Because I am not just my love for Poppa, for Ben, my botched love for my mother. I’m also their love for me, and Raisa’s love, Pavel’s – who are still alive. Vladimir’s, Manya’s. Joseph, Anatoly.
And more than that, I am – myself. This wash of thought, emotion, impulse, perception. The eye squinting this very moment in the late sun, the hand drawing the façade, toes cramped in their worn shoes. Something mutable and transient but, nonetheless, finally, there.
It has stayed with me, that antidote to grief. The drug of work, as Raisa said. And the self it gave me. It still cures. At this very moment, when I should put the boxes, the folders away, when I should go back to the dinner I’m still grateful for, my kitchen steeped in the fragrance of mushrooms, all I want is to go to the office, sit at my desk. The desk is very beautiful. I’m inordinately proud of it, designed it myself. I’m proud of my office too, which is, of course, both spare and elegant. Populated with “pedigree furniture” as my daughter calls it, her proletarian sensibilities somewhat offended: the standard architect’s office fare, Barcelona chair, Corbu chaise longue. I like his Basculant chair best. Despite my “semiretirement,” I still come in three or four times a week, drink coffee, fuss over sketches, bother everyone. I’m proud too (the sin of pride following directly on the sin of humility) of what I have managed to build here – a few schools, many homes, one art gallery I’m altogether too pleased with, a clinic. I think my mother would have liked my buildings. My father too. They aren’t tall or grand: no palaces for the workers . . . But they are beautiful, I believe, and they’re whole. It’s hard to be whole.
I should eat. Or turn the television back on and listen to what those children have to say. But I’m hungry. My body still has its appetites, still communicates these things quite nicely: You’re hungry: make a snack. You’re tired: take a nap. There are days when I wake up feeling so strong that I can delude myself that I’m still thirty – on the inside, at least.
When everything still seems possible, even love. I’m thinking about my old friend Oscar Rheinhold again. He was eighty-seven when he died, ripe, as they say. I’d rather die ripe than rotten. Margaret, his wife, had died four years earlier. I couldn’t stand Margaret, a sour, pinched little soul perpetually disappointed in Oscar. I put up with her for twenty years only for Oscar’s sake. Everybody did. And then she died, and Oscar was released from his fidelity, and took up with the woman who’d been his next-door neighbour for thirty-five years, also widowed. It sounds like the punchline to a joke, but I think it was the first time he was happy with a woman. And it moves me. It moves me.
I should be making dinner, tasting my mushrooms, but instead I’ve gone and picked up a snapshot I still have of Vladimir, sere old woman that I am. I haven’t been able to pack it away in a box; it’ll go last. It used to sit on the bookshelf at Pavel and Raisa’s. It was taken on one of his last summers at Young Pioneer camp. He looks about fourteen. He’s leaning over a heap of firewood, holding one end of a double-handled saw, his thick hair brushed back from his forehead. He’s got one skinny, sinewy arm resting for balance on a log. The smile on his face is quizzical, hesitant, as if he were caught at the very moment at which he was about to grow up – as though he’d made up his mind about it.
But that winter of conversations, of intrigue, he wasn’t smiling much, Vladimir. He’d lean in his chair at the table, an arm draped over the back, the casual stance contradicted by his face as he talked to Anatoly. The two of them would be sunk into another intense political conversation. At first I hovered at the edge of that talk, fielding questions from Anatoly that felt more like interrogations: didn’t Vladimir and I know that Lenin had left a will warning against Stalin? Were we not aware that there were unnumbered camps across the country holding millions of prisoners, most of them unjustly condemned?
I never was the kind of believer that my parents, or even Pavel and Raisa, were. I’d always felt that, under that surface of belief, there were things that were wrong. So Anatoly’s information and the propositions that it offered were seductive. It made me feel there was some way of breaking the code, of seeing beyond the official story. I wanted to know. But mostly the talk made me miserable. Anatoly’s theories were ungiving, unforgiving. And his immense certainty – socialism is this and not that; Lenin meant this and nothing more or less – there was something wrong with it. The loudspeaker voice. My mother’s certainties, though Anatoly’s certainties took a different tangent from hers. Swallowing my anger, I would pick up my class notes or my textbooks and pretend to read them while the sparring continued.
