Nastya held my head but didn’t stroke it. The throbbing was so painful that I couldn’t have endured her caress. My hand went down between my legs.
“They didn’t violate you,” she whispered. “I’ve been with you the entire time.”
But it wasn’t my own violation that concerned me. It was your life. I felt between my legs and there was no wetness. I knew you had survived.
I HAVE NEVER FELT REMORSE FOR THE LIFE I TOOK. NOT when I realized what I’d done, not when they brought me to trial, not in the long months and years that have followed. I’ve tried to, many times, but cannot. There’s an area of numbness in me, a void. Its size and shape matches the heart of the man that I killed. It’s a wilderness, an emptiness, an utter absence of compassion.
Nor do I regret my moment with your father, the heat in his touch, the taste of his mouth, the wonder I experienced as I carried you to life. I won’t deny the hurt I brought to Bayla, the betrayal that she felt, but what I gave her in the end was far more precious than anything I ever took.
While I feel no shame about the revolutionary activities in which I partook, I feel no glory either. The events of 1905 are well known: the rising tide of revolution, the glorious victory of the Manifesto of Freedom and its promises, the betrayal that followed, the pogroms, the reprisals. I will break all of you like dogs while you get your freedom, a police officer in Zhitomir told the citizens of that town. And in that instance he was as good as his word. Attack the Jews, Officer Pirozhkov urged his fellow Kievans, and they did. For days.
It was blood, all blood. The country flowed in blood. And when it was over nothing had changed.
BAYLA WAS ARRESTED ON THE TREE-LINED AVENUE THAT led to the entrance of the Borisov mansion. She had come back to get me just hours after leaving. I never saw her in prison—she was held in another cell—and she was released in the amnesty of October 1905, as were the other members of the Combat Battalion who had been arrested in the betrayals of that March and whose crimes were not capital. The betrayer, it came out later, was the Frenchman himself. The commander of the Socialist Revolutionaries’ Combat Battalion and mastermind of all its most successful operations, including and especially the Von Plehve assassination, its greatest victory. He turned everyone in. His entire battalion. Why? We don’t know. Who can know the human heart?
I DIDN’T BETRAY BAYLA AT MY TRIAL, AND IN THIS ALONE I feel some pride. She would not have been pardoned had the true nature of her role—her great skill—been revealed. They thought all that was mine, and what difference to me, really? My crime was already capital.
Bayla left for Montreal soon after her release, for the life she’d realized she wanted when I told her of my pregnancy with you. But not before saving you. Not before making the necessary inquiries and taking the necessary actions—at great risk to herself—to pull you from almost certain death. She’s your mother now.
It was Shendel and Yehuda who sent the money for your passage, Shendel and Yehuda who provided Bayla with work. Amends, perhaps, for the disastrous match with his cousin Leib that Yehuda had once helped arrange. And why Montreal instead of Argentina? Why the appeal to Shendel and not to her own sister? That Bayla has never told me. Pride, I suspect, an unwillingness to face Tsila’s satisfaction that she’d been right. Though maybe she’ll tell you differently.
NASTYA ESCAPED. DORA WENT MAD WITHIN MONTHS OF her arrest and died not long after in an asylum. Your father eluded capture altogether, making his way to Geneva, where I hear he’s joined the Mensheviks. And Wolf? I don’t know, but I dream of him sometimes, moving like a shadow through the wreckage.
It was early in the summer that I first felt you move. The countryside was on fire, manors burning to the ground, torched by the very hands that had always tended them. Smoke wafted through our open window; the sky was lit at night. You turned inside me, and I felt a joy and fear at once. I had been sentenced by then and thought I would hang at your birth.
I was still with Nastya and the other women who poured into our crowded cell as the revolution progressed. The prisons were so crowded that year that even the punishment cells held no less than two or three prisoners at a time. “She’ll save your life,” Nastya said as she felt you move under her hand. “They won’t hang a pregnant woman, and the new order will come to life before your child does. Your life will be spared.” And it was, in the amnesties of that October.
