The Knife Sharpener's Bell (14 page)

“Go already.”

“I'm going.”

Ben's standing in the hallway, watching, trying to keep the smirk off his face. Raisa's looking away, so careful with my mother – not to interfere, not to get too close. Raisa's smart.

Brimming, tragic, I stalk off to my room to get my sweater, walking in that funny stiff way I know I get when I'm angry. Where's my blasted sweater? I throw my blankets onto the floor, scatter my pillows. Vladimir comes into the room.

“Did you find your sweater?”

I scoop up the pillows, pull the blankets back up. I'm afraid to open my mouth.

“Annette? Can I help you?”

“It's fine, Vladimir. It's here somewhere. We've got plenty of time.”

There was a little girl
. . . . Straightening the blankets with meticulous fury I can see how idiotic I'm being over nothing, nothing, and I want to stop but I can't. Not with her, not with my mother. It keeps boiling inside me. I'm so tired
of being caught in these eternal tempers, the tyranny of my mother's moods, my moods. Cartoon thunderclouds, bolts of lightning forming over her head and mine, between us. And the only thing to stop us is Poppa's
there-there
. Even his
there-there
doesn't work as well lately. And Poppa seems to get quieter every day, can't seem to get mad even when he should get mad. For Joseph, Poppa had no
there-there
.

All through the trolley ride I keep myself busy talking to Vladimir, trying to shake myself out of my mood. And now we're all walking down to the entrance, a breeze blowing the boys' shirts, Raisa's and my skirts. The air is fresh here, a bit cooler, but I can't smell the salty ocean smell of ships, of fish, of Odessa. It smells ferny here, green.

While we wait at the entrance of the catacombs for our turn Raisa explains, in her deep doctorly voice, how the limestone quarried here was used to build Odessa, to make the creamy façades I'm so fond of. Kilometres of limestone tunnels fifteen metres below the surface, a rabbit warren, a labyrinth. My mother was telling the truth. I never believe her, but the stories are true.

The guide takes us in. He's an older man, defeated looking, in a worn grey suit jacket, a navy turtleneck sweater under the jacket. It must be damp down there. He looks at me, smiles, his blue eyes crinkling. Then he turns and we follow him into the catacombs, going down the cool mouth of the tunnel. The daylight soon fades, but there are electric lamps along the walls. I take a deep breath. The air seems to cling to the inside of my throat, moist, almost sticky; cool but not fresh.

I'm still grumpy, still stiff. If I stay with Vladimir, it'll be better. I won't let myself take my mood out on him. He
glances at me, twitches his nose. “Smells like a closet down here. Smells like dust.” I nod. Cool, wet dust. Or moths. The taste of moths on my tongue – not that I've tasted moths – but a grey taste, stale and damp. Raisa and the guide are talking quietly now, politics, Hitler, the usual fear. The floor's smooth here, soft, almost polished, slippery with humidity. The cool down here is a different colour from the cool outside, grey, not green. I shiver. Ben sees me. “You done with your snit now, Annette? Busy being scared now? Scaredy-cat,” he whispers in English.

“Don't talk English,” I glower back, in English. “Momma says.”

He switches into Russian: “
Momma says, Momma says.
Now you're Momma's little girl!”

I start to shake. I feel it, that twist of rage again; I can't help it. My mother in the doorway, blocking my way. Now the guide is explaining about how the limestone was formed, all sorts of scientific details that Raisa seems fascinated by.

“Do you ever get lost down here?” Vladimir asks.

“You have to know your way around,” the man says. “If you know where you're going you can always find your way back.”

“You have a background in science?” Raisa asks.

The man shrugs. “I used to teach in the university.”

“Here in Odessa?”

“Moscow.”

Raisa doesn't ask any more questions. The tunnel narrows and we have to go single file. Soon Ben and Raisa and the guide are way up ahead of us. I start shivering again.

“Are you scared, Annette?” Vladimir asks.

“I don't like being under the ground; it makes me feel boxed in.” The air is even thicker.

