Read Online The Knife Sharpener's Bell by Rhea Tregebov - Free Book Online

anything. He held me hard against the tobacco-smelling jacket and then he set me down, where I kicked and screamed, almost nine years old, and my mother took me by the arm and onto the streetcar, and the train left, carrying my father away.
    The train I failed to stop lifted my father out of his life, out of what had been, for me at least, a whole, and carried him east, from the Prairies to the Maritimes, Winnipeg to Halifax. In Halifax he boarded the
SS Montcalm
, which crossed the Atlantic to land in Liverpool. By train from Liverpool to Dover, by ferry to Calais and then on the long train to Moscow, my father was carried backwards from the New World to the Old, his life wound backwards into a possible future, into the country, the life he’d left.
    All through the winter months I waited: for spring, forPoppa to come back. All winter I walked the blocks to school in my heavy overshoes, in my heavy coat and double mittens, crunching the packed snow under my boots, watching the clean white snow dirty and then the dirt hide under a new layer of snow. What I wanted was my father, but what I had was my mother, who sat me down in a kitchen chair, got the tortoiseshell brush from the dressing table:
    Sit still if you want me to fix your hair.
Such a fidgety thing. I don’t want you sulking all the time just because your poppa’s not here to fuss over you. Hold your head still. When I worked in the orphanage in Odessa those orphans sat just so when we did their hair – no squirming and crying. All that work to do. Not that I was with the children often. I’ll do anything but look after children. My job was in the dining room, laying the table, washing dishes. Hard work. You’ve never known that kind of work. And if I have anything to say about it you never will. That’s why I don’t like you hanging around my kitchen all the time. I’m not teaching you to be anyone’s servant. Catch yourself a rich husband instead. Fourteen I was when I started with the job in the orphanage. Six days a week there and then three evenings a week at the opera house – during the season – as soon as I turned sixteen. We all had to find jobs; that was it. At the orphanage sometimes, after the dinner dishes were done, they’d ask me to check in on the dormitory. Those children were like wild animals, jumping, yelling, if you didn’t know how to handle them. But they didn’t dare act up with me. Stop crying, I’d say, and they’d stop, and without me laying a finger on them. These were orphans. You could have done anything with them. But I never needed to smack any child. Not like my mother, a hard woman.She’d use her fists, the broomstick, whatever came to hand. And I always got the worst of it, even though my big sisters tried to keep her away from me. It was because I stood up to her. When I was twelve I got my arm broken. I still remember how it sounded when it broke, like a twig on a tree. And I remember my mother’s face, like she knew she was doing just the right thing. No arguing with her. Nobody can say I ever laid a hand on any child, not even the electrician. Not me. Hold still. When I was your age, in Odessa, I had hair down to my waist. Every day I’d come home and one of my sisters would sit me down in front of the stove and brush my hair, a hundred strokes. And we’d walk, all us girls, along Nikolayevsky Boulevard, taking our time, and the boys would call out to me: hey, green eyes. I never even looked at a boy. My sisters taught me to respect myself. Here, we’re almost done. I’m making you pigtails. So it pulled a little. Don’t make a big to-do about every little thing. The orphanage was hard, but the opera I loved. That building – more beautiful than the opera in Paris, that’s what they said. I worked out front, I told you, a cashier. Sure I watched! I never got to see the first act, but I saw the rest.
Che gelida