I stole the knife from Sergei frequently. Sometimes I hid it, hoping he’d make do with an inferior tool. I rolled it close under my work board, and waited to see if he’d think of it and walk two fingers slowly across my table, to the crouching knife, humming a snotty victory tune.   It came to spend half days with me in the studio, and sometimes days in a row, when Sergei was not sculpting. I began to experiment using it for smaller and smaller work. I discovered I could sharpen it with a stone, and make the slender tip prick and bite the steadiest porcelain.

It has a pathetic, DIY visage that looks makeshift even from far away. Sergei made the knife by filing both edges of a band saw blade to a long point. Most blades are imperceptibly honed. But the edges of this one taper in uneven, swollen slopes to the blades. The handle smells faintly and always like creosote. By the time I met it, the blade had oxidized to black, except for its pocked silver edges. The handle is a nameless tan grey, the color of nothing, that terminates in a soft bump like the bottom of an egg. In my hand it first felt handicapped, weighted too far to the back. I thought the knife was rude and dispensable, and I used it for everything. I cut 25-pound blocks of clay, opened boxes, pruned the shade garden out front of the studio, and made long careless cuts in unwieldy slabs of toothy stoneware. It took several months before I located the sharp oily scent as the amalgam handle he had made for it. Until then I had thought the material was bone, from road kill Sergei harvested for hair to make paintbrushes. How else to explain its calcified web texture? He didn’t know what the compound was.

I can’t say it’s stout because it’s not that thick. Nor is it short because in terms of knives, short refers to what type of knife you’re talking about. And this is no kind of knife – not for steak, or utility, or skinning anything, or chopping, not a razor, not serrated. It is of unknown materials found in a Russian factory.

The proportion of blade to handle is entirely unseen in the knife world. The handle is perhaps 56% of the total five inch length, and the diameter of a penny. Like only certain rare fish knives I’ve seen, the blade is sharp on both edges, and stretches in imperfectly symmetrical slopes, to its pointy point. Sergei had done neurotically precise work shaping the amalgam of the handle where it meets the blade, making it impossible to tell from that one feature alone, whether the thing was made by man or machine. It looks dangerous, but not ill-tempered, sharp but not hygienic.

The knife seemed to me a true Russian, caustic and bedraggled. Sergei and I once went to the dacha with a family whose 17-year-old son was just the sort of Russian I am describing. His bulbous forehead, seamed with an ungraceful hairline, cast a grey shadow on his potato nose. His moist eyes and scabbed lips popped from his face in a look of exodus from the thoughts pressing behind them. He slumped forward at the top of his wasp-shaped fighter’s torso, weighted by his dangling, unanimated arms. Spindly legs ratcheted him at least 20 rickety centimeters too far above his enormous white tennis shoes. I was making up possible names for this boy in my head – Tolia, Dima, Igor – when Sergei turned to me and said, “This kid looks like a typical American.”

The tip is thin and small, flexible in the flat directions as it was, ostensibly, as a band saw blade. Evidence of teeth and paint were sanded away. The Russian artist in 1992 was thrifty, having to endure the fall from pretty good social security for an artist anywhere on the planet, to total governmental abandonment and insane, absurd, cartoon inflation. We had salads of parsley alone, clothes were mended, no one ever got new shoes unless duct tape counts. And that only if you had non-Soviet friends, who brought it to you from the magical retail West, when you asked for duct tape, because you are a thrifty Russian. You didn’t ask for jeans, those stories are from the 80’s. And for the record, that is not the dark side of what the Russians didn’t have in 1992.

Russian ceramists typically used broken band saw blades as clay knives. They wrapped one end in paper, tape or yarn to keep from cutting themselves. Sergei had the idea to form the handle from a two-part hardening putty that he found in the porcelain factory where he worked. I could get into the history of ceramics and explain that, starting with Lenin, the Russian ceramists were not not not allowed to make functional ware of any sort, for food or otherwise. Because the bright red factories that employed the full-souled, toiling masses were churning out useful things day and night. So Sergei was not sitting around all the time thinking about how something ought to be shaped so a hand can hold it. The handle is a perfectly round cylinder, with a rough, bone-like texture. Did he roll it into a tube like cookie dough, or wrap it, uncured, in burlap, and place it inside a length of pipe to harden? I could ask him but why spoil the mystery.

We had a divorce made in heaven, and Sergei turned the knife over to me. I took it from his hand like I was stealing it, just to feel what that would have been like. Several months later he sent me a painting of himself, thinking. In thought bubbles he had drawn a ladder, a white dog, a drill, a pussy, a pick-up truck, and that knife. All the bubbles had red slashed circles painted over them.

I could barely say I gave English to Sergei. But he gave the knife to me, aping anxiety, on the day we divided the studio equipment. On this day, as well, I took ownership of the small set of carved Hungarian sculpting tools, while he got the large. We were both overjoyed and suspected the other of having made a sacrifice.

The knife. Fashioned after tooth, or claw, because we partake of parts. Knives for killing, eating, healing. We live by cutting tree for home, land for place, creature for food. He gave me the knife as a blessing. There is the moment he handed it to me, a performative act, precisely the same gesture as a thousand times before, and vastly different. With this act he made his last work with the knife. Sergei, on our behalf, cut a soft and long horizon between us.

