"Bag skate," he says, sitting down. "Assistant coach. Very fast. I am not fast enough."
"You kept up," Davis says.
"I did not die. This is different from keeping up."
Hájek's English has improved noticeably in four days, mostly through immersion and the survival instinct of someone who needs to understand what a coach is yelling at him during a drill. His grammar is careful. His idioms are a work in progress. Yesterday someone told him to "kill the clock" during a penalty kill drill and he stood there for two full seconds trying to work out why anyone would want to harm a timepiece.
Camp has a rhythm now. Morning skate, lunch, video session, afternoon practice. Between sessions, the building sorts itself into clusters the way any group of humans does when forced into close quarters. The French speakers have their own gravity. Leclerc, Gauthier, and Soucy huddle in rapid conversation that the rest of the team eyes with mild paranoia. It is its own small country within the team, complete with borders the English speakers cannot cross and customs they cannot decode. They don't know Berger has already decoded all of it and is distributing translations like a newsletter.
The vets have their rhythms. Jensen and Murray and Fraser, the Canadian contingent who have done this enough times that training camp is a process, not an event. They know when to push and when to coast, and us rookies who try to match their casual pace learn fast that casual for an eleven-year vet looks very different than casual for a twenty-two-year-old eager to make a mark.
And then there are the captains.
Ikonen is easy to track because he exists at the edges. He arrives before most of the team and stays after. Occupies doorways, walls, the periphery of conversations. He participates in team activities the way a man fulfills a professional obligation. Present, competent, and gone at the first reasonable exit. I've watched him end conversations with a nod so efficient it’s a master class. Three days of observation and I can predict withintwo exchanges when he'll leave. He is a man with a system, and the system does not include lingering.
Except with Asher.
I noticed it first during a video session on day two. Asher was talking, because Asher is always talking, breaking down a clip with a hand gestures and a grin and the easy authority of someone who makes analysis feel like storytelling. The session ended. Guys started filtering out. Ikonen didn't. He stayed in his seat while Asher finished a point to Jensen, and when the room was half empty and any reasonable person would have left, Ikonen was still there. Not contributing. Just there.
I catalogued it and moved on. Then it happened again at practice. Asher skating over to talk between drills, Ikonen stopping to listen when he could have kept moving. On day three, team lunch. Asher dropped into the seat next to Ikonen without asking, started talking, and Ikonen's posture shifted. Not a lot. His shoulders settled a fraction of an inch. He angled toward Asher instead of toward the exit.
Today during the morning skate, I watch it happen again. Asher finishes a drill and glides to the boards where Ikonen is waiting for his rotation. They stand next to each other. Asher says something. Ikonen's mouth does a thing that on any other face would be a smile. Asher laughs, full and easy, and skates away. Ikonen watches him go for about two seconds longer than the moment requires.
I file it next to the Leclerc intel. Information is a resource.
At lunch, Perry sits at the table next to ours with a plate piled high enough to suggest he's preparing for a siege. He's telling a story about a moose that wandered onto the ice at an outdoor rink in Saskatoon, and it is the most Canadian story I've ever heard. He says "bud" four times in three sentences. Mueller is listening with genuine interest because Mueller does not have the filter to recognize when someone is being absurd.
"You ever see a moose up close?" Perry asks, turning to our table. "They're huge, bud. Like, the size of a car."
"In Czech Republic we have similar animal," I say. "Also very large. Also very stupid."
Perry grins. "Sounds about right."
"Much like hockey players from Saskatchewan."
The table next to us goes quiet for one beat. Perry's water comes out of his nose. Davis puts his fork down. Mueller looks confused, which is his default state when conversation leaves the topic of hockey. Hájek is the first to laugh, a surprised bark that sets off Perry, who is now coughing and laughing at the same time and pointing at me with a fork.
"This guy," Perry says, wiping his face. "This guy is going to be a problem."
I take a drink of my water and offer nothing further. Timing is everything. In comedy and in hockey.
After lunch, Mueller goes back to studying film. Davis walks the facility the way he does every day, circling, cataloguing. Hájek pulls out his phone to text someone, probably his family back home. I sit on the bench and watch the hallway traffic and think about what I've seen this week.
We've been here four days and the team is already forming itself, connections and tensions and alliances taking shape the way ice forms on a lake, from the edges in. Some of it is predictable. Some of it, like a captain who can't leave a room when his alternate is still in it, is not.
I don't say any of this. I am a rookie. I see many things and say none of them. This is how you survive your first camp: eyes open, mouth closed, and a very good memory for patterns.
Chapter 11: Hájek
The cafeteria has fourteen types of protein. I counted.
In Czech league, we had chicken and sometimes fish. Here there is chicken in four preparations, two kinds of fish, beef, turkey, something called a "power bowl" that contains grains I cannot identify, and a smoothie station with a menu longer than some restaurant menus back home. The nutrition staff has printed cards explaining macronutrients in three languages. Czech is not one of them.
I take the chicken and rice because chicken and rice is the same in any country, and I find our table. The rookie table. My table, which is a strange thing to feel attached to after less than a week, but here I am, attached to a table in a cafeteria in a city I had to look up on a map four months ago.
Everything in this country is enormous. The rink is enormous. The cafeteria is enormous. The trucks in the parking lot are enormous. The volume in the locker room would register on seismic equipment. In Brno, our locker room was small enough that you could hear someone's phone buzz from across the room.Here I cannot hear the person next to me unless he is yelling, and he usually is.
Novák finds me after lunch, which is a thing he does now. He came to North America two years before me, for college, and knows things I don't yet. Which coaches want you early and which don't care. Where the good coffee is. That you don't sit in a veteran's stall, ever, even if it looks empty.
