The Knife Sharpener's Bell

Prologue

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My father is wearing a heavy tweed overcoat and a brown wool suit, his best, as he boards the train. Brown tweed cap flecked with green, striped tie. He’s smoking his pipe, a narrow tin of tobacco in his breast pocket: Prince Albert in a can. His white apron he’s taken off and hung on the peg by the back door of the delicatessen. He’s packed two small suitcases – white shirts, clean socks, long underwear.

The train hisses and snorts at the platform. Thirty people to see him off: neighbours, comrades, friends. I’m not yet nine years old. Winnipeg, February 1935. The station is splendid; I’ve never been in a room this big. I tip my head back and my mouth holds itself open, the vault of my palate repeating the vault above. But when my father moves towards the train, something shifts. I’ve been everywhere in the room but now I snap into myself. Say goodbye, my mother instructs. No. I won’t let him go. Poppa! I’m taken up and smoke from his pipe wreathes my head. I nuzzle my face into the scratchy wool. There. That’s what I want. But he puts me down, tries to settle me back onto the platform. My poppa – who has always found a way to fix things, has always found room for what I need – will not be moved. I have to go, he says, his hands smoothing my hair back from my forehead. You’re a big girl now. And he releases me, turns to the comrades, friends. No. The black body of the train shifts beside me. No. I concentrate. Somewhere above me, my mother is speaking, but I don’t hear. In one slight movement I slip by, step up onto the train, over the frightening gap between the platform and the shifting metal body of the train, which will stir at any moment, which will move and sigh and take my father away.

I’m up over the gap, I’m in the strange air of the train. In the flurry of goodbyes, no one has noticed I’m gone. I’ll find my poppa’s seat. I want something of him – a last trace, a last place, a scent – before the train takes him. I slip along the aisles and spot his name on a paper tag. The car is empty; no one sees as I fit myself beneath his seat, between the two rows of back-to-back benches. It feels good. On the platform they’ve noticed that I’ve gone. I hear voices calling me. It doesn’t matter. My heart is bumping inside me. It doesn’t matter; I won’t give up. Make a wish. All my body wants to keep my father home, and I will. It’s with my body that I’ll keep the train from leaving, from taking him away. The voices go by. I’m crouched against the rough fabric at the back of the bench. If they don’t find me, the train won’t go. My breath is scratchy in my chest, but it doesn’t matter. My knees are dirty now from the floor of the train car. I think about dirt and bugs, brush my red plaid pleated skirt. Run my fingers, twisted, up and down, up and down the edges of my red suspenders, my heart getting quieter. There are more voices, but I’m concentrating; I concentrate, shrink into myself so that even I can’t find me. Now it’s my thumb that runs itself up and down the stiff elastic edge of the suspenders. The shuddering stops. The smoke from the stack diminishes, dies.

Chapter One

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Speak when illuminated. Good advice, even if it does come from a sign above a speaker on an elevator. I was taking it from one level of the subway to the next, bent on some little chore. I doubt much of my mind was illuminated. I don’t like the subway particularly; I walk whenever I can, but one knee was a bit stiff. When the doors opened to the platform, I saw that every surface – floor, stairs, columns, even the trash bins – was covered with words. At that moment, I went dark. I can’t say I knew where I was, who I was. I didn’t know why I had come into this forest of words and I couldn’t understand any of them, couldn’t understand the letters they were written in, as if it were some foreign alphabet. A stranger put his hand under my elbow – I must have looked as startled as I felt – and asked me if I was all right. With that touch at my coat sleeve, I understood. They were ads. The station had been papered in words that were intended to make us feel how empty we were so that we would want something. Is this the surface we’ve become, defaced, an illegible scrawl over everything? That solicitous stranger asking me if I was all right – I don’t know.

I got myself home. Got past the beige cardboard packing cases that seem to be taking over my life bit by bit these days, snapped on the television. I do that a lot – leave the set on for company with the volume on mute. Let the images stutter by peripherally as I make dinner or tidy up. Usually I don’t pay any mind to it, but this stopped me: their faces, again. As if they were in the very middle of inventing the world, standing on the edge of Eden. Such earnestness as they waved their resolute placards and chanted their chants, sang their songs. No Blood for Oil. Children, I thought. You are children. You believe in the world and you don’t know what’s waiting for you. You don’t know what gate will swing shut on you, standing there hoping for Eden. I wasn’t sure if I was cursing or blessing them.

