The Knife Sharpener's Bell Read online

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 the farm girl who helps out in the store will take it away and scrub the heavy cotton clean. My mother sets a roast chicken, potato knishes, carrots on the table. Pumpernickel so dark it’s almost black, her homemade dill pickles. He’s here, she says. That one, the boy. Three months before, the family had written. My father’s first wife was dead. My father’s mother had also written to say that no matter what had happened between Poppa and his first wife, he should take his son in. Blood was blood. My father had sent the fare. And now the boy’s here and Poppa has to make my mother believe that the little mamser, whose mother was a whore, shouldn’t be left to sleep in the street.

  We’ll give the boy a chance, Poppa is saying. We need an extra pair of hands. You have yours full with the little one. His voice is soft, because there’s no arguing with my mo
ther. His voice is soft when he explains that it’s not for himself that he’s asking. He has his own son, a fine boy, and now the little one. Yes, the boy’s a stranger to them, and at thirteen he’s almost a man. All right so he’s an orphan; we’re all orphans someday and here he is, a stranger in a strange land. But it’s not the boy who needs anything and it’s not Poppa. It’s my mother who needs the help. Work – the boy will learn to be a worker, not a hooligan, not an idle bourgeois. An extra pair of hands for my mother. Poppa’s voice is soft, no arguing, so in the end my mother decides: they’ll give the boy a chance. He’ll work; he’ll pay his way. And if he doesn’t, he’s out in the street.

  And the boy is allowed to come into the house with his parcels, stand awkwardly in the room, the image of his father, though there’s something different about the eyes.

  He stands in the room as though rooms were alien to him. At eight, his mother already ill, he’d run away from home. In the chaos of those early years of the Revolution, the Civil War, there were gangs of street urchins, besprizorny. He’d gotten into trouble with the police, come into the custody of child welfare, been sent to a reformatory for street kids. Now he’s in his father’s house.

  My mother tells him he’s to share the room with Ben, who’s been led to believe that the boy’s a cousin, or adopted. The boy can go to Argyle School on Monday. Meanwhile, he can have some supper if he’s hungry.

  On Monday at Argyle School they put him in with the grade three class, so he can learn English. Small for his age at thirteen, he’s still ridiculous. He says little, does what he’s told. He tries out his new words of English on the customers at the store, twisting the sounds around his tongue. And he sweeps out the backroom, picks me up when nobody’s looking, sings songs to me in Yiddish, plays peekaboo. I smile to see him, because he’s there and because I am.

  Annette, he says, giving me my name. The family calls me Baby or Monkey, but the boy gives me my name. It’s the name my mother chose, a name that’s almost hers. You don’t name a child after a living person; it’s bad luck. I’ll call her whatever I feel like calling her, my mother says when the women shake their heads. I don’t believe in superstition. My mother and Poppa don’t believe in all that mumbo-jumbo, never go to shul. She’ll call her daughter whatever she wants to call her. No arguing with my mother.

  The boy doesn’t argue; he keeps out of my mother’s way. He knows a good thing when he sees it. In his first month in the apartment above the delicatessen on Main Street, he grows an inch, my mother setting the plates hard in front of him. Nobody’s going to be able to say that Anne Gershon let a child, not even a mamser like him, go hungry from her table.

  He sticks it out as best he can, listens, makes himself useful, fixes the wheels on Ben’s wooden dog. Sings, on the sly, to me. He doesn’t make any trouble. But even so, he doesn’t last more than eight months in Anne Gershon’s house.

  When did the knife sharpener first come to me? I have to think back as far as memory goes, to the apartment on Main Street, to the crib whose wooden slats I believe I can remember. In this memory, the crib is empty. I’ve been taken from the apartment to the quarantine ward at King George Hospital with scarlet fever. Ben wants to know what happened, where Baby is. She got sick from eating dirty things. He goes into the bedroom where the crib is. Dull sunlight comes through the tall, narrow window. He’ll be sick too. He runs his finger along the baseboards, puts it in his mouth, eats the dust. Nothing happens. It doesn’t work. Only his sister is sick, gone.

  The room is glowing a dark pink, as though a fire were burning at some distance. In hospital I turn and turn my head but the pillow is harsh against my cheek. Over and over again a sound sways in my head, two beats, light and then heavy. The first time I hear it. It won’t let go. Something that’s waiting for me, something that wants me, inevitable. I want to fight against it; I want to give in. That sound that is outside me, nothing of myself, and that is me. I want my mother but she isn’t there. Someone takes my hand, puts something cold against my forehead. I have nothing but the sound and what it’s telling me. Give up; don’t give up. I want to fight against it; I want to give in. Something dark comes down on me and I close my eyes to everything. I have nothing but the swaying in my head, two beats, light and then heavy. I want it gone.

