Your Mouth Is Lovely Read online

  I whimpered at first, then howled, while just a few feet away the honey glowed and the dates released their fragrant scents. The air was humid, alive with insects; I wiggled like a grub against the tree. But Lipsa waited. Ants began to gather at the picnic, a few bees, some wasps. Crows, of course. The air thickened in the afternoon heat, shimmering as the unseen made their passages through it. And still, Lipsa waited. In due time—I don’t know how long—my wiggling lessened, my cries turned to hiccups, and finally, at the very moment that my eyes shut and I dropped into sleep, Lipsa untied me and stole me away.

  She renamed me that evening. Miriam. Just to be on the safe side. So that if my luck, tired of sweets, should come back, looking for Nechama, it would find only Miriam. Bitter Sea. A better name for me anyway.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1894

  SIX YEARS I STAYED WITH LIPSA AND SIX YEARS I FORGOT I wasn’t hers. I don’t blame Lipsa. She was a busy woman. There were seven children in her house—six of her own and me. Her husband was a peddler and was gone for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Lipsa plucked chickens, sold eggs, took in other women’s babies and washing. One winter she packed matches for the factory in Mozyr. Another she made pickles to sell in the market. She had no time to remind me of my misfortune.

  We worked, all of us, packing matches, pushing carts of laundry to and from the river, but we had our pleasures too. I took mine from the eggs I cleaned for market. Delicate and fragile, each one was heavy with the secret of life. I removed dirt and feathers with three-year-old fingers without ever breaking a shell.

  In my seventh year, my father remarried. It was unusual for a widower to have waited so long, unusual for a man to have lived alone for so many years—a young man, at that. There had been talk, of course. None of it good. My mother was thought to be behind his unnatural behavior. Her body had never been recovered, after all, had never been properly laid to rest. There was no saying where her restless spirit hovered.

  A woman in my father’s position would have been forbidden to marry. Agunah, we would have called her, an abandoned wife. Our town had two. Sima, whose husband was surely dead—his blood-spattered coat had been found in the forest shortly after his disappearance—and Fruma, whose husband had left for America ten years earlier and forgotten to send for her. Those women were unfortunates. They remained bound to an absence for the rest of their lives. Abandoned men, however, could more easily obtain dispensation from their marriages. And in the seventh year of my life, my father obtained his.

  Tsila was the name of his bride. Avram the Hero’s eldest daughter. He was called the Hero because ten years earlier when his house had caught fire in the middle of the night, he had run outside alone and sat on the snow, head in his hands, rocking and weeping, while his wife ushered their five children to safety.

  Tsila was twenty when my father married her. A tall girl, she was slender as a reed and had long, velvet hair the color of honey. Hardworking and practical, with clever hands and a strong back, all things being equal, she could have married much younger and found a far better match than a shoemaker whose first wife’s spirit had never been properly put to rest. But all things are never equal: Tsila’s face was marked by Divine anger. Across her left cheek and extending down to her chin was the unmistakable red handprint of the angel that had slapped her before birth.

  In a sweet-natured girl, such a birthmark might have been talked away as a mistake, a momentary lapse in Divine judgment. “Look at her hair,” a clever matchmaker might have pointed out. “Her eyes like emeralds. Her voice like a flute. And her disposition …” But Tsila wasn’t sweet. Sour as spoiled milk, there were those who said that when the angel marked her face, he also placed a slice of lemon under her tongue, prohibiting her from sampling any of the more pleasant seasonings life might offer.

  Their wedding took place two days after Purim, and he sent for me soon after. Spring was early that year; the roads were rivers of mud. Lipsa walked with me along the planks of wood that had been lain across the mud to prevent us from drowning in it. “You’ll be a good girl,” Lipsa said as we walked. I stared at the dark sludge that oozed through the spaces between the planks. “You’ll be helpful and you’ll do as she says.”

  The day was mild, the air thick with the smells it had held frozen all winter. “She’s your mother now,” Lipsa said. I inhaled unfurling greens, thawing excrement, softening earth. “You had no mother, but now you do.”

