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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  ‘I am committing a sin,’ she cried, leaning out from the rotunda. ‘I am laughing, Aba . . . Say, better, how do you live and how is your family?’

  ‘Ask me about something else,’ Aba muttered, without releasing his beard from his teeth, and continuing to read the newspaper.

  ‘Ask him about something else,’ Father said after Aba, and he went out into the middle of the room. His eyes, smiling at us through tears, suddenly turned in their orbits and fixed themselves on a point that was visible to no one else.

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  ‘ Oy, Shoyl,’ Father articulated in a level, false, preparatory voice,

  ‘ oy, Shoyl, dear man . . .’

  Father’s face, which had tightened into a spasm, was rent by exultation, and he was preparing to bawl as Jewish widows bawl at funerals or like old women in Morocco, old women who have landed in misfortune.

  We saw that he was going to bawl horribly, and Mother gave us advance warning.

  ‘Manus,’ she cried, growing instantly distraught, and beginning to tear at her husband’s breast, ‘look how our child suffers. Why do you not hear his little hiccups, why is this, Manus?’

  And Father fell silent. His dying eyes were surrounded by tears.

  ‘Rakhil,’ he said fearfully, ‘I cannot tell you, Rakhil, how sad I am about Shoyl . . .’

  He went into the kitchen and returned from it with a glass of water.

  ‘Drink, artiste,’ said Aba, coming over to me, ‘drink this water, which will help you just as a censer helps a dead man . . .’

  And, true enough, the water did not help me. I hiccupped all the

  more fiercely. A snarl escaped from my breast. A swelling, pleasant to the touch, rose up on my throat. The swelling breathed, filled out, covered my gullet and tumbled out of my collar. Within it bubbled my lacerated breath. It bubbled like boiling water. And when towards night I was no longer the lop-eared boy I had been throughout all of my previous life, and became a writhing ball, rolling in my own green vomit, Mother, wrapping herself in her shawl and gown, taller and more shapely, approached the rigid Rubtsova.

  ‘Dear Galina,’ said Mother in a loud, singing voice, ‘how we are

  troubling you and dear Nadezhda Ivanovna, and all your family . . . how ashamed I am, dear Galina . . .’

  With flaming cheeks Mother pushed Galina towards the door, then

  she rushed up to me and stuffed her shawl into my mouth to suppress my groans.

  ‘Be brave, dear son,’ she whispered, ‘be brave, my poor Babel, be brave for Mama . . .’

  But even if I had been able to put up with it, I would not have done so, because I no longer had any feeling of shame. I tossed about on the

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  bed and, falling to the floor, did not take my eyes off Galina. Fear was shaking the woman and making her writhe; I snarled in her face, so as to prolong my power over her; I snarled in triumph, in exhaustion, with the ultimate exertions of love.

  Thus did my illness begin. I was ten at the time. In the morning I was taken to see the doctor. The pogrom continued, but we were left alone.

  The doctor, a fat man, found that I had a nervous illness.

  ‘This illness,’ he said, ‘occurs only in Jews and among Jews it occurs only in women.’

  So the doctor was surprised to find I had such a strange illness. He told us to go to Odessa and the professors as soon as possible, and there await the warm weather and the sea bathing.

  And so we did. A few days later I travelled with Mother to Odessa to stay with Grandfather Levi-Itskhok and Uncle Simon. We sailed in the morning by steamer, and by midday the brown waters of the Bug gave way to the heavy green swell of the sea. Before me opened life in the home of crazy Uncle Levi-Itskhok, and I said farewell for ever to Nikolayev, where ten years of my childhood had passed. And now, when I remember those sad years, I find in them the beginning of the ailments that torment me, and the causes of my premature and dreadful decline.

  t o n k a

  r o b e rt m u s i l

  I

  At a hedge. A bird was singing. And then the sun was somewhere

  down behind the bushes. The bird stopped singing. It was eve-

  ning, and the peasant girls were coming across the fields, singing. What little things! Is it petty if such little things cling to a person? Like burrs?

  That was Tonka. Infinity sometimes flows in drips and drops.

  And the horse was part of it too, the roan that he had tied to a willow. It was during his year of military service. It was no mere chance that it was in that year, for there is no other time of life when a man is so deprived of himself and his own works, and an alien force strips everything from his bones. One is more vulnerable at this time than at any other.

  But had it really been like that at all? No, that was only what he had worked it up into later. That was the fairy-tale, and he could no longer tell the difference. In fact, of course, she had been living with her aunt at the time when he got to know her. And Cousin Julie sometimes came visiting. That was how it had been. He remembered being disconcerted by their sitting down at the same table with Cousin Julie over a cup of coffee, for she was, after all, a disgrace to the family. It was notorious that one could strike up a conversation with Cousin Julie and take her back to one ’s lodgings that same evening; she would also go to the bawdy-houses whenever she was wanted. She had no other source of income. Still, she was a relative, after all, even if one didn’t approve of the life she led; and even if she was a light woman, one couldn’t very well refuse to let her sit down at the table with one. Anyway, she didn’t

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  come very often. A man might have made a row about it, for a man

  reads the newspaper or belongs to some association with definite aims and is always throwing his weight about, but Auntie merely made a few cutting remarks after Julie had gone, and let it go at that. So long as she was there, they couldn’t help laughing at her jokes, for she had a quick tongue and always knew more about what was going on in town than

  anyone else. So, even if they disapproved of her, there was no unbridge-able gap between them; they had something in common.

