“Aaron Lev and Tsila?” the women muttered among themselves. They were unsettled, disturbed. They had great sympathy for my father, a quiet man with sad eyes, and only suspicion for Tsila, who was too arrogant and too sharp. The match offended any proper sense of balance.
“Impossible,” one of the women, Freyde, said. Freyde the Sinus. Her voice was so nasal that words seemed to bypass her throat altogether and flow directly through her nostrils. “After what he went through with the other …” She glanced quickly my way. “What would he want with a pickle like Tsila? What would any man want with such a pickle? It must be Bayla he’s marrying.”
Bayla was the second of the Hero’s daughters. A pretty girl but very pale.
“Aaron Lev and Bayla,” Freyde repeated, beginning to tap at the ice with her long pole to break an opening in its surface.
“Aaron Lev and Bayla,” the other women agreed, their murmurs already more peaceful as they drew together in one breath the names of those two gentle souls.
“And why not?” Freyde asked. “Bayla’s a pleasant girl, kind …”
“Very kind,” all the women agreed. So kind, Rivka reminded them, that for a while there had been talk she might be simple. “Better simple than sour,” Freyde pronounced.
“Maybe so,” Rivka conceded. “But it’s sour he’s marrying. I have it from the mother of the bride herself. Aaron Lev and Tsila. The chupah will be right after Purim.”
Freyde shrugged but didn’t argue further. The other women were silent as they considered the news.
“Maybe the parents didn’t want to marry off the second before the eldest,” Lipsa ventured.
“Maybe,” the others agreed, unconvinced.
“Maybe it was parnassah,” another suggested. A few heads nodded. Tsila’s value as an earner couldn’t be discounted.
“Or maybe Tsila bewitched him,” Freyde droned.
WAS MY FATHER BEWITCHED? I WONDERED AS I WATCHED his eyes meet Tsila’s. What passed between them was strange, certainly. There was a look on my father’s face—a softness—that could have been part of a spell. But there was boldness as well, a boldness that didn’t speak of bewitching. And wasn’t it Tsila who looked away first? Her cheeks that filled with blood? I watched them look at each other and understood that the dangers in that household were many.
I tried to eat the meal she had laid before me, but her potatoes and onions seared the inside of my mouth. I took a sip of cooling milk, then turned the whole mess back onto my plate.
“My food’s not good enough for your daughter,” she said.
I pushed my plate to the edge of the table. I didn’t know why. My father watched me push my plate. Tsila watched me too. I pushed it over the edge and heard it land with a dull thud. Potatoes and onions splattered the floor and I waited for the blow to the back of my head that might have exploded what was building within me.
“No one’s taught her anything,” Tsila said, her voice dull with resentment. “She’s been living like an animal, and now I’m to raise her.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but no words came and I couldn’t fill my lungs. My father averted his eyes as if I were obscene.
“Well, come on, then,” Tsila said to me. “Clean up your mess.”
My father pushed away his plate of half-eaten food and closed his eyes to recite the grace after meals. He took a long time, although only the short grace was required, and when he finished, he remained with his eyes closed, his head nodding, as if reluctant to break off his communication with God and return to the scene before him.
There were those who said it was my mother herself who inhabited the air of that house. He’d do well to find new quarters before bringing home a new bride, they whispered, and maybe they were right. Was it my mother I was feeling tightening my chest, smothering conversation and laughter?
My father pushed himself back from the table. I heard his chair scrape against the boards of the floor, then felt him standing over me. He was a giant of a man, very close now. I smelled the leather of his workday, saw the patterns of dried mud splattered up the legs of his pants. His hands hung at his sides. One hand—it was open and very large—began to swing toward me. A careful swing, deliberate and slow, a swing that might have turned into a slap or a caress. It stopped an inch from the skin of my cheek—I felt the heat of him, my own burning skin radiating out to meet his—then it swung back to hang again, clumsy and useless as an oversized paw. His step was heavy as he retreated to the door.
“Will you be late?” Tsila asked him.
The wind was up and from the north. I heard it against the rear wall of the house.
