The Knife Sharpener's Bell Read Online Free PDF Page A

scared of the lady in the picture. In your room.”
    My mother comes in. “What’s wrong with her?” my mother asks. “Why is she crying?”
    â€œShe’s scared of the picture in the bedroom.”
    â€œScared of a picture? Why should she be scared of a picture?”
    It comes out; I have to let it out. “The lady makes me do things. I have to do things for her.” I said it. Now what happens?
    â€œCome here,” my mother says, taking me by the hand. “Show me the picture.”
    We go into the bedroom. “That one. The lady.”
    â€œAll right,” my mother says, and she sits me on the bed. “This is what we’ll do.” And she goes over to the wall, takes it down, puts it face down in the bureau drawer. “There,” she says. “It’s gone. You don’t have to do anything any more. You don’t have to be scared.”
    I am not who I was. I was someone defined by what I obeyed, my mother and the laws that governed her, my sense of the world as ungovernable, my certainty of my own helplessness and its power. Didn’t my mother, even then, offer me something else? Didn’t she always offer me something else? One night in the apartment on Main Street the lights went out just after dinner. I reached for Poppa’s hand in the darkness, felt it warm and solid in mine. But in the moment before I took his hand, that first moment of darkness, I called out
Momma
. I thought then,
why is it Momma I call when it’s Poppa I love?
He was wearing the green sweater; even in the dark I could see it green. I pulled closer and we sat quietly together until the lights came on. When those days come back to me, the very earliest days I can remember, they’re fixed, the family its own immutable constellation. My life was of a piece and then, when my father stepped onto that train, what was whole came to be broken and I fell into these fragmentary selves, this collection of beings. Sometimes I wonder who the girl on Main Street was. I was reading an article in the newspaper just the other day. It said that the self – which we have but animals don’t – resides behind the right eye, a spot in the brain which, removed, or damaged, removes or damages who we are. And that who we are is defined by our memory of our life, but not by memory alone: by memory as it is imbued with emotion. Who we are. So if I remember your hand, Vladimir, but not the love that accompanied it, I am not who I was. I’m not. I have this other life now, the life that’s not my old life. I’ve turned the corner from that old life, the one I won’t talk about. Turning my back on the past, I haven’t allowed myself to be that girl on Main Street any more, haven’t even let myself remember all the separate people I’ve inhabited. And yet. Does
not who I was
mean
less than I was
? Could it not mean
other
, couldn’t
different from
mean
more than
, mean gain, not just loss?
    There he is, in the doorway of the delicatessen, the boy who’s not supposed to be there. He’s stopped in the doorway, watching his father. Avram looks up. “Come in, come in,” Avram says. “It’s good to see you. Have a bite to eat.” He touches the boy’s arm, then wipes his hands on the immaculate cotton of the apron, even though his hands areclean. The boy seats himself on one of the red stools at the counter, whirls slowly around once or twice. Avram’s hands are quick making the sandwich, piling two inches of corned beef on the rye. He sets the plate down, sets himself down beside the boy, watches as he eats. “It’s good?” he asks in Yiddish.
    â€œTalk English, Pa,” the boy says, his mouth full. “We should talk English.”
    â€œYou talk good already.” Avram pushes a plate of coleslaw towards him. “Anybody would think you were born right here in Canada.”
    â€œI need to