by John Degen
“I love this new city, this Montreal, but I am not fooled into thinking it is so much more free than where we’ve come from, my friends, only that I was free in choosing it. You will see what I mean, I think, when you get your first jobs over here. You will see what this Western freedom really means.
“And now I am here. I made my coat a little bit dusty, then walked across, I think, fifteen sets of tracks in the switching area, and found the corresponding hole in the fence on the Italian side. A much more accommodating hole, the Italian hole. There were no shots, and no sirens. No bright lights switched on to blind me in my tracks. I simply strolled through the night into Trieste. You know, it is interesting about the tracks. I walked across them without counting them, not even thinking to, and only many weeks after my arrival in North America did I think back to that moment and wonder how many tracks there were. I can count them in my mind now, every one of them. The mind knows; it knows even when we don’t, like you knew when you saw me outside your door. You knew. Your mind just took some time telling you. And now I am here. And, to my great joy, and my shame, so are you. Welcome, my friends, to my city. Welcome to Montreal.”
That was it for him on that first morning. Ionescu came into their room with his terrible cookies, told them the story of his life for almost an hour and, just as suddenly as he arrived, he left. But before leaving he insisted on giving them one more gift.
“I have been in this Montreal for almost a year now,” he said. “It is very different for defectors, you know, than it might be for just you everyday refugees. Defectors get a certain privilege; especially defectors these Western authorities think might be able to help them with information. From Trieste, I travelled quickly to Paris and London and, given the choice to stay in England or go to North America, with a list of ‘safe’ cities for me to disappear into, I chose Montreal. I chose this city, Nicolae, because I am still good at what I do. I knew you would not find in Israel what it is you need, and I knew how hard it was to reach New York. I bet against Australia for you, and… look at you here. I bet correctly.
“There are many Romanians here in Montreal, you will find. Many from recent times and many more from a hundred years ago. You know, they have a street in this city named after our Queen Mary, our teenaged English Saxe-Coburg who married Ferdinand. Everyone assumes it is named for a Scottish woman, but if you check the archives, it was named for our lovely Mary.
“And now, I am here. Still an invisible man. Now, I am invisible to avoid being followed myself, to save my own skin. It’s almost too silly to think about. There is nothing I know that will help anyone perform any act of counter- revolution against great mother Romania or the Soviet Union, but I don’t fool myself. I am Securitate, and the defection of a Securitate is serious business. Given the opportunity, they will try to kill me, I know this.
“Of course, this means I should not be talking to you—for my own good I should avoid the very sight of you; but, when I saw your name on the list, I simply could not stop myself. This is the new life, Nicolae. In the old life, I could never have spoken to you, I mean really spoken to you as I have today. But this now, what you see outside your little window here is the new life. I will not have to hide forever.
“Anyway, I will go now. I leave you these tickets. They are not much of a gift, but they are what I can afford to give right now. I think maybe you will enjoy this spectacle, maybe especially the boy here. It is no football match, but it is interesting, and more importantly, it is Canadian—from the new life.”
Ionescu left the room before Nicolae could stand up from the table, closing the door for himself without looking back. Nicolae, Veronica and Dragos were left sitting at the little wooden table in the YMCA on de Maisonneuve, and on the table in front of them lay Ionescu’s parting gift. Three tickets to the Montreal Forum for that very evening. Three tickets to see the Montreal Canadiens play hockey against the New York Rangers. One day in their new city, in their new country and they found themselves preparing to attend a sporting event. They didn’t know what the Montreal Forum was, or where it might be in the city. Nicolae was familiar with hockey, of course. There had been hockey in Romania for many, many years, but as far as he knew it was played only in the very coldest time of winter, outdoors, and then not very well.
They had just been visited by a phantom from their old life. The most fearsome kind of phantom, a security police, and yet somehow none of them had succumbed to anxiety. They found themselves laughing about it. A security police had visited them, brought horrible cookies, made a confession and then left them with tickets to see a sporting match.
Nicolae and his family dressed themselves as nicely as they could manage, and went to the Montreal Forum to experience this spectacle Ionescu had promised. The tickets were for 7:30 in the evening, a strange time for sports. Would it not be dark? Before the game, they did their business for the day. It was important they checked in at the immigration department and made their various appointments with advisors and assistance agencies. There were distant connections, the friends of friends, the relatives of relatives to be telephoned and surprised with a friendly voice in their old language. And, of course, there was the city to be explored, an art gallery here and there, a subway system to be deciphered. They were told by one of the friends of friends that they could find real Romanian smoked meat in a restaurant on Boulevard Saint-Laurent, and so they did.
They were tourists for a day, and such a day passes very quickly. In the evening, full of meat and new experience, they found their way along Sainte-Catherine Street to the Forum. They were laughing, and Nicolae and Veronica could not seem to keep their hands off each other. It was as Ionescu had suggested. They were in the new life. Without money, without a home, without even the promise of a job, they were nevertheless very happy people. Such a sight was the Forum, with its crowds of people outside, its boys selling programs and men in scarves selling tickets in the street. It seemed impossible that this thing, this hockey game, just a normal part of life in Montreal would be theirs for the evening.
