Your Mouth Is Lovely

by Nancy Richler

  “Can you promise me that?”

  “No, I can’t,” he admitted.

  “And when they’re released, then what?”

  “I can’t answer that either,” he said.

  There was a fury to my shaking, to the clattering of my teeth. “I’m cold,” I told him. “Always cold.”

  “It’s fear,” he said.

  “It’s death,” I told him.

  He tucked the blankets closer around me.

  “I have a hard knot of coldness inside me. Ever since my imprisonment.”

  He laid the flat of his hand on the center of my chest.

  “Here?” he asked.

  “Deeper,” I said. I felt the firm pressure of his hand through the thickness of the blankets. “It has always been near me, but until now, outside me. In my moments of weakness he has always tried to embrace me.”

  “Shhh,” Wolf said, pressing harder.

  “He never leaves me alone,” I said. “I’ve felt his touch while drinking coffee in a crowded café, while walking alone on a hot summer night. My whole life he has stalked me, always close, waiting for his opening. And now he’s inside me.”

  “It’s grief,” he told me.

  “I shared my mother’s womb with him.”

  “With grief?”

  “With death.”

  He loosened the blankets and slipped in beside me.

  “He lured my mother, but that wasn’t enough. Nothing is ever enough for him. He’s never satiated.”

  “Shhh,” Wolf said again.

  “I thought you were him the first time I saw you,” I whispered.

  “Death?” he asked, a slight quaver in his voice.

  “My dead brother come to retrieve me.”

  And maybe he was, I thought. Was it not he who had handed me the dynamite that night in the forest, an agent of death that he promised would lead to good?

  He pulled the pin from my hair to release it, then he held my head against the quiet, steady beating of his heart. I felt his lips resting against the top of my forehead, the first tears sliding down my face.

  I don’t know how long he held me like that, or how long I wept. I felt the wetness of his shirt from my tears, the taste of salt in my mouth, the exhaustion of my body from weeping, and still he held me. An hour, half the night, I don’t know—I cried until I had no more strength for it, and when I was finally still, Wolf slipped out from under the blankets to moisten a cloth for my face. He washed my face, then lay the cloth against my eyes. I felt the heaviness of my exhaustion but did not surrender to sleep until I felt the full length of his body warm against mine again, the smooth skin of his neck against my cheek and the rhythm of his heart pulsing beneath my lips.

  Siberia, March 1912

  A bird blew into our cell today. A strange event. It’s winter here; the wind is high and the earth lies hidden under snow. The bird was a crow, obviously lost, and very close to death. It blew through our open window and landed—stunned and stunning us—right in the middle of our table. A dream, I might have thought, had my cellmates not shared the same vision. It lay motionless and we looked on in silence, no one daring to say what she thought.

  I would like to tell you that it lived, that we warmed its frozen body, filled its starving mouth, and released it to the sky, but it didn’t. It died right there on our table, before twelve shocked sets of eyes.

  Was this an omen, then? Perhaps, but today I saw it as a crow—unfortunate, yes, and dead, but nothing other.

  Still, it brought to mind—perhaps because of the way it fell from the sky—something Tsila told me once, a legend that when the temple was destroyed the letters of the Holy Scrolls flew into the sky. Tsila didn’t tell me what the letters did up there, or if they sprouted wings, but I imagined that they did sprout wings and then turned into birds. I would watch the birds that wheeled and dove in the marshes and fields around me and know that they were the scattered letters of the Holy Scrolls, the secret of creation, forming and reforming in the sky, and we just had to lift our eyes to see it.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1904

  AT FIRST I HARDLY VENTURED FROM WOLF’S BED. I slept most of the day while he sat outside in the cold of that early winter, serving tea from the samovar that had once been his mother’s. He was not often alone. I would hear him talking by the fire, the low tones of his voice soothing me back into a sleep that I could not quite rise out of. His guests were varied—I would hear the gruff voices of men, the laughter of women, the quick chatter of children who would not live to see another winter. From the thickness of sleep I would hear his discussions with the water porters, his advice to the sick, his suggestions to the group that had formed to defend against the hooligans that ruled the ravine by night. One day I heard the unmistakable voice of the organ-grinder. I wanted to ask him to sing a song for me, but I could not pull myself from my stuporous sleep.