So what could I do then but turn up the volume and sit on my bed and listen? Those bright faces, hope cupped in each one, they were ready to give up everything they didn’t know they had – just as we had been when we were that ignorant, had that much hope. I say we when I shouldn’t. I don’t think I ever did hope that purely; maybe for myself, but not for the world. I was always standing at the edge of that heaven on earth holding myself back from it. I doubt I ever believed the way Vladimir did, or my parents.

I turned the television off. The room had gone dark, so I switched on the lights and I did what I do at the end of every working day – I went into the kitchen, turned on the radio and started making dinner. You have to eat. And you have to be glad to eat, to stand in your very own kitchen, in a light that’s there when you touch a switch, and you’ve got food in the cupboards, in the refrigerator, and you can eat. I started slicing the beautiful brown mushrooms that I’d bought at the market just that day, but then the news came on the radio, and their voices, so fresh, and their faces came back to me. I told myself dinner could wait, even though the mushrooms were already loading the air with their fragrance.

I try not to be a coward more often than necessary. All I had to do was pick one more empty box, go into the spare room, open a drawer and take out the papers.

They were in crisp blue file folders, labelled, in order. My tidy daughter has taken care of that. My girl – my grown girl. They have a historical value, she tells me. I have to look after them, even if I can’t stand to look at them. Some day her almost-grown son, my grandson, will want them. All right then, my dear. I will look after them. They’ll go with me to the new apartment, to my new home where the snow will be shovelled by someone else and there will be no icy stairs for me to slip on. A crack in one little bone. It wasn’t even a proper fracture, just a hairline crack in one minor ankle bone – I was out of the cast two weeks ahead of schedule! But that was the last straw. For her. For me too, I guess. Because of course she was right, as she usually is, though I’m not particularly fond of admitting it. Life will be a bit more simple for these bones, a bit easier, once I’ve left this house and am in the apartment. Once I’ve moved. This is the hard part. It’s always been the hard part for the likes of me, the move from one thing to another, but then I get used to it. I always do.

So I took those folders in my hands. How could they hurt me, pieces of paper? I was about to put them in the box but then some of the pages slipped out from their crisp blue cage and words slipped out and I couldn’t stop myself from reading them. Lecture notes from school, a newspaper article. A thin blue envelope with a square Canadian stamp, a sheet of paper in Manya’s elegant hand, one in Lev’s. And then an official document with its seals and signatures, its words and numbers. Article 58-1a. I stand accused.

I’ve kept myself busy, for years, for decades, so I won’t have to stand accused. My mother wouldn’t credit it, but I’m a practical person now, content as long as I’m at work. For the longest time work has been what’s given me to myself. And what’s kept me away from myself, I suppose. Maybe the only way to go on was not to look back. Or maybe the only way not to look back was to go on. Whichever was the case, that was how I managed.

It’s not so foolish, not so cowardly, really, being afraid to go back. I know people, some of them dear friends, who live there. They’re the faithful ones. They hold on and don’t forsake the past, but I’ve watched what I think of as their real lives wane, their real children diminish, while they live amid ghosts or near-ghosts. I have a grown, healthy daughter to admonish me. A grandson who’s almost grown. What good are memories? I’ve worked so hard for so long at not remembering. It has been a lot of work; it has been labour, keeping myself from the past. Hard work, not remembering. Somebody told me that once, in a dark room, the war just years, not decades, behind us. Somebody told me that, once, in a cold room.

But what yanked me into the past? Pieces of paper. Suddenly there I was, in the spare room. Kneeling, my heart yammering away in my chest. On my knees in the spare room, praying at the altar of my cardboard box, shovelling folders into it as if to keep some demon at bay. And remembering. I couldn’t stop myself. Remembering, and wondering what got me here, to a house with a kitchen and light and food. What’s getting me ready to leave.

