karel rachunek/petr schastlivy

3528 words
the title, and all the section headings, are literal translations of russian proverbs




trouble never comes alone
1998

Petr spoke no English, no French, only Russian. Karel spoke no Russian, no English, only Czech. He didn’t apologize when he stumbled into Petr on the first day of training camp.

Petr had pineapple for the first time on that day. It had not ever been on the menu in his house growing up. When he went to Yaroslavl, where his teammates called him Сибирский, the Siberian, the dormitory served very little in the way of exotic tropical fruit. He picked up a piece of yellow fruit and ate it sitting alone at a folding table in a folding chair. He expected something faintly sour, like a grapefruit, and he was unprepared for the intense sweetness of the fruit that exploded in his mouth like a cut square of adrenaline.

-

Karel hated every minute of his English classes and always claims he learned more by watching television with the closed-captions on. He flipped to the back of the book for the answers that were not there, counted the seventy-two tiles in the dropped ceiling of the room with no windows and industrial gray carpeting. He drew over the publisher’s logo on the front of his book with his pen until it was blackened in entirely.

-

Petr can’t pronounce Karel’s name properly on his first introduction because his accent is too heavy. He tries and tries and tries and it still falls apart in his mouth until it sounds like “Kirill.” For years and years and years afterwards, when he is speaking quickly or angrily or in Russian, it sounds like Kirill.

Karel doesn’t mind. He’s never had a nickname.



it’s better to see once than to hear one hundred times
1999

Karel was not looking at the ice at the time. He will lie about this more or less for ever, though, because he doesn’t really want to admit that he was too absorbed in picking tape off his stick blade to notice what had happened on the ice. Before he saw that one of his teammates was lying on the ice, he was relieved that play had stopped, because he was not paying enough attention to listen to the coach and would have missed his next shift.

Petr, on the other hand, had no idea what was going on because every nerve in his body had relocated to his knee. In the stomach-dropping second before the tearing pain set in, he was vaguely aware that he was lying on the ice, that a referee was kneeling at his head, that the player who had collided with him was hovering by him and apologizing—this must really be bad—for the inadvertent knee-on-knee hit, that a trainer was running over and asking if he could move his knee at all. He was escorted off the ice, rushed to the hospital, and had a complete knee reconstruction in short order. He was twenty. It was the end of his season. For the next six months he watched his teammates play and score and bounce back and forth to the big club. Petr sat around and lifted weights and practiced his English on store clerks.

-

What Petr remembers, more than the blinding pain of his injury, is the stricken sound in his father’s voice when he calls him with the news. Irkutsk is so far away that it’s almost a full day ahead, and when Petr dials he wishes that for him it was already the next day or next week or next year.

His father calls him Petruschka as he hasn’t done for many years, and at the sound of it Petr is seven years old again, puts his head down on his desk and the ache in his knee is no longer the worst pain he’s endured.

-

None of his teammates are bothered by the fact that Petr can’t master possessives while they play poker. No one seems to mind that he is effectively immobilized with his knee brace; instead, they offer to get him things so he doesn’t have to get up.

No one is particularly surprised, either, when Karel continually shows up halfway through a game and produces his own personal fifth out of his coat. “Deal in,” he demands laconically. He’s figured out that if he never puts emotion into his rote English words, he will never be caught out of step when he doesn’t know what to say. It doesn’t register on his face when a question or desire grips him, heavy like a strike across the face, and unwilling to let him go. It is no mistake that “because I could” is his answer to every question posed to him.

After everyone else leaves, Karel staggers to the door and Petr stops him halfway there and offers his sofa. Karel winds up spending a lot of nights on that sofa. Petr never wonders why Karel was so loath to go to his own home, or why he sometimes showed up at two in the morning, reeking of someone else’s sweat. He never thought to question.

-

“Didn’t you go to the draft?” Karel asks.

“No,” Petr says. “I wasn’t projected to go high, and my dad couldn’t afford to send me anyway.”

“Oh,” is all Karel says.

