by Terry Fallis
Right before the end of the first period in Game Six, with the score still deadlocked at 0–0, Yuri Lyapkin, a defenceman, had his bell rung when Peter Mahovlich plowed him into the boards. The Soviet trainer was quickly escorted onto the ice, using his right hand to hold onto the arm of the linesman. Not conclusive evidence of another righty, but it was a start. Then when the trainer knelt down beside Lyapkin, he used his right hand to unsnap the player’s helmet, even though his left hand was much closer. Good enough for me. Another check mark in the right-handed column.
By this time it was almost noon and I was dying to know what progress Dimitri and Matt were making with the players. But I had just one more candidate to rule in or out, as the case may be.
I used the fast-forward button to move quickly to about the midpoint of the second period when Bobby Clarke’s famous two-hander felled Valeri Kharlamov. I watched for any sign of Vladimir Krupin, the Soviet team doctor, but he never stepped onto the ice. Kharlamov limped, under his own power, to the dressing room, where apparently no cameras recorded Dr. Krupin’s examination.
Rather than watching more tapes, I decided to bring Google onto my team. Dimitri had already logged me into the Wi-Fi network, so I simply plugged the doctor’s name into the search bar and hit Return. There were plenty of entries in Cyrillic that meant nothing to me. But there was one English article on the Hockey News website from 2012, commemorating the fortieth anniversary of what, in Canada, we called the Summit Series. The article recounted in bone-crushing detail the Bobby Clarke slash and its aftermath. The piece included an interview with Dr. Krupin from 1987 wherein he claimed Kharlamov’s ankle was indeed broken and that he’d immobilized it and given him a local anaesthetic so he could continue playing. Kharlamov had returned to the ice later in the second period. Well, that was all very interesting, but what really mattered to me were these two closing sentences:
It was the only interview Dr. Vladimir Krupin ever gave about the infamous Clarke slash. He died in a Moscow hospital in 1989 after a heart attack at the age of 72.
I was done. I’d confirmed that none of the non-players associated with the 1972 Soviet National Hockey Team was left-handed. None of them was our father. That meant that he must have been a player. It made me wish I’d not given up hockey. Another decision Gabriel and I made together that I’d like to take back.
—
When I returned to Dimitri Dumanovsky’s office, Matt and our resident Russian hockey historian looked at me in anticipation.
“Progress. I’ve conclusively determined that four of the five non-players were right-handed,” I announced. “I couldn’t figure out which hand the team doctor favoured but it really doesn’t matter. He died a year before we were conceived.”
“Blast,” Matt said. “We’ve made progress too, but haven’t found him yet. We’ve already eliminated four of our left-handed players.”
“Just give me the topline,” I asked Matt, while Dimitri buried his head in another file cabinet.
“Okay, in summary, two of the left-handed players actually died before January 1990, one from cancer and the other in a car accident. So they were eliminated from our little investigation, in the truest and most permanent sense of the word,” Matt explained. “Three lefties remained. We moved next to Anatoli Firsov. He was a left forward on the 1972 team.”
Dimitri rolled his eyes.
“Actually, we call them left wingers,” I corrected.
“Right then, he was a left winger, but he was not a starting player. He saw very little action in the series. But he went on to be first a player, and then a player coach for the Soviet Red Army team in the old Soviet League, retiring in early 1992, as the Eastern Bloc broke apart. Still, he was a possibility. So we tried to confirm his whereabouts around March 23, 1990, when you and I were likely conceived.”
“Right. I’m with you. And?”
“Well, the Soviet hockey season was still on in March. So Dimitri pulled the game sheets for the Soviet Red Army team for all the games in the early months of 1990,” Matt said, holding up the stack of game sheets. “Firsov played for the team in all nine games in March. He scored twice, as Dimitri put it, ‘had two assists, and was assessed four penalties’ across those nine games. With never more than four days between games, it is highly unlikely, indeed almost impossible, that in the middle of this stretch of games he could have suddenly flown to Ottawa, met our mother, and grown close enough to her to, well, to be an equal partner in our conception, and then jet back to Russia in time for the next game. It just doesn’t make sense. So we’ve ruled out Anatoli Firsov.”