We’re in the kitchen. Poppa boosts me up onto a chair so I can reach, hands me an orange. Here, he says. Look, I’ll start and then you can peel it yourself. His thumb gouges into the thick peel, then he hands it over, big and orange and not quite round, like a picture in a book. It smells like summer, smells bright even though it’s almost always winter and dark. I put my small thumb in where Poppa’s big thumb made a beginning, work the thick peel loose until it’s all gone, every last nick of orange. Then with sharp little nails I peel off every scrap of white. The orange is still there, but it’s different. I pile the peel and white in a little heap on the table, put both thumbs into the centre and break the orange apart. And now it’s gone, no longer itself. Poppa’s taken off his white apron; he’s reading the newspaper. I can’t think of what to say, don’t want to spoil this present. I poke at a little segment with a finger, shiver. What was whole is broken. I don’t know what to do.

I’m leaning my elbows on the table, leaning my whole body towards the bowl. I can smell the cocoa my mother has stirred into the flour, specks of it swimming in the air, a rich, steamy smell, the kitchen warm from the oven. In another bowl – heavy cream-coloured china – after the butter and sugar, go eggs. One tough rap as her fingers break the eggshell in two and the yellow spills out, the clear stuff around it. Five, six, seven eggs – seven eggs! A king’s ransom, precious. Seven eggs are going into this cake because it’s my brother Ben’s birthday. Now the whoosh as she beats air into the eggs and the sugary, buttery pulp with the old wooden spoon, working round and round the bowl till everything is all of a piece. What was once eggs and sugar and vanilla and butter now are something altogether different, something rich and strange. The mix of flour and cocoa and salt goes in and stops being flour and cocoa and salt and becomes batter, which will become cake – but only if I remember not to slam doors, not to shout and wreck it all. My mother pours the batter from the big bowl into the cake tins, nudging each last lazy bit of batter out, to be sure that both tins are exactly the same. Then the best part happens. She takes the spoon and cleans the bowl, each round carefully overlapping until every last chocolate lick is cleaned off into the tins. Every last lick. Nothing precious is wasted.

That’s why the work of memory is so perilous, why it hurts to do it. It gives you back what you had and with it what you’ve lost: my parents, my brother. Vladimir. I know them dead, now. Know them as I never knew them when they were alive, their lives complete, completed. Change is over; possibility’s over. It’s done. My father will never grow older; my mother will never soften. They never saw a grandchild, never knew my daughter or her son. What do I really know of them, with my child’s perspective, afraid of who they were, what they meant to me, what I mean because of them? The day my aunt Manya told me the facts of life – I was thirteen and my mother had told me nothing – when she told me, I started to cry. Manya sat beside me on the bed, massaging a dab of lavender-scented cream into my palm, her small fingers tugging at each of mine, a firm pull, as she rubbed circles into each joint, the pink nails, white quarter moons at each base. My hands are just like Poppa’s deft, compact hands. My mother’s hands were narrow, the fingers long, elegant. When Manya was finished explaining, the calm, clear words of explanation – mother, father, egg, sperm – I took my hands back, chewed on a thumbnail, the tears starting in my eyes. Why, my aunt asked. Because until then, I didn’t know I was my father’s too. I thought I was just my mother’s child, but with those words, for the first time, I knew I was half Poppa too.

Whose daughter am I? Why do I still need to know? If I am to remember properly, I should start where I started, in the apartment on Main Street near Selkirk Avenue, in Winnipeg, above the delicatessen. When I hear my parents’ stories, I hear them told by others’ voices. This is how children learn about their parents’ mysterious lives before they were born: sitting under the table, at the foot of the stairs, listening while the grown-ups talk. We need to imagine our parents’ lives before ours because we believe – foolishly, utterly – that they were born only to give birth to us. And maybe they were. Maybe our parents’ lives came into being to generate ours, and ours for our children’s.

I do know that I was the last, least, child Anne Gershon bore, the one she didn’t want. I wonder if I ever had a home in my mother, who told everyone who would listen how she ran up and down the stairs in that first month of pregnancy, not caring if something bad happened? And then the child she didn’t want turned out to be a girl.