It didn’t matter. Petr was always trying to go back.



look for wind in a field
2001

For a very long time in North America, Petr wakes up and imagines himself somewhere else. Every single time he wakes up in a different hotel room, he is startled for a moment to find himself in Texas or California or New Jersey. The sound of his alarm clock or his road roommate in the shower jerks him out of sleep and for a moment he lets his eyes unfocus and imagines himself back in Russia. After a moment or two he returns to reality.

Petr would disappear in the mornings and not return, sometimes for hours, and when he got back sometimes Karel had left and sometimes he was still there, still lying in Petr’s bed half-asleep and watching television, sometimes eating an apple and dripping juice on the white sheets. Petr came home once, wearing a suit, and Karel just looked at him and talked around his accent and the wedge of fruit in his mouth.

“You went to church, didn’t you,” he said, not a question. Petr took his jacket off and hung it in the closet. “You don’t believe in God, you’re just homesick for people speaking Russian.” Karel threw his apple core towards the trash in the corner but missed, and Petr picked it up for him, saying nothing.

-

Karel courteously waits until Petr is gone to go through his things. He shuffles through all the things in his drawers and all the clothes in the closet, all his kitchen cabinets and the linen closet, trying desperately to find something to pin a label on. There is nothing there, though, only envelopes and shirts and cans of soup and spare sheets, and Karel is irritated, like he expected to find something hidden among the hydro bills. Petr says nothing when he discovers all his drawers out of order and his clothes in disarray. What could he possibly ask?



in the home of the hanged person, don’t talk about ropes
2003

Karel never goes home. He doesn’t like his family very much, he doesn’t like the dark walls and the yellow dishes. When he is around them he is seized with the frantic desire to crawl out of his skin.

“You don’t miss your brothers?” Petr, the only child, asks.

Karel shrugs. “No.” He says nothing about his middle brother, whose greatest desire in life was to play in the NHL and his intense jealousy of Karel, who doesn’t care very much. He says nothing about his youngest brother, who was six when Karel left for North America and never came back. Now they meet as friendly acquaintances, but not as brothers.

“You never want to go home?” Petr asks.

“I am home,” Karel says. They are lying in Karel’s bed as the Ottawa snow keeps falling. Karel is turned away from the window and Petr is facing towards it, out somewhere beyond it, his heart turning over and over in his chest.

-

Two weeks later Petr falls in love and he can’t quite figure out why.

-

He is more superstitious than anyone Karel has ever met. Petr refuses to have anything to do with black cats or broken mirrors or spilled salt. He will not put his car keys on the kitchen table. He keeps a safety pin on the inside lapel of all his coats that he says is in case of an emergency, but the one time Karel loses a button off his shirt on the way to a game Petr mumbles and shrugs until Karel gives up.

“Now, is your shirt just missing a button?” Marty asks. “Or did you buy it like that? You look like shit.”

Karel grumbles to himself. Petr looks around the room at nothing in particular and fingers the safety pin inside his jacket where it is warding off the evil eye.

-

Over Petr’s dining-room table he has hung a large painting of bread. When he is sent to Anaheim, Karel spends an indeterminate amount of time slumped over that table, staring at that picture, convincing himself he is only bitter about their last loss before going out every night for two weeks to obliterate any remaining brain cells.

Anaheim is not a new beginning for Petr. He is done with North America before his first game at the Staples Center and he knows it. He is only reluctant to say it to Karel because he is frightened Karel will shrug and wish him good luck in Russia.

Petr doesn’t know Sergei Fedorov very well, but he knows his story and he’s heard all the gossip. He knows that he grew up in Pskov and he played for the fabled Red Army team and he defected in Seattle. He knows about the Stanley Cup rings and the gold and silver and bronze medals tumbling through his hands. Petr has heard about everything else as well, about Anna Kournikova, the legendary parties, the shadowy figures who helped him defect and what they wanted in return.

But Sergei is not a monster, nor is he an oligarch. He meets Petr at the airport, finds him a car and a hotel room, buys him dinner and gives him a tour of the area. He promises to pick him up for practice the next morning so Petr won’t be forced to navigate in rush-hour traffic.

