Your Mouth Is Lovely

by Nancy Richler

  I HAD BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO THE TRAIN JOURNEY from the moment the plans for my trip were first formulated, but the scene inside the third-class car headed for Gomel was disappointingly familiar. Here were rows of seats as hard as those of Noam’s coach, the usual winter smells of wet sheepskin, onions, and herring. My fellow passengers were not the exotic mix of strangers I had imagined, but the same peasants and Jews I could see on any market day. We found seats near the stove at the end of the car, and Mrs. Frumkin’s daughter sipped tea.

  As the conductors readied the train for departure, vendors crowded the platform selling cigarettes, cabbage pies, seeds, and other snacks. A bell rang once, then twice. Passengers rushed around the platform directing porters, collecting wayward children. The third bell rang, followed by the engine whistle, and then, almost indiscernibly, the train started rolling slowly forward.

  A steady drizzle had begun to fall. For hours we passed through nothing but the same forest and mist-enshrouded swamp that I had seen every day of my life until then, yet there was newness in the very motion of the train itself, a strangeness in doing nothing but peering out a window at unfolding landscape. Here and there were villages, all the same with their huddled houses, gray in the drizzle, and their flat fields, mostly mud and stubble with a few ragged patches of snow still clinging to them.

  The station in Gomel was like the one in Kalinkovich, except more so. Here were the same beggars, the same priests with their long hair and robes. The Kalinkovich station had featured several posters of little yellow-skinned monkeys with slits for eyes running in all directions from the huge, white fist of a Russian soldier. This was for the Russo-Japanese war, which had begun only three months before. In Gomel, the posters showed instead a large Cossack hat from under which a swarm of spiderlike Japanese tried to escape, and the caption, “Catch them by the hatful!”

  The waiting room was larger than the one in Kalinkovich, but seating was just as scarce. All the benches were filled, and entire families, many of them emigrants, sprawled on the floor, surrounded by their trunks and baskets. The emigrants were Jews, mostly, leaving Russia in ever growing numbers as a new wave of pogroms spread across the country and a more ravenous draft was instituted for the war with Japan. The room had only one stove to heat it, but the air was stuffy and close. A well-dressed gentile woman in a long fur coat covered her nose delicately as she wound her way through the crowd. Mrs. Frumkin’s hand went to her heart soon after we entered from the platform, and she declared that she could go no further.

  “It’s not much farther, Mamma,” her daughter Zivia reassured her. The train to Kiev was, in fact, in the station. The first warning bell had already rung. “Come,” Zivia urged her mother. But Mrs. Frumkin remained where she was, fanning her face and declaring herself faint.

  “A little water,” Zivia murmured, and a woman seated on a trunk nearby called for water. “Quick,” she yelled. “A woman’s sick.”

  “I can’t go on,” Mrs. Frumkin moaned.

  “What did she say?” someone asked the woman on the trunk. “She’s dying,” someone answered.

  “Make room,” someone else yelled, clearing one of the benches. “A woman’s dying.”

  “She’s not dying,” Zivia said. “She’s ill. I’m taking her to the clinic in Kiev for treatment.”

  A disapproving murmur rippled through the crowd that had now gathered around us. The woman was obviously dying, and the daughter was uncaring, cold. “Give the poor woman some air,” someone said. “Some water.” Mrs. Frumkin sank onto the bench while the group argued about the best course of further action.

  Anxiety filled me, the first I had felt since leaving my home. My legs were suddenly heavy, my arms weak, my head so light it felt like it was floating away. Instead of traveling to Kiev and finding Bayla, I would be stranded in Gomel, attending to Mrs. Frumkin. Or worse: accompanying her and her daughter home on the next westbound train, which, according to the assembled group, would be there within one to three hours. Meanwhile, the second warning of the Kiev-bound train sounded—two clangs of the stationmaster’s bell.

  People around me started moving, surging past me toward the platform. Among them was another mother-daughter pair with a porter. The mother looked as sickly as Mrs. Frumkin, but it was she who seemed to be guiding her daughter, whose face wore a dazed expression, and whose eyes blinked rapidly as if she had recently emerged from total darkness into a light that disturbed her. They were coming straight toward me, and though I could have stepped out of their way, out of the path of that stream of passengers, I didn’t.

