Face-Off

by Michael Betcherman

  None of that surprised Alex. When he was in grade ten he did a science project on identical twins. He remembered reading about two brothers who met at the age of thirtynine after having been separated at birth. Both had been named James by their adoptive parents. Each had been married twice, the first time to women named Linda and then to ones named Betty. Their sons had the same names. They smoked the same cigarettes, drank the same beer, and drove the same model of car.

  And that was just one story. There were plenty of others that were just as amazing. Alex was pretty sure he and Stefan would find other things to add to their list.

  He got out of bed and did his push-ups and sit-ups. After he put on his jeans and a T-shirt, he walked down the hall and knocked on the door to his mom’s office, where Stefan had slept on the pullout couch.

  “Come in,” Stefan called. He was doing push-ups, wearing only a pair of boxers. “Almost done,” he grunted.

  Alex smiled to himself and mentally made an addition to the list. Stefan’s back muscles expanded and contracted with each push-up. Alex noticed, with a twinge of envy, that his brother was more muscular than he was.

  Stefan’s guitar was on the couch. Alex sat down and idly plucked a few strings while Stefan finished doing his push-ups. When Stefan was done he got to his feet. Three small incisions formed a triangle above the waistband of his boxers. Alex lifted up his shirt and showed his appendectomy scars to Stefan.

  “Freaky,” they both said at the same time.

  “How long have you been playing?” Alex asked, gesturing to the guitar.

  “Since I was five. My dad taught me.”

  “You must be good.”

  Stefan shrugged. Alex passed him the guitar. Stefan played a few chords of “Born in the U.S.A.” “Better than the Boss,” Alex said, only half-joking.

  “Yeah, right.” Stefan handed the guitar back to Alex. Then he lay down on the floor and started doing his sit-ups.

  Anna was in the kitchen, making pancake batter and listening to some classical music on the radio. Alex watched her for a while from the doorway. She looked different, lighter, as if someone had removed the invisible weight that had always been on her shoulders. It was no mystery, he thought. For all those years she had thought that Stefan was dead. And now, as if by some miracle, he’d suddenly come back to life. She should have told me about him, Alex thought, but he wasn’t angry about it anymore. All that mattered now was that he and Stefan were reunited. Everything else was ancient history.

  “Morning, dude.”

  “Morning, Anna. Let’s put blueberries in the batter,” he suggested.

  Boris and Stefan came into the kitchen a few minutes later. “I hope you guys like blueberry pancakes,” Anna said.

  “Stefan’s favourite,” Boris said.

  “What time are we leaving?” Alex asked, as his mother took a third batch of pancakes out of the oven. Team Oregon had beaten Team Michigan the night before, knocking B.C. out of the medal round, and the four of them were going to Whistler for the weekend. In normal circumstances, Alex would have been disappointed at missing out on an opportunity to impress Bill Henry and the other college scouts, but these weren’t what you would call normal circumstances. He had one week with his brother—one week to make up for seventeen years—and he wanted to spend every minute of it with him.

  “I have to drop in at the store in Langley,” his mom said, “but I won’t be there long. I’d like to get out of here by one so we can beat the traffic. More pancakes, Boris?”

  “No, thank you. They’re delicious but I’m full.”

  Alex and Stefan held their plates up at the same time. Anna divided the pancakes evenly between them.

  Alex’s cellphone beeped, alerting him to a text message. “Kenny says you can borrow his Brodie,” he told Stefan after he read the message. “We’ll bike to the peak of Whistler tomorrow. A mile of vertical.” Mountain biking was another thing he and Stefan had in common.

  “A mile of vertical?” Stefan asked, not understanding the term. Alex was about to explain when Boris hushed him. He leaned over and turned up the volume on the radio to listen to the news.

  “… has won the election in Berovia, defeating the Freedom Party, which has governed the country for the past nineteen years. The new government is promising to co-operate with the International War Crimes Tribunal, which has indicted two Berovian generals, Milos Koralic and Anton Zarkov, for war crimes committed during the country’s war with Maldania. During its time in power, the Freedom Party refused to arrest the two men, who are regarded as national heroes by many Berovians.”

