Your Mouth Is Lovely

by Nancy Richler

  When I continued to say nothing, she asked if I thought mine was the only family whose good name had been besmirched in the mud that passed for human discourse in our town. “Do you think it was easy for me when my mother started her heder?”

  I remembered, then, the comments I had overheard when word first spread that Hodel the widow had taken it upon herself to educate the girls of the town. Old maids. That’s what she’ll produce. Dried-up spinsters full of nothing but letters.

  “Better she should have remained a charity case like all the other widows. That the yentas would have approved of,” Sara said, a bitterness creeping into her voice. Oh, thank you, Mrs. Chayvitz, for your kindness to a poor widow and her children, Sara wheedled, extending her hand for alms as a beggar would. “Yes, that would have been more acceptable. Then Zelda Chayvitz and her cronies could have collected a few more mitzvahs for themselves by giving charity compassionately to the poor widow Hodel.”

  Sara strode ahead, her pace quickening as her anger mounted, then she stopped in her tracks. “I know the truth about your mother,” she said to me. “I know the truth behind all the gossip and I can tell you what it is.”

  I waited, hardly daring to breathe.

  “Your mother turned her back on the good women of this town. She turned her back on the so-called help they offered and the plans they made for her, thereby cheating them of the precious mitzvahs they’re forever trying to amass for themselves. Even when her own plans failed and she had to follow theirs, she kept her back to them, and for that they’ll forever take their revenge. That’s the truth behind the talk you bother yourself over.” And with that pronouncement Sara resumed walking.

  I fell into step beside her, disappointment heavy within me. I admired the neatness of Sara’s explanation, the certainty of her conviction, but try as I might to impose it on my own mind, unruly thoughts escaped its net.

  “It wasn’t just the women of this town that my mother turned her back on,” I said to Sara, a shame I hadn’t anticipated rising hot within me. The unnaturalness of my mother’s final act—that’s what I wanted to speak of. Her turning from life, newly born and her own. Could it not be that the endless talk about her was simply an attempt to find the story, the one story, that might finally explain the inexplicable? But I said none of that, for shame choked my voice, shame that I—my mere existence—had not only been insufficient to root her in this life but had proved the ultimate provocation for the unfathomable within her. Sara took my hand, and we walked in silence for a while.

  “It isn’t a person’s origins or pedigree that determine her worth,” Sara said quietly. “It’s the actions one takes or fails to take in one’s life. Come to Malka’s study group,” she urged me. “You’ll find your truth there.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  IT WASN’T SARA’S URGINGS, THOUGH, THAT FINALLY led me to Malka’s study circle, not a sudden interest in “my truth,” as Sara called it, or in action, or in meeting young people who didn’t care about a person’s pedigree. It was grief, a grief that in that early stage was still simple in its demands of me: to find what comfort I could by immersing myself in the same world Sara had inhabited.

  The last time I saw her was four evenings before her death. She was leaving the next day for Gomel. “On private business,” she said, her face bursting with pride and self-importance. “I absolutely can’t breathe a word about it to anyone.” Though for me she would make an exception.

  A new pamphlet had recently been printed in Mozyr. Illegally, of course. Was it Gozhansky’s A Letter to Agitators? Dikshtein’s Who Lives by What? I can’t even remember, but Sara had been elected to carry copies of it to Gomel for distribution there. She would go alone, disguised in a schoolgirl’s uniform, with her hair in braids and a book satchel slung over her shoulder. But instead of books of arithmetic and grammar, the satchel would be filled with the pamphlets.

  “You’re going alone?” I asked, feeling envy and apprehension in equal parts.

  “Absolutely,” she answered with a confidence that sparked yet more envy in me. “I’m the youngest in the group, the least likely to arouse suspicion.”

  “How will you know what to do once you get there?” I asked.

  “I have instructions,” she said.

  “Someone will meet you?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Hava Leibowitz?” I persisted.

  “I can’t say another word.”

