The Knife Sharpener's Bell

by Rhea Tregebov

  “I have school tomorrow.”

  “Such a hard worker. Well, I’ll have a little slug for the both of us.” He sits at the table, takes a long swallow and another, closes his eyes. His head nods.

  “Anatoly.” I set my hands on his shoulders. “You should sleep it off.”

  He opens his eyes, leans his head against me. “Annette, Annette. You’re not mad.”

  “Not now.”

  “But I like it when you’re mad; that’s when you’re you. But you don’t like it, do you? You don’t like yourself when you’re angry. I’m going to have one hell of a hangover tomorrow.” He kisses my arm. “I’m mad all the time, you know. Did you know that about me?”

  “There’s lots I don’t know about you.”

  “If you knew more, maybe you wouldn’t like me so much.”

  I stroke his head, heavy against me. “Who says I like you?”

  “That’s right. I shouldn’t make assumptions. It’s dangerous. It’s a dangerous life. Hey, Annette, do you remember how people used to talk during the war? When this war’s over, we’re gonna get married, you just wait and see. All sorts of promises. Everybody talked like that – just wait till the war’s over. Bet you said that, didn’t you, Annette?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “But what if it’s never over? In here?” He taps his head. “What if it doesn’t want to go away?” He reaches for the bottle again, takes another swig. “But you did what you wanted to do, didn’t you? Architecture school. Just like you said you would.”

  “That’s right. Maybe we should put the bottle away now, no?”

  “An architect. Good for you.” He sits up suddenly, twists around to face me. “You want to know about architecture? I can tell you all about architecture. You ever heard of a zemlyanka? No? A zemlyanka, now there’s ideal Soviet architecture for you. Genuine folk art. You know how we build them? No? You never learned? We built lots of them, lots of them.”

  “Anatoly, maybe I should put you to bed. You can sleep here tonight. Raisa won’t mind.”

  “No no no no no. I shouldn’t go to bed, Annette, because I got to explain to you how we built a zemlyanka. Listen and you’ll learn. You dig a pit about two metres deep, right into the ground. No matter how frozen the ground is, you dig right in. And then you line the pit with nice fat logs. And then, then, you make a roof and a floor and you find a stove – see? See? That’s how we stayed warm during the war. Five months. Five months like a worm under the ground. One day they had to pull me out of the mud, did I tell you that? I went outside naked and stretched myself out in the mud because I knew what I was. A worm. I tried to dig myself a grave with my fingernails. They had to pull me out. Did I tell you that? Did I tell you about that, about my home in the zemlyanka, my life as a worm? Did you know that about me? Did you know that about architecture? Soviet architecture?” He slumps back into the chair. “You just ask me if you want to know anything about architecture.”

  His head sinks onto the table and he’s asleep.

  The next afternoon the door to the apartment opens; it’s Raisa, her arms full of packages. “Anatoly gone home?” she asks.

  “Vladimir walked him to his apartment about an hour ago. He was still feeling sick.”

  “It’s the wormwood,” Raisa says. “They shouldn’t be allowed to use it.” She pushes my papers to the side, sets her packages down. “That was quite the performance again last night.”

  “I’m sorry, Raisa. He gets like that sometimes.”

  “Are you serious about this boy?” She starts drumming her fingers on the table, and before I can answer, she continues. “It must be a comfort that he knew you in Odessa, no? What was he like then?”

  I shrug. “The same and not the same. He was different from the other boys. He always seemed to be in charge, somehow, always knew what he was doing.” I haven’t said anything to Raisa about Anatoly’s extracurricular activities making little deals on the black market.

  “The drinking, does it affect his school?”

  “School’s fine, Raisa. He doesn’t drink that often.”

  “And this sour little edge?”

  “He’s not really like that, Raisa. It just comes out –”

  “ – when he drinks.”

  “What are you saying, Raisa?”

  “I just want to know if you’re in love with this boy.”

  “Love. Do you believe in love, Raisa?”

  “You’re annoyed with me.”

  “I’m asking.”