  Some days Wolf would try to coax me to join him at the fire, but I was too tired, too afraid of what might happen if I showed my face outside. I can’t say what it was I feared, exactly, but the weight of it was heavy in my chest. It was fear, not death, I told myself, though sometimes my cough made me wonder. Other days Wolf would leave to go into the city to get food, medicine for some of the residents, other supplies. I stayed in his bed, waiting for his return.

  “THERE WAS A PLACE IN THE SWAMP WHERE I USED TO find food,” Wolf told me one day. It was a cold morning and very damp.

  I had just started going outside—it must have been December, or maybe late November—and though I was sitting close to the fire, I could not warm the stiffness out of my joints or the ache from my muscles.

  “Loaves of bread, baskets of eggs, fruit in season—I assumed it was peasant women who came to leave their food, for reasons nobody could remember anymore. But then, on Pesach, I saw that there was matzah.” He handed me a glass of hot tea.

  “I know the place,” I said. “A fallen-down old cabin by a channel shallow enough in springtime to reach only midway up the thighs of a woman.”

  He smiled. “And so you do know exactly the place.”

  “I went with Tsila once. It was a long time ago, soon after I first went to live with her and my father. We left bread, some fruit.”

  “For whom? Did she say?”

  “ ‘You never know who is hungry,’ is all that she told me. I didn’t know others left food there as well.”

  “I tried not to eat what I found, but I was so often hungry.”

  “Why would you try not to eat it?”

  “I knew it was meant for someone else.”

  “For anyone who was hungry, surely. It was tzedakah, after all.”

  “It was for a boy that once lived in your town.”

  “A boy?”

  “He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t utter a sound. An idiot, people thought. Worse than a simpleton, for what simpleton can’t manage to produce a few sounds? His family was ashamed of him. The townspeople ignored him. The townschildren teased him mercilessly … and then one night there was a fire. And while everyone else who lived in the house managed to escape—all the other children from all the other families—the boy didn’t. He wasn’t in his bed when his father went to rouse him, but then neither was he outside with the other children. And at that point it was too late to go back into the house for him—though some fathers would have. Already beams of fire were falling inside. The boy was gone, left to burn in the fire.”

  I had heard a similar story before, but in another village, not ours. A boy who couldn’t speak. Worse than a simpleton, as Wolf had said, except that he could communicate with birds. He couldn’t utter a word of Torah, but geese would follow in a line behind him, and migrating birds would stop to rest on his shoulders. He was teased by the others in the village, and his own parents were said to be ashamed of him. And then one day there was a flood, and though everyone claimed afterward that they had tried to save him, he was, in fact, the only one who drowned. It was a tragedy, and a terr
ible shame on that village, which suffered all manner of afflictions forever after. I told this to Wolf, and he smiled. “I’m sure the variations are endless.”

  “So none of it’s true.”

  “To the contrary,” Wolf said. “The boy’s soul mingled with the smoke of the fire that had claimed him. It hovered over the town and neighboring swamp, cursing those who had tormented him in life, causing troubles from barrenness to ill temper …”

  “There was certainly no shortage of ill temper in our town.”

  “… to marital discord to hemorrhoids.”

  “Hemorrhoids? I don’t think so.” Though I did remember old Rakhmiel Schneider hobbling past our house once, in obvious discomfort, heading into the swamp with a basket of eggs and bread. “Where did you hear such a story?”

  “I tried not to eat the food, as I told you, but I was less and less welcome at my aunt’s, and I was hungry, always hungry. One day when I arrived there I found apples, Antonov apples, my very favorite kind. I waited for a long time, trying to resist them, but after a while I couldn’t. I emerged from the shadows, and as I did someone shrieked. It was a girl, a few years older than I.

