The Knife Sharpener's Bell

by Rhea Tregebov

  I look down at my shoes, the bump where my big toe sticks up. “Elena was just telling me.”

  Luba’s playing with one of her braids. She doesn’t have any bows in her hair, just elastics to keeping the braids tidy. “I guess they don’t have socialist competitions in America, do they Annette?”

  I’m not American. I’m from Canada. It’s a different country.

  “Do they have socialist competitions in America, Annette?” Elena’s head is cocked to the side, making her look even more like a Scottie. I shake my head.

  Luba’s friend Sonya, a sturdy girl with bright button-blue eyes and masses of red curls, has come over too. She puts her hand on the sleeve of my coat, runs her fingers along the knitted wool cuffs.

  “Did you bring this coat from America, Annette?”

  I nod.

  “My mother says you probably brought diamonds, too. And a whole trunkful of saucepans.” Sonya tugs at the cuffs.

  “Don’t be silly, Sonya,” Elena says. “Annette’s father is an ordinary worker, a good Soviet citizen. How could he have diamonds?”

  Sonya shrugs. “She dresses pretty fancy. Who knows what her father did in America?”

  “Her father dresses real swell. I saw him. In a camel hair coat. He dresses like a real bourgeois.” Luba gives me a little shove.

  “That wasn’t my father. He’s my uncle Lev.”

  “Well your uncle’s pretty fancy looking too.” She gives me a second little shove.

  “Leave her alone,” Elena says. Both their chins are jutting out, about an inch from each other.

  I want to tell them I’m not American.

  “She’s a show-off,” Luba says.

  “Is not.”

  “Is too.”

  Luba gives me another good shove, and then Sonya shoves from the other side.

  “Cut it out,” I tell them.

  “Two against one isn’t fair,” Elena says.

  They both smile. Sonya steps back, and then Luba suddenly rushes at me with a big shove and I’m sitting in the gravel on the playground, my elbow scraped red and full of little stones. Luba’s standing above me, and suddenly every-thing’s bright, white, and I can’t see anything but her, can’t see Elena, though I hear her yelling, can’t see the sky. Luba’s still smiling. I want that smile.

  The brightness swallows everything but I want what I want, that smile, and then it’s Luba on the ground beneath me, I don’t know how, brightness pouring through me and I’m happy, so happy, and I’m sitting on her stomach and I can feel myself pounding my fists on her shoulders, my voice spilling out words in English, the language I’m not supposed to speak. Leave me alone leave me alone leave me alone. The soft give of her shoulder as my fists connect. I look at Luba’s face and she’s afraid. The whiteness recedes and colours come back. I can see that Sonya’s gone and can hear Elena saying quietly, “Get up, Annette. Get off her. C’mon, the teacher’s going to see.”

  I look again at Luba’s face, her mouth open in surprise, the tears. That’s what I wanted. I wanted her face to change. I changed it.

  I get up.

  “How’d you do that?” Elena asks. “How’d you throw her off you like that? She’s so much bigger.”

  Luba’s blubbering. “I’m going to tell,” she says.

  You started it,” Elena says. “We’ll tell.”

  “You’re both getting in trouble.”

  “You shoved her first.” Elena says. Luba stares at Elena, but Elena stares right back. “And you know what? I’m going right now to tell Comrade Ivanova that you were intimidating a new classmate. And that you were making fun of her because she’s American, when you should have been making her feel welcome in the Soviet Union. And that you shoved her right on the ground and she hurt her elbow and she had to defend herself.”

  Elena twirls around, takes hold of my good arm and starts pulling me towards the school. “Come on,” she says, “we’re reporting her to Comrade Ivanova. Luba’s not allowed to taunt you and she shoved first – it’s against the rules.”

  “No, Elena. We can’t. We can’t tell on her.” My elbow smarts. I’m going to have to pick the stones out.

  “Why not? She was pure mean.”

  “We can’t be tattletales.”

  “Don’t be silly. She’s not supposed to make fun of you and she’s not supposed to shove you. It’s anti-social behaviour.”

  “But we’ll get her into trouble!”

