The Knife Sharpener's Bell (2 page)

I turned the television off. The room had gone dark, so I switched on the lights and I did what I do at the end of every working day – I went into the kitchen, turned on the radio and started making dinner. You have to eat. And you have to be glad to eat, to stand in your very own kitchen, in a light that's there when you touch a switch, and you've got food in the cupboards, in the refrigerator, and you can eat. I started slicing the beautiful brown mushrooms that I'd bought at the market just that day, but then the news came on the radio,
and their voices, so fresh, and their faces came back to me. I told myself dinner could wait, even though the mushrooms were already loading the air with their fragrance.

I try not to be a coward more often than necessary. All I had to do was pick one more empty box, go into the spare room, open a drawer and take out the papers.

They were in crisp blue file folders, labelled, in order. My tidy daughter has taken care of that. My girl – my grown girl. They have a historical value, she tells me. I have to look after them, even if I can't stand to look
at
them. Some day her almost-grown son, my grandson, will want them. All right then, my dear. I will look after them. They'll go with me to the new apartment, to my new home where the snow will be shovelled by someone else and there will be no icy stairs for me to slip on. A crack in one little bone. It wasn't even a proper fracture, just a hairline crack in one minor ankle bone – I was out of the cast two weeks ahead of schedule! But that was the last straw. For her. For me too, I guess. Because of course she was right, as she usually is, though I'm not particularly fond of admitting it. Life will be a bit more simple for these bones, a bit easier, once I've left this house and am in the apartment. Once I've moved. This is the hard part. It's always been the hard part for the likes of me, the move from one thing to another, but then I get used to it. I always do.

So I took those folders in my hands. How could they hurt me, pieces of paper? I was about to put them in the box but then some of the pages slipped out from their crisp blue cage and words slipped out and I couldn't stop myself from reading them. Lecture notes from school, a newspaper article. A thin blue envelope with a square Canadian stamp, a sheet of paper in Manya's elegant hand, one in Lev's. And
then an official document with its seals and signatures, its words and numbers. Article 58-1a. I stand accused.

I've kept myself busy, for years, for decades, so I won't have to stand accused. My mother wouldn't credit it, but I'm a practical person now, content as long as I'm at work. For the longest time work has been what's given me to myself. And what's kept me away from myself, I suppose. Maybe the only way to go on was not to look back. Or maybe the only way not to look back was to go on. Whichever was the case, that was how I managed.

It's not so foolish, not
so
cowardly, really, being afraid to go back. I know people, some of them dear friends, who live there. They're the faithful ones. They hold on and don't forsake the past, but I've watched what I think of as their real lives wane, their real children diminish, while they live amid ghosts or near-ghosts. I have a grown, healthy daughter to admonish me. A grandson who's almost grown. What good are memories? I've worked so hard for so long at not remembering. It has been a lot of work; it has been labour, keeping myself from the past. Hard work, not remembering. Somebody told me that once, in a dark room, the war just years, not decades, behind us. Somebody told me that, once, in a cold room.

But what yanked me into the past? Pieces of paper. Suddenly there I was, in the spare room. Kneeling, my heart yammering away in my chest. On my knees in the spare room, praying at the altar of my cardboard box, shovelling folders into it as if to keep some demon at bay. And remembering. I couldn't stop myself. Remembering, and wondering what got me here, to a house with a kitchen and light and food. What's getting me ready to leave.

We're in the kitchen. Poppa boosts me up onto a chair so I can reach, hands me an orange. “Here,” he says. “Look, I'll start and then you can peel it yourself.” His thumb gouges into the thick peel, then he hands it over, big and orange and not quite round, like a picture in a book. It smells like summer, smells bright even though it's almost always winter and dark. I put my small thumb in where Poppa's big thumb made a beginning, work the thick peel loose until it's all gone, every last nick of orange. Then with sharp little nails I peel off every scrap of white. The orange is still there, but it's different. I pile the peel and white in a little heap on the table, put both thumbs into the centre and break the orange apart. And now it's gone, no longer itself. Poppa's taken off his white apron; he's reading the newspaper. I can't think of what to say, don't want to spoil this present. I poke at a little segment with a finger, shiver. What was whole is broken. I don't know what to do.

