Your Mouth Is Lovely

by Nancy Richler

  “But tell me,” he said, looking closely at my face now. “How do you find conditions in the ravine?”

  “Cold,” I said.

  He nodded. “When I first went into one and saw how it was, I realized what unmined veins of humanity the ravines are. Wretched now, yes, but richer in potential than any seams of ore that a miner might empty for profit.”

  I thought of the hillside across from our shack. It was so thick with humanity that it seemed to be heaving, like a carcass alive with maggots that seethe on its surface. I said this to Leib and he nodded again, still looking at me, and began stroking his mustache.

  “Can you just imagine the power of the blast when it finally ignites?” he asked me.

  “Leave her be now, Leib,” Bayla said. “Can’t you see she’s exhausted?

  “There’s no harm in you spending the night here,” she said to me. “I don’t want you out walking alone tonight.”

  IT WAS LATE THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON BEFORE I arrived back in the ravine. I had had another day of failure looking for a job, and as I descended into the smoke and soot of the ravine I felt a sense of defeat and growing anxiety.

  Wolf was sitting on a crate outside our shack. He smiled at my approach.

  “I was at Bayla’s,” I said.

  “That’s what I hoped.”

  “Have you heard what’s going on?” I asked him. The massacre in Petersburg, I meant. The spreading outrage.

  He nodded.

  “I could hear a demonstration a few streets over on my walk back here,” I told him.

  “A demonstration or a riot?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.” I’d heard shouting, breaking glass, and had hurried nervously along.

  Wolf pulled up another crate for me to sit on and began peeling an orange.

  “An orange!” I said. “What’s the occasion?”

  “I sold the samovar.”

  I looked at him.

  “We don’t know what’s coming,” he said.

  He handed me a segment of orange, and as it burst in my mouth I thought I’d never tasted anything so sweet. He handed me another and I ate it slowly, trying to make it last, peeling the membrane off it before eating the pulp.

  “The revolution has started,” I told him.

  “So they say,” he responded, and I felt a surge of impatience.

  We went to bed early that night, but I couldn’t sleep. I was on edge, alert to every sound outside our shack, uncomfortable in the narrowness of our bed, restless. Hours passed, it seemed. Wolf was so still beside me that I thought he was asleep, but then, his voice:

  “There was a feeling of illness in me as I waited for Von Plehve to approach,” he said.

  I waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. There was shouting in the distance. Men’s voices raised and angry. It was a sound no different from any I’d been hearing since arriving in the ravine two months earlier, but with the knowledge of the massacre and escalating violence each shout now sounded like a threat. My body tensed as I heard footsteps approaching, and though they ran past our shack without slowing, my tension remained.

  It was a long while before Wolf spoke again, so long that I thought perhaps I had momentarily dropped into sleep after all and dreamed his words, but then he continued. It had been late in the previous winter, he told me, that a small group of the Combat Battalion of the Socialist Revolutionary Party had gathered in St. Petersburg for the first attempt on Von Plehve. That’s where he had gone, directly from Geneva, just one month after giving me the dynamite, the seven pounds of dynamite that would be used for the primary bomb in that operation. They had arrived in the capital in February, and disguised as cab drivers and peddlers, they had then taken up positions in the streets around the Fontanka to observe their target’s comings and goings.

  “That’s how we prepared for assassination,” he said. “We disguised ourselves as vendors and the like and observed our target for as long as it took to learn his habits and routines.”

  I remembered running into Leib disguised as a tobacco vendor on the Krestchatik the previous April, and I wondered now what sort of scheme I might have inadvertently interrupted.

  “By the middle of March we knew with absolute confidence what route Von Plehve would take on what day, and where we could strike to minimize the danger to others. On the eighteenth of March we were in our positions. Our main striker was disguised as a cab driver in a lineup of cabs on the Fontanka. I was stationed on a bridge above the Fontanka. It was my job to alert our main striker, with a tip of my hat, to the first sign of Von Plehve’s approach.”