  Past the butcher’s we walked, the smells of fresh blood, chicken’s feet. Past Reizel’s stand of rotting fruit. It was Thursday. Lipsa’s husband would be home tomorrow. Sometimes, if he’d been away a long time, he brought us small gifts. Once he had brought us candies. Hard yellow balls so sour, they raised sweat from my forehead. “I was never your mother,” Lipsa said.

  We turned down the narrow passage where Malka the Apostate had lived. I wasn’t usually allowed in that passage. Malka’s mother had long since died of shame, but her wails could still be heard on certain nights of the year. A fat drop of water fell on my face. I looked up at Lipsa. Her eyes were black stones. More drops fell. Lipsa clutched my hand tighter and hurried us along. We were close to the outskirts of town now—the planks of wood didn’t extend this far. With each step we sank ankle-deep into mud. A lark sang but I couldn’t see it. The mud was alive, sucking hungrily at our feet.

  I hadn’t been to my father’s house since my birth, hadn’t seen him except in passing, had never heard his voice. We started up the hill. I knew that when we reached the top we would be there. The rain was falling more steadily now. Lipsa adjusted her kerchief, gave her chin a quick pat. She had a tuft of coarse black hair that grew out of her chin like the beard of a goat. Saturday evenings, when the men were at shul and we waited at home for the three stars that would end Shabbes and start the week, she would take me onto her lap. The hair on her chin tickled my cheek when she laughed.

  We reached the top of the hill and stopped in front of a one-story house. It looked like any other house. The walls were logs, the roof steep, the windows on either side of the door were squares of yellow light in the darkening afternoon. Chickens scratched in the mud of the yard. Smoke piled straight up out of the chimney as if it weren’t sure where to blow. Lipsa released my hand and thrust a small cloth bundle in my arms. “You’re a lucky girl,” she said. “I couldn’t have kept you forever.”

  Tsila was tending her stove when I pushed open the door. Down on her knees, her back turned to me. Her hair, which had once draped her back like a thick, golden curtain, was gone. In its place, a matron’s wig perched on her head, its color indeterminate in the late afternoon light. Pretension, I had heard women say. Immodesty. Since when did an artisan’s wife wear a matron’s wig? Who was she, a sour lemon of a thing, that a plain kerchief—silk on Shabbes—wasn’t good enough? I stood in her doorway, waiting. I knew enough not to approach a creature that wasn’t prepared to face me, not to enter a new life that greeted me with its back.

  “Don’t just stand there dripping rain,” she said without turning around.

  I had known she wouldn’t want me. Lipsa’s oldest had warned me. “Why would she want you?” Rohel had asked. “A new bride like her just starting out and you, a misfortune from her husband’s first marriage?”

  “In or out,” Tsila said. “Don’t you know it’s bad luck to tarry on a threshold?”

  Against my own judgment, I entered.

  “Do you know how to tend a fire?” she asked, still bent over her stove.

  I determined it was better to hold my tongue.

  “Are you mute?” she asked, and turned half around.

  The side of her face that she presented to me was unmarked, and although I had not seen beauty in my life until then, I recognized it immediately in the profile I beheld.

  “Well, sit down, then,” she said, and gestured vaguely toward the window.

  I followed her gesture and saw a small table beside the sewing machine by the window. Alongside the table were
two chairs. I stood between them, uncertain which to choose.

  “Sit,” Tsila said, pointing to the one closer to the stove and settling herself on the other. “Here,” she said, and pushed a plate of cookies my way.

  It was Thursday and the cookies looked fresh. Who had fresh cookies at the end of a week unless there was a special occasion, a special guest, something to celebrate? I reached over and took one. They were almond bars, dipped in sugar, then baked until they formed a sweet crust. Holiday cookies. At Lipsa’s we would have dipped them in tea.

  Tsila watched me eat, then took one for herself. “I suppose your father will have to make another chair now,” she allowed.

