The Knife Sharpener's Bell

by Rhea Tregebov

  A whole crowd of us waited for Poppa’s train – a hero’s welcome, thirty people on the platform – but I wanted him the most. When he stepped down everybody shouted, everybody ran to him, my mother standing at the back, smiling. And then Poppa turned to me and picked me up. Make a wish. I put my nose into his jacket; he smelled different, distant. Poppa, I said, you need to smoke your pipe. He smiled into my face, not listening, and pulled me tighter to him. You see, Monkey? I told you I’d be home before you knew it. We bundled into the streetcar, got off at the Liberty Temple where the banquet table was set and the farm girl who helped at the delicatessen was bustling around, smiling, humming to herself. After we ate, Poppa gave his speech.

  While I’d been waiting in Winnipeg, my father had waited in Moscow. After more than a month of paperwork, red tape, of waiting rooms, bureaucrats behind barred wick-ets, he finally got his appointment with Immigration. He’d stood in the high-ceilinged room and explained to the man behind the desk – a young man, younger than my father, his suit pressed, a good dark wool. My father had explained it all to the young man, but it wasn’t easy. They don’t let just anybody into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. My father had to talk the man into it; he had to explain. How capitalism was crumbling here, how the workers had been betrayed. About the strikes of the employed, the riots of the unemployed, the anarchy of capitalism, the corruption of government, of lives. I’m forty-nine years old, he told the man, and my own hopes are rotting. A planned economy, it was the only rational approach. Look at what had been accomplished in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: the Five Year Plan, the granaries full . . .

  At first the man said nothing. My father thought it was all over, that he’d be refused. So he took out pictures of us, set them on the desk. Still the man said nothing. What is to be done? Comrade. Comrade, the man said, this will not be easy, arranging the repatriation papers. But my father wouldn’t give up. Again he explained. It wasn’t just him; there were so many back home who felt the way he did, who looked towards the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for hope, who wanted only the chance to help give birth to some sort of a better world where the workers of the world could find a decent life for themselves, an honest living. Comrade, the man said, do you not think that your first duty is to go home and make the Revolution in Canada? The man handed back the photographs. We need workers for the Revolution throughout the world, he said. You should go back to your family. Go home.

  But my father would not take no for an answer. No. He’d made his wish. And he would give my mother hers. He would at last make her happy, take her back to her family, her city. Had either of them ever really felt that Winnipeg was home? Coming back to Russia made sense in every way. It seemed to be the only thing that made sense. He had come to Canada at a loss, had come because he was so unhappy. He’d come to a place where he thought an ordinary man could make an honest living for his family. And they’d worked so hard to make a life here. They’d lived through the 1919 General Strike, when innocent men were shot dead in the street. All that work, all that belief, and then they had to watch that hard-earned life eaten up by hard times. Hard times. It wasn’t hard times; it wasn’t an act of nature! It was a government that didn’t care about ordinary people, didn’t give a damn about the workers. Finally my father told the man this, told him about William Spratt, about a fine man, a life thrown away because the government didn’t give a damn . . .

  He talked until there was no more to say, until the man behind the desk stopped offering other possibilities. Very well then, Comrade, the man said. I’ll see what I can do.

  So my father went back to Odessa, to wait again. Two weeks he waited, dreaming every night of family, Anne, Ben and me, Joseph; dreaming his mother’s ghost, brown braids like a crown. In daylight, the Odessa faces crowded round him too, alive, wishing: Manya, the sister who stole my mother’s boyfriend, Lev; my mother’s two older sisters, Basya and Reva, and their families. Evenings they waited, the whole family around the table, all his favourite food, the lace tablecloth pressed, the samovar steaming hot, polished. Lev, a middle-aged man now, though handsome still, tall, took photographs of all of them. If we weren’t allowed back, at least my mother would have photographs.