“Momma says I shouldn't be scared, because if there's something bad that wants to get me I can fight it or I can run away. That's what animals do,” Vladimir says. “We fight or else we run away.”

“And you're an animal?” I ask.

“Of course I am. That's what people are.”

“And what if you can't run fast enough to get away?”

“Well, then I have to fight. And even if I don't win, I did something.” He pulls his hand out of mine. “I want Ben. I want to catch up with him.”

I can hear the patter of his shoes, but he's turned a corner and I'm alone. Where's Raisa? There. Up ahead, still talking away with the guide, his worn grey jacket blending in with the gloom. I can barely see Raisa either, just the back of her cotton blouse, a pale blue that's almost white in this light. I lick my lips, swallow. My own blouse feels clammy against my back. The corridor narrows further. The top of my head brushes against the ceiling and I feel something fall onto my scalp. I run my hand through my hair: grit. Touch the ceiling; it crumbles when my fingers brush against the surface.

“Auntie Raisa,” I call. Raisa doesn't turn. Nobody's paying any attention to me; nobody cares what I want. I feel the anger fold into the fear. And then the corridor gets wider, higher. It's a room more than a corridor, with much more light and benches set into the walls. Vladimir's sitting on Raisa's lap, chatting away. My legs are wobbly. Good. I can sit, calm myself down. But Ben has spotted me, can see how pale I've gone.

“What's wrong, Annette?” He starts to smile. I bite my lip, glare up at him. “You're pale as Momma's strudel dough.” He pushes his mouth against my ear, says again in English, “
Scaredy-cat.
”

I'm sick of everything: me, Ben, my mother. Before I can think I give him a solid shove that lands him on his rear. I hear his shout explode in the chamber, but before he can get up I've taken off, running helter-skelter down a narrow corridor. My good shoes are slipping on the slick, smooth floor. I slow down, stop, sink down to crouch in the corridor. Hug my knees, close my eyes.

That sound. Maybe it's just my heart pounding away. No. It's there. Swaying, full bellied, below the drip-drip of water. Nearby. A knell. It's there, over again and over again, swaying in my head. Two beats, light and then heavy, and that gap in between. Stalemate. No way out. No way out of here; no way out of myself. I try to breathe it out, let it go. It comes up, into my throat. The knife sharpener.
He's not here.
All right, then. Ghosts. Goblins. The Minotaur of the deep. Half human, half beast. That's what makes it a monster.

Something bad. All right. But I looked him in the face, didn't I? And it wasn't me; it wasn't a monster either. Just an old man ringing a bell. I'm not so scared, not so angry. I open my eyes to the dim light, close them again. The air is a grey damp; my skirt's getting all crumpled in the humidity. And suddenly I remember the train car, the dry wooden floor-boards of the train car, voices calling me. Sometimes it's right not to listen.
Be good. Be good.
No. I won't. I want what I want.

I hear footsteps coming down the corridor: the Minotaur, the bogeyman. I open my eyes. It's Raisa, her blue blouse pale, almost white. She doesn't say anything, just gives me her hand. “Come on,” she says quietly. “The boys are worried.”
Back outside, in the sudden daylight, they're waiting in the shade of a chestnut, Ben's back to me. He hears us coming, but doesn't turn around. I can apologize later. We walk back up the ravine path in silence, the sun setting, flashes of light shifting, flickering between the trees with every step.

Chapter Four

As a child who had been transported by her parents' will from one life to another, I hadn't yet learned that other, larger forces could take all of us. In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland and the world was at war. My mother was right: if we had stayed in Canada we would have been caught in the capitalist war. But my mother's country was at peace, thanks to the non-aggression pact that Germany and the Soviet Union had signed in August. So it wasn't our war. Capitalist Canada was at war and capitalist Britain was at war but capitalist America was staying out. My mother didn't say anything about that. But she did keep saying that everything was fine. In fact, once the pact was signed, it became easier to get sugar, butter, meat – everything. But, though salaries had been cut, both my mother and Poppa were working longer hours. Everybody was. And unlike my mother, few were at ease. It was hard to believe in our peace. People wondered whether Stalin was just buying time to build up armaments. No one was sure that the Germans could be trusted. My father was particularly worried about Joseph. Despite Daisy, despite the new baby, he might have enlisted. Or perhaps he'd been drafted. We didn't know: when the war began, the letters stopped.

