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.
Yes, parties. I met some English boys, press attachés with the embassy, when I was asked to translate for them at the Mostorg. It was February 2, the day of the victory at Stalingrad, and when we got the news the boys asked me to the party.
I know you’re going to tease me about the boys, but I don’t care. We all felt like celebrating. I like the dancing, and I like flirting, and it feels so good to be able to speak English! I met a lot of nice boys there. They take me to the movies, or the theatre. They all have very English names – Christopher and Clarence and Oliver – and English manners, and they’re all perfect English gentle men. Your English beaux, Raisa calls them. They act more like brothers than beaux, so don’t get all knotted up about this. They make me miss you.
No news, Ben. We haven’t had a letter from you in ages.
That’s where the letter ends. I don’t know if I’ve lost the rest of it, or if I never finished it. There’s a newspaper clipping too. I keep these clippings as if they keep the truth. Poppa was like that. He’d spread out the newsprint sheets as if, reading, knowing, he somehow owned it all.
The clipping is of an illustration, a soft pencil
drawing of the winning submission to an architectural competition. I remember, when I first saw it, admiring the pencil technique. Concrete walls curved like the sides of a malting mill or silo, like the rollers of a printing press, a conveyor belt. To the left a “Greek” statue, toga and sword and all – why did everything have to be fake Greek? And then, stuck in the middle of the façade, a tiny ridiculous dollhouse door. A door for whom? The caption reads: “Winning Project Proposal by Georgii Golts: Monument to the Fallen in the Struggle for Stalingrad.”
The fallen.
How did those boys, flesh and blood, the strong young bodies I danced with, become the fallen? Why do these stale words take the place of emotion? Genuine suffering is taken and puffed up at the same time as it’s turned into nothing. Using words to make the pain, the people, these boys, both less and more. Rhetoric. That’s what Pavel always said. Necessary in war. But I hated it, hate it still. Ben. I can see the stammer of a body, the long slow tumble off a tank, off some muddy hill. I can see, in slow motion, that body’s fall into nothingness, into decay, its chemical elements going back to soil. No.
The blue folder is beside me on the bed, and there it is, the scrap of paper that ended one stage of my waiting. The paper is yellowed now with age, the letters of Pavel’s name and address in white on the red strip along the top. It was clean and white that day, the government telegram:
Comrade Efron. We regret to inform you that your cousin, Benjamin Gershon, has fallen in the line of duty . . .
Weeks later we got a box of Ben’s “personal effects”: snapshots of me and our parents, a crumpled paperback copy of Pushkin’s short stories, the jacket of his uniform. I still have the brass buttons from that uniform somewhere in my sewing basket. And my letters, carefully folded and bundled with string.
I get up, wash my face. I’m letting myself drift here, letting myself drown in old griefs when I have things to do, boxes to pack. I go back into the spare room, take my black woollen coat from the closet, run my hands absentmindedly along a sleeve. There’s a rim of grey dirt crusted along several inches of the hem. We were at the cemetery, my daughter and I, my grandson too, some colleagues from the office. An old friend, poor Oscar Rheinhold, had finally passed away. Before the funeral it had been raining, but as I stood among the mourners, the rain stopped. The wind was bad and there was no shelter there among the headstones; trees a fringe at the edges of the cemetery, but none among the aisles.
At the graveside my legs suddenly went rubbery and I began to sink to my knees. My daughter was right beside me, and she gripped me by the elbow to help me stay upright. “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing . . .” I whispered. “I’m all right.”
“I’m right here,” she said, her hands strong at my elbow.
The wool is soft in my hands, but the dried mud is coarse. I rub at it with my fingers. It’s grey, though the earth was black, heavy, for the mourners as we stood in the wind, each with a shovelful for the grave till it was almost filled in. A crust of dried mud under my nails now. My fingers stop. I don’t want it cleaned up. Let it stay.
We got no funeral for Ben.
Chapter Seven
Poppa’s thumb presses tenderly into the thickness of the peel to make a beginning. “Here,” he says, handing me the orange. “Look: I’ve given you the world.” But he’s mistaken: it’s the sun he’s given me. I sniff the bright smell of summer and when I break the not-quite-round globe open, it is the world that spills out: Selkirk Avenue, Main Street, the delicatessen, all miniature, all perfect, preserved. And then it’s Deribasovskaya Street, its creamy façades; the Opera House and Theatre Square, the curved iron of its lampposts. I bite in and it’s not just place, it’s time, all my days, on my tongue: midnight on the train from the beach; four o’clock walking in darkness from Aberdeen School; noon at the Odessa beach; the white dawn of Moscow in June. Each day, each moment, repeats itself and is unmoved, eternal. “Here,” Poppa says, “take it now. It’s yours.”
