Your Mouth Is Lovely

by Nancy Richler

  The poem passed finally to Malka, who finished the reading and then calmly informed us that the discussion planned for after the reading would have to be postponed on account of a report that the police had received word of this meeting and might, at any moment, launch a raid. We were to leave at once, in absolute silence, and disperse immediately. And with that, the room emptied so quickly that by the time I stepped alone into the cool night air there was no sign that the evening’s proceedings had been anything other than a dream.

  Siberia, November 1911

  Bitter Heshvan begins with this new moon. Bitter, for it is the only moon that brings us no holidays. In every other month we have been given something to celebrate: a feast, a fast, an occasion to exalt, to remember. But in Heshvan there is only the passage of days, and what dreary days they are. Here at Maltzev, the cold has returned, imparting its own sort of bitterness, but in the Polyseh too, there was always a sadness to this month. The sky, so glorious for the festivals of Tishri, would darken and lower itself over the flat landscape. The rains would begin, the roads turn to mud. Leaves lost their color and hung lifelessly, waiting to fall. Fields lay naked and half flooded. There is no beauty to Heshvan, I thought as a girl. The eye turns inward, awaiting the bright frosts of Kislev. And yet, the beauty must be found. So Tsila instructed me the Heshvan following the loss of her child. Otherwise our blessing of each new day, our thanks to the Creator, will be uttered with a falseness of feeling.

  I have a particular bitterness this Heshvan. The letters from Bayla, so regular for so long, have stopped.

  The last letter came in the spring. There were the usual inquiries about my health, the usual reassurances about you, your sweetness and intelligence, and about how when the time was right—the minute the time is right, and that’s a solemn vow—all would be revealed to you about who your mother really is. And then three paragraphs that filled me with sadness, a story meant to provide a moment of amusement.

  “Last night the Zalmans entertained a special guest for dinner,” Bayla wrote. “The new partner that has recently joined Yehuda in business. Sam Eisenberg is his name. Not a bad-looking man, though self-satisfied. I didn’t like the look he gave me when he walked in: coolly appraising, as if I am yet another piece of merchandise he might easily acquire. And his conversation! As he and Yehuda sat at the table waiting to be served, he talked of nothing but profits—of which there seems to be no shortage in his life. Can you imagine such a bore? Or do I mean a boor? I promptly spilled the soup on him. Not on purpose, but what difference? There it was, Shendel’s famous chicken soup all over Sam Eisenberg’s lap. And scalding hot it was too.

  “I was mortified, of course, and immediately chased hot with cold—a whole pitcher of cold water, I threw into his lap—then I fell to my knees as I tried to clean him up, but really what I felt—once I realized he wasn’t seriously injured—was satisfaction. I shouldn’t have—the man was quite scalded, and I could have lost my job right there, and where would that have left me? But I felt strangely satisfied to have caused some pain to this man who, just moments earlier, had looked me over with a superior air.

  “My satisfaction was short-lived, however, for do you know what he said? As Shendel tried to pry me off of him, all apology to him and anger to me, he put a restraining arm on Shendel’s and told her to let me be, for when in his life had he ever encountered a woman who could cause such pain and such pleasure all in the same moment? That is what he said, the boor. At dinner. In mixed company. Can you imagine such nerve?”

  I could imagine it all too clearly. The scene rose up vividly in my mind the moment Bayla described it. Sam Eisenberg, successful and handsome, but more hungry than satisfied, despite Bayla’s mistaken first impression. Ravenous, in fact—he is a man of huge appetites. It’s his first dinner at the home of his new partner. The talk is of business, of profits—present and future. Of expansion. He’s talking, for his tongue is smooth, but his mind is on the woman coming through the door from the kitchen, carrying a large, steaming tray. She is tall and very pale, with wavy red hair hanging down to her waist. She gives the appearance of calm, placidity even, as she carries in the tray, but two spots of color burn in her cheeks, as if great feelings roil inside her, surfacing there, in those two burning spots. And where else, Sam wonders. Where else on that long, white body might her passion surface? That is his thought as he sees the tray begin to tilt. Yes, he sees it happening. He watches the tray tilt slightly, sees the bowls as they begin to slide, but like so many of us who see our fate before us, he is powerless to stop it.

