She nodded her comprehension. “Go now,” she said, and maybe I would have had it not been for the next sound to rise out of her throat, a cry so like a tearing, a rending of muscle and flesh, that I instinctively encircled her with my arms to hold her together. The cries continued, accompanied soon by a shuddering, a terrible vibrating from within, as if the grief inside her was lashing itself against the walls of her body. I held her tighter, fearing the fragility of her body’s frame—the brittle cage of her ribs, the soft aging flesh. How could it withstand the violence of her grief? We stayed like that, I don’t know how long, my smaller body absorbing her vibrating shudders, until a pressure on my shoulder, Lipsa’s firm touch, released my arms and she took Ida into her own.
Ida’s cries had reached beyond the walls of her home and comforters were coming now, singly and in pairs. I did not want to be seen—the messenger of grief and death—and started up the hill to my home.
It was night by then, a humid night, filled with the buzzes and saws of insects. There was no moon, the road was utterly dark. I walked slowly, exhausted by the day’s events. My arms ached, a dull heaviness that spread to my shoulders and seeped into the cavity of my chest. My legs felt heavy too, each step an effort, as if walking through water or a dream. I smelled cigarette smoke, a curl of it wafting through that thick darkness. I knew then that I wasn’t alone, but, strangely, I was unafraid. I walked slowly, quietly, aware of another’s presence, a silent presence, unwilling to identify itself with sound or movement, just that thin curl of smoke snaking through the heavy air.
Then he was beside me. I smelled his clamminess, the rot of him. I stopped in my tracks but saw nothing, heard nothing. He was still there, I could smell him, but when I reached my hand out I felt only air. Go! I knew I should say in a firm, strong voice. That was the way Lipsa spoke to the dead. They must always be aware of your strength, she had told me. But at that moment I felt no strength, only the heaviness of my limbs, the exhaustion of that day and all the days that had preceded it. Now I heard his voice, a soft, urgent whisper, but I couldn’t make out his words. Go! I knew I should tell him, but my tongue was too heavy in my mouth, my head too heavy on my neck. The air thickened around me and I couldn’t take another step, so I lay down in the soft, moist earth by the side of the road.
In utter darkness I lay, overcome but not unaware. I heard noises—soft, even breathing above me, the fall of footsteps on the road, the calling of my name. I might have answered, but the air around me was thick as water and closed around me like a seal. I was alone then, utterly alone; even my thoughts had flown from my head.
How long I lay there I don’t know, but eventually there was a light. A harsh light more blinding than illuminating, yet as I clenched my eyes against it, it returned my other senses to me. I became aware of a noise, a clatter different and apart from the far-off noises I’d been hearing. It was my own teeth clattering against each other. Bile filled my mouth. I spat and at once felt the dampness of the earth against my back, the stiffness of my neck, my own hands lying inert beside me. I raised one hand from the dirt to cover my eyes, to shield them from the light that pried so painfully beneath their lids. A strong hand grabbed mine then, a warm hand, my father’s. It pulled me to my feet, then his two arms enclosed me, drawing me to the warmth of his body.
I could not explain what had happened. I sat wrapped in the blanket Tsila threw around me after removing my wet, soiled dress. “No one hurt me,” I said, and my body, under Tsila’s careful inspection, revealed no wounds. I drank the cherry brandy my father gave me and told them about Ida. They watched me as I spoke, Tsila’s eyes sharp, my father’s soft as mud. I told them about Ida’s cries of grief, the convulsive shudders that had risen out of her and threatened to break her apart, the darkness of the road, the exhaustion that overtook me, the sudden clamminess of the air. “Did Moishe smoke?” I asked.
“Hush now,” Tsila said.
“Was it Moishe I met on the road?”
