Face-Off

by Michael Betcherman

  “It was a good win,” he said automatically, as if he were being interviewed on TV, where it was considered bad form to talk about yourself.

  “He’s going to be the next Mike Barkich,” Roman said.

  Yeah, right, Alex thought. Mike Barkich was the only Berovian to ever play in the NHL, but no matter what Roman might think, Alex knew he wasn’t going to be the second. Like any kid who’d ever laced up a pair of skates, he had fantasized about playing in the NHL, but he’d played enough hockey by now to know that wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t a lack of confidence that made him reach this conclusion; it was a fact. Only sixty men in the entire world got to play goal in the NHL—two for each of the thirty teams—and even though Alex knew he was good, maybe even better than he thought, he knew he wasn’t close to being good enough to become a member of that club. But he might just be good enough to get a scholarship to the University of Minnesota. And that would be just fine with me, he thought.

  “Who do you play next?” Tomas asked.

  “Maldania.”

  “Kick their ass,” Tomas ordered. Tomas was a charter member of the Berovian Mafia. He was even more crazed about the war than Roman was.

  “We’ll do our best,” Alex said. But beating Maldania wasn’t the problem. The question was whether Michigan would beat Oregon so that B.C. would move on to the medal round.

  SIX

  “Don’t make the mistake of taking these guys for granted,” McAndrew cautioned in the locker room before the game. “Divac isn’t going to give up any easy ones,” he said, referring to Team Maldania’s goalie, Stefan Divac, “so we’ve got to keep up the pressure for all sixty minutes.”

  McAndrew was right about Divac. Alex remembered how well he’d played at the end of the game against Team Michigan. He and his teammates knew that a hot goalie could win a game all by himself, but everybody in the locker room, including McAndrew, knew that there was no way Maldania was going to beat them, no matter how well Divac played.

  “Don’t get distracted wondering whether Michigan is going to beat Oregon,” the coach continued, knowing that was exactly what was on everybody’s mind. “We can’t do anything about that. We need to win tonight to give ourselves a chance to move on. So let’s go out there and take care of business.”

  Team B.C. took care of business, as ordered. Stefan Divac was magnificent, but the talent gulf between the teams was too wide and B.C. kept its medal hopes alive with a 5–0 victory.

  Alex spent most of the game leaning against the crossbar while his teammates mercilessly bombarded Divac. The Maldan goalie made a dozen saves Alex would have been proud to feature on his highlight reel. Team Maldania managed to send just a handful of shots Alex’s way and only one was even remotely testing: a quick wrist shot from the wing that Alex played perfectly by coming out of his net to cut off the angle. It was the easiest shutout he ever had.

  Could have played this one in my street clothes, he thought as his teammates piled over the boards to congratulate him. He glanced at Anna, who was sitting behind the team bench. She’d been able to make it after all. She gave him a thumbs-up and, making a gesture to indicate that she’d meet him outside the locker room, headed for the exit.

  It’s up to Team Michigan now, Alex thought as he took off his mask and skated to centre ice for the traditional postgame handshake. He was so preoccupied with thoughts of the upcoming Oregon–Michigan matchup that he had shaken hands with half the Maldan players before it registered that they were all looking at him strangely.

  He realized why when he reached the end of the line and found himself face-to-face with Stefan Divac.

  He could have been looking in the mirror. Stefan Divac looked exactly like him, right down to the mole under his left eye. Neither of them said a word. They just stared at each other for a moment, wide-eyed and uncomprehending, before skating away. When Alex reached his bench, he turned and looked across the ice. Stefan was standing by the Maldan bench, looking back at him. He held up his Lou Roberts mask. Alex did the same. Then they both turned and walked off the ice.

  “You don’t have a twin brother you never told me about, do you?” Kenny Nelson joked when Alex walked into the locker room.

  Alex was asking himself the same question, but he wasn’t joking. He didn’t know what to think. His gut was telling him that Stefan Divac was his twin brother even though his brain was telling him that was impossible. How could he have a brother he knew nothing about? And if they were brothers, his last name would be Petrovic, not Divac, wouldn’t it?

