The Knife Sharpener's Bell

by Rhea Tregebov

  “You’re not needed here, missy,” the man says.

  I meet Pavel on the stairs. “Go see to Vladimir,” he says. Then I hear his voice in Polankov’s apartment. “What’s the problem, Comrades?”

  “No problem at all, Comrade,” one of the men says.

  “Pavel Efron, Professor of Agronomy at Moscow University. I live on the third floor.”

  “Your papers, Comrade.”

  I run to our apartment. Vladimir meets me at the door, his hand against the injured mouth. “Where’s Poppa?”

  “Talking with those men.”

  He goes pale.

  “It’s all right, Vladimir. Don’t worry.” We hear the murmur of voices downstairs, Pavel and the men. What if they take him too? What if Pavel doesn’t ever come back up the stairs? What will I do; what will Vladimir do? I pull him to me, hold him against me, feeling something move through me and into him. “Vladimir, it’ll be all right.”

  “Promise?” he says, speaking into my body.

  “Promise, Vladimir. I promise. He’ll be fine.”

  I make the promise knowing I have no right to, that they may take Pavel, bundle him along with Polankov into a Black Raven paddy wagon, and that will be the end. My words do nothing. I can no more stop the men from taking Pavel than I could stop my father’s train, and where it took us all. Than I can keep my parents safe from whatever has taken them in Odessa. We’re specks spun along this current; we count for nothing.

  And yet, that shock of love still moving through me, I promise myself, Vladimir, that, wherever my father is gone to, his will come back. Knowing, certain, that I will, if I have to, put my body between this boy and any harm, will do all the nothing I can do for him.

  “Annette?” It’s as though he can feel what I’m thinking.

  My hand goes to the sore cheek. “This doesn’t look too bad. I’ll put a cold cloth on it.”

  “He’ll come back?”

  “He’s just talking with the men; he’ll be right back.” And it’s true: we can hear voices in the hall, the regular rhythm of conversation, Pavel’s tenor steady against the men’s bass. Maybe this promise will be kept. “See. He’ll be upstairs in just a minute.”

  “Annette, they called Comrade Polankov an enemy of the Revolution.” Vladimir’s mouth is trembling, with indignation now, not fear.

  “I heard.”

  “They said he’d ‘abandoned his duties.’ I guess because he didn’t do anything to stop the looting.”

  “Olga Moiseyevna’s apartment . . .” I dab at his lip with the cloth. He flinches, and tears start in the hazel eyes, the colour almost transparent now. It’ll be all right. We’ll be all right. “Did you really bite one of them?”

  He flushes red, nods.

  “Vladimir – what were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t thinking. I was just mad. Like you when you yelled at them.”

  Neither of us was thinking. How valiant we are when we don’t think. “Mouths heal quickly. It won’t be too bad.” I can hear the convincing calmness of my voice.

  “Annette?” Pavel’s voice calls softly. “Can you come downstairs for a moment?”

  I touch Vladimir’s shoulder, whisper to him that I’ll be right back, believing it. When I get downstairs, Polankov is gone. Pavel is there, composed, talking with the smallest man, who’s shorter than Pavel but twice as broad. His voice sounds even and I feel my jaw unclench, my heartbeat steady.

  “My wife and I will vouch for Polankov. He rushed to the clinic to get my wife when our neighbour was attacked. My wife will verify that.” He’s speaking very quietly, standing very straight.

  “We’ll take that into consideration, Comrade.”

  “Here’s my niece. You wanted to see her papers?”

  The man waves his hand tolerantly, sucks his teeth. “It’s all right, Comrade.”

  “I can come down to your bureau and make my statement as soon as my wife is back from the clinic.”

  “Very well, Comrade.” He looks me up and down. I straighten, try to look at him directly but can’t quite. “You keep an eye on these youngsters.”

  Pavel’s mouth tightens; he nods.

  And the man is gone. Pavel too, gone – to check on Vladimir.

