Tony wakes to the sound of horse's hooves on a road. The open window of his room lets in cool morning air, mist and the echo of horseshoes. It is before real light, when the air is blue. There is another sound, a piercing clank of steel on steel. This sound, and not the horse, has woken him. He pulls himself to the open window and looks out over a landscape that both rises and falls before him. Across the road, at the station, a lone man in a black overcoat walks the track beside a steaming passenger train. He carries a flashlight and a long steel hammer. He walks the length of the train, stopping at every wheel to tap and listen to the sound of steel ringing in the early morning. He is testing for weakness in the wheels. Beside Tony's bed, a large silver-plated trophy stands in a padded black carrying case. Tony opens and closes the clasp on the case and slips back into bed.
On the third weekend in June 1995, in the northern town of Ilisesti, Romania, there are two wedding ceremonies for the same couple, and the Cup is present at neither of them. On the Saturday, while a small civil ceremony takes place at the town hall, Tony keeps to himself, keeps close to the Cup, spends most of the day staring from his hotel room window into the wooded hills of Bucovina, into the soft hills speckled with sheep, and lush, forested valleys. He watches the comings and goings of trains at the station. He photographs soldiers and tourists walking the tracks and platforms. He uses his binoculars to discover birds in the tall pines surrounding the small tourist hotel.
The next day, at the church ceremony, Tony stands in a crowd of family, friends, reporters and onlookers as Dragos Petrescu marries Irina Mihu, a girlfriend from childhood, hardly even a woman yet, and someone with whom the young hockey player seems oddly formal. Tony wonders if the marriage has been arranged. The priest chants and speaks, guests hold golden crowns over the heads of the bride and groom; many people, guests and casual passersby, kiss a very large Bible. Every woman holds flowers, while fragrant beeswax candles light the stone walls and floor.
Children in rags stand near the entranceway, quietly begging and offering prayers for money. In another corner of the church, an older priest holds a private mass for the dead, one old woman in black standing before him in the gloom. In his mind, Tony recounts the number of times he checked the ancient lock on his hotel room door and feels the weight of the heavy iron key in his pocket.
The only Romanian citizen ever to win hockey's championship trophy, twenty-one-year-old Dragos Petrescu, a sudden, entirely unexpected national celebrity, has brought the Cup with him to his wedding. It is to be the centrepiece at the reception, set on a small podium behind the head table, to be used as a background for photographs; to be viewed, touched and admired by all the guests and visitors. Tony Chiello, the keeper of the Cup, keeps out of the way, eating tiny meatballs and Black Sea caviar, observing the traffic around the Cup. Occasionally he wipes down the trophy's gleaming sides with a silk handkerchief, to remove fingerprints and the grease of dinner, to make it perfect again.
There is dancing to mandolins, violins and clarinets. Gypsy music sings from the bandstand and women wrap their men in long scarves on the dance floor. In one corner of the hall, several older men in dark suits crowd around a small table. Smoke rises from them; they laugh and drink, slap backs and tug at the sleeves of each other's jackets. On the table, there is a game of backgammon. There is cheering for good dice and low, ironic murmuring for bad. Wooden pieces slide across the wooden board with force, are picked up and slapped down again. The groom sits at the table across from a man in his seventies. They smile at each other drunkenly, each smoking a long cigar. Tony assesses the board. The old man is clearly in front, and Dragos appears to be stalling, pointing at his own pieces and speaking quickly in his own language.
“He is explaining how the backgammon is like hockey.”
A powerful hand grips Tony's arm, and he finds his glass refilling with champagne. Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae, the hockey player's hulking father, has lurched across the room to accost and instruct Tony, drunkenly, joyfully.
“Soon he will lose this game, so he takes his time now to make this explanation.”
Nicolae leans down on Tony, his gleaming bald forehead speckled with sweat, a cigar raging in his smile. He carries a bottle of champagne by its neck, drinking from it whenever he removes the cigar from his mouth.
