“It is an interesting feeling is it not?”
Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae follows Tony from room to room in the wedding hall, up great wooden staircases and through narrow back corridors, checking behind pieces of furniture and inside darkened doorways.
“This feeling of suddenly not understanding anything. Language is always a difficulty in these situations. Not knowing the words. But worse I think is that sudden shock, that instance of ultimate strangeness. An experience all travellers have, even the bravest of us, I think, and certainly something all immigrants must eventually face. Whether it comes on the first day or the fifteenth or the five hundredth, there will come this moment when everything that once seemed normal and familiar and correct is whisked away like the tablecloth in a magician’s trick. It is unsettling, isn’t it?”
Tony walks with purpose ahead of the older man, vaulting stairs two at a time despite a head filled with homemade liquor. He calculates the time between his last seeing the Cup and the empty podium to be mere seconds. It is simply not possible that whoever took the trophy was able to get it very far. He knows his best chance of recovery will be if the Cup has been kept in the building. A quick look out the front door showed quiet empty streets and no signs of recent activity. He’d scanned the faces in the crowd to see if their eyes led him anywhere obvious, but the other guests, amused by his desperation, simply smiled back at him and laughed privately among themselves. Now it is simply a matter of checking every room in the building. The Cup will be found.
“It is my burden,” Nicolae continues, undisturbed by the speed of their search and the fact that Tony is not listening to him, “that I brought this moment not only upon myself and my wife, but upon a young child. We are told children are very resilient, that they recover from trauma. What we are not told is that whether they recover or not is immaterial. Trauma is trauma. It is my burden, and I accept it.”
The entire time they lived in Israel, Nicolae and his young family tried to leave their new and foreign homeland, tried to escape again to one of three places. Their preferred choice, of course, was the United States. Everyone wanted to go to the United States.
“To fly in an airplane over New York City,” Nicolae says with a dismissive wave of his hand in the smoky air above his head, “to look down upon the Statue of Liberty and et cetera. You know the whole story. You don’t think you are going to fall for this story, but when you have left the only world you know, and you must choose a new world, all of a sudden this story is very convincing. Next there was Canada, which was also attractive if only because it is so close to the United States. The third and least attractive option was Australia, a great country to be sure, but so lost and alone there in the middle of the ocean. So far from anything we might understand, and with no accompanying story of its own.
“Naturally, it was Australia who made us the first offer. Australia opened her arms and welcomed us, and to this day I cannot say if we didn’t make a terrible mistake by not opening our own arms in turn and running to Australia. In Montreal, on a morning in February when I am waiting for the bus on Sherbrooke, I am certain that Australia is laughing at me for my foolish decision. But, at the time we decided to wait.”
The offer from Australia was open for three months, and Nicolae and his wife decided to wait the three months to see if they would also get an offer from the US. Very near the end of their wait they heard from Canada, or at least from Quebec. They decided not to stretch their luck any further, accepted the chance to become Quebecers and signed their names. They flew to Montreal with a map of North America spread between them across their knees, studying the terrain. They took note how, on their map, Montreal was not very far at all from New York City. They consoled themselves in their decision by measuring the distance between Montreal and Manhattan with their fingers.
The sky was clear and they could see everything as the plane came in over the country. They crossed Newfoundland and followed the Saint Lawrence River west into the land. It was all so big and empty, and they could imagine, looking to the south past the Berkshire Mountains, that it was also almost all New York City. It was early in October and the land was knit through with fantastic colours. They strained their eyes across the brilliant carpet, peering south, imagining they might see the tip of the Empire State Building peeking out above the horizon. And then the plane was on the ground and they were moving through the airport with everything they owned, never knowing to whom they should speak French and to whom English. They guessed at this speaking game, and guessed wrong almost every time.
That first night, in all the exhaustion of a day of travel, the luggage and the jet lag and the emotions of his wife and little Dragos, Nicolae was unable to keep his eyes closed in their tiny YMCA room. He would lie down and listen to his wife and child breathe, but then he would have to stand up and go to the window. At that time in Montreal, the YMCA sat directly above Boulevard de Maisonneuve. The traffic of the thoroughfare flowed through the building, cars and taxis on their way across the city, beautiful young people walking through on their way to Crescent Street clubs or going east for food at Ben’s or to the jazz clubs of Saint-Laurent and Saint-Denis. And Nicolae was at the window, not knowing any of these places, but knowing at least that the blood was flowing, seeing it below him and feeling it hum up into his feet. There was so much kissing. So many arms clutching other arms. It was a fine show, too inviting, but he couldn’t bring himself to go for a walk because the thought of his wife and child waking to find him not there was painful to him. After everything they’d just been through, he could not risk them waking up alone, without their only reason for being in such a strange place.