“Shit,” I said. “I can’t really argue with that. Okay, three down, two to go. Who’s next?”
“Leonid Veselov, another lesser-known player who only took a few shifts in the tournament,” Matt said. Dimitri looked up and shook his head at the name. “Over to you, Dimitri. Why don’t you tell Alex why Leonid Veselov is not our father?”
“Sorry, Alexei, but our friend Leonid is also not him.”
He turned to his computer and pulled up a newspaper article and photo. He pointed to a youngish-looking man in the back of a police car.
“Leonid Veselov?” I asked.
“Bongo,” replied Dimitri.
“I think you mean bingo.”
“Stupid,” he said. “Bingo. It is Leonid leaving court to start four-year prison sentence for nasty bar fight. I think it was about somebody’s girlfriend and lots of vodka.”
“But then,” Matt interjected, “his four-year sentence was extended to eight years when he was implicated in a prison riot. But in good news, he was scoring champion for the prison floor hockey team.”
“When was he locked up?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“June 1985 to July 1993,” Dimitri reported.
“Four down, one to go,” I sighed. “Who’s the lucky final prospect?”
“Yuri Golov is his name,” said Matt. “And we’ve saved the best for last.”
“Well, by the process of elimination, Yuri must be our man,” I said.
“Based on what we’ve found so far, you might be right,” Matt said.
Dimitri frowned and waved to cede the floor to Matt.
“Right then. We’ve checked his hockey records, and Yuri Golov was very young when he was on the team in 1972. He was a nineteen-year-old army officer and did not play much in the series. Like our earlier candidate, Anatoli, Yuri also played in the old Soviet League afterwards. The most recent reference Dimitri can find had him playing for Dynamo Moscow early in 1990. There’s nothing in the Russian media after that. It’s as if he disappeared.”
“Okay, then what?” I pushed. “Don’t keep me hanging here.”
Matt then turned his laptop around to show me another newspaper clipping on the screen, this one in English.
“Then I found this courtesy of several online search engines. It’s a 1991 Toronto Star article about the University of Toronto’s Varsity hockey assistant coach, Yuri Golov. It also says he was working with Hockey Canada to help get Team Canada ready for the Lillehammer Olympics. This must be our father.”
The photos Matt had found online showed a very Slavic-looking man – high cheekbones and a strong jawline – with no obvious physical similarities to us.
“We couldn’t find any record of him in Canada before 1991, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. Besides, he is our only option.”
“I have just found little bit more on Russian Internet,” Dimitri said. “It seems still Yuri Golov is alive.”
He called up an article in a Yaroslavl newspaper from June 2011 about a new industrial bakery that had recently opened. There was a photo in the story showing ten bakers gathered around one of the large new ovens. Yuri Golov was identified in the photo, third from the left. Dimitri used the Zoom function to make the photo larger.
“Hello, Yuri Golov,” Matt said when it was obvious we’d made a positive ID. “So, Yuri Golov, former member of the Soviet National Hocke
y Team, and potential father of identical twin sons, is now living in Yaroslavl and working as a baker?”
“Correct,” Dimitri replied. “And I just found a Y. Golov in online telephone directory for Yaroslavl.”
“Where is Yaroslavl?” I asked.
“About 250 kilometres north and east of Moscow where Volga and Kotorosl rivers meet. There is some history there, but is not great town. But they do have new bakery,” Dimitri said.
We agreed that Dimitri should call but would not tell Yuri Golov about us. He suggested he just ask Yuri if he could come to Yaroslavl to see him about some old hockey records he was trying to assemble and maybe ask him a few questions about his time in the old Soviet League.
