Your Mouth Is Lovely Read online

  YOUR

  MOUTH

  IS

  LOVELY

  NANCY RICHLER

  Dedication

  For my parents, Dianne and Myer Richler, and for Jason Richler, in memory

  This book takes place between the years 1887 and 1912. At that time Belarus and Ukraine were part of the Russian Empire. The official language was Russian, and for that reason I have used Russian rather than Belorussian or Ukrainian for place-names: Gomel instead of Homel, for example.

  The narrator of this book would have been speaking Yiddish, the language used by most of Russia’s Jews at that time. Hebrew, the language of the Torah, is the language of most Jewish liturgy and ritual. Pronunciation of Hebrew would have been Ashkenazic: bayis instead of bayit.

  The YIVO Institute has established a standard transliteration from Yiddish to English. I have chosen instead to spell the words as they most often appear in nonscholarly contexts: heder instead of kheder, to give one example.

  — NANCY RICHLER

  Epigraph

  Most devious is the heart;

  It is perverse—who can fathom it?

  JEREMIAH 17 : 9

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Siberia, April 1911

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  Siberia, May 1911

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Siberia, July 1911

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Siberia, August 1911

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Siberia, September 1911

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  Siberia, November 1911

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Siberia, December 1911

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Siberia, January 1912

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Siberia, February 1912

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Siberia, February 1912

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Siberia, March 1912

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Siberia, May 1912

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Siberia, June 1912

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Siberia, June 1912

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  PRAISE FOR Your Mouth Is Lovely

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Siberia, April 1911

  Spring has come, even here. We smell it first in the mold that spreads along the floor, hear it in the slow dripping away of the ice that has coated our walls all winter. Soon will come the rush of water down the mountains that surround us, the drifts of smoke as peasants from distant villages burn off last summer’s grass, then the fragrant grass itself, sweetness and life wafting through the bars of our open windows. For now, though, we content ourselves with the slow softening of the ice cave we’ve inhabited since autumn, the smells of mold and decay released at last from the grip of winter, our plans for our tiny garden in the courtyard. Maria turns the compost, encouraging the rot that will nourish our vegetables and flowers. “Surrender yourself,” she whispers in all earnestness to her pile of stinking parings. I glance up but she is intent on her task.

  Surrender yourself, we began to hear in those years leading up to the failed revolution. From the intellectuals like Maria who roamed the countryside alight with their vision of a new future, from our own lips as their fever spread, from the natural world around us where a single drop of rain suddenly became significant for its willingness to subsume its own form in the gathering torrent of a river in flood. Surrender yourself, your father once implored me. Destruction births creation.

  IT’S MY FIFTH SPRING AT MALTZEV PRISON. EACH WINTER I’m sure will be my last. Dust to dust, I find myself saying as my frozen fingers struggle to hold the pen with which I write these words to you. Ashes to ashes, I mutter, and nothing but suffering and joy in between. I’ve had my share. Hot and sharp—I taste it still in the blood that fills my mouth when I cough.

  They’ve put me with the politicals. A mistake. My act was criminal—this I know—but well-dressed in beautiful words: the higher good, the loosening of humanity’s shackles. So instead of languishing in the filth and squalor of the criminals’ section, I am here among the exalted, the political prisoners of Maltzev.

  “Your mother was a heroine,” you’ll be told. “She sacrificed her own life for the betterment of others.” It’s a lie, but not entirely. No person can be so neatly understood. Hence these words I write to you, my meager offering, my attempt to clear a path to your own beginning.

  WE ARE STRICT WITH OURSELVES. ALWAYS, BUT PARTICULARLY in winter, when the frosty silence threatens to obliterate us as thoroughly as it has the world outside our four walls. In the mornings we study. Anatomy, antiquity, mathematics, philosophy. Any book that isn’t forbidden is devoured and regurgitated, its contents shared and discussed. “The socialization of intellectual property.” This is what my comrades call this most ordinary of human endeavors, this discussion and sharing of ideas. They’re a high-thinking bunch. They don’t simply discuss ideas as humans have done since receiving the gift of speech. They “make common property of the learning that, in freedom, was unequally divided.”

  Lunch is quick—it affords us no pleasure. A slice of black bread, a bowl of thin soup, then a return to our studies. We heat ourselves with tea—our stove is inadequate—then run around the courtyard swinging our arms and clapping our hands. Supper is quick too—buckwheat turned blue from the iron of our frying pan. In the long evenings we huddle together, sharing a candle, a blanket, the heat of our bodies. My coughing never stops.

  We try, but by late winter our resolve wavers. We’re beyond tired, beyond cold. The blood that fills my mouth is sticky, souring even as I still draw breath. Job floats unbidden into mind. Naked came I into the world and naked will I leave it thither. The cold drags on even as the light returns. I write to you, but my hand falters. To everything its season, and mine was this: twenty-three years in the bowels of the turning century. I feel my end coming. The Lord giveth and He taketh away. Then I cough again and it’s the taste of my own blood that spurs me on. Is it not still thick and pungent and rich as the heart that pumps it? I pick up the pen once again and move it across the page.

