The Uninvited Guest (18 page)

“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, what 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.

“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
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. 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.”

“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.”

His shirt soaked, Tony begins to feel the cold of the forest air. He draws closer to Diana, pulling her warmth to him.

“How does a brilliant strategist like Napoleon fail to complete his vision of a continent under his cloak? He thinks only of the position of pieces on a board and has no thought for the rolling of the dice. In the dice are the Russian winter; in the dice are burnt livestock and destroyed crops; in the dice are his own advancing age and madness.

“Backgammon is the real game of war because it is possible to lose at the table even when you are the far superior player. It is possible for the dice to decide you need to be brought low, and when the dice decides such a thing, you are brought low. Roman emperors and generals understood better the whims of war, and this is why they were fascinated by backgammon. They wanted the dice to decide against them, knowing eventually it would decide
for
them as well. We are all Romans in that way, waiting to have favour returned to our lives. Sometimes, it does not return. For my great uncle Stefan, who died here in this village during the war, favour did not return.”

Diana pushes harder on Tony's shoulders, walking him further into the village. Her voice continues, echoing against wooden buildings and out into the dark forest.

The village of Ilisesti is not much of a village. There are two roads: one that travels generally to the east or west, and one that intersects, travelling generally to the north and south. The north-south road is made of earth. Every year the town sprays it with oil to keep down the dust. The east-west road has been covered in asphalt by the regional government, to encourage tourism to the historic monasteries of Bucovina. Buses from Suceava travel this road, but they almost never stop in the village, continuing on to the larger villages containing the medieval monasteries famous for their fantastically painted churches.

There are one or two small inns on the main road. Some villagers have talked about building a restaurant for tourists, but worry they are too close to Suceava to convince anyone to stop. The tourists will have eaten before boarding the bus and by the time they get to Ilisesti they will not be hungry enough to stop for food. And food is all they have to offer. The village has been populated by farmers since before anyone can remember. Farmers have wonderful food, but if someone doesn't want food, there is little point in it being wonderful. Not hungry is not hungry.

The villagers of Ilisesti have been conquered by the Turks, by the Hungarians, by the Russians several times, and by the Germans. They are a people who wish to stay where they are and farm the same land they have farmed for too many generations to count. That is the history they wish for themselves. One generation after the next, farming the same fields and raising the same animals.

When the country went fascist, a prison was built several miles from the village and young Communists were transported from Bucharest to spend the war behind its walls. It was a working prison, a farming institution where the young idealists were set to work growing vegetables for their German captors. Throughout the growing seasons they worked in the vegetable fields, producing potatoes and cabbages for German soldiers, and they themselves were fed a diet of little more than boiled cornmeal.

The Nazis took food from the villagers as well, as one would expect during an occupation. But always the local farmers managed to have enough for the occupiers and for their own families as well. If the Germans took three pigs from a farmer in one year, he kept two hidden in the cellar beneath the barn. Everyone in Ilisesti kept a secret cellar, and shared out the food among neighbours and friends.

Secret slaughters were carried out in these earth-lined, underground rooms—the squeals and screams of the dying animals drowned out by drunken singing—and the meat transported by night from village house to village house. If one house had extra meat, they would exchange it for some milk from another house, or for some
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from yet another neighbour, and in this way the people of the village sustained each other under occupation. They had less than at other times, and it was difficult, but never desperate. It was the young Communists in prison who ate the corn meal every night, and worked all day growing food they would not taste. Their signatures had appeared on paper, so the cornmeal was theirs.

In 1944, after years of occupation, the Nazis were still in control of the region, but it was certain they wouldn't be for much longer. The Russians were pushing the lines ever closer. The German soldiers spent much of their time studying maps of the routes leading back toward Germany, and in the evenings both the soldiers and the villagers would listen to the voices of Soviet propagandists broadcasting in increasing strength on an increasing number of radio frequencies. The Russians counselled patience, advised the Romanian peasantry that soon their comrades would arrive to liberate them from the Nazis.

The German garrison slowly depleted itself until all that was left were a few small rear-guard panzer units and the division of prison guards who, no one doubted, were to make sure no Communist prisoners were left alive to join with their liberators. One evening, a group of these few remaining German soldiers, a tank crew, blasted Ilisesti's old stone water tower to rubble and arranged the debris in the central intersection, blocking both roads as they crossed in the middle of the village. Their work completed, the soldiers retreated to the village tavern to drink, gamble and spend another nervous night waiting for the order to retreat.

