The Knife Sharpener's Bell (26 page)

That wild decision I made during the war to let Joseph go home without me, it came, at least in part, from what I felt those days, that my life belonged to the lives of the others fighting alongside me. And then at last the war was over. I was alive. I held firm to my choice, happy that I was alive, and that I was at last in school, as Poppa would have wanted. I
wanted my life. And even if, because of my alien background, my Jewishness, I didn't exactly fit the image of the good Soviet citizen, I could follow Pavel and Raisa's path. Educate myself, contribute. Belong. Or think that I belonged. Although around us the evidence was gathering – the arrests, the purges – we kept our heads down. Believing that work, that good intentions, that patience, would all pay off. Hadn't we, after all, survived the greatest evil? Surely now we deserved a life. We told ourselves that ugly little incidents like the one at the puppet theatre were just surface disturbances. But as the evidence gathered, it began to shake even the sturdy belief of people like Pavel and Raisa, whose lives had as their foundation the gifts, and the purpose, the Revolution had given them. Even they began, inwardly, to question.

The night after the puppet show I come home from school to a quiet apartment. Instead of being in the midst of her usual cheerful and efficient dinner preparations, Raisa is sitting, listless, on the davenport. As always, Pavel's at the table, reading. He picks up a copy of
The Lives of the Saints
, a little volume the size of a hand – Raisa's, not Pavel's – the cover a moss green buckram with gilt lettering. Pavel never can resist a bookstall. But there's something in his face that worries me, that reminds me of the afternoon when we heard about the occupation of Odessa, that collapse. We talk of how buildings fail, as if volition were involved, as if there were a choice. I saw that collapse, once, in Pavel's face, I saw the structure fail. I'm afraid of seeing it in his face again. I lean over his shoulder to read:

His limbs, torn and mangled by many cutting blows, are commanded to be broiled upon the fire in an iron
framework which was of itself already hot enough to burn him and on which his limbs were turned from time to time, to make the torment fiercer, and the death more lingering . . .

A description of the martyrdom of Saint Lawrence.

“Pavel?” I ask. “Pavel, it's kind of awful, isn't it? Grotesque?”

“I suppose so.” He turns to me, gripping the book on a slight twist, the cover askew. “But what's intriguing to me is not that these people's suffering was grotesque. It's that they themselves are sublime.”

At the tone in his voice, Raisa sits up. “Pavel, dear, you're bending the pages.” Raisa can never bear seeing someone mishandle a book.

“Sublime, really, the human spirit. Even in pursuit of a false god.” He looks at his hands, sets the book carefully beside him. “These people believed in something you and I consider absurd. And yet this belief, it enraptured them.” He pauses, looks up at me again, again that look on his face. “It was a belief in goodness. At least that's how it started.”

Raisa frowns, gets up to sit across from him. “Pavel . . .”

“The State,” his voice is soft now, “why is it that we accept the State as though it were a natural phenomenon? We believed . . .”

“Pavel, please. This is not a conversation for children . . .” Raisa takes the book from his hand. “Annette, I should be making us dinner. Can you help me?”

After dinner, I find her sitting on their bed, the book closed on her lap.

“Raisa,” I ask, “are you all right? Pavel doesn't seem himself tonight.”

“We've just, we've been worried lately. It's work, Pavel's and mine.”

“You work too hard, both of you.”

She looks up and past me. “Sometimes it feels as though I've just put my head down for thirty years and worked and never looked up, never checked which way the wind was blowing. It's a mistake, Annette. It's a mistake to play the innocent, use work like a drug.”

“Raisa?”

She gets up. “But the work has been good. I've done good. I have nothing to be ashamed of. Pavel has nothing to be ashamed of either. We've always done our work as it had to be done, and up to now that's been enough. Hasn't it? I see how we are, Annette. Exempt; privileged. And now, now when I hear about others suffering, about this suffering that we have allowed, somehow, to be invisible to us . . . How is it possible that I didn't see, that there's been a hidden suffering behind all the visible suffering I've tried to heal? I want to see myself as innocent, Annette.”

