The Knife Sharpener's Bell (37 page)

And wake to voices by the door. It opens – a male guard, and a woman who reminds me absurdly of Olga Moiseyevna, our old neighbour, with her painted nails and trim, tailored suit. She goes to the little stack of diapers, nightgowns, at the foot of the bed, starts folding them into a paper sack.

I push myself back against the wall. “What are you doing?” The woman looks up at me, lets her hands rest on the bundle. “It's all right, miss. She'll be fine.”

The male guard is standing in a corner of the room, his hands behind his back. He turns to the window and I can see his wrists crossed, one hand holding the other, as though he's trying to comfort himself.

The baby's still asleep. I touch my cheek against her cheek, feel her breath across my lips.

“You can give her to me now,” the woman says. “It's good she's sleeping. I'll just take her in the little blanket you've got her wrapped in.”

I look at the woman's face. What's there? What is it I see in her eyes? She's steady, she looks straight at me.

What's happening to the room? I tip my head back, feel
the ceiling open, lift. Close my eyes. Open them, and the woman has her hands out. I pull the baby closer to me. I've never been in a space this large, this small.

“You can give her to me. It's all right.”

Something shifts. I snap into myself. No. I won't let her go. My hands tighten around her and she wriggles, sighs. I release the grip a little, put my mouth to the top of her head, smell her. There. That's what I want.

I feel a hand on my elbow, the woman's voice in my ear. “It's better this way, my dear. She'll be fine. She'll be safe; I promise you.”

No. I concentrate. Somewhere in the room, the guard is speaking with the woman, but I don't hear. In one slight movement I get up from the bed, holding her, not letting her go.

The guard moves quietly to stand in front of the door. I hear whispers in the hallway. How many of them are there out there? I stand in the middle of the room and suddenly my legs go, I'm on the floor, but I'm holding her, she's fine, she's still asleep.

The guard's lifted me by my elbows; I'm back on the bed.

“Get her a glass of tea,” I hear the woman say, and the guard goes.

“Settle yourself down,” she says. “You know there's no point making a fuss. Be a good girl, now.” My heart is bumping inside me. I won't give my girl up. All my body wants to keep her, and I will. It's with my body that I'll keep them from taking her away. Voices in the hallway again. I pull my knees up, crouch against the rough wall. There are more voices but I'm concentrating, I concentrate, shrink her inside me so that no one can find us.

The door opens.

Two guards this time.

The first one has a glass of tea in his hand.

“Take a sip,” the woman says.

I sip. It's sweetened; I think I taste strawberry preserves. My mother used to put strawberry preserves in her tea.

“I won't give her to you.”

“I'll tell you what,” the woman says. “You behave, and you can go with us. All right? Finish your tea, and bring the baby along with us.”

“We've waited long enough,” the new guard says.

“Do you see these papers?” The woman stands, waves them at him. “I am the one authorized to transport this child. I am the one in charge. Let the girl finish her tea.”

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.