Because it was really Vladimir that Anatoly was talking to; it was Vladimir that he needed to taunt, to challenge. The two boys, men, wrangled over everything, so that everything was a showdown, hands at their six-guns. And Vladimir, who was reading Marx and Lenin now as often as he was reading poetry or his medical texts, seemed to be enjoying it. He’d always rise to the bait, try to measure himself against Anatoly.
They didn’t argue when Pavel or Raisa were around, though. We hid our talk from Pavel and Raisa just the way the adults had once protected us. This is not a conversation for children. In those days, we grown children were the ones who needed to hide what we knew, or thought we knew, or were afraid to know. I quickly tired of those boys and their talk. I wanted it to stop. Because it exhausted me. And because it was dangerous. Much as we were our own closed circle – or so I thought – we were putting ourselves at risk with every word.
Anatoly and I had another one of our fights about it. One evening when he turned up late to meet me, he claimed that he hadn’t been drinking, that he’d been out talking with Vladimir. I told him he was a bad influence. These conversations were damaging. Vladimir was being distracted from his school work. Anatoly was an idiot to think that such topics were harmless, without consequences. And he had no right to draw Vladimir into his idiocy. This analysis of the Soviet state, it wasn’t idle conversation. It was tinder. If anyone overheard, we might all get into trouble. NKVD, informants, you didn’t know who was standing beside you in the Metro station, who was reading next to you on a park bench. And the NKVD had listening devices; we’d all heard about them. Anatoly was silent for a moment and then launched into me, ridiculing my bourgeois concerns, circling me with his disdain, his certainties. He told me I was a coward and stalked out. Two hours later he was at the apartment door, drunk but contrite. It was his pattern: leaving, coming back, apologizing. Always coming back.
Chernikhov is giving a lecture at three o’clock. I’ve come early to the lecture hall to make sure I get a good seat. I take the stairs two at a time, though they’re grooved with wear, each step a little concave hazard. At the top of the stairs there’s a tight cluster of students. But instead of the usual casual buzz of conversation, gossip, their faces are taut.
Mikhailov, our studio instructor, has been arrested.
One of the things I liked most about Mikhailov was his sense of humour, how he was a bit outspoken, not as eternally careful as the other profs. He’d say things, joke.
It’s a political charge – Mikhailov has been declared a socially dangerous element. An admirer of American democracy. Enemy of the people.
Then the talk stops because one of the professors opens the double doors to the lecture hall. We all file silently in. Polina has saved me a seat. We always sit beside each other at lectures; we share each others’ notes too. So we sit and listen, as if nothing has happened. After the lecture, I ask Polina whether she’s heard about Mikhailov. She nods, makes a face. “He’s not the only Jewish faculty member to get in trouble.”
“He was Jewish?”
“Of course he was,” Polina says. “Couldn’t you tell?”
Tell.
What tells Polina this? Some mark, some stain or word or scent gives her this certainty that she asserts so easily.
Polina’s not Jewish. I’ve never thought about this before. It didn’t matter.
“Mikhailov’s real name was Mordukhov,�
�� she says.
A name, then, or a feature. A smudge that distinguishes him and at the same time makes him indistinguishable from others of his kind. My kind.
Polina’s face is furrowed with concern. Mikhailov is one of her favourite teachers too.
Polina’s face is innocent.
When I get home, Vladimir’s at the table as usual, reading.
“Pavel and Raisa still at work?”
He nods. “We’re supposed to eat without them.”
“What’s today’s organ – the intestines? The reproductive system?” I lean over the table: Stalin’s Issues of Leninism. “Are you reading that article Anatoly recommended?” The page he’s reading has phrases underlined, the pencil marks of Vladimir’s tight, meticulous handwriting crowding all the margins.
Vladimir nods, but his mouth goes tight. “I read everything Anatoly recommends.”
For the past week or so, Vladimir and Anatoly have been circling each other, alternately locked in talk and aloof from each other.
