The Knife Sharpener's Bell (34 page)

The guard fiddles with a ring of keys, opens one of the doors into a small room empty except for a table, a bench. He points to the bench, tells me to sit down, then closes the door, locks it.

There are tears running down my face. I wipe my face on my sleeve, then notice that Raisa's handkerchief is in my hand. I have to stop shaking.

A sound. I hear it clearly again, that knell. It's here with me in the room again, swaying in my head. Two beats, light and then heavy, and a gap in between. It's come.

I have to settle myself, listen.

Silence except for the distant taut flap of guards' communication flags signalling the prisoners' slow waltz from room to room, cell to cell.

Silence then, except for the flags, the occasional footsteps.

How long have I been sitting here: an hour? a half-hour?

The room is freezing. The walls are a dark green mixed with brown. There's a small window high in the wall, wire mesh soldered over the glass, the bench I'm sitting on, a battered table.

What if they don't let me out? Maybe it's all a ruse: they have no intention of letting me see Vladimir; they just thought up an easy way to trap me, arrest me . . .

Arrest me for what? I haven't done anything.

The door opens. It's the guard who brought me here. He faces me and for the first time I can see him: a lanky, horse-faced man. “A few more minutes, miss. You'll have to wait.” He leans against the wall across from me, takes out a
paper packet of mints, striped white and green. He puts one in his mouth, then offers the packet. I shake my head.

We wait. Then footsteps. The door opens again. Two new guards, enormous men, enter. Their faces are round, pink, well-fed.

And between them is Vladimir.

I stand up. He doesn't move, a pale smile tugging at his mouth.
I am not who I was.
They've shaved his head, cut off the silky brown hair. His hazel eyes have gone darker, dim. Where has the boy gone? He's been evacuated, and now there's this husk left. He's hunched around his body, stooped, as though he expects at any minute to be hit. As though he's trying to protect what's left of him.

“Vladimir,” I whisper.

The door clicks shut, locked. We're alone.

I go to him. He puts his arms around me. I lean my head against his chest, listen. If we're left alone just a little longer, if I'm very quiet, I'll be able to hear the blood moving through him. Just a little more time and I'll be able to hear the electric rustle of his thought.

“You're shaking,” he says. “Sit down, Annette. Sit.”

We sit together on the bench. I hold his hands, try to warm them. He's shaking too.

I pass him the parcel. “From Raisa. Did you get them – the other parcels we sent, the letters?”

“No. I'm in solitary. We don't get anything.” He undoes the brown paper, takes out the loaf of bread, breaks off a piece and starts chewing. “It's good. It's so good.”

“There's sausage. Are you all right? Can you sleep any?”

“Not much.” He's so thin. “They leave the light on in my cell all night. And then half the time they wake me in the middle of the night to take me for interrogation.”

“The middle of the night? Why?”

“All sorts of interesting rules here, Annette.” His lips are chapped, cracked. He licks them. My mouth is dry too. “Prisoners are instructed to lay out their socks and towel on the foot of the cot every night. Mugs must be set on the bedside table with their handles towards the door of the cell, aluminum spoons set precisely beside them. Prisoners may have a daily fifteen-minute walk, but it is forbidden to stop, or listen, or watch the sky. It is forbidden to pick the dandelions that grow in the cracks in the pavement. It is forbidden to sleep past the guard's wake-up shout, even though it's still night when he calls us, and all we've got to keep us from the cold and damp is the coarse army blanket they give us. But not me, Annette. I'm lucky. I still have the sweaters Momma packed, and Poppa's coat. I can wrap the blanket around Poppa's coat. I wear it all the time. There's so much I have to do, Annette, and so much I mustn't do.”

He stops. He's so thin. I didn't think he could get any thinner. His hand is thinning in mine as I hold it, slipping away.

“And food? Are you getting enough to eat? Have the sausage. There's chocolate. Raisa packed some chocolate.”

“It's all right. They give me coffee, black bread. Fish soup of a sort. Sometimes borscht.” He bites into the sausage, sighs.

