The Last Season (30 page)

I do not know what to do. Cursing Pekka, I lean down and gather up the equipment he has dropped and the board-stiff pike.

When Pekka goes through the sauna door and the giggles are shut off, it is as it has been so many times in the past: me, alone, cleaning up after a day's fishing. I have half a mind to simply walk to the cottage and gut the fish, just to let them know Batterinski takes the outdoors seriously, unlike them.

But while I can imagine, I cannot follow through. If I was just out fishing alone and this scene happened in my mind, I would follow through in my mind, ripping off my clothes as I raced to the sauna and bursting in on the heaving-breasted, saucy redhead and her lithe angelic friend while they squealed in delight and spread their legs in greeting. But no, this is not in Batterinski's mind, and in reality I am standing here with a toothy, useless fish in one hand and a basket in the other.

There is laughter in the sauna. It had better not be at me. But what then? No, it had better be at me. Those bastards, leaving me out here....

The sauna opens and Kristiina's head leans out. She shines with sweat and her entire body bursts with fog as it slides further out. She is giggling, unable to speak, and I imagine right through her, right through the door and the dry wall and the birch and see a puffing, fat-lipped Pekka tickling her from behind with his erection.

“Get in here!” she commands.

I drop the fish and basket, walk over slowly as if we have not met.

“Hurry up! It's cold,” she laughs. She reaches out and grabs my arm, pulling me and yanking the door open with her other hand. Pekka is not there. His clothes are neatly hanging from the wooden peg.

“Take off your clothes, silly man!” she orders.

I do, only shucking my jockey shorts at the last moment when I decide it would not make the point intended. Pia would think I was ashamed of my size when in truth I am ashamed of Pekka. No, outraged — outraged that he is in there naked and my woman is also in there naked.

Inside I do not focus quickly, but when I do there is no grunting and slipping and sliding on hot rocks, no tongues and missing fingers and steaming pubic areas. Pia and Kristiina are sitting on the top bench, their heads lowered and hair falling and sticking on their faces as they lean forward intently toward Pekka. But he is not standing there waving an erection at them. They stare at his back, and he sits like them, only one step further down.

No squeals. No sucking. Nothing. You'd think we were at a church social were it not for the fact that all are naked and the two women have shapes that should have creases in their bellies where the centrefold fits into the magazine. But it is neither church nor magazine. It is real and, for them at least, natural.

“What's going to happen to Walesa?” Pia asks me.

I pretend not to hear; there is no need for them to include me just out of courtesy. And how would I know anyway? But she is waiting. I pretend to be mulling it over, and then answer as if it is all well thought out.

“It's hard to say.”

“Your
Time
magazine has made him their ‘Man of the Year,'” Pia says.

I nod. Didn't Poppa say that in his letter? I can't remember. I should have paid more attention.

“It is so pathetically ironic,” Kristiina says, “Karl Marx's great prediction finally comes true, Walesa leads an honest-to-God authentic revolution of the proletariat and what happens — the communist party puts down the revolution.”

“Dey say nineteen died,” Pekka says.

“They
admit
nineteen died,” says Pia. “Who will ever know?”

“Such a sad, sad story,” Kristiina says.

I can feel Pia's hand on my back, comforting me; it sends a shiver down my back that has nothing to do with comfort.

“You must feel very strongly about what is happening, Bats,” she says.

“I do. Yes.”

“Walesa gets his strength from his religion. Where do you turn?”

“I try not to think about it,” I say with total honestly. Her hand pats along my back as if burping me.

“Your prime minister says Solidarity's demands were excessive anyway,” Pekka says, laughing.

He is staring at me.
My
prime minister? Trudeau?

“How did Canadians react to that?” Pia asks.

“They think he's a jerk,” I say, again with complete honesty.

I am scouring my mind for some remembrance of what Poppa or Jaja might have said. If only I had read the letter more carefully; if only I had paid attention. Why should they, Finns, know and care more about Poland than a Batterinski? Can I really be that ignorant?

“It has happened so many times before,” I say gravely. “And it will happen again. My great-grandfather died fighting, you know. There was a revolution a hundred years ago or more and he was a great general and the Russians tortured him but he would never talk. He died and we came to Canada. Even now I would not be allowed back in Poland, you know, not with my name. It is the same as his.”