  She had already fabricated several lies to cover her absence. One for her mother and one for her employer, Mrs. Gold. “A lot of revolutionary work involves creating lies that are believable,” she informed me, and certainly she had mastered that aspect of her calling.

  “So do you have to rush home?” she asked me then.

  “Not tonight,” I said with a pang of misgiving. A few weeks had passed since Tsila had lost her baby, and in those weeks I had made a habit of returning home directly after leaving Mrs. Entelman’s, forgoing my early evening walks with Sara.

  With the approach of cooler weather, Aaron Lev was working as a shoemaker again and had to resume his excursions to neighboring villages, excursions that sometimes kept him away several nights at a time. While Tsila had recovered sufficiently by then to recommence her dressmaking and household duties, her sharpness had not yet returned to her, and without it she was unarmed against the gloom that descended on her every evening just before nightfall. I could feel it hovering around her the moment I entered our home, a gloom so heavy that I feared it would suffocate her if its full weight came to rest on her heart. I therefore tried to be home before nightfall, sensing my company provided distraction and some comfort.

  “Tsila’s not alone tonight,” I said. “Her mother’s visiting.”

  “Shall we go for a walk, then?” Sara asked, linking her arm through mine.

  We walked toward the swamp. I wanted to show her the cranes, to show her that I too had my secrets.

  There were always cranes in the marshes during the warm months. They arrived in early spring soon after the ice broke on the river and could be seen throughout the spring and summer walking around, singly or in pairs, searching for food with their long beaks. In the fall they converged on a field that I knew, thousands of them from all over the swamp, where they chattered and murmured and called to each other before flying off for the winter. Usually it happened later in the autumn, but that year the weather had turned early and the cranes began to gather in preparation for their journey.

  “Should we be going here?” Sara asked nervously as I led her across the footbridge that led to the swamp. The sun was beginning to sink and a gray mist rose up from the marshes.

  “It’s okay,” I assured her. There was comfort in the thick, rank air closing in around us, my baby brother’s soul among the vapors we inhaled. I took Sara’s hand as I led her into the mist.

  We walked along the paths that were so familiar to me, Sara’s grip tight on my hand, and it wasn’t long before we heard the noise.

  “What’s that?” Sara asked, stopping in her tracks.

  “Listen,” I said, putting my finger to my lips to stop any sound that might scare them into flight.

  We walked a bit further, and there before us was the field with its crowd of chattering cranes.

  Sara watched, a look of wonder on her face. “What on earth are they discussing?” she whispered to me.

  I shrugged my shoulders. Who could know?

  “How long will they be here?”

  “A few weeks. A month.”

  “And then?”

  “And then …” I spread my arms wide and flung them skyward. “They’ll take off, all in one motion.”

  “For Africa?” she asked.

  “That’s right,” I said with the same self-assurance I had seen Sara display earlier that evening, although I really had no idea where the cranes flew to when they left us.

  THE POGROM IN GOMEL BEGAN AS SUCH THINGS OFTEN do: over a trifle. In this case, it was the price of a barrel
of herring. The woman selling the herring, a Jew, wanted six rubles for the barrel. Her customer, a Christian, offered one ruble fifty. A fight ensued, Jews fighting Christians, Christians fighting Jews.

  That was Friday, Sara’s first day in the city. By that evening the agitation against the Jews had begun, venomous words calculated to stoke any embers of hatred that smoldered in the hearts of the Christian townspeople. Effective words: on Saturday the first riots began. The speeches continued, words like streams of kerosene poured onto the fires of hatred. On Sunday, more riots.

  This time the Jews were armed, prepared to defend themselves. Was it not helplessness that had encouraged the rioting crowd to slaughter in Kishenev, in the way that a weak and cowering dog incites the pack to rip it apart? This is what the Jews of Gomel asked themselves as they heard the rising fury of the rioting crowd. There would be no repeat of Kishenev in Gomel, they decided, no women dragged naked through the streets by their hair, no babies held by their feet as hoodlums bashed their heads against the pavement. Not in Gomel. The Bund had organized a defense of the city, dividing it into districts, each with its own squadron of armed protectors.