I'm leaning my elbows on the table, leaning my whole body towards the bowl. I can smell the cocoa my mother has stirred into the flour, specks of it swimming in the air, a rich, steamy smell, the kitchen warm from the oven. In another bowl – heavy cream-coloured china – after the butter and sugar, go eggs. One tough rap as her fingers break the eggshell in two and the yellow spills out, the clear stuff around it. Five, six, seven eggs – seven eggs! A king's ransom, precious. Seven eggs are going into this cake because it's my brother Ben's birthday. Now the whoosh as she beats air into the eggs and the sugary, buttery pulp with the old wooden spoon, working round and round the bowl till everything is all of a piece. What was once eggs and sugar and vanilla and butter now are something altogether
different, something rich and strange. The mix of flour and cocoa and salt goes in and stops being flour and cocoa and salt and becomes batter, which will become cake – but only if I remember not to slam doors, not to shout and wreck it all. My mother pours the batter from the big bowl into the cake tins, nudging each last lazy bit of batter out, to be sure that both tins are exactly the same. Then the best part happens. She takes the spoon and cleans the bowl, each round carefully overlapping until every last chocolate lick is cleaned off into the tins. Every last lick. Nothing precious is wasted.

That's why the work of memory is so perilous, why it hurts to do it. It gives you back what you had and with it what you've lost: my parents, my brother. Vladimir. I know them dead, now. Know them as I never knew them when they were alive, their lives complete, completed. Change is over; possibility's over. It's done. My father will never grow older; my mother will never soften. They never saw a grandchild, never knew my daughter or her son. What do I really know of them, with my child's perspective, afraid of who they were, what they meant to me, what I mean because of them? The day my aunt Manya told me the facts of life – I was thirteen and my mother had told me nothing – when she told me, I started to cry. Manya sat beside me on the bed, massaging a dab of lavender-scented cream into my palm, her small fingers tugging at each of mine, a firm pull, as she rubbed circles into each joint, the pink nails, white quarter moons at each base. My hands are just like Poppa's deft, compact hands. My mother's hands were narrow, the fingers long, elegant. When Manya was finished explaining, the calm, clear words of explanation – mother, father, egg,
sperm – I took my hands back, chewed on a thumbnail, the tears starting in my eyes. Why, my aunt asked. Because until then, I didn't know I was my father's too. I thought I was just my mother's child, but with those words, for the first time, I knew I was half Poppa too.

Whose daughter am I? Why do I still need to know? If I am to remember properly, I should start where I started, in the apartment on Main Street near Selkirk Avenue, in Winnipeg, above the delicatessen. When I hear my parents' stories, I hear them told by others' voices. This is how children learn about their parents' mysterious lives before they were born: sitting under the table, at the foot of the stairs, listening while the grown-ups talk. We need to imagine our parents' lives before ours because we believe – foolishly, utterly – that they were born only to give birth to us. And maybe they were. Maybe our parents' lives came into being to generate ours, and ours for our children's.

I do know that I was the last, least, child Anne Gershon bore, the one she didn't want. I wonder if I ever had a home in my mother, who told everyone who would listen how she ran up and down the stairs in that first month of pregnancy, not caring if something bad happened? And then the child she didn't want turned out to be a girl.

What good is a girl? I have a fine son already
.

The neighbour women don't like my mother should talk this way.
Pooh
,
pooh
, they spit, to keep away the evil eye. Not that anyone is superstitious, religious –
the opiate of the masses
.

The women know everyone and everything. They knew my father in the Old Country, grew up in the same courtyard in Simferopol. And they like to talk.

Avram Gershon came to Canada
, they say,
after his first wife walked out on him
. Yes, he was married before: a wife and son he left in Russia. The first wife was a beauty – she was a seamstress maybe, maybe a nurse. One story is that she was a medical student, and the man she ran off with was the boarder they took on while she was in medical school. Though if you were to ask Anne, she'd tell you the first wife was nothing but a whore. So poor Avram, his heart was broken. The child was just a toddler when the wife ran away.

