My Mistress's Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Other times, I would just go and open the door. We spent most of our days in the basement. I read and Natasha studied television English. When I had a delivery to make she accompanied me. Between reading, television English, and deliveries, I taught Natasha how to get high. I showed her how to roll a joint, to light a pipe, or, in a pinch, where to cut the holes in a Coke can or Gatorade bottle. In exchange, Natasha taught me other things. Many of these things had nothing to do with sex.

  After our days in the basement we would listen for my mother to

  arrive home from work. To avoid some serious unpleasantness I made a habit of setting my alarm for five o’clock. If we weren’t sleeping, the alarm simply reminded us to open a window or get dressed. By the time my mother came home we were usually in the kitchen or out in the backyard. Chores that had been assigned to me were usually done at this time. It pleased my mother to come home and find me, spade in hand, turning over the earth around the berry bushes. Also, once it was established that Natasha much preferred to stay at our house, my mother grew more than accustomed to having her around. Unlike me and my father, Natasha volunteered to help her in the kitchen. The two of them would stand at the sink peeling potatoes and slicing up radishes and cucumbers for salad. I often came in to overhear my mother telling stories about her childhood in postwar Latvia—a land of outhouses, horse-drawn wagons, and friendly neighbors. In Natasha she found a receptive audience. They spoke the same language—Russian girl to Russian girl. This despite the fact that, in too many ways, Natasha’s childhood couldn’t have been more different from my mother’s if she had been raised by Peruvian cannibals, but there was never any indication of this in our kitchen. Only my mother telling stories and Natasha listening.

  Very quickly, our family of three became a family of four. No more than two weeks after I picked her up at my uncle ’s apartment Natasha

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  became a fixture at our house. It was a situation that, for different and even perversely conflicting reasons, suited everyone. It solved the Natasha problem for my uncle. It solved the Zina problem for Natasha. It made my mother feel like she was protecting my uncle ’s last chance at happiness and also satisfying her own latent desire for a daughter. It absolved me of the need to find a job and cast me in a generally favor-able light with the rest of my family. And, strangely enough, Natasha’s incorporation into the household made the things we did in the basement seem less bad. Or not bad at all. What we did in the basement became only a part of who we were. There were layers upon layers. Which was why, at any one moment, I felt for Natasha the most natural and unusual feelings; to explain the feelings would be impossible, but whatever they were they were never bad.

  Since I had been conditioned to approach sex as negotiation, I was amazed to discover that it could be as perfunctory as brushing your teeth.

  One day, after some but not too many days together, Natasha simply slid out of her jeans and removed her shirt. We were sitting inches apart, each on our own beanbag. Moments before, we had finished smoking a joint and I had gone back to Kafka’s diaries. I became aware of what she was doing slower than a sixteen-year-old should have. I looked over as she was wriggling out of her pants. That she saw me looking changed nothing. On the beanbag, naked, she turned to me and said, very simply, as if it were as insignificant to her as it was significant to me: Do you want to? At sixteen, no expert but no virgin, I lived in a permanent state of want to. But for everything I knew, I knew almost nothing. In the middle of the day, Natasha in the basement, was the first time I had seen a live naked girl. All the parts available for viewing. Nothing in my previous dimly lit gropings compared. In my teenage life, what was more elusive than a properly illuminated naked girl? And the fact that it was Natasha—my nominal cousin, fourteen, strange—no longer mattered. After spending days with her and thinking about her at night, I knew very well how I felt. And so, when she asked if I wanted to, I wanted to.

  That day was the first of many firsts. With the house to ourselves and no threat of being disturbed, we did everything I had ever dreamed of doing—including some things that hadn’t even occurred to me. We

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  showered together, we slept in the same bed, I watched her walk across the room, I watched her pee. These prosaic things, being new, were as exciting as the sex. And for me the sex was as much about the variation as the pleasure. Much of the pleasure was in the variation. I kept a mental list from position to position, crossing off one accomplishment after another. Nothing was repeated until everything was attempted. That way, in the event that I was struck by a bus, I would feel as though I had lived a full life. Most of the things we did Natasha had already done, but she was perfectly happy to oblige. If she was doing it as a favor, she never expected gratitude and demanded nothing in return.

  In our quieter moments Natasha told me about the men who had

  taken her picture. She had never minded any of it, but she never understood why they couldn’t explain why they liked one thing over another.

  They had always known exactly how they wanted her to look but none of them could give her a reason. Why did they prefer her leg raised this way and not that, why squatting from behind or holding her hand in a certain position? Some of the positions had been practically identical, and yet they had insisted on them. The only explanation they offered was that it looked good, or that it was sexy. And yet she never felt that way about men. She never cared how they looked, or what side she was viewing them from.

  —You don’t care how I look?

  —You look how you look. If you bent over it wouldn’t make any

  difference to me.

  I bent over.

  —That doesn’t make any difference?

  —It looks stupid. But what if I bend over? Does it look stupid?

  —No, it looks good.

  —Why is that?

