The Knife Sharpener's Bell (5 page)

Miss MacLeod has told us to put our heads down because we were too noisy. I run my fingers along the smooth groove in the top of the desk where my pencil goes, round the opening for the inkwell. Bottles of ink are dangerous. Pupils are not allowed to use ink until grade three.

“All right,” Miss MacLeod says, “time for Spelling.”

I sit up straight and fold my hands in front of me on my desk, feet flat on the floor and knees together: Position One. It's so hard. And I don't want to, but I do.

“Now class,” Miss MacLeod is saying, “what do you write in the right-hand corner of the page?” She turns to the blackboard and her black gabardine skirt swirls as she turns. “This is today's date,” Miss MacLeod says, and she writes
October 18, 1932
on the board in her beautiful, clear printing.

I hold the pencil the way I've been taught, cradled against the second finger of my right hand. I'm getting a bump there from the pencil rubbing, my finger taking on the shape of what I do.
October 18, 1932
. It makes me shiver. I've never written the date before, never pencilled myself into time, but this is how time enters my life.

Time. I can stand in the spare room or I can walk back into my darkened kitchen and say,
it's Tuesday, it's six o'clock, it's time for dinner
. But time is slippery. If we let go that thread of the present, we're released into what gave us this moment, the darkness in it or the light. My father was a believer, a dreamer. His daylight dreams took him to what he thought of as his future in Canada, and then they made him get on that train. But he had nightmares too. Just like me. Sometimes I think even now I'm still dreaming his dreams.
Make a wish.
I want to remember.

In the dream of summer I used to play at my friend Cassie's house, a two-storey, white stucco with a picket gate painted green in the carragana hedge.
Picket, picket.
I liked that word. Cassie's mother fed us cinnamon buns hot from the oven. Her backyard was big and open: no trees or apartment buildings to make the sky small. They had a vegetable garden that took up most of it. Laundry flapped on the neighbour's line: sheets and pillowcases white against the blue sky. Once Cassie and I got to dig a new patch of garden. She showed me how to put my whole weight on the spade, and while we dug it was as if the soil got looser, deeper, as we worked it, sun hot on our shoulders. We were workers. The screen door squeaked. Good times.

But it wasn't good times; it was hard times. Kids came to school wearing clothes that were too big or too small, jackets made over from coats, patches on patches. Half the neighbours were on Relief. Because it was hard times, my mother would let me invite a friend over for lunch once a week, sometimes twice.
Nobody can say I let anyone go hungry from my table
, she'd say, setting the dishes down on the table, potatoes fried in lots of oil, salami sliced thick.
They can't say that about me. I'm not stingy like some people.

Plenty did go hungry. Mrs. Goldbaum down the street's husband was a travelling salesman, no good, a gambler. Three kids to feed and nothing to feed them with. Poppa would leave bags of groceries on the back step and my mother wouldn't say not to.
They won't go calling me stingy.

The boy from across the street showed off the new boots he got on Relief – soles
that
thick – and my brother Ben was jealous. But my mother made a face when he told her.
People should work.

Some wouldn't take Relief, like Mr. Spratt, the lodger on the third floor above the store. He was thin, quiet. His footsteps overhead hardly made any noise.

The flowered apron covers my mother's knees. She's shelling peas.

“I'm worried about Mr. Spratt.” Poppa sets his
Tribune
on the kitchen table.

“Worry about yourself, Avram.” Each pod is unzipped, the peas stripped click click click into the enamel bowl. I want to eat one, just one.

“He's thinner every day.” Poppa's hands rest on the newspaper.

“He dresses fancy, always in that dark grey suit, a white shirt, black shoes polished up. If he's under the weather again you can bring him a bowl of my chicken soup.”

“God knows how the man lives.”

“He gets odd jobs. He may have a bit of savings tucked away somewhere.”

“Thirty-seven, and he looks like an old man. Look at the prices I'm charging here: fifty-two cents for a twenty-four-pound bag of flour. The farmers are getting nothing. Peanut butter nineteen cents a pound. He'd be better off.”

“Better off how?”

“On Relief. If he was working for Relief at least he'd get a food voucher.”

“People have no shame.”

“Anne . . .”

“
No shame
.”

“Anne, people are hungry.”

“They're lazy.”

“Anne . . .”

“Just lazy.”

