyes that wear a soldier’s weariness badly, as if a laugh might sneak out if he’s not careful. He, too, takes my passport and double checks with a zeal that would s
uggest I have grown a beard between here and the last checkpoint. Satisfied finally that it is indeed Batterinski, he indicates I should dump the bag on the stainless steel table between us.
He takes the equipment bag first. He removes me piece by piece, checking the cloth lining behind the fibreglass of the shinpads, the pad pockets of my pants, even my jock, removing the plastic cup and then rolling the cloth holder around until he seems certain nothing has ever rested there but Batterinski’s privates. He indicates that I should open up the second bag. I unzip it and lay it out flat for him and he proceeds to give the same treatment to my pants, shirts, underwear, socks, even my shaving kit. He turns to a side pocket and takes out my training equipment, trying to find out if the Nike heel is all rubber or simply a reservoir for explosives. He checks my sweatsuit, the stopwatch I never use, the sweatbands.
Smiling, he unzips it for me and hands it back. I smile back. Then, as I take it, he notices the flat pocket along the side where I have stuffed all of Poppa’s letters.
He reaches out and hauls the bag back, eyeing the zipper as if I have somehow deliberately tricked him.
“It’s only letters,” I say.
He looks up, not understanding. Timo is behind me and repeats, in Russian. But he is determined to see for himself. I groan, seeing another five minutes wasted while he tries to read between the lines for instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail in your bathroom.
Poppa’s most recent letter seems to fascinate him, yet I already know he does not understand English.
“Mail is a private affair in my country,” I say very loudly, looking at Timo for a translation. But Timo does not translate. He signals me to keep quiet.
The soldier shouts something that I do not catch. It is not to me, anyway, but to a group of scowling soldiers standing in a huddle near the closest door. They all appear to be generals, all of them puffed up to manufactured heights, all with better tailored brown jackets, most with heavily embroidered caps with gold embossing, red bands and shiny black peaks. They all turn, scowling deeper, and then hurry over as if glad to finally have something to do.
“What’s in the letters?” Timo asks quietly. He has moved up to my shoulder and barely moves his mouth.
“They’re just letters from my father, for Christ’s sake!”
“I see clippings,” he says.
“He cuts things out and sends them to me,” I say, growing very weary of this.
“That’s a picture of Walesa, though, isn’t it?” Timo says, indicating with his nose.
“Yes. Sure. Poppa’s a big fan.”
“You should not have brought them.”
Brought them? He makes it sound so calculated. I never even gave them a second thought, no more than I thought they’d want to take out my jock cup. What is going on here?
My man shows the letters and clipping to the generals and they scowl into the pile, picking up random pieces as if grabbing for someone else’s French fries. They are delighted, but unable to show it. When they exchange something it is like children trading hockey cards, trying to get the most mileage out of whatever happens to be in their hands. They are far more interested in whatever is written there than I was myself, and yet they are my letters!
I would just go and rip them out of their hands if they weren’t an army and this a foreign goddamn country where I haven’t a clue what the laws are. I begin to step forward, but my knees seem suddenly without bone. For a moment I am not sure what is wrong. Kristiina’s bug? My mouth is dry, my throat pinched so I almost feel as if I will cry if I speak. It is a feeling so strange that for a long moment I cannot place it. I am worried. No, I am scared.
I do not know their laws!
This is one of those horrors that all your life you’re used to waking up from. This is the witch chasing you down into the swamp, the monster beneath the bed. This is my body falling helplessly through space. This is the plane crash. This is Batcha staring in Kristiina’s cabin window. But this time I cannot awake!
I do not know their laws. I have no control over what is happening!
This must be how Ig must have felt when Lacha’s half ton failed to come out of its fishtail.
The short generals break up their group examination. One takes Poppa’s letters and signals toward the corridor; just a simple raised finger and suddenly a severe-looking woman soldier surfaces from the doorway and approaches him. She looks like Pomerania’s Sister Agnes Marie out of her habit. She is thick-lipped and snub-nosed, a vast disappointment breeding within. When she reaches the general he leans, speaks, and sparkles, not in language, but gold; more than half his teeth have been replaced with the metal, and when he talks it is something one sees rather than hears — a lighthouse flashing its warning.
The sad soldier woman turns to me. “Mr Batterinski,” she says, “we would like to know why you have this material.”
“It’s letters, from my father,” I say, my voice tight and dry.”
“But is typed.”
“Yes. So?”