  “Kiev?” the porter asked me, looking at my ticket. He instructed me to follow them, which I did, past the blue cars of first class, the tan cars of second, arriving finally at the third-class cars just as the final warning rang out. I looked back as I stepped onto the train, half expecting the Frumkins to be hurrying after me, but they were nowhere in sight.

  It was night by then, and I was exhausted. The mother of the pair—Mrs. Kaminsky, she introduced herself—insisted I sit with them and pushed me into the seat by the window.

  “Are you sure you or your daughter don’t want the window?” I asked, my relief about being on the train far outweighing any second thoughts about what I had just done.

  “It’s too cold for me. And my daughter is nervous when she’s hemmed in.”

  The daughter looked nervous even sitting on the aisle. Her face glistened with sweat and her eyelids continued to flutter rapidly in what I now realized was a tic. As soon as the train began to move, however, her eyelids closed, her mouth fell open, and she began to snore softly.

  I closed my eyes as well and felt myself sinking almost immediately into welcome sleep.

  “Have you ever felt such hard seats?” Mrs. Kaminsky asked me.

  I shook my head no without opening my eyes. Mrs. Kaminsky shifted in her seat.

  “Here. Eat this,” she said, poking me in the ribs until I opened my eyes.

  “I’m not hungry,” I told her.

  “I’m a sick woman,” she said as she began to eat the roll I had refused. “Sick with worry about my daughter. That’s why we’re going to Kiev.”

  I didn’t respond.

  “There’s a rebbe there, Rav Shpira. You’ve heard of him, perhaps? It’s said he can heal anybody, though between you and me, I worry she’s beyond help.” She glanced at her daughter, out of whose open mouth flowed a fine stream of spittle. “And you?” Mrs. Kaminsky asked. “What takes you on such a journey all alone. You have living parents?”

  “Yes,” I said, recognizing for the first time since bolting from the Frumkins just what I had done and how angry Tsila would be when she heard. I explained that my aunt was about to be married in Kiev but had been ill. I didn’t know what made me tell such a story except that it was easier than the truth.

  “Already she’s sick? Even before the wedding?” Mrs. Kaminsky took a bite of her roll and settled in for a description of Bayla’s symptoms, but when I was unable to provide any she looked at me through narrowed eyes as if appraising me anew. “And your parents sent you to care for her?”

  “There was no one else who could go,” I mumbled.

  “I see,” Mrs. Kaminsky said in a tone that made me wonder what it was that had suddenly come clear to her, but she asked nothing further, and after a while I felt my eyes closing again.

  The rhythm of the train was soothing to me, and I soon pushed out all thoughts of Tsila’s anger and my own irresponsibility, musing instead about Mrs. Kaminsky and her miracle-working rebbe. Mrs. Kaminsky’s attempt to find a cure for her daughter from such a charlatan reminded me of Lipsa’s scheme to trick my luck when I was a baby. Futility, I thought. Backwardness. And yet, as I drifted toward sleep, the clicking of the wheels on the track measuring the growing distance between my present and my past, I had the distinct sensation of having tricked my luck at last, of having slipped free of it in that moment that I slipped away from the Frumkins. I fell asleep to the image of
my rotten luck running haplessly around the Gomel station, asking everyone if they’d seen a girl like me, trying—too late now—to find me once again.

  I don’t know how long I’d been sleeping when I felt Mrs. Kaminsky’s finger in my ribs again and the odor of hard-boiled eggs permeating my nostrils.

  “Eat,” she said, pushing an egg at me when she saw my eyes open a slit.

  “I can’t,” I protested.

  “You’re too thin,” she insisted. “Everyone will think you’re sickly like your aunt, and then you’ll never find a husband.”

  I remembered the humiliating marriage proposal I had already received from Benny and closed my eyes again. I counted the clicks of the train over the tracks, each click taking me farther from ever having to see the likes of Benny, Dina Markowitz, Freyde … I fell into a deep sleep then that took me into Kiev.