  “Were you scared?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said. “Scared, and something else as well. Von Plehve was a murderer, I knew, responsible for the deaths of countless innocent people, but as I stood there, awaiting his approach, I did not feel in myself the justice that would soon be ours. To steel myself to the task ahead I imagined the lineups of corpses after the Kishenev massacre, each inert body a mother or a father, a daughter or a son. I imagined the bodies, and the lives that had been destroyed by each of those deaths. Bile rose in my throat, but I did not feel the restorative power of the act I was about to commit. I tried to, but I simply could not.

  “Minutes passed, and with each one we were closer to the act. My heart beat faster and heavier in my chest, each beat ominous in sound. I imagined scores of policemen descending upon us from all sides, each beat of my heart the heavy fall of a boot. I imagined the impact of the bomb on living flesh, the thud of imploding bone and sinew. I could no longer concentrate on my task, the beat of my heart distracting me, planting dreadful images in my mind.

  “I ran,” he said. “I abandoned my comrades. I left my duties knowing that I was dooming the operation to failure. I walked quickly from the Fontanka and caught the tram to the outskirts of the city, to a workers’ suburb, where I knew I could pass several hours without drawing attention to myself. I was in an agitated state, as you can imagine, sweating heavily despite the chill of the day, breathless and faint.

  “I wandered the narrow streets and laneways of the area, scarcely aware of my surroundings. I found myself suddenly in a cluttered shop that sold housewares. I don’t know what drew me in there. The quiet, perhaps—the noise of the street was unbearable in my state of turmoil. I stood in the quiet dimness of the shop for a few moments trying to calm myself and steady my breathing. I looked up at a shelf crammed full with crockery and pots. It was the sort of crockery my mother had used every day.

  “I had been in a terrible state of agitation until then. Agitation and panic, and also shame, deep shame about my cowardice. But in the dimness of that shop, surrounded by the housewares of my childhood, a relief filled me, a relief almost indescribable in its pleasure. That I was still alive; it was that simple. That I could feel the unpleasantness of my life—the shame and the panic of that moment—and the pleasure of it too, the pleasure of the relief that was filling me. That I had not taken a life that wasn’t mine to take.”

  He paused again, and I waited for him to continue.

  “I left Petersburg that evening. On my own, of course. My comrades would have forgiven me a moment of cowardice—we were all inexperienced—but my betrayal ran deeper than cowardice. I had realized in St. Petersburg that I love life more than justice.”

  We lay together for a long time in silence after he had finished speaking.

  “I think there are places where such choices don’t have to be made,” I said finally. “Between life and justice. Places where the two coexist. Maybe after the revolution this will be one of them.”

  “Utopias,” he said. “They don’t exist.”

  “America,” I said. “Argentina.” Just mouthing those words had a particular sweetness that night.

  “To remain alive is to accept injustice. That’s the fact that can’t be changed.”

  In the long silence that followed, the shouting started up again. Usually by now Magda would have thrust her head outside the curtai
n of her doorway to yell at the drunks to quiet down. That night, though, she didn’t. The noise continued, ominous and threatening.

  “There’s no life for us here,” I told Wolf, and waited. Did I hope he would close his eyes then and dream of apricots, as Aaron Lev had done when Tsila said the same to him?

  “This is my life,” he answered. “There is no other.”

  IN THE WEEK FOLLOWING BLOODY SUNDAY—AS THE massacre in St. Petersburg was now being called—the level of protest and revolutionary violence increased steadily. Major demonstrations continued in cities across the empire, more and more university students went out on strike, and the unrest was said to be spreading to the countryside. I continued to look for work, without any luck, arriving at Bayla’s one afternoon, discouraged and looking for hot tea and company. Leib answered the door.

  “You again,” he said, but not unkindly.

