The Defection and Subsequent Resurrection of Nikolai Pushkin
Chaper 1 of a new novel from the Los Angeles Times best-selling author of “AMP’D,” runner-up for the 2017 Thurber Prize for American Humor.
In 1989 a young Soviet hockey player defects to the West, where he hopes to see Cats, meet Mayor Ed Koch, and win the Stanley Cup. He’s surprised to find himself not in New York City but Buffalo, New York — where none of those things are likely. Instead, he falls in love with the music of Rick James, “Fight the Power,” and the beautiful sister of his roommate, the Buffalo Sabres’ truculent enforcer and the only Black player in the NHL. As he tries to defect once again, this time to New York City, the disparate lives of a neglected toddler, sullen teen musician, overzealous KGB agent, “Tank Man,” Vladimir Putin, and a Russian dancing bear collide with devastating and absurd effect that will ripple across decades.
It’s a surreal romp through late-’80s world events and into the present, an exploration of youthful dreams, middle-age ennui, and a future that’s never quite what we’d envisioned.
Пролог
The driver inside the burning car at the intersection of West 33rd Street and Seventh Avenue was very dead, and would not be missed. In fact, he was actually in the middle of a kidnapping, heading west toward the Lincoln Tunnel and from there… more west? That’s all he’d figured out; as with most of his endeavors, he hadn’t thought this completely through. The victim, his daughter, age two, cried from the back seat, her enormous eyes — the ones her head had not yet grown into — scrunched shut. It was better not to see the flames, her dead father burning, the thickening smoke. And soon, she was unconscious.
Outside the car a crowd had gathered and just as quickly, been repelled by the flames, a single undulation that mimicked the last dying breath of the man behind the wheel. Undaunted by the flames, a teenage boy in a porkpie hat circled the car with the swagger of a jazz great about to blow a solo. Police on the scene ordered him back, and he ignored them like the opinions of others. A giant of a man watched from nearby subway steps, nursing a fresh limp. He wore a trench coat that he believed afforded him anonymity, but instead accomplished the opposite — at least three people earlier in the day had turned to a companion to ask, Did you see that huge guy in the trench coat?
The man who had inadvertently caused the accident was already blocks away, unaware of these events in his wake. He’d disappear into the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and would not be heard from again for three decades, when all these people — the toddler, the swaggering teen, the man with the limp and the man in the tunnel (but not the man in the car; he was, after all, very dead) — would find each other again in circumstances impossible now to imagine.
Один
On the day of Nikolai Pushkin’s scheduled flight to the United States, a van pulled up to the US embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, and four men with unsavory reputations and faces like pounded meat exited the vehicle. Another remained inside, maintaining his stranglehold on the steering wheel. Two of the four lumbered into the embassy while the other two stood watch; minutes later, the first pair exited flanking a nervous young man, his face shielded by dark glasses and a Buffalo Sabres baseball cap. They all piled into the van, which sank noticeably under their weight, and took off at a high rate of speed. Right behind them was a rented Saab driven by a large KGB agent stuffed into the driver’s seat.
Just ten days earlier, twenty-year-old Nikolai Pushkin had led the Soviet team to the gold medal at the 1989 Ice Hockey World Championship, scoring eight goals with seven assists in the tournament. No contest, really, as the Soviets won all ten of their games, leaving their opponents skittering like seals under the assault of a polar bear. It was the indomitable Soviets’ sixth consecutive World Championship and twenty-first overall, an enviable hope-destroying streak. The team celebrated with a trip to a shopping mall in Stockholm, where a pair of KGB agents trailed Nikolai like a clumsy shadow.
Did they know? Had they guessed? Or was this just reasonable suspicion: one year earlier, Nikolai had been drafted by the Buffalo Sabres in the 1988 NHL draft — a wasted gesture (albeit with the eighty-ninth pick in round five), a fruitless late-round gamble against the history that no Soviet had ever played in the National Hockey League. And it remained unlikely, even in the waning days of the Cold War, that any might be allowed to leave the Motherland to join that capitalist enterprise.
Nikolai lifted a blazer off the rack without a look, pastel colored and big shouldered and two sizes too small. As he headed into the dressing room the two agents pretended to riffle through the shirt rack; quickly entranced by the unfamiliar fashions, they soon stopped pretending.
