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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  Okay: crisis averted. I lit the oven, unwrapped the chicken, sawed the top off the bread loaf with the good knife from Broadway Panhandler, and began clawing out the soft inside.

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  “I have a confession to make,” he said as I lit the candles. “I smoked most of a pack of cigarettes last night.”

  “Steven,” I said. “You didn’t.”

  “I decided I’m not going to do it anymore,” he said.

  “How come you did it at all?”

  “Well, we had that—and believe me, I’m not blaming you—but we

  had that unpleasantness yesterday that never really got resolved, and I felt like I was under the gun with those pictures, which it turns out I’m not, I mean I’m actually in very good shape with them. I think all it really was, I was just looking for an excuse to do it. So I did it.”

  “I don’t know what to say. I’m sorry if I contributed.” I began cutting the stuffed bread loaf into inch-thick slices.

  He shook his head. “Not your responsibility. It was my choice.”

  “And you had them around,” I said.

  “Yeah. I had them around.” He did his snorting laugh. “But I think this has taught me something. I mean, if you weren’t reason enough, there ’s Trigger Junior to think of.” Trigger Junior was his provisional name for the baby.

  “What about you?” I said. “Aren’t you reason enough?”

  “Well, I never have been,” he said. “Maybe that ’s changing. Did I tell you? I think these pills might be starting to do something. This morning I woke up and I felt just sort of—I don’t know. Not heavy of heart for a change. I can’t really describe it. But I definitely didn’t want a cigarette, despite putting all that nicotine into my system last night. Which I find almost scary.”

  “But that ’s wonderful,” I said. I laid a slice on his plate and a slice on mine.

  “God, that looks splendid,” he said. “At any rate. Full disclosure.”

  He cut off a corner and speared it with his fork. “I’m assuming we still care about that.”

  “I think we do.” What else was I to say?

  “Good.” He put the corner in his mouth. “Mmm. Surpassed your-

  self.”

  “I’m glad you like it,” I said, not meaning it to sound that dismal.

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  “In the interest of even fuller disclosure,” he said, “I must further confess to you that I nipped a bit at the cognac while you were out this afternoon. I don’t actually know why. Except that it was like, I really wasn’t craving a cigarette and that freaked me out. It was like nothing was wrong, you know? And that made me suspicious that something

  was really wrong that I didn’t even dare bring to consciousness, so I thought I’d better drink to sort of preempt it. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. I wasn’t paying attention. How could he not have noticed that so much was gone out of that goddamn bottle? And now what? Try to keep him out of the kitchen and pour out some of what you just poured in?

  We ate.

  He took a second slice.

  Half of a third.

  Now he was talking about names for the baby. Lately he ’d been liking Margaret. Did I know that was the same as Pearl?

  “The same in what sense?” I said, getting up to clear the table.

  “You know, etymologically,” he said. He stood up too, and reached for the platter with the remains of the stuffed bread loaf.

  “Sit,” I said. “I’ll take care of it. I think you’ve had a hard day.”

  “Only in my head.” He carried the platter and the salad bowl out to the kitchen; I set the plates and glasses on the counter next to the sink.

  “Tinfoil be the best thing?” he said, pulling open the drawer.

  “Why don’t you just let me take care of it?” I said. I snatched the foil out of his hands. “Just go and sit and relax. Actually, you know what would be lovely? If you would put on some music, I’ll take care of this stuff and then bring our desserts out to the living room. How would that be?”

  “Now you’re talkin’,” he said. He took down a brandy snifter.

  “What are you doing?” I said. “I’ll get that for you. Go and sit

  down.”

  “I can get it.” He opened the cupboard door, took out the bottle of Rémy, looked at it and said, “What the hell?”

  He looked at me. Then I saw his eyes go down to my hands and get

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  big. I looked down, too. I was sawing the saw thing on the aluminum-foil box across the thumbprint part of my thumb. There was blood on the front of me.

