Your Mouth Is Lovely

by Nancy Richler

  Here, for example, are several versions of one moment, each one as true and as false as the next: your father was faithless, but I was taken with him anyway. I had no love for your father but took pleasure in his touch. I was a girl and your father violated my innocence. I took pride in luring your father from Bayla.

  For too long I’ve felt only the failure of my task, the un-lockable mystery of a single human heart. Today, though, I awakened with a feeling of excitement. It had come to me, at last, how to reach you. But as I fed the first few pages to the flames, Lydia rushed across the room to stop me. “Your life is in those pages,” she said. “I can’t let you destroy it. I won’t.”

  I wasn’t destroying it, of course, but releasing it. And already, as the first letters flew into the air, I felt a corresponding lightening of my own spirit.

  But Lydia begged me, and I relented, after extracting from her a solemn oath that at the moment of my death she’ll burn every page. And then, at last, the letters that I’ve written will be unfastened from the static order I’ve imposed on them, free to form and reform all the truths of who I was, I am. And then you’ll understand. If you’ll just remember to raise your eyes to look.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  1905

  THE RAID ON THE RAVINE TOOK PLACE THE THIRD WEEK of January. I returned from the city late one afternoon and all that remained was rubble. The dwellings people had constructed for themselves had been razed, but already their components—the wood and straw that had formed walls, the scraps of tin roofing—were being carried away for reconstruction somewhere else. There was an antlike quality to the stream of people leaving the ravine with bales of straw and sheets of metal slung across their backs. Wolf was nowhere to be seen.

  Two men were picking through the wood that had once formed the walls of our shelter. There was no sign of any of Wolf’s belongings—not a book or blanket or piece of kitchenware in sight—but then I saw the quill pen Tsila had brought me when I was in prison. It was lying in the mud, mistaken, perhaps for the worthless feather of a crow. I slipped it into the pocket of my coat and left the ravine.

  Leib had already departed for Moscow by then. I would not see him again. I stayed with Bayla after the raid, and in the last week of January we vacated her apartment for another.

  “OUR NEW QUARTERS WILL BE A LITTLE GRANDER THAN what you’re used to,” Bayla had warned me with a slight smile. As we passed through an ornate gate in the Lypky, the “Palace District” of Kiev, and walked up a tree-lined avenue to what truly appeared to be a palace, I thought a terrible mistake had been made. It had to be a miscommunication of some sort, a trap that would lead—in mere moments, I was certain—to our arrest. What other business could Bayla and I possibly have in a mansion such as this?

  But there was no mistake. We were greeted by a servant who led us into the house in silence. We followed him down a long vaulted hallway to a drawing room whose pale, cool beauty made the Entelmans’ music room seem, in contrast, a kaleidoscopic stall in a bazaar. Here the walls were covered in pale gray silk, and the ceiling was the airiest of blues. Across the ceiling drifted two large birds, though even they were muted in color, as if the artist had painted the scarlet of their plumage, then applied a coat of powder so as not to excite the senses of anyone whose eyes happened to drift upward toward their flight. The room was empty except for a dark-haired woman about Bayla’s age who was seated behind a desk when we entered.

  “You’ve arrived,” she said, rising to greet us. Her dress was gray silk but darker than the walls, and it rustled slightly as she walked toward us. Her eyes—also gray—were clear and calm as they grazed me. She kissed Bayla once on each cheek, then extended her hand to me. “I’m Nastya,” she said.

  “I’m Miriam,” I responded, and as I took her hand I felt the energy that coiled within her.

  She was Nastasia Alexandrovna Borisov, daughter of Brigadier General Alexander Borisov, who was away that winter, on duty in the Far East, where the disastrous war with Japan continued to rage. Nastya’s mother was dead and in her father’s absence Nastya had established his home as a safe house for the Socialist Revolutionary Party, a place where pamphlets could be stored, meetings held, messages exchanged. In that winter of the failed revolution the General’s house had also come to be used as a transfer point for arms that were being smuggled into Russia, and with Bayla’s arrival, a lab for bomb making was set up.