“Magnum P.I.,” the shorter one said in Russian, holding a Hawaiian shirt against himself, and the taller one laughed.
But the tall man’s mind was elsewhere, in the dressing room with Nikolai — not as a function of his job as it should have been, but in imagining him naked. During the course of the championship, he’d seen, under the guise of surveillance, all these sturdy young men in varying degrees of nudity in their locker room. On more than one occasion, he’d had to conceal or physically restrain his erection. His yearnings were unseemly for a Russian, and left him shamed.
Alone in the dressing room, Nikolai stared at his reflection. He’d known fear in his life: fear of failure, or being cut from the team, of his coach’s wrath and the state’s power over him. In his youth he feared hunger, cold, the disapproval of his mother and the fate of his father to be inconsequential. And he harbored a terrible fear of flying. But nothing like the terror of what he was about to do, fright etched on the face that looked back at him like a shriek.
It took a moment for both agents to realize that Nikolai had exited the opposite end of the dressing room, covering ground in increasingly quicker strides toward the mall’s exit. As they floundered to catch up, Nikolai broke into a run, leaving them behind as he had so many defensemen on a breakaway. The revolving door slowed him like a full body check, and he emerged, stumbling, on the other side, startling the executive from the Buffalo Sabres waiting by the car, Don Woolf. Woolf waved and shouted, the cigarette dropping from his lips, and both jumped into the vehicle and sped off as the two agents lurched from the same quadrant of the revolving door, the shorter one losing his shoe and watching it spin back inside the store. The taller one swore in Russian.
It wasn’t until he was several blocks away that Nikolai realized how, in addition to having just defected from the Soviet Union, he’d also stolen an ill-fitting blazer from the Gallerian.
***
Two weeks earlier Don Woolf, head of player development for the Sabres, had received a phone call from Nikolai, whom he’d met at the World Juniors in Anchorage, Alaska, a year ago. That was when he decided to risk a late-round draft pick on the teen prodigy and presented him his business card of inscrutable letters to a boy schooled in Cyrillic. Nikolai had called to tell him in fractured English that he wanted to “come over” to the Sabres of New York. It took a moment for Woolf to realize that he meant “defect.” Woolf couldn’t be sure the voice belonged to Nikolai and not a pretender for the Nordiques — a prank phone call would be just like them, the fucking Queebs. He asked “Nikolai” to tell him something only he could know about their meeting. After a moment’s hesitation, Nikolai replied something about Woolf’s hands — like hockey mitts, and that his own had disappeared in Woolf’s handshake.
Woolf had in fact remarked at the time about Nikolai’s hands, surprisingly delicate for a hockey player. But Nikolai’s power wasn’t in his fists; he was all about velocity and motion, a blur on skates with breakaway speed, Soviet discipline, and the indefatigable energy of youth. Woolf believed Nikolai was a shortcut to beating Edmonton, and he wanted him enough to risk an international incident. The Sabres had been eliminated from the playoffs a week earlier, losing to Boston in the first round for the second straight year, and Woolf had little interest in watching the eight remaining teams chase the Stanley Cup. The next day he and Sabres general manager Jack Horstmeyer were on a plane to Sweden, and shortly thereafter in a car speeding away from the Gallerian, and now at the American embassy, where a career consular officer tried to talk all three of them out of their plan.
“I’m not sure he qualifies for political asylum,” she said. “This isn’t exactly Svetlana Alliluyeva we have here. He’s a hockey player.”
“America’s taken grandmasters of chess, ballerinas, conductors, playwrights, violinists, tenors, pianists…” Horstmeyer noted. “This man is an artist with a hockey stick.”
“Who the hell is Svetlana Ali-who-ha?” Woolf asked.
“Are you really sure that you want to leave home?” the woman turned her attention to Nikolai, imagining that he might wish to be included in this discussion of his future. “You have a family there, and you’ll never see them again. Also, as a member of the Red Army this isn’t just a defection — you’ll be charged as a deserter.”
His fear gone now, dispersed in the act of his defection, Nikolai explained his desire to win the Stanley Cup, see Cats, meet Koch.
“Koch?” Woolf wondered.
“Ed Koch, mayor of New York?” she asked. “You understand that Buffalo, New York, isn’t the same as — ”
“America’s greatest state,” Horstmeyer interrupted. “Everyone hearts New York. You can do all those things if you come with us.”
