The Knife Sharpener's Bell

by Rhea Tregebov

  That was why we were there: to live in a bright new world. My mother talked about our Uncle Pavel and Auntie Raisa, relatives in Moscow who had helped Poppa sort out the red tape when he first came to get permission for us to immigrate. Pavel and Raisa couldn’t have been nicer to him when he was in Moscow; they’d helped out with all sorts of things. Under the tsar, Pavel and Raisa could never even have enrolled in university. And here Pavel was a full professor, of agronomy, at Moscow University, Raisa a medical doctor, a researcher. That was why they’d named their little boy Vladimir, after Lenin.

  That was how they talked; that was what they believed, my parents, at least in those first weeks and months. To judge by Lev and Manya’s apartment, my father had brought us to heaven on earth: four sunny rooms, high ceilings, big windows. In the twenties, under the NEP – Lenin’s New Economic Plan – Lev had owned a few trucks, a small shipping business. He had a billiard hall too. Manya had sent us photographs – mahogany tables, stained-glass fixtures – beautiful. A NEPman, my mother said, a wheeler-dealer. Dirty money: he made it all in the black market. But my father told her that wasn’t fair; it was all legal then. NEPman wasn’t a dirty word then. Well, when Comrade Stalin threw out the New Economic Plan, my mother said, Lev was smart enough to know which way the wind was blowing. By 1931 he was a Party member – that was what landed him a job in Public Works. And it was a good thing for us he did, my father said, because that was how Lev could find us such a nice apartment so fast. Lev was the one who had pulled strings to get my father his job at Centrosoyuz.

  What they couldn’t stop talking about was how every single person in the Soviet Union had work. People back home wouldn’t even be able to imagine it. People want to work. How can you respect yourself when you’re out of work? Think of poor Spratt. But if it hadn’t been for Manya and Lev, things wouldn’t have been as easy for us. Whenever my father tried to thank them for all the help, Manya would just shake her head, wave her hand as if to clear the air of thank-yous. Manya and Lev didn’t have any children. Barren, my mother said; Manya’s completely barren. Just take one look at her. And it was true: Manya didn’t look like anybody’s mother, in her slim, neat dresses, her curly hair dark, no grey in it. I can’t remember my mother with dark hair.

  Whatever she thought, my mother said. But what did my father think? Was there any unease about the choice he’d made for us? He must have worried about Ben and me. He knew Ben’s struggles learning Russian. At the Centrosoyuz, Avram had the “Western expertise” that in 1936 they still valued. Only weeks after he started working, there was talk of a bonus at the end of the year, of nominating Avram as a “shock-worker,” someone who’d made a special contribution to the team, because he’d made some suggestions for administrative improvements that they were able to apply. Everybody seemed to want more efficiency, a less backward economy. All those years he and my mother were their own bosses – what really bossed them around was business: one day up, another day down. They could never count on anything. In Odessa, they had steady work, regular salaries. They were better off already. That’s what he told my aunt Manya, as Manya fussed over him, brewing him glasses of tea, slicing extravagant cakes. There was construction everywhere in Odessa – the new Five Year Plan – and Uncle Lev was busy with all of it. The air was full of promises, full of the future. Could anything have been more different from Winnipeg?

  But there was one thing, just a minor worry, that he couldn’t hide his annoyance at: the bureaucracy. The country seemed knotted in red tape. It had taken my father forever to sort out the family’s papers: residency permits, internal identification papers. What bothered him most, a knot he couldn’t swallow, was that the identification papers had Jew as our nationality. Why should people still think that way? He hadn’t been in synagogue since his father’s funeral. He’d had enough of that mumbo-jumbo when he was a child. And then to see that here, in the homeland for workers, they marked down Jew. . .

  Take care of your cousin Vladimir, they say. Vladimir and Auntie Raisa and Uncle Pavel – I never even heard about them in Winnipeg – are visiting from Moscow, so all the cousins are at our house. Pavel is Reva’s husband’s sister’s son. Reva is my mother’s oldest sister, so Pavel is fifteen years younger than Poppa. I’m to call Pavel and Raisa “auntie” and “uncle” when they aren’t really my aunt and uncle. They’re not blood relations at all – they’re cousin’s cousins. And I’m stuck inside looking after Vladimir because it’s too cold for us to play outside. Ben and the other boys can play outside, but not us.