  The women from the jail were another example of the same thing.

  Most of them were prostitutes too, and not long afterwards the jail itself had to be moved to another district because so many of them became pregnant while serving their sentence, carrying mortar on the building sites where male convicts worked as bricklayers. Now, these women were also hired out to do housework. For instance, they were very good at laundering, and they were very much sought after by people in modest circumstances, because they were cheap. Tonka’s grandmother also had one in on washing-day; she would be given a cup of coffee and a bun, and since one was sharing the work with her it was all right to share breakfast with her too—there was no harm in that. At midday someone had to see her back to the jail, that was the regulation, and when Tonka was a little girl, she was generally the one who had to do it. She would walk along with the woman, chatting away happily, not in the least ashamed of being seen in that company, although these women wore grey prison uniform and white kerchiefs that made them easily recognisable. Innocence one might call it: a young life in all its innocence pathetically exposed to influences that were bound to coarsen it.

  But later on, when the sixteen-year-old Tonka was still unembarrassed, gossiping with Cousin Julie, could one say that this was still all innocence, or was it that her sensibilities were blunted? Even if no blame attached to her, how revealing it was!

  The house must also be mentioned. With its five windows looking

  on to the street, it was a survival between towering new buildings that had shot up around it. It was in the back premises that Tonka lived with her aunt, who was actually her much older cousin, and her aunt ’s little son, the illegitimate off
spring of a relationship that she had regarded as

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  permanent, and a grandmother who was not really the grandmother but the grandmother’s sister. In earlier days there had also been a brother of her dead mother’s living there, but he too had died young. All of them lived together in one room and a kitchen, while the genteel curtains of the five front windows concealed an establishment of ill repute where lower-middle-class housewives of easy morals, as well as professionals, were brought together with men. This was something that the family tacitly ignored, and since they wanted no trouble with the procuress they even passed the time of day with her. She was a fat woman, very set on respectability. She had a daughter of the same age as Tonka, whom she sent to a good school; she had her taught the piano and French, bought her pretty clothes, and took care to keep her well away from the business. She was a softhearted creature, which made it easier for her to follow the trade she did, for she knew it was shameful. In earlier times Tonka had now and then been allowed to play with this daughter, and so had found her way into the front part of the house, at hours when it was empty, and to her the rooms seemed enormous, leaving her with an impression of grandeur and refinement that was only reduced to proper proportions after he came on the scene.

  Tonka was not her real name. At her baptism she had been given

  the German name Antonie, and Tonka was the abbreviated form of the Czech diminutive Toninka. The inhabitants of those back streets talked a queer mixture of the two languages.

  But where do such thoughts lead? There it was, she had been standing by a hedge that time, in front of the dark open doorway of a cottage, the first in the village as one came out from town. She was wearing laced boots, red stockings, and a gaily-coloured, stiff, full skirt, and as she talked she seemed to be gazing at the moon, which hung pale over the corn stooks. She was at once pert and shy, and laughed a lot, as though she felt protected by the moon. And the wind blew across the stubble fields as if it were cooling a plate of soup. Riding home, he had said laughingly to his comrade-in-arms, young Baron Mordansky: “You

  know, I shouldn’t at all mind having an affair with a girl like that, only it ’s too dangerous for my liking. You’d have to promise to make up a threesome, to keep me from going sentimental.” And Mordansky, who

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  had done a spell as a trainee in his uncle ’s sugar-mill, had thereupon told him about how, when the time came round for digging the beets, hundreds of such peasant girls laboured in the fields belonging to the mill, and it was said they were as submissive as black slaves to the supervisors and their assistants. And once, he remembered quite distinctly, he had cut short a similar conversation with Mordansky because it was an affront to his feelings. Yet it had not been at that time, he knew—what was now trying to impose itself on him as a memory was really something else, the tangle of thorns that had later grown inside his head.

  In reality it was in the Ring that he had first seen her, in that main street with the stone arcades where the officers and the gentlemen who worked in the government offices stood chatting at corners, the students and young business men strolled up and down, and the girls wandered along in twos and threes, arm in arm, after the shops closed, or the more curious of them even during the lunch-hour. Sometimes a well-known local lawyer would make his way slowly through the crowd, lifting his hat to acquaintances, or a local deputy, or, say, a respected industrialist; and there were even ladies to be seen, on their way home after shopping. There her glance had suddenly crossed with his, a merry glance, lasting only for the briefest moment—like a ball accidently landing in a passer-by’s face. The next instant she had looked away, with a feigned air of innocence. He had turned round quickly, supposing that now the usual giggling would follow, but Tonka was walking on, looking straight ahead of her, rather tensely. She was with two other girls, and taller than either of them. She was not beautiful, but her face had a clear-cut, definite quality. There was nothing in it of that petty, cunningly feminine look which seems to result from the face as a whole; in this face mouth, nose, and eyes were each something clearly in their own right and could stand up to being contemplated separately, delighting the beholder simply by their candour and the freshness irradiating the whole face. It was odd that so gay a glance should stick fast like a barbed arrow, and she herself seemed to have hurt herself with it.