  “Heroes,” Boris snorted. “How can they call those butchers heroes after what they did at the Church of San Marco?”

  “What did they do?” Alex asked.

  “Those heroes,” Boris said, spitting out the word, “forced two hundred and forty Maldans, including women and children, into the church, barred the doors, and then set it on fire.”

  “The Maldans were just as bad,” Anna said.

  “That’s true,” Boris responded, “but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t pay for what they did.”

  Alex was thinking about all those people being burned alive when the doorbell rang.

  “That will be Roman,” Anna said. “Your uncle,” she said to Stefan. She turned to Boris. “We have a house rule here. No talk about the war.”

  “That’s fine with me,” Boris said.

  Anna walked out of the kitchen. A few seconds later she came back with Roman.

  “This is my brother, Roman Kuchar,” Anna said, making the introductions as Boris and Stefan stood up. “This is Boris Divac.” Roman and Boris exchanged a wary glance. “And this is his son, Stefan. Your nephew.”

  “Gardo je mi,” they said to each other as they shook hands. Nice to meet you. “It’s a miracle,” Roman said, putting his hands on Stefan’s shoulders and staring at him in disbelief. “It’s a miracle,” he said again, before he finally let go. Alex realized that his uncle had known about Stefan all along and that for all these years he, like Anna, had thought he was dead.

  Anna poured Roman a cup of coffee. “Thank you.” He looked at Alex and then back at Stefan. “They’re like two peas in a pod,” he said. “I hear you’re a goalie, too,” he said to Stefan.

  “I am,” Stefan said.

  “He’s amazing,” Alex said. “You should have seen some of the saves he made against us.”

  “Maybe you’ll both end up in the NHL,” Roman said.

  “For sure,” Alex said. He looked at Stefan and rolled his eyes.

  “You’re going to love Whistler,” Roman said. “The village is much newer, of course, but it reminds me of Varsoya.” Varsoya was a town in Berovia. “Before it got destroyed by the bombing.”

  “A lot of towns in Maldania were destroyed by bombs, too,” Boris said.

  “Your army was shelling us from those towns,” Roman answered.

  “That’s enough,” Anna said forcefully.

  “Your army did exactly the same thing,” Boris said.

  “Enough,” Anna shouted in Berovian before Roman could reply. She glared at the two of them. “I don’t want to hear another word about the war. That’s all you people talk about. You’re like little children. He started it. No, he started it,” she said in a child’s voice. “Not another word.”

  Boris and Roman squirmed in their chairs like two kids who’d just been scolded by their mother.

  “Anna tells me you’re in the travel business,” Roman said politely after a few awkward seconds of silence.

  “Yes. I have a small agency back home,” Boris answered just as politely.

  “There’s a lot to see in Maldania,” Roman said.

  “We go to Berovia as well. One week in Maldania and one week in Berovia. The island is so small that we can go everywhere by bus. We try to have an equal number of Berovians and Maldans on the tour. I think it’s important people understand that both sides suffered during the war. That’s the
only way we’ll ever be able to move on.”

  “What a wonderful idea,” Anna said.

  “Interesting,” Roman said, in a voice that made it clear he wasn’t interested in the least. “How long have you had your agency?”

  “About ten years. How about you?”

  “Twenty-three. The business has changed since I got started. I used to be able to make a good living booking flights and hotels. But now, with the internet, people do that for themselves. These days you’ve got to be a lot more creative. New sources of revenue. That’s what my accountant calls it.”

  Alex and Stefan looked at each other. The conversation was about to get real boring. “You want to play some ball hockey?” Alex asked.

  “That was heavy,” Alex said to Stefan as they walked toward the garage.

  “Heavy?”

  “Intense. Emotional,” Alex explained. He raised the garage door. “It must be terrible living somewhere where there’s so much hatred.”