“Don’t wait up,” my father said.
I stared at them, uncomprehending. The wind was high—surely they must hear it—and coming from the swamps.
“The wind,” I said, but Tsila was already on her feet, approaching my father in the doorway. She stood close to him, her face turned up toward his. Something glinted in the mud of his eyes. He stroked her cheek once, easily, then stepped out into the night.
OUR VILLAGE SAT IN THE MIDST OF THE POLYSEH SWAMP. To our south were pine forests where the air was sweet and trees grew straight and thick, but to our north stretched an endless tract of road-less swamp. The Pripet River meandered through the Polyseh, flooding freely over most of its flat course and turning here and there to avoid any obstacle that might disturb its lazy flow. Our town occupied one such obstacle—a slight rise in the land that the river curved around rather than cutting a path through. We sat in the crook of the river’s curve—a few streets, a crowd of wooden houses, some cultivated fields that flooded every spring, a market, two synagogues, and two churches, Orthodox and Catholic, that served the Russian officials, the local gentry, and the peasants from neighboring villages.
Why our town existed, no one knew; how it had started, no one remembered. The train station was in Kalinkovich, the match factory in Mozyr. All we had were trees. In the local forests were thick pines that men could cut and float down the river, in the swamp a profusion of aspens, easily transported to the match factory in Mozyr. From such endeavors others grew—so that by the time of my birth in 1887, we had our own mill and more than a hundred Jewish families eking out their lives in that rise on the edge of the swamp.
The swamp was an unhealthy place—a wilderness where snakes lurked in black waters, vapors and mists befouled the air, and the earth opened itself like water to swallow the foot that dared to walk upon it. There were lights in its vapors, lights anyone could see. They moved about in strange, weaving patterns and sometimes they moaned. Those lights were the souls that had departed our world but not yet entered the next, souls without peace that were detained between worlds for reasons only He could know. Lonely and comfortless, they waited for north winds so they could ride into town and look for solace among the living. It was on such a wind that my brother, Yaakov, for example, had drifted in to lay his claim on our mother. Rohel had told me. And on such a wind that my mother would come for me. You could smell them coming, damp and musty as they wafted in from the swamp. We closed our windows against them.
“The wind,” I said to Tsila when she shut the door behind my father. I had never known anyone to venture out when the wind from the north was blowing so strong, but Tsila seemed unconcerned. She looked at me for a long time, impatience growing all the while.
“Your head is filled with bubbe meises,” she said. “What wind? The wind is wind. That’s all it is.”
I didn’t answer, but her impatience grew. “I’m not interested in the foolishness Lipsa taught you.”
It wasn’t just Lipsa, and Tsila knew that. The streets of our town were all but deserted on nights such as this, for who could say with perfect confidence that the souls of their loved ones had found their final place of rest? But Tsila, born and raised in our town, wasn’t really of it.
“Do you think your mother is waiting to snatch your father? Is that what you think? That she’ll rush in to snatch him now when she
never wanted him in life? Idiocy,” she said, but she did rub her fingers on the amulet she wore around her neck, whether from habit or to ward off the evil her scornful words might have invited, I couldn’t know for certain. “Your mother wasn’t one to tarry,” she said.
She led me then to a corner of the room—behind the stove, against the back wall of the house. There was a wooden bench there, small and narrow as I was, and upon it a straw mattress, a quilt, and a pillow. The quilt was the color of young leaves and stitched with blue. The pillow was white and unstained. I had not seen such brightness in the objects of Lipsa’s home.
“You’ll sleep here,” Tsila said, and I closed my eyes. “Now what?” she asked, but how could I explain?
Until then I had slept in the middle furrow of a tamped-down mattress, wedged between Lipsa’s two middle girls. Our blanket was rough but warm, leached of all color and ripe with the smells of our accumulated nights. There I had drifted easily into sleep, the warmth of living flesh keeping me from drifting too far, the breath of other lungs leading my own breath into morning. What Tsila led me to was my bed, I knew, but how could it offer me rest when I was expected to enter it alone?