  “Such important people, Pavel and Raisa,” my mother says. “Be nice to them. They’ve been very good to us. Important people: a professor, a doctor. You see? In my country you can do anything – it doesn’t matter if you’re a Jew.”

  I don’t care. And I don’t care about the Five Year Plan either, whatever it is, the adults blabbing on about it non-stop when they’re not gossiping about each other. Auntie Basya and my mother can never get along. As soon as Basya leaves the room, before she even leaves the room, my mother’s talking about her. Backstabbing. I chew the juicy English word, thinking in English English English. At least my mother can’t come inside my head and pick what language I think in.

  The big boys lumber around the apartment knocking things over and then running off. They’re always bossing me around or running off to play without me. It’s all right for Ben to go with them, but not me. As if I’m a baby. Vladimir’s the stupid baby.

  They want me to look after him, and I will. Sit still, I tell him. And he’s so good, just like Poppa. He sits still while I fix his hair, tie the red satin bow. There! It’s done. He looks ridiculous. Ridiculous. I say it to myself in English, take him to the mirror.

  He looks at himself, the dark bangs cut straight across his forehead, the narrow hazel eyes, green mixed with brown, changeable eyes. He looks at himself and then me. The watery winter light on both of us, showing everything.

  “I’m a girl,” he says. “But I’m not.” And turns to look at me again. “What are we going to do?”

  I walk to the window, run my hand along the polished dark wood of the table, the lace tablecloth Manya crocheted for us. A pretty table, a pretty cloth. I feel the meanness in me, put a hand to my hot cheek. I’m ready to open my mouth, use my mother’s voice, my mother’s words. Wreck everything.

  I look at Vladimir, who looks back at me, patient.

  It’s not fair.

  I walk back, take the bow out of his hair.

  “All right,” I say, my face cooling. “Let’s not play this game.”

  There. It’s over. I can do what I want; I can be mean or fair. I run my hand through his soft hair, sorting it out. “What if I teach you how to read instead?” Raya, the Young Pioneer leader, was right when she said it would be easy to learn the Russian alphabet – it only took me two weeks. Now I don’t need any help, I don’t even think about reading. Spelling’s a snap – it all makes sense.

  I can teach Vladimir a few letters, give him a head start. Kids here don’t go to school till they’re eight.

  “I already know how to read,” he says. “My mother taught me.”

  Raisa and Pavel and Vladimir – they’re a funny family, always so serious, always talking everything out. No one seems to shout in Vladimir’s family.

  I take down the Red Fairy Book, the one in English I brought from Canada. “I’ll read you something new,” I say. I translate as I read, the way I have to translate everything now.

  My mother takes me through her city. “Now this is a city, Annette! Don’t tell me you ever saw anything like this in Winnipeg. It makes me sick even remembering Winnipeg. I don’t know how they ever fooled me into going there . . .

  This is a city. This is what you call a street. I told Basya she should have taken you last week down Deribasovskaya Street, but she never listens to me. I give her a few suggestions on what to do with those girls. She knows nothing about raising girls – her first three were boys – and does she
listen to me? No. She’s full of her own opinions. The girls are spoiled through and through, running around like wild animals. She’s got to teach them how to behave. I’ve never seen such hooligans, not girls.”

  As my mother walks me through her city, I’m walking a different city, with Joseph. He’s taking me to the Palace, where they’re showing a Laurel and Hardy, and a cartoon, and a newsreel, and then we still get to see the feature talkie. Tallulah Bankhead is the star; we both like Tallulah Bankhead. Half a block from the house, we stop and Joseph kneels in the snow and wraps my scarf tighter around my face and then he tucks my mittens just so into the knitted cuffs of my coat. There, that’s better.

