The Knife Sharpener's Bell

by Rhea Tregebov

  Everything bad has already happened.

  He was always heavy in me, Anatoly. Maybe I still carried too much grief to have found someone lighter. If he hadn’t been so beautiful, the line of hip bone clear above his thigh, those green eyes, that notch above the breastbone, tender, female, that I needed so badly to touch. If he hadn’t been hurt, hadn’t been taken apart in his war. I loved him hard. It was Anatoly who had told me how much work it was, not remembering, in that cold room, the war just years behind us.

  He’s been gone again, for four days this time; no messages. I’ve been to the apartment but Misha can’t tell me anything. I’m at the studio, fussing over an elevation. We’re a hard-working little bunch – quiet conversations here and there, the squeak of parallel rules along their wires, the shush of soft brushes cleaning off erasings. A dull light comes in the dirty windows. There’s a layer of grime over the entire studio. No one ever seems to clean, though I’ve seen the caretaker hauling a mop and bucket up the stairs. When I look up, Anatoly’s there. Grinning.

  “You look good,” he says, leaning over to kiss my neck.

  “I like watching you work.”

  I stand up. It’s as if I’ve gone over a cliff and into the deep and am slowly filling with water. An interior scream rising in me, an animal grammar. If I open my mouth, the whole studio will be drowned in one scream. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

  The grin’s still there; pure innocence. “What’s wrong?”

  “Where were you? You were coming over to Raisa’s for dinner four days ago and you never showed and you never came by. Misha didn’t know where you were. No one knew.”

  It’s gone now, the grin. “Does everything have to be so dramatic, Annette? I was tied up for a few days. I was out of town.”

  “Where? Why?”

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you. I had business. I told Misha.”

  “You didn’t tell Misha. He had no idea where you were.”

  “He forgot. He’s too busy screwing Nadya to remember what I tell him.”

  “What about school?”

  “School is fine. I got suspended. Just for a week. It doesn’t matter.”

  “I want you to go.” If one more syllable drops from his mouth, the scream will come up. I have nothing but the scream. Because that’s all I can do with Anatoly. Not let go. Not hold on.

  He puts an arm around me, leans into my ear. “Please. Please. Don’t say that. Annette, I’m sorry. Misha just forgot. He’s like that. Don’t be mad. Don’t be mad at me. I can’t stand it.” His lips brush against my ear. “Please.” He puts his arms around me, leans his heavy head against mine. And I know I’m going to fall. I let go: I hold on.

  It’s not the usual raw weather. The day is mild, so Anatoly and I are walking across the river on our way to Novodevichy Cemetery, where we’re to meet Vladimir. The walk is part of our truce. I can’t stop forgiving him. Anatoly’s back at school, doing well, contrite. He’s been promising to go with me to Novodevichy since August. In summer Novodevichy is beautiful. Gorky’s buried there, and Chekhov, in a cherry orchard no less. But today despite the mildness it’s hard even to imagine summer. Though the sun is out, it’s still a chill brightness.

  Suddenly Anatoly sets his hand on my arm, grimaces. “Another cramp,” he says after a bit. It’s the shrapnel in his calf. It can take years, decades even, to work its way out of the body. So we rest a bit, leaning against a railing looking down on the stretch of frozen water, the wide sidewalks lining the embankment, snow-filled now. Raisa says the embankments of the Seine are like this, though the Seine is much narrower. On the sidewalks above, vendors sell old books, prints from battered wooden stalls. I won’t ever see Paris. “I’m all right now,” Anatoly tells me. We start up again, and soon Novodevichy Convent is just ahead with its wedding-cake layers of windows, its bright red brick, its gilded domes, its towers and turrets and battlements. The domes repeat themselves, squat, heaped like toadstools, disorganized – more fairy tale than real, more imagined than constructed, as if only too much were enough. At the entry the gatekeeper is sipping his glass of tea, his breath fogging in the air. He nods us on. We pass through the high arch into the cemetery and head down a winding, meticulously shovelled path. Two tidy rows of small firs, their boughs laden with new snow, meet at right angles. On the third side there’s the high red brick of the convent wall. Vladimir’s standing in front of an immense white marble tomb, a book in one mittened hand, the other tucked into his pocket.