The next week, over another meal, Petr suddenly leans onto one elbow and looks at Sergei.

“I don’t think we’ll be playing next year,” he says.

Sergei, who has just shoveled an enormous hunk of beef into his mouth, is a little blindsided. They had previously been discussing the various merits of the new models of BMWs.

“Okay,” he says as best he can.

“I don’t want to come back to North America,” Petr continues. A moment later he amends his statement. “I am never coming back to North America.” It is a statement of fact, not an idea.

Sergei swallows.

They eat in silence for another minute or two and return to their discussion of cars.

On the way home Sergei randomly breaks into one of Petr’s sentences. “Do you know Alexei Kovalev?” he asks.

Petr shrugs. “I think I’ve met him once.”

“I don’t think you’d like him very much,” Sergei says.

-

If he could, Karel would give Petr everything—every constellation in the sky, every drop of water in the ocean, all the things on earth from creation—but these are not his to give. Instead he gives him what he can—pineapple when he goes to the store, a filled gas tank when he takes his car, his heart without quite knowing it—and this will have to do.



in Russia the domes of churches are covered in gold so god will notice them more often
2005

The worst conversation in Karel’s life takes place on an unseasonably cold evening in Yaroslavl as Petr is poring over the newspaper and Karel is searching in vain for something he can understand on television.

“Have you talked to your agent lately about Anaheim?” Karel asks absently. He puts one foot on the coffee table.

“No,” Petr says. He deliberately folds his newspaper back up. “I’m not going back.”

Petr has known for years that he would never make it in North America. He has known that he would never stop being homesick and never really adapt.

Karel feels sick to his stomach. He opens his mouth to say something but before he can draw breath Petr rushes in again.

“Don’t waste your time,” he says. “You can’t change my mind.”

Karel closes his mouth again and Petr desperately tries to take back his words, but it is too late, they have fallen on the floor like beads slipping off a broken string and scattered into every corner. Unspoken questions are lingering in the corners of Karel’s mouth, caught on his broken tooth.

“Is it because of me?” he finally asks,

Petr just looks at him with one hundred thousand answers in his eyes and in his mouth. One is crowding out the others the way city lights will cast all the stars out of the sky. You were the reason I could stay as long as I did. He can’t possibly say that without falling to pieces. It is more breakable than saying I love you.

So instead he says “no.”


That night, Karel begins talking, only because he believes Petr is asleep and dreaming. Instead he is awake and listening to words he can’t understand that Karel is whispering against the back of his neck. If he knew the meaning he would know that it is not a love song but words of gratitude. Not that Petr is staying in Russia and he is returning to America, but in thanks that Petr came at all. He doesn’t know the words but Karel’s breath, hot against his skin, is full of fear because Karel’s love is fiercely, violently jealous.

Petr listens to these possessive things he doesn’t understand without moving a muscle, drifts off to sleep and dreams of snow and snow and snow.


The next morning, as Petr is sitting at the kitchen table with a steaming cup of coffee in front of him, Karel stalks in, barefoot on the cold wood floors. He doesn’t look directly at Petr, even when Petr watches him move around the room.

Because Petr doesn’t know quite what to say, he says “This has nothing to do with you.”

Then Karel does look at him. He takes the two steps to cross the kitchen and shoves Petr’s coffee cup off the table. It describes a graceful arc in the air before smashing on the floor. Petr stands and throws a towel at Karel, then goes to his bedroom and lies in his bed and closes his eyes.

Karel kneels on the floor and gets pieces of ceramic in his knee for his troubles. The handle of the cup is unbroken and lies apart from the rest of the pieces drowning in coffee. The supplicant, on his knees with the mess he’s made.


what’s on sober’s mind is on drunk’s tongue
2008

On New Year’s Eve, Karel is waiting, and he has carefully figured the time difference so there will be no mistake. He has a game that evening, but instead of sleeping, he is sitting on the edge of his bed and tossing his phone from hand to hand. He drops it twice. When it is two minutes past midnight in Moscow, he calls Petr.

