The Knife Sharpener's Bell (17 page)

The days and sleepless nights ran into one another. At night, as I drifted towards dreams, English words would wash through my mind, funny bits about English. Miss MacLeod, the comfort sounds she used to make when one of her pupils scraped a knee:
Now-now. There-there.
Poppa's sounds, the sound of soothing.
There-there; go to sleep. Now-now; don't cry.
English in my head. It should have been
then-then
, really, to go with
there-there
. I think in those first weeks of shock I lived nowhere but inside my own head, my good-for-nothing head. What I wanted was to sleep through the night with no dreams and to wake up and be in one place, be where I was: Moscow. I was in Moscow because of my father. He dreamt Moscow into being for me, because of what he wanted for me and couldn't give himself. Who dreamt Moscow first, who dreamt Moscow into being? Some tsar back in the fourteenth, fifteenth century? At first there was nothing and then there was this city. People wish for things, dream them into being, good or bad. And not just buildings, or roads. The Revolution, the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics. Marx, Lenin. Stalin. But not just them. People like my mother, and Poppa, and everyone else who believed in the Revolution, in a Soviet Russia.

And the war. Hitler dreamt it. It's all desire: cities and streets and governments and wars, anything built by people. Hitler wanted his
living space
. Germany wasn't enough for him. He willed a war. No, that's not true either. It wasn't Hitler alone; it wasn't one man. Not Hitler and not Lenin and not Stalin. Someone wished them into being, dreamt along with them. Whole peoples, nations, believers who dreamt them into power. Awake and dreaming, they'd made it all.

And what about me, what have I dreamt into being? Or have I let myself be dreamt by someone else? What about me?

Joseph's head is bumpy; my knees bang against his shoulders. He's giving me a piggyback ride. It's dark and very late. The air smells of the sharp, sweet scent of grass. The sky is full of coloured bits of light, red and green and blue Blossoms and pinwheels of light. “Did you like that, Annette? Do you like Firecracker Day?” I can hear pops like bubbles bursting and then a shaky boom. That flower of light, right on top of my head, inside me. I'm big with light. Then it fades. How can Joseph carry me like this? I'm too big for a piggyback ride. He's walking away from the fireworks, but the noise is getting louder. Someone's banging on the door. I can smell the sulphur from the matches. I'm pounding Joseph on the shoulders. He has to stop. It's too noisy; I don't want to go.

“Annette,” Raisa's voice is in my ear, “Annette, get up.”

I'm too tired to get up. I try to pull the covers back on.

“Annette, we've got to hurry.”

“Where's Poppa?” That howling, sirens. Is there a fire?

“Annette, wake up. You're in Moscow. It's Raisa. We have to go down to the Metro station; we'll be safe there. Come, Annette. We have to go.”

Underground? I won't go. Pavel's in the room. He has Vladimir in his arms, half-asleep. Ben's beside me on the davenport, pulling on his sandals.

“Ben, what is it?”

“An air raid. We'll be safe in the Metro station. Get up.”

Ben takes my arm and I'm outside, part of a river of people pouring out of the apartment buildings that moves for me, carrying me away into the night, the cool July air. The people in the crowd have no faces, only shoulders and backs, pyjamas and robes, some with their day clothes hastily put on. Just the determined set of those shoulders and backs as they move towards safety. Then I see that there
are
faces, a few, children like Vladimir still little enough to be carried, their small tousled heads bobbing on their parents' shoulders, sleepy, pale. And the roar, the wailing of the air-raid siren as it moves through the night and through it the noise of the German bombers above us. The streets are dark but the sky is criss-crossed by the light of the searchlights.

Then we hear a noise so loud the ground shudders and I shudder with it, and suddenly the sky is full of coloured bits of light. I stop, feel the current of people flow past me, and I become myself again, someone. Ben grabs me from the centre of the street, holds me against the warm brick wall of a building, presses me against it, his body between me and whatever is out there. I can feel the concussion from the bomb reverberating in the wall.

“We're all right,” he says. “Let's keep going. It's not that
close.” And he's pulling me back into the street. We're propelled along with the crowd. I twist around: Raisa's right behind us, Pavel with Vladimir just ahead. We cross the street.

