Chapter Text
The photo came in at nine-thirty, and Ilya smiled at his phone in a way that made Shane hit pause.
Shane didn’t hit pause often. He’d only made it halfway through the second period of last night’s game tape, and there were at least three more bad shifts ahead, all of which deserved to be rewatched slowly and with disgust. But Ilya was stretched out at the other end of the couch with his feet in Shane’s lap — heavy, warm, in the moose socks David had given him for Christmas — and he was smiling at his phone.
Not smirking. Smiling.
Shane was still learning the difference.
“What is it?”
Ilya turned the screen toward him. Jackie had sent a photo: the youngest Pike asleep sideways across her crib, arms flung wide, hugging a stuffed animal — brown, round, with enormous ears sticking out on either side like two saucers. Ilya had brought it for her a month ago. According to Jackie, the two of them hadn’t been apart since — not at the table, not in the bath, not at the rink.
The caption read: She named him Mister Ears. Hayden wants to know what kind of animal it even is. Honestly, so do I.
“Good question,” Shane said. “What kind of animal is it?”
“Cheburashka.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It is the only answer.” Ilya took the phone back and started typing, still smiling. “Nobody knows what kind of animal he is. That is the whole point.”
“How can there be a point to an animal if nobody knows what it is?”
Ilya looked at him over the phone with such profound pity that Shane might as well have confessed he’d never seen snow.
“Hollander,” he said. “You are so Canadian.”
He sent his reply, set the phone on his chest, and stared up at the ceiling. Outside, the snow was coming down — big, slow flakes, like in a commercial — and the streetlight next door turned it into gold dust.
“I will teach ours Russian from birth,” Ilya said. “Right away. So they don’t grow up like you.”
It took Shane a second to work out what had snagged. He rewound the sentence — the way you rewind a bad shift — and found it.
Ours.
Not if someday. Not hypothetically. Ilya had said it in the same voice he used for morning skate is at eleven: like it had been on the schedule for ages and simply hadn’t happened yet.
“Ours,” Shane repeated.
“Kids, Hollander. Not dogs.” Ilya considered. “Dogs also. But the dogs I will teach English. They don’t care.”
“You want kids.”
It was supposed to come out as a question. It didn’t.
Ilya propped himself up on one elbow.
“And you don’t?”
Shane opened his mouth. Closed it.
He didn’t know. Or — he did, probably always had, but he kept it on the high back shelf where he stored everything he wasn’t allowed to want. Kids were something Hayden had. Something normal guys with normal lives had — wives in the wives’ group chat, crayon drawings on the fridge, lock screens full of baby pictures. Shane had a training schedule and a meal plan, and for years he’d honestly believed that would be enough. Nothing else was on the table for him anyway.
“I didn’t think…” He stopped. “That we were allowed.”
“Why not?”
There were reasons, obviously. Shane even started running through them — out of habit, down the old list he could have recited in his sleep — and suddenly noticed that half the items were gone. He couldn’t remember crossing them out.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly.
“See.” Ilya lay back down, extremely pleased with himself, like he’d just won a faceoff. “So we are allowed. I want everything, Hollander. Kids. A dog. A house on a lake. The Cup. Two Cups. Together.”
“For two Cups, we’d have to—”
“Don’t ruin it.”
Shane shut up. He looked at the laptop, where last night’s second-period Shane was frozen with his mouth open and out of position. He looked at the moose in his lap.
“So what would you read them?” he asked. “Ours.”
The word came easier than he’d expected.
“Fairy tales,” Ilya said at once, like he’d known for a long time. “About Baba Yaga.”
“Who’s that?”
“A witch. She lives in the forest, in a hut on chicken legs.”
“On what legs?”
“Chicken.” Ilya walked two fingers across his chest, strutting like a chicken. “The hut stands on two chicken legs. You say the right words, it turns around to face you.”
“Why does it need to turn around?”
“Because the door is on the other side, Hollander. Are you not listening?”
“And what does the witch do?”
“Eats children.”
Shane sat up straight.
“Ilya.”
“Not eats.” Ilya held up a hand. “Tries to eat. This is different. She sits a boy on a big shovel and wants to put him in the oven. And the boy says, I don’t know how to sit, show me. She sits down to show him — and he puts her in.”
“In the oven.”
“In the oven.”
“Wait. That’s Hansel and Gretel.”
“They stole it from us.”
“It’s a German fairy tale!”
“So the Germans stole it,” Ilya said serenely. “There is also Koschei the Deathless. Nobody can kill him, because his death is hidden. His death is at the tip of a needle, the needle is in an egg, the egg is in a duck, the duck is in a hare, the hare is in a chest, and the chest hangs from an oak tree.”
Shane took a moment to process this.
“That’s…” he said finally. “That’s actually a really solid security system.”
Ilya stared at him for about three seconds. Then he buried his face in a couch cushion and laughed — silently, with his whole body, hard enough that Shane felt it shaking through his knees.