  AT LIPSA’S THERE HAD NEVER BEEN A MOMENT IN THE day or the night when the sounds of human life unfolding could not be heard. Her home was one of several grouped around a small courtyard, each one filled to bursting with its noisy generations. Reb Sender’s nightly tantrums, his mother’s snores, the whooping laughter of the Halpern old maid, the low moans of the fishmonger’s wife—all that and more had filled the two rooms of Lipsa’s house and passed freely through the walls that barely separated us from our neighbors. “There’s time enough for quiet in the world to come,” Lipsa said once to a neighbor who complained. “We don’t have to invite it before its time.”

  But in the house where Lipsa had just left me, the house where I had had the misfortune to be born, quiet had already descended. I strained my ears, but nowhere was the hum of human conversation, the shrieks of children playing, voices raised in anger or lowered in fear or in love. Even Tsila’s intake and output of breath was unaccompanied by sigh or cough. I knew I had not yet crossed into the world to come, but I couldn’t feel certain. I listened for human sound, but all I could hear was my own blood racing through my head.

  We sat for a long while, Tsila mending, me clutching my bundle of belongings in case Lipsa should come back to return me to the noisy world of the living. I was still wearing my coat and was both too hot and shivering at the same time.

  “It’s good you don’t look like her,” Tsila finally uttered. It was late in the afternoon by then and already dark. I started at the sound of her voice but felt a relief so great that I immediately began to weep. “Don’t be silly,” she said harshly. A harshness sweet and reassuring in its earthly tones. I wept harder. She looked at me without expression, then laid her cool hand on mine. “Don’t be silly,” she said again. “A man doesn’t like to be reminded of past misfortune every time he looks at his daughter’s face.”

  She didn’t speak again. She continued her mending, I clutched my bundle of belongings, the rain fell on the roof and windows. I cleared my throat once to check if my voice had taken flight. For some time I had felt it flutter in my throat as if it longed to break free, return to Lipsa, and abandon me to the silence, but it had not, as yet. Tsila looked at me. Eyes of a cat, one of Lipsa’s daughters had said about her. “What are you staring at?” she asked, then turned back to her mending.

  I risked a look at what she was working on. She was a gifted seamstress, renowned not just in neighboring villages but in towns as large as Mozyr and David Gorodok. And not merely for the lines of her creations—though they were elegant and flattering—but for the way she drew color and light out of the fabrics and threads available to her. Other seamstresses made do with the reds, browns, and blues that came to them out of the textile factories, but not Tsila. No, Tsila made her own dyes, searching forests and marshes for the roots, flowers, and barks that would yield the exact color she was seeking. She could catch the ruby flash of a hummingbird and stitch it into a sleeve, October forests flamed at her necklines, and the silver of birch trees glimmered in the satin ribbons of her blouses.

  Such colors lured women, of course. Like the scarlet flicker of a blackbird, Tsila’s colors drew females from miles around. Rich and poor, Jew and gentile, women came to her with kopecks and rubles in their hands. Kopecks and rubles that some said would be better spent on less frivolous purchases.

  “Beauty is not frivolous,” Tsila was heard to respond, which, of course, immediately raised more than eyebrows.

  “An attitude such as hers …,” voices whispered. “To what could it possibly lead?”

  To frippery, some said, even as they squirreled away their kopecks for a sample.

  “To a proper living,” Lipsa responded. No small thing in those times, and certainly a feat my father, a shoemaker, could never have hoped to accomplish. “A living for an entire Jewish family, may they prosper and be healthy,” Lipsa pronounced, attempting to put the matter to rest.

  But the matter didn’t rest. Questions persisted, as they do wherever the unusual dares to show itself. Where did she get the inclination to create such finery, women asked one another. Did her creations not lead to immodesty and the flaunting of the female form? Was it not possible that the Evil One was her guide?

  I peeked at Tsila’s lap where her hands were working, but a simple rust skirt was all that she held. We sat in silence as she finished her mending, then silence again as she took up a white slip.

  Eventually I heard footsteps approaching. My father, I knew, though I had never heard his footfall before. I looked up as the door opened and met his eyes for the first time. A man of the earth, people said about him, and I recognized immediately the clay of the riverbank in the hues of his face and beard. His eyes were the color of mud.