“Shush,” Tsila said, placing her hand on my mouth to halt any further flow of words. It was my imagination I had encountered on the road, Tsila said, not Moishe. The dead didn’t go for strolls down the road. I’d smelled the smoke of a cigarette, had I not? Since when did the dead smoke? The dead didn’t smoke. The living did. The broad-shouldered men who stood in clusters in the market, along the road, outside Markowitz’s tavern—that’s who smoked. Young men like the one Moishe had been, lumberers and carpenters with their caps at jaunty angles and a cigarette always dangling from their lips—that’s who I had encountered on the road. My own imagination. My own vision of who Moishe had once been. But Tsila shuddered despite herself, afraid perhaps that it might indeed have been death I’d encountered on the road to our house when the birth of her own child was so near.
My father, meanwhile, had not removed his eyes from my face. He watched me without blinking, without glancing away, as if in raising me from the earth in which I had lain he had noticed something that had escaped him until then. “Imagination in itself is no sin,” he said, “but it has to be turned toward good.”
“Do you choose to turn your heart toward death?” Tsila asked, her voice rising in frustration. “Do you choose to squander your life in this world yearning for the next? There are people like that, you know. The graveyard is full of them. Shall I take you tomorrow to see them?”
She read an answer from my face.
“Then enough with your fainting fits,” she said. “Enough with your nonsense.” She took my chin in her hand and brought her face close to mine. I smelled the clean health of her, felt the bracing sharpness of her gaze. “Lift yourself now,” she commanded me. “You’re a big girl, almost a woman. It’s time you lift yourself from the grave of your own morbidity.”
CHAPTER ‘SEVEN
MY EXPERIENCE HAD FRIGHTENED TSILA. WHERE once she would have shaken it off, refusing to submit to superstitious fears and premonitions, the presence of another life within her had made her more vulnerable to those fears. Swollen with a pregnancy that was not going as it should, she felt painfully aware of all that she didn’t understand in the universe and the many harms she was powerless to prevent. It was not just to raise me from my own morbidity that she decided to send me out to work, but to free her own house of it for a few hours a day.
I knew this as I left the house the following Sunday, and I half expected Mrs. Entelman to turn me out as well, preferring her own loneliness to the morbidity that Tsila had accused me of, a morbidity that both she and my father had likened to a kernel of evil that I carried within myself. Mrs. Entelman, though, seemed delighted to see me. Would I be a dear and bring her the valerian drops from the bureau, she asked as soon as Ghitel, the maid who had escorted me upstairs, left us alone. “I would get them myself, of course …,” and she immediately began talking.
It wasn’t merely Shendel’s departure that had felled her, despite what I had heard. Certainly she missed the girl. Who wouldn’t miss such a daughter, she asked. Of course she’d wept bitterly—would I be a dear and change the cloth on her forehead? No, never mind; this would do for now.
“Of course I long for my daughter, but take a look at me lying here …”
Her face was pinched, though her color was good.
“Does mere longing reduce a woman to this?”
That I couldn’t answer. I had only begun to guess at the feats longing could accomplish.
“No, it doesn’t,” Mrs. Entelman said. “Longing, when it’s pure, drains tears from the eyes and joy from the heart, but it’s only when it’s twisted by anger and regret …” She paused now. “And to think we rejoiced at the match. Mr. Entelman as well, and he’s no fool, my husband, as anyone in town can attest.”
So it was Yehuda, then, I thought, something in the marriage.
“And to hear now that Bayla is also in the clutches of that family … oh, that sweet girl,” Mrs. Entelman moaned. “I hear Rosa and Avram blame us for the match,” she said, glancing at me only lo
ng enough to confirm her fears. “If they would only talk to me—do you know they’ve stopped talking to me now?”
I nodded. How could I not? The whole town knew that Rosa and Avram turned their backs when anyone related to the Entelmans walked past them.
“They blame us as if we knew something about the Zalmans and didn’t let on, but if they would only come talk to me … has the family heard anything from Bayla?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Not even if he’s married her yet?”
Even that information had not reached our ears.
“If they would only come see me, they would know I’m every bit as heartsick as they are. More heartsick. Look at my condition compared to theirs. Do they even know the condition I’m in?” She glanced at me to confirm that I would tell them. “They blame me for the loss of their daughter, but have they forgotten they have four other daughters? Four beautiful, healthy daughters, and a grandchild on the way.” She spit three times to distract the evil eye’s attention from the pregnancy she had just mentioned. “Not to take away from their pain—but compared to mine, a sickly woman like me losing the only flesh that could warm her old age …”
“You’re not old,” I rushed to assure her. Her face, beneath her sickroom bonnet, was unlined, and her hands were as smooth and unmarked as her daughter’s.