  And then one morning I awaken to the drip of water and inhale the stirrings of early spring.

  IT’S BEEN ALMOST SIX YEARS SINCE YOU WERE BORN, six years less a day since you were taken from me. Taken from me, do you understand? I would never have let you go. I was still in Kiev, awaiting execution. I would hang as soon as you were born; that was my sentence: death, postponed until your birth. I sent a note out to Bayla, begging her forgiveness for what I was about to ask of her, begging her to find you, to save you from death. Then I waited to hang. A week I waited, two weeks. In the third week after your birth my sentence was commuted to “life.” Mercy, they called it. I had no illusions about what lay ahead. But still, I was happy. That was one of the happiest days of my life. That was the day Bayla’s note reached me.

  “She’s beautiful,” Bayla wrote to me. You, she meant. She had claimed you from the foundling home where they had taken you. “Beautiful, but skinny like her mother.”

  Skinny like your mother, but hardy like me too. This I knew from your first moments of life. I felt your mouth on my breast before they took you from me. I felt the power of your hunger, the beauty of it. Hayya, I named you. For Life.

  “I’ve booked passage to Montreal on the third of next month,” Bayla wrote. �
��Shendel has kindly offered me a bed under her roof. Generous as always—I expect I’ll be her maid. But it’s a start, isn’t it? Just when I thought it was the end of days, the end of my days, anyway, it turns out you’re still alive, your daughter is safe, and I’m booked to begin my life again.”

  As for forgiveness, Bayla said, if there was any to be begged, it was she who had to beg it of me. She would spend her life atoning for what she had taken from me.

  “Your daughter is safe,” Bayla reassured me again. “Whatever else you must contend with, rest at least with the knowledge that your daughter is safe and well loved. I’ll raise her as I would my own until you come to claim her from me. And you will come to claim her, Miriam. This I believe.”

  CHAPTER ONE

  MINSK GUBERNIA, 1887

  IN THE SEVENTH MONTH OF HER PREGNANCY HENYE dreamed of thirst. It was the month of Tammuz, but not like Tammuz. Nowhere was the high blue sky of previous summers, the afternoon breeze sweet with blossoming rye. The air was so thick with heat that the wheat in the field bent under the weight of it, and the sky hung yellow and low over the town, portending nothing good. Night after night, Henye lay on her bed dreaming of thirst. Such thirst as she had never experienced in her waking life. Unslakable thirst. Unearthly.

  The pregnancy was her second. The first had ended in shocking misfortune. Shocking, because the signs—until the birth itself—had all seemed so favorable. Seven months into that pregnancy the kicking inside her had been so vigorous that she could place a crust of bread on her swollen belly just to have the pleasure of watching it fly across the room. It was a boy, she knew, and one endowed with such power and obvious strength of purpose that surely he could only be destined for greatness.

  Her first mistake: second-guessing Divine intention.

  Compounded by a second: she told the other women in the town. That was reckless. Foolhardy. The evil eye couldn’t help but be tempted. Not to mention Lilith, who delighted in nothing so much as stealing other women’s babies.

  Still, the kicking persisted. And on the new moon of the month of Av, the first pangs of labor began. The midwife was called; pangs turned to pain. All seemed as it should: the crown appearing soon enough, followed by the torso, long and perfect, and finally the legs, kicking in movements by now so familiar to the mother.

  “A boy,” the midwife pronounced, but when he opened his mouth to howl, he couldn’t take a breath.

  He tried again. And again. Mouth open like a fish, he gulped and gasped, but to no avail. Used to the rarefied air of the other world, he found ours too thick. Too cluttered, maybe, with mortal desires and disappointments. It collected like mud in his lungs. He began to strain and thrash, his small back arching, his skin turning blue. His legs still moved, but in more of a twitch than a kick, like the dance of a chicken whose head is already rolling in the dirt. The midwife slapped him, shook him, breathed whatever she could spare of her own breath into his gasping mouth, but his lungs weren’t like ours. More like wings than lungs, they flapped inside his chest, transporting him back to the world in which he belonged.

  They named him just before he died. A final attempt, perhaps, to ensnare his fleeing soul. Yaakov, they named him, for his grandfather who had loved life.

  The third mistake. They should have named him Yaakov Simcha. That was our grandfather’s full name. Yaakov, who fought with the angel, and Simcha, who is joyful. A balanced name, full of luck—that’s what should have been my brother’s. Instead, they returned him to the earth eternally fighting with his angel.

  And fight he did. From the moment he crossed back into the other world his strength returned, but it was coupled now with a cruelty he hadn’t exhibited before. His kicking resumed. Timid at first, daring only to interrupt her dreams. Then bolder, brasher, it began distracting her at all times of the day and the night. Those same kicks that had so delighted her once with their promise became taunts now, torments, a rain of blows and mockery under which she soon began to falter.

  She conceived again quickly enough—she was young and healthy in body—but her spirit was changed. She could barely eat, would no longer meet anyone’s eye, and as her pregnancy progressed she took on stranger and ever more disturbing behavior. She could be in the middle of a task, a conversation—it didn’t matter what—when all of a sudden she would stop still, face frozen, as if listening to something far away. The daily tasks that root us to this world became odious to her. The elements left to women’s care—water and fire—she neglected. Her stove remained unlit, her cisterns collected dust. The call from the other world was relentless.