  On Monday, though, when the defenders of the Jewish section of town went to block the marauding crowd from entering their streets, they, in turn, were blocked by soldiers. The rioters swarmed the streets, shattering, plundering, beating … but the soldiers stood on guard for the attackers, beating and arresting any Jews trying to come to the aid of their own.

  By the end, hundreds of Jewish homes and businesses had been destroyed, scores of Jews lay injured, and several were dead. Sara was among the dead.

  Arise and go now to the city of slaughter;

  Into its courtyards wend thy way;

  The young man on my left began the reading of Bialik’s poem. It was the first meeting of the study circle since Sara’s death. Dissatisfied with the religious mumblings at the funeral, they had decided to honor Sara’s memory in a way that they felt would be truer to her life and in keeping with her wishes: with a reading and discussion of Bialik’s “City of Slaughter.”

  Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay,

  The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.

  I had heard the poem before. Sara had read it to me on one of the hot summer nights when we had met to cool ourselves in the river long after everyone else had gone to bed. Sara hadn’t swum that night but had remained on the bank, reading to me as I treaded water a few feet away. It was a still night but not peaceful. The words Sara recited disturbed the air. When I quieted my own movements I could feel the uneasy bodies of everyone else in the town tossing sleeplessly in their beds.

  “Kishenev did not just happen,” Sara told me when she finished reading. “It was planned by the government, stage-managed from its earliest stirrings, to vent anger and frustration that could be turned against the government, to misdirect its expression. And it wasn’t the first time.”

  I remembered Tsila telling me how the government had incited a wave of pogroms and expulsions twenty years earlier, following the assassination of Alexander II.

  “Not the first time. No,” Sara agreed with herself. “But something’s going to change now.”

  The perfumes will be wafted from the acacia bud

  And half its blossoms will be feathers,

  Whose smell is the smell of blood!

  The air had been thick with feathers, Sara had told me. For miles around, feathers had fallen like snow in the warm spring air carpeting the streets, blanketing the faces of the dead. Feathers from the shredded mattresses of Jewish homes, from the pillows that had once cushioned sleeping heads.

  And, spiting thee, strange incense they will bring—

  Banish thy loathing—all the beauty of the spring,

  I had expected a small group of young women, maybe ten or so, arranged in a circle so that no one was ahead or behind anyone else, not even Malka. That was how Sara had described it. But for this occasion, this memorial to their fallen comrade, the room was crammed full of young people of both sexes, every space on the benches filled and more standing against the back walls and in the spaces between the benches.

  Upon the mound lie two, and both are headless—

  A Jew and his hound.

  The self-same axe struck both, and both were flung

  Upon the self-same heap where swine seek dung;

  The poem was passed from person to person, each reading a line or two before passing it on to his neighbor. Such variety in tone and timbre … some of those present could barely read, but no one rushed them. They took the time they needed to sound each word, and the one or two who couldn’t read at all still held the text in their own hands while a neighbor read their lines.

  Descend then, to the cellars of the town,

  There where the virginal daughters of thy folk were fouled,

  There was a gentleness to the voice that read those lines, a tenderness that caressed the violence of the lines. I looked up and saw the boy I had encountered in the swamp a few years earlier, the boy who had rendered a single note of sadness out of one of the reeds I had collected for Tsila. The sadness he had evoked that day had since come to fruition, the only thing, it seemed, that had come to fruition since I had last seen him. He was a young man now, and even in that room crowded with like-minded young people, something in his voice reached more deeply into me than the others. I strained to get a better look at him but could see only his profile—sharp and gaunt, his skin sallow in the dim light of the room.

  How did their menfolk bear it, how did they bear this yoke?

  They crawled forth from their holes, they fled to the house of the Lord,

  They offered thanks to Him, the sweet benedictory word.

  As the poem passed from person to person, the atmosphere of sadness that had filled the room began to give way to a building anger, an anger that seemed as directed at the victims of the slaughter as at the perpetrators.

