by Terry Fallis
Matt’s mouth sagged open as he shook his head.
“Unbelievable. Impeccable. The voice, the mannerisms, the inflection, the tone, the pacing. Everything,” he said. “How do you do that?”
“Well, I’m an actor. I worked very hard at acting in high school. I loved it. Modesty aside, I think I’m still sort of good at it.”
“Can you do some more accents? That’s the most impressive part of your performance.”
“Can I do more accents? Does Donald Trump use hair product?”
Then, in quick succession, I repeated Matt’s same three sentences in the voices of Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory, Barack Obama, Sean Connery from his James Bond period, and finally, Mike Myers as Fat Bastard in the Austin Powers films. I had dozens of voices I’d been practising for years. I’d added many more since becoming a Netflix member and watching all the old TV series and movies I’d never seen before.
Matt was nearly on the floor in hysterics.
“Brilliant! Bloody brilliant!” he wheezed. “I think your talents are wasted in software engineering.”
“Thanks. I think.”
His breathing had almost returned to normal. I took another long draw from my Heineken, parched from my little one-man show.
“But you don’t strike me as someone who would naturally gravitate to acting. You know, being on stage in front of lots of people, mostly strangers.”
You just can’t stay away from it. But it totally makes sense.
“Think about it, Matt. When I’m acting, it’s not just that I’m inhabiting someone else’s character, it’s that I’m no longer inhabiting my own. I’m somebody else. I’m no longer shy. I’m no longer nervous. I’m no longer worried about being found out, of being called out or put down. In a way, I’m liberated from myself when I’m in someone else’s shoes, wearing their clothes, speaking in their voice, shouldering their problems. It’s like a heavy weight is lifted. I don’t expect you to understand. Not yet. You don’t know enough, yet. But you will eventually.”
“Well, that was rather deep,” Matt replied. “I won’t push you. I’ll give you all the time you need. But I’m ready when you are.”
“Thanks, Matthew.”
He looked past me for a moment as he took a long swallow of his beer.
“You know,” he said, “if we’d grown up side by side, we’d have dealt with this together long before now. It would be behind you, now, behind us.”
“I know.”
—
I spent the next morning sitting with Matt and Isabella Prochillo working our way through the Innovatengage software. I doubt I could have done it without Matt there. He seemed to sense this and helped a great deal as I tried very hard not to sound like I was being critical of Isabella’s work. In reality, she’d done an amazing job on the code and I found several different ways of telling her that, particularly when I was about to suggest an improvement. But I need not have worried. She was a true professional and seemed excited at the enhancements I proposed. She even gave me a hug just before she left to brief her team so they could implement most of my changes and incorporate them into the next software update, which was imminent.
“Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Matt asked after she’d departed.
“She was great,” I replied. “Smart and nice – a rare and wonderful combination in software engineers.”
“All right. With that out of the way,” Matt said, “it’s time you and I turned to our next pressing challenge.”
“Can’t we just bask a little longer in the afterglow of our triumphant reconnection?”
“No, we can’t,” he replied solemnly. “Our story isn’t complete until our family is complete. It’s time to track down our father.”
Oh sure. No problem. Why don’t we crack cold fusion and cure cancer while we’re at it? And then after lunch, we’ll move on to the crisis in the Middle East.
“Oh sure. No problem. Do you think we’ll be gone overnight?” I replied.
He didn’t even acknowledge my gift for sarcasm. Rather he ignored my comment, sat down at his desk, and lifted the lid on his laptop.
“Matt, finding you was actually kind of easy after I discovered the photo,” I said. “But that photo won’t help us find our father. So where do we start?”
“Let’s start at the very beginning,” he replied in a kind of rhythmic voice.
Please tell me you’re not about to sing a song from The Sound of Music.
“Please tell me you’re not about to sing a song from The Sound of Music.”
“I was thinking about it, but perhaps another time,” he said. “Instead, why don’t we review what we already know about our mystery father?”