Pia's hand rests in respect. Pekka leans forward and shakes his head. I am afraid to turn, so I imagine Kristiina, staring at my back, listening and then going over my words, so moved she can only sit and let the tears fall, imagining what wonderful, special thing she can do to me to ease the enormous pain of my past.

Bless you, Jaja.

My stomach sloshes with wine. When I turn in the bed, I listen to supper. Parts of it I can still find in my teeth where the goddamn pike bones have anchored like tent pegs. We have made love, formal as missionaries but with the climax of heathens, me riding above on the sole support of my forearms and toes, our bodies touching in one area alone, slowly, silently, tensely, as if the organs have gone off alone to do whatever pleases them and the lovers are merely politely smiling at each other from a respectable distance, unaware of the lust below.

We were so quiet in our lovemaking that I could hear the wood stove and the wind outside. I have mentioned the wind and Kristiina has said that the sounds of the elements are so vital to Finns that there are even different names for separate winds.
Humista
for the whisper in the pines.
Kohista
for the slight rattle in the birches. And so on. It strikes me as the work of people with too much time on their hands. I think of the bleak farmhouses on the way up here and the madness I imagined beyond the curtains. I see Finns inside cowering in the corners as armies of wind attack, some slipping in lassoes across the fields, great sheets roaring in off the roads, wind sneaking through the trees, wind full of the kind of voices even screams cannot silence.

I tuck in close to Kristiina, grateful for her warmth and smell.

“Can't sleep?” she says very quietly, her eyes still closed.

I nibble at her ear. “Uh-uh.” I bite, hoping it will lead to a full meal.

Her eyes open. She turns full on me, smiling. “Something's been bothering you since the sauna. Is it Poland?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“I don't know.”

“Come on. You can tell me.”

I control my voice, lowering it to a bare whisper. “I don't care to have Pekka see you like that.”

“You saw Pia ‘like that.'”

“Yes. And Pekka should be upset too.”

“Pekka upset — but why?”

“Pia is his woman.”

“Pia is her own woman.” She seems cross. “You think Pekka has never seen
me
naked before?”

I hadn't thought of that. For a moment I am angry, then realize I am probably acting like an ass.

“The sauna?” I say.

“Yes. That's one place.”

“Just the two of you?”

“Yes. And others. Like today.”

“What do you mean ‘That's one place?'”

“Bed,” she says in a small voice.

“Bed?”

“Yes. Bed. Just the two of us.”

“You and Pekka?”

“Me and Pekka.”

“In bed?”

“Yes. I thought you knew.”

I can barely speak. “How could I know?”

“Pekka introduced us. I thought he might have said so to you.”

“Said what?”

“We were lovers once, you know. Pia and I were roommates and when Pekka and I broke off they moved in together. They make a much better couple than Pekka and I ever did. All we did was fight and make up. It was awful.”

I say nothing. I cannot.

I turn my back to her. She kisses my neck and runs a hand down my side and begins working around toward my pubic hair, and though I can feel myself growing I carefully lift her hand away. She sighs, accepting this, and after a while I can hear her breathing deeply, asleep.

But I cannot sleep. I stare up at the ceiling rafters, now fully formed in the glancing light of the moon. The room is shadowed, the furniture clear and black, the windows light blue with a slight glow. I can hear the fire, the heat in the pipes, the wind beyond, and as I lie staring another sound comes, faint and slow at first, but soon accelerating. It is the sound of a bed and soon it is the sound of the entire cottage, a grinding, knocking beat of old springs and headboard, and through it all their breathing, moaning quick Finnish phrases.

I lie listening, and it is no longer Pekka and Pia but the sound of Pekka and Kristiina making love in the past. I can feel her pressing spoon-fashion to me, but it is still her, not Pia, in the other room thrusting herself upward to meet Pekka's arrogance. He knew her before I knew her. He perhaps knew her better.