“Have they told you the charges?” My voice is as soft as I can make it.

“The charges?” That smile again. “Article 58. I'm accused of treason against the Motherland, organization, anti-Soviet agitation and terror. I'm accused of being a member of a youth counter-revolutionary terrorist organization –”

“It's nonsense,” I say, cutting him off.

“No, it's not. I'm guilty as charged.”

I put my hand to his mouth. “Sh! Don't joke!”

“I'm not joking. It's all true.”

“Vladimir,” I move closer to him, whisper in his ear, “don't say these things. We have to be careful. There may be,” I lower my voice further, “some sort of listening device in the room. Why else would they have left us alone together? It has to be a trick.”

“It doesn't matter,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn't matter. I've told them everything. It's the only way. Make a clean breast of it; tell the truth.”

“What truth? You haven't done anything.”

“We did; we did. All of us.”

“All of who?”

“Me. My friend Solly, Solomon. And his girl Lena. We formed a group. And there are others.”

“Vladimir, don't . . .”

“I told you Annette. It doesn't matter. They know everything. They've known everything all along. They've kept a file on me since I was nine, since I sent Comrade Stalin that letter about the beggars. We had a group. We called it the Group for the Liberation of the Cause of the Revolution.” He smiles miserably. “We argued for two weeks over the name.”

“Vladimir, you shouldn't tell me this. You shouldn't say so much.”

“I told you, it doesn't matter. I told them everything. They got to Solly first and he told them about me, and about Lena. We have to tell the truth.”

“There can't be anything to tell!”

“We talked, Annette. We had counter-revolutionary discussions.”

“Counter-revolutionary? What do you mean?”

“You know. Discussions. Criticizing everything. At Solly's or Lena's. We'd talk. At first we just talked about literature and stuff like that. While we were studying. But then everything changed. After all that talk with Anatoly, all that political theory. I started telling Solly about Anatoly, what he'd say. And then, one day early in January, Solly and I went to the movies. We were in the lobby, and Solly suddenly was talking to me, telling me what he really believed, talking openly – about politics, about what he thought of the Soviet Union, what had happened to the Revolution.”

“Vladimir, you shouldn't, you shouldn't have . . .”

“We knew that; we knew it was dangerous. So we decided that we would meet again to talk more outdoors, where no one would hear us. We walked and walked, Annette. We walked all over the city. At first we argued about everything. There wasn't a thing we agreed on. But the more we talked, the more we understood what we wanted, what we were hoping for. It was, it was as if I could suddenly see everything, Annette. It was as if everything was suddenly clear. And there was something I could do. Lena would talk with us too. Solly kept asking to meet Anatoly, but it never happened.” He looks up at me. “I keep telling them Solly never met with Anatoly, Annette, but they don't believe me. And they're asking about you too, Annette, but I told them you weren't involved, that you never met Solly. They never believe me. They keep asking. They keep asking the same thing over and over and over again. I'm so tired.”

He's turning my hand in his, then he raises it to his mouth, touches his lips against the palm. “Annette. Momma, Poppa . . .”

“They're fine. They're all right. You know how strong they are.”

“I know. You too. You have to be, don't you? Solly was so strong. A few weeks after that day of walking, Solly told me he'd do it. He was ready to fight to change things. He wanted to know if I was too.”

Fighting guns with sticks.

“I didn't agree to anything, not right away. But when I thought about it, I knew it was what I wanted. To fight. So I said yes. And that was when Solly told me that they already had a group, an organized group, and that I should consider myself a member of it. He said he couldn't tell me anything in detail about who belonged, but that he did know that there were more than a dozen of us. They'd already made up an executive committee. Solly and two others were the executive.”

“Vladimir, don't tell me this. It can't be true.”

“Don't worry, Annette. I keep telling them you and Anatoly didn't know anything about it. And it's not like we did much. We fought about everything.” He smiles. “We just couldn't agree. And then we figured that the best thing to do would be to try to open up a discussion. We wanted to have a newspaper. We were trying to get a hectograph, print copies. Lena, Solly and I were going to write articles that would get people talking about what they believed in. Openly. We were going to make twenty copies of the newspaper and distribute them to everyone in the organization. Maybe more, distribute them around the schools.”