  “You’ve been drinking,” he said.

  “Obviously,” I said. I couldn’t feel the pain yet. I had a picture in my head of a bad person in shame.

  “You’re pregnant and you’re drunk?” he said. “Don’t you know

  what that can do? Do you care? How could you do it? What the hell is going on in your mind?”

  “I’m not drunk,” I said.

  “You’re a whore,” he said. “Where did you go this afternoon?”

  I wasn’t angry. Or frightened, really, even though I cringed to

  appease him. He would never be a hitter. That fist he was raising at me would wham into the cupboard door, hurting only himself. I saw it all happening, then it really did happen. But I didn’t understand the whore thing. Why was he confusing the drinking with the other? Then I got it.

  Obvious. It was all mixed up for him, all the same thing: the drinking, the other, anything that could make a woman free.

  f i r s t l o v e

  i s a a c b a b e l

  When I was ten years old I fell in love with a woman called Galina Apollonovna. Her last name was Rubtsova. Her husband, an

  officer, went off to the Japanese war and returned in the October of 1905. He brought many trunks back with him. These trunks contained Chinese objects: screens, precious weapons, thirty poods in all. Kuzma told us that Rubtsov had bought these objects with the money he had made in military service in the directorate of the Engineering Corps of the Manchurian Army. Not only Kuzma, but other people said the same thing. People found it hard not to gossip about the Rubtsovs, for the Rubtsovs were happy. Their house was adjacent to our property, their glass veranda usurped a part of our land, but Father had not quarrelled with them on that account. Rubtsov, the tax assessor, had a reputation in our town as a fair man who maintained friendly relations with Jews.

  And when the officer, the old man’s son, arrived back from the Japanese war, we all saw how well and happily they settled down together.

  Galina Apollonovna held her husband ’s hands for whole days on end.

  She could not take her eyes off him, because she had not seen her husband for one and a half years, but I felt horror at her gaze, turned away and trembled. In her exultant eyes I saw the wonderful, shameful life of all people upon earth, I wanted to fall asleep in an extraordinary slum-ber, in order to forget about that life that exceeded all my dreams. Galina Apollonovna used to stroll about the rooms with her hair down, wearing red shoes and a Chinese peignoir. Under the lace of her low-cut chemise one could see the deepening and beginning of her white, swelling, downwards-crushed breasts, and on her robe there were embroidered pink silk dragons, birds, hollow trees.

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  All day she lounged about with a vacant smile on her moist lips,

  bumping into the trunks that had not yet been unpacked and the gymnastic rope ladders that were littered about the floor. If she had bruised herself, she would lift her peignoir above her knees and say to her husband:

  ‘Give baby a kiss . . .’

  And the officer, flexing his long legs in their
narrow dragoon’s trousers, their spurs, their close-fitting, kidskin boots, would get down on the dirty floor and, smiling, moving his legs and crawling across on his knees, kiss the hurt place, the place where there was a swollen crease from the garter. I saw those kisses from my window. They caused me suffering. Unbridled fantasies tormented me, but this is not worth talking about, for the love and jealousy of ten-year-old boys are in every respect similar to the love and jealousy of grown men, except that in boys these feelings are more secret, more exalted, more ardent. For two weeks I did not go to the window and avoided Galina until a chance incident brought us together. This chance incident was the anti-Jewish pogrom that in 1905 broke out in Nikolayev and other towns within the Jewish pale. Crowds of hired murderers ransacked my father’s shop and killed my Grand-uncle Shoyl. All this happened in my absence, on the sad morning when I was buying doves from Ivan Nikodimych the

  hunter. For five years out of the ten I had lived, I had dreamed about doves with all the power of my soul, and then, when I had bought them, Makarenko the cripple had smashed the doves on my temple. Then

  Kuzma took me to the Rubtsovs. On the gate of the Rubtsovs’ house a cross had been drawn in chalk, they were left alone, they hid my parents in their house. Kuzma took me to the glass veranda. There in the green rotunda sat Mother and Galina.