  “Vladimir,” I call.

  He looks up, puts the book into his satchel. He looks small beside the white marble column of the tomb, which must be close to seven feet high. The lower portion is square cut, but from the top, the head of a woman and one helpless-looking hand abruptly emerge: Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife. She looks cold, a coldness not marble, but snow.

  “See that searchlight mounted on the wall, Annette?” Anatoly points to the red brick. He leans towards me, whispers dramatically, “They say it’s for Comrade Stalin’s midnight visits.”

  They also say that Alliluyeva was poisoned by Stalin. I glance over at the two police patrolling nearby. They’re not paying us any attention. I can’t keep myself from shivering. Vladimir puts his arm around my shoulders.

  We pause as Anatoly stops to stretch his sore leg, then takes out a pack of Belomorkanal. He offers one to Vladimir, who shakes his head. “Saint Annette doesn’t smoke, or I’d offer her one,” Anatoly says as he lights up, drawing the smoke in deeply. Then we continue down the path, the sunlight cold on the gravel.

  “Annette says you’ve joined a literary club.” Anatoly squints through the smoke at Vladimir.

  “It’s not a club, so much. More a reading circle. We’ve been meeting for a while now. A bunch of kids I knew from Pioneers. I told you about Solly, didn’t I, Annette? Really interesting fellow. Solly and some younger guys.”

  “Guys? What’s the point of a literary circle without pretty girls?”

  “We have our share. A couple of very pretty girls. They like poetry.”

  “Of course. Reading anything good?”

  “Esenin. Blok. He’s interesting.”

  Anatoly raises an eyebrow. “Interesting indeed.”

  Vladimir shrugs. “The thrill of the forbidden. We have as much fun hanging about afterwards, walking around the streets of the Arbat, fancying ourselves literary critics.”

  “And school?” Anatoly asks.

  Vladimir grimaces. “I wish we could just concentrate on our coursework. It seems like we spent half the fall on the November 7 festivities, and then all this nonsense for Comrade Stalin’s seventieth birthday. And the next thing you know, we’ll be working on our May Day celebrations. It’s a bloody waste of time.”

  “Commemorating joyous national holidays like genuine Soviet people is a waste of time, Comrade?” Anatoly takes on the loudspeaker voice.

  “Can I have a puff?” I ask.

  Anatoly flicks the ash from the cigarette, adjusts the cardboard holder, offers it to me. “You’ve decided to join us sinners?”

  I shake my head. “I just want a puff.” The raw smoke scratches at my throat. I hand it back. “Why do you do that?”

  “What, smoke?”

  “No. Make fun of everything.”

  “Your little cousin Vladimir’s right – this enforced celebration is a waste of time. Don’t tell me you enjoy all these parades and banners?”

  Vladimir grins. “You haven’t seen her on May Day, Anatoly. On May Day Annette takes her vodka like a man. It fuels her dancing, increases her appreciation of the street music and the fireworks and acrobats . . .”

  “I’ve always liked parades. In Winnipeg Poppa would take us to the Santa Claus parade every single year.” The past catches me in a wave and I have to stop on the path.

  “Are you cold?” Vladimir asks. “Should we go in?” “Why would the army celebrate the Saviour’s birth?” Anatoly asks.

  “I’m
fine, Vladimir. It wasn’t a military parade, Anatoly.” How can I even begin to tell them? “No army. There were floats, and clowns, and Santa Claus in his reindeer sleigh.”

  “Do you remember much about Winnipeg?” Vladimir asks.

  We sit on a stone bench under the bare branches of an immense elm, the stone faintly warmed by the sun.

  I remember everything.