As morning grew in the window, Nicolae was surprised by a knock on the door of the room. It was a quiet knock at first, respectful of the hour, and Nicolae was initially unsure if he was hearing it correctly. Their small room was one of many in a long hallway of identical drab grey doors. He was still standing at the window, watching the streets fill with daylight, and he looked over at his wife, still in bed but staring back at him now. They questioned each other with their eyes for many seconds before whoever it was knocked again, this time with more force.
A man was laughing now behind the door. Nicolae imagined the visitor had mistaken their room for that of a friend. He opened the door, again uncertain of which language to try, and looked at a small man dressed for cold weather shuffling slowly from foot to foot at the threshold. The unexpected visitor greeted Nicolae in his own language, by his own name, smiling broadly.
“I saw your name on the list of new arrivals downstairs,” the laughing man said. “I knew you would be awake. I must tell you, to have you here in this city with me is the most beautiful gift. The most beautiful gift.”
Without introduction, he handed Nicolae a small rectangular package, something Nicolae did not fully understand at the time but which he came to know as Canadian-style cookies, dry and too sweet with chocolate like wax, crumbling to the table every time he took a bite. The man waved to the small table and he and Nicolae sat.
“To begin,” the man said, “please do not be afraid or concerned in any way. I am here as a friend. I hope to prove this to you.”
Nicolae glanced again at Veronica in the bed. Dragos lay beside her, his eyes still closed, but his breathing betraying the fact that he was awake and listening carefully. The past year had prepared them all for almost any experience but this one. This one was new.
“You were mine,” the man continued. “My very first, and my favourite.”
Having said this, the man fell silent, and his laughing mood turned sombre. Nicolae sat across the table from him, munching cookies expectantly, wishing he had some coffee. He was aware of a growing tension between himself and the stranger as though already they had run out of things to say to each other, as though there was little more about the man that he cared to know and little more about himself that he cared to have known. It was a feeling he recognized, but vaguely, like the recollection of pain from far in the past.
It was Veronica, dressing herself behind a makeshift curtain wall, who first made the connection. She stuck her head out into the room and stared suspiciously at the interloper.
“We know nothing anymore,” she said, her voice shaking with anger and fear. “We don’t want any trouble. Why have you found us out like this?”
Recognizing severity in his mother’s voice, Dragos ceased feigning sleep and raised his head to observe the growing drama of an unwanted stranger in a strange room in a strange country. The man suffered Veronica’s questions like they were aimed at his face. His eyes filled with water and he could only look down at his hands shifting uncomfortably on the tabletop.
“I understand what I have done here,” he said. “I’m sorry. I thought maybe the cookies, somehow... if you will please allow me a few minutes to explain myself. I assure you, I bring no trouble to your door.”
The stranger’s name was Alexandru Ionescu and, as Veronica had guessed, he was a member, a former member, of those very same secret police, the Securitate who haunted Nicolae’s final years in his homeland. So it was, Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae had left Bucharest, lived for over a year in Israel, travelled all the way to Montreal and on his very first full day there, he would have yet another talk with the secret police.
Veronica was not to be consoled. At the time, so early on her first day in a new country, she had become very unhappy and wanted this uninvited man to leave. Nicolae too could not see any reason to continue the conversation, except that this Alexandru Ionescu did not act like any police he had ever known. He did not seem concerned to prove to Nicolae that he was in charge, or that he was as smart as anyone else.
Underneath his genuine distress at having made a startling admission, he seemed, simply, very happy, like a child is happy. He watched young Dragos struggle to eat one of those bad cookies and laughed at the expressions on his little face. He looked around the room and out the window at Montreal, rubbed his moustache and said things like “fantastic; is it not fantastic?” while the wary family sat at the small table, looking at him, waiting for things to turn worse and wondering why they hadn’t turned worse already.
It occurred to Nicolae that had he wanted to, this Alexandru Ionescu could have broken their spirits completely as soon as he entered the room, but he did not seem to want their spirits broken. In fact, it seemed this man had decided it was his job to make sure their spirits remained intact. As well, Nicolae could not ignore the fact that a Romanian Securitate in Canada simply cannot have the same powers as in Bucharest, and that in fact, if Nicolae had wanted to make trouble for this Ionescu, he may very easily have done so. Former Securitate, as this man claimed to be, were not generally in the habit of admitting to their past profession. It was the kind of history one generally wished to bury. For this man to make his admission to Nicolae was, as far as he could tell, a form of confession, not intimidation. Where Veronica’s well-trained nose smelled trouble, Nicolae sensed only pathos. Ionescu saw this understanding cross Nicolae’s face and continued his explanations.