Tsila watched me undress, then ran her hand across my naked back, my neck, and through my loosened hair. Her touch, unburdened by affection, was lighter than Lipsa’s. She probed at my temples and between the partings of my hair but found neither louse nor flea.
“I’ll bathe you tomorrow,” she said.
I turned away from her to recite my Shema, the same prayer that I had recited every night from the first moment my lips could form the words. “Sleep is a perilous journey,” Lipsa had instructed. If death should overtake us before morning, we should enter its embrace with praise of His Name on our lips.
“Are you finished?” Tsila asked. I hadn’t even shut my eyes yet, had not begun to summon the necessary concentration. Out the corner of my eye I saw the brightness of the bed. I shut my eyes to clear my mind of distractions that were leading me away from Him.
“Nu?” Tsila said.
“Hear O Israel,” I began, but as I did my mind exploded with colors. The pale green of the quilt, the blue of its stitching, the honey of her hair, the crimson of her birthmark—new life, eternity, sweetness, anger—each color had a meaning, and more beyond. I fell silent before it.
“Even this she didn’t teach you?”
“She taught me,” I said.
“Hear O Israel,” Tsila prodded.
“The Lord is our God,” I continued, then stopped. White now, as brilliant as the new pillow on which I was to rest my head, refracting to the emerald of her eyes, the unyielded copper that had glinted in his. Longing—but for what?—swept through me like wind. Then fear—of what, I didn’t know.
I felt Tsila’s hands on my shoulders. She turned me—a half turn—to face her. My eyes were still closed, but upon them I soon felt a presence, a pressure, cool and calming. Tsila’s hand. My eyelids fluttered against it, the colors exploding beneath.
“Hear O Israel,” she began, and I listened, word by word, my mind ablaze. “Blessed is the Holy Name,” she continued, praise of His Name calming the colors, each in its turn until they rested, still vivid but quiet beneath her hand.
She removed her hand and met my eyes with her own. She shook her head slightly as if dismayed by what stood before her. “We’ll begin tomorrow,” she said, and extinguished the lamp by my bed.
BUT WHEN I AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING HARM HAD COME to me. The storm had passed with the night, and sunlight flooded the room. My skin felt hot, as if the air of the room had scorched it, but my core had grown cold in the night and I shivered underneath the bright quilt. I felt a pain in my throat but did not yet understand its meaning. Tsila was tending the oven. Her hair, unbound, fell golden across her back.
“Nu?” she said when she saw my opened eyes.
I pushed back the quilt and swung my legs over the side of the bed. The floor was smooth and solid on the soles of my feet, but the room spun around me.
“Modeh Ani,” Tsila prodded. The prayer upon waking. This too Lipsa had taught me, but when I attempted to utter the words, I could not. The prayer was there, lodged in my heart, but the instrument for its delivery had been taken from me.
“I stand before Thee,” I rasped. The theft had been incomplete. A ragged shard of my voice still remained, but it hurt to use it, so raw and sore was the place from which the rest had been torn.
I waited in terror. Afraid of Tsila’s anger, yes, but more of the damage that had been done to me.
“King of the Universe,” Tsila went on, “who has mercifully returned my soul to me …”
“My mother,” I whispered to Tsila without thinking, understanding at once who had swept through me the night before.
Tsila looked up from her oven. I saw her as from a great distance away. She was kneeling as she had knelt the day before, but her face was turned to me now. She put down the poker she had been using, arose, and walked over to me. Her hand was rough on my forehead.
“You have a fever,” she said. “Get back into bed.”
I obeyed her, as Lipsa had told me I must, drinking the tea that she gave me and allowing her to wrap a warm towel around my neck, but she was misguided to think that tea and a towel might bring back what had been taken.
“Sleep now,” she told me, and I did. Through that day, and the following.
I awoke at one point to the sound of whispers. It was night then, the lamps extinguished and darkness pressing against the windows. I lay in the darkness confused, a stream of whispers drifting toward me from the alcove where my father and Tsila lay.
