The Knife Sharpener's Bell (25 page)

I can see that alternate self again, can picture United College, the lawns of the campus a green dream, the traffic on Portage Avenue.

“Before I do anything more, Annette, I want you to tell me: do you want to come home?”

I take Joseph's hand in both of mine – a small hand, not that much bigger than mine, the fingers intelligent. No wonder he's so good at his work. I could live with Joseph.

“Annette?”

I turn it over, palm up, pat it.

Home.

I have everything. Even Manya's letter, the one Joseph brought from Odessa for me. I take it out of its folder, put the paper to my face – is it possible that it still smells of lavender?

May 15, 1944
My Dearest Annette,

Joseph will bring you this letter. I know you will want me to come and visit the family in Moscow, but I will have to wait some time before I'm strong enough to travel and, as you're no doubt aware, travel is still difficult.

I know also that you'll want to hear more about your mother and father. I've picked up my pen many times and then put it away. I'm sure you understand how difficult it is to turn to those events.

There was something unreal about the first days of the occupation. Even Lev seemed paralyzed at first, I think because he felt so bad that he hadn't gotten us out of Odessa in time. And he'd failed to convince Basya and Reva and their families to leave, as well as your mother and father.

Lev had had contacts all along with the groups that were forming into the Resistance. I guess he knew the occupation was inevitable. He'd arranged for all of us to join the Partisan cells that were planning to operate from the catacombs.

You have to understand that Anya, your father, me, your aunts and uncles – we weren't of any value as fighters. So we wouldn't have been welcome. That's the way it is with the Partisan groups. But Lev had it all worked out. Joseph has probably told you about the cache of guns, ammunition? And Lev had valuables too: some jewellery, other things. All of this was our “ticket” into the protection the Partisans offered.

And there was something else. Do you remember your mother's stories? About the family, generations of us, working in the catacombs, the mines? I know Anya didn't have
the greatest credibility with you . . . You might have thought these were fairy tales, but it was all true. Your grandfather, great-uncles had all kept detailed maps, plans of the catacombs, as souvenirs after they'd retired. They'd tell endless stories, argue about the various tunnels, paths. Lev had been the keeper of this archive, and the maps were invaluable to the Partisans.

And this is how we were all to stay together. It was our best chance.

Your mother refused to go. She said Lev wanted us all buried alive. You know how she could be when she got her back up. “I won't live in a sewer,” she said. “I'm not going to live like a mole, like an animal, underground.”

It did seem like madness, going into the catacombs. Reva and Basya also refused to join us. Maybe if they had agreed, your mother could have been persuaded. I tried to convince her that it was the only choice we had. I even – you'll laugh at this (you know I'm not in the least religious) – I even asked her to pray before she decided.

“I don't talk to God any more,” she said.

You must realize, though, that even if your father had been able to persuade her, there's no telling if it would have saved them. It didn't save Lev. We were all so frightened – it was hard to know what was right. Your mother was always so certain, and your father's tendency was just to go along. It was as if his last act was to put you and Ben on that train.

I'll write more later, my darling girl. And hope to see you before too long.

Your devoted aunt,
Manya

How is anyone in our shiny new century to understand the choice I made then? How am I to understand it myself? It seems so foolish, from a distance; worse than foolish. I was eighteen and an orphan. I was my own worst enemy. I was my truest self.

I'm beside the creek in Gorky Park, sitting on the bank, the ground still breathing damp from yesterday's rain. Tentative spikes of forget-me-nots are pushing up through the earth. Soon all the undergrowth here will be starred with their flowers, a blue haze, as though the earth were full of possibilities.

I've come to think. Here, in this little crevice in time. I'll float here, drift, till I've figured it out. So many voices in my head – Raisa, Pavel, Joseph – all telling me:
Go. Go home.

I pull my knees to my chest, rub my chin against the soft cotton skirt. What would Poppa want me to do? I could live with Joseph, who loves me, who I've loved since I was a baby. Joseph, who first called me by my real name, who gave me myself. The Joseph I was taken from could take me back. I could have my own family again, a bit of it.

Who do I belong to, whose am I now? I have to decide, like Poppa, who chose to come here, wanting to make us a life.

If we hadn't come we'd be alive, together.

But he did choose.

When I think Winnipeg, I think delicatessen: Poppa behind the counter, his white apron tied round his waist. But there is no Poppa, no delicatessen.

I take out Manya's letter, sniff at the lavender. Read it again; read and reread it. Touch the inked letters with my fingers.

I can feel the damp seeping through the cotton of my skirt, the May air, mild today, stroking my forearms, sun filtering through the branches of the trees, the complex shift of pattern on my skin.

Pavel, Raisa, Vladimir. Do they belong to me? Are they borrowed?

I don't own anything.

I put Manya's letter back in my pocket, twist my head to ease the ache in my shoulders and suddenly, with that single gesture, I'm back in Odessa, at Manya's, the samovar steaming, agleam, Manya offering poppyseed cake warm from the oven. I can smell the sugar-and-butter smell of it. Done to a turn, like everything Manya made. A friend of Manya's is over with her new baby – we're celebrating. Real French champagne for a toast. The grown-ups have wineglasses in their hands, so they give the baby to me to hold. He's a pretty baby, a head full of black hair, a newborn, just days old. You can see his newness; the little body is still used to the underwater world of his mother's belly, still adjusting to gravity, the neck barely strong enough to turn his head. I have him on a pillow in my arms and as I watch, he turns his head weakly, the pillow cushioning it as it wobbles. And suddenly I remember, fully, in my body, remember.

