The Knife Sharpener's Bell (22 page)

Later
we will drink
all the juices of the earth,
tilting the world
like a cup.

I know you're not big on poetry, but isn't it beautiful? And it makes me sad. All that sacrifice. And now more. It helps me understand why you had to sign up. It's not that I'm glad. But I understand.
Write soon.
Love,
Annette

That long winter, it seemed we'd never see another season. But winter leaked into spring, and Pavel found full-time work for me at the Mostorg, one of Moscow's biggest department stores. By the spring of 1942, the Mostorg was five floors of mostly bare counters, because every button factory was putting out bullets, so customers had to fight over the little merchandise that was left to sell. My days were filled with typing and filing. At the end of the day I'd look up and there'd be a stack of papers beside me that meant I'd been useful. Like the brigade work, it made me feel real, kept me from thinking. How many decades now have I used work as an anesthetic?

After a couple of months, I started interpreting for customers, snooty American women mostly. Whenever I heard the loudspeakers talk about how we were fighting “shoulderto-shoulder” with the Americans, all I could think of was the padded jackets of those society ladies. After so many years of making sure I never let a word of English slip in public, I was being asked to translate. And then they seconded me into a job translating Lend-Lease purchase orders and invoices. So I paid out my days moving from English to Russian and Russian to English, my old life seeping into the new. Beside the little plaster bust of Lenin on my desk, I had a vintage English typewriter from the days when the Mostorg was Muir and Merrilees, back before the Revolution. The
e
on it was broken, I remember, the tail of the bottom curve missing. Poor old
e
, the most common letter in English, the proletarian vowel – it'd been worn out with work. There were other relics too, bone-china teacups, saucers. It's strange, what lasts, the past surviving inside certain stubborn objects, certain stubborn heads. You find pools of the past in the present, currents of the future. After
the Revolution, people were so sure they could sweep the old away – tearing down buildings, churches; renaming the streets. But within people's heads, within china teacups so thin the light came through, the past persisted. While out there, in the world, in time, things stopped, ended. People still called it Muir and Merrilees. Some of the customers must have still remembered those times. Those who, like Joseph, had been kids during the Revolution were only in their thirties during the war, young. Now and again I'd find myself imagining Joseph as a little boy in the store with Poppa or his mother. But of course they'd never been to Moscow.

Sometimes it felt as though I lived from one of Joseph's letters to the next, that taste of home, the knowledge that at least one part of my family was safe. He didn't write long letters, but he wrote often, sent us pictures of Nathan, a dark, sweet-eyed boy. Everything changed once the war began, so business was good for Joseph. He kept busy repairing radios. People were glued to their radios for war news. And he was selling plenty of new ones too, though the government was threatening to stop civilian production. To Joseph's tender, hasty letters, Daisy would add a note, a funny little sentence or two about her spindly Victory Garden or the lopsided socks she tried knitting for the troops. Even Nathan would add a scrawled little drawing in crayon.

Beyond the letters from Joseph, I think it was Vladimir who kept us all – me, Raisa, Pavel – able to hope in those months, as we ploughed through long days of work, Raisa at the clinic, Pavel back at the university. As we waited for word from Ben, thought and didn't think about what had happened in Odessa. Every time I looked at Vladimir it
seemed he'd grown. He had those knobs of elbows, long fingers, broad palms; an elongated creature. On one of those endless July days, he dragged me to the Park of Culture and Rest, Gorky Park, to see an exhibit of captured German equipment: parachutes and uniforms and shoes. They even had downed planes. The Germans put cutters on the front wings of the planes to slice into the metal cables that held the barrage balloons to the ground, those huge lolling inflatables that were set up to protect us from low-flying planes. Vladimir was eager to get close enough to see the planes, even though they were scarcely more than wrecks.

