I want to be a good girl, but I don’t want to go into the bedroom where the lady is. “I don’t want to,” I say.
“Annette,” Poppa says, “be nice now and go and get me my slippers. Listen to your poppa. They’re under the bed.”
I go into the bedroom but I watch the floor all the way in and all the way out and I don’t look up. There, I did it.
“That wasn’t so hard,” Poppa says, when I bring them to him. It was hard.
At dinner that night, I sip my milk the right way. I have to eat all my peas first and then my mashed potatoes. I can’t eat my chicken until everything else is done, even the milk. Every last pea. My mother wants to know why I’m not eating my chicken but it’s all right, I’ve finished the peas and the mashed potatoes so I swallow down every bite of chicken before she has to ask me again. Then everything’s fine. It’s all fine and when I go to bed I can feel that the lady’s happy with me.
I keep thinking up better and better things to do. I put my clothes on from the bottom to the top one day – socks, underpants, skirt, undershirt, blouse – and from the top to the bottom – undershirt, blouse, skirt, underpants, socks – the next. When I feel the lady get mad at me, I think of something more to do. For a little while everything’s good; nothing bad happens. But it gets harder and harder. I have to walk around the block three times one day. The next day I have to do it five times. Poppa doesn’t like me going to the end of the block by myself. And I don’t ever want to go into the big bedroom. Then no matter how carefully I drink my milk and eat my dinner, no matter how many dandelions I sink in a circle in the mud puddle, nothing seems to work any more, nothing’s good enough. The lady’s never pleased with me. I want it to stop.
Poppa comes out on the back porch and finds me playing with Blackie, my doll.
“Annette,” he says, “your momma says you’re all the time quiet. She thinks you’re worrying about something.”
I look up at him but he’s so far away. The lady can see me wherever I go. She knows everything. Poppa picks me up and sits me on his lap. He pushes my hair back from my face. My poppa.
“I’m scared,” I say and I can’t help it; I start crying a little bit.
“Don’t be scared,” he says. “There’s nothing to be scared about.”
“I’m scared of the lady in the picture. In your room.”
My mother comes in. “What’s wrong with her?” my mother asks. “Why is she crying?”
“She’s scared of the picture in the bedroom.”
“Scared of a picture? Why should she be scared of a picture?”
It comes out; I have to let it out. “The lady makes me do things. I have to do things for her.” I said it. Now what happens?
“Come here,” my mother says, taking me by the hand. “Show me the picture.”
We go into the bedroom. “That one. The lady.”
“All right,” my mother says, and she sits me on the bed. “This is what we’ll do.” And she goes over to the wall, takes it down, puts it face down in the bureau drawer. “There,” she says. “It’s gone. You don’t have to do anything any more. You don’t have to be scared.”
I am not who I was. I was someone defined by what I obeyed, my mother and the laws that governed her, my sense of the world as ungovernable, my certainty of my own helplessness and its power. Didn’t my mother, even then, offer me something else? Didn’t she always offer me something else? One night in the apartment on Main Street the lights went out just after dinner. I reached for Poppa’s hand in the darkness, felt it warm and solid in mine. But in the moment before I took his hand, that first moment of darkness, I called out Momma. I thought then, why is it Momma I call when it’s Poppa I love? He was wearing the green sweater; even in the dark I could see it green. I pulled closer and we sat quietly together until the lights came on. When those days come back to me, the very earliest days I can remember, they’re fixed, the family its own immutable constellation. My life was of a piece and then, when my father stepped onto that train, what was whole came to be broken and I fell into these fragmentary selves, this collection of beings. Sometimes I wonder who the girl on Main Street was. I was reading an article in the newspaper just the other day. It said that the self – which we have but animals don’t – resides behind the right eye, a spot in the brain which, removed, or damaged, removes or damages who we are. And that who we are is defined by our memory of our life, but not by memory alone: by memory as it is imbued with emotion. Who we are. So if I remember your hand, Vladimir, but not the love that accompanied it, I am not who I was. I’m not. I have this other life now, the life that’s not my old life. I’ve turned the corner from that old life, the one I won’t talk about. Turning my back on the past, I haven’t allowed myself to be that girl on Main Street any more, haven’t even let myself remember all the separate people I’ve inhabited. And yet. Does not who I was mean less than I was ? Could it not mean other, couldn’t different from mean more than, mean gain, not just loss?