  —It just does.

  —You can’t explain it?

  I thought it had to do with the forbidden. The attraction to the forbidden in the forbidden. The forbiddenest. But it still wasn’t much of an answer.

  *

  *

  *

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  At the same time that things with Natasha were improving my mother started to hear the first rumblings of trouble in my uncle ’s marriage.

  My grandparents, who had been accustomed to visiting my uncle frequently, were informed that maybe they shouldn’t come over quite so often. Their habit of arriving unannounced was aggravating Zina, who insisted that she had too much to worry about without always having to accommodate my grandparents. My grandmother, although hurt, naturally made excuses for both my uncle and Zina. We were a close family, she said, but not all people can be expected to be the same way. Also, with time, as Zina became more comfortable, she was certain that she would feel differently. In any case, as long as my uncle was happy she was prepared to respect Zina’s wishes. My uncle, for his part, said nothing. The signals were mixed. There was what my grandmother said, but my mother also knew that he and Zina took a weekend trip together to Niagara-on-the-Lake and another to Quebec City. After Quebec City my uncle sported a new leather jacket and a gray Stetson. Whatever was happening between them, he wasn’t complaining.

  I heard all of these things through my mother, but I also heard other things from Natasha. I now knew more about my uncle ’s life than I ever had, and certainly more than anyone else in my family. I knew, for instance, that he now spent as many nights on the living room couch as he did in the bedroom. I knew that Zina was racking up long-distance bills to Moscow, calling Natasha’s father, a drunk who had effectively abandoned them years ago. She called in the mornings as soon as my uncle left for work and made various and emphatic promises. Natasha had seen her father only infrequently as a child, and was perfectly content to go the rest of her life without seeing him a
gain. She could say the same thing about her mother. Essentially, since the age of eight, she had been on her own. Going to school, coming home, cooking her own dinners, running around with friends. Zina, when not at work, was chasing after Natasha’s father or bringing random men into the apartment. As much as possible, Natasha avoided her.

  When Natasha was twelve a friend of hers told her about a man who paid ten dollars for some pictures of her. The girl had gone and taken a shower in the man’s bathroom and he had not only paid her but also

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  bought her dinner. He had promised her the same again if she could bring a friend. Ten dollars each for taking a shower. Natasha remembered thinking that the man had to be an idiot. She went, took her shower, and collected her ten dollars. There wasn’t much to it and it wasn’t as boring as hanging out at her friend ’s apartment. And ten dollars was ten dollars. Zina hardly gave her anything, and so it was good to have some of her own money.

  After that man was another who took pictures of her and some

  friends in the forest. He had them climb birch trees and lie down in a meadow. He asked some of the girls to hold hands and kiss each other.

  Another man took some photos of her in her school uniform. None of these men touched her, but she wouldn’t have cared if they had. They were nice and she felt sorry for them.

  All of this led eventually to a Soviet director who had gone from working at the Moscow studios to making pornographic movies for

  Western businessmen. The man had a dacha on the outskirts of the city and would send a car around to pick up Natasha and her friends. Some of these friends were girls, some boys. They would spend the day at the dacha eating, drinking, having a good time. At some point the director would shoot some movies of them. Aside from teenagers there were also older women. On the first day, Natasha watched the women have sex. She understood that doing it or not doing it was not a serious consideration. In the end, everyone did it. If not in movies, then somewhere else, and it made absolutely no difference one way or the other. The only thing about having sex at the dacha was that it was much more pleasant.

  The house was beautiful and there was a large lawn and a forest. There was also a banya and a Jacuzzi. The filming itself didn’t even take very long. The rest of the time they just relaxed. She was never asked to do anything she didn’t want to, and she never saw anyone else do something that she wouldn’t have done herself. Even though she and her friends knew they wouldn’t be at the dacha if it weren’t for the movies, the sex never felt as though it were the focus. The director and the other men became their friends. They treated them very well. And if they wanted to sleep with the girls, the girls could see no reason why not. At the end of the day everyone got twenty-five dollars.

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  Natasha didn’t have any of the pictures or movies, which was disappointing since I wanted to see them. But it wasn’t like she was a model.

  She didn’t keep an album of pictures to show to prospective photogra-phers. She was the album. They looked at her and preferred not to know about her past. And without having pictures around there was no risk of Zina finding out what Natasha was doing. Not that she thought Zina would care, instead it was that Natasha suspected Zina would want the money. In any case, when Zina did finally find out it was only because she heard something from another girl’s mother. And much as Natasha expected, Zina told her that if she was going to be a whore she could at least help out with the rent. Natasha never felt like a whore. She didn’t do it for the money, but she also wasn’t so stupid as to turn it down. If anyone was a whore, it was Zina. And she came cheap. She sold herself to Natasha’s father for nothing, and the men she brought to the apartment treated her like filth. They paid her with curses and bruises.