  So much was now clear. Well, then, at that time she had been working in the draper’s shop. It was a large shop, employing a great many girls to handle the stock. Her job was to look after the rolls of material

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  and get the right one down when it was asked for, and the palms of her hands were always slightly moist because of the irritation from the fine hairs of the cloth. There was nothing dream-like about that, and her face was guileless. But then there were the draper’s sons, and one of them had a moustache like a squirrel’s, turned up at the ends, and always wore patent-leather shoes. Tonka was full of stories about how smart he was, how many pairs of shoes he had, and how his trousers were every night laid between two boards and weighed down with heavy stones to keep them well pressed.

  And now, as he got a clear glimpse of something real through the mist, that other smile emerged, the incredulous smile his mother wore—

  essentially an onlooker’s smile, full of pity and disdain for him. That smile was real. What it said was: ‘Heavens, not that shop, surely?’ And although Tonka had still been a virgin when he came to know her, that smile, treacherously furtive or masked, had also turned up in many a tormenting dream he had. Perhaps it had never existed as a single smile; even now he could not be sure of that. And then too there are nuptial nights when one cannot be entirely sure; there are, so to speak, physio-logical ambiguities, times when even Nature does not give an unequivo-cal answer. And in the very moment when he remembered that, he knew that Heaven itself was against Tonka.

  I I

  It had been rash of him to bring Tonka to act as nurse and companion to his grandmother. He was still very young then. He had worked out a little stratagem: Tonka’s aunt, who went out doing sewing for ‘the gen-try’, sometimes worked for an aunt of his, and he had contrived that she should be asked if she happened to know of a young girl, who . . . and so on. The idea was to get a girl to look after his grandmother, whose merciful release was to be expected in a couple of years. Apart from her wages, the girl would be remembered in the old lady’s will.

  But meanwhile there had been a number of little episodes. Once, for instance, he was going on an errand with her; there were some children

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  playing in the street, and suddenly they both found themselves gazing at the face of a little girl who was howling—a face that wriggled and writhed like a worm, in the full blast of sunlight. The pitiless clarity of it there in the light seemed to him a symbol of life, over against the orbit of death that they had both just left. But Tonka was ‘fond of children’.

  She bent down to the child, cheerfully and consolingly, perhaps even slightly amused by it—and that was all, however much he tried to make her see that behind the appearance there was something else. From however many sides he approached it, in the end he always found himself confronted with the same opacity in her mind. Tonka was not stupid, but something seemed to prevent her from being intelligent; and for the first time he felt this wide expanse of pity for her, this pity that was so difficult to account for.

  Another time he said to her: “Tell me, how long is it now you’ve

  been with Grandmamma, Fräulein Tonka?” And when she had told him, he said: “Oh, really? It ’s a long time to have spent with an old woman like that.”

  “Oh,” Tonka exclaimed, “I like being here.”

  “Well, you needn’t be afraid to tell me if you don’t. I can’t imagine how a young girl can manage to
put up with it.”

  “It ’s a job,” Tonka answered, and blushed.

  “All right, it’s a job. But that isn’t all one wants from life. Isn’t that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “And have you got that?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, no. Yes, no.” He grew impatient. “What ’s the sense of talking like that? Can’t you even grumble about us?” But he saw that she was struggling to find an answer, that she kept on discarding possible answers just when they were on the tip of her tongue. And suddenly he felt sorry for her. “I dare say you’ll hardly know what I mean. It ’s not that I think badly of my grandmother, poor woman. No, it isn’t that.

  I’m not looking at it from that point of view at the moment. I can’t help thinking of it from your point of view, and from your point of view she ’s a perfect old horror. Now do you see what I mean?”

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  “Yes,” she said in a low voice, blushing more than ever. “I understood all right before. But I can’t say it.”

  At that he laughed. “That ’s something that ’s never happened to me!

  But now I’m more curious than ever to know what you really think. I’ll help you.” He looked at her so intently that she became more embarrassed than ever. “All right, then. Here goes: do you like just having regular duties, a quiet, steady routine? Is that it?”

  “Well, I don’t know quite how you mean. I like my work all right.”

  “You ‘like it all right ’. But you’re not exactly mad about it, I suppose?

  I mean, there are people who don’t want anything but a steady job.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Desires, dreams, ambition—that ’s what I’m getting at. Doesn’t a fine day like this start something up in you?”

  Between the stone walls of the streets the day was full of a quivering light and the honey of springtime.