  It was risky, of course, to establish a lab in a house with so many comings and goings, but Nastya was utterly confident in the security of the venture. “This house has always sheltered clandestine activities,” she said. “But only decadent ones before now.” She raised an eyebrow archly and I felt a heat creep into my cheeks. “I don’t think you can quite imagine the size of this place,” Nastya continued. “The privacy it affords. If you time your entries and exits properly and use only the door that I show you, no one will even know you’ve taken up residence here.”

  “But what about the servants?” Bayla asked.

  “They’ll never be the wiser,” Nastya promised.

  Her dress was exquisite in the simplicity of its lines and I marveled at my own shallowness to be admiring such details at such a time.

  “There’s an entire apartment on the second floor that’s sitting empty,” Nastya said. “We used to use it for guests, family members who came to spend the winter, but now …”

  Who could know what emotion she experienced in that momentary pause as she thought about the change in her family’s situation? Was it her mother’s death that came to mind? Her father’s absence? Her own betrayal of them that surfaced briefly in that slight knitting of her eyebrows, the almost imperceptible twitch of her lips?

  “Its windows are draped now, its furnishings covered. The servants never enter it. It’s perfect,” she assured us. “There’s probably no place more perfect, in fact. Who would ever suspect that the main explosives lab for southern Russia would lie in the bosom of the household of a Brigadier General?”

  There was an impishness to Nastya’s smile then, a mirth so infectious that as she led us up the stairway and through the dark cavernous halls to our quarters I felt less an atmosphere of revolutionary purpose than the excitement of embarking on an adventure.

  “She thrives on risk,” Bayla said as soon as we were left on our own. “In case you hadn’t noticed. She’s extremely brave, of course, but she takes too much pleasure in her own fear. It’s not that she isn’t committed to the cause. She is. Utterly committed. But her attraction to danger, the delight she takes in the ironies she’s setting up in this house … it could at some point become a danger to us.”

  I HAD INTENDED TO WORK WHEN I MOVED IN WITH Bayla—I’d found a job, finally, as a folder at a printer’s—but she assured me that I didn’t have to. “You’re ill,” she said, and that was true. My cough had gotten worse again, and I was often feverish at night.

  I hung the bird Leib had given me by the window near my bed. It was the first thing I saw in the morning, the last thing at night. “That’s beautiful,” Bayla said when she first saw it. “It’s like the bird Leib was telling us about.”

  Told me, I thought, not us. Then a wave of shame so strong I thought I might drown in it. Bayla had already paid me back almost all of the money for my passage and had given me a place to live, but my trespass against her remained unacknowledged and unconfessed, and could never be repaid. Or so I thought at the time.

  BAYLA ROSE EARLY EACH MORNING AND LEFT OUR BEDroom for her lab. She didn’t return to our room until late in the evening. She told me to rest, but I found the days long. I was restless, uneasy, plagued by fears and doubts that could no longer be contained beneath the surface. The revolution had begun; that’s what I kept hearing. Already hundreds of thousands of workers were on strike across the empire. But in our quiet room in that second-floor apartment there was a stillness disturbed only by the troubled ruminations of my mind.

  I left our room one morning and went down to Nastya’
s quarters. I told her I wanted to help with whatever they were doing. She smiled and said she needed someone to help her with her errands.

  “Your errands?” I asked, surprised and insulted that she would treat me as her servant.

  The shopping basket Nastya gave me was of standard size, and she showed me then how pamphlets could be hidden under a layer of vegetables, eggs, and meat. And at first it was just that. Pamphlets. But weapons were being smuggled into Russia in great numbers that winter, and soon there were occasions when my pickups and deliveries consisted of guns, dynamite, and other munitions. It was Nastya who prepared and went over my “shopping list” at the beginning of each day, and Nastya who coordinated my deliveries. It was Nastya also who taught me how to shoot one of the Browning revolvers that I had just transported from another safe house.

