The Knife Sharpener's Bell (28 page)

His head sinks onto the table and he's asleep.

The next afternoon the door to the apartment opens; it's Raisa, her arms full of packages. “Anatoly gone home?” she asks.

“Vladimir walked him to his apartment about an hour ago. He was still feeling sick.”

“It's the wormwood,” Raisa says. “They shouldn't be allowed to use it.” She pushes my papers to the side, sets her packages down. “That was quite the performance again last night.”

“I'm sorry, Raisa. He gets like that sometimes.”

“Are you serious about this boy?” She starts drumming her fingers on the table, and before I can answer, she continues. “It must be a comfort that he knew you in Odessa, no? What was he like then?”

I shrug. “The same and not the same. He was different from the other boys. He always seemed to be in charge, somehow, always knew what he was doing.” I haven't said anything to Raisa about Anatoly's extracurricular activities making little deals on the black market.

“The drinking, does it affect his school?”

“School's fine, Raisa. He doesn't drink that often.”

“And this sour little edge?”

“He's not really like that, Raisa. It just comes out –”

“ – when he drinks.”

“What are you saying, Raisa?”

“I just want to know if you're in love with this boy.”

“Love. Do you believe in love, Raisa?”

“You're annoyed with me.”

“I'm asking.”

“Do I believe in love? Do I believe in chemistry? That's what all this adolescent infatuation is about, Annette. Propagating the species. If you want an opinion on love you should ask Vladimir. He's the expert on love.”

Vladimir's in love: some girl at the university.

“Falling in love is a fad with these kids Vladimir's age. They're so starved for contact with the opposite sex that as soon as they get to coed classes at university, they're obliged to declare themselves madly in love. It's an adolescent epidemic. But you're too old for infatuation. You need to think carefully about what you want. About this boy.” She sits down. “Can we deal with love some other time? I should get going on supper. And you need to finish your work.” She picks up my textbook, Chernikhov's
Architectural Fictions
.

“You sound tired,” I say.

“A long day. It's all this worry at work.”

They've finally told me about the trouble at work. The union office had asked Raisa to sign a letter accusing the chief engineer at the plant of being an “enemy of the people.” They were claiming that he had tried to obstruct the doctors' efforts to improve working conditions.

Raisa hasn't decided what to do yet. If she doesn't sign, she's almost sure to lose her position. She's never liked the man, an officious stuffed shirt who's been impossible to get along with. But he's thoroughly competent.

And, more to the point, he's a Jew.

I still have it, my copy of Chernikhov's
Architectural Fictions
with its fawn and pigeon green cover. The fine binding seems to carry something of Lev. It belonged to him – he must have bought it just after it was published in '33. He had a whole collection of architectural books, pamphlets and photographs too, that he would sort through wearing his white cotton gloves. He'd invite me in, explain what I was looking at. He'd puff on his cigar and talk about how he and Chernikhov knew each other way back when, before the Revolution, when Chernikhov was studying in Odessa. They used to drink in the same cafés, talk politics, art. By the time I was admitted to the Mossovet Workshops, Chernikhov's ideas, his elaborate, overly systematic methodology, had fallen out of favour, but he was still head of the school. Lev's stories, these beautiful illustrations, were what got me seriously thinking about studying architecture. I didn't know how to read the axonometric perspectives until Lev explained them. And I remember, as a kid, fretting to myself about the title,
Architectural Fictions
. It should have
been “architectural facts”: something as solid as a building couldn't be a fiction.

There's a glossy coloured plate for Fiction 51. Looks more like a mechanical spider than a building.
An idealized industrial complex distributed on a road system.
That disc or spool in the middle must be the complex, but because of the axonometric it looks like it's exploding in place. And the spokes that are the roads look like they're either floating or sinking. The colours are beautiful: that flat red for the disc, a gorgeous yellow flowering at the right hand as background. 1933.

Even today, in the twenty-first century, it still looks like the future, what the future was supposed to be.

How is it that I am what I am? Why have I sunk myself in my work the way Raisa did in hers? This fascination with architecture, the obsession with sorting out what's wrong or right about a building, finding a way of shaping things in the world so that they fit – I want a world where things fit. At one time the playfulness, hopefulness, of these drawings was enough to make me believe in the future.

It's a miracle, having something of Lev's. Manya had a few things from the apartment, odds and sods, that one of the neighbours managed to save for her. She sent me the book when I started university. Something from Lev.

And I have, as well, a few of my lecture notes, the handwriting tidy, dutiful:

– the new architecture a rejection of outdated canons and of the idealistic aestheticism that considers art an end in itself
– the machine the source of a new aesthetic of asymmetries, dynamism and functionality
– fundamental laws governing the relationships of bodies in plane and space

The words don't make as much sense as the illustrations. Those broken, beautiful forms – is that what the Revolution was supposed to have done? Break things to make them better? When this book was published everything was new; everything was possible. The old smashed up to create the new, and beautiful.

Chernikhov was so quickly out of fashion, his Constructivism declared “bourgeois aestheticism,” a throw-back to conventional standards of beauty.

But I wanted beauty. Still do.

And what about love? I don't know if I understand any better now than I did then. How do I weigh and measure my love for Anatoly, if it was love; for Vladimir, Raisa, Pavel, Ben, my parents? I don't think we even have the right vocabulary. Plato's parable about each person being half of a whole, each incomplete – it doesn't give me anything now. Why do we need to make ourselves complete in someone else? Why do we think individuals are essentially incomplete? It's an infantile fantasy, a yearning to go back to the womb.