“What? It is solid. It’s multi-layered.”
“You would be friends with him,” Ilya groaned into the cushion. “With Koschei. You would make a schedule together.”
Shane had been read different things growing up. His mom read him the Japanese stories she remembered from her own mother: Momotaro, the boy born from a giant peach, who set off to fight demons with a dog, a monkey, and a pheasant. His dad read him Canadian picture books. One of them — about a mother who sang her son the same lullaby his whole life — David had never once managed to finish out loud: by the last few pages his throat always went dry, and he urgently needed a glass of water.
“A boy from a peach,” Ilya repeated. “From a peach. And you will say something to me about chicken legs.”
“My mom and I also watched Totoro.”
“Totoro I know,” Ilya said. “Everybody watched it back home. On a tape, with a voice-over. Very nasal.”
“A what?”
“One guy translates for everybody. Through his nose. They say he wore a clothespin.” Ilya pinched his nose shut and said something in Russian in a voice that made Shane snort. “Best translation in history.”
Shane looked at him — and for some reason couldn’t stop. Somewhere in Moscow, a little Ilya had sat in front of a TV watching the same Catbus, the same rain at the same bus stop, as a little Shane on a couch in Ottawa. Around the same years. On opposite sides of the world. Back when neither of them knew the other existed.
“What?” Ilya said. “Why are you looking like this?”
“Nothing.” Shane cleared his throat. “Just… we watched the same thing.”
“Not everything,” Ilya said. “You never saw Hedgehog in the Fog.”
“What?”
“Exactly,” Ilya said.
“And Winnie-the-Pooh,” Shane added. “Who’s Canadian, by the way.”
“Who is?”
“Winnie. The real bear was from Winnipeg. That’s where the name comes from.”
Ilya propped himself up again — this time with the look of a man whose homeland had just been insulted to his face.
“The bear, maybe, is yours,” he said. “But Vinni-Pukh is ours.”
“You guys have, like, your own completely different Winnie-the-Pooh.”
“The correct one,” Ilya said flatly.
Shane wanted to argue. Instead he asked the thing he’d apparently been wanting to ask for a long time.
“What did you watch? When you were little.”
Ilya thought about it. Really thought — Shane saw his brows draw together slightly, the way they did on the bench when he was running someone else’s power play through his head.
“Cartoons,” he said finally. “Soviet ones. They were on all the time back then. Nu, Pogodi!, for example.”
“What’s that?”
“A wolf tries to catch a hare. Twenty episodes.” Ilya shrugged one shoulder. “The wolf smokes.”
“What do you mean, smokes?”
“Cigarettes.”
“A wolf. In a kids’ cartoon. Smokes cigarettes.”
“Of course he smokes. He is a wolf.”
“Wolves don’t smoke because they’re wolves!”
“This one smokes,” Ilya said with unshakable calm.
Shane looked at him. At the frozen laptop. Back at him.
“Show me.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
The wolf lit up within the first ten seconds.
Shane hadn’t even gotten comfortable: an apartment block appeared on screen, a white hare was watering flowers on a balcony, and down below stood the wolf — scruffy, a cigarette between his teeth — gazing up at the hare the way J.J. gazes at a buffet.
“He’s smoking,” Shane said.
“I warned you.”
“In the first scene!”
“So you understand right away who is the main character.”
For the next ten minutes, the wolf climbed the building on a rope, whistling as carelessly as if he were popping out for bread; tore around on a motorcycle; hid; slipped; fell from great heights; got flattened by everything a person can possibly be flattened by — and every single time, he got up, dusted himself off, and started over.
The subtitles were in English and, judging by Ilya’s face, were translating something else entirely.
“No,” Ilya said, when the wolf muttered something while dangling by one paw. “That is not what he says.”
“What does he say?”
“It doesn’t translate.”
“That’s the fourth line you’ve said that about.”
“Because they don’t translate, Hollander. It is not my fault your language is poor.”
By the third episode, Shane had figured out two things.
One: the hare was insufferable. White, tidy, huge-eyed, always in exactly the right place, always coming out without a scratch, and everybody loved him.
Two: Shane was rooting for the hare.
“Of course you are for the hare,” Ilya said without looking.
“He’s the good guy.”
“He is boring. He is always right. He has probably never been late in his life.”
“That’s not a flaw.”
“It is a diagnosis.” Ilya jabbed a finger at the screen, where the hare was emerging from yet another disaster without a single smudge on him. “Look at him. White, clean, everybody loves him, does everything by the rules. You are absolutely the hare, Hollander.”
“I’m not the hare.”
“You are the most hare of anyone I know.”
“Then you’re the wolf.”
“Of course I am the wolf,” Ilya said, so calmly it might as well have been common knowledge, written down somewhere in the league’s official records. “I was always the wolf.”
