The Knife Sharpener's Bell (9 page)

They did their best with me. And I did my best, determined that Poppa wouldn't be ashamed of my bad marks. Raya, the Young Pioneer leader, assured me that it was easier to learn Russian than English, English being such an illogical language. She would stay late with me in the Young Pioneer room. The children had hung red banners in the corner with its little framed photograph of Lenin. Raya had the bluest eyes, kind eyes, and short curly hair so blonde it looked gold in the sunshine. She assured me also that in the Soviet Union they were
liquidating illiteracy
 –
. It was a hard word,
liquidate
, but I knew what it meant – liquids, solids. Liquidating illiteracy was a good thing, even though it sounded bad, turning something that had its own shape into something that fit into a container.

Raya told me I would be able to join a Young Pioneer troop as soon as my marks improved. There were all sorts of clubs and activities, summer camp too. As I struggled with my new penmanship, Raya pulled her chair closer, brushed my hair out of my eyes. She told me that she understood that it was hard at first, coming to a new country. But wasn't it good to have to think about things? To know that things could change, that they could be very different from one country to another? In the Soviet Union, they were building a new world full of changes.

No. It wasn't good. I didn't like to have to think about things. I wanted everything to stay the same. I wanted to be with Joseph. I wanted to twirl around on a stool in the delicatessen, to see Poppa's apron hanging on its peg. I wanted to run upstairs and show Mr. Spratt my report card, all A's.

When Raya asked me to bring my mother in to speak to
the teacher about getting more help with my homework, I lied, told her it was my father who came for meetings because he worked closer to the school. I wanted Poppa, not my mother. I told her Poppa had just started work at the Centrosoyuz – at least that was the truth. Poppa would come; he'd make it better.

On Poppa and my mother's free day – they got the whole day off – we'd take the trolley to Manya and Lev's. The streetcars were never as crowded in Winnipeg.
We're jammed in like herrings in a barrel
, Poppa would say. My mother would get into an argument if someone bumped into her or poked her with their bag, and then Poppa would have to calm things down. Sometimes the whole trolley would get into the discussion – in Odessa everything was everybody's business. Poppa and my mother would talk about their work, about how happy they were to be workers, not bosses. It was good to have someone else the boss. What was even better was that they were working only five days a week, seven hours a day – if you could call that work, sitting in an office all day, Poppa said. He was a buyer, a manager at Centrosoyuz, a showplace department store. It was a step up for him, that was for sure. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics a person could do anything. My mother had a job she liked as well, at a nice, smaller-sized store. It was the meetings she didn't like. They had meetings, all the time, where everybody was supposed to criticize everybody else. A waste of time, people making a fuss over little things that could have been talked about over a glass of tea. Not that any of this could have happened in the old Russia, not for Jews. Nor in Winnipeg either – were they hiring Jews as managers at Timothy Eaton's department store? In the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics, anti-Semitism was against the law. No such law in Canada. And child beating, wife beating; they were all against the law too. Because such things were
uncultured
, as they said.
Dark
, from the old days of the tsar. All the old darkness was gone.

That was why we were there: to live in a bright new world. My mother talked about our Uncle Pavel and Auntie Raisa, relatives in Moscow who had helped Poppa sort out the red tape when he first came to get permission for us to immigrate. Pavel and Raisa couldn't have been nicer to him when he was in Moscow; they'd helped out with all sorts of things. Under the tsar, Pavel and Raisa could never even have enrolled in university. And here Pavel was a full professor, of agronomy, at Moscow University, Raisa a medical doctor, a researcher. That was why they'd named their little boy Vladimir, after Lenin.