  “I don’t hate anybody,” Stefan said, “except guys who shoot the puck at my head.”

  “Did you know about San Marco?” Alex asked.

  “Sure. It happened on January 27, the same day Dad got me at the orphanage. Every Maldan knows about it. Zarkov and Koralic, the two generals they talked about on the radio?” Alex nodded. “People say they were laughing when the church burned down.”

  “With all those people inside?” Alex asked incredulously.

  Stefan nodded. “They’re the two most hated men in Maldania.”

  “No wonder,” Alex said. “Why did they do it?”

  “There were a lot of Maldans living in Berovia when the war started. The Stork and the Snowman wanted to get rid of them. After they burned down San Marco, every Maldan in Berovia left the country.”

  “The Stork and the Snowman?”

  “Zarkov is called the Stork because he’s very tall and very thin. Koralic is the Snowman because he’s got a round head on a round belly.”

  “The Stork and the Snowman,” Alex said. “Sounds like a movie title.”

  The hockey net was on a shelf at the back of the garage. It was covered in cobwebs. Alex hadn’t used it in a long time. He got up on a stepladder and passed the net down to Stefan. They carried it out of the garage and put it down in the driveway. Alex grabbed a pair of goalie pads, the ones he used when he was in Bantam, from a box of hockey equipment. “You want to go in goal first?” he asked.

  “Sure,” Stefan said. He strapped on the pads and grabbed the goalie stick and a baseball glove.

  Alex took a tennis ball and a hockey stick and went to the end of the driveway. “Want to keep score?” he asked.

  “No point if you don’t.”

  “Switch after fifty shots?” Alex asked. Stefan nodded. Alex stickhandled toward the goal. Stefan got down in a crouch. Alex fired the ball low to the stick side. Stefan turned it aside easily.

  Seventeen shots and seventeen saves later, Roman came out of the house. He went up to Stefan and hugged him tightly for a few seconds. “Have fun in Whistler. See you at the office when you get back,” he said to Alex as he walked to his car. He took a final look at Stefan and shook his head in amazement before he got in his car and drove away.

  Alex went upstairs on his next shot, a bullet that Stefan caught as casually as if they were playing catch. It took thirty-four shots before Alex finally squeezed one past Stefan. It was the only goal he was able to score.

  “You’re too good,” Alex said after he’d taken his fifty shots. They were about to switch positions when Anna and Boris came out of the house.

  “Boris is coming to Langley with me,” Anna said.

  “Do I have time to show these boys a few tricks?” Boris asked. Anna nodded. Alex handed Boris his stick. He stickhandled toward Stefan, feinted to his glove side, and flicked a shot high to the stick side. Stefan blocked it with ease. “Not bad,” Boris said. He took a few more shots—all of them hard and well placed—but none got past Stefan. Anna cheered for every save.

  “Time to retire, old man,” Stefan said affectionately.

  Boris handed the stick back to Alex. “Stefan used to drag me outside to practise no matter how bad the weather was,” he recalled. “He would make me take shots at him for hours on end.” Alex remembered that he used to drag Anna outside, too, but by the time he was ten there was no point. She couldn’t shoot the ball hard enough to dent a piece of paper.

  “Don’t forget,” Anna said. “We’re leaving at one.” She and Boris got in her car and drove off.

  Alex put on the pads and took his place in front of the net. He saved the first eleven shots but Stefan scored on the twelfth, a slapshot from point-blank range that Alex got a piece of, but not enough to keep it from trickling into the net. Stefan only managed to score once more on Alex, but it was enough to give him a 2–1 win.

  “Are you going to play for the same team as last year?” Alex asked after they put the net back in the garage.

  “No,” Stefan said. “I’m too old.”

  “So where are you going to play?”

  “Nowhere.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s nowhere to play once you turn eighteen. We don’t have a junior league in Maldania. There are club teams but nobody takes it seriously.”

  “What about playing in another country in Europe? You’re good enough to play anywhere.”

