The Knife Sharpener's Bell Read Online Free PDF

practise. So how’s by you, Pa?”
    â€œYou know, the usual,” Avram says. “If I didn’t have to give so much credit, we’d be sitting pretty. And you,
tateleh
? Is Sarah Katz looking after you? Still making those famous poppyseed cookies?”
    The boy smiles. “I moved. I’m boarding with the Posens now; I’ve got enough cash for room and board. Bought myself a bicycle.”
    â€œHere,” Avram says, “take a pickle with it.”
    â€œWhat’s this you’re reading, Pa?” the boy asks, picking up a thick hardcover.
    â€œI got it out of the library, just published. About the Five Year Plan, what it’s going to do for the Russian people.”
    The boy puts the book down.
    â€œListen to what they say here,” Avram says, reading the English carefully aloud:
    In the societies of the West the evolution of institutions proceeds for the most part without plan or design, as a sort of by-product of the selfish competition of individuals, groups and enterprises for private gain. In Russia, on theother hand, the Soviet government has sought to promote the rational and orderly development of the entire social economy. In the great Five Year Plan of Construction, which was launched in October of 1928, and which will run to October of 1933, a whole civilization is harnessing its energies and is on the march towards consciously determined goals.
    â€œ
This
is interesting,” Avram says. “
This
I make time to read.”
    â€œA lot of big words, Pa.”
    â€œAnd you,” Avram gently closes the book, “how is your school?”
    â€œI’m not going to school,” the boy answers. “I got these odd jobs, and coming up in a month I got an apprenticeship with Cohen’s Electric.”
    Avram sets his hands along the counter, runs his fingertips along the ribbed edge. “I wanted for you an education,” he says.
    â€œTell me, Pa,” the boy’s voice goes sour, “what’s the point, someone like me getting an education? I have no head for it.”
    â€œThat’s not true . . .” Avram says.
    â€œI want to earn a living and pay for my keep,” the boy says. “Don’t offer me money, Pa.” Avram’s hands are on the till. “You know I won’t take it. She’ll say I stole it,” he says. And before Avram can say anything more, he’s gone.
    The boy is as good with his hands as he is with his head, can make anything electrical work.
The electrician
, my mother calls him. Never uses his name.
Joseph
.
    Joseph could fix anything. Every time he’d visit he would bring me a little treat: coloured pencils or a new eraser. And he’d help me draw: trees and suns, flowers. I could spend hours drawing, trying to put down on paper something that made a pattern, that had colour in it, a shape. When Joseph visited, we’d talk English to each other. He’d learned to speak good English, not my-country English like Poppa and my mother. He took me to see the fireworks once, gave me a piggyback ride all the way there. I wasn’t scared because I was with Joseph. When the fireworks started, the sky was full of coloured bits of light, red and green and sparkly blue, some like flowers, some like pinwheels. And noises: pops like bubbles bursting for the little lights and a shaky boom for the bigger ones. Then a noise came that was so loud the ground shuddered and I shuddered with it and a big flower of light bloomed right on top of my head. It got bigger and bigger in the sky, came closer and closer till I felt the sky come down to touch me, till I felt the light inside my chest, breathed in light till I was full with it.
    My mother is at the sink, washing dishes. “The
electrician
was here. He fixed the wireless,” she says. Poppa is adding a column of numbers that’s as long as the page. He can keep every one of those numbers in his head all the way down the