There he is, in the doorway of the delicatessen, the boy who’s not supposed to be there. He’s stopped in the doorway, watching his father. Avram looks up. “Come in, come in,” Avram says. “It’s good to see you. Have a bite to eat.” He touches the boy’s arm, then wipes his hands on the immaculate cotton of the apron, even though his hands are clean. The boy seats himself on one of the red stools at the counter, whirls slowly around once or twice. Avram’s hands are quick making the sandwich, piling two inches of corned beef on the rye. He sets the plate down, sets himself down beside the boy, watches as he eats. “It’s good?” he asks in Yiddish.
“Talk English, Pa,” the boy says, his mouth full. “We should talk English.”
“You talk good already.” Avram pushes a plate of coleslaw towards him. “Anybody would think you were born right here in Canada.”
“I need to practise. So how’s by you, Pa?”
“You know, the usual,” Avram says. “If I didn’t have to give so much credit, we’d be sitting pretty. And you, tateleh ? Is Sarah Katz looking after you? Still making those famous poppyseed cookies?”
The boy smiles. “I moved. I’m boarding with the Posens now; I’ve got enough cash for room and board. Bought myself a bicycle.”
“Here,” Avram says, “take a pickle with it.”
“What’s this you’re reading, Pa?” the boy asks, picking up a thick hardcover.
“I got it out of the library, just published. About the Five Year Plan, what it’s going to do for the Russian people.”
The boy puts the book down.
“Listen to what they say here,” Avram says, reading the English carefully aloud:
In the societies of the West the evolution of institutions proceeds for the most part without plan or design, as a sort of by-product of the selfish competition of individuals, groups and enterprises for private gain. In Russia, on the other hand, the Soviet government has sought to promote the rational and orderly development of the entire social economy. In the great Five Year Plan of Construction, which was launched in October of 1928, and which will run to October of 1933, a whole civilization is harnessing its energies and is on the march towards consciously determined goals.
“This is interesting,” Avram says. “This I make time to read.”
“A lot of big words, Pa.”
“And you,” Avram gently closes the book, “how is your school?”
“I’m not going to school,” the boy answers. “I got these odd jobs, and coming up in a month I got an apprenticeship with Cohen’s Electric.”
Avram sets his hands along the counter, runs his fingertips along the ribbed edge. “I wanted for you an education,” he says.
“Tell me, Pa,” the boy’s voice goes sour, “what’s the point, someone like me getting an education? I have no head for it.”
“That’s not true . . .” Avram says.
“I want to earn a living and pay for my keep,” the boy says. “Don’t offer me money, Pa.” Avram’s hands are on the
till. “You know I won’t take it. She’ll say I stole it,” he says. And before Avram can say anything more, he’s gone.
The boy is as good with his hands as he is with his head, can make anything electrical work. The electrician, my mother calls him. Never uses his name. Joseph.
Joseph could fix anything. Every time he’d visit he would bring me a little treat: coloured pencils or a new eraser. And he’d help me draw: trees and suns, flowers. I could spend hours drawing, trying to put down on paper something that made a pattern, that had colour in it, a shape. When Joseph visited, we’d talk English to each other. He’d learned to speak good English, not my-country English like Poppa and my mother. He took me to see the fireworks once, gave me a piggyback ride all the way there. I wasn’t scared because I was with Joseph. When the fireworks started, the sky was full of coloured bits of light, red and green and sparkly blue, some like flowers, some like pinwheels. And noises: pops like bubbles bursting for the little lights and a shaky boom for the bigger ones. Then a noise came that was so loud the ground shuddered and I shuddered with it and a big flower of light bloomed right on top of my head. It got bigger and bigger in the sky, came closer and closer till I felt the sky come down to touch me, till I felt the light inside my chest, breathed in light till I was full with it.