  “You can’t just show up. You have to be scouted, and scouts don’t come to Maldania. I was hoping something would happen here, but …” Stefan shrugged. Alex nodded. Team Maldania was so bad the scouts hadn’t bothered showing up for their games.

  “You mean you’re finished playing hockey?” Alex asked. Stefan nodded. “That sucks,” Alex said. “That really sucks.”

  “What?” Stefan asked. It was another expression he didn’t know. But he figured it out soon enough from the context. “Yeah,” he said. “That sucks. That really sucks.”

  “Is that Mom’s report card?” Alex asked.

  Stefan nodded. “From her last year of high school.” He and Alex were in the living room waiting for Anna and Boris to get back from Langley so they could go to Whistler. They were looking through some of Anna’s papers from Berovia that were in an envelope glued to the back cover of the photo album. Stefan was explaining them to Alex because they were written in Berovian, which had a different alphabet from English.

  “What’s this?” Alex asked, pointing to an official-looking document with a seal.

  “Your father’s death certificate.”

  “He’s your father, too,” Alex said.

  “Only biologically. Boris is my real father. He’s the one who raised me. He’s the one who took care of me.”

  “Did you ever wonder who your biological parents were?” Alex asked.

  “I did at first, when Dad told me I was adopted. But there was no way of finding out who they were so after a while I stopped thinking about it. I wasn’t the only kid whose parents were killed in the war so I didn’t feel like I was different. Lots of my friends were in the same situation.”

  “And now?”

  “I don’t know. It’s weird. If Darko didn’t die, I would have grown up with you guys. That would have been great”—Yes, it would, Alex thought—“but then I wouldn’t have grown up with Dad and I can’t imagine me without him.” Alex nodded. He couldn’t imagine himself without Anna, either. “This doesn’t make sense,” Stefan said a moment later, looking up from the death certificate.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “It says here that Darko died on January 27.”

  “So?”

  “That was the day he and I went to get the doctor, right?” Alex nodded. “But Dad—Boris—said he got me at the orphanage on the twenty-seventh. That’s why he chose it as my birthday.”

  “Somebody must have found you and taken you to the orphanage after Dad—Darko—was killed,” Alex said.

  “The people at the orphanage said I’d already been there fo
r a couple of days. How could I have been there before the twenty-seventh, before Darko died?”

  “You couldn’t … Didn’t the Church of San Marco burn down on January 27?” Alex asked. He had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “Yeah. Why? … Oh my God.” Stefan stared at Alex. Alex nodded sombrely. Anna had never told him how his father died. He had assumed that was because she didn’t know. But she knew. She hadn’t told him so he wouldn’t know the truth—his father had been one of the victims of the massacre at San Marco.

  Just then Anna and Boris came through the front door. “Are you guys ready to leave?” she asked. Then she saw the look on Alex’s face.

  “I was on the balcony of my apartment watering the plants when a man came running around the corner at full speed,” Boris recalled. “He was carrying a small child. You and your father,” he said to Stefan unnecessarily. “There was a hedge in front of the apartment building. Your father hid you behind the hedge and ran off.

  “A few seconds later a truckload of Berovian soldiers turned the corner, coming from the same direction your father had. They had obviously been chasing him. When they caught up to him, the soldiers threw him into the back of the truck.” Boris paused for a moment. “I waited until the truck drove off, and then I went outside and brought you back to the apartment.”

  He turned to Anna. “My wife and I thought Stefan might have family in Sarno but we couldn’t ask any questions without putting us all in danger. We left for Maldania the next day.”

  “You had to leave. No Maldan was safe in Sarno after San Marco … You saved Stefan’s life,” Anna said, her voice cracking.

  Boris shrugged. “Anybody would have done the same.”

  “If someone had seen you and turned you in, you would have been killed.”

  Boris shrugged again. “I couldn’t just leave him there.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me the truth?” Stefan asked.

  “I thought about it,” Boris said, “but I didn’t know how it would affect you. And I was worried it would make you hate all Berovians. There are too many people like that.”