  “Such an ugly city, Winnipeg,” my mother says, and we’re walking down Deribasovskaya Street. Something in me agrees, though I don’t want to. In Winnipeg, I’d take the long way home from St. John’s Library at Salter and Machray, the wind sneaking up the sleeves of my coat. Church Avenue and Anderson Avenue, St. John’s and then Mountain, College, Boyd, Redwood, Aberdeen. I’d look at the fronts of the buildings, wanting something. Most of the houses were of wood siding with little peaked roofs. But how the doors went with the windows, where the trees stood in the yards: it was wrong. There was always something missing. The only building I liked was the little ice-cream-cone-turreted Ukrainian church, a building with a sense of humour. It wasn’t solemn and straight like other churches. But even it looked lonely, like it didn’t belong. Nothing belonged, and it hurt, the way the furniture in the rooms in the apartment on Main Street hurt. And my clothes, the way they felt against my skin, the way they looked when I saw myself in the mirror. My own face made me sad, the eyes too big, nose crooked, nothing in the right place. In the picture books at Aberdeen School, the little girls’ faces were right, the houses were right. The windows and doors were where they were supposed to be and trees shaded the houses. Rose bushes climbed up the walls. In Winnipeg I’d never seen a rose, except in a book. Something was wrong, something was missing on Main Street, on Selkirk Avenue, in Winnipeg.

  My mother’s hand pulls me along as we go window-shopping along the wide sidewalks of Deribasovskaya Street, the March sunlight warm, the brown knobs of buds on the trees splitting to a yellowy green. Soon there will be roses in Odessa. The wind is hurrying after dried-up bits of leaves left over from the fall and I’m being pulled along by my mother’s talk, how beautiful Odessa is, how ugly Winnipeg. I don’t want to agree with my mother, not even in my head. But I can’t help remembering the sad buildings of Winnipeg. I turn my mother’s voice down to a hum and look at the buildings: the doors and windows, the curlicues above the windows, the peaks above the doors. And I find a rhythm to them, a sense of being finished, right. Like faces with the features all in the right places. It’s what I want. I stare at the faces of the buildings, trying to memorize them so I can draw them when I get home. Uncle Lev is teaching me to draw in perspective. The fronts are called façades, Poppa says, a French word.

  All the nice words are French, my mother tells me. That’s why they gave me a French name: Annette. Back in Winnipeg, and now in Odessa, when people ask where I got my name, my mother says, I named her after me. It’s a good name, Annette. My auntie Manya, who likes French words too, says it’s an elegant name. Manya herself is elegant, her clothes, the way the fabric lies on her shoulders, the little trim of lace. French lace, French words. Façade.

  My mother talks quickly but her walk is slow. Her legs hurt all the time from when she had to stand fourteen hours a day at the store. We’re at the Arcade, where a glass roof stretches between the buildings on each side of the street. Just like pictures she’s seen of the Galleria in Milan, in Italy, my mother tells me. Italy’s not that far away. Ben might travel there some day, to the cosmopolitan city of Milan, a sophisticated city, elegant. The Arcade is elegant too, as good as any store in Moscow, my mother tells me.

  When I look hard at the shopfronts I can see that my mother’s wrong: they’re not elegant. There are too many curlicues and statues: they’re showing off. The shopfronts aren’t quite right; none of them is just right. My mother tells me we’re not going to buy anything – it’s too expensive. That’s what she says, but it’s clear she likes to look. Most of the clothes in the windows are too fancy too. I’d be embarrassed wearing them. Manya’s clothes are simple. Does Manya sometimes shop here? My mother tells me that an honest worker can’t afford the shops in the Arcade. Manya doesn’t work at all.

  I’m tired of walking, and I’m more tired of listening to my mother talk. She’s scrubbing at my face with a damp handkerchief. Stop slouching and stand straight or people will think you’re uncultured. I yank my face away and she stops. Don’t get yourself into another temper! Whether you’re tired or not, we’re going to see the opera house. I haven’t seen it yet, the famous Odessa Opera House where my mother worked as a cashier, where she looked through her opera glasses at all the ladies far away in their velvet evening cloaks and long white gloves. A different world. And now I’m here. We cross Theatre Square, under the curls of the lampposts. Fancy, but not too fancy: beautiful.

  “Just like Venice,” my mother says.

  “Look,” my mother says.