There were seven village men in the tavern when the soldiers entered. By the time the Germans had ordered their drinks and sat down to begin playing each other at table, only three villagers remained. There was little luck to be had around soldiers at that time, so in the initial disturbance of their entrance to the room, four villagers, their hands fluttering up around their eyes, managed to slip out of the tavern and make their way home along the darkened streets. The old tavern owner and his middle-aged son had nowhere else to go. They stayed to serve the soldiers and suffer whatever fate waited them. The only other villager to stay was a small, strong man named Stefan.

Stefan lived in the centre of the village in a tiny house, and grew beets in a field adjacent to the water tower, now destroyed. He owned the lumber mill at the edge of the forest. Stefan's hands milled all of the wood used for the fences and barns of Ilisesti, and all the wood was cut from the village's own forest. Though a smart man, Stefan had a weakness for alcohol, for the
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he made himself in a shack beside his mill. It was Stefan's
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that most of the village drank at the tavern.

A month before this night, Stefan's wife had died giving birth to a son. He was in misery, and had been drunk already several hours before the soldiers walked through the door. He sat in the corner of the tavern, hunched over a backgammon board and a bottle of his own
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.

The presence of the Germans in town was more misery to Stefan, as they forced him to work longer days in the mill to supply lumber for their own purposes. Stefan made it a habit to regularly express his hatred for the Nazis, but only under his breath and never within their hearing, even when drunk. He was an intelligent man who understood the reality of life under occupation. But as the war dragged on, it became apparent to everyone in the village that, even when the Germans were defeated, Ilisesti would not be rid of idiot masters. Hearing the Soviet broadcasts and anticipating a seemingly unending trouble, Stefan became less careful.

In the tavern that evening, drinking
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followed by beer and then more
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, and playing backgammon with the owner's son, Marian, Stefan had watched the soldiers enter. Against his own good judgment about such situations, he had decided to stay. He stared darkly at the three young men in their combat uniforms, his expression so ugly Marian hissed at him to leave while he still could. But Stefan would not leave as long as there was backgammon to be played.

“My great-uncle Stefan was a genius at the table.” Diana walks Tony to the central intersection, a winding paved road interrupted by dirt. The remnant foundation stones of the old water tower sprouted tall weeds by the roadside. Tony feels controlled, manipulated. He enjoys the feeling.

When the dice were with him, Stefan could not be beaten, and on this night the dice were with him. With the German soldiers watching, he beat Marian eight games to two in a match for fifteen. It was a destruction. The entire time they played, Stefan drank
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followed by beer and then more
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; and the entire time they played, Stefan was being watched by these three panzer soldiers. They watched him and marvelled out loud at his luck with the dice, as though luck is all a Romanian needs to play the game. When the match against Marian was at an end, of course one of the soldiers offered to play Stefan.

It was not wise to say no to a German soldier without very good reason. Even through his drunkenness, Stefan was aware of the danger of his situation and of the even greater danger awaiting him when he accepted the offer. As unwise as it was to play, it was certainly less wise still to beat a German soldier at backgammon, or any game for that matter.

It was difficult for Stefan to lose when the dice were with him. Such was his skill at the game that he could have found a creative way to lose without it looking like he was giving the game to the soldier. But he had been in the tavern all evening, and was just drunk enough from
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followed by beer and then more
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to lose this part of his skill. Contributing also to the moment was Stefan's great sadness, a certain mood of hopelessness, a despair that he would never again be his own man in a tavern without soldiers from some foreign country watching his every move.

Stefan agreed to play the soldier a match of fifteen, and the wager was set at one bottle of
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. For Stefan, this was a meaningless wager, just something to make the game decisive. The winner would get the
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, and the loser would pay for it. It would have been very easy for Stefan to lose this bet since he would hardly feel the loss of one small bottle of his own
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. With the tavern owner and his son Marian watching, Stefan began the match in a manner certain to lead to his loss. He dropped the first two games slyly, leaving pieces uncovered and then reacting in horror when the soldier rolled the dice, to make sure the capture was not missed. But as the match progressed, and both men continued drinking, something changed. To the horror of the tavern-keepers, Stefan slipped back into his normal style of play. He had forgotten who his opponent was. He began to play again like the champion he was and, eventually, won the match eight games to five. Not so humiliating a match record for the soldier, but still a loss at the hand of a Romanian peasant.