“He is showing how the playing surfaces are very similar, a rectangle with a line in the centre separating all the action. Both games, you see, are essentially races, with the fastest player most likely winning the day, but both games also depend on a wise use of speed. There is such a thing as speeding to one's own destruction. Go too fast at the wrong time in hockey and you are offside, destroying a scoring opportunity. Concentrate only on the speed of your players around the board in backgammon, and you will spend all night on the bar, reading the newspaper, as they say. Like my idiot son himself has done tonight. But who can blame a man for going too quickly on his wedding night? You know what I mean, of course.”
Dragos plays his bride's grandfather Andrei, a man whose abilities at the game have been tested every day for almost eighty years.
“The old man almost never loses, even when the dice are against him. He knows this board like a man knows the pattern of moles on his mistress's chest. He played backgammon against the Fascists in the '30s.”
“Did he beat the Fascists?” Tony asks.
“He is here today, is he not? Of course he didn't beat the Fascists. He may be the best backgammon player in this country, but when the Fascists are in power, one does well not to beat the Fascists at any game.”
The game ends as expected, with much cheering for old Andrei who clasps his hands together over his head and then runs to the podium to kiss the Cup. Everyone crowds around to take photos of the two champions, generations apart, posing with the trophy.
“You play?” Nicolae asks Tony.
“Mostly I watch, but I think I'm getting better at it.” Tony searches the room quickly with his eyes, looking for Diana, hoping she will not notice him in conversation over a backgammon board.
“Then we will play. Please sit.”
Tony sits across from the large, sweating man. The heat of hands and exertion rises from the table. Tony checks across the room for the Cup, safe in the arms of someone who won it. The party builds force around them, young and old dancing and singing, men standing in groups near the doorway, smoke rising from them as though from a campfire. Dragos Petrescu has seen his father sit down at the gaming table, and he sends Tony a stern nod.
“You are probably wondering why it is my son uses only his mother's maiden name?” the older man laughs across the table. “You know how this life is. You try to always live as though you are doing the best for everyone. Sometimes, you do not succeed. If you knew how we sacrificed for this boy.”
Tony looks into Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae's smiling, half-crazed eyes and the game begins.
Of course, very little the police could do to Nicolae Petrescu-Nicolae before he left Romania mattered to him. He was confident of eventually getting away. There was great pressure on the government at that time not to make immigration too difficult for genuine Jews who genuinely wanted to live in Israel. They could stall Nicolae in paperwork and bureaucracy for a few years while they tried to talk him out of it, but eventually they would have to open up the gate at the airport and let him go. At that time, planes were leaving every week for Tel Aviv. The truth of the situation was that there were not so many genuine Jews on those flights, and not so many people who genuinely wanted to go to Israel to live. Israel was the pathway to America, and America, meaning New York, was the ultimate destination.
The police were aware of the leaking hole in international convention, and it made them more zealous in their interventions into the immigration process. As a result, Nicolae had his two fellows assigned to him. Two officers who made it their business to be in the same places he was. The police especially liked to observe Nicolae on Jewish High Holidays. Naturally, when one is asking Israel to take you in, it is a good idea to be aware of the Jewish High Holidays, if not to observe them, at least to know which is which and not be wishing someone well at Yom Kippur when it is Rosh Hashanah. On the High Holidays, one of the two plainclothes men would always find some reason to invite Nicolae into the police station, an invitation he was obliged to accept. He spent many a Jewish High Holiday at the police station in Bucharest answering questions.
“So, Petrescu, I understand you like plum tarts?”
Nicolae would scratch his head, trying to discover if there was some Hebrew proscription against plums, or pastry, or enjoying sweets on holidays.
“Yes, I suppose I have eaten a tart or two in my life. They can be very enjoyable when baked well.”
“Yes,” they would say meaningfully, while writing something down in a small book.
“Did you see the result of this Saturday's derby, Petrescu? Steaua gave it up in the eighty-ninth minute and it ended in a draw. Damned amateurs.”