Another explosion. I stop again, feeling myself separate out once more from the crowd. I want to look up: only a few stars. Then the whine. The notes diminish and suddenly there are more stars, a huge blossom of light right on top of me. The light expands from its centre, coming closer and closer till I feel the sky coming down to touch me, till I feel the light inside my own chest –

“Annette!” Ben grabs me again, this time by the scruff of my nightgown, pulls me into the safety of a doorway. “Are you nuts?” He's speaking English. “Why do you keep stopping in the middle of the street?”

There's no point answering because the roaring has grown louder, not just the sirens but the sound of bombs, of falling, of everything collapsing. Just across the street one of the walls of a building abruptly sags, then the whole structure crumples, falls in on itself. The dust immediately layers my face, my throat. I'm coughing, choking.

Then Ben is pulling me along again, silent. We're safe; we can see the mouth of the Metro opening for us all, the big M. Vladimir's pale face over Pavel's shoulder is about half a block ahead, and beside him what must be the back of Raisa's head. I don't have to decide anything: the crowd courses down the steep polished steps and I'm part of it, going into the Metro station, down to the workers' palace underground. The bad things are happening up on the streets now; it's the streets of Moscow which may become the city of the dead. And underground is where the living are kept safe.

Summer's gone. The September sky bears down on us. It's a steady rain, untiring. My clothes are heavy with it. The truck takes a corner and the woman I'm sitting beside is flung against me, a warm solid body. I shiver, and the woman, her smile glinting silver, puts an arm across my shoulder. “Not as good as your boyfriend, but I'll do for now. I'm Katya.”

“Annette.”

“The work will soon warm you.”

An older woman on the bench across from me offers her flask of vodka, but I shake my head. The girl beside her looks no older than me but she's stocky, bundled in so many layers she's almost egg shaped.
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall
. . . the words run through my head in English. The rocking of the truck lulls me. My eyes close and I lean against my neighbour's solid shoulder, still foggy with the bad dreams of the night before.

Raisa and Pavel got up before dawn, making me breakfast and layering me in old sweaters, a jacket Ben's outgrown, mittens over gloves. I'd been afraid that Pavel wouldn't let me volunteer for the women's brigade, tens of thousands of them digging immense anti-tank trenches at the outskirts of the city. But he said yes right off. He'd been on the streets himself every day, filling sandbags for hours. Everyone with a free day volunteered. All the shops and monuments and public buildings were being barricaded. School had been suspended. When I got to the square, I worried again that they wouldn't take me. But there were other volunteers just as young, and none of us were told to leave. We piled into the trucks, handed up with a few words of encouragement. And now the truck is carrying us beyond the edges of the city to where the anti-tank ditches are being dug.

When I open my eyes – it can't have been more than a minute – the egg-shaped girl is munching on a piece of bread, the kind of black rye Poppa used to eat. The kind he eats, would eat, will eat. Poppa. Think of something else. Food. I'm still full from breakfast, but I feel in my pocket for the fat lunch Raisa packed, three thick sandwiches of bread and cheese. “You'll be surprised how hungry you get,” she'd said, stuffing them in my pocket. “You haven't ever done physical work before.”

Never worked. It's true. What use have I been, what have I ever done with my body? Hide. Listen. Watch. I'm not a worker. And something in me believes that if I'm not a worker, I'm not real. I want to do something hard.

I must have dozed again because the truck has jerked to a stop and Katya, the silver-toothed woman, is shaking me. We scramble out of the truck and over to the crest of a low hill. In the cold rain, a bit lighter now, rank upon rank of earlier shifts of women are already at work with shovels and wheelbarrows. It's the measured, even pace of work I've seen before: the girl plucking a chicken back in Winnipeg, scrubbing the back stairs on her hands and knees; my father unpacking cans in the delicatessen. And in Odessa, women sweeping the streets with their twig brooms, construction workers gnawing at the streets with pickaxes. Here there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of women.