We walked out into our sunlight and waited for a trolley to the park. Even though we were the only ones getting on the trolley, I had to follow Vladimir to the back because the rule was that only pregnant women were allowed to get on at the front. It offended Vladimir's sense of fairness ever to bend the rules. There were, in fact, two pregnant women seated at the front, the worn flowers on their cotton dresses stretched tight, distorted, over their bellies. War or no war, women still got pregnant. Vladimir, in the meantime, was chattering on about the People's Army squad he'd seen pulling an enormous barrage balloon across the square like a pet whale on a leash. Then he was on to one of the fantastical but accurate stories he loved to collect. This time it was spiders: the British used spiders' silk for the crosshairs on gunsights. They'd found that the common British spider had the strongest silk. But even spider silk wasn't fine enough, so each strand was sliced in half with a razor blade. And then they let the spiders go, not wanting to hurt them, because these patriotic spiders were helping the war effort.

When we got to the park, the sun beat down on my head, burned into the skin of my forearms. We walked under
the tall cool shade of the chestnuts, their candelabra blossoms long gone. Along the path were families picnicking, blankets and tablecloths spread out on the grass, and suddenly I was crowded again with the absences I could never fend off, no matter how busy I kept myself: Poppa and Momma, Manya and Lev. Ben, who was somewhere fighting. Ben, who had told me over and over again that it was foolish to hope. And though hope was useless, I couldn't stop.

Vladimir and I went down into a stream bed. The path was overgrown and still damp with rain from the day before. By the edge of the path we found patches of tiny wild strawberries. I popped a few in my mouth, despite Vladimir's cautions about cobwebs, bird spit, beetle footprints. Down an even smaller path right along the edge of the stream we found a clump of tiny blue flowers: forget-me-nots. They should have been blooming in May, not July: spring flowers in the middle of summer. The wind shifted a branch and we were outlined in sunlight, then the light shifted again into shadow. It was as if, in that spot, it was still spring, while all around us was summer.

Place is time. How can that be? But it is. Somewhere else there was peace, while in Moscow there was war. Just as now, in this city, we are at peace while all around – Israel, Chechnya, Afghanistan – there is war. In that moment in the shade beside that stream, all I wanted was not to be where I was. I wanted my father never to have brought us to Russia. I wanted never to have left Winnipeg, because if we hadn't left, we might have all been together on that hot day of summer. I wanted it never to have happened. I wanted us never to have come.

But there was something I wanted that I could have: I wanted Ben, and Ben was coming home on leave.

I can't find my brother anywhere among the uniforms. I try to make out faces, features, but the boys are lost to the stiff brown sameness of their woollen jackets, the peaked angle of their single-starred caps. Clothed in the State.

A fresh wind blows, swelling the cotton shirts where the jackets are unbuttoned, lifting the cigarette smoke, the smell of male bodies.

The press of palms over my eyes. My brother's found me because I'm still me, Annette.

“Knock-knock,” he says in English, his hands warm, light over my face.

“Who's there?” I whisper.

“Me,” he says, and the hands are released. He pulls me into his arms, holds me. And then lets me go.

He's thinner, much thinner. And taller. Can he be taller or is it just because he's so thin? His head is shaved; most of them have their heads shaved beneath the caps. After he enlisted I saw him twice in uniform, but I've been remembering wrong, I remembered the old Ben, not this new self that has swallowed the old.

“Look at you,” he says. “You scrawny thing, there's nothing to you – you eating okay?” He works his mouth, rumples my hair.

We stand a foot apart, looking at each other. Then I'm shoved up against him again as a florid-faced woman in a beret steams by, using her massive cardboard suitcase to carve out a path.

“Just give me a sec,” he says. “I have to check where I put my papers.” He sets down his duffel bag, sorts through his pockets.

Another boy in uniform stops in the little island of stillness Ben has made, puts his head down, the peaked cap
shielding his eyes. He's lighting a cigarette. He scratches at a match with his fingernail and a flame blossoms.

The whiff of sulphur catches me and I'm down again, underground, the grief shovel in my hands, a crowd beside me digging too, all of us. But I'm not with the anti-tank brigade – it's graves we're digging, deep as they're wide. A grave for Poppa, and I can see the tanned skin of his bald head, the blotchy shapes and bumps on it, that map of an undiscovered country. A grave for my mother, ruling nothing now, stretched out on her side, legs straight, an elbow digging itself into the ground, into dirt. Others now too; I can feel but not see them all around me, the bodies in their soft fall . . .