Ionescu had worked for the state police in Bucharest since his days as a student. He had been recruited secretly at the university—this was one way the state kept track of the goings-on of so-called radical student activities—and he had been a very willing and enthusiastic recruit. As a young man he proudly infiltrated and then destroyed numerous secret networks just like Nicolae’s own banned literature network, sending a small but significant number of his fellow students to jail for four years here and five years there. The number of his victims grew so significant that his presence at the university quickly became ineffective.
Students would begin to instinctively avoid these fellows, smelling prison on their clothes. Eventually, these agents would disappear from the university, pulled in by their police masters and reassigned to a place they could once again be effective. And then, of course, students like Nicolae were in worse trouble, because without the obvious mole, they had to wonder who the new well-hidden agent was. They were more anxious without these operatives around than they had been with them in plain view.
Ionescu told the Petrescu family all about himself freely, though often he stopped his story to repeat an apology. It seemed to be an apology he had been developing within himself for a very long time, and to Nicolae’s well-trained ear it contained a clear tone of sincerity. Ionescu said, “Please allow me to tell you about my former self, and so reveal my great shame again to the world,” and sometimes, in the middle of his story he would just stop, rub the tabletop lightly with his knuckles and say “my great shame, my great shame.” Listening to this repeated mea culpa, Nicolae understood his first morning in Montreal was becoming extraordinary, and he began to enjoy himself.
Pulled from the university, Ionescu was sent for surveillance training in Timisoara, where he spent two years becoming the kind of secret police most feared in Romania. He became an invisible man. And when he said the words “invisible man” to Nicolae, the mystery of his face disappeared. In an instant, Nicolae understood the strange familiarity of his presence, how his body seemed to fit into the picture of the world as seen from Nicolae’s eyes. Here was the man who had haunted him the last five or so years of his life in Bucharest. No longer the apparition on the periphery, here he was right in front of Nicolae, across a table in Montreal now, eating cookies with his family. It was a thunderous realization, one that made Nicolae leave his chair and back away from the table.
“You must understand,” Ionescu said, rubbing his moustache, “with you it was always just play. I did not detect in you any real threat to the state. In my job, you develop a very dependable sense for these things. But I was a man who followed the orders handed down to me. I could question the logic of these orders in my mind, but not openly to my superiors. For some reason, they were worried about you, especially after you applied for a visa, but for me, I could tell you were not interested in counter-revolution. When you spent hours in the library of the American Embassy, it was just to read books from another culture. That is all, am I right? You simply love to read books. I watched you read so many books, Nicolae.”
Ionescu was assigned to Nicolae, not in the way the other two fellows were assigned to him. Those Securitate were to make themselves known to Nicolae, to appear to him as police, to look menacing, and to occasionally invite him for a discussion at the station. Nicolae was to know these men when he spotted them, and to feel the weight of their oppression on him at all times. But there were three agents on Nicolae, not two, and Ionescu was the invisible man. It was Ionescu who let the other two agents know where Nicolae would be and who he’d be with. Ionescu gave them the information that allowed them to ask Nicolae such pointed questions. He was the invisible man who watched Nicolae eating plum tarts.
Ionescu was with him all day, every day. Nicolae was his job for over five years. He was to follow him through Bucharest, track his movements, anticipate any odd changes in routine, make note of his social circle, flag friends of his who were also worthy of individual surveillance. He was to follow Nicolae on his vacations and business trips especially, because it was on these disruptions of normal routine that most counter-revolutionaries did their real business. He was to do all of this without being detected.
“Once, Nicolae, I served you and your friends beer for an entire evening,” Ionescu confessed, in Montreal, smiling with cookie crumbs in his moustache, “from behind the bar at that little tavern in Brasov. You were there for a conference, you remember. Some conference, Miki. How you can concentrate on work when you are throwing up half the morning I do not know, but it was all very entertaining for me. You see, it was a matter of playing for me, a matter of being able to look you straight in the eye as I handed you a stein of beer, to smile and know you had been fooled again. Fooled by me. And you, with your foolishness and gamesmanship that I admired so much. To be able to fool you was the greatest achievement.”
Ionescu sat up straight at the table, smoothed his moustache and tried to calm the nervous tapping of his fingers on the tabletop.