  For the first time I notice the smell of cabbage cooking. A few potatoes have been left half-peeled beside the white enamel pot. The lacey bedspread on the brass bed is rumpled. I turn off the hot plate, close the door carefully behind me.

  I wonder if that winter of 1942 was the worst. Every night had its own nightmare. I would dream about my parents, the delicatessen. I’d be back in Winnipeg, smelling pickle brine, smelling the dust on the tins of fruit, the vinegar my father used to clean the counter. Everything completely real, but backwards, the counter on the wrong side of the room, the stools green instead of red. Sometimes I’d discover the building was on fire, sometimes that I had gone into the backroom to find Poppa, but the backroom wasn’t the backroom any more, there was another room behind it, and yet another room after the second room. Or I’d be trying to lock the front door against something terrible, but the bolt wouldn’t latch, the workings coming apart in my hands.

  I would dream hunger dreams, too: my mother cooking chicken soup. I’d be able to smell the clingy, rich smell of it, a tang of garlic. I could feel the smooth wooden boards of the kitchen floor under my bare feet. My mother would have her back to me, skimming the scum off the top of the soup. She never noticed me, and I knew in every dream that I mustn’t ever disturb her, mustn’t get her upset or – or what? Or she’d pack her bags and go. Home. Home to Odessa. I’d lean my elbows on the table, lean my whole body towards her, but I could only watch as she sorted with her fingers through the chicken bones, pulling the meat away. Her fingers quick, busy but calm, she’d strip off every bit of meat. I was hungry, but not allowed to eat. Her long elegant fingers would pick up the bones, put them in her mouth, cracking them carefully, sucking out the marrow, taking everything good.

  That hungry winter we brewed dried pumpkin peel for tea. Raisa would hunt and hunt and come home from the market with the trophy of an onion. I felt the emptiness, the cold crouching inside me like it had made itself a home in me. It wasn’t just Poppa, my mother. Ben was gone. Not long after the news about Odessa he enlisted. For a day he just vanished, and when he came back, he was in uniform. What could we say? For me he was gone but not gone because he was somewhere; he was at war. I would try to imagine that somewhere, and then stop myself, because what I imagined scared me.

  I comforted myself with writing to him, though I was careful about what I wrote. The letters have their own folder. Of all that didn’t come back to me, they did come back to me, bringing their own news.

  January 23, 1942

  Dear Ben,

  I’m writing to let you know we’re well here. Please don’t worry about us. Since early December, when Germany abandoned the attack, the city has been secure. After all those months of noise – the air-raid sirens and fire engines, the slow screams of bombs and shells, the rumble and grind of truck engines – it seems strangely quiet here. Things are getting back to normal. The civilians who were evacuated are slowly coming home, the bureaucrats too.

  I worry about you all the time. The newspapers are reporting such terrible losses, so many dead.

  We have our own small battles. Winter has been hard. We’re short of oil, coal for heating, for cooking. Clothes, shoes, tobacco, matches, eggs. No gasoline for civilian cars, so horse-drawn sleds are back in the streets. Pots, pans, chinaware, hairpins, combs, brushes, soap, razor blades – they’re all but impossible to find. No toys. No boots, no overshoes for sale. You see people patching their shoes on the curb so they’ll hold together for the walk home. Don’t think we’ve given up, though. The opera and the ballet are still on, the ballerinas performing Swan Lake by night and cutting firewood by day. We all cut wood, loading it onto trucks or trains and then delivering it all through Moscow, stacking it roof high in the city’s squ
ares.

  And of course, now that the Americans are in the war, everyone is more hopeful.

  Since you enlisted I’ve gotten two of your letters. They take months to get to me. Please write more often. And write more. You tell me what you’re eating, what you’re reading – those war thrillers sound pretty dumb, but I’m glad you’ve got your hands on the Pushkin – but you don’t say anything about how you are.

  I’ve started helping Raisa at the clinic. The workload’s too much for her. The clinic is to serve civilian war workers, but it’s very hard for Raisa to turn anyone away. It’s tough finding the most basic supplies: Aspirin, bandages, adhesive tape.