  ‘We must wash,’ said Galina, ‘we must wash, little rabbi . . . Our whole face is covered in feathers, and the feathers have blood on them . . .’

  She embraced me and led me along a passage that had a sharp odour.

  My head lay on Galina’s hip, her hip moved and breathed. We arrived at the kitchen, and Rubtsova put me under the tap. A tall goose was simmering on a tiled stove, gleaming kitchen utensils hung along the

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  walls, and beside the utensils, in the cook’s corner, hung Tsar Nicholas, adorned with paper flowers. Galina washed off the remains of the dove that had dried on my cheeks.

  ‘You shall be a bridegroom, my little snub-nose,’ she said, kissing me on the lips with her pouting mouth and looking round.

  ‘Little rabbi,’ she whispered suddenly, ‘look, your papa is upset just now, he walks about the streets all day doing nothing. Why don’t you call your papa home . . . ?’

  And through the window I saw the deserted street with an enormous sky above it and my red-haired father walking along the roadway. He had no hat covering his lightly ruffled red hair; his cotton shirt-front was turned askew and fastened by some button or other, but not the one it ought to have been fastened by. Vlasov, an emaciated workman in wadded soldier’s rags, was following my father relentlessly.

  ‘Babel,’ he was saying in a hoarse, earnest voice, touching my father affectionately with both hands, ‘we don’t need freedom so that the Yids can be free to haggle . . . Give light to the life of a working man for his labour, for this terrible great labour . . . Give it to him, friend, do you hear, give it to him . . .’

  The workman was begging Father for something and touching him;

  flashes of pure, drunken inspiration alternated in his face with dejection and sleepiness.

  ‘Our lives ought to be like those of the Milk-drinkers,’ he muttered, tottering on his unsteady legs, ‘our lives ought to be like the Milk-drinkers’, only without that Old Believers’ God. It ’s the Jews who profit from him, no one else . . .’

  And Vlasov, with wild despair, began to shout about the Old Believers’ God, who took pity only on the Jews. Vlasov cried out, stumbled and tried to catch up with his unknown God, but at that moment a Cossack mounted patrol crossed his path. An officer in trousers with stripes down the seams and a silver parade belt rode at the head of the detachment, a tall peaked cap on his head. The officer rode slowly and without looking to either side. He rode as though he were in a ravine, where one can only look ahead.

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  ‘Captain,’ whispered Father, when the Cossack drew level with him,

  ‘captain,’ said Father, gripping his head, and he got down on his knees in the mud.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ replied the officer, looking ahead of him as before, and he brought his hand in its lemon suede glove up to his peaked cap.

  Ahead, on the corner of Rybnaya Street, ruffians were smashing our shop and throwing out boxes of nails, the machines and the new portrait of me in school uniform.

  ‘There,’ said Father without getting up off his knees, ‘they are smashing the things that are vital to me, captain, and why . . .’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ the officer muttered, put his lemon glove to his cap and touched the reins, but his horse did not move. Father crawled in front of it on his knees, rubbing against its short, good-natured, slightly ruffled legs and its thick, patient, hairy muzzle.

  ‘Yes, sir!’ repeated the captain; he jerked the reins and rode away, the Cossacks moving off after him. They sat dispassionately in their high saddles, they rode through their imaginary ravine and disappeared from view at the turning into Sobornaya Street.

  Then Galina again pushed me to the window.

  ‘Call your papa home,’ she said, ‘he hasn’t had anything to eat since early morning.’

  And I stuck my head out of the window.

  ‘Papa,’ I said.

  Father turned round when he heard my voice.

  ‘My little son,’ he mouthed with inexpressible tenderness, and began to tremble with love for me.

  And together we went to the Rubtsovs’ veranda, where Mother lay in the green rotunda. Beside her bed lay dumbbells and gymnastic equip-ment.