  “Ben took me to the circus one time. We rode our bikes down Main Street right past the edge of town. If we’d gone a few blocks further, past Kildonan Park, we’d have been completely in the country. It felt like the city was just barely perched on the surface of the land. It could blow away any time, leave the prairies exactly the way they were before all those buildings with their false fronts were built. We could stand at the edge of town, and the prairie would just open out. It was like we were the ghosts – the landscape was more real than we were.” That emptiness that had no need for me.

  “Do you ever feel like that here?” Vladimir asks.

  “Here? Not really. I guess the closest I ever felt to it was at Pioneer camp. When I was a kid, Pioneer camp was heaven.”

  “Saint Annette at peace in the workers’ paradise . . .” Anatoly says.

  But it was lovely, the woods round the campsite thick, dense – so different from the thin birches and scrawny elms scattered along Lake Winnipeg at the beach. These Old World woods are soaked with history, wise. And exhausted.

  What I had really wanted there, and found, was to have every day shaped for me. Every day had a form. And I felt part of something. I felt that I had a purpose beyond the small purpose of my life.

  Anatoly takes out another cigarette. “God, those ditties we learned in Pioneers!:

  How wonderful to live in the Soviet land!

  How wonderful to be beloved of the land!

  How wonderful to be useful,

  and wear the red tie with pride!”

  He minces his way through the lyrics. “We lived in ‘the very best country in the world.’ Such patriotic fervour, but we knew nothing about any other country.” His face has darkened. I reach for his hand, but he puts both fists in his pockets, looks out over the snow-covered clearing. “Just look at them,” he says, gesturing to the tombstones, monuments. “All the lovely dead. The best of Russia, dead.” There’s a cold fury in his voice.

  The police pass by, talking to each other, casual. Guarding the dead. “Anatoly,” I say at last.

  He swallows, sighs. “What?”

  “Were we better off serfs?”

  “Of course not. But I’m not convinced we’re living in the promised land. Maybe the promise has been broken.” His eyes trail the police, who are at the far end of the clearing, who can’t possibly hear us.

  Vladimir, who has been quiet, looks up at Anatoly. “We spent four years fighting fascism, Anatoly.”

  “Then why did our army sit and watch while the fascists burned Warsaw?”

  “Anatoly.” I put my hand on his arm.

  “Are we supposed to give up believing that we can make something better here just because it’s a mix of bad and good?” Vladimir asks.

  “Of course not,” Anatoly says. “Look, Vladimir. It’s not useful to see things as either socialism or fascism. Do you think socialism had reached perfection here? Do you think that the way things are right now, here, is the fulfilment of what Lenin, or Marx, had in mind? Look around you; look at where the power lies. Party bureaucrats. Apparatchiks. Petty officials.”

  He puts his arm around Vladimir, his voice gone suddenly brotherly, though I hear an echo of the loudspeaker in his voice. “There are people who would say that what we have now is nothing more than state capitalism. You should read Lenin; read Marx, Hegel. Start with Lenin’s The State and Revolution.”

  “Anatoly, Vladimir’s got more than enough work already . . .”

  “No, Annette, he’s right,” Vladimir interrupts. “I should know more, read more.”

  “I’m just saying that if we do know more, we’ll do a better job of understanding what we have, what we want changed. Anyway, it’s not going to be up to old folks like you and me, Annette. We’re worn out. The war did us in.” Anatoly’s smiling now, his voice light. “It’ll be the kids Vladimir’s age who’ll be the vanguard of real socialist progress. Right Vladimir?” He punches him lightly in the shoulder. “Come on, it’s freezing. I’ll buy us all roasted chestnuts.”

  You don’t get close to it in winter – the smell of earth. My schoolmate Polina has given me a pot of basil to keep on the windowsill beside my drafting board. The little plant looks cramped, so I’m moving it to a bigger pot. Have to water it first, and when I do, that earth smell is released. I lift the plant out gingerly, tenderly, from the damp soil, both hands cupped around the root system, then set it in the new pot, tamp the soil home. There. A bruised leaf gives off its own fresh, peppery smell. Makes me suddenly, briefly, homesick. Everything comes back to me in smell.