  Sixteen days after his meeting in Moscow, a thick envelope arrived at the house in Odessa. My father opened it, his hands steady. Yes or no, he was ready. Yes. He closed his eyes, held his hands clasped in front of his face as though in prayer. Yes. Our repatriation papers were all in order: permission had been granted. He opened his eyes, ran into the front room to tell the Odessa family, my mother’s family, the good news. We were going home. He could tell them he was at last bringing my mother home.

  Home. In the Liberty Temple, everyone sighed. And my father told us what home was like: how everybody in the Soviet Union talked about the Five Year Plan, how every person felt that they had something to contribute to make the country better, how ordinary citizens in the Soviet Union knew that they could make a difference. Here’s how it was: if the people living in an apartment building wanted to make a daycare centre in the building, or a reading room, what they did was call a meeting and talk it over. They worked together to make things happen – they didn’t have to go begging to a landlord. And he told us about the beautiful apartment that Lev and Manya had in Odessa, and Lev had a very important job for the government. Things were good for them. Lev would be able to help us out.

  But the thing that everybody was most interested in was when Poppa told us about how good a place the Soviet Union was for the Jews. It wasn’t just that they had laws against the anti-Semites, he said, it was that the laws were being enforced. One of Reva’s friends – Avram said the woman was from a very well-heeled Jewish family – told him a funny story: she and her husband had to go down to the police station to fetch their nanny, an old woman who had worked for them since before the Revolution. Why was the old woman arrested? For saying it was the Jews’ fault that the lines at the grocery stores were so long! The Jews’ fault. Three words and this harmless old woman had to sit for four hours in jail. That’s how serious they were about the law, about justice for all the peoples of the Soviet Union.

  And that wasn’t all, my father said. They were very serious also about building a Jewish proletarian culture. They meant business. Lev had told him that in the Soviet Union in 1932 they’d sold more than two million books in Yiddish. And there was a Jewish State Theatre that did plays in Yiddish, and there were public schools for children where they taught in Yiddish, and magazines that published in Yiddish. And then my father told us about how much progress was being made in Birobidzhan, the special home-land that the Soviet government had set up for the Jews seven years ago. Basya gave him an article to read about the Jewish communal farms, about how they were turning rag men and tinkers into farmers, how they were making a gan eyden, a paradise, on earth! That’s when everybody clapped and clapped. Then we gave Poppa the surprise: I stood up in the middle of the room and sang “The Internationale” in Russian. Such a beautiful voice, the ladies said.

  And now we’re home and the excitement’s over. My mother’s already in her bed, reading the Vestnik like she always does, her gold spectacles on her nose. Poppa’s tucked me in (I wanted him the most) and turned out all the lights. But I’m not asleep. I’m listening for Poppa’s voice.

  “I talked myself hoarse,” Poppa says.

  “Should I make you some tea with honey in it? I have raspberry preserves.”

  “Never mind,” he says. “You’re in bed already; don’t get up. Anya, I didn’t tell you. There was a problem when I was leaving, at the border.”

  “What kind of a problem?” I hear the rustle of the newspaper as she sets it down.

  “It’s nothing really. Nothing. But, you know you wanted me to have photographs taken of the family in Odessa? Lev has his own camera and he took such nice ones, Manya and Lev, Basya and Reva – the whole family around the samovar. Well, when I went through Customs, the Soviet auth
orities confiscated the film.”

  “What for? What do they want with pictures of my family?”

  He sighs. “It doesn’t make any sense. But I had to oblige them . . .”

  “You let them take my photographs?”

  “Anya, they must have a reason. They promised the film would be sent on to us as soon as it has been cleared.”

  “Cleared? Cleared of what?”

  “I don’t know, Anya. But don’t worry. It’s nothing.”

  It’s nothing, Poppa says, and I hear the there-there in his voice, and then my mother’s voice again, angry, and then less angry, and finally calm, because Poppa’s spread his there-there over the room till everything’s smooth, everything’s good. Their voices go on into the night, and I keep listening, even in my dreams. I dream I’m on the shifting deck of a boat and I can still hear their voices talking about the new life we’re going to have, and I think I can even hear Joseph’s voice reading poetry, o brave new world, though his voice is sad, and then Poppa and my mother’s again, talking about the good days and hours and Poppa always with me now, what I want, Poppa and me, so that nobody will ever take him away again.

