“You’re worrying for nothing,” Anne says. “He’s hiding somewhere. It was in the papers; he was ashamed.”
“Nobody knew him but us!” Avram answers. “Why should he be ashamed? He said he was coming for dinner . . .”
“He owed rent on the room,” Anne says. “Our landlady told me. Almost two months already. She was going to throw him out, but he’s such a nice quiet type. He kept trying to pay, a dollar here, a dollar there.” She touches Avram’s shoulder. “He was ashamed; he owed money. He ran away. Tomorrow’s Sunday. Take the children to the beach for the afternoon. You need a rest. I’ll mind the store. I’m not interested in swimming. Go. Take the Moonlight Special home. Listen to me.”
“I’m going to visit Joseph,” Avram says. “I’m going to spend tomorrow with Joseph.”
She stands up and walks to the bedroom.
When Avram comes home Sunday evening, Anne won’t talk to him. Monday it’s busy. The Relief money is in and customers come into the delicatessen to pay something of what they owe. Anne still isn’t talking; she keeps herself busy in the kitchen.
Avram puts two cheese blintzes on a plate and takes it out back, where he might be able to catch a breeze. He opens the paper. Lux soap, 7¢ a bar. Jobless Conference Held in Edmonton. Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle.
Unidentified Man Found Floating in Red River. Approximately forty years old, 130 pounds, five feet, ten inches. Dark grey suit, white shirt, black shoes.
He puts the paper down, picks it up. Farmers’ Army Gathers in Ottawa. Flit Kills Mosquitoes. Whose Problem Is It? Demoralizing dole-supported idleness. And the Society page: Printed Voile Frocks. White Softee Hats. Paris Falls for Five O’Clock Teas. Society. He puts his head down on the paper, the cool newsprint against his cheek, the words pressing into him, the lies.
Hard times, hard winter. But walking down the street in Winnipeg, I don’t think, Winnipeg, don’t set myself in a particular place because in my life there is only one place, here. Five o’clock and it’s already dark, the sky gone from royal blue to a velvety purple to black and the snow so white it seems to glow. Yesterday there was just a bit of snow and the snowbanks are still white, new with it. No wind tonight, so there’s an extra stillness added onto the layer of stillness the snow seems to give.
A car is hunched at the traffic light and someone’s inside, the person inside thinking his own thoughts just the way I’m thinking mine. We’re each alone, looking out from behind our faces, seeing just the edges of cheek, nose, ridge of skin around the eyes, a kind of wavering shadow if I try to look down at my own face, but I don’t like doing that, it’s too scary. Though I do sometimes like the feeling of being alone, especially outside like this on the dark, familiar streets, the cold air against my face so that I feel the edges of myself, my skin, know where I end.
Winnipeg. Are there really other places? In the middle of winter, in Winnipeg, it doesn’t seem there are even other seasons. In school I’ve learned about the tropics – Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn – but they sound frightening, not real: beasts, diseases. My school books say that in other places there is no winter. No winter. They can’t put that one over on me. It can’t be true. Nobody gets away without winter. The snow just comes and goes there, the cold not quite as cold. The snow, heavier, warmer, bends the feathery leaves of the palm trees till they almost touch the frozen sand. I like drawing palm trees, the sawtooth leaves, crisscross of the trunks. Miss MacLeod says I’m the best drawer in the class.
It must get so cold in those thin grass huts. Here we have wooden houses, solid walls. I don’t like the story about the three little pigs because nobody here uses brick for their houses. And wooden houses don’t fall down, not in Winnipeg, no matter how hard the wind blows. Though lots of people are cold, even inside. And what about animals? I’m still not sure how animals get by in winter. Well, Nature takes care of everything, the balance of nature, Miss MacLeod called it. Mother Nature takes care of everything. Or maybe God. But Poppa and my mother don’t believe in God. Superstitious mumbo-jumbo. It’s Mother Nature who looks after the animals. Mother Nature and Poppa.