  IT WAS SUNNY IN KIEV. COUNTLESS GOLD CUPOLAS glinted from the wooded hillside of the city as we crossed the bridge over the Dnieper. I had left my home in late winter, but here it was spring. The trees were not yet in leaf, but buds were swollen on their limbs, and beneath us sparkled the vast Dnieper, blue in the morning light and free of ice.

  The Dnieper was in flood, of course, ravaging the poorer low-lying parts of town, further polluting the already filthy water supply of the city, but I didn’t know this. I saw only the vastness of its waters, the beauty of the cliffs that rose from its shores, the sun-touched domes and rooftops that peeked out from the hillside, beckoning me to enter the city.

  “You’ll come to us if you have a problem,” Mrs. Kaminsky said as we parted, giving me the address of the relatives where she and her daughter were staying.

  I thanked Mrs. Kaminsky and tucked away her address, relieved to be free of her, her nervous daughter, and her hard-boiled eggs. I emerged alone from the station into the pale spring light and understood how far I had traveled in the night. Nowhere were the half-starved oxen that roamed the streets of our town, the patroling geese, the ribbons of mud we called roads, the rough gray wagons and nags that were our only transport besides our own legs, the coachmen in their long sheepskin coats and mud-splattered boots. The road outside the station was wide and paved in yellow stone. The cabmen in the lineup sat high and upright on their boxes, immaculate in blue cloaks tied with brightly colored sashes. Their caps, also blue, sat high and upright on their heads; their gleaming boots were spotless. Even their horses seemed more refined than those from my town. Sleek and well fed, they were proud in their elaborate harness, tossing their heads imperiously, steam flowing from their nostrils.

  “Can you take me to Zchiliansky Street?” I asked a cabman, showing him the paper on which Taube had written Bayla’s address. He was fair and broad faced, with a thick neck and a yellow mustache that he had waxed to fine points on either end. He studied the paper carefully, twirling his mustache as he did, then he looked at me. “Twenty-five kopecks,” he said, his Russian as accented with Ukrainian as mine was with Yiddish.

  “First time in Kiev?” he asked me, and I felt immediately the shabbiness of my appearance, this despite the new dress of fine linen I wore beneath my coat and the new boots I had found by my bedside the morning of my departure.

  “First time,” I admitted, ignoring Mrs. Kaminsky’s warnings about Kievans who lay in wait to take advantage of bumpkins like me.

  “Then I’ll take you the scenic route. No extra charge.” And he offered his arm to help me into his cab.

  Fineness, I thought, as we joined the stream of cabs leaving the station for the city, and fineness, I thought again, as I looked at the sights all around me. The streets we drove along were wide and paved with a yellow stone that matched perfectly the yellow stone of the buildings we passed. All the streets were lined with trees, leafless now but still gracious in size and in span. I noticed a large brick building the color of blood. “The university,” the driver announced; then, not long after, we turned onto a wide boulevard thronged with people where the buildings—three to five stories, most of them—had shops on the street level with huge plate glass windows in which merchandise was displayed. “The Krestchatik,” the driver called out.

  Many promenading the Krestchatik were elegant and finely dressed, yet many were not. I saw two women in spring coats trimmed with fur strolling arm in arm, peering into shop windows. They ignored the man in boots of bark selling shoelaces from a tray, the legless woman calling from the curb about the high quality of the gingerbread she was selling.

  Down the center of the boulevard rolled a horseless tram, powered, seemingly, by a life force within itself. It was electric, I knew—I was no illiterate bumpkin, no peasant from Cockroachville of the sort I would later see mocked in the Kievan newspapers. I had read of this tram—it was the first in the empire—and seen a depiction of it in a book from Hodel’s lending library. Still, to know of something is not to experience it, and my heart beat with sheer joy at the wonders unfolding before me.

