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  Praise for Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth

  “A splendid novel, gorgeously written. Edeet Ravel brings deep insight and humour to this exquisitely moving story of a group of friends haunted by memories of unfathomable losses and burdened by secrets of love and death.”—Donna Morrissey, author of Sylvanus Now and What They Wanted

  “A very fine and moving novel … Nuanced, compassionate, insightful and gently humorous … Ravel does an excellent job of bringing all these characters to life, making us care for them, even ache for them. This is a sign of her great skill, as is the complexity and depth of her characters. There are no stereotypes here … What shines through this wonderful novel is … the incredibly impressive, one might even say heroic impetus toward life on the part of both the survivors and their children … All the characters are deeply burdened but beautiful. Wounded, but wonderful … A heartbreaking but funny, readable book—what remains with you as much as the horror and grief is the almost infinite human capacity for recovery, resilience, hope and beauty. A true testament not only to the survivors of the Holocaust and their children, but to Edeet Ravel’s talent.” —The Globe and Mail

  “A lyrical, passionate and subtle account of the emotional challenges faced by children of Holocaust survivors, whose parents are wobbly and partly dysfunctional … but still courageous and full of love.” —Lawrence Hill, author of The Book of Negroes

  “Sweetly compelling.”— More (Toronto)

  “Edeet Ravel’s latest book, Your Sad Eyes and Unforgettable Mouth, is, on one level, pure entertainment—a traditional novel with all that we expect from the form: passion, drama and life-changing secrets that span decades. At the same time, it is a thought-provoking commentary on the legacy of the Holocaust.” —National Post

  “Ravel … nails the historical underpinnings and offers a truly sensitive read.”— Chatelaine

  Praise for the Tel Aviv Trilogy

  “A Wall of Light by Edeet Ravel charmed me utterly. I was captivated.”—Elizabeth Hay, Giller juror

  “Skillfully juggling the weight of the multi-layered past with the bright intensity of the present, Ravel has written a book that shimmers with suspense, mystery and wit. Tell your friends.” —Toronto Star

  “Ravel is unflinching in her exploration of the moral and emotional conflicts of her characters and of the country in which they live, but the light she shines is as compassionate as it is clear-eyed, illuminating each character’s full humanity and revealing the beating heart of the state of Israel as well as its wounded spirit … Her seemingly simple and direct sentences often resonate with myriad meanings, possibilities and ironies … [Ten Thousand Lovers] is a brave and beautiful book. —Nancy Richler, The Globe and Mail

  “Deeply moving … [The] narrative alternates between memoir and linguistic meditations on ancient and modern Hebrew. It is in these passages, conveyed in a quiet and almost lyrical voice, that the full tragic dimension of Israel’s character emerges.” —The New York Times

  PENGUIN CANADA

  YOUR SAD EYES AND

  UNFORGETTABLE MOUTH

  EDEET RAVEL is the author of a trilogy about the Israeli– Palestinian conflict—Ten Thousand Lovers (finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Award), Look For Me (winner of the Hugh MacLennan Prize), and A Wall of Light (finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and winner of the Canadian Jewish Book Award). She is also the author of the Pauline series for younger readers, and of The Saver, for older teens.

  Edeet was born on a kibbutz in Israel and has a PhD from McGill in Jewish Studies. She currently lives in Guelph with her daughter, Larissa. Visit her website at edeet.com.

  ALSO BY EDEET RAVEL

  Ten Thousand Lovers

  Look For Me

  A Wall of Light

  FOR CHILDREN AND YOUNG ADULTS

  The Thrilling Life of Pauline de Lammermoor

  The Mysterious Adventures of Pauline Bovary

  The Secret Journey of Pauline Siddhartha

  The Saver

  EDEET RAVEL

  YOUR SAD EYES

  AND UNFORGETTABLE

  MOUTH

  PENGUIN CANADA

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada),

  a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2008

  Published in this edition, 2009

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (WEB)

  Copyright © Edeet Ravel, 2008

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this

  publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any

  form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the

  prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead,

  events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in Canada.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Ravel, Edeet, 1955-

  Your sad eyes and unforgettable mouth / Edeet Ravel.

  ISBN 978-0-14-316997-0

  I. Title.

  PS8585.A8715Y69 2009 C813’.54 C2009-902206-0

  * * *

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by

  way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without

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  Visit the Penguin Group (Canada) website at www.penguin.ca

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  For Larissa

  kindest of souls,

  brilliant and wise

  There is a name for us now: we can, if we wish, call ourselves the second generation. We have websites; books have been written about us. But back then we were alone with our parents, and they were alone with their survival. Limping and stunned, they returned from the Nazi camps. How does one reconcile that world and this one? No one has the answer. It seems impossible, and yet they for
ged new lives; but even those who had not lost their minds had lost their orientation.