  The Cohanim sallied forth, to the Rabbi’s house they flitted:

  Tell me, O Rabbi, tell, is my own wife permitted?

  The poem, it seemed to me, scorned those who had died, for their own helpless martyrdom, and scorned too those who had survived, for their cowardice. Was this not a sacrilege, I wondered, a dishonor to the dead and living alike?

  Come, now, and I will bring thee to their lairs,

  The privies, jakes and pigpens where the heirs

  Of Hasmoneans lay, with trembling knees,

  Concealed and cowering,—the sons of the Maccabees!

  The poem was moving ever closer to me, would soon be in my own hands, my own voice expected to ring out in the silence of the room. Apprehension hardened to a knot in my stomach. I thought of Sara’s mother at the cemetery, a figure as twisted in grief as the most gnarled of the junipers in the swamp.

  Brief-weary and forespent, a dark Shekinah

  Runs to each nook and cannot find its rest;

  Wishes to weep, but weeping does not come;

  Would roar; is dumb.

  I thought of the cranes on their field in the swamp. The weather had been mild all week and they seemed in no hurry to bring an end to their gathering. That is where I wanted to be, alone with the cranes in their last moments of communion with each other, alone with the memories of the last moments I had spent with Sara. But the poem was handed to me, a few sheets of flimsy paper, gray and grubby from all the sets of hands it had already passed through. The words were barely legible, between the poor quality of the paper and the dim light of the room. Was this a fitting tribute to my friend? And yet, as I held those sheets of well-worn paper in my hands and my eyes passed over the words printed upon them, a surge of energy flowed into me, as if with these few sheets of paper came the combined vigor of all the hands that had touched it before mine, and all the eyes that had beheld these words before mine had. My voice,

  when I started to read, surprised me with its strength.

  Its head beneath its wing, its wing
outspread

  Over the shadows of the martyr’d dead,

  Its tears in dimness and in silence shed.

  A pair of hands received the poem I passed to them, but though the poem left my grasp, the energy it had carried with it did not ebb from me. I listened with heightened awareness to the reading, noticed even more clearly than before the faces and voices of those around me.

  It is a preacher mounts the pulpit now.

  He opens his mouth, he stutters, stammers. Hark

  The empty verses from his speaking flow.

  It was Breina, the youngest daughter of the rabbi of the new shul, who read those lines. A few weeks earlier her sister Hadassah had married the son of the Slutsk Rav, and now, Freyde had told me, a quick match was being sought for Breina. Freyde didn’t know why. “It’s not like she’s an old maid, at sixteen. What’s the rush? Are they afraid her beauty won’t keep another year?” I understood from the anger in Breina’s voice as she read that it wasn’t her beauty her parents feared wouldn’t keep.

  The old attend his doctrine, and they nod.

  The young ones hearken to his speech; they yawn.

  The mark of death is on their brows; their God

  Has utterly forsaken every one.

  Breina continued reading, longer than others before her had, but no one reached for the poem until she had read as much as she wanted. The poem passed then to a woman sitting in the dimness of a corner of the room.

  What is thy business here, O son of man?

  Rise, to the desert flee!

  The cup of affliction thither bear with thee!

  Her voice was deep, forceful yet not forced. I glanced up and saw that it was Hava Leibowitz, returned to our town, as the soothsayer had predicted, for a death not her own. I remembered her as a clumsy girl, an ungainly presence stooping beside her mother, always the more noticeable for her attempts to make herself smaller, but the woman she had become bore little resemblance to the girl she had been. There was still a bulk to her physical presence, but it seemed proportional now to the size of the personality that dwelled within. Dressed austerely in high-necked dress and pince-nez, her hair pulled into a tight bun from which no strand escaped—there was a severity to this Hava’s physical presence, and an authority to her voice that forced other eyes in the room—not just mine—to seek her out. Why had she returned to this place, I wondered, a place she had once fled. To honor Sara, I told myself, but Tsila’s voice echoed in my head. Like Lot’s wife, Tsila had said about Hava the morning after she fled. She never could resist a disaster, that one.