Poppa doesn’t cut the bread under his arm, sawing away and letting the crumbs fall onto the kitchen floor, like my mother does. He sets the loaves on the counter and slices carefully. Then with the stiff flat edge of his hand he sweeps every single crumb into his other hand and then from his hand into a chipped bowl he keeps beside the sink. And when the bowl gets full enough, I’ll wake up one morning and he’ll be in his robe and slippers on the back porch, standing still as anything, his palms turned out and up, like a kind of a prayer. I wait without breathing, and then they come, the sparrows, and land on his shoulders, fingers, his head. They’re not scared. What would it be like to be a sparrow? Or Poppa, who’s nothing but good? Make a wish. I wish there was no stubborn knot of meanness to twist inside me. I wish I could be like Poppa.
Most days after school I go skating, even though it’s dark by the time I get to the rink, and cold. My mother tells me how crazy I am to go skating in this cold but I want to; I don’t listen. Fine, she says and she says I can’t blame her if I get frostbite. I have to get out, so I sling my hand-me-down white figure skates over my shoulder by the laces. They’re all scratched and a bit bulgy-looking at the ankles, but they fit if I wear two pairs of socks. When it’s forty below, you can’t even sit down in a snowbank to put on your skates – the snow pulls the heat right out of you. You have to keep skating, move. It doesn’t matter how tired you get. If you stop, it won’t take long for the cold to get you. The cold will climb inside you and then you won’t be yourself any more. What will you be? Something rich and strange. Joseph read me the poem. Something rich and strange. No, you’d be dead. Dead, not yourself. That’s the way it is. Even the air can be dangerous; not much between you and what wants to end you. Nothing’s easy, not even dying.
I know about Mr. Spratt, the wreck, the waste.
I’m not supposed to know, but I do. What has he changed into now, Mr. Spratt, the grey, muddy water filling up his mouth?
We all go to the wedding, Ben all dressed up in his new suit, me in a brand-new party dress. Poppa makes even my mother go. But then, a few months later, Joseph stops coming by as often. It’s because Joseph and Poppa have an argument about the Soviet Union, Poppa’s trip. Poppa is planning to visit the Soviet Union to see our grandmother. Joseph says, go, good. You need to see your mother. That isn’t what they argue about. What makes Joseph so mad is Poppa’s plan to take us to Russia. He wants to see if he can get permission for all of us to go there. I’ve never heard Joseph talk to Poppa like that. It’s plain stupid; no, worse than stupid, criminal. And Poppa says, don’t talk to your father like that.
But I know why Poppa wants to take us to the Soviet Union. Because of Mr. Spratt, what happened to him. And because of what happens all over the capitalist world to ordinary workers who are just trying to make a decent life for themselves. And because Poppa is tired of the store, tired of giving kids loaves of bread when my mother isn’t looking so they won’t go hungry. And because of the future he wants for me and Ben. In the capitalist world, there is no future. No jobs, no chance of an education. That’s why he wants us to leave.
I can’t understand what’s possessing you, why you’d even consider leaving! Joseph sounds so mad. And he keeps trying to tell Poppa what it’s like in the Soviet Union, how things have changed since Poppa left twenty years ago.
Joseph doesn’t understand, but my mother does. She wants her country back.
My father is upstairs in the bedroom, stretched out on his bed. The letter came yesterday. The room’s warm, stuffy, the curtains closed. Anne’s bed beside his is empty, the bed carefully made, the heavy gold bedspread pulled tight over the blankets. One hand holds the letter, the other lightly touches the nubby surface of the spread, gold, matching.
For eight months he’s been planning, finding the money, arranging the paperwork, getting a good price on his ticket. Letters h
ave been sent to offices in Ottawa and Moscow, to the family in Simferopol and in Odessa. Everything was falling into place. And now this letter.
With heavy hearts, we must write to tell you that your beloved mother, Sarah Chava Gershon, passed away November 15, 1934. She died quietly in her sleep. May she rest in peace.
He’s too late. He’s missed his chance.
Anne comes quietly into the room, lays a hand on his arm. “Avram? You were sleeping?”
He shakes his head.
“Avram, listen to me. I’ve been thinking. The way things turned out, this maybe isn’t the right thing for us. So much trouble to see your mother – alevasholem, may she rest in peace – and now everything is over and done with. Maybe, with your mother gone, we shouldn’t bother . . .”
“Anya –”
“Listen to me, Avram: it’s too much work for you. Why do we need to go and change everything? It’s not like we’re not eating, like we don’t have work.”
