Your Mouth Is Lovely

by Nancy Richler

  “Quite honestly, there aren’t. Not right now. There’s obviously an informer at work. I thought I’d be arrested as I headed out of town. I was waiting for the sound of footsteps chasing after me as I crossed the bridge out of town, as I slipped into the forest. Then I heard a voice, a woman’s voice, reciting the Psalms. It couldn’t be, I told myself. Why would anyone be standing in the middle of the forest on a winter’s night, in total darkness, no less, reciting the Psalms? It was a dream, I thought. There was an instant when I even wondered if it was my own death coming for me. Silly, I know.” He smiled wanly. “I was afraid,” he admitted. “And then I realized it was you.”

  “Do you remember our first meeting?” I asked him. I don’t know why; there was so much else of a practical nature I should have tried to extract from him.

  “In the swamp?” he asked me, and nodded.

  I remembered the grayness of his skin at that first meeting, the yellow of his eyes, and the initial shock I had felt, the repugnance that had given way to the recognition of my own life in another.

  “I thought at first you were my brother.”

  “I am your brother.”

  “My dead brother …”

  He put a finger to my lips, and something opened inside me. “Do what I ask,” he implored me. “Even if you’re not sure why. It will lead to good, I promise.”

  Such were the words Lipsa had used when she first instructed me on following the commandments of the Torah. I was a young child then, no more than three or four years of age. Each commandment has its purpose, she explained, each its place on the path. Ours was not to understand but to follow the path. “And where does the path lead?” I asked, for even a child of three knows each path in the forest has its unique destination. “To faith,” Lipsa answered.

  “Someone will contact you. I promise,” Wolf said again.

  And with that he disappeared into the forest.

  Siberia, December 1911

  A moment from my childhood; it rose to mind this morning. A peaceful moment, early in my first summer with Tsila and Aaron Lev. I had recovered from my illness, and I was in the yard with Aaron Lev, who was building the chair that was to be mine. It started to rain, a fine summer rain, and we took shelter under the overhang of the roof. We watched the falling rain in silence for a while, and then he said to me, “It doesn’t matter to a drop of water where it lands.”

  It was the first he had spoken to me directly, and I experienced a feeling of comfort, a sensation, in that moment, of being held, weightless, in the embrace of his voice.

  “It’s the way of all water to flow downward to the sea,” he said as we watched the drops of water pool, then slide down the incline toward the road.

  They could join this rivulet or that, I understood him to mean, this stream or the other. One might seem nicer than the next, one swifter, but such differences were only momentary, insignificant, for no matter where they fell, they would find their way downward, ever downward to the sea.

  As I recalled that moment, I experienced again the comfort of it, the sense I had had of being carried swiftly and effortlessly by the flow of life itself. Comfort passed quickly from me, though, for all around me was ice—we are encased in ice this time of year. All around me were drops of water frozen in time and suspended in their voyage to the sea.

  I felt my mind turning, a shift to discomfort, a panic, mild still but rising. I felt myself encased in ice, entrapped within a single frozen drop of rain. I stood up and paced the length of our room to clear my mind of the image, but I couldn’t. With each passing moment the ice was thickening around me, layer upon layer, forming an ever more impenetrable shell. The colors of life beyond still filtered through, but not the shape. Soon the colors would be gone as well.

  “Are you all right?” Natasha’s voice.

  “The ice,” I said.

  Natasha rose from the table and approached me. “What ice?” she asked.

  “On the walls. All around us.”

  “The ice will melt,” she told me, her voice a deliberate calmness. “It forms every winter, and every springtime it melts.”

  “And finds its way to the sea?”

  “That’s right,” she said, her voice still calm, but alarm clearly visible on her face.

  “But for us it’s different,” I told Natasha. “Human beings are not like drops of water. It is not in our nature to flow effortlessly to our fate.”

  I felt her arms embrace me, the warmth of her wasted body.

  It is only through our own actions that we can place ourselves on the proper path, I remembered Lipsa telling me.

  And every act we undertook was significant in that it either furthered us along our proper path or diverted us from our intended fate.

