Your Mouth Is Lovely

by Nancy Richler

  “Sometimes I feel I should be sewing a shroud out of this brocade for all the joy this marriage is going to bring.”

  “What?” Bayla wheeled around to face her sister. “How could you say that? Don’t even think that!”

  “Two years you’ve been engaged and I’ve never even met the man. So in love you’re supposed to be that not a word about him has passed your lips, and I have to wait for Miriam to come running home from the market to learn anything about him. I have a bad feeling …,” Tsila said again.

  “I’ve had enough of your bad feelings for one day,” Bayla said firmly, but she too looked pale and a little shaken. She turned around for Tsila to pin up the back of the dress. Tsila, however, made no move toward her sister.

  “Take off the dress,” Tsila said. “It’s not for you.”

  “Stop it,” Bayla said, remaining where she was with the back of the dress open, revealing a V-shaped expanse of her back. “If I took every unpleasant feeling I experienced to be an omen of sorts …”

  I had not known until then that a back could be as expressive as a face. I saw a resolve in Bayla’s slight, straight back that her milky face had only recently begun to reveal.

  “Turn now,” Tsila said, her voice still weaker than usual. Bayla’s pale skin glowed against the dark fabric like fresh fallen snow that glows against the night. Her narrow shoulders and upright spine were not only able to carry the fabric but seemed to subdue it so it followed her form like the softest silk.

  Tsila smiled in satisfaction, despite herself. “It suits you,” she said, the highest compliment I had heard her pay anyone. “I wouldn’t have known beforehand.”

  Bayla smiled weakly in return. “I can only hope there’s much you don’t know.”

  IT WAS THE FOLLOWING WEEK THAT SARA GRABBED MY arm just as I was leaving the market to head back up the hill to my home. “There’s something going to happen soon that we can’t miss,” she said. It was May Day and there was to be a demonstration by the main bridge in town, right before sundown.

  My heart stopped in my chest. A demonstration? Right in town? I couldn’t go to a demonstration. The police were known to ride into the crowds at such events, beating and arresting those present. “I can’t,” I said. “Tsila will kill me.”

  “She won’t even know. Tell her we’re taking a walk.”

  “I can’t.”

  “If you can’t, you can’t. Far be it from me to get you into trouble at home.” We walked a few steps in silence. “It’s too bad, though,” she said after a while. “I’ve heard Golda will be there to address the crowd.”

  “Golda from the strike?”

  “Who else?” Sara answered, a smile widening on her face. Golda was the girl leader of the strike at the match factory in Mozyr the previous winter. Unlike Palefsky, the male leader who had been found hiding in the slaughterhouse and arrested, she still remained at large.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I’ve heard,” Sara answered.

  Golda was from Kalinkovich. Her mother was a hatmaker, her father a cantor who didn’t speak to his family so as to save his voice for holiness. It was said that without Golda the women at the factory would not have agreed to the strike that previous winter. It was said too that she always carried a pistol. My fears about Tsila’s anger fell away at the prospect of laying eyes on such a girl.

  The sun was setting as we reached the bridge. A crowd had already gathered. I recognized a few faces, but many were strangers. Access to the bridge itself was barred by a chain of young men with linked arms. They wore black shirts with red woven belts and carried rods made of iron.

  “Who are they?” I whispered to Sara.

  “Workers,” she whispered back. “Bundists.”

  I recognized one of them, a tall, well-built man with masses of thick black hair. It was the man I had encountered in the swamp two summers previous when I returned there on Shabbes to gather reeds for Tsila.

  “Look,” Sara said, pointing to the very man I recognized. “That’s Leib Zalman, whose cousin Yehuda married the daughter of our very own capitalist, Lazer Entelman.”

  “That’s Leib?” I repeated. “Leib who’s engaged to Bayla?”

  “The very one,” Sara answered. Then she bent to whisper in my ear. “He’s in love with Golda,” she whispered.