I got up from the couch at the other end of his office and moved to a chair in front of his desk. I leaned forward, my elbows on the desk.
“Okay. I’m with you.”
“We know our father was in Ottawa at least for a period of time around the date of our conception and then of our birth, assuming the photo is of our father,” Matt said.
“Right,” I agreed. “We also know our father clearly went to some lengths, with Mom’s complicity, to keep his identity a secret. They didn’t want us to know about him. And they apparently didn’t want us to know about each other, either. That’s going to make it hard. And that’s about all we know.”
Matt’s fingers were working his touchpad and keyboard.
“We actually do know something else. And we know it from the very photo you just dismissed,” Matt said.
He swivelled his computer so I could see the screen. He’d obviously scanned the photograph I’d found in Mom’s safety deposit box. Propelling his chair around to my side of the desk, he used the touchpad to enlarge the photo. Then he repositioned part of the enlarged shot to centre stage. Filling the screen was our father’s left arm cradling Matt’s diapered baby ass.
“You see? We do know something else,” Matt said, pointing. “We know our father had a tattoo.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. “That really narrows it down. I’m sure we’ll bump into him on the street any day now.”
PART THREE
After their collective gasp, it took what seemed like a long time before anyone said anything. It wasn’t as long as it seemed.
CHAPTER 9
The enlarged photo was a little blurry but still revealed more details of the tattoo than you could see in the original.
“Right, then,” Matt said, as we both stared at the left arm of the man we assumed was our father. “What do you see?”
“I see two parallel diagonal lines that disappear at the top beneath some red shape with curvy borders, and at the bottom they go under your baby butt resting on his forearm. Two more diagonal lines cross the first two towards the bottom, but I can see even less of them.”
“What else?”
“And I see a small black circle, or maybe a black ball, below the crossed diagonal lines,” I continued. “And finally, I see two complete letters and part of a third. We’ve got an upper-case ‘K,’ a lower case ‘a,’ and what looks like it might be an upper-case ‘H,’ though it’s smaller than the capital ‘K.’ Weird.”
“Perhaps it’s a capital ‘A’ with the top cut off from our view,” Matt offered.
“Maybe. So the options are ‘KaA’ or ‘KaH,’ ” I said, spelling out the two word fragments. “Neither makes much sense.”
It felt like I was too close to the image, that it was too big to take in clearly. So I stood up, stepped back from the screen a couple of paces, and turned to view it again.
“Hmmm. I’m not sure it’s a black circle,” I said. “I’ve just discerned a slight change in the shade of black along the lower portion that makes it look more like a disk than a circle or ball.”
Matt nodded. “I see it now.”
I was getting a little bug-eyed from staring at the image with such intensity. I looked away and surveyed the office scene playing out on the other side of the glass. There was a
lot going on. Two different groups were meeting in different corners of the office. A Foosball tournament seemed to be in full swing. And the sales and new bus dev team was projecting a PowerPoint deck onto a blank wall, presumably in anticipation of an upcoming pitch. Still, something was nudging at my consciousness – a memory, perhaps. Something.
Matt was silent.
I turned back to the screen and finally saw it. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen it before, but now that I had, it was almost unmistakable.
Holy shit, I’m an idiot, a blind idiot.
“It’s a puck,” I said, moving closer. “It’s a puck. So those aren’t just two sets of parallel lines crossing at the bottom, those are two hockey sticks. And now that I see it, if I’m right, that red thing at the top could be part of a flag, probably Canadian by the colour.”
“I don’t see it.” Matt sighed.
“If it were a soccer ball, or a cricket ball, you’d see it. National context is everything, here,” I explained. “And remember, we’re only seeing half of the tattoo. You’re rather unhelpfully sitting on the other half. But if we were seeing it all, I suspect we’d see two hockey sticks angling down and crossing just above the puck in the middle. I once received a similarly configured hockey crest for losing a peewee tournament.”