I have spoken too chippily and instantly regret it. Timo steps in, speaking gently, sincerely. “His father had it typed by someone else because he does not write clearly.”
She switches from English to Finnish and lectures Timo at length. Then she turns to the general and switches to yet another language. Then back to me, in English.
“We believe it is not a letter. We believe it is a manuscript.”
“It is a letter,” I say, trying to sound firm. “My father has also enclosed some of my grandfather’s memoirs. He’s dead. My father is simply having them typed up in English so that I will have them. That’s all.”
She tells the short general who has been huddling with a wiry little soldier in wire-rimmed glasses. The glasses bounce with a nervous twitch. This general has more of Jaja’s memoirs and is slapping them as he speaks. She enters the huddle and they grunt at each other for several minutes, the first general’s teeth periodically flashing with delight. I turn to Timo, but he indicates with a finger he has been told to button up. I am on my own here.
“Your grandfather,” she says when she returns, “he was from Poland, yes?”
“Yes.” But I am not. And he came over a hundred years ago. “Is there something wrong with that?” I ask, no sarcasm.
I feel Timo nudging my leg from behind, the message clear: tread carefully.
“No, of course not,” the woman says in a haughty voice. “The Poles and Soviets are friends. We would just like to wait a few minutes, yes. There is a seat for you here, please.”
She indicates a bench to the side, and before I can even think to complain I feel Timo’s hand pushing my shoulder in that direction. He follows behind me and when I sit, he sits, his big face wrinkling with concern.
“Is everything all right here?” a high, disturbed voice asks. It is Erkki, hanging on to the nail of a small finger, left hand.
Timo speaks. “They are looking at some letters of Felix’s.”
Erkki sneers like he has known I am a double agent all along. “What kind of letters?”
“A letter from my dear old father,” I say sarcastically.
“It contains stuff on Poland,” Timo says matter-of-factly. “And some clippings.”
Erkki reddens, anger and satisfaction rising to do battle. “What an incredibly stupid thing to do, Batterinski.”
I say nothing.
He persists. “You really should have known better.”
I cannot take it. “Fuck off Erkki. What do you mean ‘known better’? A letter or two or three from home — is that some kind of international crime or something?”
Erkki shakes his head, his prissy too-trimmed moustache curling in disgust along his upper lip. “What’s going to happen?” he asks Timo, as if Timo might himself have once brought letters from Pomerania into the Soviet Union.
“We wait,” Timo says.
Erkki nods, as if this satisfies him. “I’ll go ahead and be with the team,” he says. We nod, not carin
g.
I wish I smoked. I wish I hadn’t come. I wish Kristiina had. I wish Timo had told me to expect this. I fold my arms and they feel stronger now, the strength finally flowing back. Is this the way it is in battle? Soldiers so weakened by fear they can barely raise themselves to fire? I am as appalled by my fear as I am by the circumstance.
It is twenty minutes before the gold-toothed general and the translator return. He still carries Poppa’s letters and Jaja’s memoirs, but the clippings are missing. And he also has several long documents, as brown and dull as the visa they have taken from me.
“Would you come with us, Mr. Batterinski?” she commands rather then asks.
I turn to Timo for help, the terror washing down and through again. “May I come as well?” Timo, asks forcing a smile.
“No.”
I rise, look desperately at Timo, who can only raise his hands helplessly, and then follow them out through yet another heavily guarded exit while the few remaining players of the team, Pekka included, stare after me as if I am slipping from a cliff and they know no one can reach me in time. Beyond the barricade is a long hall and two armed soldiers fall in front of us. They stop at the far end before a large unmarked door and the general flashes his wealth and indicates I should enter.
Inside, a young soldier sits on a stool, eyeing me. No guns are in evidence here, but like a good deer hound, I can sense their presence. The room is starkly lighted by one central, adjustable spotlight, its beam spreading over a second stool a few feet from the soldier. I take this seat, knowing it’s mine.
The general smiles, the gold now black, and with great emphasis pulls out one of his own pockets, indicating that I am to follow suit. I do, my hand sweatily wrapping around my jackknife on the first dig. The general grunts and falls on the knife when I produce it. He opens the blades and runs a thick thumb over them and taps the handle for hollow chambers. I imagine what is going through his mind: General Ivan Goofov saved the Soviet Union’s beloved leader Leonid Brezhnev this morning by selflessly hurling his body on a diabolical new capitalist weapon a Polish mercenary disguised as a Canadian hockey player was trying to smuggle into the country. The Order of Lenin at least.
The Last Season Page 35