What I need to understand is the durable kind of love built on want, not need. It's a structure, as much as any of the buildings I've made. You build it out of days. I've had my own taste of it, though it came late. Sometimes what I've felt for others has seemed to me indelible, like my love for my parents and Ben, which has lasted longer than the individuals that generated it. For my daughter, my grandson. Blood love. And for Joseph, my brother, whose offer I refused. I have his letters too. I have to squint to read his
faded scrawl, though by now the words feel almost a part of me.

September 14, 1944
Dear Annette,
Sorry I didn't send this sooner, but we both know I'm not much of a writer. And mail to the USSR hasn't exactly been “express” most of the time . . .

Wish you had decided that you wanted to come back here, but it was up to you.

About Poppa. I never really thought he could have made it, but there was always this kind of wish that somehow he had. I guess you know what I mean. Hard to give up on that. I'm sorry we had to.

It was good to meet Pavel and Raisa. I'm glad it's them you're bunking with, even if you are camping out on their davenport still. They're sweet people; you deserve sweet.

Like I said, things are good for Daisy and Nathan and me. Feels like I'm making myself a real life here. Daisy and me, we've already saved for a down payment on a house. If I ever do get you back here, you know you can always move in with us.

I'm showing all the folks from Selkirk Avenue the snapshots I took in Moscow. Everybody says you're a real looker now . . . Tell Vladimir to keep an eye on you for me.

Your brother,
Joseph
PS I hope you do go into architecture. At least one of us will get an education. You always were the smart one
.

After the war, Joseph's letters stopped, the way the letters from Odessa stopped in September 1941. I found out later that at first he'd written, but when we didn't reply, he knew the letters never reached us. And then, as the Cold War became worse, he stopped writing, knowing that letters from a capitalist state, contact with enemy foreigners, would only mean trouble for us. In those years, I also wrote letters to him that I never mailed. About my trip back to Odessa. Raisa and I went back, once. She and Manya and I went to the port, the square where it happened, where Poppa and Momma were killed with the others. We stood on the pavement beside the water. But we didn't find anything. No blood, no cries, no smell of smoke. There was no dark mark of burning along the stone walls that lined the square, no gauge of how high the flames went, how thick the smoke rose, no memory. Just people going about their business. As if nothing had happened. Or as if what had happened were nothing.

Chapter Nine

As 1950 ended, the country fell into a frenzy over Stalin's seventieth birthday. The Museum of the Revolution was crammed with gifts, letters, telegrams. The ovation for Stalin on the radio was endless – shrill, strained voices chanting slogans. It must have been hard even for the staunchest of believers not to be taken aback. It was whispered that Stalin couldn't have known the scope of the adulation; if he had, he would have been mortified.

I tried, as had become – and has remained – my habit, to hide in my work. I'd broken away somewhat from the rigours of Chernikhov's convoluted pedagogy. That December the instructor for my studio was Mikhailov, a brilliant, genial fellow I had a slight crush on. I was chumming with another female student, Polina, and we'd decided, perhaps to impress Mikhailov, to work as a team on a study of the Rusakov Workers' Club, a building on Strominka Street by the Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov. The boxes he'd set jutting out of the third storey of the building always seemed to me ready for flight. I still love Melnikov's work; love his vision of the “force of maximal possibilities.” Maximal possibilities! What an absurd concept then, in 1950.

What an absurd concept now . . . I'm not sure even now why we were allowed, in Chernikhov's school, to study this champion of intuition over method. I'm even less certain of how the buildings of this visionary of individualist space survived Stalin, though they did, more or less. Today the Rusakov Club is on the “endangered heritage” list; even in 1950 it was beginning to decay. But Polina and I had copies of the original plans and sections. We were doing measured drawings, perspectives, everything. Anatoly disapproved of the Rusakov and continued to plague me about “ideal Soviet architecture.”

I think he was drinking less in those days, though perhaps I'd just gotten used to the drinking. He'd still disappear for a day or two, wheeling and dealing in the black market no doubt, shady activities that I chose to ignore. There was much I chose to ignore because I liked being in bed with him so much. His stolid pragmatist of a roommate, the kindly Misha, had fallen absurdly in love with an exquisite young woman named Nadya. Nadya was a serious Komsomol classmate of Misha's who lectured him on his obligations as a citizen. And Misha solemnly accepted these lectures, lapping it up so long as he could remain in the company of the exquisite Nadya. But Misha's infatuation with Nadya gave us more privacy, more time with each other, and we made the best of it.

I hid any uneasiness in work, in the intensity of my attachment to Anatoly. We were all caught up in our private lives. Vladimir was at the top of his class in medical school; Pavel was hard at his research at the university. But Raisa was in trouble, still battling the situation at her plant. Things were coming to a head: she was almost sure to lose her job. We all thought the worst that could happen, though it
would have meant that she'd have had to put her research on hold, was that they'd demote her back to a job at a community clinic. Pavel told us there was nothing to do but be patient; these things would blow over eventually. We kept thinking rational thoughts about the worst that could happen. How was it that I still believed that my life, at some final moment, would simply fall into place? But I did, and so these disruptions surprised me. I hadn't yet learned that our lives get to float along the surface of events only briefly. We never know whether this is the moment before things settle at last, the moment we're about to come home, or the moment before everything's shaken apart. But I thought then that everything bad had already happened. The war was over. We were alive.