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

thumb along the flat, narrow edge. I had something dangerous: a weapon, a tool.
    I had it for years, had comfort from it whenever it was in my hand. Ben’s gift. Neither of us fortune tellers – we couldn’t have known that nothing he could give me couldcarry me through what was to come. But that’s not true. Haven’t I always told myself that the self-pity of the old who have in fact survived their lives doesn’t wash? I was carried through. And it was Ben’s gifts, all of them, along with the others,’ that kept me alive.
    A whole crowd of us waited for Poppa’s train –
a hero’s welcome
, thirty people on the platform – but I wanted him the most. When he stepped down everybody shouted, everybody ran to him, my mother standing at the back, smiling. And then Poppa turned to me and picked me up.
Make a wish.
I put my nose into his jacket; he smelled different, distant.
Poppa
, I said,
you need to smoke your pipe
. He smiled into my face, not listening, and pulled me tighter to him.
You see, Monkey? I told you I’d be home before you knew it.
We bundled into the streetcar, got off at the Liberty Temple where the banquet table was set and the farm girl who helped at the delicatessen was bustling around, smiling, humming to herself. After we ate, Poppa gave his speech.
    While I’d been waiting in Winnipeg, my father had waited in Moscow. After more than a month of paperwork, red tape, of waiting rooms, bureaucrats behind barred wick-ets, he finally got his appointment with Immigration. He’d stood in the high-ceilinged room and explained to the man behind the desk – a young man, younger than my father, his suit pressed, a good dark wool. My father had explained it all to the young man, but it wasn’t easy. They don’t let just anybody into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. My father had to talk the man into it; he had to explain. How capitalism was crumbling here, how the workers had been betrayed. About the strikes of the employed, the riots of the unemployed, the anarchy of capitalism, the corruption ofgovernment, of lives.
I’m forty-nine years old
, he told the man,
and my own hopes are rotting
. A planned economy, it was the only rational approach. Look at what had been accomplished in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: the Five Year Plan, the granaries full . . .
    At first the man said nothing. My father thought it was all over, that he’d be refused. So he took out pictures of us, set them on the desk. Still the man said nothing. What is to be done?
Comrade. Comrade
, the man said,
this will not be easy, arranging the repatriation papers
. But my father wouldn’t give up. Again he explained. It wasn’t just him; there were so many back home who felt the way he did, who looked towards the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for hope, who wanted only the chance to help give birth to some sort of a better world where the workers of the world could find a decent life for themselves, an honest living.
Comrade
, the man said,
do you not think that your first duty is to go home and make the Revolution in Canada?
The man handed back the photographs.
We need workers for the Revolution throughout the world
, he said.
You should go back to your family. Go home.
    But my father would not take no for an answer. No. He’d made his wish. And he would give my mother hers. He would at last make her happy, take her back to her family, her city. Had either of them ever really felt that Winnipeg was home? Coming back to Russia made sense in every way. It seemed to be the only thing that made sense. He had come to Canada at a loss, had come because he was so unhappy. He’d come to a place where he thought an ordinary man could make an honest living for his family. And they’d worked so hard to make a life here. They’d lived through the 1919 General Strike, when innocent men wereshot dead in the street. All that