“That's all you did?”

“Solly and I wanted to write a book. We were going to call it
State Capitalism
. We talked about that for a week, argued about the title, the approach. Then we changed our minds. We figured that what we needed to write was a book on the history of the Party, the direction it had taken.
We were going to call it
Thirty Years
. I would have shown you what we wrote, Annette, but nothing ever came of it. We never finished writing anything. We never got anywhere; we argued too much. So you see? I did everything they say I did. And now I have to tell them the truth. They know everything anyway. They had listening devices in Solly's apartment; they recorded us.”

The building bears down on us and I can see it now – section, plan, elevation – this prison, its labyrinth of cells, bars, staircases, corridors. And moving fluidly through the concrete and brick arteries and veins, the life inside: these prisoners yoked to their guards, the monstrous couples they form, half human, half animal. Vladimir's not the one who's guilty.

“What did they record? It's nothing,” I say. “Nothing but talk. You didn't do anything wrong.”

“It wasn't just talk, Annette. We, we discussed taking action. We had huge arguments. Solly had a gun. He, he even talked once about blowing up a Metro station . . .”

“A gun? What kind of a gun?”

He looks sheepish, chagrined. “From his brother; from the war. It didn't work.”

“You promised me, Vladimir. You promised.”

“I promised not to do anything foolish. It wasn't foolish.”

Not foolish! – toying with rebellion, playing at a revolution! A broken gun. He'd give away his freedom, everything, his whole life, for these childish pranks?

“What do you think you're doing?” I say. “Casting yourself as a hero of the Revolution?” I grab him by both arms, shake him. “A hero! What makes you think revolutions have heroes?” I let go, get up, wanting to walk away, but there's nowhere to go.

He covers his face with his hands, rocking, a dry gasping wracking his narrow chest. He's a child.

They're children, all of them – Vladimir, this Solly, the girl.

Articles he never wrote, newspapers he never printed. Surely the authorities can't seriously be charging him with treason? Maybe they're bluffing; maybe they want to give these naughty children a good scare, give them a year or two in exile for the nothing they've done. And they'll be out, and all right, and everything will start all over again.

But they are: they are charging them with treason. And the sentence for treason – I don't want to think about the sentence. I don't want Vladimir to think about it.

I sit beside him, take his hands from his face, stroke them. “Vladimir?” He looks up, wipes his face on his sleeve.

“Vladimir, I'm sorry.”

He's taken my hand now, turning it his quarter turns: to the left, then the right.

The horse-faced guard comes in, an amused sort of smile on his face. “You have fifteen more minutes.”

They must be listening.

The guard looks at us and his face suddenly changes. “Fifteen more minutes.” Briefly his face seems sad, almost human. He leaves, shutting the door.

We have fifteen minutes. I won't let them take him from me, not this time. “Vladimir,” I whisper, pulling him to me, holding him against me. I want what I want. They're not going to take him from me. “Vladimir.” I stroke his chest, his face. He's not crying now; he's holding on, pressing his mouth against my hair, breathing me in. I hold on, hold tighter, won't let him go. All my body wants to keep him. It's with my body I'll keep them from taking him away. I kiss his chest, his shoulders. He says nothing, no words any more, just our bodies. Our bodies decide. He puts his mouth against mine.
Have me so you can keep me. Remember
me with your body.
His body held against mine, pressed hard now, as if he wanted to erase, just for this moment, the border between us. And we do. There's no time for more than this: my body held against his, legs held around him, him inside me. Where I'll keep him. His eyes are open, looking into mine, steady, holding onto me. In the cold room we're both sweating, our bodies sheeted in sweat. I can feel the bones of his rib cage against my chest, can feel his spine under my hands. I can feel myself both drawing him in and letting him go, letting myself go. The border between us eradicated, so that I can know him and keep him, a part of him. Not just memory. He pulls me tightly against him, releases a small cry.