“Koch. Yes! He’s Jewish!” Woolf declared of Nikolai, not knowing if it was true.
“Yes! Yes he is,” Horstmeyer concurred. “Fleeing the well-documented persecution of Soviet Jews.”
Nikolai understood about half of what they were saying, none of which made him Jewish.
The consular official scribbled something, adding with undisguised skepticism, “And if in so fleeing, he happens to do so in the direction of this Stanley Cup…?”
She wasn’t really certain what a Stanley Cup was, but she could tell by the way the three men lapsed into a dreamlike state in the silence following her unfinished sentence that it was more important to them than politics, international relations, or world peace.
“This is a big step,” she pleaded with Nikolai to understand, sensing the worldview of a twenty-year-old Russian hockey player to be as small as the gap between the sutures in his brow. “Have you really thought this through?”
Nikolai repeated the phrases Stanley Cup, Cats, and Koch, and with that, plans were put in motion to whisk him to Buffalo where none of those things were apparent. There remained obstacles: Nikolai had no passport. It was routine for Soviet players traveling internationally to surrender them to the KGB agents who accompanied the team as deterrent to events like the one perpetrated by Nikolai. It would take time to secure the necessary travel documents from the State Department in Washington for Nikolai to travel and enter the United States. In the meantime, the consular officer assured them, KGB agents would likely attempt to stop Nikolai’s defection.
“The Soviets fear every defection might lead to a wave,” she declared. “It’s also a terrible propaganda blow, for America to flaunt as proof that our way of life is better.”
“Which it is,” Woolf urged, hoping to dispel any second thoughts in Nikolai, an impulsive boy, really, for whom deliberation was uncommon.
The means by which the Soviets might undermine his defection were these: they’d attempt to contact Nikolai, give him a final chance to change his mind before committing this irrevocable act; they’d take advantage of his youth and naivety, and if the idea of never seeing his family was not enough, they’d add the threat of reprisals against them for his treason. And if persuasion failed, the KGB might even attempt to kidnap him, international law be damned.
The final hurdle belonged to Nikolai, as he was terrified of flying.
He could cite casualties of the year’s flight accidents so far: a British Airways crash in England, 47 people dead; an Italian charter in the Azores, 144 tourists killed; a cargo door blown off a flight near Hawaii, nine passengers pulled to their deaths. He concluded with Pan Am, Lockerbie, bomb, delivered with the same affect but none of the hope with which he’d intoned Stanley Cup, Cats, Koch.
“You didn’t walk here to Stockholm, son,” Woolf reminded Nikolai.
Nikolai had in fact flown to Stockholm the same way he’d always traveled internationally with the Soviet team by air: heavily sedated, and carried onboard by his teammates; on arrival, propped up between two of them long enough to pass customs and dumped on a skycap’s cart, wheeled through Stockholm’s Arlanda Airport to a waiting bus. Nikolai was never available for practice on a travel day but with the recuperative powers of youth, he’d play with speed and accuracy a day later as if nothing had happened. It was like removing the batteries from a toy before shipping, and replacing them on receipt to watch it perform perfectly.
The American embassy would offer no safe haven for Nikolai while it prepared his paperwork, a task that could take as long as a week. Having arranged only to spend a couple of days in Stockholm, Woolf and Horstmeyer had just their overnight bags. Nikolai was even less well prepared for a lengthier stay on the run; beyond the clothes on his back, all he owned in the world was the too-snug blazer he’d stolen from the Gallerian, and his gold medal from the Worlds. Woolf’s solution to that immediate problem was to purchase a stack of T-shirts from a street vendor, allowing them to blend in with the rest of the tourists touting Swedish icons Garbo, Björn Borg, and ABBA.