There was no new order, though, just the briefest of lulls in the old. You were born in the week of the pogroms; the screams of the dead pierced our dreams. You flew out of me like a bird. I named you Hayya.
THERE’S A DREAM I HAVE THAT STARTED WHEN THEY took you from my arms. I’m in the streets of Kiev, the winter streets, making my way home at the end of the day. But I’m not weary in my dream, nor am I cold. I’m walking home through snowy streets, the light is fading. It’s twilight. I see the colored lights of a skating rink up ahead and hear the sounds of a brass band playing. They’re playing “Bitter Parting,” and I stop by the side of the rink to listen. The music is poignant but it doesn’t make me sad.
The rink is filled with skaters, men and women, boys and girls. The young men skate solo, some go backward, not bothering to look over their shoulders as they circle the rink. Others skate in pistol fashion, with one leg bent and the other stretched out straight. The girls skate in groups, chatting and giggling as they circle. They are all in long coats, their hands tucked into muffs. They call to a friend, “Come, come,” they call, but they never call her by name.
I look beside me and there in the gathering darkness is a young girl. She’s wearing the blue coat I saw in the window in Kiev. It’s a blue more lovely than any I have ever seen. She has a black fur hat and and a black fur muff, and the braid that hangs down her back is as dark as mine. She steps away from me onto the ice to join her friends. Is it you, I wonder, or me? You, I think. Or maybe both.
Night falls, but the blue of her coat is so filled with light that it glows as she circles the rink. It’s the only thing I see as everything else in the dream fades into the darkness: a swatch of blue light circling in my mind. I awaken with a feeling of peace that lingers for a moment before dissolving.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
All the characters in this novel are fictional and any resemblance to actual living or historical people is purely coincidental, with the following exceptions: the character of Dora is based on Dora Brilliant, who was an explosives expert with the Socialist Revolutionary Party. The “Frenchman” refers to Evno F. Azeff, chief of the Socialist Revolutionary’s Combat Battalion, mastermind of many of its plots and informing all the while to the Okhrana. Grigor Gershuni was the head of the Combat Battalion until he was betrayed by Azeff and arrested in 1903. The character of Nastya is based on the Izmailovich sisters, daughters of a Brigadier General who was on duty in the Far East in 1904–1905. Their home, in their father’s absence, became the headquarters of the Socialist Revolutionary Party in Minsk. (Katerina Izmailovich was killed following her attempted assassination of Admiral G. P. Chukhnin. Alexandra Izmailovich received a commuted death sentence for her attempted assassination of Governor Kurlov of Minsk, and was imprisoned at Maltzev.) Quotes by Larissa Petrova at her trial are a combination of quotes by Maria Spiridonova, the Izmailovich sisters, Katerina Breshkovskaya, and Vera Figner.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Your Mouth Is Lovely is a work of fiction, but it is set in a particular time and place that I have tried to portray as accurately as possible. I read many personal memoirs and historical works during the course of researching and writing this book. The following were particularly helpful:
Simon Solomon’s My Jewish Roots (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1956) provided vivid descriptions of the Pripet marshes, as well as some of the details about local Jewish customs and beliefs and accounts of Bundist and other radical activities in the Kalinkovich region that appear in this novel. Michael Hamm’s Kiev, A Portrait 1800–1917 (Princeton University Press, 1993), and Kons
tantin Pavstovsky’s Story of a Life (Harvill Press, 1966) provided me with many details and images of life in Kiev and its ravines in 1904–1905. It was in Martha Maxwell’s Narodniki Women (Pergamon Press, 1990) that I learned about the daily life of the Socialist Revolutionary women who were imprisoned at Maltzev between 1906 and 1912. Maxwell’s book was also an invaluable source of information about the mind-sets and activities of the women who turned to terror during that time.
For the events of January 9, 1905, Bloody Sunday, I turned to Orlando Figes’s A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891–1924 (Penguin Books, 1998). The translation of the petition to the Tsar on page 321 is from Walter Sablinsky’s The Road to Bloody Sunday and is used by permission of Princeton University Press. I found detailed descriptions of the assassinations of Von Plehve and Grand Duke Sergius Alexandrovich in Boris Savinkov’s Memoirs of a Terrorist (Albert and Charles Boni, 1931. Translated by Joseph Shaplen).