  He will marry Bayla, this I knew as I read the story she sent to amuse me. He will bestow his name on her, his fortune. He will welcome her into the life he has made in this new country, she and the child she has brought with her from the old. He will embrace the child as well as the woman, adopt the child as his own, for that’s the sort of man he is, this Sam Eisenberg. Generous as he is ravenous. And Bayla won’t refuse him. Why would she, a woman who has never felt the unreserved love of a man? So she can continue to serve Shendel when she might instead sit as a guest at her table? So she can raise a child not her own in poverty, ever waiting for the mother who will not come to claim her? No. Bayla is neither stupid nor stubborn. She will marry Sam Eisenberg, if she hasn’t already, and allow him to adopt my daughter as his own. You, my lovely.

  CHAPTER TEN

  1903

  “THE BEAUTY OF LIFE IS NOT ALWAYS OBVIOUS,” TSILA said to me that dreary Heshvan after the summer of deaths. “But it must be found. That is our task here. To find the beauty of His work and make it manifest.”

  On a dull afternoon of that month I entered the music room of the Entelman household. I had finished work early that day—Mrs. Entelman was tired, more tired than usual, and wanted only to be left alone in her darkened room. She had received a letter from Shendel that day, an event that at one time would have brought her pleasure but now seemed only to deepen her exhaustion. The mail had arrived after breakfast, but she had not read the letter then. She had placed it on her night table, where it had sat, unopened, throughout the morning.

  “Honeysuckle,” she muttered at one point as she sniffed the envelope beside her. “A cloying fragrance, don’t you agree? It has always given me a headache.”

  It was the change in weather that was giving her a headache, I suggested. A wind had risen with the dawn—if you could call such grayness dawn. A cold wind, from the north.

  “Maybe you’re right. Would you be a dear and bring me a compress. Not too cold—you know how I like it.”

  And so she lay all morning, neither speaking nor moving. And so I had to sit as well—Mrs. Entelman didn’t like activity around her when suffering one of her headaches. She refused lunch, swallowing only two spoonfuls of consommé before pushing away the tray, but she did at least remove the compress from her eyes and sit up in her bed. And after I took away the tray she reached for the letter beside her.

  She read without comment or expression, letting each scented page flutter to the floor beside her as she finished with it. I stooped to pick up the scattered pages.

  “Put it all in the fire,” she said, and when I stared at her in confusion, she said, “Go on now, don’t just stand there like a statue—did I not ask you to do something for me? And this too,” she said, holding out the sweet-smelling envelope with two fingers. “If she is no longer able to bring herself to obey the commandment of honoring her parents, she can at least have to her credit the mitzvah of providing her old mother with some warmth. Come on, now. I can’t hold this all day.”

  Mrs. Entelman watched me as I fed her daughter’s letter to the fire, then she sighed deeply, settled back into her pillows, and put the compress back on her eyes. “To think I should end up in this way,” she said. “As if I never had a daughter, and she no mother.”

  “You still have a daughter,” I commented, as I remained by the fireplace and watched Shendel’s letter curl and blacken, then turn to ash.

  M
rs. Entelman didn’t answer but she smiled. “Your mother also used to answer back,” she said from behind her compress. “She was cheeky, high in spirits. Or so it seemed.” Mrs. Entelman was quiet for a few moments, then added, “Your mother was happy when she worked here. Don’t mind what you hear.”

  “I’ve heard nothing,” I said quickly.