“Could we go tomorrow?” Matt asked.
Dimitri checked his old-school paper desk calendar for the next day.
“I am hockey historian. Most days are clear.”
He called, and the phone rang and rang and rang. Dimitri frowned but kept the phone to his ear. Finally, just as he started to hang up, we all heard someone pick up on the other end.
“Yuri?” Dimitri said in a heavier accent.
He then spoke to someone for about six minutes and hung up.
“It was Yuri, our Yuri,” Dimitri said. “He sounded hanged over. But he said yes to see me tomorrow, but not until twelve. I told him I had two friends who might be with me. He said okay. You have got me now curious. I guess we are going to Yaroslavl.”
Someone shouted, “Kill the spotlights!” But they stayed very much alive.
CHAPTER 10
We met Dimitri on the platform of the Moscow Yaroslavskaya station at 7:15 for the 7:35 departure. We’d taken the Metro from our hotel that morning, like so many other commuters.
“You have my ticket?” he asked.
“Right here,” I said, handing it over.
“We should get on now or seats will be gone.”
We managed to find three seats together. Dimitri took the single seat facing backwards so Matt and I could behold the breathtaking scenery as it flew past our window. Kidding. The only aspect of the trip that was breathtaking was the foul odour emanating from the young, rough-looking man sitting directly across from me. Our knees touched on occasion. Dimitri, sitting next to him, seemed unaffected by the stench.
I tried to sleep for some of the four-hour run, but that was not going to happen. Both Matt and I had been awake most of the night in anticipation of meeting our father. I’d Googled part of the night away trying to find out more about Yuri Golov. Given my limited ability to read Cyrillic – and by limited, I mean nonexistent – I was left with very few English entries. I found a brief reference to him as a volunteer coach with the local Yaroslavl hockey team. Matt had spent the night doing the same thing.
I sent a long update email to Abby, who’d been texting me every twenty minutes or so. Despite my inability to keep her textually satisfied, I’d been thinking about her quite a bit. Not on purpose. She was just there.
“I read that Yuri Golov is still involved in ice hockey in Yaroslavl,” Matt said.
You can just say “hockey,” not “ice hockey.”
“Yes,” Dimitri replied. “He is helping to rebuilding city’s KHL team, the Lokomotiv, after the tragedy.”
“What tragedy?” Matt asked.
“Four years ago, whole Lokomotiv team was killed on their way to their first game of season. The plane crashed,” Dimitri explained. “It happened just when they take off. Then poof! Whole team gone.”
“That was in Yaroslavl? I remember that,” Matt said, turning to me.
“It was big news in Canada,” I said. “Very sad.”
“The team now is back, but it takes time to be good,” Dimitri said. “And they are not as strong as before.”
The malodorous man next to me seemed to be growing more pungent with every passing kilometre. I’m quite proficient at holding my breath, but not breathing for four hours is slightly beyond my capabilities. For reasons other than brotherly bonding, I leaned towards Matt, sitting beside me.
Beyond near-asphyxia, the four-hour trip passed uneventfully in what felt like eight hours. We took a taxi from the Yaroslavl Glavny train station. It was a short drive to the nondescript, low-rise apartment house – I actually can’t describe how nondescript it was. I almost nodded off when looking at the building for the very first time. It must have been designed and built during a nationwide architects’ strike. The only aesthetic flourish was a piece of blue-painted plywood covering a broken window in the front door.
There was no security system and no way to buzz up to a tenant. We just walked directly up the stairs to the second floor, and down a dank, dirty, and dimly lit corridor that smelled, to me, very much like a dank, dirty, and dimly lit corridor. But compared to my neighbour on the train, it was quite pleasing to the nose.
Dimitri stopped in front of a door with a number 6 stencilled on it. He looked at us. My heart was attempting to break free from its moorings, it was beating so fast. Matt looked a little calmer but still excited.
“If I am you, don’t expect too much,” Dimitri said.