Two minutes past midnight in Moscow, Petr answers his phone, but only barely. He only feels it ring because in a past life he thought to put it on vibrate and in his shirt pocket. Inside the club people are screaming and the music pulses so loudly he can feel it through the soles of his shoes and in his chest like a second heartbeat. He doesn’t quite know why he’s there.

Karel doesn’t know what he was expecting, but this wasn’t it. It doesn’t matter what he says because Petr can’t hear a word of it. Karel wishes him a happy New Year in the Russian he practiced carefully, sitting alone in his bedroom. If Karel says “I love you,” who can tell? It disappears somewhere between the satellites or into the ether over the Atlantic.

On New Year’s Eve, Karel is suddenly tired of the life he’s fastened together out of pieces of other people’s lives.

An unfamiliar telephone ringing wakes Petr the next morning and on his way home to sleep the rest of the day away in his own clean bed, he recovers a memory of being called on the phone sometime the previous night. At a decent hour, he calls Karel with no recall of anything either of them had said the previous night. He could, if he wanted to, give Karel a detailed account of what he’d done the night before, but he chooses to say nothing. But he knows what he would say instead. Safronov—you’ve played against him, he plays defence? In St. Petersburg? As tall as I am, but thin. When he comes he sighs over and over again like he’s finished a marathon. His first name is Kirill and he has eyes the same colour as yours.

It is the first time and the last time.

-

On Monday Karel calls his beleaguered agent, who promises to make some calls. No one ever admits to gossiping but by the end of the month Brent Sutter knows all about Dynamo, if not the reason why, and Karel is benched for ten games. “Don’t waste my time,” Sutter tells him.

Karel tells everyone who asks that he’s signed with Dynamo because blue is his favorite color and under his breath he tells them to go fuck themselves.

-

Petr knows only a voice on the phone for months, but this year it sounds different and he can’t say why. The tally he’s kept in the back of his mind for years has not grown any longer. Every tick mark that he put there for every time Karel gave in to someone who wasn’t him, for years.

There was a Tuesday afternoon. And there was a Saturday morning and there was a Friday night and on and on and the days repeat themselves and they make themselves into weeks of infidelity. But always there is the corollary: there was a Tuesday evening and there was a Saturday afternoon and there was a Friday at two in the morning for every time Petr welcomed him back with open arms. Petr ran his hands over the body he knew better than his own and bowed his head to Karel’s chest and said nothing out of fear.

Instead Petr talks about his Moscow apartment and how close it is to the metro station and what he had for dinner the other night when he went out with some of his teammates and how he got a new pair of gloves to replace the ones he lost. He says nothing about how much he misses Karel and his sour presence.



there will be a holiday on our street
2009

It is cold, cold, cold, when Karel gets home, late on a night very early in the year. He locks the padded door behind him and sets his suitcase to the side; he takes off his scarf and lays it over the radiator so it will dry before the morning. He goes to close the curtains in the living room and wonders at the lights on in the building across the street.

His eyes adjust to the darkness in the bedroom as he moves around as quietly as he knows how and he recognizes Petr’s form sprawled across three-quarters of the bed and under three blankets. As he climbs in to soak up the space allotted to him, he jostles Petr’s outstretched arm.

“Late night,” Petr mumbles without opening his eyes.

“Weather. And delays,” Karel says. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

“It’s all right,” Petr says. He withdraws his arm and Karel stretches out.

“Did you win your game?”

“We did. Five to three, and I got the game-winner.” Petr grins in luxuriant memory.

“Well done.” Karel kisses his tired face and lays his own weary head down.

“Is it still snowing?” Petr asks.

“No, it stopped, but they were saying it was going to begin again. I was hoping I would make it home before it started again.” Karel closes his eyes.

“You made it home in time, though,” Petr says. Karel runs a hand through Petr’s long hair.

“I made it home with time to spare,” Karel says.

-

rest in my arms
sleep in my bed
there is a design
to what I did and said
(sufjan stevens 2003)