What good is a girl? I have a fine son already.

The neighbour women don’t like my mother should talk this way. Pooh, pooh, they spit, to keep away the evil eye. Not that anyone is superstitious, religious – the opiate of the masses.

The women know everyone and everything. They knew my father in the Old Country, grew up in the same courtyard in Simferopol. And they like to talk.

Avram Gershon came to Canada, they say, after his first wife walked out on him. Yes, he was married before: a wife and son he left in Russia. The first wife was a beauty – she was a seamstress maybe, maybe a nurse. One story is that she was a medical student, and the man she ran off with was the boarder they took on while she was in medical school. Though if you were to ask Anne, she’d tell you the first wife was nothing but a whore. So poor Avram, his heart was broken. The child was just a toddler when the wife ran away.

So Avram sells everything he has, buys a third-class ticket to Winnipeg. He steps out of the train station, 1914, the middle of nowhere! He could have gone to Chicago, or Buenos Aires, but he buys the ticket for Winnipeg. Doesn’t know a single living soul in all of America, except for Sarah Katz, Hershel’s wife. It’s not that Avram and Sarah were sweethearts; she was married already to Hershel. Avram and Sarah weren’t sweethearts, but they were like family: they grew up in the same courtyard in Simferopol. Sarah Katz. You won’t find a better woman than Sarah Katz. All Avram had was a postcard with her address on it, and that was how he found her. Just walked into her kitchen. She had no idea. She’s down on her knees, washing the linoleum. She hears someone at the door, and she thinks it’s her husband come home early from work. There’s Avram in the doorway, fresh off the boat. Oy, Avram, she says. Can’t find another word in her mouth. Oy, Avram. She had no idea.

Poor Avram, his heart was broken.

The story is that when my mother and father met in Winnipeg, each had a story. Because my mother had a story too, another love story.

You want to know Anne’s story? the women ask. Anne Gershon came from Odessa, one of four sisters, big-city girls. Odessa, it’s all she’d talk about: the cherry orchards, the fountains, the beaches, the opera house. Odessa. She’d say it sweet like candy. My city is the most beautiful city in the world. That’s what she’d say. I never meant to leave.

But she did leave, in 1914, just before the Great War. It all happened because, in Odessa, Anne had a boyfriend, a certain Lev Zvarensky. A fine-looking man: broad shoulders, more than six feet tall he was. Everybody said, now there’s a match for Anne; there’s a man who can handle her. They were talking marriage, Anne and Lev, when suddenly he falls for Manya, the little one, the youngest of Anne’s sisters. Big brown eyes and a waist like a china doll. Suddenly it’s Manya and Lev who are getting married.

What’s the song about sisters? A sister to hit you, and a sister to kiss you, and a sister to steal your love. So for Anne, the taste of Odessa goes sour in her mouth. And she leaves, for a little while, she says. For a little while, till the taste improves.

And why doesn’t she go back? Because of the war, and because she meets Avram. No, no, Sarah Katz didn’t introduce them. Anne just went into Avram’s store. She walks into the store like a queen, points to a can of tomatoes. Those green eyes, so proud she barely speaks a word to him. And Avram is smitten. He talks to her in his soft voice, trying to make her notice him. And meanwhile already she’s decided he’s the one.

Because Avram Gershon was a catch. You should have seen him in 1914: handsome, kind as could be. Such manners, such a gentle voice – one of those handlebar moustaches! Some people said he was no match for a woman like Anne, but Anne was the one he wanted. And she wanted him: a man she could handle. A man who had taught himself English by reading the newspapers, who was doing well enough with the store to send money home. It was not only that he was a handsome man and a capable man: it was politics too. Because they were both believers. You think Avram is a believer? Anne Gershon can talk politics till you’re blue in the face. Listen to me, Yossel Zalinsky, the one with the store that sells artificial limbs, says to her one day, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is no paradise. The Soviet Union is not a democracy, he says. It’s been six whole years since the civil war there ended and still there hasn’t been an election, not in the whole of the Soviet Union. Anne takes a look at him. Democracy? Anne says. She tells him: I’ll tell you about democracy. So Anne folds up her copy of the Vestnik; you’d think she was going to give him a good smack with it! In the democratic United States of America, she tells him, they waited thirteen years after the War of Independence before they had elections! And she looks round the room with those green eyes of hers. Why should the Russian people jump right into a democracy? she asks. They’ve got better things to do, she says. And you know there’s no arguing with Anne Gershon. A real Bolshevik – she once threw a Menshevik right out of the apartment!