  Homesick for what? For my life, which I’m nothing if not in the middle of.

  I lean over my drafting board, studying the façade that I’m working on. It’s complex, and I can’t quite get it right. I want to try changing the proportions of the windows just a bit, realigning them to see how it looks. Mikhailov, our handsome studio instructor, is a couple of tables over. He sees me looking at him, nods, then strolls over.

  “Gardening in the studio is strictly prohibited.” He mock frowns at the basil plant. “But I see it’s not primarily your agricultural concerns that are weighing heavily on you . . . You have a problem?”

  “Comrade Mikhailov, it’s this façade. I can’t quite get it right.”

  “Can you articulate your problem here a bit more clearly?” He pushes back a strand of thick black hair, frowns for real, in concentration, though one eyebrow goes up quizzically. “Usually I can count on you to be a bit more coherent . . .”

  “It needs a better balance of elements. Those windows look too heavy in the wall, too big.”

  “Well, how about something like this?” He draws a couple of sketches, doodles almost, in the corner of the drawing, then heads off without waiting for a reply. I study his sketch, such light, deft strokes. But it’s what I want. This small change in proportion and it’s settled into beauty. There.

  There.

  The murmur of student voices in the studio rises, dims, but I’m not listening, I’m elsewhere: walking the long bare sidewalks of Selkirk Avenue, of Main Street, following my mother reluctantly down Deribasovskaya Street, wandering the streets of Moscow. Since I was small, I’ve been hunting something in buildings: rightness, wholeness. In the ungainly faces of the Winnipeg houses, in those dislocated façades, everything out of place, there was always something missing, something that left me steeped in sadness.

  I can hear Anatoly, his familiar, confident cadences: aesthetics aren’t universals; they’re merely subject to the current ideological fashion. But I don’t believe it’s just petit-bourgeois aestheticism, this craving for beauty, for integrity. If these human structures are made carelessly, made ugly, how do they honour the people who live among them? Why shouldn’t we love what we’ve made, why shouldn’t we take care making it?

  I need wholeness. I need things to be right.

  That’s how I’m home.

  I’ve found it in my work.

  I have to stop myself from laughing out loud: I sound like a good Komsomol. But this is what gives me to myself, this work.

  I start the drawing again. The classroom noises fade. Polina asks if I want a break but I shake my head, scarcely look up. There. There. That’s what I want. I rub my eyes. The studio’s almost empty. Mikhailov must have gone home already. I’ll have to show him the new drawing tomorrow. Polina is still working away a few desks from me, her blonde curls hanging into her face, and Olga, one of the older students, is slumped across her drafting board, fast asleep. It’s so quiet that I can hear her breathe. Down the hallway the caretaker sweeps his mop doggedly backwards and for
wards across the black and white tiles.

  I’m happy. It comes to me that I’m happy.

  Have I come to the end of grief? That was where I was living. It inhabited me, was me.

  What I’d been all that time, knowing and not knowing whether Ben or my parents were alive, was grief; what I’d been was the past. Wrapping myself around that loss, holding it tight so that it didn’t escape. So that the loss hadn’t really been a loss – it had been a presence. Because if I let the grief go – who would I be?

  And now, after the months, years – six years since I learned of their deaths, six and a half – I want to extricate myself, to take the memories, emotions, the grief, outside of me, so that I can feel something else. To have room for something else.

  For myself, my work.

  For Anatoly, maybe.

  So have I, then, come to the end of grief? This morning, and other mornings like this one, I’ve woken and thought merely of the day, what I have to do, whether I’ll be ready for class; thought with pleasure of this drafting board.

  And, in that moment, Poppa, Ben, my mother – they’re gone. They’re not with me and neither is my grief.

  I don’t know what to do with this. Even the loss of grief is a loss. I’m afraid of it. But want to come to an end.