by John Degen
“You’ve brought it with you?”
“Yes. I go where it goes.”
“Is that it in the car?”
“Yes. Would you like to see it?”
“Has Petrescu shown it to anyone else yet?”
“No. We’ve just arrived.”
“Then I’ll see it when he shows it. At the wedding. He won it?”
“Yes. His team.”
“Do you play at all?” The man works at the lock on the gate with two fingers and indicates the inner courtyard with a flick of his jaw.
“Which? Hockey or tennis?”
The man laughs. His gate swings out into the sidewalk. “Backgammon. Do you play backgammon? I think you saw us playing here.”
“I know how to play.”
“But do you know how to win? Come, we’ll play. Vasile, bring the car in here. It is safe.”
Dragos and Tony climb back into the car and let Vasile drive them through the opened gate into the courtyard. Diana has already walked through the gate and made her way to the edge of the tennis court. The woman stops her tennis game when she sees Diana. She drops her racquet and screams, running to Diana to enfold her in a hug. Her opponent, another woman, walks toward them, patting at her face with a towel.
As they settle into their visit, a servant arrives with drinks for everyone—small tumblers of vodka, and a full bottle beside them on the tray. Seeing there is a game in progress, the servant avoids the table and gently places the tray on an unused chair. He then picks up one of the tumblers for himself and downs the contents in a single gulp. The patio table is decorated in a backgammon mosaic. The pieces are of polished stone and the dice are far heavier than they looked, as though made of lead. The man who calls himself Ilie Năstase sits opposite Tony, rubbing the dice between his hands before each throw.
“Tennis? Please. It’s very nice,” he says. “It has done nice things for me, as you can see. And hockey, yes, also very exciting, very athletic. But backgammon, this is our national sport. This is the pride of my country. Would I trade my professional trophies for a chance to play for Romania at the table? Maybe not—no certainly not. But I would trade almost anything else. Am I right, Mr. Petrescu?”
Dragos smiles, but his expression is unconvincing, even to Tony. “For you perhaps. You have a great deal to trade.”
The game proceeds with embarrassing rapidity, Tony feeling from his very first roll that he has seated himself at a game he only thought he understood. The man named Ilie completes his final roll, taking the game.
“You see, to be great at tennis is an honourable, excellent thing in Romania. But to be truly great at backgammon… that is Romania.”
Tony stares at the table, his pieces scattered haphazardly across it, two of them still stranded ridiculously on the bar.
“Perhaps I should play you at tennis,” Tony says to his smiling opponent. “to make myself feel better.”
Diana begins resetting the board. She looks Tony in the eyes, and Tony sees anger touch down briefly on the young woman’s face. Early in the visit, Diana had excused herself to the bathroom. Whatever she had done there makes her look suddenly glamorous, erasing the fatigue of long travel. Her hair is now perfectly brushed and arranged, falling across her eyes as she sets the pieces. As she leans across the table, her shirt front opens to Tony and he glimpses there a black bra strap against the whitest of skin.
“Perhaps this time, you should try,” Diana says.
Ilie and the young hockey player laugh into their empty vodka glasses. Vasile and the other guest have fallen asleep in their chairs, victimized by drink. The servant is busily filling a new tray of glasses. The other women laugh and drift back to the tennis court. Diana finishes with the board and slaps the dice in front of Ilie. She stands behind Tony, and a new game begins.
Eleven
Tony, the Cup, the young champion and his beautiful cousin fly the final leg of their journey aboard a rattling turboprop on Tarom, the Romanian national airline. Somehow, in the transfer through Bucharest, Dragos’s father and aunt have left the travelling party. Tony’s mind has begun to shut in on itself in a whirl of new information. He fidgets with the locks on the trophy case, finding solace in repetition.
Taxiing before takeoff, the plane passes by several of its own kind abandoned in rusted hulks behind a chain fence on the side of the runway. The ever-present Romanian dogs have made homes of these shells. They stick their heads from the empty doorways, sniffing the air and peering suspiciously at Tony’s plane as it passes on the tarmac. Tony tries not to wonder how the doghouse planes have ended up there, their propellers bent, their wheel rims shorn of all rubber. The plane takes to the air at sunset and makes the trip in three dark hours of turbulence and engine-howl.
Sitting, as usual, across the aisle from Tony, Dragos struggles to keep up a conversation. The closer he draws to his old life, the more agitated and talkative he becomes. Earlier, at Năstase’s house in the heart of privileged Bucharest, it had not been hard for Tony to see Dragos as a man comfortably at home, laughing and joking in his native language. Now he wonders if that sense of belonging had been just a matter of Dragos being in the presence of another elite athlete. Here, suspended above the Romanian countryside, flying into the heart of a Romanian night on his way to marriage in an ancient Romanian ceremony, the young man struggles to hide his fear.
Fear of what, Tony can’t imagine. To return to your family the celebrated hero of a Cup-winning team? This has been, for Tony, the only truly comfortable fantasy for too long. How could such a golden reality generate anything but blissful satisfaction?
“Your problem with the game, Tony, is that you play to win.”
Tony blinks at the younger man, confused.
