The Knife Sharpener's Bell

by Rhea Tregebov

“Are you sure?” Raisa’s voice is sharp. “It isn’t just another rumour?”

  “I heard on a street loudspeaker. It’s official. On October 16, the Red Army, the Navy, withdrew. The Romanian army just walked in.”

  “The Navy withdrew? They withdrew?”

  “Without a fight. Comrade Stalin ordered the withdrawal.” He’s crying still, the tears running down his face.

  “It’s not true,” I say. “Comrade Stalin wouldn’t let them go without even putting up a fight.”

  “I’m sorry, Annette. Raisa – ”

  “What is it?”

  “Raisa, Annette can help us.” He looks up at me, his eyes searching mine as though he will find in them something incalculably precious he has lost. He doesn’t seem to notice the handkerchief Raisa is offering him.

  “She can help us what, Pavel? Please, try to calm yourself. I’ll get you a small glass of brandy.” She turns quickly, goes to the cupboard.

  Pavel looks up. “We have to pack our bags.”

  “Our bags?” I ask.

  “We have to pack our bags.” But he sits on the bed, only his long tapered fingers moving, fidgeting with the bedspread.

  “Why, Pavel?” It doesn’t make any sense – Raisa has always refused even to contemplate being evacuated . . .

  “We have to go there. To Odessa. We have to find them.”

  “Pavel . . . Uncle Pavel . . .”

  “Your mother, your father.” His voice is so low I can barely hear.

  Raisa’s back, a small tumbler of brandy in her hand.

  “Lev, Manya . . .” The words are dry; he licks his lips. “We have to pack and go to Odessa and save them all.”

  “Save them?” Raisa asks.

  “We have to bring them home.”

  Home. I’m looking down on the top of his head, the thinning blond hair, the thin gold frames of his spectacles. My uncle Pavel. Lost. Gone, vanished into grief. Collapsed, his whole self sagged.

  I sit. Home. Winnipeg. Odessa. Moscow. It doesn’t matter what city I’ve dreamt myself into or what someone else has dreamt for me. “Pavel.” I take his hands. They’re smooth, dry, uncallused. Raisa stands in the doorway. Two grown-ups helpless. I put my hand on his. “Pavel, we’re Jews. There is no home.”

  Then, suddenly, I can’t look at them. I pull my hand away, walk out of the room, away from their helplessness, uselessness. Walk past Vladimir, out of the apartment, down the stairs, into the street. If I don’t stop, if I keep walking, if I can keep my mind at bay, I won’t have to think about Poppa, my mother, what these useless grown-ups have done to me.

  Chapter Six

  Some things elude me, even now as the memories invade. I can’t remember where or how I heard exactly what happened in Odessa. I do remember needing to be alone, seem to remember walking along the river, finding a park whose name I didn’t know. Do I remember brushing aside the snow, sitting on a park bench? Have I invented this memory, transposed it from something else? There was, somewhere, the darkness of early evening in Moscow and the silent branches of a tree. Was it oak, chestnut? That evening, if it was that evening, the streets were crowded with rubble from a recent bombing. How the details came is lost to me, rubble, but I remember that they came in pieces, and more in numbers than words.

  Today I can sit at my desk and turn my laptop on; I can go to a search engine and type in the words “Odessa massacre” and in .32 seconds, 306 hits will display. If I scrolled through them all, would I have the story of Odessa? Would I find my parents’ story? If I read every fact, every eyewitness account, would I know anything more than I know now? Today we collect facts on an invisible network of electronic signals that burn like the neurons of the brain, a network that is both permanent and ephemeral. Point and click. And despite this, who knows about Odessa? The people of Odessa, certainly. But in the larger world, which holds its convenient or inconvenient stories, its myths and legends, truths and facts about that curious marriage of industry and slaughter, the story of what happened in Odessa is muted. “Less known than some other massacres,” to quote my Internet source. The numbers themselves are contested. But let me offer a few.

