The Knife Sharpener's Bell

by Rhea Tregebov

  I set the cup down and both men come up, haul me by my elbows. The door opens and we’re walking down the hall, past the identical iron doors, their peepholes, their slots. Up and up stairs and if the guards’ hands weren’t at my elbows my legs would not carry me.

  At last we go into a hallway that seems somehow familiar.

  “Tell her we’re ready,” I hear the woman say. The men seat me on a wooden bench. The baby stirs, opens her eyes, closes them. As they go out, the woman catches the door, holds it, just for a moment, open and I see something, someone just beyond the door, a woman. It can’t be, the slim figure, little bit of French lace at the collar . . .

  “If you give me your daughter now, I’ll give her to your aunt.”

  “Manya?”

  “Give me your daughter, miss. She’s here from Odessa, your aunt. I told you it was all right. It’s better this way. Believe me.”

  My arms are not my arms. They let her go.

  I used myself up in the days that followed, wore myself out, not eating, not sleeping, my breasts, all my body aching. Cored, hollowed, without my girl. What I held on to was that glimpse of Manya, the smell of lavender, hope, the knowledge that Manya would place inside the emptiness of what the war had taken from her a love for my daughter. Manya, who had been barren, who had something now to hold. I held on to that.

  The sky bears down on us. It’s a steady rain, untiring; my clothes are heavy with it. The truck swerves round a corner and the woman I’m sitting beside is flung against me, her elbows sharp against my ribs. I shiver. The truck’s rocking briefly lulled me to sleep and for a moment I don’t know where I am, think I am back among the volunteers digging anti-tank ditches on the outskirts of Moscow. I close my eyes. We’re being transported, again. The Black Ravens, the Stolypin train cars, now these trucks. I open my eyes. The woman beside me – Lydia, she told me her name was Lydia – touches my hand. She’s a lean, tough woman who must be fifty or so. Dark, intelligent eyes, grey hair. She puts her hand in her pocket and takes out two pieces of rye bread, hands me one. Yesterday they did have us digging trenches; that’s where the memories come from. Rank upon rank of women with shovels, but we staggered at it, rough, uncoordinated. And Lydia helped me. I was useless, the handle slipping from my hands, just as it had in those first days volunteering during the war. Useless. How have I been used? What have I ever done with my body? Something hard. Something good, my girl: you. Think of something else.

  “Thank you,” I tell Lydia. And suddenly I’m crying.

  “Don’t,” Lydia says. “It’ll wear you out. Eat the bread. You’ll feel better.”

  But I can’t stop. “What’s wrong?” she asks. “Are you sick?”

  I shake my head. “My daughter,” I tell her. “I’m thinking about my baby.”

  “You can’t,” Lydia says. “Once you start thinking like that it won’t stop.”

  I wipe my face with the back of my sleeve. “They took her away after I was sentenced. They gave her to a relative in Odessa.”

  “Odessa? You said you were from Odessa. I’m from Odessa . . .”

  “I lived there before the war. My aunt still lives there.”

  “Your family is Jewish?”

  I look at her before answering, examining her face for the source of the question. “We’re Jewish too,” she says quickly. I nod.

  “So your daughter’s with your aunt – she’s all right. You see,” Lydia’s smoothing my sleeve, “she’s all right. You don’t want her here, do you? I didn’t know you were from Odessa.” And now it’s Lydia who’s crying, silently. She turns her face away from me.

  “Lydia?”

  She leans her head against my shoulder, but without facing me, her eyes looking out into the rain. “I had two sons.” I can feel the story coming. This is how we stay human, telling each other our stories. “Our first, Sergei, was adopted.” I shiver, remembering my mother’s stories of the orphanage. The truck takes another turn, throwing us against each other. “Then we had our own child, just sixteen months later, our son Osip.” Lydia’s still leaning her head against me, still speaking quietly out into the rain that seems to be gathering now around us. “In the fall of 1941 they were 15 and 16. Your age, I guess?” I nod. “My husband knew Odessa wouldn’t last long.” She stops. “Your family?”