“You must play to destroy. Trying to pick your way home safely all the time, that is well for beginners in the game, but a champion must know when to take chances, when to have courage.”
“Ah, backgammon,” Tony nods. “Yes, courage, that’s fine, but he had the better dice every time.”
“Who, Năstase? Please, Tony, if that man played tennis the way he trips around the backgammon board, he would still be retrieving balls for the rich at some spa in Constanţa. Năstase’s dice were no better than your dice. The difference was he was able to take the drive to destroy that he uses in tennis and use it as well on the board. Năstase decided to beat you; that’s why he beat you.”
“Well, I think I tried to destroy him.”
“No, Tony, you tried to not lose. You played like the hockey team that goes up 3-nil in the first period and then slowly lets it all slide into the toilet.”
Diana joins in, not hiding the disgust in her voice.
“I know it is not polite in the man’s own home,” she says, “but, Tony, you should have tried to humiliate him. A game is for winning. It’s nothing personal; everyone knows that, everyone here anyway.”
“The country of champions. Romania!”
“Yes, that’s funny.” Diana speaks to him, but her face is turned toward her own window. In effect, Tony is being spoken to by the reflection Diana’s face in the Romanian night.
“You say funny things about this country. I wish I could think of something funny to say about Canada for you.”
“No, Romania is not a country of champions, you are right.” Dragos puts himself between them again. “But it is a country that knows every game, no matter how friendly, no matter how sociable, holds within it a grain of the ultimate struggle. You should tell me now what is more important than the ultimate struggle.”
“Okay, the ultimate struggle,” Tony says wearily. “I was engaged in the ultimate struggle with a retired tennis champion, if that’s even who he was. I lost at backgammon to someone who may or may not be Ilie Năstase. And yet, I don’t feel any great sense of loss.”
Tony wonders how the loss of a casual match as a guest in someone’s house has turned him into Diana’s enemy. Since leaving Năstase’s compound after a 3-1 embarrassment, t
he young woman has steadfastly refused to even look in Tony’s direction.
“Really, Tony?” Diana continues to address the window. “Where I grew up in Bucharest, the three streets we considered our neighbourhood, this game was a way of life. At every street corner you would see two or more old men sitting around tables or benches, either playing or watching someone else play. You know, a great many of the old neighbourhoods there in central Bucharest were taken away by Ceauşescu, the houses nationalized and then brought to the ground to make way for the new wide avenues surrounding that idiocy he called his palace. Yet even after the houses disappeared, the same old men would show up at the same street corners and play the same games again and again.”
Diana is now not talking to anyone—she is simply talking, and Tony begins to suspect this mood that has overcome both these young Romanians has very little to do with him. The country has done this to them. Something they left behind when they escaped from Romania years before has found them again, and overtaken them. Some disappointment. Some anger.
“You would not find one of those men who would say as you do that to lose a game means not to lose anything important. They could be forced from their homes and into any one of the hundreds of identically ugly apartments that were built back then, but they could not be forced from their game. Our grandfather has played a match of fifteen games every day with the same man for almost forty years now. It is the doctor, Fischoff, the same man who delivered both of our fathers and both of us. For forty years this man has delivered babies and removed tumours and watched old people die, and for the same forty years he has taken time in each day to meet my grandfather in the park near the hospital for a match of fifteen games.”
“I see,” Tony says, working to keep all sarcasm from his tone. “That’s some important game then. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize.”
Diana suddenly climbs from her seat, slips across the lap of her cousin and lands in stockinged feet in the aisle beside Tony. She leans down and kisses him on the mouth, using a skinny hand behind his head to pull him hard against her lips.
“I thought so,” she says, and climbs back over her cousin.
Tony says nothing. He sits and pays attention to the burning of his lips and the memory of Diana’s fingernails digging into the back of his head. The lights in the airplane blink out for several seconds as they hit a particularly bad patch of air. In the darkness, Tony concentrates on the sound of the seat belt straining against the black carrying case beside him. Diana starts talking again, her voice shaking with the vibrations of the flight. Again, Tony relaxes, resigned to listen.
In the late 1970s, a woman named Vera lived in one of the square, dull concrete apartment blocks built on a new street full of square dull concrete apartment blocks near the Victory Plaza in Bucharest. Vera’s street, Titulescu Avenue, was named for a public servant who won small fame for having resisted the Fascist push of the mid-’30s. A statue of an uninteresting businesslike figure still stands at the head of her street, where the streetcars turn from Victory Boulevard. Vera was in her late fifties, but a grandmother of some years. Her granddaughter Andrea lived with her in a one-bedroom apartment on the second floor that was also home to Vera’s husband Serban and Serban’s invalid mother. What had become of Andrea’s parents, no one knew.
“I was in junior school with Andrea,” Diana says. “She was older by some years, and used to take care of the younger children after school until we were picked up. There were girls more beautiful, but she had all the talent.”