  “We can lose our own fate,” I told Natasha.

  That’s why the Almighty gave the Torah to us and not to drops of water, Lipsa taught me. To guide us to our proper path. The Torah lights our way.

  I buried my face in Natasha’s neck and covered my ears.

  “Talk to me,” she said.

  This is your fate, I heard Tsila’s voice as my heart pounded in my ears.

  “Talk to me,” Natasha said again.

  Listen to its strength. Do you think it’s so easily diverted? I raised my head and looked into Natasha’s face.

  “It’s nothing,” I told her. “Double agents.” That’s what we call our turning thoughts.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1904

  IT IS NO SIMPLE MATTER TO HIDE A PACKAGE OF EXPLOsives in quarters as close as the ones I shared with Tsila and Aaron Lev. Even transporting it home was not without its complications. The package was about the size of an average tractate of the Talmud—Baba Matzia, perhaps—but heavier. I tucked it under my coat and began to think about where I might hope to conceal such a secret from Tsila’s observant eye.

  That was not all that occupied my thoughts as I walked back through the forest toward town. The news of Malka’s arrest had shocked me, despite all I knew about the dangers of our meetings. Would she be sent to prison now, I wondered, to desolate Siberia? And would we, the other members of the group, also be arrested? Was that, then, what she’d hoped to talk to me about, the growing danger of arrest, the ever tightening net? I thought again of that first meeting when she’d told me how I could honor the memory of my mother. Who else in our pious village had ever offered me guidance on how to observe that most basic of commandments? I shuddered now to think of her alone and at the mercy of her jailers.

  And who was Wolf, I wondered. Was it really just coincidence that he’d encountered me in the forest? He’d said he was no longer with the Bund but had told me nothing more. And I, as if in a spell, had asked him nothing of use. He had frightened me with his dynamite, his talk of informers, his destruction births creation. And who was to say he wasn’t the very informer he was warning me about? But he had thrilled me too, I couldn’t deny it. And I could still feel the pressure of his finger on my mouth, the opening inside myself. It will lead to good, he’d promised as I’d surrendered to my trust.

  I felt the weight of the explosives that I carried, the danger of my action, and it frightened me but excited me also. Whose hands had these explosives passed through before finding their way into mine? And to whom and to what would they lead me?

  I approached the town from the south, through the wealthier section. The streets were quiet—they always were here—the spacious homes peaceful in the falling snow. The Entelmans’ home also looked peaceful, its gables and steep roof blanketed in snow, its lit windows glowing softly, promising comfort and warmth. But I knew there was another life beneath the one that was obviously visible. I stood by the front gate and imagined I knew exactly the life of that house: Ghitel and one of the younger maids sitting at the kitchen table polishing silver, Mrs. Entelman lying alone in her room, heavy-headed from her valerian but not asleep, Mr. Entelman standing by the piano in the music room, inhaling the scent of the fresh almond blossoms that he
could procure with one easy snap of his fingers, no matter what the season of the year.

  I could practically see Ghitel at the table in the kitchen—so well did I know the workings of that household—each piece of polished silver adding to the growing pile on her right, the unpolished in a diminishing pile on her left. What was Ghitel discussing with her young helper tonight, I wondered. She had always gossiped with me about maids who had worked there before. Had I now become one of the topics of her conversations? That strange girl who left for no good reason to go work for that stingy Mrs. Gold?

  My eyes shifted to the upstairs window, Mrs. Entelman’s room—still lit—where I had spent so many hours. Pleasant hours, I had to admit, especially when compared to my present job at Mrs. Gold’s, where I spent my days climbing up and down ladders searching the crammed shelves for the goods customers wanted. My days at Mrs. Entelman’s seemed dreamlike, in contrast. While Mrs. Entelman had a streak of cruelty, it was not as wide as some, nor was she without a compensating kindness. Rare was the day when she hadn’t invited me to pour myself a cup of tea as she drank her own. I spit on her charity, I said softly to remind myself of why I had left there, but as I stood by that gate, cold in the falling snow, I craved for a moment the warmth, the conversation, and the hot cup of tea I knew would await me had I never stormed out of that house. Gone, suddenly, was the sense of excitement I had felt only moments before. I was tired now, and cold, and it frightened me to feel the hardness of the package wedged under my coat.