That was how they talked; that was what they believed, my parents, at least in those first weeks and months. To judge by Lev and Manya's apartment, my father
had
brought us to heaven on earth: four sunny rooms, high ceilings, big windows. In the twenties, under the NEP – Lenin's New Economic Plan – Lev had owned a few trucks, a small shipping business. He had a billiard hall too. Manya had sent us photographs – mahogany tables, stained-glass fixtures – beautiful. A
NEPman
, my mother said, a wheeler-dealer. Dirty money: he made it all in the black market. But my father told her that wasn't fair; it was all legal then. NEPman wasn't a dirty word then. Well, when Comrade Stalin threw out the New Economic Plan, my mother said, Lev was smart enough to know which way the wind was blowing. By 1931 he was a Party
member – that was what landed him a job in Public Works. And it was a good thing for us he did, my father said, because that was how Lev could find us such a nice apartment so fast. Lev was the one who had pulled strings to get my father his job at Centrosoyuz.

What they couldn't stop talking about was how every single person in the Soviet Union had work. People back home wouldn't even be able to imagine it. People want to work. How can you respect yourself when you're out of work? Think of poor Spratt. But if it hadn't been for Manya and Lev, things wouldn't have been as easy for us. Whenever my father tried to thank them for all the help, Manya would just shake her head, wave her hand as if to clear the air of thank-yous. Manya and Lev didn't have any children. Barren, my mother said; Manya's completely barren. Just take one look at her. And it was true: Manya didn't look like anybody's mother, in her slim, neat dresses, her curly hair dark, no grey in it. I can't remember my mother with dark hair.

Whatever she thought, my mother said. But what did my father think? Was there any unease about the choice he'd made for us? He must have worried about Ben and me. He knew Ben's struggles learning Russian. At the Centrosoyuz, Avram had the “Western expertise” that in 1936 they still valued. Only weeks after he started working, there was talk of a bonus at the end of the year, of nominating Avram as a “shock-worker,” someone who'd made a special contribution to the team, because he'd made some suggestions for administrative improvements that they were able to apply. Everybody seemed to want more efficiency, a less backward economy. All those years he and my mother were their own bosses – what really bossed them around was business: one day up, another day down. They could
never count on anything. In Odessa, they had steady work, regular salaries. They were better off already. That's what he told my aunt Manya, as Manya fussed over him, brewing him glasses of tea, slicing extravagant cakes. There was construction everywhere in Odessa – the new Five Year Plan – and Uncle Lev was busy with all of it. The air was full of promises, full of the future. Could anything have been more different from Winnipeg?

But there was one thing, just a minor worry, that he couldn't hide his annoyance at: the bureaucracy. The country seemed knotted in red tape. It had taken my father forever to sort out the family's papers: residency permits, internal identification papers. What bothered him most, a knot he couldn't swallow, was that the identification papers had
Jew
as our nationality. Why should people still think that way? He hadn't been in synagogue since his father's funeral. He'd had enough of that mumbo-jumbo when he was a child. And then to see that here, in the homeland for workers, they marked down
Jew
. . .

Take care of your cousin Vladimir
, they say. Vladimir and Auntie Raisa and Uncle Pavel – I never even heard about them in Winnipeg – are visiting from Moscow, so all the cousins are at our house. Pavel is Reva's husband's sister's son. Reva is my mother's oldest sister, so Pavel is fifteen years younger than Poppa. I'm to call Pavel and Raisa “auntie” and “uncle” when they aren't really my aunt and uncle. They're not blood relations at all – they're cousin's cousins. And I'm stuck inside looking after Vladimir because it's too cold for us to play outside. Ben and the other boys can play outside, but not us.

“Such important people, Pavel and Raisa,” my mother
says. “Be nice to them. They've been very good to us. Important people: a professor, a doctor. You see? In
my
country you can do anything – it doesn't matter if you're a Jew.”

I don't care. And I don't care about the Five Year Plan either, whatever it is, the adults blabbing on about it non-stop when they're not gossiping about each other. Auntie Basya and my mother can never get along. As soon as Basya leaves the room, before she even leaves the room, my mother's talking about her. Backstabbing. I chew the juicy English word, thinking in English English English. At least my mother can't come inside my head and pick what language I think in.

The big boys lumber around the apartment knocking things over and then running off. They're always bossing me around or running off to play without me. It's all right for Ben to go with them, but not me. As if I'm a baby. Vladimir's the stupid baby.