At Lipsa’s no one had whispered except in prayer. What needed to be said among people was to be spoken aloud, Lipsa had taught us, claimed by clear, unashamed voices, or not to be spoken at all. But now as I lay in my bed in the place that Lipsa had brought me to, I was engulfed by the forbidden: a stream of unclaimed words, a flood of the unutterable, interrupted only by Tsila’s light laugh.
I began to shake and pulled my quilt closer around me. The same quilt that had dazzled me—when? Was it the night before, the week before? Simple cotton under my fingertips, that’s all that quilt was. Simple cotton and useless against the chill that now gripped me.
Tsila’s laughter rose from the whispers and I heard his laughter too now, a low rumble. And yet more whispers. My body shook under the quilt, but my cheeks burned. Shame, perhaps, in the presence of the unutterable.
I curled myself into a ball—only my hot forehead exposed. I lay like that, burning and shivering all at once until I felt a breath on my skin. That breath was balm, soothing as a cool hand, and though I had not felt her touch until then, I knew at once whose it was.
I must have called out—but how? and with what?—because when I opened my eyes both Tsila and my father stood by my bed, Tsila’s hand on my brow now.
“My mother,” I whispered. Come for me, at last.
“It’s the fever,” Tsila said.
“Should we not call Lipsa?” I heard my father suggest as I fell back into sleep.
LIPSA’S LIPS WERE PINCHED TIGHT, HER EYES UNNATUrally bright—two dark stars glittering out of a milky face.
“How long has this been?” she asked, then without awaiting an answer told Tsila to boil water with the lemons and honey she had brought.
“My mother,” I whispered to her, but she placed her finger on my lips to silence me.
“My mother, my mother,” Tsila mimicked. She was suddenly by my bed, waving her wooden spoon around. “What kind of curse have you brought into my house?”
Lipsa rested her hand on Tsila’s waving arm. “Go stir the lemon. It shouldn’t boil too hard.” She removed her hand from Tsila and lay her fingers on the point of violation. My throat fluttered beneath her touch. I waited for her to appeal to my mother. I had heard her make such appeals before. Just the week before my father’s wedding I had accompanied her to the cemetery, where she had begged Hanna-Gitl t
o loosen her hold on her daughter’s heart. Two years after Hanna-Gitl’s death, the daughter was still so stricken with grief that she was barren and unfit as a wife. Have mercy on your poor daughter, Lipsa cried out to Hanna-Gitl. Release her from her mourning. Free her for the life that is still hers to bring forth. I closed my eyes now and waited for a similar appeal to my mother.
“Your mother wouldn’t do this,” Lipsa said quietly. She removed her fingers from my throat and I felt a damp warmth. A towel. She was laying a towel at my throat, no different from the towels Tsila had been laying throughout the week. “Your mother doesn’t need your voice,” Lipsa said to me. “What would she need with your voice?” But Lipsa’s own voice trembled and there was fear in her face. “It’s your father who needs to hear your sweet voice.”
“What, sweet?” Tsila muttered. “She has the voice of a crow.”
“And Tsila, Tsila needs it too,” Lipsa said.
“What do I need with her voice?” Tsila asked. “She wants to be mute all her life? Excellent.” She handed the concoction she had boiled to Lipsa. “Let her be mute. Deaf too if she wants.”
In Tsila’s voice too, though, there was the tremble of fear, and it was from her that I understood just how close the Angel of Death hovered. Leave her be now, Tsila was imploring. She is ugly, unloved, not worth your trouble. Go and find yourself a sweeter child.
Lipsa brought a spoonful of syrup to my lips and I swallowed it. Hot, sour, and sweet, it stung my throat as it passed through.
“Your father and Tsila need to hear your voice,” Lipsa said as she continued spooning syrup down my throat. “What’s a household without the voices of children?”
She pushed a lock of damp hair off my forehead.
“The next time I see Tsila, I want to hear you’ve been singing for her. Do you understand me?” I nodded miserably, hot tears sliding down my cheeks. “Tsila’s your mother now,” Lipsa said.
Your Mouth Is Lovely Page 3