Memories of Pavel Bure stoked by World War 2 escape epic

Sometimes you find something in a book that surprises you.

In the literal sense, there was on-line Georgia bookseller Perry Falwell (of the Booksaga blog), who bought a bunch of old hardcovers from a woman and found many of them hollowed out and filled with pornographic Polaroids of her recently deceased husband and various women.

And, perhaps equally surprising, a lot of people found something of value in the megaselling Fifty Shades of Grey.

Recently, I stumbled across something in a book that took me by surprise. Actually, that should probably happen all the time, but who would have thought that a book published in 1956, about an epic trek undertaken by escaped Second World War prisoners, would evoke memories of the Vancouver Canucks’ flashiest player ever, Pavel Bure?

I was engrossed in the pages of The Long Walk, a ghost-written book by Slawomir Rawicz, a cavalry lieutenant in the Polish Army who had the misfortune, at the war’s outset, of being sentenced to decades of hard labour in one of the Soviet Union’s infamous Siberian gulags.

Rawicz and six others escaped in 1941 and trekked almost 6,500 kilometres south, into British India. Some members of his multinational party didn’t survive the journey, his (disputed by some) memoir of which became adapted into the Hollywood film The Way Back in 2010.

In the book, Rawicz and his companions are helped numerous times by inhabitants of the regions through which they travelled, and one of the first included a hospitable Mongolian elder who proudly displayed a fine old pocket watch with the maker’s name engraved thereon, a name that the young lieutenant said he somehow always remembered: Pavel Bure.

After mentally remarking on the coincidence (and with Bure fairly fresh in my mind because of his recent enshrinement in the Hockey Hall of Fame), I started to read on, but there was a nagging tug at my memory.

Then I recalled reading that Bure, during that extended layoff after his 1995 knee surgery, was involved in a business venture in Russia with an individual who had been been linked by national media outlets, fairly or unfairly, to some unsavoury commercial activities.

The new venture involved luxury watches. After some quick web searches, I found that Vancouver’s Russian Rocket is the great-grandson, and namesake, of the founder of a dynastic watchmaking concern, one that served the Russian czars from the early 1800s.

The Pavel Bure watch probably found its way into the herdsman’s hands by way of a displaced military officer or member of the czarist court after the 1917 revolution, and the famed hockey speedster was attempting to resurrect his family’s past glory in that arena of precision craftmanship.

So, a rather meandering anecdote, but a good illustration, to my mind, of the type of serendipity that makes reading such an endearing, and enduring, pleasure.