“Raisa, I don't understand.”

“Of course you don't. We don't want you to.”

I rub my hands over my face to push away the image of Raisa's face when she said that, of the puppets, the invisible puppeteers. Not a conversation for children. They didn't want us to understand. Because knowledge was dangerous. But by then I wasn't a child. Or I didn't think I was. I was twenty-four.

Because there's a rumour of chickens, I'm standing in line in front of the store, in the cold, the grey dark of Moscow in winter, hoping to bring a trophy home for Raisa, to divert us, to cheer us all up.

How long have I been waiting here in line? And for what? I stare at the plastic displays of food in the windows of the shop – ham, chicken, sausages, cheese, fruit – a relic from the days when few could read.
We're liquidating illiteracy.
I feel a nudge behind me, inadvertent.

“Excuse me, Comrade. Pardon.” A man's voice. A string bag has bumped my knee, a grey overcoat brushed against mine. I put my hands back in my pockets to warm them, look down at the stooped shoulders of the older woman in front of me.

The man behind me touches my shoulder. “Annette? Annette Gershon?” His face is narrow, grey. “It's me. Anatoly Trubashnik. We were in school together in Odessa.”

I suddenly see, through the man, the boy I knew: the brown hair, steel-rim glasses; the soft, clever mouth, warm and hard at the same time, the residual faint irony in the smile. And those green eyes, so like my mother's. It's been nine years, nine and a half. How did he know me?

“Anatoly. What are you doing here?”

“I'm in science at the university. What about you? How is it that you're in Moscow?”

“I got out of Odessa in '41, just before the siege. I have relatives here.”

He hears it in my voice. “Your family . . . ?”

I shake my head.

“I'm sorry.”

I can't look at him.

“Sorry,” he says.

“And you?” I draw in a breath. There's a greyness about him.

He shrugs. “Me? I'm fine, what's left of me. Didn't finish my hitch in the army until a year and a half ago. Just before
the war ended I caught some shrapnel when the guy beside me got blown to bits.”

I flinch.

“It's fine,” he says, some sort of smile working along his face. “None of the essentials got clipped.”

“My brother was killed at Stalingrad. Were you –?”

“Stalingrad? I was too young.”

Of course he was; we're the same age.

“I enlisted when I was eighteen; it was '44.”

“Where were you, then? Where were you stationed?”

“We were moving back into Poland.” He leans in close to me, whispers. “
Liberating
Warsaw.”

I hear the disgust in his voice. “What . . . ?”

“Warsaw.” His mouth against my ear. “We stood by the river, did nothing. Let the Germans grind them up.”

I reach up, whisper back, “I, I heard . . .”

“A pack of lies.”

I look around. No one's paying attention to us, a thin young man in civilian clothes, a slight, attentive young woman.

He presses his lips together. “I must be crazy talking to you like this. Annette?”

“What?”

“Annette, come to my place; come for dinner.” He takes my hand. “Let's go.”

“Right now? I wanted to get a chicken . . .”

“Aren't you sick of this? How much of your life have you spent standing in line? Come on. I'll find us something in the cupboard.”

For a block we say nothing. He's let go of my hand. Maybe he's regretting his chicken. Or his words.

“Freezing out here,” I say at last.

“Comrade, as a daughter of the working class, you must be stalwart!” He takes my hand again, squeezes it. “It's not far. Remember we used to walk to the library to study together? Did you have a crush on me?”

“It was brotherly love, Anatoly. Respect for a comrade. Besides, you were a bad influence.”

“Me? I was a mamma's boy!”

“The girls used to say you sold stuff on the black market.”

He laughs. “Somewhat of an embellishment of the facts. I was a teenager. I retailed a few cigarettes from wholesalers. Hey, remember Comrade Lozovsky, that sanctimonious physics teacher? The one who only had one arm – he kept the empty sleeve tucked into the pocket of his suit jacket?”

I start to laugh. “And I was so immersed in my studies, and adolescence, that I never even noticed the missing arm?”