  The light went out in Mrs. Entelman’s room. She would toss sleeplessly now for hours—or so she would report to the girl who showed up with her tea in the morning. And what else would she talk about to the girl who had replaced me? Why had she hired me in the first place, I wondered. Was it cruelty or kindness or some other instinct entirely? Surely she had known who I was.

  And what about Mr. Entelman, I dared to wonder for the first time since I had last left his house. Had he recognized who stood before him that afternoon? My eyes were shaped like his, it was true, but perhaps he had looked into them, seen all I had beheld in my life, and recognized nothing of his own. Had he been kind to my mother, I wondered, and then my mind veered away from him and back to the more comfortable kitchen, where Ghitel still sat polishing and gossiping. I could hear Ghitel’s complaints about her daughter, who, now that she was finally pregnant, suddenly thought herself too delicate to get out of bed first in the morning and start the fire—She makes her husband do it, did you ever?—but the remembered rhythms of Ghitel’s gossip didn’t soothe me.

  My beginnings were there, I felt, in that warmly lit house I could never again enter. My future was not unlike the dynamite tucked beneath my coat—a hard compactness, the strength of whose unexploded power I could not even begin to guess at. And my fate—would it not be determined from some meeting of the two?

  “Your fate is here,” Tsila had told me once, placing my hand on my heart. I felt the wildness of its beat as I stood at the Entelmans’ gate and despaired.

  I EXPECTED THE TOWN TO BE ASLEEP. SO MUCH HAD happened that I thought it must be close to midnight. But it was still early in the evening and people were out in the streets in the lower part of town. It was Thursday night; stores were open late to enable everyone to buy what they needed for Shabbes. People finishing up the day’s business scurried about with heads bent and shoulders hunched against the snow. “Good evening,” I greeted everyone I passed with as casual a tone as I could manage, trying all the while to look like it was the falling snow that made me clutch my coat so tightly. As I ducked into the alley that ran behind Lipsa’s, a noisy group of boys returning home from heder almost pushed me into the wall. “Watch it,” I told them, clutching my precious package to my abdomen. “Sorry, sorry,” a few of them muttered, followed moments later by a snowball whizzing by my head. “Miriam,” I heard someone call me. It was Benny, Simple Sorel’s oldest brother. I had been hired by his mother a few weeks earlier to draft a letter to the Governor of our gubernia, making a case for Benny’s exemption from the military service. “He’s too clumsy,” his mother had instructed me to write. “He’s too stupid. Tell them he can’t remember the beginning of a sentence by the time he gets to the end of it. Tell them he came out of me backward and hasn’t known up from down since.”

  It had proved useless to point out that each year the Governor received a thousand such letters about the clumsiness and stupidity of the Jews, and that each year he ignored them. His mother had insisted I write it, and then, as the weeks passed and her Benny remained uninducted, she became convinced that my letter had saved him.

  Benny was under no such illusion—he knew the draft officers just hadn’t yet reached the swamps of the Polyseh for that year’s crop of recruits—but he had developed a liking for me as I sat in his mother’s house writing insulting things about him.

  “Wait up,” he called after me now as I hurried to get home with seven pounds of explosives under my coat. I waited. “What’s that witch done to you now?” he asked. “Did she make you stand outside all day to catch customers? You look like a snowman.”

  Mrs. Gold, he meant. It had become Benny’s habit to drop in on me at work, supposedly to make a purchase. He would ask for several items before making up his mind, observe how Mrs. Gold ordered me around, then wait for me after work to offer his indignation on my behalf and call her a witch. At first I hadn’t minded. There was something pleasant about his attention. I soon realized, however, that the items he asked for were always those on the highest shelves, and it began to annoy me that Benny’s motive, apart from winning my favor with his sympathy, was to look up my skirt as I climbed up and down the ladder.