Vladimir gets up from the table, goes to the samovar. He comes back with two glasses, passes me one. His hands are big, now; broad across the palm but the fingers are slender, supple. He settles down beside me on the davenport. “Did you see this?” he asks, picking up a candy-red cardboard cylinder from the end table and twisting it against one eye. A kaleidoscope. “Solly gave it to me.”
“Solly Koznitsky? The fellow who’s studying philosophy? The one in your literary circle?”
“Yup.”
“I still haven’t met him. You should bring him over for dinner.”
“I will,” he says. “Promise. It’s just we study mostly at his house or his girlfriend Lena’s . . .”
“Vladimir, you’re not, you’re not being indiscreet, are you?”
He looks at me, laughs. I can’t laugh back. “You know what I mean. You’re not talking about anything . . . about the stuff you and Anatoly talk about. It’s a bad idea.”
“I am a doctor in training. I intend to be the soul of discretion.” Not an answer, really. He passes me the little cylinder. “Want to have a look?”
“Sure.” I had a kaleidoscope back in Winnipeg. Pale bits of paper in it that the mirrors inside would pull into patterns. This one’s better than my old one – no paper bits. Much more satisfying because there are infinite combinations. You can look at anything, change anything, even the least little chunk of a windowsill, corner of a room. Change anything through looking, though nothing really changes.
I turn to pick out the pattern on the davenport fabric, then to Vladimir’s open book: Stalin’s text taken apart, reorganized. An ordered distortion. I move to the margins of the page, play with Vladimir’s pencilled notes; they look like a musical score. Then I focus it on Vladimir’s face. I can see only a fragment – the diminutive topography where jaw meets ear – repeated and inverted so that it’s unrecognizable as Vladimir. He’s not closer or farther away; he’s just not Vladimir.
“Annette, you all right?”
My face always gives me away. “A bad day,” I say. “Another faculty arrest: Mikhailov. Turns out he’s Jewish too.”
Vladimir’s face goes grim. “Our department has had two Jewish faculty fired. Zionism in the service of American imperialism.” His long fingers tap against the fabric of the davenport; he takes a sip of the honeyed tea.
“Annette,” he says. I focus the kaleidoscope on his mouth, teeth. “Annette, I get scared.”
I put it down. Vladimir is never afraid. “Scared of what?”
“Scared that we’re fooling ourselves.” He reaches for the kaleidoscope, trains it briefly on my face, then sets it down. “I’m scared that we keep wanting to see this country the way it was meant to be, the way it could be, the way it used to be – and not how it is. It’s like kids telling themselves a story to keep from getting afraid. We tell ourselves one that makes us feel better, that lets us keep on hoping. But maybe that story is just a lie.”
“My parents,” I say, “they were like that. What they wanted wasn’t what they got. But they wanted it so badly that they never let go of the wanting.” I take the kaleidoscope back from him but don’t look into it, just worry it in my hand, twisting it back and forth. “ My country. I hated it when my mother said that. Like she owned it.” The cylinder turns in my hands. “But I did choose. I chose this as my country.”
“Pavel and Raisa . . . if I talked like this with them, they’d tell me we have to believe, have faith,” Vladimir says.
“Faith in what?”
“The future, I guess. The possible. That somewhere, sometime, we’ll be able to build the kind of socialism that Lenin and Marx meant for us to have. But I get sick of just sitting around talking.”
“Have you and Anatoly had a falling out?”
Vladimir shrugs.
“Vladimir?”
“I’m tired of talk.”
“What do you mean? Do you mean you want more than talk or that you want less talk?”
“I’m tired of it.”
“That’s not an answer.”
He smiles, shrugs again. “What is to be done? ”
“Don’t go quoting Lenin on me,” I say. “You know that Lenin got the title from a novel by Chernyshevsky . . .”
“I don’t care where he got the title! What we have to do, here and now, is be patient and wait it out.”
“You sound like Anatoly,” he says. “You can’t fight guns with sticks. ”
“That what he said?”
Vladimir nods. “He also said even talk is dangerous.”
“And he’s right, Vladimir.” At last Anatoly has started to listen to me.