  “Listen up,” Charlie Boyle shouted. The room went quiet. Boyle waved a stack of tickets. “I’ve got tickets for anyone who wants to see the Michigan–Oregon game.”

  The other players all gathered around Boyle but Alex’s thoughts were elsewhere. He spotted a copy of the tournament program lying on the floor. He picked it up and turned to the page with Team Maldania’s roster. Each player’s birth date and place of birth were listed beside his name. The players were listed in alphabetical order. Stefan Divac was the second name on the list. It didn’t make any sense, but Alex was suddenly positive he knew what he would see in the other columns. Sarno, Berovia. February 11. Same as him.

  He was wrong. Stefan was born in Sarno all right, but his birthday was January 27, not February 11. Alex took a second look to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him. They weren’t. He and Stefan were born on different days. They couldn’t be brothers. He stared at the program blankly. He felt as if the wind had been knocked out of him.

  “Are you okay?” Kenny asked.

  “Fine,” Alex said. But he wasn’t fine. Not even close.

  Stefan was standing in the hallway when Alex came out of the locker room. Alex was vaguely aware that the other people waiting outside the locker room were staring at them. The stunned look on Stefan’s face made it clear that he was as confused and overwhelmed as Alex was.

  “I’m Stefan,” he said finally. He spoke with a heavy accent.

  “Alex.”

  They solemnly shook hands, their eyes not leaving each other’s face. As soon as their hands touched, Alex felt as if a bolt of electricity had flowed into him, as if a current that had been switched off had been turned back on. He had the overpowering feeling that they had met before, even though he knew that couldn’t possibly be true.

  “Do you speak English?” Alex asked.

  “Yeah. Everybody in Maldania does. We take it in school from grade one.”

  “You speak really well.”

  Stefan shrugged. I can’t believe how much he looks like me, Alex thought. “This is freaky,” he said.

  “Freaky?” Stefan asked.

  “Strange. Really strange. Like …” Alex made a who-oo-oo sound, like in a horror movie.

  “Freaky,” Stefan agreed.

  “The moment I saw you I was positive we were twins. Then I saw that we had different birthdays.”

  “How do you know my birthday?” Stefan asked.

  Alex opened the program to the Team Maldania page and handed it to Stefan. He pointed to Stefan’s January 27 birthdate. “I was born on February 11,” Alex said.

  “January 27 isn’t my real birthday,” Stefan said. “I’m adopted. That’s the date my dad got me from the orphanage. The doctor told him I was around a year old so he chose it as my birthday. I don’t know my real birthday.”

  Alex could feel his heart start to beat faster. “I was born in Sarno, too,” he said. He noticed that Stefan had a rubber band on his left wrist.

  Alex held up his left wrist.

  “Freaky,” Stefan said.

  Alex felt … he didn’t know how he felt. He and Stefan were born in the same town. They were the same age. They looked exactly alike. It all added up to the two of them being twins, but if he had a brother, why didn’t Anna tell him? He was trying to solve that puzzle when he looked over Stefan’s shoulder and saw a middle-aged man with black hair and bushy eyebrows walking toward him. He was looking straight at Ale
x and he had a big smile on his face.

  “Barod ragi, sin,” the man said to Alex. Good game, son. At the sound of his voice, Stefan turned around to face him. The man’s eyes moved between the two boys. Then he held his hands out as if to say, What’s going on?

  “This is Alex,” Stefan said in Berovian, “the B.C. goalie. This is my dad, Boris,” he said to Alex. He turned back to Boris. “Alex was born in Sarno.”

  “Sarno,” Boris repeated. He said something to Stefan but Alex wasn’t listening. He saw his mother walk toward him. Stefan turned, following Alex’s gaze. As soon as Anna saw Stefan, she stopped in her tracks. The blood drained out of her face, as if she’d seen a ghost. Then she fainted dead away.

