The Uninvited Guest (19 page)

Realizing he had made a mistake, Stefan opened the bottle of
Å£uic
ă
and poured out large glasses for himself and the three soldiers, smiling and apologizing for the dice. The soldiers smiled and accepted the free drinks, but were not so easily distracted. Another of the soldiers now wanted to play Stefan. This young man, drunk and sick to death of fearing an imminent Soviet attack, intended to win back the honour of the German Army on the table. Marian complained about the time, about the need to close up the tavern and go home to a wife and children, but the soldiers refused to be moved.

Another hard-fought match of fifteen began, and with the games tied at five apiece, Stefan did something unimaginable. He offered to raise the bet. The soldiers laughed and slapped Stefan on the back. They had decided to like this courageous little Romanian with the incredible luck at dice. But Marian and his father sank into despair. They knew that for Stefan to raise the bet at this point meant he had decided he would win, and that could only mean trouble for everyone in the room.

The Germans were satisfied with their position in this match. Their wins, through Stefan's skill at deception, had seemed decisive, and Stefan had made sure his own wins were the result of blind luck. To anyone who did not know Stefan, it would have seemed the dice were on the side of the Germans, and so when Stefan offered to make it more interesting, the Germans assumed he was bluffing, desperately trying to make them back away from the match. They asked him what he had to offer.

In the distillery shed at the back of his lumber mill, Stefan had just completed bottling over three hundred new litres of
Å£uic
ă
from that year's plums. He made it known to the Germans he was willing to wager the entire three hundred if they would put up something of equal value. The soldiers laughed. They were far from their homes. What did they have to wager with? Stefan had no interest in their German Army money, and anyway it is doubtful they would have had enough between them to cover the cost of three hundred litres of ţuică.

It was Stefan who smiled then. He didn't want their money. If Stefan won, he said in his best, most formal and polite German, the soldiers would agree to retreat from Ilisesti, when the time came, on horses that Stefan himself would supply. Stefan would end up with their Panzer tank, the pride of the German infantry.

Marian could stand it no longer. At the mention of the tank he jumped from his seat behind the small bar and rushed to the gaming table. He swore at Stefan in Romanian and in the same sentence was politely conciliatory to the Germans in their own language. Obviously, this fool had been drinking too much
Å£uic
ă
. Obviously he would never try to insult the great German army with such a foolish joke. If they would end the tournament now he, Marian, would see to it himself that Stefan delivered to them as much
Å£
uic
ă
as they could take with them, when he had slept off his idiocy, when he was not such an embarrassment to the Romanian people.

But the Germans would not hear it. The mention of the tank reminded them where they were, reminded them of the distance to their own homes and of the possibility that Stalin's troops were at that moment plotting how they were to be killed. Their tank was everything to them. It was the reason they were now a target for barbarian Russians, and it was the only thing that could save them from those same barbarians. At the mention of their battle home, all three soldiers began to nervously finger their side arm holsters. Stefan kept his eyes on their eyes. Somewhere deep within his drunkenness he recognized the line he had crossed. He smiled at the soldiers. They smiled at him.

Stefan had Marian bring another bottle of
Å£uic
ă
from behind the bar, and all the glasses were refilled. The match continued, Stefan playing for a German panzer tank, and the soldiers playing for a year's supply of the best
Å£
uic
ă
in the country. But now, with the stakes as high as they could go, it was apparent Stefan would not allow a loss. He wanted to take the tank from these men. He had begun to feel he was fighting a war with the table, that perhaps his success at the table would mean success for his village once and for all against these and any future invaders. Stefan played a heroic final three games, beating the Germans in a humiliation, three games to nil. With the final roll of the dice, he slapped his palm on the board and shouted, “The panzer belongs to Ilisesti.”

Refilling the glasses yet again, he toasted the soldiers. He toasted Germany. He toasted the factory and the factory workers who had made his fantastic tank. The soldiers remained silent throughout all of Stefan's drunken, victorious toasts. When Stefan looked around the room to share his victory with the village, he discovered that he was alone with his gambling partners. Marian and his father had slipped out the back door of the tavern and were hurrying through the dark fields. Stefan's tank sat in the town square, directly in front of his house where it had often been seen, its gun trained on the road into town from the forested hills of Bucovina.

There was no witness to Stefan's final moments that night. Marian claims to have seen Stefan and the three soldiers stumbling up Ilisesti's main road very drunk, singing German army songs. The men were arm in arm as though friends for life. There is no witness for what happened, but the entire village is aware of what they found the next day. Stefan lay in front of his tank, his face in the dirt of the road, a hole in the back of his head. The three soldiers sat against the side of Stefan's house in the centre of the village, drinking his
Å£uic
ă
.

They sat with their Lugers drawn and told of how they had played yet another match after leaving the tavern, won back their tank and the three hundred bottles, and that Stefan had then attacked in a rage, trying to sabotage the panzer and shouting insults about Germany. They had not wanted to shoot him, but as members of the great German army they had no choice.

For the people of Ilisesti, it was an anxious, dangerous morning. The soldiers were still very drunk and in a blood rage from senseless killing. The villagers worked hard to make the killers comfortable again, to draw them back to humanity so no one else would be lost. They cleared Stefan's body from the roadway and congratulated the drunken men on both their win and the completion of their duty. The women of the village brought the soldiers breakfast and made sure to keep their
Å£uic
ă
glasses full. Finally, overcome by their long night and many bottles of liquor, the Germans collapsed into sleep where they sat, crumpled against the house of the man they had murdered.