  And then we’re still doing the paperwork for this business with Polankov. Pavel and Raisa have to file affidavits, give statements, all in defense of that horrible little man. The thing is, we heard that after the looting house managers – “lickspittle remnants of the defeated classes,” according to the newspapers – were being shot to restore public order.

  At least his wife makes it seem worthwhile. “We’re so obliged,” she keeps saying, “so obliged.” She’s broken-hearted that she can’t make us one of her famous apple cakes – but butter, sugar, eggs, where would you find them now? There are hungry faces all over the city, people with their clothes hanging off them. At the brigades, people work as if they were under water. They’re so ground down by the shortage of food they can barely lift a shovel.

  Just writing about food makes my mouth water. But don’t worry. We’re having bread and cheese and soup for dinner. Raisa makes sure there’s always something. And because there are three of us working now, since I started helping most days at the clinic, our ration allowance is good.

  I do have Raisa and Pavel, and Vladimir. We all look at Vladimir and thank our lucky stars he’s still a kid. Those stories in the papers about mothers giving up their sons gladly – I don’t buy it. Who could be glad?

  Yesterday Raisa told me more of the story about why they named Vladimir after Lenin. She was pregnant with him in 1932, just eight years after Lenin’s death, in the middle of the first Five Year Plan. She was on a trolley listening to two women grumble, the usual complaints about the food shortages, the lineups, all the hard times of those early years. And then – a minute later – they were talking about their factories’ goals for the Five Year Plan, the figures, strategies. There was such determination in their faces, she said, such optimism that the sacrifices that they were making would bring better times for their children . . .

  That’s what made her want to name him after Lenin. The Revolution was young then, fifteen years old. In those days, she said, they were all living in, for, the future. All that sacrifice was going to pay off. I’ll write down the lines from this Mayakovsky poem that she recited – she still remembered it:

  Later

  we will drink

  all the juices of the earth,

  tilting the world

  like a cup.

  I know you’re not big on poetry, but isn’t it beautiful? And it makes me sad. All that sacrifice. And now more. It helps me understand why you had to sign up. It’s not that I’m glad. But I understand.

  Write soon.

  Love,

  Annette

  That long winter, it seemed we’d never see another season. But winter leaked into spring, and Pavel found full-time work for me at the Mostorg, one of Moscow’s biggest department stores. By the spring of 1942, the Mostorg was five floors of mostly bare counters, because every button factory was putting out bullets, so customers had to fight over the little merchandise that was left to sell. My days were filled with typing and filing. At the end of the day I’d look up and there’d be a stack of papers beside me that meant I’d been useful. Like the brigade work, it made me feel real, kept me from thinking. How many decades now have I used work as an anesthetic?

  After a couple of months, I started interpreting for customers, snooty American women mostly. Whenever I heard the loudspeakers talk about how we were fighting “shoulderto-shoulder” with the Americans, all I could think of was the padded jackets of those society ladies. After so many years of making sure I never let a word of English slip in public, I was being asked to translate. And then they seconded me into a job translating Lend-Lease purchase orders and invoices. So I paid out my days moving from English to Russian and Russian to English, my old life seeping into the new. Beside the little plaster bust of Lenin on my desk, I had a vintage English typewriter from the days when the Mostorg was Muir and Merrilees, back before the Revolution. The e on it was broken, I remember, the tail of the bottom curve missing. Poor old e, the most common letter in English, the proletarian vowel – it’d been worn out with work. There were other relics too, bone-china teacups, saucers. It’s strange, what lasts, the past surviving inside certain stubborn objects, certain stubborn heads. You find pools of the past in the present, currents of the future. After the Revolution, people were so sure they could sweep the old away – tearing down buildings, churches; renaming the streets. But within people’s heads, within china teacups so thin the light came through, the past persisted. While out there, in the world, in time, things stopped, ended. People still called it Muir and Merrilees. Some of the customers must have still remembered those times. Those who, like Joseph, had been kids during the Revolution were only in their thirties during the war, young. Now and again I’d find myself imagining Joseph as a little boy in the store with Poppa or his mother. But of course they’d never been to Moscow.