On screen, the wolf was once again plummeting from a great height, limbs splayed.
“Does he ever catch him?” Shane asked.
“No.”
“Never? In twenty episodes?”
“Never.”
“Why not?”
Ilya didn’t answer right away. The wolf was crawling out from under the wreckage and shaking himself off, and his eyes were already hunting for the hare again — as if nothing had happened, as if this time it would definitely work.
“Because then it would be over,” Ilya said.
Shane turned his head.
Ilya was watching the TV. He shrugged.
“The cartoon would be over,” he clarified. “Who wants to watch the wolf catch the hare, and that’s it.”
He put on the New Year’s episode out of order, with the air of a man who’d been saving it for dessert all night.
There was a costume party. The hare showed up as Ded Moroz — Grandfather Frost — in a fur coat and a cotton-wool beard, tiny and extremely pleased with himself. And the wolf…
It took Shane a moment to understand what he was looking at.
The wolf was Snegurochka. The Snow Maiden. A huge, hoarse wolf in a Snow Maiden costume — and he was singing. A duet. With the hare.
“Wait,” Shane said. “Wait. The wolf is dressed as a girl?”
“As Snegurochka. It’s different.”
“And he’s singing… to the hare?”
“It is New Year, Hollander.”
“That’s not an explanation!”
“It is the most important explanation in Russia. On New Year, everything is allowed.”
Shane watched the bearded hare dance around the tree while the wolf in the Snow Maiden costume croaked out his part and tried to grab him at the same time, and felt his entire understanding of a Soviet childhood slowly and irreversibly slide sideways.
“What’s he singing?”
Ilya thought.
“Complaining,” he said. “That he is always running after him. And it’s no use.”
“Ilya,” Shane said carefully. “Is this… a love song?”
“Twenty episodes,” Ilya said. “Twenty episodes he runs after him. Even on New Year. Even in a dress. You really think he wants dinner?”
“You can’t seriously—”
“Absolutely seriously.” Ilya watched the screen with the deep satisfaction of a man who’d been waiting twenty years to tell someone this. “The Soviet Union knew everything, Hollander.”
Shane looked at the wolf in the Snow Maiden costume. Then at Ilya.
“So you’re the wolf,” he said slowly. “In a dress.”
“I would look good,” Ilya said, without a shadow of doubt.
Shane opened his mouth to argue — and realized, to his horror, that he had nothing.
At the end of every episode, the battered, soaking wet, occasionally bandaged wolf shook his fist at the hare and bellowed the same thing. The subtitles translated it as Just you wait!, and every time, Ilya winced like someone had stepped on his foot.
“That’s not it,” he said after the fifth episode.
“Then what is it?”
“Nu, pogodi. It’s…” Ilya wiggled his fingers in the air, as if trying to catch something small. “It’s a threat. And a promise. And a little bit — that you are hurt. And that you will come back anyway. All at once.”
“That’s a lot for two words.”
“It is Russian. We are economical.”
Shane tried it.
“Nu, pa-ga-dee.”
Ilya slowly turned his head.
“Again.”
“Nu, pagadi.”
“God.” Ilya covered his face with both hands, and his shoulders started to shake. “My God. Again. One more time. I will record it.”
“You’re not recording it.”
“I will make it my alarm. I will wake up happy.”
Around midnight, in the family group chat — it was called Sunday Dinners, his mom had set it up, and Ilya had been in it for three months now — David sent a photo of an enormous fish on the kitchen scale. No caption. It didn’t need one.
Ilya replied with a screenshot: the wolf and his cigarette, in close-up. Caption: Showing Shane what I grew up on.
Shane: HE’S SMOKING. THE WOLF. IN A KIDS’ CARTOON.
Dad: Popeye had a pipe. I turned out fine.
Shane: Debatable.
Dad: 👍
Mom: WAIT.
Mom: What are you watching? Don’t you dare watch without me!!! I want to watch too.
Mom: Sunday, after dinner. Ilya, pick something. Shane, don’t argue.
Shane hadn’t even started arguing. He looked at don’t argue, then at Ilya, who was already typing a private message to his mom with the face of a man plotting a coup.
“What are you writing her?”
“Nothing.”
“Ilya.”
“Asking if she has a projector.”
That night, once Ilya was asleep — sprawled diagonally across the bed, as always, leaving Shane twelve inches at the edge, which Shane had long since stopped considering a problem — Shane picked up his phone and opened his notes.
He thought for a moment. Typed a title: Cartoons (I.)
Underneath:
- Nu, Pogodi! — finish all of them.
- Cheburashka — WHAT IS HE.
- Hedgehog in the Fog (???)
- Ask more about Baba Yaga.
He thought some more — and added a fifth item, even though it wasn’t about cartoons anymore.
- Kids???
He looked at it. For a pretty long time.
Deleted two of the question marks.
Thought about it — and deleted the third.