That is the last anyone ever saw of those men, or their precious panzer tank. The tank and the three murderous soldiers disappeared that morning. Other soldiers from their division swept the village before the final retreat but nothing was found. They searched through every house, looked through every barn for the tank. They burned down Stefan's lumber mill trying to intimidate someone into talking, but the villagers were unmoved by their story. The three soldiers had become very drunk one night in the tavern and had talked openly to some of the townspeople about deserting. They had asked for help from the villagers, who had refused, for the villagers believed in the German cause. The soldiers became violent, breaking into the distillery for more ţuică, killing Stefan in the process. Then they boarded their panzer and drove out of the village into the forest, toward the advancing Soviet army.

Tank tracks in the dirt road supported their claim. This was the story on the lips of every citizen of Ilisesti, and though the Germans searched for three days, they could find no trace of the tank or their soldiers.

“A division of Nazis could not find the tank.” Diana laughs, pointing up the roadway to the squat lumber mill built decades before to replace the one destroyed by Germany. “Stalin's glorious army found no panzer when they liberated Ilisesti. The panzer is still hidden in the village. There are pieces of it here and pieces of it there. Ilisesti won that tank in an honest game at the table, and they will never give it up.

“You think you can find one little silver cup in this dark village?” Diana slaps Tony lightly on both cheeks and brushes her lips against his. “You must begin to think about this more clearly.”

Diana curls herself closer into Tony, pulling his arm over her shoulder and taking his hand in hers.

“Now, of course, I will be kissing you again.
If
you win back your cup. And only if you win back your cup.”

“Where is the Cup?”

“More clearly, Tony. Are you a champion?”

“But you know what I have to do to get it back? Is it dancing?”

“Dancing is for grooms. Are you a groom?”

“No.”

“Then something else.”

When they re-enter the reception hall, there is no more music. The bride, Irina, has been returned to the celebration and she attends to an exhausted Dragos Petrescu, who is collapsed against the stage steps, his shirt open. He takes small sips from a cup of water in his new wife's hand. Tables and chairs have been moved, and the small backgammon table now sits in the centre of what had been the dance floor. Petrescu's new grandfather, Andrei, sits at the board across from an empty chair. As usual, everyone in the room is smiling at Tony. They cheer when they see Diana wrapped around him. Tony decides he hates the smiling, and the cheering even more.

“Ah,” yells the exhausted bridegroom, “I recognize the look in his eye. I have seen this look in the locker room. This is the look of a man who will not leave here without the Cup. If he has to kill us all, he will take that cup, and whatever else he wants, back with him to Canada.”

When Tony is seated at the game board, Diana leans in to Tony's ear.

“Remember, he is not an old man. He is your opponent—your enemy.”

Autumn is just days away. Tony stands beside his car and counts trees in the chill evening air. Skate-high on the sixth trunk from the road he finds the nail and the cottage key dangling from it. He straightens up and pictures Stan doing the same, always alone, an old man walking the gravel path from his car to his lakeside cabin, tired after some long flight from Europe, glad to finally be home.

“Thanks, Stan,” he says to the cedars. “You really should have had a family, old man, someone with your blood to leave this to. But better me then some other asshole, am I right? I guess I deserve it.”

He skirts the sagging building and walks first to the shore. The sun is well past the western trees and he is facing east. Lake Simcoe stretches out calm into purple blackness, spotted here and there with lights from the far shore. The lighthouse on Big Bay Point glows out suddenly and then fades, glows and fades. Tony stands in the darkness, counting the rhythm of the slowly turning light. A triple-decked paddlewheel chugs by far out on the lake. Tony hears the sounds of soft jazz bouncing in off the water, a saxophone and stand-up bass, laughter and shuffling feet.

The sign by the road had said
Coop
, the final
e
and
r
of Stan's last name lost to weather, or maybe never painted there in the first place. The sign above the threshold reads
Reward
. The door catches a bit on buckled floorboards. With its opening it releases the moist scent of a building rotting slowly into the muddy lakeside.

Tony palms the wall for the light switch, feels a moth brush his face in anticipation of the flare. The cabin walls are lined with shelves. Light bounces back at Tony from every angle. On the shelves sit hundreds of shot glasses, souvenirs of every hockey-playing country in the world, of every hockey team in every year since 1952. The dust on them is thin, barely there, but Tony picks up the cloth Stan has left folded over his chair and begins to wipe glasses, looking at their logos.

“This is as far as I go, Stan,” he says. “I like it just fine, but it doesn't do for me what it did for you. I think instead I'll fill this house with some voices.”

He scans the room with his eyes, looking for anything that doesn't reflect back to him the image of himself in an armlock with someone else's triumph.

“Diana will be landing in about two weeks, Stan. And she will kick my ass if she sees this place looking like this. Until then, maybe I'll start by getting a radio in here.”

He nudges at the arm of Stan's one comfortable chair with his shoe.

“And maybe I'll do something to get that smell out of here.”

On the lake, a lone powerboat slices past, its engine a dull hiss like the slow deflation of an air mattress.

Thanks to Miki, Andrei, Gino, Vasile, Peggy, Julius and Valentin for wonderful drunken stories. Thanks to Georgiana for reading first and getting all the accents right. Thanks to Chris Chambers and Tim Elliott for hockey. Thanks to Julia for long discussion over martinis.

I want to especially thank the people at Toronto's Gibraltar Point artists retreat centre (Susan, Claudia, Robert, everyone) for October 2001, a terrible, turbulent month during which the first draft of this novel was completed. More whiskey, please.

Thanks to Eva Blank for a fine first edit; to Silas White for wanting it and making it better; and to all at Nightwood Editions.

Finally, thanks to Jonathan Bennett. A good friend, though distant. Look Jonathan, it's a book.