  SEVEN

  Alex hovered over his mother, his emotions ping-ponging between concern for his mom and shock at discovering that he had a twin brother. Anna’s reaction when she saw Stefan had eliminated all doubt about that. But how could this be possible? The question kept reverberating inside his head, as if it was on an endless loop.

  A wave of relief washed over him when his mother finally opened her eyes.

  “Stefan. Mija Stefan … Milo damse marte,” she said, reverting to her mother tongue. Stefan. My Stefan. I thought you were dead. She sat up and took Stefan’s face in her two hands, as if she had to touch him to prove she wasn’t dreaming. “I thought you were dead,” she repeated, this time in English.

  Why did she think he was dead? Alex felt hopelessly confused, and judging by the looks on everyone else’s face, he wasn’t the only one.

  It didn’t take long to sort things out. It was like a jigsaw puzzle where Anna had some of the pieces and Boris had the others. Between them they were able to put the puzzle together.

  The story Anna had told Alex was true, as far as it went. The two of them had been ill and his father had gone to get the doctor. She’d just omitted one little detail—the fact that Alex had a twin brother. “Darko had to take Stefan with him because I was too sick to take care of him,” she said. “I knew something bad happened when they didn’t come back. The next day I learned that Darko had been killed …” She touched Stefan’s face. “I thought you …” She couldn’t complete the sentence. She took a deep breath to compose herself and then looked at Boris. “Do you know how he ended up at the orphanage?”

  “The people there told me that a woman brought him but they didn’t know who she was,” Boris said. “He’d already been there for a few days.”

  “Why did you decide to adopt him?” Anna asked.

  Boris shrugged. “My wife and I couldn’t have children and there were all these kids with nobody to take care of them.” He shrugged, as if anybody would have done the same thing.

  “Where’s your wife now?”

  “She was killed in a bombing raid a few weeks after we got to Maldania.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Anna said. Boris shrugged again. “And you never remarried?”

  Boris shook his head. “After the war I put a notice in the Sarno newspapers with Stefan’s picture and the details of what happened. When nobody answered it, I adopted him.”

  “We were already in Canada by then … One thing I don’t understand,” she went on. “How did you know his name was Stefan?”

  “I didn’t. I named him after my father.”

  Anna looked at Stefan mournfully. “All these years, all these years.” A tear trickled down her cheek. She hugged Stefan, burying her head in his chest.

  Stefan looked at Alex over Anna’s head. As their eyes met, Alex saw the same look of shock and disbelief on his brother’s face that he imagined was pasted on his. And he knew his brother felt the same bittersweet emotions he was feeling: the sweetness of reuniting with the brother he never knew he had, and the bitterness that came from knowing that all those years were lost forever.

  They drove straight from the arena to the hotel where Team Maldania was staying. Alex and Stefan talked the entire time. It felt bizarre, at first, to hear his mirror image speaking English with a Berovian accent. It was as if he and Stefan had lived all those years in parallel universes that had somehow merged into one. But the strangeness quickly wore off, and Alex soon felt as if he and his brother were merely catching up with each other after a long separation.

  When they arrived at the hotel, Boris and Stefan took the elevator up to their rooms to get their luggage. They were moving in with Anna and Alex instead of going on the week-long tour of the province that the owner of TelCel had arranged for the Maldanian contingent.

  “I can’t believe he’s alive,” Anna said. She was talking more to herself than to Alex.

  “Why didn’t you tell me I had a brother?” Alex asked accusingly.

  The question jolted his mother out of her reverie. She turned to face him. “I thought it was kinder not to,” she said.

  “Kinder? How was it kinder?”

  “Remember, I thought Stefan was dead. I thought he’d been murdered just like your father. What good would it have done to tell you?”

  “Because it was the truth. Because then I would have understood why I felt the way I did, why I always felt that something was missing, why I kept having the dreams.”

  “I was afraid it would only make the dreams worse.”

  “You should have told me,” he said.

  Anna reached out and touched his cheek. He sat frozen in his chair. “Maybe it was a mistake,” she said, her voice cracking. “Maybe I should have told you. I don’t know. I did what I thought was best.”