“Feh!” she responded. “I’m a dried-up old woman doomed to spend the rest of my days lying alone in the dark, rotting like a dog.”
It was hard to follow everything Mrs. Entelman said. The lying alone part, for one thing. The house seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of servants who appeared at regular intervals to see if there was anything Mrs. Entelman might need. And the darkness she spoke of—the house was as light-filled as I remembered it, even without Shendel to enhance it. And as for the comment about her rotting like a dog—but there was no time to ponder whether dogs rotted more readily than humans, as Mrs. Entelman was now explaining the curse that Yehuda had laid on her when he returned to drag Shendel away.
“Shendel was sobbing,” Mrs. Entelman explained. “She did not want to go—I don’t need to tell you that. She was clinging to me, both arms like this …” Mrs. Entelman demonstrated by flinging her own arms around my neck, drenching me with the scent of lilac. “Yehuda, meanwhile, looked puzzled, feigning confusion as to the source of the tears. ‘What?’ he kept asking in that unctuous voice of his. You’ve heard his voice? ‘Tell me, Shendel, please,’ he begged. And to think it was that voice that charmed us just a few years earlier, and Bayla’s parents too. ‘You’ll have a new home,’ he promised her. ‘And built of solid stone. That’s how they build houses in Canada. Out of stone and brick. None of this wood that goes up in flames at every whim of nature.’ Did you ever hear of such a thing? Nature he ascribes whim to, that unbeliever, as if the Almighty is a mere handservant of the very forces that He Himself created. ‘With a wrought-iron gate,’ he continued, ‘and electric lights that go on with a flick of the finger, and indoor toilets, and water you can drink from a tap without dying of typhus.’ As if anyone has died of typhus around here in recent years—not to take away from your loss. I knew your grandparents, may they rest in peace. Lovely people, all of them.
“Shendel wasn’t much comforted by his promises. Why would she be? ‘My mother,’ she wept, throwing herself on me again. ‘I’ll give you children,’ he answered, as if the future erased the need for a past.
“ ‘But Shendel’s roots are here,’ I said to him. ‘Will you tear her out and then wonder why she withers?’ To which he fixed a cold eye on me, the same eye that just three short years ago was all obsequiousness and twinkling. ‘Shendel is not one of your husband’s trees,’ he said to me, as if I could not differentiate my daughter from a sapling. ‘Trees have roots, Jews have legs.’ That’s what he said to me, the khokhem.”
Why such a statement—hardly an original or shocking observation—should have felled her, as she put it, was a mystery much discussed in the lower part of town. No one knew the answer, but it was then, as those words passed his lips, that the strength passed from her legs. “One moment I’m standing by my daughter trying to provide what comfort a mother can in such a situation. The next, I’m on the floor like a worm. Yes, a worm that crawls on its belly, that’s what that man reduced me to. But come closer, dear, I haven’t had a good look at your face.”
I obeyed her, felt the light touch of her fingers on my cheeks, lips, the lids of my eyes. She examined my face as a blind person might. “You look nothing like a crow,” she pronounced at last, and my cheeks heated with shame. It hadn’t been that long since the boys and young men along the sides of the roads had stopped making cawing sounds as I passed. “The hair may be black, the skin dark, the eyes small, the nose prominent, but to me you’re a beauty, and do you know why?”
I shook my head miserably. Just a few weeks earlier Lipsa’s daughter Mirel had looked at me long and hard and said I was coming along, that if I could just learn to sew a straight hem and let my face catch up to my nose, my father might make a decent match for me yet.
“You have a good heart,” Mrs. Entelman said. “I felt it through my fingertips. I felt the heat of your heart. I’m never wrong about such things. Now go get me that water. Down in the kitchen. Ghitel will show you. But mind you, be careful on the way up and don’t spill. Your mother used to spill.”
“My mother?” I asked.
