The Knife Sharpener's Bell

by Rhea Tregebov

  [Signed] Colonel Yevdokimov

  And then I was taken back to my own little room, the cell that sheltered me and the girl who was growing in me. I don’t remember ever being sick during my pregnancy, though all the women I know tell stories, tales of morning sickness, of eating only crackers, drinking only soda water,the only thing they could keep down. I ate whatever they fed me. Maybe it was she who sustained me, my girl. I know that she steadied me, gave me the strength I needed to carry us both through. I built the months of my pregnancy and incarceration, the months of waiting for birth and for trial, out of hope, out of stubbornness, determined that this child be born, and born well.

  Even inside the machinery of Lefortovo, there were those who still found something human within themselves. An extra blanket appeared on my cot, thick and clean. The prison doctor who checked me over suddenly walked to his desk and handed me an apple. I remember how slowly I ate it, back in my cell; the smallest of bites, to make it last. So I nibbled away the time till my daughter was born, or it nibbled away at me.

  And so the State acknowledged my daughter’s birth. Maybe it’s the light this evening, but these papers seem so bright to me now. I finger the stiff, official paper:

  Birth Certificate dated 10 December, 1951; a female child born to Annette Gershon and Vladimir Efron. Weight: 2.7 kilograms; place of birth: Lefortovo Prison Infirmary, Moscow.

  It was an easy birth. And after she was born I built the nights and days out of her breathing.

  I’m rocking the baby, my back pressed into the spooled ribs of the stiff wooden rocker they’ve given me. The locked room in the infirmary is dark except for a pale light that leaks through the square window in the door. Her small body is limp with sleep, but there’s no telling for how long, because my daughter’s sick again, the fine hair on her forehead damp, her breathing rapid. She was sick and then better, but now she’s sick again. The night nurse won’t listen to me, refuses to call a doctor. The day nurse doesn’t come in until eight. Her touch, the way she’ll tuck the corner of the blanket in around the baby – I can tell that she feels something for us. But until she comes, there’s nothing for me to do but wait and see this child through the night. In the darkness, in the muddy fear filling my body, time seems to slow, as though my own heart were beating slower, as though I were somehow outside the flow of time.

  There’s nothing more to do, but I have to do something. I feel that panic, the animal reflex: fight or flight. Tell me, Vladimir, what happens when you can’t do either?

  I’m holding on. I won’t let go, not of my daughter, not of who I am, what the truth is. I’m no one’s daughter; I’m my mother’s, my father’s. I’m holding on to being stubborn. I haven’t done anything wrong. I won’t give them anything. In daylight, in my right mind, I know I’ve done nothing, that it can’t be that bad. But these nights of sickness, waiting for the fever to break, waiting for trial – they’re the worst. This is when I believe anything might happen.

  Suddenly the baby stirs. I try to soothe her, try somehow to extend my own body to encompass hers, touching, smoothing. Everything, all my life, has come down to this darkened room and her rapid breathing, the heat her small feverish body is generating even in its uneasy sleep.

  She coughs. A charge of adrenaline goes through my body. She coughs again and I feel another surge, my heart jumping. The day nurse told me to count breaths per minute – too fast is bad. But I can barely make out the clock and I can’t remember the number: was it thirty-two, thirty-eight breaths per minute? I’m counting, but I’m counting wrong; it’s too hard.

  Then suddenly there’s a sick, miserable cry – she’s woken wretched. I get out of the rocking chair and walk up and down the small room, up and down, pacing. And still she won’t settle, can’t. Whatever I do isn’t enough; I can’t make it right.

  I start to waltz round the room, bracing her head with one hand, my other arm aching, even though she’s so light. There-there. She twists in my arms; nothing, nothing will help. I try at last deep knee bends, a jounce that sets her small head drooping onto the blanket on my shoulder. There. Her body loosens in my arms and I settle slowly into the rocking chair.

  This jouncing is what she needed. Is it what my heart did when she was still inside, still a part of me? Can she be any more a part of me than she is now, in this moment? There. I wedge my arm against the arm of the chair, look down at her small body, quiet now. And I’m afraid again, wondering what the sudden stillness is. I can see, hear the breath move across her soft lips, but is it easier or worse?