  “I see they haven’t drafted you yet,” I answered his greeting.

  “Thanks to you,” he said, beginning to brush the evening’s accumulation of snow from my coat. “I’m on my way to Kugelmass’s. Would you like to come?”

  Tsvi Kugelmass, the son of the grocer, had recently taken it into his head that it was the Yiddish language that was the source of many of our troubles, the Yiddish language that symbolized the oppression we had suffered and the degradation we had sunk to during our long exile in hostile lands. If the Jews of Russia would begin speaking Hebrew instead of Yiddish, Tsvi and his friends reasoned, we would begin to regain our dignity and throw off the yoke of our oppression. With this in mind, Tsvi had begun holding soirées where young people of both sexes stayed up until all hours conversing together in Hebrew.

  I wasn’t interested in Kugelmass’s soirées. No one from that group had ever extended me a cordial greeting—in Hebrew or in Yiddish—and they were all planning to move to the Holy Land, where, from what I had heard, they would likely perish from malaria.

  “I’m tired,” I said to Benny.

  “She keeps you too late. You should tell her you’ll go on strike.” He smiled at his own joke.

  “I’m not coming from work,” I said. “She let me out early because I wasn’t feeling well.”

  “Is that why you’re walking like an old woman?” Benny asked me. Hunched, he meant. Over the package of dynamite that I held against my belly.

  “Yes,” I lied. “I have terrible cramps.”

  “Then I’d better walk you home.”

  “The soirée at Kugelmass’s,” I reminded him.

  “Oh, they’ll still be there when I get back,” he said, falling into step beside me.

  He was a decent person, I thought, as we walked together through the back alleys of town. And he made a decent living as a shingle maker. He was the kind of man, I realized, who could be suggested as a match for me, his simpleminded sister enough of a mark against his value to put him in the running for one whose mother had disappeared into the river. And there would be no good reason for me to refuse him.

  I felt the dynamite slip a bit under my coat and I shifted it a little. “Your offer to walk me home is very kind,” I told him, “but a kinder thing would be to stop in on Ida and see if she has en
ough wood for tonight.” We were just passing the widow Ida’s, and though I knew she had enough wood—it was I who checked on her every few days; I had ever since I’d delivered the news about her Moishe—I also knew Benny would not refuse my suggestion. He was decent.

  I WAS WELL AWARE THAT TSILA MIGHT FIND THE DYNAmite hidden in our home—our quarters weren’t large, as I have mentioned, and I couldn’t hide it outside for fear of how dampness might affect it. That she would find it the very next day, however, was unexpected. I had decided, after much consideration, to wrap it in the cobalt brocade. That, I thought, would afford at least a few weeks of safety. The half-finished dress lay at the bottom of Tsila’s pile of fabrics, where she had placed it, carefully folded, the morning after she had wrapped her dead child in one piece of the skirt. I thought the very sight of it reminded her of her deepest grief and disappointment. I did not realize it was for that reason that she pulled it out of the pile every day to stare long and hard at it.

  I arrived home from work well before dark the next afternoon. It was Friday; every store in town closed early to prepare for Shabbes. Aaron Lev had come home already and departed for the bathhouse. Our house was spotless, the table covered with a white cloth and set. Tsila was sitting in her chair with the cobalt brocade on her lap. “What is this?” she asked me, as she pulled back the material of the bodice to reveal what lay enfolded within.

  “Dynamite,” I said simply. I had never lied to her and did not begin then.

  “Dynamite,” she repeated. I waited for her anger, but she said nothing more. She refolded the material carefully around the dynamite, placed it gently on the floor beside her sewing machine, and covered it exactly as I had, with the rest of her fabrics. She told me then to clean myself up and get changed for Shabbes.

  WHEN AARON LEV CAME HOME FROM SHUL THAT FRIDAY night, he brought with him a guest. There were always a few out-of-towners in shul on Friday nights, travelers on their way to here or there who, of course, had to stay put once Shabbes descended, and it was customary to invite them home for a proper meal.