And then Nicolae saw Ionescu, winking at him from behind a scarf. The invisible man, no longer so invisible to Nicolae after their formal introduction. He was pacing the street outside the Forum, yelling in near-perfect French, selling tickets to anyone who was interested. The tickets he had given Nicolae and his family were his bread. Ionescu yelled through his scarf at passersby, tempting them with tickets, and Nicolae could tell he was smiling broadly at the sight of him. He imagined the same scene from where Ionescu was standing. This little family who had looked so small and frightened in the morning, now smiling and full of food.
Feeling immense gratitude, Nicolae did the only thing he could think of to do. He took a hand from his pocket and sent a peace sign through the air to Ionescu. It was the sign only Nicolae’s very good friends would use to acknowledge each other on the streets in Bucharest. It meant, we know each other. We are the same. Ionescu must have watched Nicolae make this sign hundreds of time in Bucharest, but only for friends. Nicolae could see only his eyes that evening, but he felt sure it made Ionescu very happy to see this sign directed at him.
“That was Dragos’s introduction to this game he has become so good at,” Nicolae says through more cigar smoke.
Tony has slowed his searching now, the alcohol and exhaustion beginning to gain advantage. In a darkened corridor, he finds a wooden bench and sprawls across it, defeated. He feels an ominous nausea building in his gut.
“It’s interesting, yes, to consider how we travelled from that first ever hockey game, to this moment here? How what begins in foreignness and uncertainty can become the very centre of things.”
Ionescu had not given them the best seats, but on that night what did they know? They were very high up in the building, and the chairs very narrow and hard. It was all a bit tight and uncomfortable, but with a perfect view of the playing surface. Veronica twisted in her seat, observing the crowd, looking to see what it meant to live in Montreal, w
hat other people wore, how they spoke to each other. Before that night, the only other hockey matches Nicolae had seen were at outdoor rinks. He was accustomed to watching the game standing up in the freezing cold and trying to see over the heads of all those in front of him. But in the Forum the upper stands fell away so steeply, all the ice was revealed to them despite the crowd. It turned the match into a sort of board game, and for the first time, that night, Nicolae began to understand the subtler skills of the sport. He could watch the movement of the puck from player to player, adjusting to set defences like pieces on a chessboard. The strategies became apparent.
On that evening, Canadian hockey began to resemble Romanian soccer, and Nicolae understood its attraction. The speed and individual skills of the players. The pace of the game, and of course, the almost unrestrained violence. It all reminded him of the soccer one sees in Bucharest, and also a little of his own game, the handball he played as a youth. Rough and fast. Beautiful.
Fifteen
“Tony, don’t worry. It is all just part of the ceremony.” The drunken bridegroom, Dragos Petrescu, clapped a sweaty hand on the back of Tony’s neck.
“I would have warned you about it, but I didn’t think they would take the Cup as well. Usually, it is just the bride that goes, stolen off to somewhere, and I must now pay a ransom to get her back. It is just a tradition. It is to show how much I am devoted to her, how much I love her. It is the last test of my loyalty before I am allowed to have her for life. I think they simply couldn’t stop themselves; it was too funny for them to take the Cup as well, so now we both have to pay a ransom to get our women back. Do not worry about the Cup. They are keeping it safe, as safe as they will keep Irina. They must keep it safe, or there would be no point in ransoming it.”
Dragos sits with Tony at the head table, trying to reassure him, a roomful of wedding guests smiling into their faces. Tony has just returned from the bathroom where he has thrown up his dinner, several glasses of champagne and several more of ţuică. His eyes ache and a shaking in his hands has become uncontrollable. His bow tie is gone, his jacket is off and he has rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow. He wants to begin yelling, but doesn’t. He thinks about games and weddings and the polite disasters people visit upon each other in the name of fun.
He remembers the moment a crowd of wedding guests closed around him, blocking his view of the Cup. He remembers being too drunk and too intent on winning a kiss to care about anything else. He recalls the moment he stopped caring about the Cup. He is a little in awe of how he stopped paying attention, and in awe of the empty podium. Tony stands and walks to the red-curtained doorway of the room’s far closet. Petrescu follows him, laughing here and there and berating the crowd in Romanian. Tony reaches behind the curtain and drags a black case into the light. He can tell the Cup is not inside by the weight of the case, but he opens it anyway, checking its compartments, making sure of his white gloves and the silks he uses for cleaning the trophy. When Petrescu reaches out to pat his shoulder, Tony blocks his arm away. There is violence in his defence. Petrescu stumbles backwards.
“It’s easy for you,” Tony says to the drunken champion. “You have everything.”