  Fine. She’s fine. Asleep.

  And suddenly in this darkness, listening to the softness of her breath, I feel the love I hold for her flood my body, move – I can swear I feel it move into hers. I’ll give you anything, I think, just take it. Take whatever it is you need because it’s yours.

  A sturdy little soul, my daughter. She was a mite, only six pounds, but as stubborn as me: she got better. We went back to my cell together, and spent our days skin to skin. I wouldn’t put her in the basket they gave me for her. I held her against me, against the moment something might take her away. Let the days spool by as I waited to find out what awaited us, waited for trial and sentence.

  Another prisoner and guard move silently down the corridor. Once they’ve passed, the traffic guard gestures with his little flags to signal us to move forward. There’s no sound but the light slap of his flags. My guard and I start forward, then stop again. I can see the construct of this building, section, plan, elevation; feel it function around me. Can imagine the bundled form of my daughter, left in the not uncaring arms of one of the female guards. And now my own guard and I are taking staircases down, past the netting, they like to jump, step after step, going down, underground; the workers’ palace. Here be monsters. The morning began with an order: Prepare yourself for trial. There was no way to prepare, though I tried to pat my hair into place, rubbed a dab of butter into my shoes for polish, smoothed my skirt with damp palms. Gave my daughter to the guard, a thick woman who kept herself from smiling. I should have known my appointment with justice was approaching: for weeks now the food has improved. Only yesterday there was meat in my soup.

  At last we’ve finished descending; the staircase ends. Down another corridor and then the guard pushes open a broad set of doors onto a huge, rectangular room. Four rows of four chairs where at the moment two young women – just girls, they must still be in their late teens, Vladimir’s age – sit. I don’t know them, my fellow accused. At the other end of the room there’s a long table. Two guards stand behind the girls. Otherwise the room is empty. For a brief moment I imagine we’re here for some official celebration, that there will be ribbons and state portraits,that the speeches will begin. My guard sets me down beside the girls, takes his position standing against the wall with the other guards. The girls smile, try to speak to me, but a guard shushes them. They seem giddy, little girls ready for a birthday party, though they’re wearing anything but party outfits, their dresses threadbare, scarcely holding together. Mine is new. I was given new clothes for my new body after my daughter was born.

  More of the accused start to file in, and the strange sense of carnival increases. We nod to each other as each comes in, try to exchange a few words. The girls beside me giggle, whisper behind their hands. And then a face I recognize: Anatoly. He looks at me; looks at the ground. All the swagger gone from his face. He looks at me again, and I shake my head. His face isn’t any longer the face of someone I love. And he isn’t even heavy in me any more. He isn’t there. A distance has opened now between us, a clearing empty of emotion.

  And then I see him, escorted by two guards. Vladimir. He risks a nod, a brief gesture of the hand. He’s not as thin as last time. I find myself wanting to laugh, just for having seen his face. Vladimir. Vladimir alive. He turns around in his chair to look at me and the guard barks. The room is full of murmurs now; they can’t stop us. We’re here, together, the accused, and though only two faces are fami
liar, we’re comrades, a conspiracy of bewilderment, of pleasure at our own company after our months of solitary, interrogation, uncertainty. The murmur rises; they can’t stop us.

  And the whisper goes from mouth to ear, mouth to ear. Vladimir is told he is the father of a daughter. I see his face illuminated and then extinguished. For a moment, in the hum of voices, it’s as if this circus, this sham trial, is not what’s real. All that matters is that we are at last in a room together. And Vladimir knows about his daughter. The guards finally quiet us; the judges are entering the room. Three old men stuffed into their generals’ uniforms, the rigid faces of bad actors.