  October 16. Time staggered that day, got cut up into minutes, days, numbers. On October 16, the Red Navy abandoned Odessa. The Fourth Romanian Army under General Ciuperca assisted by German units occupied the city. Though these forces met no resistance, on the first day of occupation, the German Einsatzkommando 11B, with the help of a division of the Romanian intelligence service, went into the city shooting any civilians they happened upon. It is estimated that 8000 people died like this, mostly Jews. Almost a week later, on October 22, at 17:35 hours, Russian Partisans blew up the Romanian military headquarters. The Romanian commander, 16 officers, 9 non-commissioned officers and public servants, and 35 soldiers were killed. From Bucharest, General Ion Antonescu mandated the quota for reprisals: for every Romanian and German officer who died, 200 Communists were to be killed. For every soldier, 100 were to be executed. At first, the soldiers shot at random. But the next day, the reprisal began in earnest at 12:00.

  So the next number is 12. No, that’s not right; the next number is 23, because it was October 23. The important number is 5000. At 12:00 on October 23,5000 civilians, mostly Jews, were hanged or shot. Five thousand. Even today, I find no refuge in numbers, because to count them right, you’d need to give each number a face. It would take me a lifetime to count to 5000.

  It was easy, on October 23, for the Romanian soldiers to pick out the Jews. The Soviet state had made it simple: it was marked on our identity papers. But the numbers don’t stop at 23. They get bigger. The same day, October 23, in the afternoon, 19,000 unarmed civilians, mostly Jews, were gathered and penned behind a wooden fence in a square near the harbour. They were sprayed with gasoline and set on fire.

  Pick a number. You have 5000, and then you have 19,000. Add 34,000 killed later in October; add 10,000 taken on a death march in November. Add 20,000 transported in cattle wagons to the death camps of Domanevka and Bogdanovka. By the end of February, through fire, bullets, starvation, deportation, they had almost cleaned the city of Jews. Almost.

  Because the figures can’t be exact. Who was hidden by a neighbour, colleague, friend; given new papers, life? Who slipped into the forests? Five thousand; nineteen thousand; thirty-four thousand. The numbers have been rounded off. What I wanted was the right number. Nineteen thousand might have been 18,929; twenty-five thousand might have been 25,034. I wanted more than arithmetic; I wanted mathematical possibility.

  I wanted to take one away.

  And let that one be – Poppa. No, Manya. Momma. Why should Manya die . . . why should my mother?

  Take one away, or take twenty.

  Why not? Take twenty, all of them; put them some place safe. Subtract one living. Then you’re not taking away, you’re adding. One. Any one.

  Though there are places the mind stops, in those long days, the months, of not knowing, I imagined, and I still imagine, my parents in the Odessa apartment just at that moment before things ended and began: Poppa woken from his dream by my mother pulling at his shoulder, telling him she heard shooting, him telling her it was just a dream, that it was nothing – though it wasn’t, it was at their door. I imagine them hearing trucks grunting up and down the street, voices, and then, at a distance, the quiet popping of gunfire. Did they argue about Lev’s plans, how they were all of them, Manya and Lev, Poppa and my mother, my aunts Reva’s and Basya’s families, they were all supposed to go into hiding? Because Lev, as always, had his plans. Did my mother lament that her city, her beautiful city with its wide sunlit streets, its beaches and orchards, her city had been abandoned, given over, without a fight? Did Poppa tell her that there was still time, that Lev’s plan was their best choice, their best, their only chance? Did my mother listen or refuse to listen? Did they hear, as they argued, the burden of something large crashing to the street, the sound of it breaking, scattering across the pavement? The shots becoming constan
t, regular; something falling, crashing, just below their window. Did they hear the voices broken against the walls of buildings, shouts, the barking of dogs? Did Poppa ask her one more time to go with him, to look for Lev, to find where he was hiding? By then was the sound – shouting, crashes – seeping through the closed window, did glass break in the window beside theirs and for that room was there then no barrier from what was going on outside? The street then flooded with sound, motors and trucks and the awful barking of dogs, voices screaming: women’s, children’s. Men’s. Was my mother’s back to Poppa, saying neither go nor stay? Did boots come up the stairs before they could move; were people shouting in German, Romanian? Did someone pound on their door, shouting orders? Or did they, at the last possible moment, leave; did they hide?