In the Forum that night, there was the noise of the crowd, the music from the loudspeakers, a great warm energy throughout the building, much excitement. And when one looked to the ice, there was such light and colour. The Montreal players in white and red and the New York players in blue. Dragos Petrescu-Nicolae sat at the very edge of his small seat there, very high up in the Forum. He was watching the skaters do their circles in preparation for the start of the game. He was consuming this sight, this spectacle, like it was fresh water and he had been so terribly thirsty for such a long time. He had his hands on the seat and he was lifting his little bum up and letting it drop again. He was bouncing in his seat, unable to control the excitement that was pulsing in his small body. His excitement was a beautiful thing for his parents to watch. For over a year they had worried in the night that they were damaging our child with their decisions. But here was real happiness again; in fact, a happiness like they had never seen in him.
The game began and Dragos watched the movements of the puck and the shifting of the players. He learned the basics of the game within the first ten minutes and soon he was explaining the action to his parents.
“They must stop now because that player there, number 29, crossed that blue line before the black disc.”
“Watch now as those three players leave the ice and three other players come on. It will happen very quickly. See, now. They don’t stop the game to change like in football, they just change.”
“They will bring the disc all the way back and drop it to the ice near the goal, I think because it crossed all the lines without another player touching it.”
On their way home from this game, the family stopped in a drugstore on Sainte-Catherine’s and Dragos asked for a notebook and some coloured pencils. In the morning there were drawings of the Montreal team sweater, hockey sticks and skates, and a detailed diagram of a hockey rink, perfectly accurate with all the lines and circles. Dragos had pencilled in the positions of players for all the goals that were scored the previous night.
“Yes, Tony, I have everything now. You are right.”
Tony feels his stomach twist again.
“People ask me,” Petrescu continues, “how it is possible a boy who had never even seen a hockey rink until he was eleven could develop into such a good player. It is simple and anyone can do it. You can do this thing yourself Tony, no matter what you say about your height.”
Diana has wandered away from the crowd and is standing beside her cousin now. She looks with amused concern into Tony’s face.
“Tony, just make it so that hockey is the only thing to make you forget your greatest sadness. Allow hockey to replace the love and everyday affections of grandparents and the only real home you have ever known, to stand in for a language that slips away from you every day in a thousand unstoppable ways. Anyone can win your precious cup if they do just this one thing.”
Sixteen
“You must begin to think about this more clearly,” Diana insists.
Outside the hall, the night has turned chill, summer heat disappearing in the forest air. Tony is being pushed along the narrow street by the gentle persuasion of Diana’s two arms. The roads of the village are empty and every house he can see is black and lifeless. The only movement, the only heat is in the hall he has just left. He turns to face the building, to scan for lit windows, for secret rooms where the Cup might be. Shouts and music flow through the open front doors.
Dragos Petrescu had been carried from his chair and thrown into the dance floor. The band started into a brisk polka and one by one the women of the village made their way into the middle of the floor to claim their ransom. His payments continue.
“It was me who told them to take your cup. I was angry. I didn’t think it would have such an effect on you.” She pushes him by his arm, fights his inertia and starts him walking in slow circles around a courtyard.
“I don’t understand, are you a man or a little child who has lost his toy?”
“I’ve told you. It’s my job.”
“A job does this to a man? Tell me Tony, do you live where Dragos lives? Do you live in Florida when it is cold and Montreal when it is warm?”
“I live in Toronto, cold and warm. I live where I was born. Like most of the people here.”
“It’s too bad. If you lived in Florida when it is cold and Montreal when it is warm, I would consider marrying you and coming to live such a life. You kiss very well. A husband, I think, must kiss very well.”
Tony turns his face from Diana and pats for gum in his pockets. He regrets the vomiting.
“You would marry a man so quickly, after two kisses?”
“Yes, two kisses are enough, I think. And besides, you forget I was sitting on your lap for the second kiss. I know more about you than most women do, I think.”
Diana leads Tony on a turn through the village. The sounds of Dragos’s dancing ransom follow them through the darkness. She walks him through a beet field and out across a meadow to the church. Beside the church, there is a public well. She pumps fresh water into a waiting wooden bucket and hands Tony a scooped wooden spoon.
“Wash your mouth out completely. Gargle with this water and then spit it out. I don’t want to be tasting your stomach if I have to kiss you again.”
Tony ignores the spoon and grabs at the cold water with both hands, spilling it over his face and the front of his shirt. His teeth ring from the cold. He feels his head begin to clear. Diana stands to the side, smiling, appraising.
“This is what a man looks like. Fresh, awake, ready for any activity. Not whining and sobbing about some lost thing, some nothing. Look at me. I lost a kiss in a game of backgammon, and I did not throw up, though I might have.”
Diana runs her hand across Tony’s forehead, straightening the wet hair across his brow.
“You play backgammon well, for a Canadian,” she says, flicking droplets from his cheeks.
“You know this game, this backgammon? It was a game of Roman emperors and generals. You think of chess as the game of war, but it is really just the game of strategy. Strategy is a necessary part of war, and so excellent players of chess may in fact be excellent wartime strategists, but even the greatest strategists have been defeated in war. Why? Because of the dice. Chess does not depend on the whim of dice, and therefore does not contain that most essential elements of war. Unpredictability. Fate. Stupid luck.”