My father and Lev would meet in cafés and over tea, a delicate, delicious tea – we had everything in those days of Stalin's peace – they would discuss the situation.
What is to be done?
Lev would drape his camel hair coat onto a bent-wood stand and they would sit at a table in a café in my mother's beautiful city and talk things over. The months of someone else's war went by and, over glasses of tea, they began to plan. In May and June of 1940, while my mother assured herself and everyone around her that, thanks to Comrade Stalin, her son – Ben was seventeen – would never be cannon fodder in a capitalist war, Germany took the Netherlands, Belgium and France. With no mail from Canada, we still didn't know whether Joseph had joined up, but my father was convinced that flat feet would keep him out of uniform. In the fall of 1940, as London was being bombed in the Blitz, Lev and my father's plans began to accelerate. Romania, whose border was only kilometres from Odessa, had joined the Axis powers. By early 1941, half the Jews of the city were leaving or preparing to leave. The difficulty was that my aunts Reva and Basya were as stubborn as my mother. Lev was at the end of his patience with them. It wasn't as if he wanted to shuttle people off to Uzbekistan. We would go to Moscow. But they wouldn't hear of Moscow. And Lev was determined that the family would all be together. What was rarely admitted in their café consultations was that Lev himself was finding it hard to extricate himself from the intricate web of business and work that he had created in Odessa. He had all sorts of irons in the fire, and there were all sorts of people who were depending on him. Besides, it took time to get the papers in order. He had to grease a few wheels. While Lev set his affairs in order, while my mother held onto her certainties, my father worried. Worrying was his specialty, he
joked with Lev, even as Lev was arranging work for him at the Moscow Centrosoyuz, assuring him that, when the young men were mobilized, they'd need to keep the old dogs in harness.

By March, Lev had the papers in order. In eight weeks, ten weeks, they'd be set. He just had to get his work in Odessa settled. If Avram and the family got there a week or two ahead of Lev, it would be fine. And if Anne continued her resistance, they'd just present the move as a
fait accompli
. Reva and Basya would come to their senses. And once Anne knew that Manya and Lev were going, she'd come around, no matter how stubborn she was, no matter how irrational her sentimental attachment to Odessa. She wasn't a complete fool. If they kept the wheels quietly in motion, everything would be all right.

I knew nothing of my father's plans, though I saw his worry. I was caught up in my own private dreams. It was spring. The windows in our high-school classroom were tall and dusty, the sunlight tall on the wooden floors. The teacher's voice went on and on about geometry. I liked geometry – logic, Pythagoras, axioms, theorems, truth being divided into such tidy portions – but some days that voice just drilled into my head. I remember the teacher's suit as grey, dust grey, like chalk dust or the dust that coated the window ledges. He was old, hopelessly old, our teacher, the few hairs on his head white. He must have been forty, ancient. Sunlight hot and tall on the floor, on my shoulders, I'd drift, watching Anatoly, who sat in the row beside me, just ahead. We walked to the library together sometimes, talking. Elena never liked Anatoly. She said he sold cigarettes to the students, got them on the black market. I would see him in
unsmiling conference with other boys behind the school. But Anatoly was the only one of my friends who showed any curiosity about my life before Odessa. There was a restlessness about him that drew me. And in this last year, he'd gotten so grown-up. He must have grown six inches. And though there was only a hint of fuzz on his upper lip, his face had changed, grown more angular, masculine. I'd study his profile, the tender curve of his eyelashes, the way his ears were set close to his skull, the untidy brown hair curling over his shirt collar – much more interesting than geometry. All I wanted was to soak up the gift of sunlight and think about Anatoly, about touching his face, feeling the flick of his eyelashes against my hand, his eyes green behind the silvery steel of the spectacles. Proofs, theorems. It was impossible.