  “My brother and I got out,” I tell her. “In June. My father put us on a train to Moscow.”

  “Your parents?”

  I shake my head. It’s fog, this rain that’s enveloping us now, seeping through our already sodden clothes. Lydia sighs, then continues. “Sergei’s natural mother was Christian. He had papers to prove it, so we thought we could save him, send him to stay with a Christian family. He wouldn’t go. I’ve lived with you and I’ll die with you, he told us.” Lydia’s looking at her hands. “We couldn’t make him go.”

  I don’t need to hear the rest of the story. We’re holding on to each other, letting the tears go, our faces against each others’ necks, letting the story go.

  And then the truck stops. The other women begin to get down. The guards come, order us out.

  “Straight ahead,” they tell us.

  Lydia stumbles as she climbs down. I take her elbow. My breath catches in my chest.

  “Straight ahead,” the guards shout. “A step to the right or the left will be considered an attempt to escape. We’ll fire without warning.”

  We walk straight ahead.

  We want to live.

  For twenty months Lydia and I kept each other alive. Hope kept me alive too, the hope that my daughter would come back to me. That Vladimir would be pardoned, that we’d both someday, soon, be released. You can make a diet of hope; you can eat and drink it.

  I have everything. Everything. The file is complete. But I won’t let the official version take over my story because I have survived the official version – exceeded it. The dates flick by, April 1952, May 1954, but they are pinpoints, pinpricks, and I refuse them.

  There was no reason to hope. There was only Manya to appeal.

  They shot him.

  Vladimir.

  April 1952. They did it. Executed him. The fallen. I can see the stammer of his body, the long slow tumble against some prison wall; can see, in slow motion, his body’s fall into nothingness. Solly too. Despite the absurdity of the charges, the appeals; despite the mere threads and shreds of evidence against them.

  For two years we didn’t know. For two years, till May 1954, we went on hoping. It wasn’t till my daughter, our daughter, was two and a half, when I’d been released from the Gulag during the Khrushchev thaw, when Pavel and Raisa came back from Siberia, when Manya, who had taken care of the baby all those long months, had handed her back into my arms – it wasn’t until then that they told us that he was dead.

  This is not a conversation for children. One day, when she was about four or five, my daughter and I were sitting on the concrete steps to our apartment. It was early in spring, and that day it was still chilly, but the sun was warming our little spot. We were eating a bowl of tiny wild strawberries I’d managed to buy at the market, the very first strawberries of spring.

  “What do we say, Baby?” I asked her. It was the spell we chanted whenever we were lucky enough to find strawberries.

  “Nothing better than this,” she answered.

  Our little ritual, the sun blessing us on the concrete steps. A family went by on the sidewalk, father, mother, two little boys. The father picked up the littlest and swung him into the air, and suddenly my daughter had brushed the bowl onto the ground. We watched it bounce and then break, pieces of china mixing with the battered strawberries.

  “What, Baby? What is it?”

  “Tell me! Tell me where he is!” She was pounding on my arm. “I want my poppa!”

  I grabbed her hands, held them against my chest. If I hadn’t, I think I might have hit her, because it felt as if, with those words, she’d taken away everything I had so carefully built for her.

  We
sat there, locked in absence, anger.

  I dared tell so little about her father – there was so much to hide. You can let secrets ripen till they rot.

  And later, when there was no secret, when it was safe to talk and I had no reason to be silent, still I gave her so little.

  I think of your brief, unfinished life, Vladimir. If you’d lived, what would you have made of this new century? What would you have made of the end of the old one, the end of the Soviet state our parents laboured for? I never imagined I’d see it end in my lifetime. Perhaps I never imagined it would end. If you’d lived, what would have become of the foolishness that made your life so short and pure? No one should be held accountable for the choices they make when they’re eighteen. And yet we are; we are held accountable. We are accused; we are tried; we are sentenced.