“Hello there, Princess.” Mr. Spratt comes down the stairs in his dark grey suit, white shirt and black shoes. He calls me Princess because I was born in the same year as Princess Elizabeth. “How are you?” His voice is softer even than Poppa's.

“Fine thank you, Mr. Spratt. And how are you?” Mr. Spratt talks so nice he makes me feel like I'm wearing little white gloves, all prim and proper.

“Dandy.” He sits down beside me on the second from the bottom step, wipes his forehead with a very white handkerchief. The cat comes up and rubs against the dark wool of his pant leg.

“Mr. Spratt, how come you're wearing your suit on such a hot day?”

Mr. Spratt smiles a big smile. I hardly ever see him smile that big. Mostly his smile is quiet, like he doesn't want to bother anyone with it. He smiles big, and then the smile stops. “That's a good question. That's a question I should ask myself, I guess.” He thinks a minute. “I like this suit.”

“It's a nice suit.”

“Thank you. But you make me wonder, Princess. It is an awfully hot day for a suit when you're not going anywhere special.”

We're quiet for a moment.

“Did you used to work in a bank, Mr. Spratt?”

“No, I didn't work in a bank, Princess.”

“Where did you work?”

Mr. Spratt takes his time before answering me. “In a big office. I had my own desk, a nice oak desk. And a secretary. There was a big fan on the ceiling that kept me cool. You would have liked that.”

“Oh.” I start to poke at a scab on my knee, then remember that I shouldn't.

“Did you read that book you borrowed from me about glaciers?”

“I'm about half-way through, Mr. Spratt. There are some big words.”

“Just ask your poppa if there's anything you don't understand.”

“Poppa doesn't always know the big words in English.”

“Well, of course you're right. But your poppa will know how to look them up.”

“All right.” I start at my knee again, stop. “Mr. Spratt, can I ask you something? Do you ever hear something, like a bad sound?”

Mr. Spratt frowns. “What kind of sound do you mean?”

“I sometimes hear him,” I whisper. “The old guy. Ringing the bell.”

“You mean the knife sharpener, that old fellow? You don't have to be afraid of him, Princess.”

I shiver. “But sometimes I hear that sound even when he's not there.”

“When he's not there?”

“It's like the sound's inside me.”

Mr. Spratt smoothes the crease in his trousers, wipes his forehead again. “Sometimes I think we're more afraid of what's inside us than what's outside us, Princess. Or maybe we're afraid that what's inside us isn't strong enough to fight what's outside us. Maybe that's why we hear something inside us that scares us. But don't be afraid of the knife sharpener. He's just an old man trying to make a living like everybody else. How about I take you to the library tomorrow, if it's all right with your poppa? We can ask him today.”

“I'd like that a lot, Mr. Spratt.”

“All right then. Well, if you'll excuse me, I've got to go meet someone.”

“Is that why you're wearing your suit?”

“Guess so. See you later, Princess.”

Princess.
That was what he called me, Mr. Spratt. He always spoke to me as if I deserved some dignity, as though, given a little encouragement, I could think things through. But though he called me Princess, I knew I couldn't ever be a princess because the world was divided into kings and commoners, bosses and workers, fancy and plain, gentiles and Jews, and I always knew on which side I fell.
One person is just as good as another and workers are the best.
My family had always been working class: farmers and shopkeepers and tailors, they'd all made an honest living. My mother's family were miners in the limestone quarries in Odessa, nothing like the bosses, tycoons in shiny top hats who took money from honest people. Nor were they kings and queens shouting
off with their heads
! Nor soldiers; they'd never killed anybody, had never done anything bad. Never being able to do anything bad – that was what it meant to be good.

But I couldn't ever be a princess anyway because I didn't look like a princess, wasn't
the fairest of them all
. I was plain. I didn't even need to look in the mirror. All I had to do was look at my mother's face, her scowl when she said,
here, comb your hair already
. I couldn't even pretend to be a princess.

Except, when Mr. Spratt talked to me, that was how I felt.

Because of the heat wave, my mother wouldn't let us outside, not even to run down the street to Levin's store. She took a clean bedsheet and soaked it in cold water in the
tub, then hung the damp, cool cloth against the window to keep the sunlight out. You're supposed to be afraid of sun-stroke, heat prostration, but I was still afraid of other things: my mother, the artificial arms and legs hanging in the shop window of Zalinsky's store. The kids told stories about boys who hopped freight trains, about how, when they fell, they'd lose a leg or worse. But it was still my mother who scared me the most.