  All through those months of pregnancy with me, she drifted further and further from this life—and me, all the while, trying to draw my nourishment from her.

  Nights were the worst. The thirst. Tormented by it in her dreams, Henye tossed and cried out in her sleep. Night after night she cried—rasping cries, half-strangled gasps. My father, Aaron Lev, upon hearing such sounds, feared for her life, for her soul, for the soul of the unborn child—my soul. But no sooner than he had decided to consult the rabbi, relief came. Relief in the form of a stranger, a boy carrying a jug of water. The boy poured some water into his hand, water so cool and refreshing that as Henye drank from his cupped hand, she moaned in pleasure. My father, hearing such a moan, mistook it for another kind of pleasure and woke her immediately. He was a pious man, you understand. He woke her so that she wouldn’t have to carry the burden of sin along with the weight of the child growing inside of her.

  But was Henye grateful toward her husband for saving her from sin? How could she be? Her thirst had reduced her to a single longing, a perfect arch that strained toward its one point of desire. She was angry to have come so close only to be snatched away, enraged to be pulled back from the union she had been about to enter.

  The boy returned. His jug of water now empty, he took her by the hand and led her to the source: a pool smooth as glass and deep with water so pure and clear that she could see the speckled stones that formed its floor twenty feet below its surface. She had just lain across the sun-warmed slate that bordered the pool, her lips touching the cool surface, when her husband’s shaking pulled her back once again. Back to the airless heat of her home, the prickliness of her straw bed, the heavy burden of the new life growing inside her.

  The meaning of the dream was immediately obvious to my father, to the other women of the town, to anyone who heard it. The boy was none other than Yaakov come to take his mother back. Had Aaron Lev not awakened her when he had, had her lips actually dipped below the surface of that pool, that deceptive, seductive pool …

  The next evening, only seven months into her pregnancy, Henye went into labor. A bad beginning, I won’t deny it, but what choice did I have? Does a child choose such an entrance if she’s thriving in the paradise of her mother’s womb? I was starving in there, parched, already exhausted. I made my escape and was delivered alive and named, at first, Nechama. For Comfort.

  Some comfort.

  Born just eleven months after the loss of her firstborn, some women might have considered their new baby a miracle, a gift, a second chance, at the very least. But not my mother. Not Henye. Named for Hannah, a woman so sorrowed by her own barrenness that the fervor of her prayers for a child became the model of piety toward which we all strive, this Henye wouldn’t even look at her own child. Not that I was much to look at—no bigger than a rat, and black-and-blue from all his kicking—but still her own, no?

  The midwife placed me on my mother’s breast, but she was dry as stone. This was no surprise. Not at that point. Milk from her I didn’t expect, but a look? One look?

  I was dispatched to a wet nurse, and the following day, without so much as a glance at the new life she’d brought forth, Henye walked into the river and slaked her unearthly thirst.

  I SHOULDN’T HAVE LIVED, OF COURSE. A MORE RESPECTFUL child would have died. Or at least kept quiet, in deference to the grief that surrounded her birth. But I’ve never known respec
t of that sort and would not still be here if I had. My mouth was as wide and grasping as my poor brother’s had been, except that the air of this world was sweet to me. Nourishing, after the deprivations I had suffered in the womb. I filled my lungs over and over, my mouth never closing, waiting for life to fly into it.

  No one expected me to live—a child born under such circumstances, untouched by a mother’s hand or eye. I was ugly, bad luck, more like a crow than a child, with cries like caws and a dark down that covered my body. They handed me over to my wet nurse with every expectation that I would be returned to the earth before the next moon. But my wet nurse took pity on me. She looked me in the face. No human had looked me in the face until then. No human eyes had met mine. How could I know what I was? Lipsa looked me in the face, and only then did she put me on her breast.

  Too late, perhaps. Note my beaked nose, my sharp eyes, my spare, bony body built more for flight than for land. Even the way I occupy this chair—don’t occupy it, actually; I occupy nothing—perched on its edge as if its wood frame is the low-hanging branch of a tree I’ve been missing all of my life. Imagine the moment of my birth: the wooden hut baking in the summer heat, the moaning woman on the bed by the window, open to catch whatever hint of wind is passing through. And just outside that open window, the lone crow perched on her low-hanging branch, looking in. Longing.

  Still, Lipsa tried. She sang to me, sweet, human songs. Night after night she sang, and when I had survived the first month of my life, she tied me to a tree and laid a picnic beside me. Under the yellow sky of that summer, she tied me to a tree while a few feet away she laid a feast of honey, dates, and small cakes she had baked. To tempt my luck, you understand. To induce it to leave me. As if luck as rotten and clever as mine could be fooled by such a pathetic scheme. As if the delicacies Lipsa scrounged up were sweeter than the soul of a baby girl. But Lipsa was hopeful. She had tricked luck before, and sometimes with happy results. Honey, dates, and small cakes she offered up in my stead, then she retreated behind a tree to watch what would happen.