Serban was a tour guide for the Ministry of Culture and was more often than not out of Bucharest leading tours through the medieval monasteries near the northern border with the Soviet Union. The responsibility for Andrea’s education fell to Vera, and it worried her greatly. Andrea was coming to the age when she would have to leave elementary school and take her place in one of the focused higher schools. Bucharest academies were filled with children of the governmental elite. Acceptance in the better academies depended much more on connection than merit, but exceptions were made when the state recognized a talent worth supporting. In both sport and art, talent still helped to determine advancement, not always, but often. Vera knew her granddaughter was such a talent. She knew Andrea could play violin in the National Orchestra. For a year, she had investigated procedures for admittance to the best music academies in the city. For a year, she had sent official letters to boards of admittance, and received no reply. She became aware the official silence was a reaction to the return address on her envelopes.
Titulescu Avenue was two streets beyond the inner circle of power and privilege in Bucharest. Vera lived near enough to power to shop at the same market with the servants of government wives, but, in correspondence, she wore her address like a disfiguring scar. Power and privilege lived on the tree-lined streets named for the greater cosmopolitan: Strada Paris, Strada Sofia, or grand avenues named for the great and happy Communist flowering, Victory Boulevard, Avenue of the First of May. To live on a street named for a bureaucrat, no matter his prominence, was to have one’s potential defined. In six months, Andrea would have to have a place in an academy. Vera saw her granddaughter’s future slipping into mediocrity. Some strategy other than letters would have to be employed.
“Our entire family,” Dragos interrupts his cousin, “lived on Kisselef. A much better address. The neighbourhoods were like separate cities.”
Through talks with the servants at the First of May Market, Vera heard stories of how women of privilege secured spots at the conservatory for their daughters, whether these girls showed musical promise or not. The conservatory was an academy greatly desired among privileged mothers of privileged daughters. Young government men prided themselves on public displays of cultural knowledge. Four times a year the recital hall was filled with young, unmarried men at the outset of brilliant careers. These men would drink cognac together in the foyer and speak about important government matters. Then they would sit and watch the beautiful daughters of their superiors send music into the night. It was unheard of for a recital to pass without at least five proposals of marriage exchanged between young men in dark suits and tittering girls carrying instruments. As often as not, these girls played only passable music, their talent being employed exclusively with the aim of securing a privileged married life. Often their mothers encouraged this scheme because they themselves had been successful at it earlier in life.
A population of music tutors existed within the inner circles of the powerful. These tutors, mostly men of middle age, worked with the privileged daughters in the year leading up to admissions trials. Whether blessed with natural talent or not, these young girls were imparted enough skills with an instrument to give a reasonable trial recital that, combined with their home address and some well-placed gifts of cognac and fine imported cheeses, assured them both a place at the conservatory and a potential young fiancé in a dark suit.
All tutors were courted furiously, the struggle for their favour and influence was desperately competitive. The most sought after tutors provided not just music lessons, but a solid guarantee of success built of their long-standing connections with the members of the conservatory admissions board. A student who arrived for recital on the arm of one of these influential men never failed to secure a place for herself. Handing over the last available Sibiu salami to a smiling maidservant, Vera obtained the name and address of one of the most popular tutors in Bucharest. She wrote it on the bottom of her shopping list and returned the sweaty paper to her brassiere.
Valentin Popescu was a large man who would sweat in mid-winter after walking only a block. In every season, he carried with him a collection of handkerchiefs, which he used to wipe his forehead and neck. Handkerchiefs were primary among the favoured gifts he received from the mothers of his students. He carried with him at all times a collection of French centimes which he used to “pay” for these unusual presents, handkerchiefs being symbols of grief and permanent separation and therefore much out of
favour as tokens of affection.
“You remember him?” Diana asks her cousin. “He was like a pig on two legs. Disgusting.” Dragos laughs and snorts. The cabin lights flicker again, like the opening strip of film running through a bad projector. Tony wonders about electrical shorts in wires behind the walls.
Eyeing a particularly fine piece of linen or silk, Popescu would reach two fingers into his pocket and produce a single, well-polished centime with which he would offer to buy the cloth. Thus charmed out of their instinctual superstition, the mothers of his students would gladly accept the beautiful foreign coin and hand over the cloth that would next serve to remove perspiration from Popescu’s beaded brow. As a consequence of his talent with violin instruction and his eminent connections with the admissions board, Valentin Popescu had a collection of handkerchiefs from the finest clothiers in Europe. When wiping his forehead while in conversation with one of his peers at the conservatory, he did not fail to stop and gaze at the moist cloth, and to proudly drop the name of the woman who had given it to him.
“This lovely kerchief I purchased from the widow Popovici for a single centime. Her daughter is to be married to the junior secretary of the Typographers Union. The cloth belonged, she said, to her dearly departed husband who purchased it in Strasbourg while on a research tour. He was very prominent in the Department of Agriculture, you know. His arena was cheese, I believe.”
Professor Popescu, as he preferred to be addressed, was also a great admirer of cheese. The woman who obtained his services for her daughter would invariably spend the next eight months bargaining with market owners for the finest selection of cheeses in the capital. A joke went about the conservatory that for each wheel of Camembert that entered the city in some diplomat’s briefcase, a full one-fifth went into Professor Popescu’s stomach.