  I barely had time to react to what Sara had told me when the crowd started murmuring and pointing. At the outside edge of the crowd appeared four young men. Like their comrades they wore black shirts and red belts, but instead of iron rods they carried two barrels of the sort that were usually filled with pickles or herring. The crowd parted to allow their passage, and the chain of workers momentarily opened to admit them to the bridge. Once there they set down the two barrels and laid a plank of wood upon them.

  They were followed by a young woman, a religious housewife in a long skirt, her head modestly covered with a kerchief. Before I had time to wonder who she was, two of the men had lifted her onto the board of wood. I recognized her then, even before she tore off the kerchief to address the crowd. It was the woman whom I’d seen in the swamp. My little Golda, her companion—Leib—had affectionately called her. She was small and wiry, standing alone on her platform with her short-cropped hair and sallow complexion, but she vibrated with energy, and her eyes animated not only her own face but the faces in the crowd that they lit upon.

  What she said, I barely remember, so taken was I with my own excitement. The speech was in Yiddish with Russian words thrown in here and there.

  “What’s an exploiter?” someone beside me asked.

  “A capitalist,” Sara answered.

  “A deceiver,” someone else said.

  Golda continued speaking, but what she said didn’t matter. It was her eyes that captured me, eyes so brilliant that each time they lit on me I felt a new shiver of excitement rush through my body.

  “Down with the autocracy!” she shouted finally, her right arm punching the air.

  “Down with Tsar Nicholas!” the crowd shouted. “Long live the revolution! Long live the Bund of Poland, Russia, and Lithuania!” the workers shouted, their chain unlinked now as they too raised their right arms to punch the evening air. When I looked back at the bridge, Golda and her makeshift platform had disappeared. The crowd began to sing the Shevuo—the Oath—but the minute the song ended, the workers in their black shirts and red sashes disappeared. The crowd too began to disperse.

  “We have to clear out quickly,” Sara warned, hurrying me along. “We don’t want to be here when the police arrive.”

  Siberia, August 1911

  Last night we were supposed to discuss our political awakenings. That was the planned topic for the discussion we have as part of every evening meal: the moment each of us awakened to social injustice and the events that led us to devote ourselves to revolution. But like so much else in our lives, it didn’t proceed as planned.

  It had been a difficult day. The previous evening Lydia had returned from her regular visit to the criminal cells—she was a medical student before her arrest and has been granted permission to attend to the criminal women. “There’s illness there,” she reported. A new illness on top of the usual fevers, gastric problems and ailments of the nerves that strike us all with such regularity. A child had died two days earlier and two more were gravely ill. Diphtheria, Lydia feared, and with so many children living in such crowded conditions … “The filth in there is indescribable,” she said. “I’m afraid of what may be coming.”

  Around our cell noses rose from their books, and eyes weakened by years of dim lighting squinted in concentration.

  “A doctor must be called,” Vera said, a comment that hung stupidly in the silence that followed. Even getting permission for Lydia to continue her ministrations has taken enormous will and effort. But there is a streak of optimism in Vera, a seemingly ineradicable faith in inherent goodness waiting to surface, which is alternately a source of great comfort and great irritation to the
rest of us.

  “And who, exactly, are you expecting to call a doctor?” Lydia finally asked, making no effort to hide her irritation.

  It was decided after further discussion that in the absence of a doctor a group of us could at least go with Lydia the next day and offer our assistance. This also is forbidden—contact between criminal and political prisoners is severely restricted—but enforcement of the rules is left entirely to the discretion of the guards, and as we made our way across the prison this morning no one tried to stop us.

  There are six cells of prisoners at Maltzev—three for politicals and three for criminals—and while the political cells are simply overcrowded, the conditions in the criminal cells might better be described as infested with humanity. I don’t know how many women there are exactly, but when Vera was still permitted to hold classes for the children of these women, she always had about one hundred pupils.