So it’s a match. The neighbours warn her that Avram’s a married man, but Anne says, never mind, he’ll divorce her. And – that’s the end of the story! He divorces the first wife. Don’t think it was easy, but he does. And he marries Anne.

My parents’ marriage was a marriage of believers. Like those young faces on the television, my father believed in possibility, in the future. Make a wish. He wanted his children with Anne to be born into a new world, a place where they’d have a chance to get an education. For me it wasn’t like that, he’d say. It’s an old story, he’d say. And we’d say, tell us, tell, and he would.

When I was ten years old, he’d say, my father died. We owed money, and because I was the oldest son it was my job to pay the debts. My mother had no choice: she apprenticed me to a shopkeeper. Twelve hours a day. Not much to eat. No shoes to wear either. The shopkeeper gave me cheap rubber boots that didn’t fit. And so my feet got sores from them. No bed to sleep on either. I’d fold a blanket and sleep under the counter in the store. I was just a kid. Can you imagine? That was before the Revolution; that was the days of the tsar. My mother I’d see only for a few hours every week, when the shopkeeper could spare me and when my mother could get away from her own work. One night, I’m fast asleep under the counter at the shop but all of a sudden I open my eyes. Maybe I heard something or maybe it was just that I could feel someone in the room. I open my eyes and see my mother’s face. She used to wear these long brown braids that she would twist around her head like a crown. I wake up and I see her face like that, with a crown of brown hair, and at first I think, I’m dreaming, this is a dream. But it isn’t. She’s really there. Not saying anything, just looking at me sleeping. And she’s crying. Why is she crying? Because my father’s dead and I’m sleeping under the counter and I have no shoes. Because she had to walk a mile in the dark in the middle of the night to see her child.

That’s enough stories today, he’d say. For you, things will be better.

The stories come like fairy tales – my mother with her broken heart, my father with his, how they left and why and what they had and didn’t. They preside over my birth. And there are other presences too: my brother Ben, standing over my crib. And on the bureau in our parents’ bedroom, the photograph of my father in Russia wearing old-fashioned clothes. With him there’s a very young boy, little more than a baby, a frilly lace collar around his neck. The boy is standing on a chair so that he and my father can shake hands: they’re saying goodbye.

There should be two brothers standing over me like fairy godmothers in a story, watching the blanket rise and fall with each breath.

But it’s Ben who watches over me, Ben who stares and stares at the photograph on the bureau. And he wants to ask, though he knows he never can, he wants to ask who the boy is.

The photo is gone. There was a day my mother tore it up, because it was unbearable to her, that other life my father had before her, any love that wasn’t hers. She wanted him to have one life, his life with her, to have always been what he was to her. The one true love, the one true self. Non sum qualis eram: I am not who I was. When I first read Horace’s Odes, just after the war, that line shook me; it seemed so true and terrifying. All change is loss. I read that in another poem once. Life changes us; we have no choice but to change. And sometimes we turn into a distorted version of what we could have been, what we were.

Much as I like to deny it, I’m an old woman. And I still don’t know about love. My parents’ story was a love story, but look what love did to my father. He let my mother drive him, take his life from him. The stories, films, the songs say complete me with your love. But maybe it’s not that we’re partial and looking to be whole. Maybe it’s that we want to stay partial. We don’t want to grow up, own our lives. So we hand over the keys of our lives, relinquish them to something that’s not real … Poppa loved that first son just as much as he loved Ben and me. But he gave him up.

My father is standing in the kitchen, talking quietly to my mother. He’s come up the stairs at the end of a day at the till, bone-tired, left the white apron on its hook. Later