  “And don’t start lying to me now,” she said. “Lying is a sin, as you’ve surely been taught.” She removed the compress and opened her eyes to see a blush rise to my face. “But at least your lies will never break your mother’s heart. You can be thankful that your circumstances have saved you from that sin, at least.”

  In what way has Shendel broken your heart, I might have asked then, for does not compassion light the way to the beauty in others? But such was the bitterness of my own suffering that Heshvan that it blinded me to the suffering before me. I felt only disdain for Mrs. Entelman, impatience that she should carry on in such a way—lying in splendor, burning letters from her daughter—while Tsila and the widow Hodel worked their fingers to the bone as their own children rotted in the earth.

  “Can I do anything else for you?” I asked Mrs. Entelman. There was a coldness to my voice.

  “Just bring me my tea, put it on my night table, and leave me for the day.”

  I did as she asked, arranging her tea and lemon within her reach, quietly shutting the door to her bedroom, then descending the narrow back staircase to the kitchen. But instead of proceeding straight ahead and out through the kitchen door, I turned at the foot of the stairway toward the high, grand foyer of the main entrance of the house, then down the hallway that led to the music room.

  I did not know beforehand that I was going to do such a thing, did not even know why, exactly, I was heading for that room. I had never been there before—I had no business in that part of the house—but as I walked along the hall, I remembered Sara’s voice as she tried to deny the rumors she had heard. Baseness, she had said. Stupidities about your mother, Mr. Entelman, his music room. I don’t know.

  The door to the music room was shut. In a normal state of mind I would have turned around then. I would have realized that I could be fired for sneaking around the house in such a way. I would have been afraid of whom I might encounter behind that closed, heavy door. Whom I might disturb. But there was a pressure inside me that day. An anger. It had pushed aside fear and shame and emboldened me.

  The room was huge, with high ceilings and tall windows and floors of polished wood. The floors were covered with rugs—Persian rugs in shades of blue and rose. The sofa was deep rose in color and velvet to the touch. The armchair was the same. I settled myself in the armchair and wondered if my mother had once sat there before me.

  Minutes passed. The gray of the afternoon pressed up against the window but could not enter the rosy room. The chair in which I sat was soft; it swallowed me deeply. Rain began to fall, a cold Heshvan rain, but the room was warm and plush. Too warm, in fact. All that velvet, perhaps. A layer of dust lay on the piano. Not a thick layer, but dust nonetheless. Enough to show that the room was little used. Yet in the vase on the piano was a sprig of white blossoms. Fresh blossoms.

  I extricated myself from the armchair and walked over to the piano, certain that I must be mistaken, but I wasn’t mistaken. The blossoms in the vase on the piano were real. Almond blossoms. In Heshvan. I touched one lightly with the tip of my finger, then removed the sprig from the vase and held its sweet fragrance to my nose.

  “Beautiful, aren’t they?” a voice inquired. It was a man’s voice, deep and sonorous, and I swung around to face it.

  I had known he would come. From the moment I had entered the room I had known. I just had to wait, and then I would face him. For what purpose, I wasn’t sure yet. Just to face him. Eye to eye. But as I stood there with the sprig of almond blossoms in my hand, it was not his eyes I faced but the floor—a swirl of blue and rose.

  “They’re from my greenhouse,” he said.

  The blossoms, he meant.

  “I haven’t seen you before. Are you new here?”

  I saw his legs advance across the room. His shoes were of fine leather and well made. There was a fineness to the stitches, a care that had been taken. It was Aaron Lev’s work—I recognized the precision—and a feeling of comfort filled me. Then I felt his hand on my chin, my gaze being lifted to meet his.

  His eyes were my own. I saw it right away. I had thought, always, that my eyes were my mother’s, but they were not. They were his. And as I stared into the same eyes that had met mine in the mirror every morning and evening of my life, I knew without a doubt and without a care to the how or why of the thing that the man I faced at that moment was my father.

  Did he recognize me as well? He said nothing.