The immense ditch seems to deepen as I watch, the work taking on an intricate pattern communicated from body to body as each row of women fills the wheelbarrows and baskets of those above them, who in turn lug the loose earth away. It's as if their bodies were of one mind, each individual woman's will blended to become a single will
that is both hers and that of all the others around her, their lives belonging to each other now. Just beyond the horizon, invisible still, there's the greater army against which this inverse dike is being built, a presence these women already feel. The hard lean male bodies in their steel boxes have also left their individual, their private lives to join into a single will.

We're called to a makeshift shack where we're given our shovels. The egg-shaped girl and I are led along one of the muddy paths, our boots slipping on the soggy ground, and assigned to a section of the trench that's no more than rain-sodden string sagging from stakes. The rain has become a fine mist dampening the back of my neck. I set my foot on the flat of the shovel. Dig. That's what I'm here for. I step down on it, wait for the bite into firm soil. But the ground here is saturated, and I have to lean hard into it as the blade skips along the slippery mud.

Damn, damn. On a second try, I manage a half load but can barely lift it, my boots sliding in the muck. I can't get a solid enough grip with my feet to fling it off, and the mud clings to the blade. I slide a half-hearted cupful off with my boot, feel the emptiness open inside me. The girl in the layers is working steadily beside me, her feet planted wide, a shallow ditch already forming at her feet.

A fury rushes into me, flooding the empty space. I lean into the shovel, manage a half load, whack it against the ground behind me so that it loosens and falls. Dig in again, get another half load, and this time I fling so hard the handle slips from my hands. I lose my balance, my feet sliding out so that I fall heavily, though my long jacket cushions me, the back of it coated with mud. Stumbling to my feet, I find Katya beside me.

“Come this way; we need you over here.”

Shouldering my shovel, head down, I run a quick mitten across my cheeks that doubtless leaves a smear of mud. I don't deserve to be with these people – my useless body, useless ideas. Katya leads me to a corrugated tin roof sheltering a pile of sand, empty burlap bags stacked to one side.

“We need you to fill the bags. See?” She points to the end of the trench that's completed, the wall of sandbags above it.

The tears still in my throat, I can't say anything; nod, wipe again at my face. Her hand rests for a moment on my shoulder, then she turns back to where the trench is taking shape. The roof has kept the sand mostly dry. I start with small loads, holding the bag open with one hand and the shovel in the other. Do something hard. By the third bag I'm working smoothly, filling bags and then dragging them to the side. The work has warmed me so that I'm damp with sweat. Got to slow down a bit, or I won't be able to keep it up all day. As the minutes pass, sand filling the rough burlap bags, I feel myself fall into that even rhythm of work.

A hand on my shoulder again. Katya. I didn't even hear her come up. “Annette, come. It's time for lunch.”

I must have been working three, no, four hours. The stack of filled sandbags marks my labour. I've done something.

The women are gathered at an improvised kitchen, drawn by the smell of soup. I peer into the pot: beef and barley. Not a shred of meat, but there must have been bones; I can smell it, and there are bits of fat at the surface. I take my tin bowl and spoon and eat. It's so good. Katya and I sit on a couple of filled sandbags where we're out of the rain and soon we're joined by other women. I take out my sandwiches, offer some to Katya, who refuses and pulls
her own lunch, bread and sausage, from her pocket. The woman from the truck offers me vodka again and this time I take a sip, choke as it burns down my throat. The women laugh, pat me on the back. I feel the delicious heat run through me.

A hand shakes me awake. I've fallen asleep on the truck ride home – most of the women have. We're back in the city. My legs tremble as I climb down. Pavel's waiting, soaked through. How long has he been waiting?

“How'd it go?”

I grimace. “I was no good at shovelling. But they had me filling sandbags.”

“I'm proud of you.” He squeezes me, hard. The rain has plastered his thin blond hair against his skull. He must be losing weight; he looks skinnier than ever. “Come on, let's get you home. You must be freezing.”

We walk home in silence.

The apartment's cold and I'm shivering even more. Raisa wipes her hands on a tea towel. “I want you in the bath right now. The water is already heated. And when you get out, you're eating soup.”