I reach out.

Ben looks up, puts his hand to my shoulder. “You okay?”

I lean my forehead against his shoulder, feel the muscle against the bone, the lack of give. Ben; flesh and blood. “It's just the crowd. I was dizzy for a second. I'm all right now.” Close my eyes, let the images scatter.

“Let's get out of here,” he says. “I've had enough of this mob too.” We snake our way down the platform, Ben steering me by the elbow. When we get out onto the sidewalk, the crowd thins. Outside the station the air is fresh, the day sunny and cool. We wait at the curbside, watching the wash of traffic go by: cars, trucks – mostly military vehicles – bicycles, pedestrians. A rhythm here, as though the random comings and goings all were purposeful, orchestrated. And they are, despite each driver's plans, the decisions he makes: the whole country an intricate symphony of activity conducted by the war effort. Inside this consonance there's a separate rhythm, slightly off-kilter – the thwap thwap of a skipping rope, two little girls turning the rope for a third, who can't
seem to miss. Her feet on the pavement lift and return. They have those damned eternal bows in their hair, all three of them – floppy ones, so bedraggled you wonder what the point is. The girls are wrapped up in their play, oblivious to the tanks and army trucks that pass by, dwarfing them.

A thin man in a grey suit stops briefly to watch. Who does he remind me of? Mr. Spratt. Except that he wears spectacles, which he takes off and angles to the sunlight to focus the rays so that he can light up his Kazbek. The strong scent of the cheap tobacco drifts towards me. Just smoke, not sulphur.

I touch Ben's shoulder. “How are you . . .”

“I'm okay, Monkey. I'm fine.” He bites his lip, won't say more. Won't say anything. A space opens between us, no man's land. His arm goes around my shoulder. “Don't worry so much.”

“Raisa's turned herself inside out making you dinner.”

“Can't wait to taste it. So,” he lets go my shoulder, “I got that last letter just days ago – you still working the brigades?”

I nod. “About four evenings a week.”

“No wonder you're skin and bones. And the job at Mostorg?” He's walking fast, despite the heavy bag over his shoulder. I have to quicken my step to keep up but it feels good, moving out of the bad dream and through the sunlight, Ben, however briefly, beside me. “Don't you get bored with it, typing, filing, totting numbers up on that stupid abacus the whole day?”

“They changed the job. I'm translating now; it's not as bad. The place is full of Brits and Americans.”

“You're just a kid. You should be back at school. You're not planning on spending your life typing . . .” The schools
have reopened, the city gone back to much of its routine. Ben's mouth is closed against what he doesn't say: that Poppa would have wanted me to go back to school.

“I'll take my university entrance exams once things are back to normal.” I won't say
when the war ends
, won't jinx things. After the bravado of loudspeakers, I stay away from the word
victory
.

“Ma and Pa – still no news?”

I shake my head.

“And Joseph, you've heard from him?”

“Lots. Short little letters, but they're funny and sweet. Daisy writes me too. It's so strange that we've never met Nathan . . .”

“You okay?” He's speaking English. “You okay here on your own?”

“Raisa and Pavel are so good to me. And Vladimir's a pet.”

“They're good people, Monkey.” We stop on the sidewalk. “I've got three days,” he says, “and then I have to go back.”

The tide is turning, our day has come, there's light at the end of the tunnel
 – in February of 1943, every cliché felt true. In early February, we'd beaten the Germans at Stalingrad, and the victory felt real. It was impossible not to feel hopeful. But there'd been no letters from Ben, not since his brief visit, those three days of leave. We knew that he'd likely been stationed at Stalingrad. We were winning the war, but what did winning mean if I lost Ben? I kept writing so that I could keep hoping.

February 18, 1943
Dear Ben,
I've got the apartment to myself for once, my free day. I spent half of it standing in line to get a paper. At least the weather was mild again today. The whole winter here's been mild, which is more than lucky, since we still have hardly any heat in the apartment. The only time I feel warm is at the parties I go to at the British Embassy.