  “I’m sorry to have disturbed you,” I told him. There was a calmness within me. And an anger, cooling after a lifetime of hot shame. “I’m in your wife’s employ and have no business in this part of your house.”

  He released my face, and I walked quickly and silently from the room.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  1904

  AARON LEV MADE HIS WAY SLOWLY HOME IN THE WANING light of the winter afternoon. I watched him as he walked. His day had been a success, I would later hear him tell Tsila. The whole week, in fact. But there was no hint of that in his shuffling gait. He looked to me the same as always—a man who had departed early the previous Sunday for a neighboring village, shoemaking materials in hand, who was now returning home on a Thursday afternoon with a pocket only slightly heavier with coins than it had been when he set out.

  The weather had been fine all week. Bright, cold days, giving way to clear, starry nights, the kind of weather he had always loved best. That morning the snow had sparkled so brightly in the bold sunlight that to behold the day directly actually hurt one’s eyes. A mere hint, he would tell Tsila, of the blinding brilliance of the Divine presence. Would that He might begin dropping such hints with more frequency. Only as he had started for home had the sky darkened and snow begun to fall. It was a fine snow, and dry. And now, as evening fell, his path was cushioned underfoot, and the dark pines that crowded the narrow road bent a bit under their soft burden.

  It had been a difficult autumn. Tsila had recovered from her illness only to be afflicted by a savage restlessness. She seemed unable any longer to find any place of repose. Nothing she saw refreshed her, nothing she did provided satisfaction. She worked incessantly to no purpose, sewing a seam only to tear it out in frustration, dyeing a yard of cloth only to bemoan the dullness of the new hue. In the fields around her she saw only dreary sameness, in the forests and marshes dampness and shadow. Even her dreams provided no escape. She tossed unhappily through the night, rising unrested in the darkness before dawn. And while she didn’t throw off the hand Aaron Lev offered in comfort, neither did she quiet beneath it.

  “I still dream of fish,” I heard her confess to him in a whisper one night. “Swimming fish, all night long. They torment me.”

  “It will pass,” Aaron Lev told her. “Everything passes, and this will too.” But when, and at what cost? As he trudged home at the end of another week he bent ever lower under the burden of his life.

  I watched this man—my father, and yet not—and thought back to that night in Heshvan when I had arrived home late and drenched to the bone.

  “Where were you?” Tsila had asked, falling on me. “Out so late on a night such as this! I thought something had happened to you.”

  “I’m sorry,” I had apologized. Then I had announced that from that day on I would no longer be working for the Entelmans.

  “What?” Tsila cried. “What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. I’ve just decided I will no longer work there. I’ll be seeking other employment, starting tomorrow.”

  “What other employment?” Tsila had asked. Her sharpness, though eroded, was not completely gone.

  “I’ll find something. I’ll work at a factory if necessary
.”

  “What happened?” Tsila had asked.

  “Nothing happened.”

  “Then you will return there.”

  “I will not return there.”

  “You will not leave her employ to work at a factory for half the wages and twice the hours. Not while you’re living under my roof, you won’t.”

  “I’ll work for Mrs. Gold, then. She hasn’t found anyone to replace Sara.”

  “She won’t pay you half of what you’ve been getting. Mrs. Entelman has been very generous with you. And she has not exactly overworked you.”

  To this I had drawn myself up in great indignation and said: “I spit on her charity.” And the very next day I presented myself to Mrs. Gold and accepted far more difficult working conditions for half the wages I had been receiving.

  Never once had I offered Aaron Lev any sort of explanation, though I well knew what sort of hardship the reduction in my wages presented for the household. Had he wondered what had caused such strange behavior? Did he wonder about me at all? Just what was he thinking as he made his way home at the end of the week? He looked so weary, so very old. He offered no hint that the fine winter weather earlier that day might have gladdened him, no hint that enough hope still lived within him to sustain him for another day. I watched him with a mix of pity, anger, and tenderness until he disappeared into the darkness.