  “You should have told me,” he repeated, this time in a softer voice. “Maybe not when I was a kid, but you should have told me when I got older. I had the right to know the truth.”

  “This is a picture of your father and me a couple of weeks after we met.” Anna was sitting on the living-room couch between Alex and Stefan, holding a worn leather photo album on her lap. Boris had gone up to his room after dinner. He said he was tired but Alex knew he wanted to give Stefan a chance to be alone with his mother and his brother.

  “How old were you?” Stefan asked. Alex studied his brother’s face as he looked at the photo. It was unreal. To think that all these years he had a twin brother he knew nothing about. It was incredible. Absolutely incredible. Stefan glanced at him. Alex could tell his brother was having as much trouble wrapping his mind around it as he was. I can’t believe Mom never told me, he thought.

  “I was eighteen. He was twenty,” Anna said. “I haven’t looked at these pictures in years. I’d forgotten how much you boys look like him.”

  “How did you meet?” Stefan asked. Alex knew the story but it had been a while since he’d heard it and he was happy to hear it again.

  “It was during the summer holidays. I went to the beach with a few of my girlfriends. Your father was there. He was very shy. I knew he was looking at me, but every time I caught his eye he looked away. Finally, just as we were about to leave, he came over and said hello. We saw each other every day after that for the rest of the summer. I knew my father would go crazy if he found out I was seeing a Maldan, so we had to meet in secret.

  “At first that made it more exciting, but after a while all the lying began to wear us down. One day, about a year later, Darko said he’d had enough. He came to the house and told my father that he loved me and wanted to marry me. My dad was a big man, a lot bigger than Darko, and when he got angry it was a scary sight. He told Darko to go away and said he would kill him if he ever came back. Darko didn’t back down. He told my father to go ahead and kill him because he wasn’t going to give me up. My father ordered me to make a choice: him or Darko.

  “I walked out the door with nothing but the clothes on my back. I wrote my parents to tell them where we were living, but they didn’t answer. As far as they were concerned, I didn’t exist. I never spoke to them again. They both died a few years after we came to Canada.” She stared off into space.

  “Everyone thought I came here to get away from the memories,” she said a few seconds later, “but tha
t wasn’t the reason. I came to get away from the hatred. I couldn’t stand it anymore. It’s insane. We look the same, we eat the same foods, we speak the same language. The rest of the world can’t tell us apart, but you put a Maldan in the same room with a Berovian and the odds are they’ll be at each other’s throats within a few minutes.”

  She turned to the next page in the photo album. “This is the apartment we were living in when you two were born,” she said. She continued flipping the pages. There were a lot of baby pictures. Alex had always assumed they were of him but now he wasn’t so sure.

  “Some of those are of Stefan, aren’t they?” he asked. Anna nodded.

  “Did you keep any pictures of Alex and me?” Stefan asked. Alex was wondering the same thing.

  Anna looked through the album until she found a photo of Darko sitting on a couch holding a baby in his lap. “That’s you,” she said to Stefan. She turned a few more pages and found a photo of herself on the same couch, also holding a baby on her lap. She turned to Alex. “And that’s you.”

  “You can tell I’m older,” Stefan joked. He was born ten minutes before Alex.

  Anna took the two photos out of the album and put them side-by-side. They were a perfect fit.

  EIGHT

  Alex woke up the next day feeling, maybe for the first time ever, that all was right with the world. He finally understood why he had his dreams, and he knew with absolute certainty that he would never have one again. He had found his missing limb.

  He and Stefan had stayed up talking until the early hours of the morning. Even though they had known each other for less than twenty-four hours, he felt a connection with his brother that he had never felt with another human being. It’s no wonder, he thought. He and Stefan had spent nine months entangled in their mother’s womb, just the two of them, alone in a private universe where nobody else existed.

  It didn’t take long to discover that their similarities didn’t end with the fact that they were both goalies, that Lou Roberts was their favourite player, and that they both wore rubber bands around their left wrist. They also used the same brand of toothpaste, were big Bruce Springsteen fans, and had pet snakes when they were seven.