  “ ‘Don’t be afraid,’ I told her. ‘I’m alone.’

  “ ‘And obviously hungry,’ she responded, affecting a calmness that she obviously didn’t feel. When she handed me the bread she had brought I could see she was trembling. ‘Eat,’ she told me, trying to look me in the eye but failing. Then, in a whisper so soft I wasn’t sure I had heard her correctly, ‘We’re so sorry about how we treated you.’

  “I took the bread, but it tasted sour to me. I was as lonely as I was hungry, after all. Lonelier. I craved human warmth more than bread, and to see how frightened that girl was in my presence … I know I’m no beauty to look at, but still … I felt repulsive, less than human.” He paused. “So unlike my first encounter with you.”

  I remembered how the shock that I too had felt when first seeing him had given way to comfort when I forced myself to meet his gaze and recognized the life beneath his ravaged features.

  “But then,” he continued, “just a few months later, I encountered that same girl again. This time it was at one of the gatherings of Bundists that used to take place every Shabbes afternoon in the forest on the other side of your town.”

  “They still take place, as far as I know,” I told him.

  “She was there, and much changed from the trembling thing I had seen in the swamp. She recognized me right away and came over, full of apologies for her behavior that day. Her imagination had been overworked, she explained, poisoned by the superstitions that had enslaved her at the time but that she had now shed, she assured me. ‘To think I believed it was enough to leave some scraps of tzedakah. That that would somehow remedy the conditions that caused his death. And to think that in so doing I ended up treating you as we once treated him. As an outcast, someone to be feared.’

  “On and on she went until I finally asked her what she was talking about. That’s when she told me about the boy. Murdered by the callousness of a system that assigns lesser value to some lives than to others, said my new comrade, who then went on to vow that we would smash the structures that led to such devaluing of human life.”

  Wolf paused. “Comforting words at the time, since I had spent my whole life on the receiving end of such callousness.” He smiled. “I joined the Bund soon after, though I think I knew even then which structure I personally believed most responsible for the devaluing of human life.”

  “And what structure is that?” I asked, knowing already that he wouldn’t say capitalism, or even the autocracy.

  “The very one that, turned a certain way, most values life in all its forms. The human heart,” he said. “And where will we be if we smash it?”

  I WAS ALWAYS COLD DURING THE DAYS, BUT AT NIGHT I was not. We would lie together in the warmth of his bed, bits of conversation floating up from us like fragments of dreams, like the colors that had unreeled from my mind into the silence of our first meeting in the ravine. Most often, though, we wouldn’t speak. The steady beat of his heart against mine would soothe me into sleep and reassure me on awakening. I began, in time, to feel a stirring in my chest, a wakefulness by day, a restlessness. The movement of my life within my veins again.

  ONE MORNING AS I WAS SITTING BY THE FIRE WITH WOLF, three men came by to discuss a rumor they had heard. A raid was being planned on the ravine, it seemed, a sweep to clear the city of its criminal element. Shelters would be razed, people driven out. As the men discussed possible responses, I noticed Magda come out of her shack and bend over her stove.

  I had seen Magda often since coming to live in the ravine—her shack was only steps away—but we had not yet exchanged greetings. I thought she didn’t remember me. We had met only once, after all, and perhaps her grief about her daughter’s death had clouded her memory of the days preceding it. On this particular morning, although she was standing close by, I was only half aware of her presence. I was listening to the discussion around our fire, wondering what I would do if I heard the sound of horses’ hooves thundering into the ravine. I only turned my full attention to her when she strode over to our fire, waving the wooden spoon in her hand.

  “What are you staring at?” she demanded of me.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Am I nothing, then?” she shouted. “Do I look like nothing to you?”

  Some of the men started laughing and making comments of a lewd nature.