  “I’m sorry to bother you. I know I shouldn’t just be dropping in …”

  “I don’t mind the bother,” he said, a smile beginning. “Bayla’s out, but make yourself at home.”

  As I went into the kitchen to make myself tea he disappeared into the bedroom. When he reemerged sometime later his hands were behind his back.

  “I have something for you,” he said, then he held out a tiny blue bird carved out of wood. “I saw it in the market and it reminded me of you.”

  “You bought this for me?”

  I held it in the palm of my hand. It fit perfectly. And it was so finely carved—each feather defined, each ridge of muscle slightly raised. The tiny claws were rough and sharp against the pads of my fingers.

  “Do you like it?” he asked.

  “Very much,” I said, and then he kissed me.

  Had the kiss been hard or rough I might have recoiled, pushed him off, but it was soft, his mustache like the brush of a feather against my lips, my face, my neck.

  “Don’t be frightened,” he whispered, continuing to brush me lightly with his mouth as his hands began undressing me.

  It was very fast after that, but I can’t pretend I felt no pleasure. He continued whispering to me, a stream of hushed endearments as soothing as the sound of rushing water. And there was heat in his hands. As they moved over the surfaces of my body, my blood surged beneath them, rising to the surface of my skin to meet his touch. He would not have entered me had I pushed him away. That I believe to this day. But I didn’t push him away, and the shock of pain I felt at first had a sharpness of feeling that wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  When it was over he was as gentle as he had been at the start. He drew his fingers softly over my features, along the long bridge of my nose, the soft skin of my eyelids, the ridge of my lips, the broad sweep of my cheek, as if encoding my face in the memory of his hands, his touch in the memory of my skin. And I watched in wonder as he washed our mingled fluids from my thighs. The blood of my body, the white liquid of his, red and white, as Tsila had once explained. Your life, though I didn’t recognize you yet.

  “YOU SHOULDN’T BE RESENTFUL ABOUT DORA,” LEIB said to Bayla that night at dinner, as she filled his bowl with soup.

  “More bread?” Bayla asked, turning to me, the rising spots of color in her cheeks the only sign that she had heard Leib’s words.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t eat a bite.

  “Are you feeling all right?” she asked me, pressing her hand to my forehead to see if I was feverish. “You feel a little warm,” she said. “And you’re flushed.”

  “I’m fine,” I said, forcing myself to swallow a spoonful of soup.

  Leib had already finished his serving and was holding out his bowl for more.

  What have we done? I had asked him when we were dressed again and drinking the tea I had started to prepare on my arrival. “We’ve made love,” he told me, then, seeing my expression, “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. There’s no purer act in the world.”

  But what about Bayla, I had thought, then asked aloud. What would we tell her? Leib smiled, and then he softly traced the outline of my mouth with his finger. It was exactly what Tsila had done years before when I first spoke after my illness. Your mouth is lovely, she had said, her prayer that the words from my mouth would always merit the gift of speech. “We each have our own separate relationship with Bayla,” Leib told me. “And we’ll each tell her what our separate consciences dictate.”

  “IT’S NOT I WHO DECIDED SHE SHOULD JOIN ME,” LEIB declared now to Bayla, helping himself to more bread.

  Dora, I thought through my haze of shame and confusion. They were still talking about Dora. I forced my mind to the conversation.

  “Who decided, then?” Bayla asked.

  “The Frenchman himself. And only because you decided to withdraw.”

  “Why are you still following directives from Geneva?” she asked.

  “What do you mean I? We all are. You included, dare I remind you?”

  “Why should we follow a leadership that has not yet returned to Russia given what’s going on here?”

  “They don’t feel the time is ripe yet. Disorder is not revolution. You know that. The masses still need to be prepared for armed conflict before the revolution can possibly take hold.”

  I could not believe at first that Leib would be able to have such a conversation after what had happened between us just hours before. And yet I found myself drawn into it, grateful for the distraction this subject offered. I took a bite of bread.

  “So they’ll stage-manage the preparations while sitting in Geneva?” Bayla asked.