  It started then, and didn’t stop as the day wore thin. Our “testimonies” were read, lie after lie, and I had only Vladimir’s face to hold me to the world. Before the unfathomable judges, one after another the young people stood up, spilled out their confusion, their shame, uttered what they’d been told to utter. And then one of the old men in his general’s uniform, that mockery of a judge, stood and read the verdict, and we learned what we had to pay, what we had to lose. We stood not only accused, but convicted. They made Vladimir stand, took him under the arms, and I could see his legs, his will, failing him. He couldn’t stop watching me. I couldn’t stand his eyes. They took him away and I saw his face broken apart not with what they were doing to him, but with what he’d done to me.

  Your father was a hero; your father was a traitor.

  My girl never knew her own father. Why was it so difficult to give her stories of him? She needed them, tried to extract them from me. And I gave her so little, scraps, when I could manage. What I could. Who were you, Vladimir, my darling, my daughter’s father? How do I fit the real man, the boy, into the changing shapes of this story I’ve riddled through – for her, for myself – that has come to me now in its portions and shreds? Your father was a hero; your father was a traitor. I turn the words in my hands, hold them tight, let them go. And I know my daughter’s son, my dear boy –whose eyes share the hazel of his grandfather’s, who is almost grown – he wants the story too.

  It’s for them I spell this story out to myself, to tell that unimaginable world that I come from and that they come from too.

  Vladimir.

  I remember, Raisa said, the day he was arrested, how he looked as a newborn; the pale pink callus he had on his upper lip in those first moments I held him.

  I remember putting a bow cruelly in his hair, and that he looked at me. I remember his head leaning against my shoulder that first cool July in Moscow. I remember him taking my hand, turning it his quarter turns: to the left, then the right.

  Your father was a hero. Vladimir was a boy who tried to shed a little light on the story of his country, even if what was spelled out there was too real, even if it left him too little hope. He tried to sift the truth from the lies; he didn’t mind that the cause was hopeless.

  Your father was a traitor. Not the way the documents tell it, not to his country. He wanted a better country, but I wonder if he might not, in his innocence, have built the same tyranny he wanted to destroy. It’s easy, in this new century, to see the foolishness of those children’s idealism, their dreams. What are our children’s dreams today? No blood for oil. A good dream. But there is blood. Your father was a hero. I don’t believe in heroes.

  Your father was a traitor. In this story I’ve been telling myself, Vladimir comes out pure. Though in his innocence, his misplaced faith, wanting to make a clean breast of it, not understanding the state he was trying to save – he did betray me. His name on my arrest warrant. Your father was a goodSoviet citizen. Or perhaps he didn’t name me. Or perhaps he was so tired, so hungry, that when they put the piece of paper in his hands, it wasn’t him that signed, not his true self. He was so young. He was afraid. And he wasn’t used to fear.

  I never needed to forgive Vladimir. For me, he never stood accused.

  Verdicts dated 20 February 1952. The decision of the Chief Military Prosecutor on the case of those persons arrested by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR regarding the accused is as follows:

  1. Efron, Vladimir, born 1932, native of the city of Moscow, Jew, citizen of the USSR, non-member of the Party, student of Moscow University: the sentence is execution by firing squad.

  2. Koznitsky, Solomon, born 1931, native of the city of Moscow, Jew, citizen of the USSR, non-member of the Party, student of philosophy at the correspondence division of the Lenin State Pedagogical Institute: the sentence is execution by firing squad.

  3. Tarasova, Elena, born 1932, native of the city of Moscow, citizen of the USSR, non-member of the Party, student at the correspondence division of the Lenin State Pedagogical Institute: the sentence is twenty-five years of the deprivation of freedom in a Corrective Labour Camp with disenfranchisement for fifteen years.

  4. Trubashnik, Anatoly, born 1926, native of the city of Odessa, citizen of the USSR, non-member of the Party, student of Moscow University: the sentence is ten years of the deprivation of freedom in a Corrective Labour Camp with disenfranchisement for five years.

  5. Gershon, Annette, born 1926, native of the city of Winnipeg, Canada, Jewess, citizen of the USSR, non-member of the Party, student of the Mossovet Architectural Workshops: the sentence is ten years of the deprivation of freedom in a Corrective Labour Camp with disenfranchisement for five years.