  Here was a city draped gracefully across its hilly landscape, nestling into its ravines, crowning its peaks with gilded domes and crosses. At each turn the driver made, a new vista opened up. “The Podol,” he called out, indicating with his hand the flat district beneath us that extended toward the river. “Pechersk,” he announced, gesturing vaguely to a neighborhood perched on a wooded ridge above us. The sky above the ridge was high and blue. The air sweeping in from the steppe smelled clean, fresh. This, at long last, was fineness, I thought, as we passed an elaborately gilded gate, leading to what, I couldn’t imagine.

  We rode away from the center of town then, to a residential area. Here the streets were narrower, quieter, the houses built of wood, some covered with rough plaster. “Zchiliansky Street,” the driver announced as he made another turn, then came to a stop. He helped me out of the cab and, as promised, collected not a kopeck more than the twenty-five we had agreed on at the station.

  A young, harried-looking woman answered the door at Bayla’s apartment. Thick strands of dark hair fell across her face from the knot she had arranged earlier in the day. Two pale, dark-eyed children clung to her legs. She scowled upon seeing me, and her scowl only deepened when I asked if Bayla was home. She didn’t know any Bayla, she told me, not even glancing at the scrap of paper I had thrust in her face, the piece of paper on which Taube had carefully written the address. The previous tenants had moved out. “Gone,” the woman said, with a slice of her hand. She didn’t know where, and the landlord was away. If he was here he wouldn’t want to be bothered, she added. She didn’t want to be bothered either; that much was clear. She didn’t bid me good day before shutting the door in my face.

  I was not discouraged by the woman’s rudeness. I had encountered rudeness far more personal from the very first moments of my life. Nor was I frightened to be alone in a city where I knew not a soul. Here was life, I thought, as the city pulsed around me. Here, my fate, I felt certain. The bright throb of the city matched perfectly the beat of my own heart. Bayla was here somewhere; I would find her. But first I needed a place to stay for the night. I walked to the nearest busy street and hailed another cab. The cabman’s coat, while still blue, was not as immaculate as the first. Nor was his horse as sleek or well fed. I told him the Kaminsky address, negotiating a fee of twenty kopecks, as if hiring a cab in Kiev was no stranger to me than bartering for a dozen eggs at the market, and he took me away from the wide boulevards that had so entranced me to the dark narrow lanes of the Jewish quarter.

  Mrs. Kaminsky and her daughter were having a snack of tea and hard-boiled eggs when I arrived at their relative’s apartment. It was in the low-lying Ploskaya, a neighborhood of steep-roofed one-story wooden houses, much like the ones in the town I was from but more crowded together. The Kaminskys’ house was near the river, but not so near that their street was flooded. The stench of sewage from the flood, however, permeated the dingy kitchen in which they were seated.

  “Your aunt was not there to greet you,” Mrs. Kaminsky said when she saw me
, no note of surprise in her face or her tone. She had not liked the sounds of this aunt of mine, it was obvious, had doubted from the start the reliability of a woman who could not keep her health long enough to reach the marriage canopy.

  “She’s moved,” I said.

  “Moved?”

  “Gone,” I said, slicing my hand through the air as the woman at the apartment had.

  “And you don’t know where?”

  At this Mrs. Kaminsky glanced at her cousin whose apartment it was. There were two rooms besides the cramped, brown-walled kitchen in which we were seated—ample space, certainly, for the family of eight that normally occupied it. But now there was Mrs. Kaminsky and her daughter as well. The cousin nodded at Mrs. Kaminsky, who then turned back to me.

  “So you’ll stay here, then,” she said. “It’s settled.”

  Her daughter’s eyelashes fluttered even more rapidly than I had seen them yet as she placed a glass of tea and a hard-boiled egg on the table before me.

  In the darkness that night, though, there was no flutter to the daughter. Her voice was smooth as satin as we lay on the narrow kitchen benches that were our beds for the night. Her name was Tsirel, and she was twenty-four years old. Her eyelids had always fluttered, she told me. This was not the problem for which she was seeking help from Rav Shpira. Her fluttering eyelids were not, in fact, a problem at all. They were merely the outward expression of the extreme sensitivity of her soul, a soul that could not bear an unobstructed view of this world’s injustice.