He sits up on the bed. “Anya, I’ve got the ticket. I’m going. We can’t sit here and wait for the Messiah. Or Roosevelt, or Bennett.”
She pats his hand. “See if you can sleep.”
He turns over, closes his eyes. And then he’s asleep, dreaming his mother’s face, brown braids in a crown. Every night for the next ten weeks he dreams her face. Night after night he’s the boy sleeping beneath the counter, the boy sleeping inconsolably beneath the counter.
Winnipeg, February 1935. My father wore his heavy tweed overcoat and brown wool suit when he boarded the train. I’d never been in a room that big. I tipped my head back to take it all in, my mouth holding itself open, the vault of my palate repeating the vault above. Say goodbye, my mother told me. I have to go, my father said. You’re a big girl now. The black body of the train shifting beside me. I wouldn’t let him go. In one slight movement I stepped up onto the train, slipping along the aisles until I spotted his name on a paper tag. I fit myself beneath his seat, between the two rows of back-to-back benches. Make a wish. All my body wanted to keep my father home. I thought with my body I could keep him from leaving.
And so the smoke diminished and died and the train stopped. I stopped the train because I want what I want. But after twenty minutes, the conductor swearing, the train delayed, they found me, and my father lifted me up, lifted me high and looked in my face, not saying anything. He held me hard against the tobacco-smelling jacket and then he set me down, where I kicked and screamed, almost nine years old, and my mother took me by the arm and onto the streetcar, and the train left, carrying my father away.
The train I failed to stop lifted my father out of his life, out of what had been, for me at least, a whole, and carried him east, from the Prairies to the Maritimes, Winnipeg to Halifax. In Halifax he boarded the SS Montcalm, which crossed the Atlantic to land in Liverpool. By train from Liverpool to Dover, by ferry to Calais and then on the long train to Moscow, my father was carried backwards from the New World to the Old, his life wound backwards into a possible future, into the country, the life he’d left.
All through the winter months I waited: for spring, for Poppa to come back. All winter I walked the blocks to school in my heavy overshoes, in my heavy coat and double mittens, crunching the packed snow under my boots, watching the clean white snow dirty and then the dirt hide under a new layer of snow. What I wanted was my father, but what I had was my mother, who sat me down in a kitchen chair, got the tortoiseshell brush from the dressing table:
Sit still if you want me to fix your hair. Such a fidgety thing. I don’t want you sulking all the time just because your poppa’s not here to fuss over you. Hold your head still. When I worked in the orphanage in Odessa those orphans sat just so when we did their hair – no squirming and crying. All that work to do. Not that I was with the children often. I’ll do anything but look after children. My job was in the dining room, laying the table, washing dishes. Hard work. You’ve never known that kind of work. And if I have anything to say about it you never will. That’s why I don’t like you hanging around my kitchen all the time. I’m not teaching you to be anyone’s servant. Catch yourself a rich husband instead. Fourteen I was when I started with the job in the orphanage. Six days a week there and then three evenings a week at the opera house – during the season – as soon as I turned sixteen. We all had to find jobs; that was it. At the orphanage sometimes, after the dinner dishes were done, they’d ask me to check in on the dormitory. Those children were like wild animals, jumping, yelling, if you didn’t know how to handle them. But they didn’t dare act up with me. Stop crying, I’d say, and they’d stop, and without me laying a finger on them. These were orphans. You could have done anything with them. But I never needed to smack any child. Not like my mother, a hard woman. She’d use her fists, the broomstick, whatever came to hand. And I always got the worst of it, even though my big sisters tried to keep her away from me. It was because I stood up to her. When I was twelve I got my arm broken. I still remember how it sounded when it broke, like a twig on a tree. And I remember my mother’s face, like she knew she was doing just the right thing. No arguing with her. Nobody can say I ever laid a hand on any child, not even the electrician. Not me. Hold still. When I was your age, in Odessa, I had hair down to my waist. Every day I’d come home and one of my sisters would sit me down in front of the stove and brush my hair, a hundred strokes. And we’d walk, all us girls, along Nikolayevsky Boulevard, taking our time, and the boys would call out to me: hey, green eyes. I never even looked at a boy. My sisters taught me to respect myself. Here, we’re almost done. I’m making you pigtails. So it pulled a little. Don’t make a big to-do about every little thing. The orphanage was hard, but the opera I loved. That building – more beautiful than the opera in Paris, that’s what they said. I worked out front, I told you, a cashier. Sure I watched! I never got to see the first act, but I saw the rest. Che gelida manina. Puccini, Verdi, Wagner. All the fancy big shots with their velvet evening cloaks and long white gloves. With my wages I bought those gold opera glasses trimmed in mother-of-pearl. If you’re a good girl I’ll let you play with them. Mother-of-pearl. Nobody was going to look down on me. Leave your hair alone already; it’s done. Go. Go now and play.