  What have I made of you, all these years, seeing your mouth in your daughter’s mouth, seeing your eyes in your grandson’s eyes? You were the boy who was never afraid, who was afraid. The boy who saw through the murk of Stalinism to a truth, though it wasn’t the truth. In the story I’ve recounted of your life, I’ve made you into a hero, though I don’t believe in heroes, never did. I’ve made you up, perhaps into something simpler than you were, perhaps into something more complicated.

  I do know something, about you, and about myself. We have the daughter we deserved, who survived, fatherless, the impossible life we gave her, whose sturdy soul thrived. You would have loved her as I love her; she would have loved you back.

  For me, she’s been enough.

  It’s because of Anatoly that I have these folders full of documents, everything. Even the letters they took from me that night Vladimir was arrested. In that brief moment when the Berlin Wall came down and the KGB – NKVD, MGB – files were opened, they all came back to me, all the confiscated material, my entire file, the official record of everything that followed. The papers came to me not by chance or miracle, but because Anatoly rescued them for me. It must have taken some considerable courage to go and get them for me, to send them. At no small risk, even then. As no small gesture of reconciliation.

  I spent some time hating him, especially in those first furious nights when my anger battled the numbness of fear. And then I continued to hate him through nights of unbearable loneliness. In the better days that followed, once the fight to survive was past, I started to feel myself going sour with that hatred for him. But I am my mother’s daughter, and, tasting that grief, I had to think of who I wanted to be. Sour doesn’t suit who I think I am. So, at some point, I decided to forgive Anatoly. Because if I hadn’t, it would have made me less myself. And though the grief, and the anger, have gone cold, the love I felt for him, whatever that was – I still keep a piece of it somewhere.

  And besides, I don’t have any right to judge him. So many good people, good and not so good people, acted the same, did what, in their desperation, they had to.

  I have everything. When my daughter was four, we received further fruit of the thaw: a report recording the review of Vladimir’s and Solly’s verdicts. The report establishes that “certain violations of the law” had taken place during the preliminary investigation, that “measures of coercion” had been applied against these two boys (the nighttime interrogations, the deprivation of parcels, of food), that their declarations had been “taken down prejudicially,” records of their interrogations fabricated in their absence, and that, furthermore, the revolver that had been taken from Solly, the reason they were sentenced to death, was “unusable.” The report noted without comment that “in view of their deaths,” Solly and Vladimir had not been questioned during the review. It made no apology for these deaths, expressed no regret. It concluded that in the light of the investigation, Vladimir and Solly were posthumously sentenced to ten years in a labour camp. They were four years dead.

  I have everything. Even the certificates in which Vladimir’s and Solly’s sentences were rescinded and they were declared “fully rehabilitated.” In 1991. Thirty-nine years after their deaths. The new Russian state was cleaning its hands, the wheels of this particular justice grinding slowly but thoroughly. There. They’ve said their piece, these yellowing bits of paper, these documents with their dates, their facts and fibs and stories. I knew they were dangerous. Once the past opens its doors, it starts inhabiting you again. But I suppose that’s what I wanted, to be inhabited, to inhabit myself more fully. Though nothing is solved. I creak back down onto my knees, gather up the papers, begin to sort them gently back into their folders.

  I stood accused. I stand accused still, of having let the story that I had to tell slip for all these years. Who am I now? Where did my story get me? What it got me is this life, a life that is tapering down now, however much I deny it. I think of the truck on that country road that passed me so carefully. Perhaps now it’s less than two solemn feet between me and what would end me; perhaps it’s more.

  I know I sound angry. I am. I am eaten by an anger that kept me silent. Till now.

  I was pardoned too. In 1991. But when those papers came, I realized that I didn’t want the record wiped clean. I didn’t want the story of what Vladimir had chosen to do corrected.

