LITMIR.BIZ

      FISH CHANGE DIRECTION IN COLD WEATHER

      Four exotic fish, lit by a white neon light, were swimming in circles around an enormous aquarium set up right in the middle of the room. A plank set on two trestles was sagging beneath the weight of books on pure mathematics. Scattered over the books were sheets of paper covered in scribbled equations and obscure calculations. Other papers were strewn across the floor, some of them crumpled. In a corner was a sports bag bearing the logo of the Val-d’Or ice hockey team. Three hockey sticks had been set on top of it – sticks for a left-hander, with a very curved blade – an attacker’s blade by the looks of it.

      Across the street a door opened. Julie appeared on the ground floor landing, still wearing her very short bathrobe. She tossed an empty wine bottle disdainfully into the blue recycling box and it smashed. A man rushed out next to her, looking left and then right. He gave a slight wave that Julie did not return. She went in and slammed the door behind her. End of love story.

      Boris Bogdanov had looked up from his reading – a book by Andreï Markov, not the hockey player but the great Russian mathematician. From his window he had seen everything. An enigmatic smile spread over Boris Bogdanov’s face, as if he knew something his neighbour didn’t.

      Was Boris Bogdanov in love with his neighbour?

      Nyet! Boris Bogdanov had never been in love, because in his entire life the only things that had ever interested him were himself and his fish. 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 remaining at the same temperature. If it were to drop, some of the fish might change direction and thereby destroy the entire premise of his dissertation.

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