I remember the world receiving me, how good it felt to be
not able
and to have the world make up for it, to have the world come to me without my having to go to it.

I'm not some helpless infant.

I'd been thinking that someone else would decide, that I could just drift. That what I
didn't
do would give me a life. If I wasn't greedy, if I wasn't rude. If I wasn't too full of myself. If I sat tight, if I didn't ask for too much, if I didn't try too
hard, if I didn't presume. If I held back what I wanted. Held it back until it was unrecognizable to me.

As if my deference, my meekness, could appease the gods. What gods – the lady in the picture? My mother? My mother, of course. It took so much to appease my mother. And now my mother and all she was is gone, except for how she lives inside of me. I look at my hands. Poppa's hands. I'm not Poppa's any more. I'm no one's daughter now.

I can't keep waiting for my life to happen, to be loved, to grow up. I can't wait for someone else to take me into his arms and carry me into the future, into life. I have to make a life for myself, wish it into being.

I hear it now, the sound, but differently from the way it has rung in my mind before. The sound comes, swaying, full bellied. Two beats, light and then heavy, and a gap in between. Nearby. But it's not a knell; it's a call, and I'm not afraid. I'll stay. I won't leave Moscow. I won't leave Pavel and Raisa and Vladimir.

I was my own worst enemy and my truest self. At eighteen, in the wake of all my dead, maybe it was loyalty that made me decide to stay. I told myself I wouldn't betray my parents' decision to believe in the workers' paradise. I couldn't bring myself to give up on their version of goodness, the golden promise at the core of their lives – despite the many things about Comrade Stalin's country that I already knew. The many things I knew and tried not to know. If I had been allowed to know nothing of the greater horrors of the Terror, didn't I at least know our own little corner, Lev's arrest? Polankov had told me about the execution of the prisoners at Lubyanka during those days of anarchy when
the Germans were so close – hadn't I heard the shots myself? Weren't these clues, crumbs that should have led me somewhere near the truth? But we were just coming out of an even greater terror, out of a time when the enemy was clear, when that dream of the triumph of the Russian people, of their heroism, was much more than a dream.

And then again, maybe it wasn't loyalty to my parents, but loyalty to Vladimir, the promise that I made him that day they took Polankov away. And loyalty to all the borrowed family – Pavel, Raisa, Vladimir – that the war had constructed for me. Maybe I was afraid to lose the tentative new self that the war, and my parents' absence, had given me, that Pavel and Raisa's less complicated, less painful love had given me. Their love felt – still feels – absolute, even though we weren't blood. They were the family I chose that day, rather than the flawed one given me. Given and then taken.

I told myself I wasn't afraid, but maybe I acted only out of fear, maybe one more change, one more translation, was more than I could bear.

Or maybe it was that I wanted to make any decision. Anything to break that passivity that had been cultivated in me. Maybe it was that deep stubborn streak, the perverse need to want what I wanted, however arbitrary.

I look back and want to grab that girl by the shoulders and shake her, tell her she's a fool. I wish I could shake her from her stubbornness, her certainty; give her the fore-knowledge to make a better choice. But I can't unwish any of those false steps, because each one of them took me to my daughter, and I can't unwish her. Wouldn't unpick a single stitch that gave me her.

Chapter Eight

I put the receiver down, decide not to dial. Why do we call it “dialing” still? I don't know when I last saw a rotary phone. I was about to call my daughter. My grandson volunteers weekends for a children's theatre company. They're putting on a puppet show. My daughter left a message to say she has tickets for the opening. I was about to call, to say I was coming, but the puppets intervened. Now I have puppets in my head and I'm remembering Vladimir, in Moscow, when he was just about my grandson's age.

I was in my third year of architecture, working very hard, evenings, weekends, but with the energy of the young. Despite the two perspective drawings and two elevations that I needed to finish, Vladimir had cajoled me into going with him to the puppet show at the Obraztsov Theatre. What a combination of adoration and condescension boys that age feel for their female relations. All he had to do was loom over me – how quickly he grew, after the war, to loom over me – and smile. And of course, as always, I let him talk me into going along.

When we first arrived in the theatre, it seemed like just the antidote to my long week of work. The theatre was
warm, crowded – a full house – and it was good just to sit, to close my eyes and feel all that space above me open.

The Obraztsov Theatre was remarkable. I didn't think much of the building itself, but the performances were extraordinary. They still are. The concert that night began with a series of satirical sketches. The cunning faces of the puppets were caricatures of stock Russian types: stuffy bureaucrats; buxom, meddlesome housewives; nervous scholars. There was a gypsy chorus of fifteen puppet dancers, each an individual in miniature. One little fellow kept hitching up his jacket as it slipped off his shoulder – a virtuoso performance, the puppeteers invisible, the little characters fluent, as though they were willing their own actions.

And then, about the fifth skit, four figures appeared on stage in loud checked suits, their features grotesque: exaggerated hook noses, cruel, thin mouths; their chins weak, eyes sly. They capered around the stage to a parody of American jazz played against a background of English-sounding gibberish. The sketch was titled “Cosmopolitan Chorus.”

Rootless cosmopolitan
: the new code for “Jew.”

I closed my eyes against it and saw my father's lost face – first whole, as I remembered it, then distorted, garbled by the hate that killed him. A second later, Vladimir grabbed my hand and pulled me from my seat and past the insulted knees of our neighbours, who sat and watched and laughed.