My mother is at the sink, washing dishes. “The electrician was here. He fixed the wireless,” she says. Poppa is adding a column of numbers that’s as long as the page. He can keep every one of those numbers in his head all the way down the line. He puts his pencil down.
“His name is Joseph.”
The cat and I watch my mother’s hands making circles with a soapy rag.
“I know his name,” she says.
It’s easy to read my mother’s back. I always know when something bad is going to happen, like the day she tore up that old picture of the little boy shaking hands with Poppa. When she gets mad, Poppa talks in his quiet voice. There-there, his voice says.
Poppa gets up, turns on the radio. “It’s working good,” he says, and goes downstairs.
My mother turns the radio off. “In Odessa, we didn’t need a wireless. Every evening we could go to the park and listen to the orchestra in the bandstand.”
They worked under the ground, my mother’s family, in the mines, like ants. The whole city of Odessa sits on top of stone, she told me, limestone, and for hundreds of years my mother’s family mined it. Hundreds of years and hundreds of miles of tunnels, a honeycomb of limestone tunnels. Maybe they’re bees, not ants, my mother’s family. A hive of relatives, her sisters and their families, still living in my mother’s city, her country.
It’s funny that Joseph has the same country as my mother – she wouldn’t want to share anything with him.
I don’t have a country. Or my country doesn’t have a name. Maybe my country is the delicatessen: Poppa’s white apron at night, the way it shines in the darkness hanging from its peg.
I’ve always lived in a forest of words, in a foreign language. On the first day of grade one at Aberdeen School on Selkirk Avenue, we walked to school, Poppa and me, his hand warm and quiet in mine. When we got to the doorway of the classroom, he said, Come look and don’t be scared. This is where all the little girls dance. Aberdeen School was where I learned to be good. Reading the faces of the teachers was easy, and so was making my own face show them what they wanted to see: a serious little girl, a smiling little girl, a girl who does what she’s told. And Aberdeen School was where I was told to speak only English: not Yiddish, which I spoke to my father, and not Russian, which I spoke to my mother. “We must all learn,” Miss MacLeod explained, “to speak English so that everyone understands everyone else. Now if you speak Russian, and Darya speaks Ukrainian, and Nadya speaks Hungarian, how will we get by?” And though I knew the teacher was always right, I couldn’t help thinking that I did understand Ukrainian, as much by the look on Darya’s face as the sounds she made. And when Johannes, the little boy with the dull blond hair cut straight across in bangs, spoke Polish, it wasn’t so hard either, especially if he had the ball in his hands and you knew he must mean ball. When I opened my mouth I didn’t always know which language I was speaking, didn’t know, really, that there were different languages, just different, familiar ways of settling into sound. Poppa had already taught me to read English. He read English just fine, though for my mother it was hard. Russian is the only language worth knowing. But I still had to sit and listen to the other children read The Little Red Hen and it would make me itchy, make me want to twist my toes and snap them against each other. Aberdeen School was where I learned to be good, but I knew I wasn’t really good, that underneath being good was a bad girl. Poppa used to sing me the rhyme in English: There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. And when she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she was horrid. The bad girl who can’t sit still, who twists her toes and snaps them. The girl who wants what she wants. Who boxed Ben’s ears once, because she was mad, even though he was bigger, even though he’d done nothing. Because she didn’t get what she wanted, and she wants what she wants. She’s horrid.
Miss MacLeod has told us to put our heads down because we were too noisy. I run my fingers along the smooth groove in the top of the desk where my pencil goes, round the opening for the inkwell. Bottles of ink are dangerous. Pupils are not allowed to use ink until grade three.
“All right,” Miss MacLeod says, “time for Spelling.”
I sit up straight and fold my hands in front of me on my desk, feet flat on the floor and knees together: Position One. It’s so hard. And I don’t want to, but I do.