So Avram sells everything he has, buys a third-class ticket to Winnipeg. He steps out of the train station, 1914, the middle of nowhere! He could have gone to Chicago, or Buenos Aires, but he buys the ticket for Winnipeg. Doesn't know a single living soul in all of America, except for Sarah Katz, Hershel's wife. It's not that Avram and Sarah were sweethearts; she was married already to Hershel. Avram and Sarah weren't sweethearts, but they were like family: they grew up in the same courtyard in Simferopol. Sarah Katz. You won't find a better woman than Sarah Katz. All Avram had was a postcard with her address on it, and that was how he found her. Just walked into her kitchen. She had no idea. She's down on her knees, washing the linoleum. She hears someone at the door, and she thinks it's her husband come home early from work. There's Avram in the doorway, fresh off the boat.
Oy
,
Avram
, she says. Can't find another word in her mouth.
Oy
,
Avram
. She had no idea.

Poor Avram, his heart was broken.

The story is that when my mother and father met in Winnipeg, each had a story. Because my mother had a story too, another love story.

You want to know Anne's story?
the women ask. Anne Gershon came from Odessa, one of four sisters, big-city girls. Odessa, it's all she'd talk about: the cherry orchards, the fountains, the beaches, the opera house.
Odessa
. She'd say it sweet like candy.
My city is the most beautiful city in the world.
That's what she'd say.
I never meant to leave.

But she did leave, in 1914, just before the Great War. It all happened because, in Odessa, Anne had a boyfriend, a certain Lev Zvarensky. A fine-looking man: broad shoulders, more than six feet tall he was. Everybody said, now there's a match for Anne;
there's
a man who can handle her. They were talking marriage, Anne and Lev, when suddenly he falls for Manya, the little one, the youngest of Anne's sisters. Big brown eyes and a waist like a china doll. Suddenly it's Manya and Lev who are getting married.

What's the song about sisters?
A sister to hit you, and a sister to kiss you, and a sister to steal your love.
So for Anne, the taste of Odessa goes sour in her mouth. And she leaves,
for a little while
, she says. For a little while, till the taste improves.

And why doesn't she go back? Because of the war, and because she meets Avram. No, no, Sarah Katz didn't introduce them. Anne just went into Avram's store. She walks into the store like a queen, points to a can of tomatoes. Those green eyes, so proud she barely speaks a word to him. And Avram is smitten. He talks to her in his soft voice, trying to make her notice him. And meanwhile already she's decided he's the one.

Because Avram Gershon was a catch. You should have seen him in 1914: handsome, kind as could be. Such manners, such a gentle voice – one of those handlebar moustaches! Some people said he was no match for a woman like Anne, but Anne was the one he wanted. And
she
wanted
him
: a man
she could handle. A man who had taught himself English by reading the newspapers, who was doing well enough with the store to send money home. It was not only that he was a handsome man and a capable man: it was politics too. Because they were both believers. You think
Avram
is a believer? Anne Gershon can talk politics till you're blue in the face.
Listen to me
, Yossel Zalinsky, the one with the store that sells artificial limbs, says to her one day,
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is no paradise. The Soviet Union is not a democracy, he says. It's been six whole years since the civil war there ended and still there hasn't been an election, not in the whole of the Soviet Union.
Anne takes a look at him.
Democracy?
Anne says. She tells him:
I'll tell you about democracy.
So Anne folds up her copy of the
Vestnik
; you'd think she was going to give him a good smack with it!
In the
democratic
United States of America
, she tells him,
they waited thirteen years after the War of Independence before they had elections
! And she looks round the room with those green eyes of hers.
Why should the Russian people jump right into a democracy?
she asks.
They've got better things to do
, she says. And you know there's no arguing with Anne Gershon. A real Bolshevik – she once threw a Menshevik right out of the apartment!