“Nicolae,” he said, a trembling of respect in his voice, “Mrs. Petrescu-Nicolae and the little sir, you have no reason to trust me, I know, but I wish to say to you that I am no longer a member of the security police of the Socialist Republic of Romania. You have nothing to fear from my presence here in your little room, just as you, Nicolae, never really had anything to fear from me in Romania.
“If you were going to practise counter-revolution in Romania, you had me completely fooled. You know, sir, you and all your friends would read Kafka, you would pass these banned books between you. You would smuggle in writings by that rogue Havel in Czechoslovakia, you would listen to your tapes of Cescu broadcasting on VOA. But what you did not realize is that your oppressors were reading the same things. How do you suppose such writing becomes banned? In so many ways, Nicolae, during those five years, you were a teacher to me. I would slip your books out of their hiding spots when I knew I had a day or two before a pickup. I would read what you read. In Romania, I began my job by thinking of you as a mark, as my target, yet by the time you left for Israel, I had come to think of you as a brother in absurdity. So, if you please, all of you, I am here in this room as a friend, and as someone seeking forgiveness and a new life of my own.”
So formal, so dramatic. His speech was in the exact tone Nicolae had come to expect from a member of the ruling party proclaiming some important truth about the great socialist revolution, but the words were all wrong for who he was. He was being sincere about the wrong sentiments for a man like him. He was being, for him, dangerously honest. Nicolae and Veronica heard the new and strange tone behind what he was saying, and it made them more nervous still. What an entirely absurd land they had found if it could turn an Ionescu from what he was to what he now appeared to actually be.
“It was the watching of you, in fact,” Ionescu continued, “that made it possible for me to be here today, I mean in my own head possible. I cannot say you convinced me of anything about our former country. I’m not really sure I ever needed convincing. Police work was a job to me. The job I was best at, and it had very little, I think, to do with politics or ideology. My great shame, my very great shame.
“I was good at following, good at reporting what I saw, very good at disappearing into a crowd and pretending not to be who I am. I see you are thinking I am probably still very good at pretending, and that is why you don’t trust me. Fair enough. You should not trust me, but maybe you should trust where it is you are. This is no longer Bucharest. I have no authority here. If you wish, you can tell me to leave and according to the law of this country, I must leave. All I mean to say about my being here now, in Montreal, is that it seemed to me if you were so convinced there was a better life for yourself outside Romania, then the world outside Romania was not without interest to me.
“I admired you, Nicolae. Admired your mind, and the way you enjoyed your life. It is not logical that someone like you would take his family into a mistake. I was happy enough in Romania, but after you left, suddenly I understood that there was also something not in Romania. After your departure at the airport—did you see me there, Nicolae, selling flowers in the terminal?—the world was no longer small enough to fit within the borders of one small country.
“I don’t think I would have left Romania, myself,” Ionescu continued, “but for the next man I was assigned to. Such a dull, stupid man. He was a writer, this fellow, and he was a different sort altogether. I think perhaps he really was involved in counter-revolution. In half a year, I was able to report at least a dozen secret meetings with others under high suspicion. This man took me to Yugoslavia, and all the way to very near the border with Trieste. You and I understand what it means to be near the border with Trieste.”
Ionescu mentioned the writer’s name and Nicolae laughed. This poor writer, Stihi, must have been the unluckiest man in Romania. He was universally despised by the young intelligentsia as a mouse of the Party, his writings ridiculed and parodied in the underground alternative press, and somehow also he managed to attract the attention of the security police. This poor Stihi couldn’t win.
“Stihi was invited to a conference of socialist writers in Belgrade,” Ionescu explained. “You understand, the usual, ‘cooperation between sister republics, for the good of the worldwide revolution’ and etcetera. Whatever he must put down on his visa application—and of course officially, he was a member of the Party and above reproach, so such a trip would not be unusual for him. He was given the visa without problem, but he didn’t realize there was a ghost on his trail. I was sent to Belgrade with him, inside his pocket. My God these writers, Nicolae, how they can talk the shit in a bar. Excuse me, young sir. How they can stroke themselves and love themselves and lick themselves all over with their tongues, each one in turn while the others listen and try to think only of their own superiority.”
“Those unending evenings listening to self-congratulation and petulant competitiveness. How I missed you and your gang on those evenings in Belgrade. How I longed for someone to accidentally light the tablecloth on fire, or pretend to the waitress that they were officials from a Russian delegation, just to try and get free beer. There is no amusement in watching a gang of writers loving themselves in a bar. There is no life there, only the slow drip-torture of perpetual ego.”