“ ‘Peewee tournament’?” Matt said. “I’m not sure I even want to know what that entails. It sounds like some kind of team toilet-training ritual.”
“Stay with me, Matt, we’re almost there,” I said. “I don’t really know what else is going on in the image – those letters are really baffling – but now that I’ve made the hockey connection, that really does look like crossed sticks and a puck to me.”
“I wouldn’t have seen that in a million years,” Matt said.
“I should have seen it long before now. Hockey was my game, at least until I gave it up when I was fifteen.”
“So you’re certain it’s something to do with hockey?”
“Not completely certain. But it’s somewhere to start,” I replied. “Besides, we’re talking Canada here, so hockey is always a good bet.”
“I guess it’s a start, but I think we could use some help,” Matt said. I watched as he saved the enlarged image as a jpeg and opened up a new email message. He hit “To:” and selected “Entire Organization.” In the Subject line, he simply wrote “Help?” Then he wrote this message:
Hi gang,
Alex and I are trying to solve a mystery. We think this somewhat blurry photo of part of a tattoo on the inside of a man’s left arm might be related to ice hockey – at least that’s what my Canadian brother Alex sees. The red shape might be a flag (Canadian?), but again, we’re not sure. And we have absolutely no idea what the letters (either ‘KaA’ or ‘KaH’?) mean. Any ideas?
Thanks,
Matt
He hit Send.
When we got home that night we snagged a couple of beers and took them out on the deck.
“Feel like an Indian tonight?” Matt asked.
What?
“Well, um, no, I think I feel like my usual Canadian self,” I replied. “I’m not sure what it means to ‘feel like an Indian.’ ”
“No. It’s a Britishism that simply means do you want to order Indian take-away for dinner,” he explained. “You know, to eat.”
“Ah. Got it,” I said. “Then, yes, I guess I do feel like an Indian, though I’m not crazy about that line.”
Matt was already dialing his iPhone. He placed the order and then checked his email. He discovered he’d already received five responses to his company-wide electronic plea for tattoo help.
The first four were inconsequential and offered no new insights. Matt thought they were well-intentioned staff who simply wanted to register that they had received, reviewed, and thought about his email, even if they couldn’t really shed any new light on the tattoo. But the fifth email, from Oksana Lysenko, a Ukrainian immigrant – I remembered her accent – and one of the coders I’d met on my first day in the office, was different. It was quite different.
Hi Matt,
I agree with Alex. I think this is a hockey tattoo. The partial word makes no sense in English, but in Russian, it’s quite a different story. I think the whole word in Cyrillic might be Канада. In English, the word is “Canada.” I suspect the red shape at the top is probably part of either the Canadian or old Soviet flag, not sure which. If it’s the Soviet flag, it dates the tattoo to before the breakup of the Soviet Union, so pre-1991. I wish I could tell you more about it. But I play hockey Tuesday nights and my coach is Russian. He actually works with the IHUK national women’s team. He’s quiet, but nice. Do you want me to see if he will talk to you?
Oks
Two days later, Matt and I were sitting at a snack bar table at the Lee Valley Ice Centre in northeast London. I could barely sit still and Matt was as fidgety as I was. Pavel Dubov was not tall, but he was very well built. I put him at about fifty-five years old. He’d just finished running a practice on the ice when he arrived at our table, as Oksana had arranged. We shook hands and then sat down.
“Okay, so I am here,” Pavel said, in his pronounced Russian accent. “What is this about hockey tattoo?”
As we’d agreed, Matt took the lead.
“Thanks for agreeing to meet with us,” Matt opened. “We’re trying to learn anything we can about a tattoo that may or may not be Russian in origin, and we think it may have something to do with hockey.”