  I carried all this information around like a prize. It was my connection to a larger darker world. At Rufus’s parties it allowed me to feel superior to the other stoner acolytes comparing Nietzsche to Bob Marley. I took Natasha to these parties and she stood quietly listening to our incoherent and impassioned conversations. Later she would surprise me with just how much she had understood. By midsummer, if called upon, Natasha could answer basic questions and had learned enough to know when to tell someone to fuck off. The other stoners liked more than anything to hear Natasha say fuck off in her crisp Moscow accent. In crude canine fashion, they accepted Natasha as one of their own. Natasha was cool.

  We coasted this way into August when Zina appeared in our back-

  yard one evening during dinner. The way she looked, it was clear that something horrible was about to happen. My mother opened the sliding door and Zina burst into our kitchen and inaccurately described what Natasha and I had been doing. Then screams, sobbing, and hysterics.

  I watched as my father wrenched Natasha from her mother, her teeth leaving a bloody wound on Zina’s hand. Zina let fly a torrent of invec-tive, most of which I couldn’t understand. But I understood enough to know that what was happening in the kitchen was nothing compared

  with what was to come. Zina threatened to call the police, to place an ad

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  in the Russian newspaper, to personally knock on all of our neighbors’

  doors. Natasha thrashed in my father’s grip and freed herself enough to lunge unsuccessfully for a bread knife. She shrieked that her mother was a liar. I sat in my chair, nauseated, contemplating lies and escape.

  After my father bandaged Zina’s hand she waited outside while my

  mother talked with Natasha and me. With Zina outside my mother fumbled for the proper way to pose the question. It was hard to believe that what Zina was saying was true, but why would she make something like this up. Natasha said that it was because her mother hated her and never wanted her to be happy. She was jealous that Natasha was happy with us and wanted to ruin it, just as she had dragged Natasha from Moscow even though she hadn’t wanted to go. Zina hated her and wanted to ruin her life, that was all. When my mother turned to me I denied everything.

  Unless Zina produced pictures or video I wasn’t admitting a thing. I was terrified but I wasn’t a moron.

  When it became obvious that we had reached an impasse, my mother

  called my uncle. He came to our house in a state of anxiety that was remarkable even for him. He sat down between my mother and Zina

  on the living room couch. I was beside my father, who was in his armchair, and Natasha stood rigidly with her back against the door. My uncle confessed that he didn’t know what was happening. Everything had been fine. What situation doesn’t have problems, but on the whole he was content. The only explanation he could propose was that all of this might have had to do with a fight between Zina and Natasha over a phone bill. There had been a very expensive bill to Russia, almost six hundred dollars, which Zina had said were calls to her mother. He could understand that while getting used to a new life Zina would want to talk to her mother. Also, her mother was alone in Moscow and missed her. It was only natural that there would be calls. That there were so many was unfortunately a financial and not a personal problem. If it was within his means, he would be happy if Zina talked to her mother as much as she liked. But as it was, he had suggested that she try to be more careful about the amount of time she spent on the phone. They talked about it and she said she understood. It was then that Natasha accused Zina of lying to him and said she wanted her mother to tell him the truth about

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  who she had been calling. This started a fight. But at no point did he hear anything about me and Natasha. He was certain it wasn’t true and was just something between a mother and daughter. Everyone was still getting used to things and it would be a mistake to make too much of it. In a day or so everyone would calm down and it would be forgotten.

  That night my uncle, Zina, and Natasha slept at our house. Nat
asha in the guest room, Zina on the downstairs couch, and my uncle on the floor beside her. Zina refused to leave the house without Natasha and Natasha refused to leave with Zina. I was relegated to my basement. In the morning Natasha had indeed calmed down and she agreed to return home with Zina and my uncle. Forgoing breakfast, the three of them walked out the door neither looking at or touching one another. As we watched them go my mother announced that she had now seen enough

  craziness to last a lifetime. Whatever the truth, she knew one thing for certain: Natasha and I were kaput.

  The following day, after hours of waiting, I left the house and headed for Rufus’s. Books, bong, television; no distraction could eclipse the greater distraction of Natasha’s absence. I was alone in my basement, she was up eleven floors with Zina—I couldn’t understand why she didn’t come.

  Our afternoons could still be ours. My mother’s proscription didn’t have to be obeyed between nine and five. Had the situation been reversed, I would not have disappointed her. Despite everything that had happened the previous night, I couldn’t see why anything needed to change.

  Clearly, judging from the teeth marks on Zina’s hand, Natasha wasn’t Zina’s source of information. And even though Zina’s accusation happened to be more true than not, it appeared to be an unfortunate raving coincidence rather than something she could confirm. I didn’t see why I had to suffer because of a lunatic.

  A pool company’s van was parked outside Rufus’s and I followed

  the sound of voices into the backyard. In the middle of the yard, Rufus stood with two men from the pool company. Guys in jeans and golf

  shirts with the pool company’s logo stitched on the breast pocket. The three were talking like old friends, each with a beer in hand, discussing the possible dimensions of a possible pool. Rufus invited me to contrib-

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  ute to the deliberations. If the price was right they could start digging tomorrow.