  “Keep your eyes to yourself,” Magda warned me, waving her spoon close to my face.

  I apologized, for she frightened me a little: the look in her eyes—it was hatred—and the waving spoon, more weapon than utensil at that moment.

  “And your friend owes me money,” she told me. “Does she think she can send me chasing after her fabrics and not pay me?”

  “My friend’s been arrested.”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “Then go collect your money,” I snapped. “I’m sure you know where the jail is.”

  I regretted that comment and the men’s laughter that accompanied it, not because of tenderness for Magda’s feelings but for reasons of caution, an awareness that to have an enemy as my neighbor was folly.

  Magda glared at me and strode back to her shack, and a few moments later I followed her.

  She was stirring a kasha gruel for her grandson, the smell of which made my mouth water. She didn’t look up from her task. I still had the money Esther had given me, though I had not thought about it until then. I reached into my coat pocket, retrieved the silver coins, and held them out to Magda. At this she looked up.

  “Stir this,” she told me. “And make sure to keep scraping the bottom.”

  She went into her hut and returned a moment later with the cashmere that Esther had ordered. My breath caught at the sight: the blue of a summer sky, there in front of me, in Magda’s swollen hands.

  I took off my glove to run a finger lightly over it, half afraid it might dissolve, that it was just my own longing I was seeing.

  “It won’t bite you,” Magda said. “Take it already. You’re burning my kasha.”

  I took it from her and held it gingerly to my cheek—too cold to feel its softness—then my lips.

  “I can get you anything,” she said. “Even the material for that coat you wanted.”

  “You saw it?” I asked, remembering the coat, the promise of that vivid blue.

  Magda nodded. “It will cost you.”

  WHEN I WENT BACK TO MY OWN FIRE, THE OTHER MEN were gone.

  “What’s that?” Wolf asked me.

  “Cashmere wool,” I told him.

  “I see that, but how did you get it?”

  “I bought it. It’s Esther’s,” I explained.

  “You bought cashmere wool? With what?”

  “With money. What do you think?”

  “You have money?”

  “From Esther,” I said. “And a few rubles left from Tsila.�
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  He nodded and said nothing more, and a few minutes later he left the ravine on his errands.

  I spent that day as I spent all the others: tidying our shack, then lying, wrapped in blankets, waiting for Wolf’s return, but I felt uneasy. It wasn’t just the darkness of his shack, which, so comforting at first, had begun by then to feel oppressive. It was something beyond my own growing restlessness. There had been a look on Wolf’s face when I told him I had money, something I hadn’t seen in his expression before. Hurt, I thought, but not only. Anger.

  I unwrapped the blankets and emerged from the hut. It had been a bright day and the last rays of afternoon sun still lingered high on the hillside. Most of the ravine, though, was already in shadow. As I looked at the tumbles of hovels, the fires that burned, the restless, constant surge of movement, I saw Wolf from a distance. I recognized his walk, a quick flitting motion. He moved like a shadow. I watched him approach.

  He sat himself right beside me so we looked out together down the smoky length of the ravine.

  “What did you do in town?” I asked him.

  “What I always do. I got us some food, kerosene, an ointment for that girl who split her knee.”

  “And how did you pay for it?” I asked him.

  “Since when do you care?”

  It was only then that I felt ashamed, only then aware of the physical demands of life, which had not ceased just because I had ceased being able to meet them. I had not only not given any thought to the matter but I had gone and bought a luxury fabric with money Wolf hadn’t even known I possessed, money that could have been put to our survival.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and reached into the lining of my coat, where I still had the last of the rubles Tsila had hidden there. I pulled them out, and he didn’t refuse them.

  It was getting dark by then. We moved inside. Wolf lit the lamp. “Hungry?” he asked.

  “A little.” I was ravenous, having eaten nothing but bread since the morning.

  “I brought you a surprise,” he said with a smile that transformed his face into a boy’s. He reached into his pocket. “Close your eyes.”