The title of this book is from the Song of Songs 4:3. I learned about the prayer by the same name, recited by Lipsa on page 35, in A Book of Jewish Women’s Prayers, compiled by Norman Tarnor (Jason Aronson, Inc., 1995).
The Hasidic tale on page 127 is from Jewish Folktales, selected and retold by Pinhas Sadeh, translated by Hillel Halkin (Anchor Books, 1989), and is used by permission of Doubleday.
Other books I’d like to single out include: Zvi Gitelman’s A Century of Ambivalence (Indiana University Press, 2000); Richard Stite’s The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton University Press, 1978); Ezra Mendelssohn’s Class Struggle in the Pale (Cambridge University Press, 1970); The Merit of Our Mothers (compiled by Tracy Guren Klirs, Hebrew Union College Press, 1993); Barbara Alpern Engel’s Between the Fields and the City (Cambridge University Press, 1996); Naomi Shepherd’s A Price Below Rubies (Harvard University Press, 1993); Marie Sukloff’s The Life Story of a Russian Exile (The Century Company, 1915); The Russian Worker: Life and Labor Under the Tsarist Regime, edited by Victoria E. Bonnell (University of California Press, 1983); I. Steinberg’s Spiridonova (Methuen and Company, 1935); The Jewish Encyclopedia, edited by Isidore Singer (Funk and Wagnalls, 1901); Alberto Gerchunoff’s Jewish Gauchos of the Pampas (Abelard Schuman, 1955); Hirsz Abramowicz’s Profiles of a Lost World: Memoirs of East European Jewish Life Before WW2 (Wayne State University Press in cooperation with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 1999); The Shtetl Book, by David G. Roskies and Diane K. Roskies (Ktav Publishing House, 1975); Born One Year Before the Turn of the Century (an oral history by Minnie Fisher, Community Documentation Workshop, 1976); Yaffa Eliach’s There Once Was a World (Little, Brown and Company, 1998).
The Bialik poem, “City of Slaughter,” was translated by A. M. Klein, and is used by permission of the University of Toronto Press.
I want to thank Robert Daum, Barbara Alpern Engel, Allan Nadler, and Michael Silberstein for generously sharing their expertise and answering questions I had about historical facts and points of Jewish custom, observance, and history. A special thanks to Barbara Engel for being such an inspiring teacher. It was in her seminar on nineteenth-century Russian social history in the winter of 1986 that some of the seeds of this novel were sown.
The following people read part or all of early drafts of this novel and offered helpful observations and criticisms: Nancy Pollak, Aletha Worrall, Dianne Richler, Martin Richler, Diane Comet Richler, Anita Braha, Susan Ouriou, Shira Rosan, Bonnie Burnard, Michelle Comet, Tova Hartman Halbertal, Barbara Engel, Camilla Jenkins, Helen Mintz, Jay Schneiders. Special thanks to Barbara Kuhne, Golda Och, Vicki Trerise, Lydia Kwa, Carmen Rodriguez, and Janet Richler Ostro.
Thanks to my agent, Dean Cooke, and my editors, Julia Serebrinsky and Iris Tupholme, for their insightful questions and suggestions, their enthusiasm, and their encouragement.
Thanks to the Canada Council for the Arts and the B.C. Arts Council for their financial support in the writing of this book.
An excerpt of this book appeared in Prairie Fire in autumn 1999 and in the Journey Prize Anthology, 2000.
Thanks to Frank Murducco and sons of the Calabria Cafe in Vancouver, B.C., where most of this novel was written.
And finally, thanks to Vicki Trerise, the eye of the storm.