  “Do I believe in love? Do I believe in chemistry? That’s what all this adolescent infatuation is about, Annette. Propagating the species. If you want an opinion on love you should ask Vladimir. He’s the expert on love.”

  Vladimir’s in love: some girl at the university.

  “Falling in love is a fad with these kids Vladimir’s age. They’re so starved for contact with the opposite sex that as soon as they get to coed classes at university, they’re obliged to declare themselves madly in love. It’s an adolescent epidemic. But you’re too old for infatuation. You need to think carefully about what you want. About this boy.” She sits down. “Can we deal with love some other time? I should get going on supper. And you need to finish your work.” She picks up my textbook, Chernikhov’s Architectural Fictions.

  “You sound tired,” I say.

  “A long day. It’s all this worry at work.”

  They’ve finally told me about the trouble at work. The union office had asked Raisa to sign a letter accusing the chief engineer at the plant of being an “enemy of the people.” They were claiming that he had tried to obstruct the doctors’ efforts to improve working conditions.

  Raisa hasn’t decided what to do yet. If she doesn’t sign, she’s almost sure to lose her position. She’s never liked the man, an officious stuffed shirt who’s been impossible to get along with. But he’s thoroughly competent.

  And, more to the point, he’s a Jew.

  I still have it, my copy of Chernikhov’s Architectural Fictions with its fawn and pigeon green cover. The fine binding seems to carry something of Lev. It belonged to him – he must have bought it just after it was published in ’33. He had a whole collection of architectural books, pamphlets and photographs too, that he would sort through wearing his white cotton gloves. He’d invite me in, explain what I was looking at. He’d puff on his cigar and talk about how he and Chernikhov knew each other way back when, before the Revolution, when Chernikhov was studying in Odessa. They used to drink in the same cafés, talk politics, art. By the time I was admitted to the Mossovet Workshops, Chernikhov’s ideas, his elaborate, overly systematic methodology, had fallen out of favour, but he was still head of the school. Lev’s stories, these beautiful illustrations, were what got me seriously thinking about studying architecture. I didn’t know how to read the axonometric perspectives until Lev explained them. And I remember, as a kid, fretting to myself about the title, Architectural Fictions. It should have been “architectural facts”: something as solid as a building couldn’t be a fiction.

  There’s a glossy coloured plate for Fiction 51. Looks more like a mechanical spider than a building. An idealized industrial complex distributed on a road system. That disc or spool in the middle must be the complex, but because of the axonometric it looks like it’s exploding in place. And the spokes that are the roads look like they’re either floating or sinking. The colours are beautiful: that flat red for the disc, a gorgeous yellow flowering at the right hand as background. 1933.

  Even today, in the twenty-first century, it still looks like the future, what the future was supposed to be.

  How is it that I am what I am? Why have I sunk myself in my work the way Raisa did in hers? This fascination with architecture, the obsession with sorting out what’s wrong or right about a building, finding a way of shaping things in the world so that they fit – I want a world where things fit. At one time the playfulness, hopefulness, of these drawings was enough to make me believe in the future.

  It’s a
miracle, having something of Lev’s. Manya had a few things from the apartment, odds and sods, that one of the neighbours managed to save for her. She sent me the book when I started university. Something from Lev.

  And I have, as well, a few of my lecture notes, the handwriting tidy, dutiful:

  – the new architecture a rejection of outdated canons and of the idealistic aestheticism that considers art an end in itself

  – the machine the source of a new aesthetic of asymmetries, dynamism and functionality

  – fundamental laws governing the relationships of bodies in plane and space

  The words don’t make as much sense as the illustrations. Those broken, beautiful forms – is that what the Revolution was supposed to have done? Break things to make them better? When this book was published everything was new; everything was possible. The old smashed up to create the new, and beautiful.

  Chernikhov was so quickly out of fashion, his Constructivism declared “bourgeois aestheticism,” a throw-back to conventional standards of beauty.

  But I wanted beauty. Still do.