  It was dangerous work, of course, and there were times I felt that danger keenly—a clenching spasm in my gut at the sight of policemen sauntering my way, a heavy dread as I waited to see who might open a door at which I had knocked. But as the days and weeks passed without incident, what I began to feel most was exhaustion, a gray layer of it settling heavily on me, smothering any spark of color or light. I woke up tired after nights of dreamless sleep, and as I made my way through the dark early morning streets of the city the weariness was sometimes so heavy upon me that I thought I would not get through to the end of the day.

  IN FEBRUARY WE HEARD OF THE SUCCESS OF LEIB AND Dora’s operation. The Grand Duke Sergius Alexandrovich, Governor General of Moscow and brother-in-law to the Tsar, was dead, assassinated by a bomb thrown at his carriage. So severe had the blast been that his head was torn off and shattered, his body mutilated. Only one hand remained intact for purposes of identification.

  “Her bombs are always effective,” Nastya said, referring to Dora’s handiwork. “She’s the only one whose skill can be compared to yours.”

  Bayla nodded but said nothing.

  “He was a vile man, impervious to the suffering he caused. Listen,” Nastya said. We listened, as she had directed, and at first heard only the crackling of the fire in the stove, the ticking of the clock, the soft intake and outflow of our own breathing, but then I heard a slight rustling of branches outside, a gentle wind brushing against the house. “The earth itself is sighing in relief for having been freed from the burden of bearing him.”

  “Please, Nastya,” Bayla sighed. “You sound like the old bubbies from my village.”

  “I’m honored to be compared to the salt of the earth.”

  “You’d be less honored if you knew them,” Bayla said, smiling a little.

  “So you haven’t forgotten how to smile,” Nastya commented, and Bayla cast her eyes away.

  “It’s horrible about the coachman,” Bayla said. The Grand Duke’s coachman, Andrei Rudinkin, had been severely, possibly mortally wounded by the blast. As had the primary striker, Kaliakev, who had been arrested on the spot.

  “Horrible, yes,” Nastya responded. “But unavoidable. Only blood can change the color of history.”

  Gorky’s words, those, and Bayla nodded her agreement, but her own face at that moment appeared bloodless.

  THE WEARINESS I FELT UPON WAKING PERSISTED. THERE were days now when I was so tired that as I went about my errands I felt as if I were trying to walk while submerged under water.

  “You’re ill,” Bayla said when I told her about my exhaustion. “You shouldn’t be doing what you’re doing. I’ve already spoken to Nastya about it.”

  “You have?” I asked, annoyed to be treated as a child.

  I continued my activities, but as the weeks wore on and my weariness began to be accompanied by nausea I realized it wasn’t illness I was feeling. There was a power to that nausea, an insistence that I recognized at once: the force of a new life pulling on my own.

  “I need to find Wolf,” I announced to Bayla one evening as we prepared for bed. For that’s what I’d decided. That’s where I would go when Bayla turned me out. People were beginning to drift back into the ravine by then. He would let me stay. I could sleep in the warmth of his bed until spring.

  Bayla looked at me sharply, then sat down on my bed and waited for me to go on.

  “It’s not right for me to be here any longer …” My voice trailed off.

  For a while Bayla said nothing. Then she took my hand. “I have the same instinct,” she said. “I wasn’t going to tell you. I thought it was bad luck to say it aloud. I thought it was just my own fear, superstition …”

  I looked at her, uncomprehending.

  “For days now I’ve had a bad feeling, a crawling at the back of my neck.”

  As she said that I felt the skin on my own neck start to prickle, a familiar clamminess.

  “It’s time to leave,” she said. “It’s not safe here anymore. I know another house …”

  I couldn’t speak. I just nodded.

  “Not a word to anyone,” she said, her finger on her lips. “I don’t know who can and can’t be trusted. We’ll leave first thing tomorrow.”

  She rose from my bed and went to the lamp to extinguish it.

  “I’m pregnant,” I told her.

  She paused, then turned to face me. Her face was a darker shade of red than I had ever seen in her, but her voice was calm when she asked me how I knew.