  And then the sound does go away, and I’m better. I want my mother. The gown I’m wearing is too big, white, loose around the collar. But it’s worn, clean; it’s soft. The nurses take me to the window, hold me up against the glass. Far away in the hospital courtyard, I see my mother, dressed in black. Ben is waving with one hand, holding my mother’s hand with the other. And far from the family, on the opposite side of the courtyard, I see the big boy. Just standing, not waving, but smiling up at me.

  Ben’s hand is hot in mine and he’s tugging; my feet aren’t fast enough. I’m eating an ice cream cone, but not fast enough, I can’t keep up and pink cream is dripping onto the crook between my thumb and finger. I lick carefully, then I hear it again, the dah-dong of it. Two beats – light, then heavy. He’s there, half-way down the block, bent over. One hand drags the grinding wheel while the other swings in an arc, and the sound sings out from his hand, two beats. My hand holding Ben’s tenses, squeezes.

  “Watcha doing?” Ben grimaces, working at the chocolate drips. “Let go!” He shakes his hand loose, then offers it. “Don’t squeeze.”

  I nod, but I can’t look at him, the sound puffed up tight inside me. Something bad is going to happen. Fight it; give up. Be good and it’ll go away.

  “Be good. Eat your ice cream.”

  The sound comes in, fills me up. Something I should know, but don’t. I start to cry. Ben yanks at my hand. “You stop it! Be good. Don’t be a big dummy.” I start to wail, the big balloon of sound filling my mouth letting go. On the sidewalk people turn to look at me. Ben’s mouth goes hard. “Didn’t Momma tell you to be good? Didn’t she? Stop it.” I can’t. He leans over, whispers in my ear, “You stop it right now. Right this minute. If you don’t, I’ll tell the knife sharpener on you. He’ll get you. If you’re bad.” He yanks at my hand again. “You shut up! Be good!”

  I close my mouth. I’m bad. The bad man out there. I’m little and I can’t do anything. Ben takes a handkerchief out of his pocket, spits on it, wipes my face. “C’mon. I’ll take you home.”

  I was up visiting friends in the country last weekend, and I decided to go for a walk. It’s one of the things that drives my daughter crazy, taking it into my head to go for a walk by myself along a country road at dawn. It was beautiful though, one of those narrow two-lane roads with tall firs on either side. Not much traffic. The mist was lifting off the paving as the sun touched it. I was walking along the edge on the left side of the highway, the way my father taught me, so I’d be facing the oncoming traffic. I was at a point where the road was quite narrow, no shoulders to speak of and rather steep ditches on either side. A large pickup was coming towards me, and he slowed, because there was no room for error, and I stopped. When he passed, there were two feet of air between us – two solemn feet between me and what would end me. Perfectly safe. I’ve known for a long time about that distance, that closeness.

  “There,” my mother says, straightening the frame. “See how nice that looks?”

  My mother’s bed has a fancy gold bedspread she pulls tight over the covers, and a mahogany headboard with little diamonds made out of lighter-coloured wood. Above the bed she’s put a picture of an old-fashioned lady who’s wearing a dress striped black with white. My mother cut it out of a magazine, and now she’s put it into a frame she found for a nickel at the five-and-dime.

  “She’s watching the opera,” my mother says. The lady in the dress has gold opera glasses in her hand, just like the ones my mother brought from Russia. My mother lets me hold them sometimes, though I have to be very careful not to break them because they’re precious. Gold and a shiny glimmery something on the handle. Mother-of-pearl, she says. I don’t understand how pearl
can have a mother. You hold them up in front of your eyes and everything changes. Everything is closer to you or farther away. My mother used to work at the opera, in her country. In Odessa, where they don’t need a wireless to listen to music, where there’s real music on every corner. Where it’s warm. Where my mother will go, if Poppa talks back to her. She’ll start packing and go home to Odessa where it’s warm. Farther and farther away.

  I stand in front of the picture a long time, looking at the fancy lady. Closer and closer. She has pink on her cheeks. She has the opera glasses lazy in her gloved hand. Her dress is made out of something fancy, shiny. She doesn’t lift her head, but I know she’s looking at me. I think she wants something. My mother calls me for lunch, but I keep thinking about the lady, about what she wants, and I have to keep going back to the bedroom to look at her.

  “You like the picture, Monkey?” Poppa rests his hands on my shoulders. “It looks nice above your momma’s bed, no?”

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  That evening at dinner I’m still wondering what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to do something for the lady, so that everything will be all right. If I don’t do things the way she wants me to do them, something bad is going to happen. Everything will be wrecked. And then I figure it out. I have to sip my milk a special way, so it’s not wrecked. I put my lips against the glass and take three sips and then wait, three sips and then wait. It slips down my throat fine. I finish the whole glass that way and I’m happy. Everything is good. When I go to bed that night I can feel the lady watching, but it’s all right. I can’t tell anyone: not Ben, he’d just make fun of me. And not Poppa and not my mother, because they’d just say don’t be silly.

  Poppa’s smoking his pipe and reading the newspaper in the easy chair in the front room. I can only see the top of his head. “Be a good girl,” he says, “and get me my slippers from the bedroom.”