  And what about love? I don’t know if I understand any better now than I did then. How do I weigh and measure my love for Anatoly, if it was love; for Vladimir, Raisa, Pavel, Ben, my parents? I don’t think we even have the right vocabulary. Plato’s parable about each person being half of a whole, each incomplete – it doesn’t give me anything now. Why do we need to make ourselves complete in someone else? Why do we think individuals are essentially incomplete? It’s an infantile fantasy, a yearning to go back to the womb.

  What I need to understand is the durable kind of love built on want, not need. It’s a structure, as much as any of the buildings I’ve made. You build it out of days. I’ve had my own taste of it, though it came late. Sometimes what I’ve felt for others has seemed to me indelible, like my love for my parents and Ben, which has lasted longer than the individuals that generated it. For my daughter, my grandson. Blood love. And for Joseph, my brother, whose offer I refused. I have his letters too. I have to squint to read his faded scrawl, though by now the words feel almost a part of me.

  September 14, 1944

  Dear Annette,

  Sorry I didn’t send this sooner, but we both know I’m not much of a writer. And mail to the USSR hasn’t exactly been “express” most of the time . . .

  Wish you had decided that you wanted to come back here, but it was up to you.

  About Poppa. I never really thought he could have made it, but there was always this kind of wish that somehow he had. I guess you know what I mean. Hard to give up on that. I’m sorry we had to.

  It was good to meet Pavel and Raisa. I’m glad it’s them you’re bunking with, even if you are camping out on their davenport still. They’re sweet people; you deserve sweet.

  Like I said, things are good for Daisy and Nathan and me. Feels like I’m making myself a real life here. Daisy and me, we’ve already saved for a down payment on a house. If I ever do get you back here, you know you can always move in with us.

  I’m showing all the folks from Selkirk Avenue the snapshots I took in Moscow. Everybody says you’re a real looker now . . . Tell Vladimir to keep an eye on you for me.

  Your brother,

  Joseph

  PS I hope you do go into architecture. At least one of us will get an education. You always were the smart one.

  After the war, Joseph’s letters stopped, the way the letters from Odessa stopped in September 1941. I found out later that at first he’d written, but when we didn’t reply, he knew the letters never reached us. And then, as the Cold War became worse, he stopped writing, knowing that letters from a capitalist state, contact with enemy foreigners, would only mean trouble for us. In those years, I also wrote letters to him that I never mailed. About my trip back to Odessa. Raisa and I went back, once. She and Manya and I went to the port, the square where it happened, where Poppa and Momma were killed with the others. We stood on the pavement beside the water. But we didn’t find anything. No blood, no cries, no smell of smoke. There was no dark mark of burning along the stone walls that lined the square, no gauge of how high the flames went, how thick the smoke rose, no memory. Just people going about their business. As if nothing had happened. Or as if what had happened were nothing.

  Chapter Nine

  As 1950 ended, the country fell into a frenzy over Stalin’s seventieth birthday. The Museum of the Revolution was crammed with gifts, letters, telegrams. The ovation for Stalin on the radio was endless – shrill, strained voices chanting slogans. It must have been hard even for the staunchest of believers not to be taken aback. It was whispered that Stalin couldn’t have known the scope of the adulation; if he had, he would have been mortified.

  I tried, as had become – and has remained – my habit, to hide in my work. I’d broken away somewhat from the rigours of Chernikhov’s convoluted pedagogy. That December the instructor for my studio was Mikhailov, a brilliant, genial fellow I had a slight crush on. I was chumming with another female student, Polina, and we’d decided, perhaps to impress Mikhailov, to work as a team on a study of the Rusakov Workers’ Club, a building on Strominka Street by the Constructivist architect Konstantin Melnikov. The boxes he’d set jutting out of the third storey of the building always seemed to me ready for flight. I still love Melnikov’s work; love his vision of the “force of maximal possibilities.” Maximal possibilities! What an absurd concept then, in 1950.

  What an absurd concept now . . . I’m not sure even now why we were allowed, in Chernikhov’s school, to study this champion of intuition over method. I’m even less certain of how the buildings of this visionary of individualist space survived Stalin, though they did, more or less. Today the Rusakov Club is on the “endangered heritage” list; even in 1950 it was beginning to decay. But Polina and I had copies of the original plans and sections. We were doing measured drawings, perspectives, everything. Anatoly disapproved of the Rusakov and continued to plague me about “ideal Soviet architecture.”