Here, perhaps, they were actually looking for sympathy, absurdly because Steaua was the football team of the Party, whereas Nicolae and his friends had always been for Rapid, the team of young fashionable dissenters. Nicolae would have been happy for a last-minute tie against Steaua in the derby, happier still if Rapid had beaten them 3-nil, but on matters of football he didn't fool around.
When football entered into the conversation, he knew he was no longer on the familiar ground of political or social disagreement. It was one thing for the police to be suspicious of your loyalty to the country, and for them to investigate you for dissent, but let them get a whiff of your sentiment in the arena of football and things could go very badly indeed. He would say it was a shame, and that Steaua should put so-and-so on the second team, or bring such-and-such off the bench. This is all he could risk, knowing so-and-so to be one of Steaua's best players in fact and such-and-such to be a complete incompetent. He risked this, knowing it was fine to be wrong in an opinion about football as long as you are talking about the correct team.
“Petrescu, why is it you buy your mineral water at the First of May, when you buy your salami on Dorobantilor? What is so special about the mineral water at First of May?”
“It is merely a question of routine. Besides, it is easiest for me to buy the mineral water closer to home as then I don't have so far to carry it.”
“You sure, Petrescu? You sure you don't just like the looks of the girl who sells the mineral water at First of May? She's something to look at I think, but of course, I do not have a wife and child.”
“Exactly Comrade Officer, you and I have different responsibilities, and so it only makes sense that you would notice this detail while I do not. If you say she is pretty, I will believe you, and maybe hazard a look next timeâbut only a look.”
“Petrescu, did you do well in science at the gymnasium?”
The questioning would continue in this vein, often for two hours or more. Police and suspect together would smoke an entire pack of Carpa
Å£i, the stubby, intensely fragrant Transylvanian cigarettes, sitting across the broad table from each other, with the mysterious table set in the corner doing nothing. Sometimes the officers would get up from their chairs, and without saying a word would leave the room. Nicolae understood at these times that he was to stay perfectly still, not leave his seat, and worry about what was to come. Whether this was a strict rule or not, it seemed the thing to do, and though he often felt lonely and anxious, there was always some kind of disturbance to concentrate on, some clicking from behind the walls or the sound of something scraping across the floor above his head. All part of the game, he could tell, but distracting in fact, and comfortingly banal in a way he was sure was not intended. The fear of what might be behind those sounds was obviously intended to disable him in some way, to suggest horrors he could then expand upon with his own imagination. And this he did, at first, but even horror can become familiar.
After the Revolution, Nicolae discovered, along with everybody else, what had always been suspected about the building he was taken to again and again. These people, these secret police, did indeed kill their own fellow citizens in that very building. They killed and maimed and ruined the minds of many, many people in that very building with the crazy backgammon game in one room. It is for this reason that many of the Securitate were dragged into the street and kicked to death by mobs during the Revolution. Many people were touched with real pain because of this building in central Bucharest and what went on in the rooms.
By the time it was his turn to get on a plane and leave Bucharest, Nicolae was no longer amused by the games he was forced to play. While the Securitate may not always have had the authority to hurt or kill, while they may not have been in a position to justify an outright disappearance, they were always able to place a threat on the table and leave it there. They were never without this option, as it was the simplest thing to do. Only they really knew whether or not they were prepared to follow it through. And when they got the threat right, it was an enormous burden on the mind. Sometimes they would not get it right and it would just seem ridiculous. Mostly, they succeeded.
Inevitably, they figured him out. Despite the fact that he did indeed escape to Israel, the Securitate won the little game they'd been playing before Nicolae left. They found the lever controlling his self-confidence and they used it. It was a matter of simple psychology. Their greatest success came not in actually catching Nicolae at anything shameful or illegal, but in presenting to him evidence that his sense of security had been compromised.
To live at all comfortably in such a police state, it was important to have something in your life that was completely secure and private. A man had to be able to walk down the street with a secret folded into his brain, and know it was safe. A man had to have at least one source of unwavering trust. He had to trust himself and anyone else who knew his secret. It was this essential trust that made it possible for entire generations to live without real freedom, because within this trust there was a kind of freedom.