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

line. He puts his pencil down.
    â€œHis name is Joseph.”
    The cat and I watch my mother’s hands making circles with a soapy rag.
    â€œI know his name,” she says.
    It’s easy to read my mother’s back. I always know when something bad is going to happen, like the day she tore up that old picture of the little boy shaking hands with Poppa.When she gets mad, Poppa talks in his quiet voice.
There-there
, his voice says.
    Poppa gets up, turns on the radio. “It’s working good,” he says, and goes downstairs.
    My mother turns the radio off. “In Odessa, we didn’t need a wireless. Every evening we could go to the park and listen to the orchestra in the bandstand.”
    They worked under the ground, my mother’s family, in the mines, like ants. The whole city of Odessa sits on top of stone, she told me, limestone, and for hundreds of years my mother’s family mined it. Hundreds of years and hundreds of miles of tunnels, a honeycomb of limestone tunnels. Maybe they’re bees, not ants, my mother’s family. A hive of relatives, her sisters and their families, still living in my mother’s city, her country.
    It’s funny that Joseph has the same country as my mother – she wouldn’t want to share anything with him.
    I don’t have a country. Or my country doesn’t have a name. Maybe my country is the delicatessen: Poppa’s white apron at night, the way it shines in the darkness hanging from its peg.
    I’ve always lived in a forest of words, in a foreign language. On the first day of grade one at Aberdeen School on Selkirk Avenue, we walked to school, Poppa and me, his hand warm and quiet in mine. When we got to the doorway of the classroom, he said,
Come look and don’t be scared
.
This is where all the little girls dance.
Aberdeen School was where I learned to be good. Reading the faces of the teachers was easy, and so was making my own face show them what they wanted to see: a serious little girl, a smiling little girl, a girl who does what she’s told. And Aberdeen School was where I was toldto speak only English: not Yiddish, which I spoke to my father, and not Russian, which I spoke to my mother. “We must all learn,” Miss MacLeod explained, “to speak English so that everyone understands everyone else. Now if you speak Russian, and Darya speaks Ukrainian, and Nadya speaks Hungarian, how will we get by?” And though I knew the teacher was always right, I couldn’t help thinking that I did understand Ukrainian, as much by the look on Darya’s face as the sounds she made. And when Johannes, the little boy with the dull blond hair cut straight across in bangs, spoke Polish, it wasn’t so hard either, especially if he had the ball in his hands and you knew he must mean ball. When I opened my mouth I didn’t always know which language I was speaking, didn’t know, really, that there
were
different languages, just different, familiar ways of settling into sound. Poppa had already taught me to read English. He read English just fine, though for my mother it was hard.
Russian is the only language worth knowing.
But I still had to sit and listen to the other children read
The Little Red Hen
and it would make me itchy, make me want to twist my toes and snap them against each other. Aberdeen School was where I learned to be good, but I knew I wasn’t really good, that underneath being good was a bad girl. Poppa used to sing me the rhyme in English:
There was a little girl who had a little curl right in the middle of her forehead. And when she was good she was very very good, and when she was bad she was horrid.
The bad girl who can’t sit still, who twists her toes and snaps them. The girl who wants what she wants. Who boxed Ben’s ears once, because she was mad, even though he was bigger, even though he’d done nothing. Because she didn’t get what she wanted, and she wants what she