The Knife Sharpener's Bell (30 page)

“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 forwards 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.

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.