  Sometimes it felt as though I lived from one of Joseph’s letters to the next, that taste of home, the knowledge that at least one part of my family was safe. He didn’t write long letters, but he wrote often, sent us pictures of Nathan, a dark, sweet-eyed boy. Everything changed once the war began, so business was good for Joseph. He kept busy repairing radios. People were glued to their radios for war news. And he was selling plenty of new ones too, though the government was threatening to stop civilian production. To Joseph’s tender, hasty letters, Daisy would add a note, a funny little sentence or two about her spindly Victory Garden or the lopsided socks she tried knitting for the troops. Even Nathan would add a scrawled little drawing in crayon.

  Beyond the letters from Joseph, I think it was Vladimir who kept us all – me, Raisa, Pavel – able to hope in those months, as we ploughed through long days of work, Raisa at the clinic, Pavel back at the university. As we waited for word from Ben, thought and didn’t think about what had happened in Odessa. Every time I looked at Vladimir it seemed he’d grown. He had those knobs of elbows, long fingers, broad palms; an elongated creature. On one of those endless July days, he dragged me to the Park of Culture and Rest, Gorky Park, to see an exhibit of captured German equipment: parachutes and uniforms and shoes. They even had downed planes. The Germans put cutters on the front wings of the planes to slice into the metal cables that held the barrage balloons to the ground, those huge lolling inflatables that were set up to protect us from low-flying planes. Vladimir was eager to get close enough to see the planes, even though they were scarcely more than wrecks.

  We walked out into our sunlight and waited for a trolley to the park. Even though we were the only ones getting on the trolley, I had to follow Vladimir to the back because the rule was that only pregnant women were allowed to get on at the front. It offended Vladimir’s sense of fairness ever to bend the rules. There were, in fact, two pregnant women seated at the front, the worn flowers on their cotton dresses stretched tight, distorted, over their bellies. War or no war, women still got pregnant. Vladimir, in the meantime, was chattering on about the People’s Army squad he’d seen pulling an enormous barrage balloon across the square like a pet whale on a leash. Then he was on to one of the fantastical but accurate stories he loved to collect. This time it was spiders: the British used spiders’ silk for the crosshairs on gunsights. They’d found that the common British spider had the strongest silk. But even spider silk wasn’t fine enough, so each strand was sliced in half with a razor bl
ade. And then they let the spiders go, not wanting to hurt them, because these patriotic spiders were helping the war effort.

  When we got to the park, the sun beat down on my head, burned into the skin of my forearms. We walked under the tall cool shade of the chestnuts, their candelabra blossoms long gone. Along the path were families picnicking, blankets and tablecloths spread out on the grass, and suddenly I was crowded again with the absences I could never fend off, no matter how busy I kept myself: Poppa and Momma, Manya and Lev. Ben, who was somewhere fighting. Ben, who had told me over and over again that it was foolish to hope. And though hope was useless, I couldn’t stop.

  Vladimir and I went down into a stream bed. The path was overgrown and still damp with rain from the day before. By the edge of the path we found patches of tiny wild strawberries. I popped a few in my mouth, despite Vladimir’s cautions about cobwebs, bird spit, beetle footprints. Down an even smaller path right along the edge of the stream we found a clump of tiny blue flowers: forget-me-nots. They should have been blooming in May, not July: spring flowers in the middle of summer. The wind shifted a branch and we were outlined in sunlight, then the light shifted again into shadow. It was as if, in that spot, it was still spring, while all around us was summer.

  Place is time. How can that be? But it is. Somewhere else there was peace, while in Moscow there was war. Just as now, in this city, we are at peace while all around – Israel, Chechnya, Afghanistan – there is war. In that moment in the shade beside that stream, all I wanted was not to be where I was. I wanted my father never to have brought us to Russia. I wanted never to have left Winnipeg, because if we hadn’t left, we might have all been together on that hot day of summer. I wanted it never to have happened. I wanted us never to have come.