  What did I want? To be with my father. What did my father want? The future he thought he’d procured for his family when he first left Simferopol. When he left Joseph, his first-born. And now Joseph fought to keep us from leaving. He and my father talked spirals around each other. The talk, the arguments, stopped the day Joseph put his hand on my father’s arm and asked him to leave us with him, me and Ben. Joseph and Daisy would take care of us. If not Ben, then just me. I had been hiding on the back stairs, listening, and my breath stopped inside my chest. My father told Joseph he had to be crazy to think that he would ever leave one of his children behind. And then Joseph just looked at him, and my father covered his face. I wanted Poppa to apologize, to tell Joseph how much it had pained him to leave when he was hardly more than a baby, how terrible it had been for Joseph when his mother was sick and he had to go into the streets looking for food. Would my father have said something if my mother hadn’t walked in just then? But she did, and Joseph walked out. I thought I’d never see him again.

  But he came to the station to say goodbye. Everyone came, all the comrades, friends. I tipped my head back to look up, and so much space opened above my head. Anything could happen in that kind of space. And then I looked down, and there he was, Joseph, bundled so I hardly knew the shape of him. He looked at Ben and Ben looked at him, and then he picked me up and hugged me just before I got on the train. And it was as if my breath stopped again inside my chest, and I couldn’t say anything and neither could he.

  I know what Joseph wanted, what he would have said if he’d said anything. I know what he wished: don’t go. But we didn’t know what to say. Everyone was talking around us. Everyone was doing something. It was just Joseph and I who stood here, not knowing what to say or do. And then I was on the train, with Poppa and my mother and Ben, and it shuddered in the track and slowly dragged itself away, leaving everything behind. You’ll see, Poppa said, things will be different. I didn’t want things to be different. Everything will be good, he said. Things were good before. The train took us east, and then the ship took us further east, skimming along the surface of the earth as it turned away from us, whether I wanted it to or not. And I was transported, carried along on the current Poppa and my mother made for me, pulled by what they wanted. I wanted to go home.

  Chapter Two

  When I lived there, I never thought Winnipeg, didn’t think I lived anywhere. But in Odessa, I found myself lost in someone else’s country: felt scooped out, a space opening inside me. Nothing was right in my mother’s country. The egg yolks were the wrong colour and the milk tasted wrong; things smelled wrong, looked wrong. Even winter wasn’t really winter; the snow came and went. My uncle Lev was indeed a miracle worker. Through his connections, he had found us a good apartment, two spacious rooms with broad windows. But I missed Selkirk Avenue, where everybody knew everybody. I missed Joseph; I missed the store. I missed the movies every Saturday – the movies in Odessa were boring. Everything was boring and wrong. Nothing was right in my mother’s country, not even the words in my mouth. I told you not to speak English, my mother said.

  I won’t wear the bow. We’re in the new apartment, and my mother has spent ten minutes perfecting the angle of the white satin bow against my curls. I won’t wear it. I’ve smiled and said hello, met the aunts and the uncles, the cousins and second cousins. But I won’t wear the bow. I don’t want to. I look ridiculous – girls in Canada don’t wear things like that when they’re almost ten.

  “You’re not in Canada,” my mother says. “You’re in my country.”

  I don’t want to live in my mother’s country. My hand goes to my head; I pull the bow off. It crumples in my fist and I feel the twist of anger inside me. Then I throw it, crushed, to the floor – the waste, the ruin of it – not caring what my mother will say, not caring what happens.

  She takes a step back. “Where do you get such a temper?” Picks up the bow, straightens it. “Ten minutes I spent fixing it for you. Go. Be stubborn. Go to school already. You’ll be late.” I pick up my satchel and go.