The air outside on Main Street was thick with smoke. They'd burn smudge fires of lilac branches in oil drums on the street corners to keep away the mosquitoes. The sidewalks were covered with empty sunflower seed shells that crackled when you walked. The trick was to stuff a handful of seeds into your mouth and one by one spit out the shells:
look ma, no hands
. The hulls crunched under people's feet, thousands and thousands crunching like the grasshoppers that came in July. Night didn't cool things any, but people still went out. Evenings were crowded with folks out for a walk, whole families on parade up and down the sidewalks on Main Street. Some even went out Old Country fashion in pyjamas and slippers; nobody said anything about it. Whole families out on the sidewalks, looking for a breeze, looking for a breath. The men would stroke their chins, talking, the way they did when they came out of synagogue. As though they were solving all the world's problems. The women talked too, one hand on a hip, but the kids stayed restless because it was hot; it was hot right through the night.

Ben wants a nickel for the movies, wants Poppa to ring in No Sale and take out a nickel for him and a nickel for me, but he won't – for a nickel, you can buy a loaf of bread.

My mother comes in, puts on her apron, tells Avram to
have his dinner break. He takes off the tired old apron, puts it on its peg and goes upstairs. Nine-thirty, and the sun still hasn't set. Light slants in the kitchen windows. My father sits at the table, spreads the newspaper out in front of him.
Cashier Robbed in Daring Daylight Holdup: $1,400 Stolen from Coca-Cola Company Clerk. Grace Church sermon on Sunday by the Reverend J. R. Mutchmore: “Can Capitalism Come Back?”

Here's what he's looking for, another article about C. R. Cummings's trip to Soviet Russia. Must be a sharp fellow, this Cummings. He isn't taken in by all the anti-Soviet propaganda, that nonsense about labour camps, famines. Even in the
Winnipeg Tribune
sometimes they have to tell the Soviet side of the story. Cummings talked with a real worker there:
Here we produce cheaply because we have collectivized production. All the workers are working for themselves and not for employers and thus they have every inducement to keep down costs. It is true that we have a lower standard of living than in other countries, but it is still better now than it was before the Revolution.
A planned economy. And here, nothing but waste – farmers pouring milk into ditches to protest that the price is less than the cost. Here they waste everything.

It's hot in the kitchen.
The Grasshopper Armada: The Balance of Nature Must Be Restored.
These plagues of grasshoppers, dust storms, drought.

William Spratt comes down the stairs. Dark grey suit, white shirt, black shoes.

“How're you keeping, Mr. Spratt?”

“Fine, thank you,” he answers, “and yourself?”

“Not so bad.” My father shrugs, raises his eyebrows.

“And the news, Mr. Gershon?”

Avram shakes his head. “No good, no good. I keep thinking it can't get worse.”

Spratt sighs. “That's what you'd think. People have to hope.”

Avram looks up at him. “Have a seat, Mr. Spratt. Have a bite to eat.”

“Thanks, but I've got an appointment. Tell Princess I said hello.”

Something about the man's back as he walks off worries Avram. A man like Spratt out of work – it's not right that people should be denied an honest day's work. Anne's voice rises from downstairs. She's talking with Spratt. Maybe if business picks up a little Avram can talk her into taking the children to the beach on Sunday, taking the Moonlight Special home. He can manage by himself at the store.

He wants to telephone Joseph at his rooming house but the phone is downstairs and Anne gets upset. It's weeks since Joseph came by with his new girl. Daisy. Such a lovely child, such a silly name. A name for a flower, not a person. Joseph's not twenty years old – too young to be thinking about getting married. He's still struggling to make a living, still hasn't been able to go back to school.
The electrician.
He should get an education, a boy like that, with brains. Spending his days pedalling through the city on his bicycle, a ladder attached to one side, tool kit to the other, repairing light fixtures and radios, changing bulbs, for heaven's sakes, for the ones who are still afraid of electricity. Milk in the ditches and society types are still paying $189.00 for a radio-phonograph. It's right here in the paper – $189.00 for a Victor Radio Phonograph Combination. He'll call Joseph tomorrow.