  One way or another, we, their children, inherited fragments of their memories. We were the children who came to reclaim the world, proxies for ghosts. Hovering always between resistance and compliance, we did what we could.

  SHIRI ARYEH

  Yes, it’s been a boozy evening. Patrick’s back in Montreal for his mother’s funeral and I suggested we meet at a downtown brasserie. He was already there when I arrived, but I didn’t notice him at first; the place was crowded and dimly lit, and he was seated at the far end, facing away from the door, his hair thinner now. I almost settled down at the bar to wait for him, but then I spotted his wife, whom I recognized from a photo his mother had shown me—glasses, delicate features—and I made my way to their table. Patrick scowled slightly when he saw me, and introduced his wife in a distracted way, as if he’d only met her a few minutes ago. Her name is Adar and she works for an academic publisher, translating Hebrew and Spanish texts into English.

  Adar wasn’t very talkative, but she was watching us closely, and I felt she was trying to extract clues from what we said and how we said it. Clues about what? About Patrick, I think.

  Patrick’s profession intersects with mine: his work at the university library includes curating, and he’s interested in art history—or art reception, as I prefer to call it. Instead of catching up, we clung to the present; we discussed document preservation, current trends in teaching or not teaching theory, climate change. The three of us were hemmed in on both sides by tinted mirrors that allowed us to see kinder versions of ourselves; as the evening progressed and the vodka flowed, the mirrors became increasingly co-operative.

  I’m back at my Plateau triplex now. Holding on to the cold, wrought-iron railing, I negotiated the spiral staircase to my front door. The triangular steps are treacherous in winter, but we’re all attached to this architectural quirk for which our neighbourhood is famous, are quite proud of it, in fact—even though keeping the stairs clear of ice and snow is an ongoing challenge.

  It’s late, but I’m not at all sleepy. I checked my email: no new messages. And then, in that post-alcoholic surrender to fate, I opened a blank page and stared at it, as if waiting for a sign from above—or below—to appear on the screen.

  Does Adar know our story, I wonder. Has Patrick broken the pact, now that his mother has died? Or did he tell Adar when they first met, in spite of his admonition that Rosie and I never tell anyone, not even our lovers?

  Our story—that’s what I want to write about. A tale of love: my love for Rosie, Anthony’s fleeting love for me, Patrick’s love for no one. As I gazed at the mirrors in the brasserie, it seemed to me that the people we weren’t talking about were hovering there, behind our reflections, waiting to be acknowledged. Or was it seeing Patrick’s casual cruelty towards Adar that sent me somersaulting back in time?

  I may change my mind tomorrow and abandon this project. I may not have the stamina—which is a sly way of saying I’m half-afraid. I have the time, if I need it. It’s Friday night, and since I’m only teaching two courses this semester, a four-day weekend looms ahead. The women whose ranks I swell at Sororité—our city’s last surviving lesbian bar—will manage, somehow, without me. I’m being facetious, of course—though I don’t know exactly how I feel about my dependence on that laid-back neverland, where we are indeed growing older, but in a cloistered haven of our own. Let all who are hungry … Even if I do not find at Sororité whatever it is I hunger for, I do find distraction from hunger.

  In any case, I will stay at home this weekend and embark on this phantom-laden voyage. I will try to write out, write down, an account of our star-crossed saga. I’ve even pulled out of a back drawer the diary I kept long ago, when I was a teenager.

  This diary of a young girl not in hiding, not heroic, consists of twenty-three spiral Hilroy notebooks, 81/2 by 11 inches, sixty lined pages each, though I rarely stayed in the lines. The first notebooks have cheap, mud-brown covers, rough to the touch. Then Hilroy noticed that the times they were a-changin’ and the covers were redesigned to attract flower children: three Canadian geese against a grey and orange sky; a skier, illuminated by a flash of blinding sun, spraying snow crystals as he swerves down a hill; six hikers resting on the ground, their legs raised on backpacks.

  Everything is here, inside these pages: our shifting and shuffling, our small victories and elaborate blunders.

  In I go.

  1968

  I lived back then with my courageous mother and, luckily, my grandmother, in an upper duplex on Bedford Street, in the Côte des Neiges district.

  A pretty name, Côte des Neiges, evoking images of snow angels and silver skates, but to Montrealers the words suggest an immigrant population, neighbourhoods running to various stages of seediness, small shops. Forty years ago, there were fewer seedy stretches, and Jews newly arrived from Europe or seeking escape from the noisy Plateau chose to settle on the more respectable streets: Kent, Linton, Bourret. We liked the worn-out witticism: God gave Moses Canada because he stuttered; he’d meant to say Canaan. All that has changed; these days, other immigrants live on Linton and Kent.