  “She deserves to be in trouble. They might even expel her from her Young Pioneer troop. She started it – she knows the rules. Pushing other students around is definitely not allowed. And she’s way taller than you, and stronger. And older. It isn’t fair.”

  “Elena, please. I don’t want to tell Comrade Ivanova.”

  Elena stops walking.

  “Elena, I can’t.”

  It was the first time I ever got in a fight. Something took over, and I found out that if you pushed me, I’d push back. It was a surprise. Maybe my mother wouldn’t have been surprised. I found out also that I wasn’t outnumbered: Elena stayed. And Sonya vanished as soon as I pushed back. One of those people eager for a fight until it starts, ready to run. I wonder more about the likes of Sonya than I do about Luba. People recur. I met a Sonya much later, when there was nowhere for me to run. Tattletale button-blue eyes, a red curl straying over one eyebrow. Blue eyes with no specific malice, no interest. A guard by a door, a staircase, a locked gate. “Raise your hands,” she told me, no expression on her face. “Turn around.” That was years later.

  In Odessa, my mother was getting very tired of me, my tempers, my moods. Nothing about her city pleased me, not Alexander Park, not the beautiful spring day, not the picnic she’d prepared. I hated Alexander Park and I hated Odessa, even in spring, even under the high blue skies, and I told my mother so, and I told Poppa he should never have brought me there. On this particular day the source of my outrage was that I hadn’t been allowed to invite Elena to the picnic: it was too much trouble, my mother had enough children to look after already. Beside our picnic blanket was a little light building, a roof but no walls, and I walked around it, trying to make myself dizzy, refusing the sunlight. It was a gazebo, Poppa told me. Good for a party, nothing serious – a building that was hardly a building. Can a building have no walls? Beside the gazebo was the bronze statue of a monster, lion body, eagle’s head and wings, claws. A griffin, Poppa told me, as if by offering me these new words, he could make up for taking me away from everything. A griffin with its monster head. I put my fingers in the open mouth, and when I closed my eyes I was back home, back in the front room in the apartment on Main Street, where it was always dusty, where the light always filtered through the yellowed Venetian blinds. I was standing beside the carved creature whose lion body made up the wooden armrest of the davenport, running my fingers around the open beak of its eagle head, the dark polished wood silky under my touch. Griffin. This was where I really lived, in a house with no walls, nothing to keep the outside out. In a park of monsters.

  My heart hurts. I can’t swallow because my mouth is so dry. Instead of the usual written exams we used to have in Winnipeg, for my Natural Sciences class I have to take an oral examination. I’m going to have to stand up in front of the whole class and give my answer.

  I don’t want to. I want Poppa to save me. Last week, he came for the meeting with Comrade Ivanova and she explained about the test. Please make sure that Annette is not alarmed in any way about these tests, she told him. Poppa just nodded. I couldn’t say anything about how scared I was. I didn’t want him to be ashamed of me.

  The teacher nods at me to take my question. The tickets with the test questions are in a pile on Comrade Ivanova’s desk. Two other teachers are helping, making notes on lined pieces of paper.

  Elena’s up next. Her marks are always “excellent”; she doesn’t have to worry. What is industrial dust and how is it harmful? Elena stands straight in front of the teacher’s desk and gives her answer. I can�
�t hear what she says. There’s a kind of roaring in my head, a buzz.

  Two more students and then it’s my turn. Elena sits down, tilts her head at me, smiles. Don’t worry, she mouths. I have to look at the question, at the piece of paper in my hand that’s crinkly and damp with sweat.

  Why has a dog a muzzle and a man a face? Give three reasons.

  What does it mean? All I can think of is a dog-face, a man-muzzle, a horrible man/dog face. Three reasons. I can’t even understand the question.

  That boy, Anatoly, is up next. He’s running his hand through his curly hair, making it even more of a mess. Comrade Ivanova tells him to take his hands out of his pockets. He shrugs; one corner of his mouth goes up in half a smile. Even his half-smile is nice. He has green eyes, like my mother. And now he’s answering but I can’t hear his answer. All I can hear is a murmur, as if I didn’t understand Russian any more, as if I were in a foreign country, and lost.

  I am.

  Why did Poppa bring me here? Why do I have to learn everything new? I want to be my old self, the one I knew, the one that never changed.