They headed to the Swedish countryside to stay in small motels and inns, each for a single night before moving on to another — continuous motion designed to confound pursuit. While a pair of middle-aged Americans and a youth of indeterminate origin who rarely spoke were arguably more conspicuous in these smaller locales, it seemed preferable to the city where the Soviet team had dominated the news for the past two weeks and Nikolai might be recognized. Not that Woolf or Horstmeyer were happy with the plan. One of the perks of their positions with the Sabres was the opportunity to escape Buffalo under the guise of player development. Aside from adding a speedy Soviet to their roster, both had been eager to flee “The City of Good Neighbors” and enjoy the pleasures of Stockholm, global metropolis and birthplace of the Nobel Prize, home of museums, concert halls, Jugend architecture, an opera house, and even a jazz festival. None of which they gave a shit about; they were interested in the city’s more than one thousand bars and restaurants, and a world-class brothel left winger Mikael Andersson used to brag about before they’d traded him to Hartford after scoring one lousy goal against fucking Edmonton in the playoffs last year.
By the third day both Horstmeyer and Woolf were struggling with insomnia, an effect of the northernmost situation of the region that, at this time of year, saw the sun rising shortly after four in the morning and remaining aloft and bright for eighteen hours before not quite setting around 9:30 p.m. Even then, the sky never darkened completely, retaining an azure glow until the cycle repeated. None of this seemed to faze Nikolai, who slept well and ate even better, feeding the enormous appetite of youth on reindeer and meatballs (both incongruously served with jam), fruit soups made of rose hips and blueberries, gravlax, and an uncountable variety of pickled herring.
“The hell is that?” Woolf asked their server as Nikolai shoved one and then another gruesome pod into his mouth.
“Blodpalt,” he replied, explaining the dumplings made from animal blood.
“Christ, the kid’ll eat anything.”
Breakfast was especially hard on the Americans. A traditional Swedish breakfast in the countryside consisted of sandwiches of hard cheese, cold cuts, cucumber and tomatoes served on crisp bread, and soupy adornments of porridge, yogurt, marmalade, chocolate. Horstmeyer would have killed for a plate of bacon, but at least the coffee was strong.
Nikolai stayed fit with a series of calisthenics overseen by Woolf: squats, sit-ups, push-ups, core twists, butt lifts, and sprints. Wool marveled at his athleticism, a lithe, sculpted body crowned incongruously with the face of a toddler under a crest of wavy hair. They avoided skating at the risk of calling attention to themselves, but on the fifth day they passed a rink and neither Sabres executive could resist the opportunity to witness in action the player for whom they’d flown across the ocean and spent the past five days eating gravlax and porridge.
Nikolai strapped on a pair of rented skates and proceeded to blister the ice into shavings. He could stop on a dime and change direction like a darting fish, and skate backward faster than most of the Sabres could skate forward at full speed. By the time he started mimicking shooting with an invisible stick, a small crowd had gathered to watch and Horstmeyer put an end to their impromptu workout…but neither he nor Woolf could stop grinning.
Watching from the embassy window, Woolf and Horstmeyer were pleased to see the quartet of thugs they’d hired, along with their imposter defector, drive away in the decoy van trailed by a Saab. Also watching with them was Nikolai, grinning stupidly, greatly amused in his sedation to somehow see himself borne away. He’d remember none of this; nor would he recall the drive to the airport or the struggle to remain standing, propped under each arm by Woolf and Horstmeyer as they made their way through the terminal and onto the waiting TWA flight to Buffalo via New York’s Kennedy Airport. He wouldn’t remember the swivel seats in first class, or how his American benefactors visibly relaxed once the plane was aloft, or the celebratory cigars and bourbon that followed. He wouldn’t remember the brief, adrenal fear that came with becoming suddenly aware of his airborne state before another pill was pressed between his lips by Woolf and washed down with bourbon, lulling him once more into unconsciousness.
He wouldn’t even remember being half-carried early the next morning through JFK Airport, where they dodged a waiting phalanx of reporters, or recall attempts to rouse him from his stupor with several cups of steaming coffee so he could respond lucidly to waiting immigration officials about his unresolved alien status.
Horstmeyer presented documents from the US embassy in Sweden and stated Nikolai’s intention to apply for political asylum. Nikolai nodded dully in agreement. When asked about the consequences of returning to the Soviet Union should his petition be denied, it was Woolf who answered:
“Seven years at hard labor and a death sentence.”
Whether provoked by the sudden realization of the magnitude of his circumstance, or a combination of jet lag and a pot of coffee, Nikolai’s response was to vomit the contents of his stomach. To the immigration officials administering the interview, this seemed to reinforce Nikolai’s case, and he was granted entry into the United States. He seemed relieved until informed they had one more flight to Buffalo.