  The filth is not, as Lydia had maintained, indescribable. I can describe it to you easily. The light is dim and the walls—blackened with soot—add to the impression of gloom. The children are pale and unwashed. They stare out of the dimness, their eyes too wide and, in many cases, streaming with pus. There is vermin everywhere—in the bedding, along the floor and walls, on the heads and bodies of the women and children, at the edges of their eyes. The smell is that of excrement, since five latrines would be insufficient to meet the needs of the crowd and there is, of course, only one per room. To save the floor, buckets—brimming with it—are scattered throughout the room.

  And yet this, one woman confided to Lydia—a roof over her head, a bed to sleep in, food of some description every day—is heaven compared to what her life had been on the streets of St. Petersburg.

  We intended to spend the day cleaning, in an attempt to improve the sanitation, but the women would not allow it. We are honored ladies to them. Baryni, they insist on calling us, to the consternation of my more radical companions. For baryni like us to clean their filth would be more shameful than helpful. “Please,” they implored us, indicating the table in the center of the room where they wanted us to sit. They served us tea but did allow us to mind the children while they attended to the cleaning.

  Meanwhile, one more child had died in the night, and another had fallen ill. But Lydia was less concerned about the possibility of diphtheria. “It’s looking more like a throat cold,” she decided. A simple cold that, in these conditions, is proving itself deadly.

  Quiet and order greeted us when we returned to our own cells: our clean whitewashed walls lined with bookshelves and adorned with postcards, our neatly made beds lined up against the wall, our table in the center of the room where we share companionship, if not wholesome food. Our quarters seemed palatial compared to where we had been, but this afforded us no happiness.

  “What was our real motivation for going over there today?” Lydia asked as we gathered around the table for our evening ration of blue grits and bread. “Was it for their sakes, really, or for our own?”

  “Don’t start,” Vera warned. With the questions, she meant. What is our motivation for this? What is our motivation for that? Were our acts ever truly impelled by the needs of those on whose behalf we claim to have acted? Or were we motivated by some baser need of our own, including the need to believe ourselves selfless? These are the questions Lydia asks endlessly.

  A deep gloom descended on us as Lydia’s unanswered question hung in the air. We ate our grits in silence, waiting for Lydia to go on, as she has in the past, about the boredom of the life she had been living on her father’s estate—Was that my motivation, then, boredom?—the dullness of spirit that she had felt as she stood among her peers at dance after endless dance, waiting for young men to tie the velvet ribbons around her wrists that claimed her for each waltz, mazurka, and reel; the thrill she felt when she first heard her voice addressing a crowd; the excitement as she held a Browning in her hand for the first time. But she said nothing more, just stared dully ahead until, at length, she left the table to retrieve a book of anatomy.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ON THE EVE OF SHAVUOS OF 1903, I MET UP WITH Bayla as I was leaving town after running an errand. “I was just on my way over to see if Tsila needed any help,” she said. Tsila was pregnant at last, a condition she had revealed with great happiness just three months before. “How is she?” Bayla asked now.

  “Fine, I guess.” It had been several weeks since I had last seen Bayla. She almost never came to town anymore. Her work kept her in Mozyr, she claimed. More likely her shame, Tsila thought. Three years had now passed since her engagement to Leib and still she was unmarried. “Actually, she’s very tired.”

  I had felt uncomfortable around Bayla ever since Sara’s revelation about Leib’s love for Golda. I felt I knew something about her that I shouldn’t and that I was lying, somehow, by not revealing it. Yet I knew also that revealing it would be even worse than lying. I found it difficult to look her in the eye. Bayla, though, didn’t seem to notice. So preoccupied was she with her own thoughts—thoughts she never revealed—that she barely looked at me anymore either and didn’t ask me anything about myself. We climbed the hill to my home in silence.

  The house was warm and smelled of holiday baking. On the table was a plate of cookies, the sugar on them melted to burnt caramel by the heat of the oven. The same cookies Tsila had made the first day I came into her home.

  “I just have to finish the challahs,” Tsila said.