The knife and I moved to Utah together and spent silent hours sliding back and forth through thin porcelain slabs. We made jars so lovely, like figs, and lined them on the bright white windowsill that looked from one ledge in the Wasatch mountains to a distant other. I became a fanatic about cleaning up my work table every night. Simply because it was similar in length, the knife began to sleep in an interloper’s nest, rolled in a sand-colored pocket with my fine Hungarian sculpting tools.

I had a year and a half of uninterrupted silence in my studio before the scent of the handle began to cause an ache in me. Sergei had become the past, and the knife and I were alone.

My adventure in Utah became expensive when I took advantage of willy-nilly 90’s business loans, and the poisonous practice of leasing one’s truck. The knife and I got down to business. We worked 14 hours a day, six days a week, at a pace that boggled the mind. I leaned on it hard to cut hundreds, nay thousands, of rocking triangles that I formed into animal heads, and double-thick rhombuses that would become lamps. I dragged it through miles of coarse, toothy stoneware known as Big White. And still I was only making minimum payments.

I made one foray into art for myself again in an exploration of genitalia as root vegetables. I discovered that my Mormon landlord had been sneaking in at night, turning these small porcelain sculptures over on their foam beds. I wrote a note, “No peeking,” that I affixed with sewing pins to the underside of a vulvular yam. He admitted that he had been handling them. I couldn’t fight him for them in my mind, so I threw them all away, unfired.

I haven’t talked about it because I don’t like that it happened, but I was briefly married a second time to a singer-songwriter my fourth year in Utah. I was chronically lonely and didn’t know it. There was no Facebook, I was neither a Mormon nor a skier, and the knife and I worked all the time to pay for the past and for the murky, dreadful future. It was a blind date, set up by a mutual friend in Wisconsin. I didn’t like him from the first moment I saw him, with his sleeveless shirt and backwards baseball hat. He talked in surfer-dude halitosis that drifted across the dinner table. Then he made a gesture that I found so offensive that to this moment I can see my tuna sashimi fanned on the oversized rim of my white plate, and feel anew the pressing knowing that I had to get up and walk away from the table, drive home and forget the evening. But I didn’t want to offend my friend who had set us up. So I stuck it out, and we went to hear some live music. By the end of the night I was laughing, and we went to the movies the next day. I laughed a lot, it was a relief in my arid Utah life. He was silly funny, not smart funny, but we laughed our way to Reno where he proposed and, whatever, I agreed. A couple weeks later he hit me, and I thought I’d really pissed him off. A few weeks after that at one of my art shows, he hit me again. I booted him out, and the ink was dry on the divorce papers a year from the first date. I don’t regret it, but I don’t like how it looks in society. It’s my ego that hates these memories. Clearly, if I’m going to live life like an adventure, I am occasionally going to get into real trouble. But it’s only real trouble if I tell myself it is.

In order to get out of it I needed ten thousand dollars, and I was sixty thousand in debt. I called Sergei, who was making money hand over fist selling his art to a long list of waiting collectors. I asked him for a loan. Sergei and I had traded a pair of ceramic artichoke candlesticks I had made, the same ones as Ross Perot bought, to a lawyer for our divorce. We never had any squabble over money. So I didn’t feel too bad asking him for this help. He obliged. I moved to Afton, Virginia, and Sergei, in an unrelated coincidence, was living in Richmond. I sent him the first repayment installment, and he called to invite himself to my new place in the mountains. He arrived several hours later with my check in his hand, and an Ikea outdoor table and chair set as a gift. He wanted to buy my second divorce for me, especially, he said, because his first love, Eva, was stolen from him by a musician and he was always delighted to see one suffer. I made dinner and we ate at the new, round folding table on my front porch. I don’t have to make up that we had to use the knife to tighten the screws on the new furniture. Because we didn’t. But it was there, dusty and motionless, on the wide open work table in the darkened studio building across my driveway.

In Virginia and later Chicago, I made bird women, and began working in the figure after a long hiatus. I switched media to paper pulp, and found the knife exactly as useful with the pulp as with the clay. Now I work with watercolors, graphite and charcoal, paper pulp, wire, paper, wax, oil paints and god knows what else. The knife has a place in all my tool trays except for metal wire.  Thursday I used it to split a crease in handmade paper, for a letter I wrote.

There are a few things a person ought to know. How to pour water from one container to another; how to start a fire; how to talk; how to use a knife. And after that, I think we don’t know, we’re just guessing.

The knife feels dry and light in the hand. Maybe on account of its round handle, or its two sharp edges, the blade swivels all the way around in the grasp. It is possible to make precise cuts when the angle can be steered in process. Knives seem to have a limited range of cutting action on account of their handles, not their blades. The good people of X-acto know it. The knife feels like an extension of the hand, like a third forefinger, or the outstanding feature of a comic book hero. The quick fatness of the blade opens the cuts it makes as it passes. It pushes the two new parts away from one another. They seem to fall more gracefully this way.