Then he knocked on the door. Nothing. Again he knocked. Nothing. And a third time knocking, or pounding more like it. Still, not a sound from within. So that’s it then. We’d come all this way, and now this. I shrugged my shoulders, giving up, but Dimitri shook his head and went at the door again like he was working the speed bag in a gym.
“Yuri!” he shouted through the door. “Yuri Golov!”
He shouted other words but none I recognized.
After a few more seconds of silence, we heard it. The guttural groan that escaped beneath the door wasn’t so much a sound as a surrender. We waited. We heard him banging around within, though I had no idea what he was doing. Inside, the loud crashing and banging noises made me wonder if one of those automated self-propelled vacuum cleaners was running at high speed but programmed to navigate a completely different apartment. Eventually, we heard him struggling with the door lock, as if he might be unfamiliar with it. Then the door opened. Standing there barefoot, in a grey hoody and jeans, was the towering presence of Yuri Golov. Looking closely, I knew we had the right guy, but he was barely recognizable from the photos we’d spent the night studying. He hadn’t shaved in a long time. There was a reasonably fresh cut above his right eye. His hair was longer than in any of the photos we’d found online, and to call his mop unruly would be an understatement of monstrous proportions. He stood before us, swaying gently, fists clenched at his sides. He looked even older than his sixty-three years. I had the distinct impression that he was not happy to have been roused at the ungodly hour of 12:15 p.m.
“Yuri, we spoke yesterday,” Dimitri said. “I’m Dimitri Dumanovsky.”
“Why English?” Yuri asked.
“Sorry, my friends speak only English and they wanted to meet you.”
“I told you come at noon,” Yuri said.
“Yes, Yuri, you did,” Dimitri replied. “Sorry we’re a few minutes late.”
“Late? It’s after noon now?” he asked.
“Yes, Yuri. It’s 12:15.”
He stood there for a few more seconds until he noticed my wristwatch and pointed to it.
I held up my arm so he could see the watch face and confirm the time.
“Sorry,” he replied. “It feels like very early in morning. Come in.”
He led us inside and closed the door behind us.
We stepped carefully and clustered near the kitchen counter where there was just enough floor space to accommodate the three of us. It was what we in the West would call a bachelor apartment. It was also what we in the West would call messy beyond all comprehension. One large room, a pull-out couch, a galley kitchen, and a small bathroom in the far corner near the sole window. The chaos in the apartment suggested either a recent bomb blast or perhaps a Force 12 hurricane. A strange smell, like freshly baked alcohol-infused bread, lingered. There was life’s debris everywhere. In one corner of th
e kitchen floor, there were several empty clear bottles with a green label featuring a bear. I’d already learned this was the cheapest, rotgut, local vodka of choice, Dobry Medved, or Gentle Bear. I noticed a half dozen more empties scattered near the couch and a few on the windowsill. Then something else caught my eye near the bathroom door. It was a shallow box filled with more vodka empties. Oh yes, I also noticed there were some vodka empties, yes, Gentle Bear, spilling out from under the couch and crowding our feet. The apartment was a veritable Gentle Bear sanctuary where the protected species was allowed to multiply and flourish.
“Okay. You are here. I am here,” Yuri said, looking at Dimitri. “What do you want to know?”
Dimitri shook his head and pointed to us, or rather to Matt.
“All right then, Yuri, I’m Matthew Paterson from London, and this is my twin brother – we’re identical twins – Alex MacAskill, from Canada, more specifically, from Ottawa, where we were born.”
There was absolutely no flash of recognition or concern or resentment or anything when the words “identical twins” and “Ottawa” sounded in the same sentence. I watched him closely to see the ruble drop behind his eyes, but it never did. He seemed utterly unfazed.
“Okay, so why are you twins here in Yaroslavl?” he asked. “I still don’t see why. Explain to me.”
Yuri’s command of English was quite good. There was an accent, yes, but he was easily understood.