“Now class,” Miss MacLeod is saying, “what do you write in the right-hand corner of the page?” She turns to the blackboard and her black gabardine skirt swirls as she turns. “This is today’s date,” Miss MacLeod says, and she writes October 18, 1932 on the board in her beautiful, clear printing.
I hold the pencil the way I’ve been taught, cradled against the second finger of my right hand. I’m getting a bump there from the pencil rubbing, my finger taking on the shape of what I do. October 18, 1932. It makes me shiver. I’ve never written the date before, never pencilled myself into time, but this is how time enters my life.
Time. I can stand in the spare room or I can walk back into my darkened kitchen and say, it’s Tuesday, it’s six o’clock, it’s time for dinner. But time is slippery. If we let go that thread of the present, we’re released into what gave us this moment, the darkness in it or the light. My father was a believer, a dreamer. His daylight dreams took him to what he thought of as his future in Canada, and then they made him get on that train. But he had nightmares too. Just like me. Sometimes I think even now I’m still dreaming his dreams. Make a wish. I want to remember.
In the dream of summer I used to play at my friend Cassie’s house, a two-storey, white stucco with a picket gate painted green in the carragana hedge. Picket, picket. I liked that word. Cassie’s mother fed us cinnamon buns hot from the oven. Her backyard was big and open: no trees or apartment buildings to make the sky small. They had a vegetable garden that took up most of it. Laundry flapped on the neighbour’s line: sheets and pillowcases white against the blue sky. Once Cassie and I got to dig a new patch of garden. She showed me how to put my whole weight on the spade, and while we dug it was as if the soil got looser, deeper, as we worked it, sun hot on our shoulders. We were workers. The screen door squeaked. Good times.
But it wasn’t good times; it was hard times. Kids came to school wearing clothes that were too big or too small, jackets made over from coats, patches on patches. Half the neighbours were on Relief. Because it was hard times, my mother would let me invite a friend over for lunch once a week, sometimes twice. Nobody can say I let anyone go hungry from my table, she’d say, setting the dishes down on the table, potatoes fried in lots of oil, salami sliced thick. They can’t say that about me. I’m not stingy like some people.
Plenty did go
hungry. Mrs. Goldbaum down the street’s husband was a travelling salesman, no good, a gambler. Three kids to feed and nothing to feed them with. Poppa would leave bags of groceries on the back step and my mother wouldn’t say not to. They won’t go calling me stingy.
The boy from across the street showed off the new boots he got on Relief – soles that thick – and my brother Ben was jealous. But my mother made a face when he told her. People should work.
Some wouldn’t take Relief, like Mr. Spratt, the lodger on the third floor above the store. He was thin, quiet. His footsteps overhead hardly made any noise.
The flowered apron covers my mother’s knees. She’s shelling peas.
“I’m worried about Mr. Spratt.” Poppa sets his Tribune on the kitchen table.
“Worry about yourself, Avram.” Each pod is unzipped, the peas stripped click click click into the enamel bowl. I want to eat one, just one.
“He’s thinner every day.” Poppa’s hands rest on the newspaper.
“He dresses fancy, always in that dark grey suit, a white shirt, black shoes polished up. If he’s under the weather again you can bring him a bowl of my chicken soup.”
“God knows how the man lives.”
“He gets odd jobs. He may have a bit of savings tucked away somewhere.”
“Thirty-seven, and he looks like an old man. Look at the prices I’m charging here: fifty-two cents for a twenty-four-pound bag of flour. The farmers are getting nothing. Peanut butter nineteen cents a pound. He’d be better off.”
“Better off how?”
“On Relief. If he was working for Relief at least he’d get a food voucher.”
“People have no shame.”
“Anne . . .”
“No shame.”
“Anne, people are hungry.”
“They’re lazy.”
“Anne . . .”
“Just lazy.”
“Hello there, Princess.” Mr. Spratt comes down the stairs in his dark grey suit, white shirt and black shoes. He calls me Princess because I was born in the same year as Princess Elizabeth. “How are you?” His voice is softer even than Poppa’s.
The Knife Sharpener's Bell Page 3