  “You sit,” Bayla said, taking the goose feather from Tsila’s hand. She spread a mix of oil and egg yolk across the braided loaves and put them in the oven. Then she heated chicory and milk and placed three steaming cups on the table.

  “You don’t have to treat me as if I’m an invalid,” Tsila said, but she wrapped her hands happily enough around the warm mug her sister offered and settled in her chair. Bayla sat on the bench by the sewing machine.

  “Miriam tells me you’re tired.”

  “A little,” Tsila conceded. She was so exhausted she could barely drag herself through her days. “And you?”

  “I’m fine,” Bayla answered. She started to drink her chicory. “You don’t look so well, to be honest.”

  “Neither do you. To be honest.”

  “I’m fine,” Bayla assured her.

  “So am I,” Tsila said. Neither of them uttered another word as they sipped their drinks. Several times Bayla sat up straight as if about to say something, but then she sank back in silence.

  “Some Shavuos,” Tsila finally commented as she peered out the window at the heavy gray sky.

  “I don’t remember a Shavuos so cold,” Bayla agreed.

  “There’s a rabbi from Slutsk visiting for the holiday,” I said. “His son is going to lead the learning tonight.”

  The son of the Slutsk rabbi had created a stir that morning as he hurried across the market square. He was tall, pale, and still unmarried, and the news quickly circulated that a match was being considered between him and Hadassah, the daughter of the new shul’s rabbi. There was an elegance to the young man as he slipped through the narrow passages of our town—his beard was blond and curled softly around his face, his caftan clung to his body, revealing a slender form—and his mind was said to be fierce. The girls of the town fell silent under the weight of their envy of Hadassah. The young man’s teaching tonight would be a final test of his mettle before his prospective father-in-law, and all the town waited to hear if an engagement would be announced at the close of the holiday.

  All the town but Tsila and Bayla. Neither of them displayed the slightest interest in the news I had brought to them. Tsila had finished her chicory and was staring out the window. Bayla kept sitting up as if to speak, then retreating.

  Unable to withstand the tension, I announced finally that I was going to the riverbank to collect the greenery that would decorate our house for the holiday.

  “I’ll come with you,” Bayla said quickly.

  Other women were already at the riverbank
: Lipsa with five of her children; Freyde with her simple Itche and the two boys she had managed to produce after him; Rivke, the fishmonger’s wife—they all wanted to know how Tsila was. Tsila’s pregnancy, like her engagement, had caught them by surprise, but they had quickly recovered and seemed to have forgotten that just a few months earlier they had all agreed no seed could possibly sprout in such sour soil as Tsila.

  “Tsila’s fine,” we both answered, but to Lipsa Bayla confided that her sister seemed exhausted and was swelling everywhere but her belly. Though Tsila herself seemed unconcerned, Bayla wondered why Tsila’s fingers would swell like sausages while her belly remained flat. And the exhaustion, it seemed to Bayla, was excessive.

  “I’ll go see her,” Lipsa promised, a promise I knew would make Tsila angry.

  Bayla smiled and thanked Lipsa, seemingly innocent of her sister’s ongoing feud with the woman, and began filling my arms with reeds.

  “Do you know why we decorate the house with greenery on Shavuos?” she asked me.

  The question surprised me. Since her engagement to Leib, Bayla had become staunchly secular, uninterested in anything to do with religion.

  “It’s the harvest for the barley and wheat in the Holy Land,” I answered.

  “And do you know why we stay up all night studying?”

  Now I was annoyed as well as surprised. Did she think I was an ignoramus? That her sister taught me nothing? Just a few feet away Lipsa had begun pointing out to her daughters which plants could cure different ailments and which could make barren women fertile. I wanted to listen to that. I wanted to discuss the reeds that Tsila had eaten so much of in previous summers, and my concerns about the questionable quality of some that I had gathered and how that might be affecting the baby, but Bayla was repeating her tedious question about Shavuos.