It’s spring. I’m tired of waiting for Poppa. I want what I want and I want Poppa, but I can’t have him. There’s nothing to do. I want to dig, but there’s nothing to dig. I’m itchy from waiting. I’ve asked Cassie but the ground in her garden is still too wet from the thaw to work in, and below the wet part it’s still too hard. So I’m out on the back porch, poking in the dirt of the flower box with an old bent fork, when I hear it, the dah-dong, full-bellied, swaying. The opening note light, and then the second note a gap in the heart, a falling. No way out. Ben’s hunched over his arithmetic, but at the sound he looks up, looks at me. “Annette, cut it out. Don’t start that stuff up again.”
I can see the familiar look of irritation come over his face – see but don’t see it because I’m so big with fear.
“Stop it,” he says. “You’re almost nine. You can’t be scared of a stupid noise.” But I can’t do anything but feel this sound come into me: something bad.
“I’ll show you, Annette. I’ll show you there’s nothing to be scared of.” He sets his hands on my shoulders. “You can’t be scared like this, understand?” Takes my hand. “C’mon. You come with me.”
He’s pulling me along the sidewalk by the hand. I can’t see anything except my hand in his, breath a bubble in the mouth that keeps me from saying anything. The sound is coming closer, or we’re coming closer to the sound, and I feel it pulling my chest tight.
“Annette, look up, will you? Just look up? See? See?” The sound has stopped. “Annette.”
Ben’s got me by the hand I can’t get away can’t do anything but what he tells me to do. I can’t remember what I want. He’s standing in front of me, looking into me so that I have to look at him, feel myself pulled out of my fear.
“Look up. Stop listening and look.”
He steps aside.
The sound stops inside me. I see an old man in a worn grey suit jacket, a navy turtleneck sweater under the jacket, the wheel for sharpening beside him, unmoving, the tarnished brass bell in his hand, silent, its grey wooden handle. Blue eyes looking at me without any malice, without any interest. He has no question for me, expects nothing from me, has nothing to say. Wants nothing. He turns away, walks on down the sidewalk and the sound begins. Outside me.
Ben takes my hand again. I’m shaking. “Let’s go home,” he says.
I can feel the sound outside me, far away, having nothing to do with me. Just an old man who wanted nothing. I looked him in the face.
How many times did Ben try to rescue me from myself? One day he took me down Main Street to Pollock’s Hardware, past the little Ukrainian church, the one set back a bit from Main Street that’s decorated with squat little swirly shaped towers – upside-down tops or right-side-up soft ice cream cones, onion domes. He’d worked all week clearing out the basement of Zalinsky’s store and the dollar folded in his pocket was to buy me a birthday present, two days late. Pollock’s smelled of sawdust and machine oil. It had shelves and shelves of cardboard boxes of nails and screws and loops and claws of black or grey metal that men in overalls pawed with grease-blackened hands. Girls didn’t belong there, but Ben put something cool and oblong in my hand: a penknife, my very own penknife. Folded closed, it fit just right in my hand. All the way home I held it, ran my thumb along the flat, narrow edge. I had something dangerous: a weapon, a tool.
I had it for years, had comfort from it whenever it was in my hand. Ben’s gift. Neither of us fortune tellers – we couldn’t have known that nothing he could give me could carry me through what was to come. But that’s not true. Haven’t I always told myself that the self-pity of the old who have in fact survived their lives doesn’t wash? I was carried through. And it was Ben’s gifts, all of them, along with the others,’ that kept me alive.
The Knife Sharpener's Bell Page 5