Vladimir smiles again. What is it? What does he want from me?
“Anatoly tells me that at present there’s nothing we can do,” he says.
“And what did you tell him, Vladimir?” “
I said: Then let’s do the nothing that we can. A gesture, an act of faith.” He’s looking straight at me, his eyes clear, stripped of anything but his question.
“Are you asking me for an act of faith? Are you imagining that there’s something you can do, something we can do?”
“Annette, don’t you get tired of waiting?”
How much of my life has been spent waiting. I know that I can’t drift. I can’t let the world wash over me. I know that it’s what I choose that gives me a life.
But the decision to wait, to endure, survive, after so many losses – it is a decision.
“Vladimir, you’re being absurd. It’s impossible. We have to pick our fights, decide what’s worth fighting for.”
“I know.” As he does when he worries for me, he’s taken my hand, is turning it soft quarter turns, left and then right. “ You can’t fight guns with sticks. Right?” He’s smiling, a different smile now, but it makes me uneasy.
“It’s true, Vladimir. We can’t do anything. Or anything that we do would be useless. We have to admit it, even if we don’t want it to be true. We can’t tell ourselves a happier story here. It wouldn’t do any good.”
“I know.”
“And besides, you’re too clever to do anything foolish. Right?” He doesn’t say anything. “Promise?”
“Promise.” He says, turning my hand slightly to the right, then the left. “Nothing foolish.”
Pavel and Raisa don’t get home until after eleven o’clock. Raisa cuts a slice of farmer’s cheese for herself, then another, which she holds out to me, smiling. Then, still chewing her mouthful of cheese, she stretches out on the davenport, her feet on Pavel’s lap. “Annette, did you see we got a letter from Manya? It’s on the desk. Your old school friend, Elena, has had a second baby, another girl. I thought we could send her that baby blanket we found in the market. And I can start a sweater for her.” Raisa’s taken up crocheting now, evenings, and as she shuttles between work and home on the trolley. “They were afraid Elena would need a Caesarian but everything went fine. The baby was born a week ago Monday.”
“Monday’s child.” I say in English.
“What’s that?” Raisa asks.
“There’s a rhyme in English:
Monday’s child is fair of face
Tuesday’s child is full of grace . . .”
“Vladimir was born on a Wednesday – what’s the rhyme for Wednesday?”
I can’t remember.
“What day of the week were you born?” Raisa asks.
“I don’t know.”
I have no one to ask.
Did I not see what was at bottom in that conversation? Didn’t I understand what Vladimir was asking of me, or, in the end, had decided not to ask of me? In the weeks that followed that day of the kaleidoscope, he was abstracted, even furtive, consumed by the exhilaration and intrigue of what he was doing. Raisa became impatient with his increased absences, his silences. Vladimir had always been so present with us, the core of our little makeshift family. He’d been open with his enthusiasms and ideas, engaged with all the little details of our lives. There was still the odd day when he would come home after school to sit at the table and peel the potatoes, mince the onions while Raisa masterminded dinner. He would have a special tenderness for us those evenings when he was back in family, would linger as Pavel and Raisa talked over their day, quizzing Raisa on some of the details of her cases.
But more often he would come home late, take the leftovers set aside for him in the pantry and head straight to his bed, where his light would be on late into the evening as he laboured over his medical books. For the first time, there was a segment of his life withheld from us. We told ourselves it was natural at his age. Told ourselves he was absorbed in medical school, in love, though no particular girl was mentioned.
The only names mentioned were Solly, and Solly’s girl Lena. We could sense there was something special about this young couple by the almost-hidden smile of sly delight when Vladimir spoke of them. But we never met them. Bring your friends by for dinner, Raisa would say, and Vladimir would agree. Yes, they were coming Sunday; they were eager to meet the family. But then Sunday would come, and their plans would have changed. Sincere apologies, excuses, Vladimir’s standard gentle regret. Next week, then? Yes, yes, Vladimir would agree. They’d find an evening next week. But as the weeks passed, they never quite managed to come. We never knew them. I never saw them, till that day when we were all to share a room.
The Knife Sharpener's Bell Page 23