Pavel nodded as Matt pulled up the enlarged image on his iPad and slid it over to him. He picked up the iPad, pushed his glasses up on his forehead, and examined the photo closely. At one point he extended his arms to move the image further away from his aging eyes. Finally, he started nodding and the first faint trace of a smile took hold of the corners of his mouth.
“I have not seen one of these for great many years.”
“So you recognize it?” I piped up, my excitement overtaking my reticence.
“I think, yes.”
“What can you tell us?” Matt asked.
“Well, I cannot be sure, but I think is a tattoo made before first great series against Team Canada in 1972,” he said. “I remember reading something about it years ago.”
“The Canada–Russia series, the Summit Series?” I exclaimed.
“Yes, but we called it the Canada–USSR series.”
“Paul Henderson scored the winning goal, right?” I asked. “It’s a famous moment in Canadian history. I learned about it in school.” Pavel winced at the name.
“Always with Paul Henderson,” Pavel said. “Thank you for reminding me. It was huge failure, big defeat for us. It took us years to recover.”
I clammed up again.
“So we can assume that whoever took the trouble to have this tattoo inked on his arm was a true fan?” asked Matt.
Pavel’s still not fully formed smile made a return appearance. “Actually, you can say even more than that. As I remember, this tattoo was created only for players on national team. No one else could have one.”
“So you think the man in this photo was a player on the Russian national ice hockey team?” Matt asked.
“The Soviet team,” Pavel said. “Possibly he could have been one of the coaches or trainers, but this I don’t know for sure.”
“Is there anything else you can tell us about the tattoo?” Matt asked.
“I think no. This was just before my time. I was just boy in 1972. But Dimitri Dumanovsky, guy I know, could tell you lots more.”
“Who is Dimitri?” Matt asked.
“For my rubles, he is best hockey historian of Soviet era,” Pavel said. “If anyone can tell you about this tattoo and who is wearing it, it will be DD.”
I couldn’t believe we might be closing in on our father. I could barely contain myself. But I did. Matt, however, wasn’t plagued by the same constraints.
“Brilliant, Pavel! That’s amazing!” Matt shouted. “Where can we find Dimitri Dumanoskovitch, Dumanovs
kolav, Dumanwhatshisname?”
“Dumanovsky. Dimitri Dumanovsky,” Pavel replied. “Where can you find him? Well, I think you can still find him where he’s always been. Moscow.”
—
Less than a week later, we were sitting in the departure lounge at Heathrow when another of her emails arrived.
TO: Alex MacAskill
FROM: Laura Park
RE: Please…
Hi Alex,
As you can see, I don’t give up easily. I truly believe that talking about that day could be therapeutic, even cathartic, for you, and maybe for me, too. Don’t you think it’s time? It’s been nearly ten years, almost an entire decade. Your perspective on the event is now informed by all those years of living, and growing, and reflecting. Don’t let this imprison you any longer. I implore you to speak with me about it. I promise you the piece I write will treat you and your experience that day with the reverence and respect it deserves. Please, I’ll come to you anywhere, anytime.
Laura
I didn’t respond, but neither did I delete it this time. I was too tired and excited to deal with it just then. It had been a very hectic several days since our meeting with Pavel Dubov. To be fair, making arrangements to fly to Moscow wasn’t nearly as onerous as I’d expected. There was some red tape involved, no pun intended, but not much. We had to obtain a visa from the Russian Embassy on Kensington Church Street in London. The embassy was employing a fancy new high-tech fingerprint scanning procedure that actually helped speed up the process of securing a visa. With neither of us checking boxes for international fugitive, underworld kingpin, violent warlord, escaped money-launderer, or petty criminal, Matt and I seemed to pass their little digital fingerprint test.
We’d already agreed that we wouldn’t specify on our visa applications that we were heading to Moscow in search of our long-lost father. We feared that might complicate matters. So we just claimed we were visiting Moscow on vacation. With passports and visas in hand, we boarded our flight without any issues. Matt did the talking. I opened my yap only when required to. That’s how I liked it.