You have to understand that Anya, your father, me, your aunts and uncles – we weren’t of any value as fighters. So we wouldn’t have been welcome. That’s the way it is with the Partisan groups. But Lev had it all worked out. Joseph has probably told you about the cache of guns, ammunition? And Lev had valuables too: some jewellery, other things. All of this was our “ticket” into the protection the Partisans offered.
And there was something else. Do you remember your mother’s stories? About the family, generations of us, working in the catacombs, the mines? I know Anya didn’t have the greatest credibility with you . . . You might have thought these were fairy tales, but it was all true. Your grandfather, great-uncles had all kept detailed maps, plans of the catacombs, as souvenirs after they’d retired. They’d tell endless stories, argue about the various tunnels, paths. Lev had been the keeper of this archive, and the maps were invaluable to the Partisans.
And this is how we were all to stay together. It was our best chance.
Your mother refused to go. She said Lev wanted us all buried alive. You know how she could be when she got her back up. “I won’t live in a sewer,” she said. “I’m not going to live like a mole, like an animal, underground.”
It did seem like madness, going into the catacombs. Reva and Basya also refused to join us. Maybe if they had agreed, your mother could have been persuaded. I tried to convince her that it was the only choice we had. I even – you’ll laugh at this (you know I’m not in the least religious) – I even asked her to pray before she decided.
“I don’t talk to God any more,” she said.
You must realize, though, that even if your father had been able to persuade her, there’s no telling if it would have saved them. It didn’t save Lev. We were all so frightened – it was hard to know what was right. Your mother was always so certain, and your father’s tendency was just to go along. It was as if his last act was to put you and Ben on that train.
I’ll write more later, my darling girl. And hope to see you before too long.
Your devoted aunt,
Manya
How is anyone in our shiny new century to understand the choice I made then? How am I to understand it myself? It seems so foolish, from a distance; worse than foolish. I was eighteen and an orphan. I was my own worst enemy. I was my truest self.
I’m beside the creek in Gorky Park, sitting on the bank, the ground still breathing damp from yesterday’s rain. Tentative spikes of forget-me-nots are pushing up through the earth. Soon all the undergrowth here will be starred with their flowers, a blue haze, as though the earth were full of possibilities.
I’ve come to think. Here, in this little crevice in time. I’ll float here, drift, till I’ve figured it out. So many voices in my head – Raisa, Pavel, Joseph – all telling me: Go. Go home.
I pull my knees to my chest, rub my chin against the soft cotton skirt. What would Poppa want me to do? I could live with Joseph, who loves me, who I’ve loved since I was a baby. Joseph, who first called me by my real name, who gave me myself. The Joseph I was taken from could take me back. I could have my own family again, a bit of it.
Who do I belong to, whose am I now? I have to decide, like Poppa, who chose to come here, wanting to make us a life.
If we hadn’t come we’d be alive, together.
But he did choose.
When I think Winnipeg, I think delicatessen: Poppa behind the counter, his white apron tied round his waist. But there is no Poppa, no delicatessen.
I take out Manya’s letter, sniff at the lavender. Read it again; read and reread it. Touch the inked letters with my fingers.
I can feel the damp seeping through the cotton of my skirt, the May air, mild today, stroking my forearms, sun filtering through the branches of the trees, the complex shift of pattern on my skin.
Pavel, Raisa, Vladimir. Do they belong to me? Are they borrowed?
I don’t own anything.
I put Manya’s letter back in my pocket, twist my head to ease the ache in my shoulders and suddenly, with that single gesture, I’m back in Odessa, at Manya’s, the samovar steaming, agleam, Manya offering poppyseed cake warm from the oven. I can smell the sugar-and-butter smell of it. Done to a turn, like everything Manya made. A friend of Manya’s is over with her new baby – we’re celebrating. Real French champagne for a toast. The grown-ups have wineglasses in their hands, so they give the baby to me to hold. He’s a pretty baby, a head full of black hair, a newborn, just days old. You can see his newness; the little body is still used to the underwater world of his mother’s belly, still adjusting to gravity, the neck barely strong enough to turn his head. I have him on a pillow in my arms and as I watch, he turns his head weakly, the pillow cushioning it as it wobbles. And suddenly I remember, fully, in my body, remember.
I remember the world receiving me, how good it felt to be not able and to have the world make up for it, to have the world come to me without my having to go to it.
I’m not some helpless infant.
I’d been thinking that someone else would decide, that I could just drift. That what I didn’t do would give me a life. If I wasn’t greedy, if I wasn’t rude. If I wasn’t too full of myself. If I sat tight, if I didn’t ask for too much, if I didn’t try too hard, if I didn’t presume. If I held back what I wanted. Held it back until it was unrecognizable to me.
As if my deference, my meekness, could appease the gods. What gods – the lady in the picture? My mother? My mother, of course. It took so much to appease my mother. And now my mother and all she was is gone, except for how she lives inside of me. I look at my hands. Poppa’s hands. I’m not Poppa’s any more. I’m no one’s daughter now.