  In the new country, everything betrayed me, even the alphabet. I spoke just fine; I’d been speaking Russian since I was a baby, but the Cyrillic stumped me. I’d seen my mother’s newspapers, the letters to and from the old country, but they made little more sense than the Hebrew characters of the Yiddish dailies my father read. My mother hadn’t had the time to teach me before we left for her country. The characters were bewilderingly like and unlike English. A for example was still a. I was safe with a. And t was t; o was o. But h was n and p was r. Why? And then there was the backwards r, how wrong it was. My teacher, Comrade Ivanova, explained that the backwards r was a vowel: the “ya” sound. What was I to do with a letter for a sound that didn’t need it? It was impossible. I’d gotten straight A’s at Aberdeen School, but in Odessa I didn’t even know how to read. I thought I’d get the strap, but the first day of school Comrade Ivanova had taken me to the front of the class and explained that, although in capitalist states teachers used corporal punishment to discipline students, in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, it was against Soviet law to punish children in such a cruel fashion.

  They did their best with me. And I did my best, determined that Poppa wouldn’t be ashamed of my bad marks. Raya, the Young Pioneer leader, assured me that it was easier to learn Russian than English, English being such an illogical language. She would stay late with me in the Young Pioneer room. The children had hung red banners in the corner with its little framed photograph of Lenin. Raya had the bluest eyes, kind eyes, and short curly hair so blonde it looked gold in the sunshine. She assured me also that in the Soviet Union they were liquidating illiteracy –. It was a hard word, liquidate, but I knew what it meant – liquids, solids. Liquidating illiteracy was a good thing, even though it sounded bad, turning something that had its own shape into something that fit into a container.

  Raya told me I would be able to join a Young Pioneer troop as soon as my marks improved. There were all sorts of clubs and activities, summer camp too. As I struggled with my new penmanship, Raya pulled her chair closer, brushed my hair out of my eyes. She told me that she understood that it was hard at first, coming to a new country. But wasn’t it good to have to think about things? To know that things could change, that they could be very different from one country to another? In the Soviet Union, they were building a new world full of changes.

  No. It wasn’t good. I didn’t like to have to think about things. I wanted everything to stay the same. I wanted to be with Joseph. I wanted to twirl around on a stool in the delicatessen, to see Poppa’s apron hanging on its peg. I wanted to run upstairs and show Mr. Spratt my report card, all A’s.

  When Raya asked me to bring my mother in to speak to the teacher about getting more help with my homework, I lied, told her it was my father who came
for meetings because he worked closer to the school. I wanted Poppa, not my mother. I told her Poppa had just started work at the Centrosoyuz – at least that was the truth. Poppa would come; he’d make it better.

  On Poppa and my mother’s free day – they got the whole day off – we’d take the trolley to Manya and Lev’s. The streetcars were never as crowded in Winnipeg. We’re jammed in like herrings in a barrel, Poppa would say. My mother would get into an argument if someone bumped into her or poked her with their bag, and then Poppa would have to calm things down. Sometimes the whole trolley would get into the discussion – in Odessa everything was everybody’s business. Poppa and my mother would talk about their work, about how happy they were to be workers, not bosses. It was good to have someone else the boss. What was even better was that they were working only five days a week, seven hours a day – if you could call that work, sitting in an office all day, Poppa said. He was a buyer, a manager at Centrosoyuz, a showplace department store. It was a step up for him, that was for sure. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics a person could do anything. My mother had a job she liked as well, at a nice, smaller-sized store. It was the meetings she didn’t like. They had meetings, all the time, where everybody was supposed to criticize everybody else. A waste of time, people making a fuss over little things that could have been talked about over a glass of tea. Not that any of this could have happened in the old Russia, not for Jews. Nor in Winnipeg either – were they hiring Jews as managers at Timothy Eaton’s department store? In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, anti-Semitism was against the law. No such law in Canada. And child beating, wife beating; they were all against the law too. Because such things were uncultured, as they said. Dark, from the old days of the tsar. All the old darkness was gone.