  “Are you questioning the party leadership now?”

  Bayla began to eat her soup. After three swallows, though, she put her spoon down again.

  “Why Dora?” she asked.

  Leib looked at Bayla as if genuinely surprised by the question. “Why on earth not?”

  Bayla looked at Leib with no expression.

  “You certainly can’t think I would have had anything to do with it.”

  Bayla said nothing but continued to stare at Leib.

  “There’s nothing personal in any of this.”

  “So you say tonight.”

  “Bayla, Bayla,” Leib chided her, switching into Yiddish now; they’d been speaking in Russian until then. “The personal doesn’t exist for Dora. You know that as well as I do.”

  “It’s not Dora’s motives I’m questioning.”

  Leib looked at Bayla without anger or warmth. “Petty jealousies only divide us,” he said quietly.

  “DORA?” I ASKED BAYLA AS WE WASHED UP THE DISHES.

  I had thought I would never be able to face her again, but what had happened between me and Leib that afternoon seemed so unreal, so impossible that it seemed almost like a bubble—separate and contained—in the flow of familiarity between me and Bayla.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Bayla said, the spots of color still flaming in her cheeks.

  “But Dora?” I asked again. “The Dora I met last winter?”

  Bayla didn’t answer. She plunged her hands into the sudsy water in the sink and pulled out a bowl for rinsing.

  “She’s not even pretty.”

  “Shallowness doesn’t become you,” Bayla said. “Have you seen my cap?” Leib called from the other room. He was packing for his departure for Moscow.

  “It’s in here,” Bayla called.

  Leib came into the kitchen and picked his cap off the chair.

  “And don’t forget your fur-lined gloves.” She handed me a dish to dry.

  “Where are they?”

  “On the desk in the bedroom. Where you left them.”

  He came up to Bayla and embraced her from behind. She held herself stiffly at first, not bothering to remove her hands from the basin of dishwater, as if his embrace was a momentary annoyance that was keeping her from getting on with the task at hand, but when he kissed her neck she softened a little and her head bent back toward his. He whispered something in her ear and they both laughed, then he kissed her once on the top of her head bef
ore releasing her and returning to his packing.

  “He doesn’t love me, you know,” she said as soon as he had left the room.

  “Of course he does,” I responded quickly, but his behavior confused me. I didn’t doubt the genuineness of what had passed between us that afternoon, but neither did I doubt what I had just seen before me.

  “Only if you consider the feeling one has for an old pair of shoes to be love,” Bayla said.

  “It doesn’t look that way to me,” I said, not sure what to make of the display of marital affection I had just seen.

  “You? What do you know of these things? You’re just a girl.”

  “No, I’m not,” I said with some vehemence, but Bayla didn’t notice. Her mind was still on Leib.

  “There’s always been someone else. Did you know that?” she asked.

  She knew, I thought at that moment. She had to know. But then, I thought, How could she?

  “Right from the beginning,” Bayla continued. “Though I didn’t know it then. I’m not supposed to care,” she said, and it was only then that she looked me straight in the face. “It’s my own lack of purity that makes me care.”

  “Lack of purity?” I could barely speak.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Pure love isn’t possessive in nature. Didn’t you know that? The very fact that I feel possessive reveals an impurity in my love for Leib, an underlying confusion of love with private ownership.”

  “It does?”

  “Mmm,” she said. She rinsed the last bowl and handed it to me to dry.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Of course you don’t. My sister didn’t raise you to understand nonsense.”

  Siberia, June 1912

  For a month I’ve been unable to add a word to these pages. It’s not illness that’s kept me away but despair. I had hoped, when I started, to create for you what my own mother denied me. An understanding of who I was, how I lived, how you came to be. A voice from the silence of death. But as I’ve put my pen to paper, day by day, week by week, I see only the gaps in what I’ve written, the distortions, the falseness of trying to impose one version of truth on a life.