  I don’t want to feel what I felt then, that’s why I wouldn’t remember. And in all the not remembering, maybe I have forgotten. I am not who I was. Is this what time does to us, dulls us, thickens us? A callus on our souls. But not then. Even with the sentence, I wouldn’t stop hoping for Vladimir, believing that Raisa and Lev would appeal, that the state would relent. I didn’t know that Raisa and Lev also had been arrested, sentenced to five years in a labour camp for the letter Pavel had written Stalin, for being Vladimir’s parents. No show trial for Pavel and Raisa; within three days of their arrest they were sent to Siberia. Not knowing, I continued to hope. I had my daughter.

  She’s finished nursing. Her eyes close, open, close, open, close, and she’s asleep. I button my blouse, pull the blankets around us. Touch my lips to her forehead and she grimaces, then relaxes, though she’s still holding onto my sleeve, that starfish grasp of her hand. You see, Vladimir; you see how beautiful and strong our daughter is? He’s somewhere in this building. I know it. I don’t believe the sentence. They just want to scare us. If only he could see her, just once. I close my eyes, let myself rest.

  And wake to voices by the door. It opens – a male guard, and a woman who reminds me absurdly of Olga Moiseyevna, our old neighbour, with her painted nails and trim, tailored suit. She goes to the little stack of diapers, nightgowns, at the foot of the bed, starts folding them into a paper sack.

  I push myself back against the wall. “What are you doing?” The woman looks up at me, lets her hands rest on the bundle. “It’s all right, miss. She’ll be fine.”

  The male guard is standing in a corner of the room, his hands behind his back. He turns to the window and I can see his wrists crossed, one hand holding the other, as though he’s trying to comfort himself.

  The baby’s still asleep. I touch my cheek against her cheek, feel her breath across my lips.

  “You can give her to me now,” the woman says. “It’s good she’s sleeping. I’ll just take her in the little blanket you’ve got her wrapped in.”

  I look at the woman’s face. What’s there? What is it I see in her eyes? She’s steady, she looks straight at me.

  What’s happening to the room? I tip my head back, feel the ceiling open, lift. Close my eyes. Open them, and the woman has her hands out. I pull the baby closer to me. I’ve never been in a space this large, this small.

  “You can give her to me. It’s all right.”

  Something shifts. I snap into myself. No. I won’t let her go. My hands tighten around her and she wriggles, sighs. I release the grip a little, put my mouth to the top of her head, smell her. There. That’s what I want.
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  I feel a hand on my elbow, the woman’s voice in my ear. “It’s better this way, my dear. She’ll be fine. She’ll be safe; I promise you.”

  No. I concentrate. Somewhere in the room, the guard is speaking with the woman, but I don’t hear. In one slight movement I get up from the bed, holding her, not letting her go.

  The guard moves quietly to stand in front of the door. I hear whispers in the hallway. How many of them are there out there? I stand in the middle of the room and suddenly my legs go, I’m on the floor, but I’m holding her, she’s fine, she’s still asleep.

  The guard’s lifted me by my elbows; I’m back on the bed.

  “Get her a glass of tea,” I hear the woman say, and the guard goes.

  “Settle yourself down,” she says. “You know there’s no point making a fuss. Be a good girl, now.” My heart is bumping inside me. I won’t give my girl up. All my body wants to keep her, and I will. It’s with my body that I’ll keep them from taking her away. Voices in the hallway again. I pull my knees up, crouch against the rough wall. There are more voices but I’m concentrating, I concentrate, shrink her inside me so that no one can find us.

  The door opens.

  Two guards this time.

  The first one has a glass of tea in his hand.

  “Take a sip,” the woman says.

  I sip. It’s sweetened; I think I taste strawberry preserves. My mother used to put strawberry preserves in her tea.

  “I won’t give her to you.”

  “I’ll tell you what,” the woman says. “You behave, and you can go with us. All right? Finish your tea, and bring the baby along with us.”

  “We’ve waited long enough,” the new guard says.

  “Do you see these papers?” The woman stands, waves them at him. “I am the one authorized to transport this child. I am the one in charge. Let the girl finish her tea.”