  And, looking up, at last I see what I want, what’s exactly right: the rows of windows set in half-circles and columns, the entrance with its two-storey porch, though it’s too grand to be a porch, a tower almost. And the curve of the domed roof with a smaller dome on top of it, to finish it off, so that it’s complete. Perfect. That sweet arc. I look and look and some of the sadness in me is taken away. When I get home, I’ll put it down on paper, save it, have it for myself, forever.

  It’s my favourite skirt, plaid with red elastic suspenders. When I put it to my face I can smell Winnipeg: the delicatessen, the stiff smell of laundry puffing like sails on the line in the backyard. “Come here, Annette. Your suspenders are twisted.” Poppa kneels to tug them straight. There’s no hair whatsoever left on the top of his head. With all the blotchy shapes, the bumps, it’s like a map of some country nobody’s discovered yet. He smells different now; he’s using a different tobacco.

  “You’re growing like a weed: last year the skirt is too long and today – look – it’s just right.”

  “Poppa, will you be home late again today?”

  He kisses me on the top of my head. “I’ll try not to, Monkey. Go see how nice you look.”

  In the hall mirror the new white cotton blouse Poppa bought me looks altogether crisp. My mother has brushed my hair and tied a bow at the top. This time I didn’t argue the bow’s a perfect match for the red of the plaid. My winter coat is warmer than I really need for the make-believe Odessa winter. Though it’s a hand-me-down from our next-door neighbour on Main Street, the navy blue wool is hardly worn and the brass buttons down the front shine. My friend Cassie told me it looked brand new. Cassie said she’d write, but I haven’t had a letter from her. I didn’t really believe she’d write, and now I’m not sure she even thinks about me, remembers me, though it’s only been a couple of months. And I’m suddenly frightened that, if she doesn’t remember me, it’s as if I never was, as if we never spent all those hours playing hopscotch or digging in the garden. As if there never had been the smell of cinnamon buns or the wide blue Winnipeg sky open above the triangle of roof of her family’s house.

  But I remember. I remember everything.

  I make a face in the mirror.

  When I go down the stairs, I unbutton my coat, let the breeze lift the collar of my blouse.

  My new friend Elena’s waiting for me in the schoolyard. She’s wearing two striped yellow bows in her hair. They perk up from either side of her head like the ears on a Scottish terrier. Elena has the eager, friendly look of a Scottish terrier: friendly but also calm. Nothing seems to bother her. When Raya asked her to help me with my school work, I thought Elena would make a face, stick her tongue out behind Raya’s back. But she just smiled. Helping me was part of her volunteer “social work.” All the student
s have to volunteer for at least two hours a week. But now I don’t need any help with reading, and it’s me who’s helping Elena with arithmetic. Elena wears her little red Pioneer scarf tied under her collar or around her neck. Once she let me try it on.

  “Luba just told me,” Elena says, “her class is challenging our class to a socialist competition this term!” She’s hopping up and down, balancing from one foot to the other.

  I smile back at her smile. “What’re we supposed to do?”

  “Comrade Ivanova will help us draw up a socialist agreement between the two classes. This is how it goes. There are three points of competition: first, superior discipline during class; second, always being ready for lessons; and third, having the class’s soap and towels always in order. So we elect two representatives from each class and it’s their job to check on the class’s progress. Maybe they’ll elect you! And, best of all,” she’s so excited that the bows are vibrating, “we’re going to draw a big poster to chart the contest: two railway trains, one for each class, racing from Odessa to Moscow. I’m going to draw the engine for our class!” Elena is the best drawer in the class, much better than I am. In Winnipeg I was the best. “We’ll move the engine forward one space for each point we get.”

  “But what do we win?”

  “Well, if our class does well enough, we get a red banner.”

  “Oh.”

  “If all the classes in the school are red-banner classes, then the school has a chance to compete in the district competitions.”

  “Oh.”

  “A red-banner class gets prizes, too, Annette. We get to go to the children’s theatre and the museum.”

  “Oh! That’s great.”

  A tall thin girl wearing glasses comes up to us.

  “Luba, I’m explaining to Annette about the socialist competition.”

  “Don’t you know what a socialist competition is, Annette?” Luba drawls out the words.