“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.”