About the Author
NANCY RICHLER’S first novel, Throwaway Angels, was shortlisted for
the Arthur Ellis First Novel Award. Your Mouth is Lovely won the
2003 Canadian Jewish Book Award for Fiction. Her short
stories have been published in Room of One’s Own,
Fireweed, Fiddlehead, Prairie Fire, The New
Quarterly, and The Journey Prize
Anthology. Nancy Richler
lives in Vancouver.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
PRAISE FOR
Your Mouth Is Lovely
“A story as sublime as its title … This novel is weighty in substance—in its textured weave of Jewish history, class struggle and female experience—and yet light and agile in style. It owes much to the Russian novel, but it also recalls the 19th-century Victorian narratives of Charlotte Bronte … It reads as if one of Bronte’s plain, inwardly seething heroines had wandered onto the pages of Tolstoy … A wonderfully realized work of the imagination … full of vital ideas [and] impossible to forget.”
The Gazette (Montreal)
“What a story … bravery, betrayal, passion and fear.”
Chatelaine
“Profoundly moving … The language is flowing and lyrical, and yet she never veers far from the story line.”
The Globe and Mail
“Nancy Richler’s second novel, long in coming, has been well worth the wait. Your Mouth Is Lovely is a true achievement … These are characters to relish … Astonishing [and] thoroughly absorbing.”
The Vancouver Sun
“This accomplished novel summons up the lost world of the Russian shtetls … Richler’s work recalls the stories of Isaac Babel, in which the knowable is charged with mystery.”
The New Yorker
“Magnificent … an assertion of the mystery of the human condition, and a defence of the need to recognize that mystery.”
National Post
“An absolutely stunning novel. Spare, lyrical, bittersweet, it held me spellbound, enchanted from the very first page.”
SANDRA GULLAND, author of The Many Lives & Secret Sorrows of Josephine B.
“Nancy Richler has created an absorbing, enchanting and politically astute novel.”
Winnipeg Free Press
“Stunning … Richler is a smart, gutsy writer, a talent to watch. Her striking ability to make human that which is to contemporary readers ‘historical’ deserves the serious attention of readers (and prize juries) everywhere.”
Magazine les Ailes (Montreal)
“What makes Your Mouth Is Lovely especially absorbing is Richler’s ability to seamlessly infuse her historical knowledge into the lives of her characters, weaving it into the crucial details of lives lived. [Her] characters are also complex and compelling … Your Mouth Is Lovely is a delight to read and can proudly take its place alongside its worthy forebears.”
Quill & Quire
“Beautifully told, with just the right blend of revelation and mystery.”
The Halifax Chronicle-Herald
“[A] delicate, deft handling of historical material, of politics, of Jewish custom, of motherhood and the mysteries of the heart.”
The Georgia Straight
“Your Mouth Is Lovely is an exquisite and haunting novel, a tale both rich in shtetl life and its encounter with sweeping historical events.”
ARYEH LEV STOLLMAN, author of The Far Euphrates and The Illuminated Soul
“Richler fashions a tale of lyric historical suspense … with tremendous conviction and feeling.”
Kirkus Reviews
“Haunting … Weaving together political and
cultural history, magical realism and the resigned mordancy of Jewish humor, Richler has created a world that seems totally inhabited but poised to self-destruct … Richler has created unforgettable, deeply nuanced characters, freethinking dreamers whose revolutionary activities feel both historically inevitable and mysteriously personal.”
Publishers Weekly
“Beautifully written and carefully crafted … A stunning novel that readers won’t be able to put down.”
Booklist
Credits
Cover photograph courtesy of Arcangel Images
Cover design by Greg Tabor
Copyright
Your Mouth Is Lovely
Copyright © 2002 by Nancy Richler.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © AUGUST 2013 ISBN: 9781443431668
Published by Harper Perennial, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
Originally published in Canada in a hardcover edition
by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd: 2002
First trade paperback edition published by Harper Perennial Canada: 2003
This Harper Perennial trade paperback edition: 2013
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the prior written permission of them publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.
“City of Slaughter” by Hayyim Nahman Bialik, translated by A. M. Klein. Reprinted by permission of University of Toronto Press. “The Angel’s Punishment” from Jewish Folktales by Pinhas Sadeh. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. The Road to Bloody Sunday by Walter Sablinsky. Copyright © 1976 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
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