  Not in the light of those faces on the television. Not in this world, this new century. Not from my new home in Toronto. That’s where they mailed the certificate. My new old home, the home I’ll be leaving soon, for another home. We’ve been here more than twenty-five years, my daughter and I. We got out. I at last got to come back to Canada, to come home. To see Joseph, his family. Home. He’s old now, my Joseph, but he’s still here, still mine.

  I have to eat. I’m going to sit down and eat, put good food in my mouth. And be glad for it. I’m going to turn on more light with the touch of a switch. Maybe put the television back on, watch my young people’s faces, listen to their voices and all their certainty and all their hopes. What would Vladimir have to say to those young faces and their protests, their chants? Could we ever have translated for them the unfathomable world we come from? What would Poppa have thought, O brave new world? Capitalism didn’t die, Poppa. Every surface gets covered with words intended to make us feel how empty we are so that we’ll want something. And my mother, my mother would have been sure about everything as she always was, would have packed everything tight into her suitcase of certainty.

  My father gave me an orange, once. I watched my mother make a cake. What they could give me, what they could never give me, resides in me still. There it is; the world. There it is; home.

  Acknowledgements

  Special thanks to my son, Sasha Tregebov, whose idea this was.

  Immense gratitude to Warren Cariou, midwife extraordinaire, splendid editor, friend, and writer. Without his help from beginning to end this wouldn’t be much of a book.

  Other hands and good eyes also helped: my sincere thanks to Charis Wahl and Lynn Coady. Thanks also to critically encouraging readers Mary Chapman, Nancy Richler, Guillermo Verdecchia and Peter Higdon. How fortunate I was to have Carole Corbeil read this and encourage me very early on.

  Thanks to Nik and the whole crew at Coteau for their time, care and generosity with this project.

  I am most grateful to Alla Tumanov for the insight her writing has given me not only into the worldview of the young people involved in the Slutsky Rebellion, but into the generosity of spirit that would allow the survivors to emerge from their ordeal with a greater humanity. Alla Tumanov’s memoir, Where We Buried the Sun: One Woman’s Gulag Story, translated by Gust Olson (NeWest Press, 1999) was invaluable to my research. The wording of the interrogation documentation in my novel is drawn from the documents included in Tumanov’s book. The names of the officials who signed the documentation are actual. These are the persons responsible during the historical events in which Vladlen Furman was arrested, sentenced and executed.

  I hope that my new cousins, Alexander and Danielle Furman, find this story worthy of their family. I am grateful to newlyweds Andreas Schroeder and Sharon Brown for thei
r hospitality and wisdom. My thanks to Prof. Julie Hessler of the Department of History at the University of Oregon for kindly looking over an earlier draft for historical veracity. Thanks also to the amazing Josh Stenberg for consultation on Russian terms and names.

  The following memoirs of the 1930s, 40s and 50s in the Soviet Union provided me with details of everyday civilian life: Seema Rynin Allan’s Comrades and Citizens; Don Dallas’ Dateline Moscow; Lydia Kirk’s Postmarked Moscow; John Lawrence’s Life in Russia; Deana Levin’s Children in Soviet Russia; Penelope Sassoon’s Penelope in Moscow; William A. Wood’s Our Ally The People of Russia. The excerpt from the Mayakovsky poem “Why Did We Fight” is from the book The Bedbug and Selected Poetry (Cleveland, 1960).

  Many thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council for their generous support during the long period in which this book was written.

  Author Biography

  Rhea Tregebov is an award-winning poet, author of a half-dozen collections of verse, and also the author of five picture books for young children. Her poetry has won both the Malahat Review Long Poem Award and the Prairie Schooner Readers’ Choice Award as well as honourable mention for the National Magazine Awards. She also acted as editor and co-translator of Arguing with the Storm: Stories by Yiddish Women Writers.

  Born in Saskatoon, Rhea Tregebov grew up in Winnipeg, and has English degrees from the University of Manitoba and Boston University. She lived in Toronto for many years but now makes her home in Vancouver, where she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six