“Yes, your mother. She worked for me; didn’t you know that? In the year before her own marriage. She was a good girl—don’t mind what they say—but unsteady. She couldn’t carry a tray from here to there without slopping and spilling. Go now, quick. My head’s killing me.”
And so I went, my own head spinning now, to get Mrs. Entelman’s water, and when I returned, full of questions about my mother, she was already onto another topic. That’s how it was at Mrs. Entelman’s. She talked, flitting from one topic to another as a bird might hop from branch to branch, while I flitted from task to task as her whim dictated, pressing compresses to her forehead, fetching her water, dusting the already glistening surfaces of her bedroom, often switching from one task to another before the first was completed. “Be a dear and do this …,” she would say. “No, on second thought, do that instead.” Until I understood that in this house there was nothing, really, that needed doing. I might do this as she suggested, or that, or nothing at all except listen to Mrs. Entelman’s melodic voice skim the surfaces of conversation.
“You’re a good girl,” she said to me at some point in the afternoon. Had I just rearranged the flowers Ghitel had brought in from the garden? Or was it after I smoothed the coverlet over her legs, which were cold, she insisted, even in the summer heat. “Your mother was a good girl too,” she told me again as she sipped the chamomile tea I brought her in the late afternoon. “And such a daughter she was. We should all be blessed with such a daughter. Do you know that not a day of your mother’s life passed without her visiting her parents’ graves?”
I shook my head no.
“Oh, yes. I can tell you. No matter what the weather, what the demands upon her—and there were many, an orphan like that with no relatives to raise her—she always found the time to spend a few moments with her parents.” A pause. “It’s true that in time she found other company at the cemetery to spend a few moments with, but was that such a sin? Two lonely souls spending their youth with the dead …” Mrs. Entelman’s eyes misted over now. “Two lonely orphans.” Another pause. “Of course, Noam wasn’t really an orphan. It was just his mother he had lost. Just. Listen to me. Just his mother, as if such a loss was the less wounding for the father being spared. And such a lovely woman his mother was. Who can understand the ways of the Almighty that such a woman would be taken—an angel among women—leaving a husband and young son, while the wicked are spared to unleash their evil among us.”
“Noam?” I asked. The same Noam that my father now worked for? The teamster Noam whom Bayla had called an exploiter and agains
t whose gaze my father had once shielded me with his own body?
But Mrs. Entelman didn’t approve of the distaste for Noam that she caught in my voice and face. It was unbecoming, she said, for anyone to set herself as a judge of another’s character. Such judgments soured the face, to say nothing of the spirit. And me, with such a long and skinny face to begin with—I didn’t want to turn into a pickle, did I?
I shook my head no.
And did I imagine, Mrs. Entelman continued, young and well cared for as I was, that I had ever tasted so much as a sample of the bitterness life offers to some? “Have you not been to the swamp?” she asked me.
I had, I assured her.
“Then you have seen for yourself the twisted shapes living beings assume when they must suck their nourishment from bitter offerings.”
I nodded, a sickening tug in my gut reminding me of the bitter reeds I had provided for Tsila’s baby.
“He scares you?” Mrs. Entelman asked about Noam, her tone less chiding now, and I saw Noam in full gallop, his eyes narrowed, his face hard as he spurred and whipped his horses ever faster.
I nodded. “There’s talk that he’s cruel. Hard,” I amended, afraid to say anything that could be construed as loshon hora. “To his horses.”
“I wouldn’t know about that. I don’t know from horses. But tell me this, would a cruel heart care for an old man as he cares for his father?”
Noam’s father, Chaim, also a teamster as a young man, had fallen under the wheels of his coach some years back, and though his mind and breath had survived the ordeal, his body had never repaired itself. He lay paralyzed on a cot in Noam’s house. Every morning Noam rose early to wash and feed his father’s broken body, and every evening he returned home to spoon another meal into his waiting mouth. It was said in town that the only luck the old man had ever had in this life was the failure of Noam to marry, for what daughter-in-law would bring such gentleness and love to the tending of her useless father-in-law?
Your Mouth Is Lovely Page 12