  They’re calling my name.

  I hold on to the edge of the desk, haul myself up.

  “Comrade Ivanova,” I say, “I don’t understand the question.”

  The teacher looks more surprised than stern, whispers something to the other teachers. “Annette, please take a seat again at the back of the room.”

  I go to the back of the class, put my head down on the desk.

  The other teacher, Comrade Kazan, comes up and leaves a new ticket on my desk. “This is your new question, Annette. Please study it and we will ask you up again in a few minutes.”

  They’re giving me another chance.

  I have to give myself a chance. I have to stop being scared of everything, scared of nothing. What was I afraid of? The strap? There’s no strap here.

  So what can they do to me?

  Send me home.

  All right then, they’ll send me home.

  Tell my mother.

  So what?

  So what.

  It doesn’t matter what they do to me. It doesn’t matter how I’m punished.

  They can’t make me do anything. Not if I’m not afraid.

  I’m not afraid.

  So much was taught in those classrooms. My teacher, Comrade Ivanova, Raya, the Young Pioneer leader with her kind blue eyes – they taught me, eventually, gently, with consideration, not to be afraid of oral examinations. Taught me this poem:

  WORKERS

  The snow is deep on the streets.

  But see, the street workers sweep the snow from the streets.

  We need not creep.

  Our feet will not get wet.

  Three cheers for the street workers.

  I memorized the lines, and can still remember them. As in the poem, we were taught to cheer – to celebrate the workers, the genuine citizens, good comrades. To celebrate those who were us, who weren’t the enemy. My mother was always talking about enemies of the people; so was Comrade Ivanova. People have to have an enemy so that they know who they are by knowing who they aren’t. The young people I was watching today chanting on TV, they’re as certain about their enemy as my mother was. Enemy : it’s such a tidy category. But back then, it puzzled me. Enemy of the people. I was a literalist. Who would an enemy of the people be? If you were a person, how could you be an enemy of the people? Wouldn’t you be an enemy of yourself? Sometimes I did believe myself to be the enemy. Because I was a foreigner, not really Russian, not born there, no matter how well I spoke, how good my marks became. And then there was the enemy within, that refusal, the hard twist inside me when I was pushed and didn’t want to listen or to cheer or to be good: the monster.

  The class newspaper, which we pinned to the classroom walls, was a good place to celebrate and denounce. My friend Elena drew wonderful satirical cartoons for it. I remember one about the story of the grasshopper and the ant. The grasshopper had a huge potbelly and wore a top hat and a watch on a gold chain. Anatoly, the green-eyed boy I was beginning to notice, liked to do Science reports, Michurin’s latest achievements in horticulture. I thought he was terribly clever, Anatoly, always sure of himself in class, ready to answer the hardest questions. I particularly liked his hair: messy, but shiny clean. The boys usually either had their hair all plastered down or shaved off, and I didn’t like either. We’d have regular reports on the results of the socialist competition between our class and Comrade Kazan’s. Our class was winning, mostly because in Comrade Kazan’s class gawky, spectacled Luba, my tormenter and victim, had received a “poor” in Science. At the end of the month, the checkup committee would decide which class would receive the red banner. I was only just beginning to perceive the thrill of red banners.

  For Poppa, because I knew it would cheer him up, I copied out the article written for the wall newspaper by Marfusha, the woman who cleaned the corridors:

  Illiteracy

  Even though I am over fifty and therefore do not have to study to overcome my semi-illiteracy, I did not want to be left out of the classes that were organized by the school committee. Now I can write a little and read the newspapers.

  On February 20 I received a bonus for my work and I am very proud of it. Therefore I made a pledge to write an article for the wall newspaper. Comrade Ivanova’s class has kindly allowed me to use theirs.

  My life was dark before the Revolution, and I was always close to starvation. Now my children are doing well at school. Although I am an unskilled worker, my children will be qualified workers and will earn good salaries.

  It was Sonya of the disappearing act who had written the report on Comrade Ivanova’s class, how well we were doing. Our pledge to have excellent discipline had succeeded thus far. We had all passed all our subjects. Elena’s “excellent” grades were noted, as was Anatoly’s need to work harder. Sonya took care to point out that I was the only student in our class to receive two “fairs.” She cautioned me that, if I truly I wanted to be a Pioneer, my marks must improve. An excellent comrade, Sonya.