I can’t keep waiting for my life to happen, to be loved, to grow up. I can’t wait for someone else to take me into his arms and carry me into the future, into life. I have to make a life for myself, wish it into being.
I hear it now, the sound, but differently from the way it has rung in my mind before. The sound comes, swaying, full bellied. Two beats, light and then heavy, and a gap in between. Nearby. But it’s not a knell; it’s a call, and I’m not afraid. I’ll stay. I won’t leave Moscow. I won’t leave Pavel and Raisa and Vladimir.
I was my own worst enemy and my truest self. At eighteen, in the wake of all my dead, maybe it was loyalty that made me decide to stay. I told myself I wouldn’t betray my parents’ decision to believe in the workers’ paradise. I couldn’t bring myself to give up on their version of goodness, the golden promise at the core of their lives – despite the many things about Comrade Stalin’s country that I already knew. The many things I knew and tried not to know. If I had been allowed to know nothing of the greater horrors of the Terror, didn’t I at least know our own little corner, Lev’s arrest? Polankov had told me about the execution of the prisoners at Lubyanka during those days of anarchy when the Germans were so close – hadn’t I heard the shots myself? Weren’t these clues, crumbs that should have led me somewhere near the truth? But we were just coming out of an even greater terror, out of a time when the enemy was clear, when that dream of the triumph of the Russian people, of their heroism, was much more than a dream.
And then again, maybe it wasn’t loyalty to my parents, but loyalty to Vladimir, the promise that I made him that day they took Polankov away. And loyalty to all the borrowed family – Pavel, Raisa, Vladimir – that the war had constructed for me. Maybe I was afraid to lose the tentative new self that the war, and my parents’ absence, had given me, that Pavel and Raisa’s less complicated, less painful love had given me. Their love felt – still feels – absolute, even though we weren’t blood. They were the family I chose that day, rather than the flawed one given me. Given and then taken.
I told myself I wasn’t afraid, but maybe I acted only out of fear, maybe one more change, one more translation, was more than I could bear.
Or maybe it was that I wanted to make any decision. Anything to break that passivity that had been cultivated in me. Maybe it was that
deep stubborn streak, the perverse need to want what I wanted, however arbitrary.
I look back and want to grab that girl by the shoulders and shake her, tell her she’s a fool. I wish I could shake her from her stubbornness, her certainty; give her the fore-knowledge to make a better choice. But I can’t unwish any of those false steps, because each one of them took me to my daughter, and I can’t unwish her. Wouldn’t unpick a single stitch that gave me her.
Chapter Eight
I put the receiver down, decide not to dial. Why do we call it “dialing” still? I don’t know when I last saw a rotary phone. I was about to call my daughter. My grandson volunteers weekends for a children’s theatre company. They’re putting on a puppet show. My daughter left a message to say she has tickets for the opening. I was about to call, to say I was coming, but the puppets intervened. Now I have puppets in my head and I’m remembering Vladimir, in Moscow, when he was just about my grandson’s age.
I was in my third year of architecture, working very hard, evenings, weekends, but with the energy of the young. Despite the two perspective drawings and two elevations that I needed to finish, Vladimir had cajoled me into going with him to the puppet show at the Obraztsov Theatre. What a combination of adoration and condescension boys that age feel for their female relations. All he had to do was loom over me – how quickly he grew, after the war, to loom over me – and smile. And of course, as always, I let him talk me into going along.
When we first arrived in the theatre, it seemed like just the antidote to my long week of work. The theatre was warm, crowded – a full house – and it was good just to sit, to close my eyes and feel all that space above me open.
The Obraztsov Theatre was remarkable. I didn’t think much of the building itself, but the performances were extraordinary. They still are. The concert that night began with a series of satirical sketches. The cunning faces of the puppets were caricatures of stock Russian types: stuffy bureaucrats; buxom, meddlesome housewives; nervous scholars. There was a gypsy chorus of fifteen puppet dancers, each an individual in miniature. One little fellow kept hitching up his jacket as it slipped off his shoulder – a virtuoso performance, the puppeteers invisible, the little characters fluent, as though they were willing their own actions.
And then, about the fifth skit, four figures appeared on stage in loud checked suits, their features grotesque: exaggerated hook noses, cruel, thin mouths; their chins weak, eyes sly. They capered around the stage to a parody of American jazz played against a background of English-sounding gibberish. The sketch was titled “Cosmopolitan Chorus.”
Rootless cosmopolitan: the new code for “Jew.”
I closed my eyes against it and saw my father’s lost face – first whole, as I remembered it, then distorted, garbled by the hate that killed him. A second later, Vladimir grabbed my hand and pulled me from my seat and past the insulted knees of our neighbours, who sat and watched and laughed.
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.”
The Knife Sharpener's Bell Page 19