Nicolae was not surprised to hear this description of Stihi away on a conference. It is how he had always imagined the “Party writers” behaving. So full of themselves and their position with the ruling class. So unconcerned that their talent was being used as nothing more noble than the grease they apply to lubricate the tracks of tanks. So boring. He was not surprised by the story, but he was surprised to hear it from this Ionescu. It was at this point of his long visit that Nicolae began to feel the first true easing of his spirit. As in Romania, the greatest clue someone was a friend and not a spy of some sort was the sympathy you felt for them when they spoke unguardedly. It was perhaps a foolish way to decide things, but for Nicolae it was often the only way to extend your trust.
“As with all conferences of this sort,” Ionescu continued, “there must be the inevitable trip to the seaside, but instead of Dubrovnik, these morons are set to go north to Koper, in the Gulf of Trieste. I am sure the appearance of this trip to Koper on the official itinerary was part of the overall suspicion surrounding the man. Why go to plain, dull Koper over beautiful Dubrovnik with its girls in bikinis, unless there is some other reason you need to be so near the Italian border? As you must know, it is impossible I’m sure even today to go to Koper without there being at least one or two invisible men on your trail. The fleshly temptations of Dubrovnik are acceptable to the Party, but the temptations of Koper are worrisome.”
Nicolae knew at least two others who had managed to slip across that very border spot. At that time, in 1985, it was considered one of the safest crossings. He had considered it as an option for himself once during an international handball tournament, but could not bring himself to make the crossing. The thought of leaving his family behind was too much for him.
“We were there just two days. The writers visited the beach; they walked together along the strand and no doubt talked some more about how wonderful they all were. They visited the local museum, took in some architecture and stayed, here now is the interesting part, they stayed in a hotel very near the train station. The train station, you understand. This was it, I was sure. If not Stihi, then someone in the group surely was going to make a crossing. Someone was going to slip from the hotel in the night and walk to Italy. It was possible and had been done before. So, I was a good little policeman and I went to the station to investigate the lines. I showed my papers to my comrade Yugoslavian security police officers and asked for access to walk the fences. I was assigned a young man to accompany me. You understand, there is no trust even among fellow security police.
“It was night and we were walking the perimeter fence. My comrade officer was explaining to me, in Russian, of course, that it was not true there had been many recent crossings there. This was a lie spread throughout the socialist world to embarrass Yugoslavia, long despised by its socialist sisters for its friendly independence from the USSR. These words all in Russian, you understand. He told me that the security at the railway border point was the highest it had ever been, and the whole time he was telling me this, I was watching the approach of a very obvious hole in the fence in the darkness between two light standards. There, almost a kilometre from the station, someone had dug a small dip in the earth beneath the perimeter fence right at the point where the light disappeared in a murky greyness.
“I pointed out the hole to my comrade, and at first he did not know how to respond. He wanted to blame it on an animal. Perhaps a dog had dug his way to Italy. For me, it was all very comical, but I contained myself and did not laugh at the poor struggling idiot comrade. Finally, my young guard gained control of himself and remembered something about procedure. But not enough about procedure, lucky for me. He should have used his radio to call for an investigative unit to come in their Jeep and fill in the hole, or even just to monitor it from afar and see who tried to use it. He should have, but instead he ordered me to stand guard at the hole while he ran back to the station to rally his fellows.”
Ionescu smiled across the table at young Dragos, no longer sleepy-eyed but listening intently to the story, worried suspense on his young face. Nicolae also looked at his son and thought, “For him, this will always be just a story. That is my gift to him.” Ionescu continued.
“A kilometre he would have to run, my young security escort. I heard his footsteps disappear in the night. Maybe I should have suspected a trap, but I didn’t. And so there I stood, in the darkness, beside a hole from Yugoslavia to Italy, from east to west. The idea that I should leave then was upon me the instant my friend took his first running step, and I believe I hesitated not from fear or indecision, but simply to savour the moment when I became completely free.
“And I don’t mean this slippery Western idea of freedom you will hear so much about in this new land, Nicolae. I mean, in that moment, when my comrade idiot security officer ran away from me in the night, I was completely free to make a decision in a way I had never before been free. I could choose to be who I had always been, to do my job and eventually to collect my pension, or to change completely into someone I suspected I might be. People will tell you this kind of decision is always possible here in the West, but don’t believe them. It is only ever really possible when what is on the line is your blood. Your blood seeping slowly into the dust of some Yugoslavian border crossing—or for you Nicolae, your blood on the back of a chair in the Securitate offices in Bucharest, am I correct? That is when real freedom occurs. This uninvited guest arrives, this choice, bringing with him danger and the possibility of something fantastic and unknown. Then, and only then is freedom real.
“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, 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.