In the spring of 1944 I was given another number: April 10, the day Odessa was liberated by Allied troops. By then we could all sense it coming, the end of the war. The Allied armies were recapturing more and more occupied territory. The Americans were fighting their way north through Italy. Though we’d heard nothing from Odessa, in the spring of 1944 I didn’t know how not to hope. Something in me whispered, if they took Ben, they’ll give you something back. As if I’d somehow made a pact, a bargain with fate.
Through the trolley window I’m watching the spring snow gather. Though the winter snow had all gone and the early tulips were coming out, the crocuses and snowdrops already in bloom, today we had a sudden cold snap. The rain hesitated for a moment and then turned to snow, that ripe, heavy snow. On the sidewalks it’s melting, but on the leaves of the iris, three inches into their new growth already, it’s collecting. And on the grass, still brown from winter; on the branches of the trees, still bare, though the nodes of leaves have swollen, though the willow branches have gone yellow, the dogwood red.
A long day. I’m glad it’s over, glad to be going home. I settle my handbag into my lap, close my eyes, then open them when two young men board, speaking English. They’re not in uniform – they must be with the American Embassy. Two more stops. I almost nodded off. I rub the heel of my hand into my eye –
I see him.
A man’s back, brown wool overcoat, sloping shoulders. He’s stopped in the street, absorbed in something. The snow in a halo around him.
Poppa.
I push my way through to the door, pound on it and I’m out into the unexpected cold, the fragile snow.
Poppa.
I’m a block away but I see the brown coat, walking now, turning the corner. Run. Full out, my coat flapping behind me, scarf loosening. I catch sight of him as I turn the corner, scream, can’t help myself, scream as I see him: “Poppa! ”
The man turns – sees me. “Annette?”
I throw myself into him, feel the strength of his hug: Poppa, Poppa.
But something’s wrong; there’s too much strength in the embrace.
I look into his face, touch it.
It’s not Poppa.
“It’s me, Annette.” He hides his face in my hair.
My legs buckle and he puts his arm around my waist, holding me up.
“I thought you were Poppa . . .”
“It’s me, Joseph.”
I test my palm against the saucepan; it’s warming. The water stirs, comes to life under the heat. Joseph has brought us packets of black tea. I feel the slight tremor as the water heats up, remember Science class: the excitation of molecules, transfer of energy. Joseph is here. For the two blocks home I could hardly speak, hardly walk, but I kept touching his sleeve, his face. Little fat snowflakes melting on his eyebrows, his moustache. He’s come back to me, my Joseph. And if he’s come back, can’t anyone? Can’t anything happen now that Joseph is here? And now that he’s older, he looks so much like Poppa. What’s the phrase in English – the spitting image. The spitting image, except for the eyes. I know Ben’s gone, but if Joseph can cross an ocean, if Joseph can be here in Moscow, can’t I believe in anything? Should I?
But no; Joseph may be my only miracle. Because he’s come bearing news. I know it. And I’ve read his face, his eyes. It’s no good, the news. He’s hardly touched me since that moment in the street when I thought he was Poppa; he’s scarcely been able to look at me. He’s talking quietly to Pavel and Raisa. His face, he looks old, old. And he’s what – thirty-one? The water’s rumbling now. Is it now that I have to stop hoping?
“Annette?” Raisa touches my face lightly. And hers is so sad. “Come, dear. Sit down next to your brother. You don’t need to do this.” Her palm rests, for a moment, on my cheek.
Joseph’s still talking in low tones to Pavel, his body contained, as though he wants to withhold what he knows.
Pavel comes up to us. “Here, let me take that.” He takes the tray, sets it
on the table. Raisa is pleating a cloth napkin between her fingers.
“Annette . . .” Joseph says. I hear the plea in his voice. No, please Joseph. Don’t say anything; just be here with me. Let me rest in this moment when you’re here, but I don’t know anything. Don’t know it, your news. The teapot’s in my hand. Pour the tea. I pour: Joseph, Pavel, Raisa, Vladimir, myself. Count. Five glasses of tea. The number seems wrong.
“Annette, come sit down.” Pavel says, making room on the davenport. Vladimir squeezes in, sitting awkwardly on Pavel’s lap; so tall and only twelve. He’s shivering. Raisa rests a hand, heavy, solid, on my knee.
“Joseph, tell us.” Pavel’s hands are on his knees. All we can do is listen. “Tell us what you know,” Pavel says, “what you learned in Odessa.”
Joseph studies the curtained windows, swallows. My brother, here with us, sitting beside me. I could touch his hand if I wanted to. He’s completely familiar, and yet he’s been changed into someone else by the burden of news that he carries. He moves a hand thoughtfully over his jaw, the old gesture – the sage in front of the synagogue, the businessman contemplating a deal, the farmer eyeing his crops. But it’s a diversion, a way of not saying, for just one moment more.
Vladimir wriggles on Pavel’s lap. Pavel whispers in his ear and he settles down.
“Raisa, Pavel – you should’ve seen Annette when she was a toddler. She was such a sweet little thing.”
The Knife Sharpener's Bell Page 17
