He had arrived from Russia in 1990 at the
age of eighteen, dreaming of changing his life on the ice of Quebec’s arenas. He was offered a chance to do just that, a spot at the beginning of the season at the training camp for the
Foreurs de Val-d’Or in the Major Junior Hockey League. The recruiters thought this young Russian must be a rare pearl. And he’d fulfilled his promise, just not quite in the way that
they’d expected.
Connoisseurs know that Russians don’t like to play rough, but that they are very talented and born scorers. Boris Bogdanov had told the recruiters a few little lies about his past as a
player for the Dynamo school club in Moscow; not big lies, just two dozen goals or so a year – half of them when his team was short-handed!
The first day of camp, during the rookie match, everyone quickly realised that he wasn’t a real Russian player as far as his talent was concerned, but he was a real Russian player when it
came to playing rough. During the first match, playing short-handed, Boris soon caught the attention of a big beefy player from Alberta who was out for his place in the sun. For this
muscle-mountain, hard play was his meat and potatoes, the key to everything, the only corporal expression he was capable of. So this colossus did what all great predators do. He was a blue, so he
looked at the backs of the reds for the weakest prey. The swiftest gazelle always gets away from the lion. For the slower ones, it’s every gazelle for himself. And for the slowest of the
slow, it’s amen.
Boris Bogdanov never thought of playing the puck when it went into the corner. He was just trying to get away from the enormous Albertan chasing after him. He heard him grunt. Boris wasn’t
as quick on his blades as he’d claimed. He didn’t manage to get very far before there was a terrible
ker-runch!
Boris Bogdanov, who was not all that hefty a guy, dislocated his shoulder when he hit the boards. All in all he had played only forty-five seconds in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League,
thirty-two of which were spent running away. In Val-d’Or, people like hard men, real men – but above all, they don’t like being taken for fools.
‘Don’t count on us to pay for your ticket home!’
The equipment attendant did let him keep the hockey bag with the club’s colours.
‘A little souvenir for your kids.’
Just because you’ve told lies doesn’t mean you’re an idiot. The fact that Boris Bogdanov is an intellectual is proof of this. But it is a very intellectual stance to think that
everyone else is an idiot.
If Boris did have a fault, that was it. He always went around with a little smirk on his face that meant he knew things others knew nothing about. He was a brilliant scholar and he knew it.
Russians don’t just make timid hockey players. They also make great mathematicians.
Boris Bogdanov was passionate about topology – about one of its disciplines anyway. Knot theory is a complex mathematical science that provides explanations for very simple things in life.
When you pull on the yarn of a tangled-up ball of wool, sometimes it comes untangled right away, sometimes the knot gets even tighter. Life’s just like that: little actions can have big
repercussions. And the same action doesn’t always have the same effect.
Boris Bogdanov’s exotic fish facilitated his research for a new theory. A fish in an aquarium always swims around the same course: that’s the yarn. The fish unwinds its yarn
according to the presence of other fish – friend or enemy – in the aquarium. Whenever a new inhabitant arrives, it must modify its usual path. For Boris, the trajectories of the fish
were like so many threads, tangling and untangling.
‘We don’t choose our path, others choose it for us.’
His doctoral dissertation was there before him, in water maintained at a constant temperature of thirty-two degrees Celsius. This was vital. His academic survival depended on that water