  The rooms of our Home Sweet Home were arranged in a claustrophobic ring around a central foyer. The living room faced the street, my bedroom came next, then the kitchen—with a door leading to the back balcony. A bathroom and my mother’s bedroom, which she shared with my grandmother, completed the asymmetrical circle. The hapless architect had left the foyer for last, and it was oddly shaped, a by-product of the five unevenly spaced rooms.

  But the floor plan was the least of it—the entire building was doomed by its white-tile facade, low ceilings, plywood doors. These paltry efforts aroused my sympathy: I felt sorry for the aluminum windows, the stippled taupe-and-white linoleum in the kitchen, the unloved and unlovable wall-to-wall carpets. They were doing their best.

  Here, then, on a rainy Saturday in April—April 15, 1968, to be exact—I, Maya Levitsky, daughter of Fanya and the late Josef Levitsky, could be found soaking in a scrubbed and sterilized lavender-blue bathtub, after a windy, drizzly journey to the Atwater Library and back. I was in love with the Atwater Library, in love with the majestic reading room, polished pine tables, vaulted ceilings, enormous arched windows, and the skylight of diamond panes surrounded by garlands in low relief—yes, garlands! Someone had gone to all that trouble, just for a ceiling. And of course the books, shelves and shelves of art books, shelves and shelves of novels. That’s what I did on weekends: I read at the library, and when I grew tired of reading I leafed through folio-sized reproductions of famous paintings. The art prints held as much intrigue and drama as the novels: Venus and Cupid in erotic embrace, angels and weeping mothers, village squares, sunsets and nightmares, a lone woman in a red hat waiting for a train …

  I sat up in the bath and submerged my legs, then slid back down as my knees went up. Maya, the human accordion. I never did mind my overly long, overly freckled body, and I felt protected by my Pre-Raphaelite red hair. Right now, though, with my head immersed up to my ears, I felt like Millais’s floating Ophelia. That very morning I’d read the story behind the Ophelia painting: Millais’s docile model, Elizabeth Siddal, had posed in a tub in the dead of winter and, not wanting to interrupt the artist at work, said nothing when the lamps heating the tub went out. As a result she contracted pneumonia, and her father sued. All in all, I preferred Waterhouse’s Ophelias, eager and sensual in white-and-gold and blue-and-gold. Waterhouse, like us, craved an alteration of the sad plot, wanted to keep Ophelia alive and well.

  Here I am, then, in the water, in the house, neither posing nor drowning, twelve years old and already nearly six feet tall. How did I come by my height? Both my mother and Bubby Miriam, who was my father’s mother, barely reached my shoulder, and according to them, my father was also on the short side. Someone in the lost and distant past must have been tall—an aunt, a second cousin. I imagined my giant ancesto
r, swinging in a rocking chair somewhere in Eastern Europe, knitting herself a shawl for the winter. On and on it trailed, past her knees and along the floor.

  At school they called me Beanstalk. We owned a hand-me-down copy of Jack and the Beanstalk, donated by one of my mother’s card-playing friends. I’d read the story to Bubby a hundred times; she never tired of it, and neither did I. Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, I said in a deep, hollow voice, and we both laughed like goofs. It was never entirely clear whether my bubby understood English, but there were illustrations to help us out.

  The beanstalk in the story grew and grew, exactly like me—like a Cossack—my mother liked to say. She touched me as if I were an amulet, kissed my arm because she couldn’t reach my face unless I hunched down. I didn’t hunch down—not for her. I bent down for Bubby but not for Fanya. Yield to my poor mother’s unfeasible demands, her gluey woes, and you could end up like Elizabeth Siddal—or Ophelia.

  So there I was, with or without Cossack blood, steeping in a bubble bath. When the water began to cool, I used my toes to rotate the faucet with the faded red dot. Through the thin walls I could hear Bubby clattering in the kitchen. That was the only sort of noise my grandmother ever made: she wore cloth slippers over her bumpy bunions, and she usually crept soundlessly through the carpeted rooms, but when she baked, a tin-pan racket filled the apartment.

  It was quiet, apart from that. My mother was out; she worked on Saturdays and sometimes on the way home she stopped at Steinberg’s to buy groceries. In the Fanya-free stillness—even the furniture seemed to breathe a sigh of relief when my mother was away—I contemplated my body. I approved of it, on the whole. Like the apartment, it was doing its best, though in addition to being excessively long, it was angular, disproportionate, my shoulders too broad, the rest of me bony. I’d found a replica of my naked body at the library, in a painting by the fifteenth-century illuminator Belbello da Pavia. Belbello—what a divine name!—left us an Adam and Eve who look as if they’ve run into each other accidentally at the pizzeria (the cute red-and-green building on the left) and are trying to decide between the all-dressed and the double cheese. Adam’s body resembled mine; maybe Belbello couldn’t find a male model. Or maybe I had a man’s body. All in all, I was lucky that my nickname at school was Beanstalk and not Frankenstein.