Free The Knife Sharpener's Bell by Rhea Tregebov Page B

back to look up, and so much space opened above my head. Anything could happen in that kind of space. And then I looked down, and there he was, Joseph, bundled so I hardly knew the shape of him. He looked at Ben and Ben looked at him, and then he picked me up and hugged me just before I got on the train. And it was as if my breath stopped again inside my chest, and I couldn’t say anything and neither could he.
    I know what Joseph wanted, what he would have said if he’d said anything. I know what he wished:
don’t go
. But we didn’t know what to say. Everyone was talking around us. Everyone was doing something. It was just Joseph and I who stood here, not knowing what to say or do. And then I was on the train, with Poppa and my mother and Ben, and it shuddered in the track and slowly dragged itself away, leaving everything behind.
You’ll see
, Poppa said,
things will be different
. I didn’t want things to be different.
Everything
will be good
, he said. Things were good before. The train took us east, and then the ship took us further east, skimming along the surface of the earth as it turned away from us, whether I wanted it to or not. And I was transported, carried along on the current Poppa and my mother made for me, pulled by what they wanted. I wanted to go home.

Chapter Two
    When I lived there, I never thought
Winnipeg
, didn’t think I lived anywhere. But in Odessa, I found myself lost in someone else’s country: felt scooped out, a space opening inside me. Nothing was right in my mother’s country. The egg yolks were the wrong colour and the milk tasted wrong; things smelled wrong, looked wrong. Even winter wasn’t really winter; the snow came and went. My uncle Lev was indeed a miracle worker. Through his connections, he had found us a good apartment, two spacious rooms with broad windows. But I missed Selkirk Avenue, where everybody knew everybody. I missed Joseph; I missed the store. I missed the movies every Saturday – the movies in Odessa were boring. Everything was boring and wrong. Nothing was right in my mother’s country, not even the words in my mouth.
I told you not to speak English
, my mother said.
    I won’t wear the bow. We’re in the new apartment, and my mother has spent ten minutes perfecting the angle of the white satin bow against my curls. I won’t wear it. I’ve smiled and said hello, met the aunts and the uncles, the cousins and second cousins. But I won’t wear the bow. Idon’t want to. I look ridiculous – girls in Canada don’t wear things like that when they’re almost ten.
    â€œYou’re not in Canada,” my mother says. “You’re in
my
country.”
    I don’t want to live in my mother’s country. My hand goes to my head; I pull the bow off. It crumples in my fist and I feel the twist of anger inside me. Then I throw it, crushed, to the floor – the waste, the ruin of it – not caring what my mother will say, not caring what happens.
    She takes a step back. “Where do you get such a temper?” Picks up the bow, straightens it. “Ten minutes I spent fixing it for you. Go. Be stubborn. Go to school already. You’ll be late.” I pick up my satchel and go.
    In the new country, everything betrayed me, even the alphabet. I spoke just fine; I’d been speaking Russian since I was a baby, but the Cyrillic stumped me. I’d seen my mother’s newspapers, the letters to and from the old country, but they made little more sense than the Hebrew characters of the Yiddish dailies my father read. My mother hadn’t had the time to teach me before we left for her country. The characters were bewilderingly like and unlike English.
A
for example was still
a
. I was safe with
a
. And
t
was
t
;
o
was
o
. But
h
was
n
and
p
was
r
. Why? And then there was the backwards
r
, how wrong it was. My teacher, Comrade Ivanova, explained that the