They want me to look after him, and I will.
Sit still
, I tell him. And he's so good, just like Poppa. He sits still while I fix his hair, tie the red satin bow. There! It's done. He looks ridiculous.
Ridiculous.
I say it to myself in English, take him to the mirror.

He looks at himself, the dark bangs cut straight across his forehead, the narrow hazel eyes, green mixed with brown, changeable eyes. He looks at himself and then me. The watery winter light on both of us, showing everything.

“I'm a girl,” he says. “But I'm not.” And turns to look at me again. “What are we going to do?”

I walk to the window, run my hand along the polished dark wood of the table, the lace tablecloth Manya crocheted for us. A pretty table, a pretty cloth. I feel the meanness in me, put a hand to my hot cheek. I'm ready to open my
mouth, use my mother's voice, my mother's words. Wreck everything.

I look at Vladimir, who looks back at me, patient.

It's not fair.

I walk back, take the bow out of his hair.

“All right,” I say, my face cooling. “Let's not play this game.”

There. It's over. I can do what I want; I can be mean or fair. I run my hand through his soft hair, sorting it out. “What if I teach you how to read instead?” Raya, the Young Pioneer leader, was right when she said it would be easy to learn the Russian alphabet – it only took me two weeks. Now I don't need any help, I don't even think about reading. Spelling's a snap – it all makes sense.

I can teach Vladimir a few letters, give him a head start. Kids here don't go to school till they're eight.

“I already know how to read,” he says. “My mother taught me.”

Raisa and Pavel and Vladimir – they're a funny family, always so serious, always talking everything out. No one seems to shout in Vladimir's family.

I take down the
Red Fairy Book
, the one in English I brought from Canada. “I'll read you something new,” I say. I translate as I read, the way I have to translate everything now.

My mother takes me through her city. “Now
this
is a city, Annette! Don't tell me you ever saw anything like this in Winnipeg. It makes me sick even remembering Winnipeg. I don't know how they ever fooled me into going there . . .

This
is a city.
This
is what you call a street. I told Basya she should have taken you last week down Deribasovskaya
Street, but she never listens to me. I give her a few suggestions on what to do with those girls. She knows nothing about raising girls – her first three were boys – and does she listen to me? No. She's full of her own opinions. The girls are spoiled through and through, running around like wild animals. She's got to teach them how to behave. I've never seen such hooligans, not girls.”

As my mother walks me through her city, I'm walking a different city, with Joseph. He's taking me to the Palace, where they're showing a Laurel and Hardy, and a cartoon, and a newsreel, and then we still get to see the feature talkie. Tallulah Bankhead is the star; we both like Tallulah Bankhead. Half a block from the house, we stop and Joseph kneels in the snow and wraps my scarf tighter around my face and then he tucks my mittens just so into the knitted cuffs of my coat. There, that's better.

“Such an ugly city, Winnipeg,” my mother says, and we're walking down Deribasovskaya Street. Something in me agrees, though I don't want to. In Winnipeg, I'd take the long way home from St. John's Library at Salter and Machray, the wind sneaking up the sleeves of my coat. Church Avenue and Anderson Avenue, St. John's and then Mountain, College, Boyd, Redwood, Aberdeen. I'd look at the fronts of the buildings, wanting something. Most of the houses were of wood siding with little peaked roofs. But how the doors went with the windows, where the trees stood in the yards: it was wrong. There was always something missing. The only building I liked was the little ice-cream-cone-turreted Ukrainian church, a building with a sense of humour. It wasn't solemn and straight like other churches. But even it looked lonely, like it didn't belong. Nothing belonged, and it hurt, the way the furniture in the rooms in the apartment
on Main Street hurt. And my clothes, the way they felt against my skin, the way they looked when I saw myself in the mirror. My own face made me sad, the eyes too big, nose crooked, nothing in the right place. In the picture books at Aberdeen School, the little girls' faces were right, the houses were right. The windows and doors were where they were supposed to be and trees shaded the houses. Rose bushes climbed up the walls. In Winnipeg I'd never seen a rose, except in a book. Something was wrong, something was missing on Main Street, on Selkirk Avenue, in Winnipeg.