I think of the fish knife in the basket, a long, thin tapered knife for filleting, with a blade so thin it bends like plastic but so sharp it can remove skin from flesh so cleanly that the scales and outer skin are left lying on the board like a book cover. There is one enormous burst of air from the other room and then silence, nothing. I imagine Pia waking up in the morning to find a perfectly filleted Pekka beside her, the flesh removed from the skin the way Poppa taught me, the shell of Pekka left beside her, empty and useless and deserving what he got.

The fucking bastard.

So this is the way it is. Outside the various winds work in off the lake and inside I dwell in madness, full of bad
sisu
. No longer Pole, or even Canadian, but Finn. I should cut out his heart.

I listen to the wind and try to sleep. The wind works in along the sauna and up onto the porch, singing in the support beams. The wind trills along the window, then bumps angrily in the eaves. The wind moves in the moonlight, little soldiers advancing.

And from down near the upturned boat comes the old woman's laugh, teasing along the tracks and past the skis and straight up to the window where Batcha stands staring in. I feel the wolf eyes burning along my neck, cutting straight into Kristiina so she opens like a gutted pike and her insides spill along the bed and down my stomach, covering my balls. Something is pulling at her neck and she breaks like gills from the throat, the air popping from her bladder, sending her spinning down into the water until I can no longer see her....

“Kristiina!”

I sit up and feel the sweat ice along my entire body. The bed is soaking. Kristiina is reaching for me, half kneeling in bed, holding me. She is not torn; she is not with Pekka. She is with me, holding.

“You had a nightmare,” she says.

I cannot speak. I want to cry but dare not. Batterinski does not cry from nightmares. There are sounds from the other room.

“Pia!”
Pekka shouts, in mock imitation of my own yell. Muffled laughter comes from their room, followed by a “shave-and-a haircut” knock from Pekka, then silence.

“Come here,” Kristiina says, opening herself to me.

I fall into her fortress, smothering myself in her breasts. I grab her about the waist and hold tight so she cannot escape, a hockey hold, so they cannot land punches. But it is not fists I am afraid of. It is dreams.

I saw Batcha at the window!
I
thought
I saw Batcha at the window. I
dreamed
I saw Batcha at the window.

Dreams
... I must remember what it was Poppa said in the letter. It was about dreams ... something about a Tsar or some other goddamn Russian...

Pas de reveries.

That's it. No more dreaming.

No more dreaming.

Please.

“With Philadelphia's Stanley Cup win over Boston in '74 and then a repeat in 1975 over Buffalo, winning through intimidation was no longer seen as a fluke. No one wanted goal scorers now; the ideal draft choice was six-and a-half feet tall, close to 220 and able to bite the head off a live chicken without ever putting his dental plate back.

Even the law was getting involved. When Ontario Attorney-General Roy McMurtry charged Detroit's Dan Maloney with ‘assault causing bodily harm' for smoothing out the ice at Maple Leaf Gardens with Brian Glennie's head, Leaf owner Harold Ballard reacted not with congratulations to McMurtry, but with his own commitment to violence. ‘We've got to get a line-up that can take on a bunch of goons,' Ballard announced. ‘I'm looking for guys you toss raw meat to and they go wild.'

Ballard got an American, Kurt Walker, a giant who looked like a Pittsburgh Steeler liner, and seemed, on the ice, like he was still waiting for the play to be sent in from the sidelines. In the playoffs of that year, Philadelphia's Dave Schultz dropped Walker with a single punch. And soon the Leaf' playoff hopes were history.

In the World Hockey Association it was bad if not worse, with Winnipeg Jets' superstar Bobby Hull even sitting out a game to unsuccessfully protest against the violent attacks on his Swedish linemates. Ulf Nilsson and Anders Hedberg. ‘If something isn't done soon,' said Hull, ‘it will ruin the game for all of us. ‘I've never seen so much vicious stuff going on.'

The effect was absolutely zero. Philadelphia, thanks to the likes of Batterinski, continued to win and others continued to model themselves on the Flyers' formula for success.

‘If it's pretty skating the people want,' said Philadelphia coach Fred Shero, ‘let ‘em go to the Ice Capades.'”

— Excerpted by permission from “Batterinski's Burden” by Matt Keening,
Canada Magazine
, June 1982