  If you don’t dare imagine, or remember, or think, the thing to do is to keep yourself busy, work till you’re numb. There’s a dull ringing in my head; I can’t make it stop. The apartment is freezing. You’d think that would help me stay numb, but it doesn’t. The problem is that I’m standing at the window, doing nothing, watching Moscow bury itself in snow. Busy snowflakes covering everything, making a new, smooth surface on the surfaces out there. Busy wind tormenting the odd, stubborn dry leaf still holding to a tree. It’s just as cold inside as out and I have to get out of this apartment, do something, walk at the very least. I can’t be with anyone, can’t look at anyone. So I put on my coat, leave, though I won’t get away from myself no matter how far I walk. Five o’clock and it’s dark already, the sky gone from blue to purple to black. No wind tonight. I walk until I find, in one of the bomb-damaged buildings they haven’t managed to repair yet, part of a room that’s still intact. My place, my very own three-walled room. There’s an upholstered armchair no one has found and hauled away yet, an oval wooden table beside it, a doily, clogged with plaster dust, still protecting the finish. Lace curtains drift against a window that might have looked out on what – a lilac tree, a cobblestone yard with flowerpots, garbage bins – but now looks out on nothing, on a heap of rubble higher than the ceiling.

  I sit in the chair and close my eyes. Try to trace the outlines of Poppa’s face, my mother’s, but I can’t bring their faces into my mind, can’t bring them to me. I open my eyes.

  Someone’s here. Someone’s here with me in this empty, furnished, broken room.

  A soldier. He’s stepped inside, out of the wind, to light his cigarette. I can smell sulphur, see the flare of the match as he lights it, the outline of the rifle slung over his shoulder. He’s in uniform. A smile, the glint of teeth. He’s seen me. He looks young in the darkness. He smiles, takes a step towards me. I smell the harsh smoke from the cheap cigarette.

  “Hello there, sweetheart – what are you doing here?”

  I stand up.

  He’s just a few feet away, smiling, pulling on the cigarette. “You want a cigarette? Look here.” He flashes something white. “I’ve got a whole package. See? Don’t look so worried. What’s your name, doll?” He stands quietly, pulling on his cigarette, smiling at me.

  But I’m not here. I’m in Odessa, burning. No. Underwater, water like blue air drowning the city. I look him in the face. Take one step, then another. When I’m by him, I start to run. I can hear him laughing behind me. “You don’t have to run so fast, little girl. I’m not chasing you!”

  I’m caged again, back in the apartment, looking out the same window, watching the same snow. Just me and Ben and Pavel home. I need to work. But sometimes even work fails me. Two days ago I was out with the brigade, inside the city this time, clearing rubble, cutting firewood, the steadiness of the work warming me, though it was snowing yesterday too. Two other girls and I were digging to clear around a sewer pipe. One of them stopped, reached into her pocket for a cigarette, struck a match to light it. That bitter, sour smell of sulphur again; it rasped at my nose, throat. Then I looked down at the shovel in my mittened hands, and there I was again: Odessa. The frozen mud at my feet was Odessa soil, and I was digging my mother’s grave. I saw first the coffin, smelt its raw unfinished pine – such a hopeful smell. Then the coffin was replaced by bones – clavicle, ribs, pelvis, femur, the long elegant finger bones of my mother’s hands – white and dry as a Hallowe’en skeleton. And then the bones were covered not by snow but ashes, heavy, sooty, dark. My mother’s hands. I covered my eyes with my own hands not to see it, felt my knees go, felt the scream come up in my throat, some word I spoke but couldn’t understand. And then someone picked me up out of the mud; someone brought me a flask of vodka. I swallowed till I was dizzy. Numb. They sent me home.

  A clattering. Ben’s puttering uncertainly by the hot plate, layered in sweaters, his fur cap on his head, a cigarette jutting from between his lips. I want to slap it from his mouth. Doesn’t he feel anything?

  We don’t know.

  We don’t know whether Poppa and our mother died. They can’t all be dead. So there are moments when I can hope, pretend.

  But it’s no good; it’s not enough. Because even if they were saved – if it wasn’t Poppa, wasn’t my mother or Manya – it was someone else. Someone else with their arms useless to protect their wife, their father, their child.

  You have to try not to think about it, have to let yourself go dead around the hard bits that won’t go away. But too much dead weighs you down.

  “Annette?” Ben’s still clattering about. “Is there any tea left?”