  “I just know,” I said, and told her about the nausea.

  “It might be illness.”

  “I’ve missed two periods.”

  “A lot of us miss periods. It happens with the fear of the work. Nausea as well. Do you think I don’t often feel nauseated?”

  “And my exhaustion,” I reminded her.

  “It’s fear,” she said. “We all experience it.”

  She was quiet for a few minutes and then she asked, “Have you been … intimate with Wolf?”

  “With Leib,” I said. It seemed she stared at me for an eternity before she slapped my face.

  IT WAS HER JEALOUSY THAT MADE HER SLAP ME. THIS she told me later, in a letter. And her own regret. It was at that moment, she told me, that she realized the extent of the lie she’d been living, the devastation it had wrought, how far-reaching. It was at that moment she knew what she wanted but had turned away from. A husband who loved her. A baby. Creation, not destruction.

  “And so I hit you,” she wrote. “Please forgive me.”

  That night, though, there were just accusations, words flung in anger, resentment. She accused me of betrayal, of cheapness, of other, worse things. “Is this how you reward my sister’s care for you? By crawling into the marital bed of your own aunt? By behaving like a whore, like a pig who can’t even think through the implications of her own body’s greed?”

  If I had known where Wolf was that night, perhaps I would have left. But I didn’t. I had nowhere to go, it was winter, and my instinct for life was stronger than my shame. I turned away from Bayla’s anger and waited for the morning. Bayla rose first. It was just after five when she sighed deeply, then got out of bed. I heard her because I hadn’t been asleep. She lit the lamp and the stove and put water on to boil. I got out of bed. Neither of us said good morning, but we were excessively polite as we handed each other cups, utensils, tea.

  “Have more sugar. You need it,” Bayla said, her voice constricted from the excesses of the night before.

  “Thank you,” I said, heaping more sugar into my glass, though the very sight of it made me want to vomit.

  “I couldn’t believe what you told me last night … And to think I worried about the men you might meet in that ravine, when it was my own husband, in my own home …” She met my eye. “You’ll come with me to the other safe house.”

  I shook my head. “I’ll be all right in the ravine.”

  “You don’t even know for certain that this Wolf is there.”

  “He’s there,” I said.

  “I have a bad feeling.”

  “Now you sound like Tsila.”

  She shrugged. “At least let me tell you where
I’m going, how to find me if you need to.” Which she did. And then she left.

  I HEARD THE COMMOTION BEFORE THEY REACHED ME—the heavy footsteps on the stairs, Nastya’s cries of indignation. It sounded like an entire squadron running through the house, and though I don’t remember reaching for the revolver, it was in my hand when they crashed through the door.

  It was the noise of them, I thought later, the smashing noise that I wanted to silence. My own fear rising like bile that I wanted to still. It was my own death that I wanted to mow down as it crashed through the door to claim me. It was the moment itself that I wanted to obliterate. I raised the revolver in my hand and pulled the trigger as Nastya had taught me. A crack like glass breaking. One of the gendarme’s hands went to his chest and his face registered concern. Consternation. That was all. There was no blood, no spreading stain. I don’t even know if I knew yet what I had done as I watched him fall, felt myself falling, being felled. I had no sensation of pain as my head hit the floor.

  Siberia, June 1912

  That you survived was a miracle. I feared I had lost you. That was all I feared when I first came back to consciousness, when I surfaced to the pain that was my consciousness. I had been dragged from the house by my hair, Nastya told me. “He wound your braid around his hand,” she whispered, holding my head in her lap. “He yanked you with a force that lifted your body from the ground.”

  “Who?” I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t. My mouth was too dry, my lips caked with blood.

  “One of the officers,” Nastya said, as if she had reached into my mind and heard my confusion. “He pulled you through the house that way, and down all the stairs.”

  It was this that saved me. This that saved you too. Had he dragged me by my feet, my head bouncing against the marble of the General’s front stairway, we would have been dead before we hit the bottom stair.