  I think he was drinking less in those days, though perhaps I’d just gotten used to the drinking. He’d still disappear for a day or two, wheeling and dealing in the black market no doubt, shady activities that I chose to ignore. There was much I chose to ignore because I liked being in bed with him so much. His stolid pragmatist of a roommate, the kindly Misha, had fallen absurdly in love with an exquisite young woman named Nadya. Nadya was a serious Komsomol classmate of Misha’s who lectured him on his obligations as a citizen. And Misha solemnly accepted these lectures, lapping it up so long as he could remain in the company of the exquisite Nadya. But Misha’s infatuation with Nadya gave us more privacy, more time with each other, and we made the best of it.

  I hid any uneasiness in work, in the intensity of my attachment to Anatoly. We were all caught up in our private lives. Vladimir was at the top of his class in medical school; Pavel was hard at his research at the university. But Raisa was in trouble, still battling the situation at her plant. Things were coming to a head: she was almost sure to lose her job. We all thought the worst that could happen, though it would have meant that she’d have had to put her research on hold, was that they’d demote her back to a job at a community clinic. Pavel told us there was nothing to do but be patient; these things would blow over eventually. We kept thinking rational thoughts about the worst that could happen. How was it that I still believed that my life, at some final moment, would simply fall into place? But I did, and so these disruptions surprised me. I hadn’t yet learned that our lives get to float along the surface of events only briefly. We never know whether this is the moment before things settle at last, the moment we’re about to come home, or the moment before everything’s shaken apart. But I thought then that everything bad had already happened. The war was over. We were alive.

  Anatoly and I are at a retrospective of Eisenstein films. I haven’t seen Potemkin since I was a little girl in Odessa and I want to watch it again, find the edits, see how the story was constructed
. And I need the distraction. I can’t stop worrying about Raisa. We’re holding hands in the theatre, and when the lights go down Anatoly’s comes to rest, light and alive, on my thigh. I can feel his warmth through the smooth wool of my skirt. We’ll have the apartment to ourselves this evening. I look at Anatoly, smile. Then a peripheral flicker tells me the film has started. Shots of Stalin’s birthday celebrations: the mountains of gifts. The camera zooms in on a hand-knitted child’s bonnet, given, the announcer booms, by a French woman – all she has left of her child who died during the occupation. All she has.

  And then they’re showing an old newsreel about the American bombing of Hiroshima, more evidence of capitalist atrocity and American imperialism according to the Russian subtitles. The people of the Soviet Union will not be deterred by these images of horror. We will match American technology rocket for rocket and bomb for bomb. Despite America’s adventurism in Asia, the Chinese people have stood up, winning their own civil war and establishing the People’s Republic. And now the flames of revolution have spread to Korea, breaking the chains of European colonialism. The peoples of the Soviet Union will not hesitate to stand up themselves against the threats of the imperialists, now led by the United States.

  The film is all scratchy. It’s only been five and a half years; seems odd that the film would be in such bad shape. The voice-over is the original English, and the announcer’s voice is terrified and smug at the same time. A pillar of smoke, he says. The mushroom cloud fearsome proof of American know-how. It reminds me of something. A column of fire. Year and years ago, before we left Winnipeg. I must have been eight, or nine. Ben and I were invited over to my friend Cassie’s for Passover, and they read the story of Exodus: With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with signs and with wonders. And then President Truman’s voice comes on, and he is saying, we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. The Russian subtitles are indifferent to the English words. I might well be the only one in the room who understands them. And then another voice comes in on the newsreel, the translated voice of a witness, a hibakusha: There was a bluish white light that flashed like an electric welding spark. The world went white. The slow menacing blossom of the cloud, then shaky, ragged shots of the pulverized landscape; the odd anomalous chimney left standing like a burnt matchstick; a building or two still upright but awry, as if looking askance at its own survival. Then a network of steel girders, the structure whole but askew, a cobweb some hand has brushed aside. And the crisp, agonized postures of the corpses. And he saw our suffering.