He laughs again. “That adolescent hormonal fog. No wonder they keep the boys and girls separate these days. Hey, can we just stop for a minute?” He leans against me, catches his breath. We're passing a vast construction site surrounded by high board fences. Anatoly's face sharpens. He leans towards me, whispers again in my ear. “The fence means they're using forced labour. See the guard towers at each corner, the armed sentries?”

We walk a half block in silence again, then stop in front of a narrow stone building. “This is us,” Anatoly says. “Fifth floor.”

In the entrance he presses a switch and a dim yellow light floods the vestibule. His eyes are the way I remember them, those light green eyes. “Annette, do you ever feel . . . It's just, sometimes it's hard to feel that I'm the same person I was back then, that Odessa schoolboy.” His voice resonates in the bare vestibule. “It, it scares me, how things change. How easy
it is for people to change.” He leans towards me, touching my shoulder. How did he know me?

I am not who I was.
Are we still young, Anatoly and me? There's something in his face, in the way that he holds himself, that argues against it. Are we who we were, who we should be? For a moment we're quiet in the quiet building.

“Do you want to go? You can go. You don't have to come in.”

“No, no. I can visit for a bit.”

“Then come on up,” he says. “I bet you're starving.”

The elevator's not working. By the time we get to the top of the stairs, Anatoly's out of breath. He fits the key into the lock, calls out, “Misha? You here?” Picks up a scrap of paper from the table. “Lucky boy: my roommate's at his uncle's for dinner. The aunt's a fabulous cook. And the people you're staying with, Annette?”

“Cousins. Not real cousins, not blood relations, but our families were close. I've lived with them since I got here. They're good people.”

“I have to scrounge in the cupboard. I'll be right back.”

I undo my coat, run my fingers along the books on Anatoly's shelves. A wall of shelves. The window in the room is large, and because the building's on a rise, I can see grey black bits of the river, its broad, careful, elegant curves. Except for the books, the furnishings are sparse: a davenport they must use as a bed at night, a cot tucked underneath it, an armchair.

“We take turns: one week Misha gets the davenport and I get the cot, and the next week we switch.” Anatoly has come back into the room, half a loaf of dark rye in his hand, some cheese, a bottle of vodka. He holds them up. “Provisions. Take off your coat; have a seat.”

“It's chilly in here. I'll keep it on for now.” I sit down in the armchair. It's leather – must be of pre-war, probably pre-Revolutionary, vintage, the red of its leather darkening to crimson with wear in places, fading to pink where the sun has taken the colour.

“Bread's fresh.” Anatoly hands me a sandwich. “I haven't even asked what your work is.”

“I'm taking architecture at the Mossovet Workshops here.”

“You must be a good student.”

“I don't know. Too good, maybe.
Do what the teacher says.
Deferential. And the head of the school, Chernikhov – he has this rigid, elaborate system of pedagogy. I sometimes wonder what I'm learning;
whether
I'm learning or just acquiescing.”

“Do I detect anti-social tendencies in that statement?”

I smile, not sure whether it's all right to laugh.

Anatoly smiles stiffly, walks over to the window. “Your cousins, what do they do?”

“Pavel teaches agronomy at the university; Raisa's a doctor. She used to work in a clinic but after the war she was promoted to health officer at the Machine Tool Factory. She's doing a study on health hazards there. She's probably up for a commendation for it. And their son Vladimir just got into medical school.”

“Genuine Soviet citizens all,” Anatoly says.

I hear the acid in his voice, the sneer at my family, at what they've been able to make of their lives. He's still facing the window. I study his back, the tense shoulders. What am I doing here with him?

“The reason that we're so happy about Vladimir getting into medical school is because there's a quota for Jews. Maybe you didn't know.” I button my coat again, reach for my gloves.

He turns from the window. “You going?”

“Yes.”

He stands there. I'm on the landing when I hear him call me. “Annette, please? I'm sorry. Please come back. You don't want me drinking all this vodka myself, do you?” I turn around. “I'm sorry, Annette. I don't know what gets into me sometimes; I just get sour. Please don't go.” He takes my gloves from me, smoothes them. “Just stay for a bit.”