  ‘Lousy copecks,’ Mother said to us in greeting, ‘human life and children and our unlucky fortune—you gave them everything . . . Lousy copecks,’ she shouted in a deep, hoarse voice that was not her own, jerked on the bed and grew quiet.

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  And then, in the silence, I hiccupped. I stood by the wall with my cap pulled down over my eyes and could not stop hiccupping.

  ‘For shame, my little snub-nose.’ Galina smiled with her disdainful smile and flicked me with her stiff peignoir. She walked over to the window in her red shoes and began to hang Chinese curtains on the unusual window ledge. Her exposed arms drowned in the silk, the living tress of her hair moved on her hip and I looked at her with rapture.

  A bookish, nervous boy, I looked at her as if she were a remote stage lit by many lights. And at the same time I imagined I was Miron, the son of the charcoal-dealer who traded on our corner. I imagined myself in the Jewish Self-Defence League and there I am, like Miron, walking in tattered shoes that are tied with string. On my shoulder, on a green cord, hangs a worthless rifle; I am kneeling by an old wooden fence, shooting back at the murderers. Behind my fence stretches a vacant lot, and in it there are piles of dusty charcoal. The useless rifle shoots badly, the assassins in beards, with white teeth, are coming closer and closer to me; I experience a proud sense of imminent death and see, high up, in the blueness of the world, Galina. I see an embrasure cut in the wall of a gigantic house that is built of myriads of bricks. This purple house defies the lane in which the grey earth has been badly flattened; at its topmost embrasure stands Galina, flushed with a merciless winter gaiety, like a rich girl at a skating rink. With her disdainful smile she is smiling from the inaccessible window; her officer husband, half-dressed, is standing behind her, kissing her on the neck . . .

  As I tried to stop hiccupping I imagined all this so as to love Rubtsova more bitterly, more ardently, more hopelessly, and, perhaps, because the bounds of sorrow are not great for one who is ten years old. The foolish dreams helped me to forget the doves and the death of Shoyl, I might even have forgotten about these murders had not Kuzma come on to the veranda at that moment with that terrible Jew Aba.

  It was dusk when they arrived. On the veranda burned a meagre

  lamp, somehow lopsided at one end, a blinking lamp, the spasmodic travelling companion o
f misfortunes.

  ‘I’ve got grandad all dressed up nice,’ said Kuzma, as he came in, ‘he

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  lies there very handsome now. And look, I’ve brought someone from the synagogue, let him say something over the old man . . .’

  And Kuzma pointed to the bored beadle, Aba.

  ‘Let him whimper for a bit,’ said the yardkeeper, amicably. ‘If the beadle stuffs his gut, he will bother God all night . . .’

  He stood on the threshold—Kuzma—with his good-natured, bro-

  ken nose turned in all directions, and was about to describe with as much emotion as possible how he had bound the dead man’s jaws, but Father interrupted the old man:

  ‘If you please, Reb Aba,’ said Father, ‘say a prayer or two over the deceased. I will pay you . . .’

  ‘But I fear you will not pay,’ Aba replied in a bored voice, putting his bearded, fastidious face on the tablecloth, ‘I fear you will take my money and go away with it to Argentina, to Buenos Aires, and open there a wholesale business with my money . . . A wholesale business,’

  said Aba, giving his contemptuous lips a chew and pulling towards him the Son of the Fatherland newspaper that lay on the table. In this newspaper there was a report about the tsar’s manifesto of 17 October and about freedom.

  ‘. . . Citizens of Free Russia,’ Aba spelled out, chewing his beard which he had stuffed into his mouth, ‘citizens of Free Russia, a bright Sunday of Christ ’s Resurrection to you . . .’

  The newspaper was sideways before the old beadle, swaying: he read it sleepily, singsong-fashion, and pronouncing the Russian words he did not know with extraordinary stresses. Aba’s stresses were like the indistinct speech of a Negro who has just arrived in a Russian port from his native land. They made even my mother laugh.