  “I told you there was tea. Raisa saved it for you. Put it in the saucepan and heat it up.” He’s making a lot of noise, then fumbling with a match. “Don’t!” I grab it from his hands.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  I put my hand on his arm. “Just use your cigarette, Ben. Don’t waste a match. We don’t have that many left.”

  “Forget it. I don’t want stale tea.” He stalks into the bedroom he and Vladimir share. He’s rarely home, wrapped up in his People’s Army unit duties. He’s moving away from family and towards something else: his life. His life or his death.

  A minute later he comes back into the kitchen. “Any cheese left?”

  “In the blue dish.”

  He pokes at it. “It’s mouldy.” Flips it into the garbage pail.

  “Ben!” I fish it out, wash it furiously under the tap. “What’s wrong with you? You think we have food to waste? You can still eat it – all you have to do is trim the bad part off.” Damn him, I am not going to cry.

  He looks straight at me, but his eyes are masked; nothing, he’ll give me nothing. “You eat it.” He makes a disgusted face, turns away.

  I grab his arm. “Don’t talk to me like that!”

  “Ben?” Pavel’s taken off his glasses and is rubbing his eyes. He’s hunched, as always, over his research papers. “Ben, have you finished that letter to Joseph you were writing? I just wanted to add a note.”

  “Not yet, Pavel. Is there any point in writing?”

  “I think the mail will be getting back to normal soon . . . Well, then, I wonder if you could run out and get me a copy of today’s Pravda?”

  “I’m going out to meet a friend. I can’t.”

  “I’ll go, Pavel,” I say. I’ll go before I haul off and slug Ben. “I need the air.”

  “Thank you, dear.” The door bangs. Ben’s gone before I am.

  I bundle myself up, head downstairs, fuming. I can’t be bothered to pick my way through the drifts on the sidewalk and before I know it I’ve lost my footing and tumbled into a snowbank. That cools me down some. No one has shovelled the snow; there’s no one to shovel it. The city feels empty, hollowed. Like me. They’ve moved Raisa’s clinic into one of the vacant schools – most of the children have been evacuated. Only a few people are in line at the cinema and there’s no lineup at all at the newspaper kiosk.

  By the time I get back to the apartment building, my mind has gone into neutral. It’s good to get out, even though my hands are going numb with cold.

  A big black car is parked in front of the entry.
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br />   I can hear some sort of racket upstairs, then light steps running down the stairs: it’s Vladimir. The back of his hand is against his mouth, the corner torn and bleeding, his face dark with anger.

  “Vladimir, what is it?”

  “Comrade Polankov . . .”

  “Polankov hit you?”

  “No, no. He was screaming, so I went to help. These big men were hitting him.”

  “Hitting him?”

  “I tried to stop them and one of them slapped me.”

  “He what?” I take the steps two at a time, all my fury returned, walk through the open doorway of Polankov’s apartment. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

  There are three large men in overcoats, fashionable, good quality. They look at me, smile at one another. I don’t care who they are; I hardly know who I am. I’m shaking with rage. Polankov is on the worn davenport, head in his hands, sobbing. I don’t give a damn about Polankov.

  “You go to your own apartment, missy,” one of the men says. “This is none of your business.”

  I close my hands into fists, unclose them. “You slapped my cousin. That’s my business.”

  “Look, missy – nobody meant to hurt the boy. He bit my friend over there, and he got a little smack for it. No harm done. And you tell your little cousin –” the man is inches away from me, “– he shouldn’t be defending enemies of the Revolution.” The sweet smell of candy on his breath.

  NKVD. They must be NKVD. Polankov has done something wrong and the NKVD have come to arrest him.

  The men are so calm, so amused by me. Because they know they can do anything, and I can do nothing. I must be nuts – what’ve I done, barging in here, shouting at NKVD?

  Vladimir’s still in the doorway. “Vladimir,” I say quietly, “listen to the comrade. Go upstairs to your father.” He vanishes.

  Polankov is weeping so dramatically that it’s impossible to feel sorry for him. The arrest documentation is on the table, proof that everything is official, everything has been approved. Proof that the men who are quietly, methodically going through the apartment are just doing their job, guarding the Soviet state from enemies of the people. They’ve beaten Polankov, but he must have been resisting arrest. As long as you cooperate, everything will go smoothly. It’s not their fault Polankov made a fuss, made this unpleasantness necessary . . .