  No more pencils, no more books : July. School was over. Uncle Lev would take us all down to the beach as often as he could get away from work. Uncle Pavel and Auntie Raisa and Vladimir were visiting from Moscow for the summer, and we all would go. I’d ask if Elena could come, but mostly my mother said no. My aunt Basya also rarely came because she and my mother were battling. My mother was always tus-sling with someone in the family or at work. She’d come along, though, having packed us a huge lunch, and then she’d stretch out on her side on the grassy part above the sand, legs straight, dress pulled down over her calves, head propped on one hand, her elbow digging into the ground. As if she ruled the earth. As if it were there to please her.

  Sometimes, when Lev came for us, she wouldn’t want me to go, claiming it was too hot out, or that I had chores at home. But she didn’t need a reason; all she needed was a bad mood. It was easier and easier for us to find ourselves at loggerheads. Like the time I read through the pages of her new cookbook, quoting Comrade Mikoyan, the Food Commissar and book’s purported author: I once told Comrade Stalin I wanted to build up the production of sausages. Comrade Stalin approved, observing that in America, sausage manufacturers become rich, especially from the sale of hot dogs at stadiums, becoming millionaires, “sausage kings.” Of course, Comrades, we need no kings, but we must make sausages at full swing. Wasn’t the idea that Comrade Stalin gave a hoot about sausages pretty amusing? My mother was bent over the table, tucking filling into the knishes she was making for dinner. She took the book from me, turned it in her hands. It had been published by the State Publishing House of the Food Industry. You’re quoting from a speech by Mikoyan. Are you saying Comrade Mikoyan is telling a lie – is that what you’re saying!? Yes. I was. But I told her no, I guessed not. Well then, don’t talk about things you know nothing about. There were so many mornings my mother was angry, not only with me but with Ben or my father, or with something
else. Who knows? I thought then that she should have been happy, because she was back in her country, in her city. But she wasn’t happy. I don’t know what capacity my mother had for happiness. I saw her satisfied. I saw her work herself into the ground. I saw her mind alive, saw her consume newspaper articles, argument. Maybe that was her happiness. I won’t ever know.

  Mornings when she didn’t want to let me go, Uncle Lev would just look at her. It’s a beautiful day, he’d say. It’ll be fine. And my mother would let me go. It was as though there were more room for me in Odessa because of the space Lev and Manya made for me. Lev wasn’t like Poppa; he didn’t just give in. Mostly Poppa didn’t come to the beach. Work tied him up. He was working longer hours and then there were so many meetings after work, so many committees. It seemed that he became quieter with every day, as though something in him was being silenced. Or maybe it was satisfaction, maybe he was settling into work he valued. At this distance, how can I know? I only know what came later.

  At the beach, even without Poppa, we felt like a family, a different sort of family than the one we had in Winnipeg, especially because Pavel, Raisa and Vladimir were there. The three of them would cluster in the shade, Pavel in an old-fashioned straw boater that hid most of his handsome face. I didn’t know he was handsome then, with his spectacles and thinning hair and elongated body. I’d never seen anyone so tall and thin. Pavel didn’t smile a lot, but when he did, it was genuine. He always had a little sketch pad for drawing Fanchuk, a beetle with a friendly smile who stood on two legs. There was a Mrs. Fanchuk too, who was just like Fanchuk, except she had a big bow in her hair. Vladimir and I loved these drawings. Pavel was so patient with his pencil, like Mr. Spratt with his paper fortune tellers. He showed me how to do them, let me copy from his drawings.

  Lev, on the other hand, loved the sunshine, the water. His arms tanned and massive, he’d scoop huge waves at Ben, whose woollen bathing trunks sagged comically, practically drowning him. Though he wasn’t as tall as Pavel, Lev was tall and much heavier. It would have taken two Pavels to make a Lev. In that powerful body, Lev moved as if he and the world were in it together, as if they were best friends, comrades. What did it feel like to have such confidence in one’s body?