  He looked away and began to shake the rain off his clothes. He stamped his feet a few times, took off his cap to shake it, then shook his clothes yet again.

  “Nu?” Tsila said after a while. “Are you going to stand there all night shaking like a dog?”

  My father took off his coat and hung it on the peg by the door.

  “Maybe you can take your daughter’s coat too … unless she prefers to sit wrapped up like an old woman as if I’m denying her heat.”

  I stood up, walked over to my father, and handed him my coat. His hands were large, his nails darkly stained from the blacking of the threads he used for his work. I didn’t dare raise my eyes to his face.

  “A glass of tea?” Tsila offered, getting up from her chair as I returned to mine.

  My father said “please”—I had never heard a man say please to a woman before—and sat down in the chair Tsila had just vacated. I jumped up and joined Tsila at the stove.

  “Sit,” she said to me. Then, to my father, “She hops around like a wounded bird, but she doesn’t talk too much.”

  My father nodded again and risked a look at my face.

  MY FATHER, AARON LEV, WAS STILL A YOUNG MAN AT that time—no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven—but already he had the bearing of one well advanced in years. His life had long become a wound from which he knew he would never recover, and he bore it uneasily, in the stoop of his back—a slight hunch that swelled between the blades of his shoulders and pushed him inexorably downward.

  He was a strong man but not well built. Out of balance, as if the Creator had assembled him hastily at the end of too long a day, throwing in handfuls of this quality or that without considering necessary counters and complements. Intelligence he had been given, but not the tongue to express it; a large appetite, but the stomach of an invalid. His heart was too delicate for a man of his circumstances, his feet too small for a man of his size. Walking up the hill to his home, his large hulk stooped over his tiny feet, he gave the appearance, more obviously than most, of one perpetually teetering on the edge of his own destiny.

  The Stutterer, he was called in our village, though he had long learned to hold his tongue. He had been born at the start of the typhus and was just learning to speak as the worst of the fever swept the village. Was it grief that strangled his tongue? Perhaps, though Henye had also lost her parents to the fever and her tongue—by all accounts—was smooth and unfettered.

  He was raised by his mother’s cousin, a kind enough man but one prone to bouts of melancholia so severe that only ceaseless recitation of the Psalms enabled him to endure
each new day that rose up against him. The cousin’s wife was more able—she supported the family by selling the bread she baked—but her meager stores of kindness had long been expended on her own children. Hungry but not starving, literate but not educated, Aaron Lev was apprenticed at nine and betrothed at seventeen to Henye, also seventeen—her dowry provided by the Society for Widows and Orphans.

  The wedding took place a year later, as planned, but it was well known that between betrothal and marriage canopy, Henye had requested a release. Her stated reasons were vague: premonitions, it seemed, cold feet—nothing to justify her reluctance, which was peculiar, because an orphan like her, with no other prospects or family, should have felt only relief that a bridegroom had been found and a dowry provided.

  Aaron Lev hadn’t wanted to force her, so a meeting had been arranged. Then another. And another. He didn’t try to persuade—his tongue seemed to twist even more than usual in her presence—but to show her by his patience that he wasn’t a bad man and that he meant her no harm. And she did, at last, acquiesce, so by eighteen, Aaron Lev was a bridegroom, and by twenty, a widower and a father. A widower whose wife’s body was never found and a father whose child brought him no joy.

  MY FATHER DRANK HIS TEA IN SMALL, EVEN GULPS. THE tea was hot—I could see steam rise off it—but he didn’t pour it into his saucer or slurp it up with cooling sucks of air. He drank precisely, quietly, as if heat didn’t burn his mouth.

  Tsila placed a plate of potatoes and onions on the table and a pitcher of sour milk between us. I waited for my father to recite the blessing for fruits that have been pulled from the earth, but he thanked Tsila first. Before God. “Thank you, Tsila,” he said, and I looked up in confusion.

  I remembered the disquiet of the women by the river when the news of his match reached their ears. It was early winter then, the week before Chanukah. Snow had not yet fallen, but the first skin of ice had formed upon the river. The air was clear and cold—free of snow, moisture, and other obstructions.