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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  When he saw something flicker in Tonka’s eyes, he was sorry, and, all at once overcome by quite a different feeling, the fear of hurting her, he pleaded: “Don’t misunderstand what I’ve been saying!”

  “I understand all right,” was all the answer Tonka gave.

  I V

  “But she ’s only a common little thing who used to work in that draper’s shop!” they had said. What was the point of that? There were plenty of other girls who were quite ignorant, who had never been educated.

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  Talking like that was like pinning a label on to the back of the girl’s dress, where she couldn’t get at it and take it off. What they meant was that people had to have learned something, had to have principles, had to be conventional and have the right manners. Simply being a human being wouldn’t do. And what of all of them, who had all that and who did ‘do’? It seemed to him that his mother was afraid of seeing the emptiness of her own life repeating itself in his. Her own choice was not one that she was proud of: her husband, his father, had formerly been an officer of the line—an undistinguished, jolly man. She was bent on seeing her son have a better life. She fought for that. Fundamentally he approved of her pride. So, then, why did the thought of his mother leave him unmoved?

  Duty was second nature to her, and her marriage had taken on meaning only when his father fell ill. Henceforth she assumed a soldierly aspect, standing on guard, defending her position against overwhelming odds, at the side of this man who was steadily declining into imbecility.

  Up to then she had not been able either to go ahead or to withdraw in her relations with Uncle Hyacinth. He was not a kinsman at all, but a friend of both parents, one of those ‘uncles’ with whom children have to put up with from the age when they begin to notice things. He was a senior civil servant and, besides, a popular writer whose books sold very well indeed. He brought Mother the breath of culture and worldly sophistication that consoled her in the intellectual desert she lived in. He was well read in history, with ideas that seemed all the more grandiose the emptier they were, extending, as they did, over the sweep of the centuries and the great problems of man’s fate. For reasons that had never become clear to the boy, his mother had for many years been the object of this man’s steadfast, admiring, selfless love. Perhaps it was because as an officer’s daughter she had high standards of honour and duty, which were the source of the moral integrity that lent her glamour in his eyes and made her the model for the heroines in his novels. Perhaps too he was obscurely aware that both the fluency of his talk and his narrative gift derived from his own lack of such integrity. But since he naturally did not care to acknowledge this as a deficiency, he had to magnify it and transform it into something universal, full of the lacrimae rerum, see-

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  ing the need to be thus complemented by another’s strength of spirit as the inevitable destiny of one so rich in intellectual resources as himself.

  Thus the situation had no lack of agonising exaltation for the woman either. Even in their own eyes they were at pains to disguise their liaison as a spiritual friendship, but in this they were not always successful. At times they were quite dismayed by Hyacinth’s weakness of character, which would land them in dangerous situations, and then they would not know whether to let themselves fall or strong-mindedly climb back again on to their wonted heights. It was only when her husband became ill that their souls were provided with the support they needed and, reaching out for it, they gained that inch in spiritual stature which they had sometimes felt lacking. From that time on she was armoured in her duty as a wife and was able to make up by redoubled dutifulness for whatever sins she still committed in spirit. And, by a simple rule that settled everything for them, they were now safe from that particularly distressful wavering between the obligation to be greatly passionate and that to be greatly loyal.

  So that was what respectable people turned out to be like, manifesting their respectability in terms of mind and character. And however much love-at-first-sight there might be in Hyacinth’s novels, anyone who without more ado simply went after another being—like an animal that knows where it can drink and where not—would to them have seemed like a wild primeval creature devoid of morality. The son, who felt pity for that good-natured animal, his father, in all the little matters of family life fought Hyacinth and his mother as though they were a spiritual plague. Thus he had let these two drive him into the diametri-cally opposite corner of the field of contemporary attitudes.

  This brilliant and versatile young man was studying chemistry and turned a deaf ear to all questions that had no clear-cut answer. He was, indeed, an embittered opponent of all such considerations and was a fanatical disciple of the cool, soberly fantastical, world-encompassing spirit of modern technology. He was in favour of doing away with the emotions. He was the antagonist of poetry, kindness, virtue, simplicity.

  Song-birds need a branch to perch on, and the branch a tree, and the tree the dumb brown earth to grow in; but he flew, he was between the

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  ages, he was somewhere in mid-air. After this age, one that destroys just as much as it constructs, there will come one that will inherit the new premises we are so ascetically creating, and only then will it be possible to say what we ought to have felt about things. Such was more or less his train of thought. For the time being the thing was to be as tough and austere as on an expedition.

  With such a strong intellectual drive he could not fail to attract his teachers’ attention, even as a schoolboy. He had conceived ideas for new inventions and, after taking his degree, was to spend one or two years devoting himself to working them out—after which he hoped to rise, surely and steadily, above that radiant horizon which is a young man’s image of his glamorous unknown future.

  He loved Tonka because he did not love her, because she did not stir his soul, but rinsed it clean and smooth, like fresh water. He loved her more than he himself believed. And the occasional tentative, needling enquiries made by his mother, who sensed a danger that she could not come to grips with because she had no certainty of it, impelled him to make all speed. He sat for his examinations and left home.

  V

  His work took him to one of the big cities in Germany. He had brought Tonka with him, for he felt he would have been leaving her at the mercy of her enemies if he had left her behind in the same town as her aunt and his mother. Tonka bundled up her things and left home as callously, as inevitably, as the wind goes away with the sun or the rain with the wind.

  In the city to which they had moved she got herself a job in a shop.

  She was quick to pick up the new work and earned much praise. But why then was she so badly paid? And why did she never ask for a rise, which she only did not get because she did not ask for it? Whenever she needed money, she had no qualms about accepting it from him. Not because he minded this, but simply because he was sometimes irritated by her humble ways and lack of worldliness, he would occasionally lecture her on the subject.

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  “Why don’t you tell him he must pay you more?”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can’t. But you keep on telling me you’re always the one they call for when they want something special?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then, why don’t you speak up for yourself ?”

  Such talk always made Tonka’s face take on a stubborn look. She did not argue, but she was impervious to his reasoning.

  “Look,” he would say, “that ’s a contradiction.” Or: “Look, why

  don’t you tell me——?” It was all no good. Then he would say: “Tonka, I shall be cross with you if you go on like this.”

  It was only when he cracked that whip that the little donkey-cart of humility and stubbornness would slowly get under way, and then she would come ou
t with some such thing as, for instance, that she was not good at writing and was afraid, too, of making spelling mistakes, things that she had hitherto kept from him out of vanity. Then there would be a quiver of anxiety round her dear kind mouth, and it would curve into a rainbow of a smile only when she realised that she was not going to be found fault with for such blemishes.

  On the contrary, he loved these defects as he loved her deformed finger-nail, the result of an injury at work. He sent her to evening classes and was amused by the absurd commercial copperplate that she learnt to write there. Even the wrong-headed notions that she came home with were something he found endearing. She would bring them home, as it were, in her mouth, without eating them. There was something nobly natural in her helplessness, her inability to reject whatever was vulgar and worthless, even while with an obscure sense of rightness she did not adopt it as her own. It was astonishing with what sureness she rejected everything crude, coarse, and uncivilised in whatever guise it came her way, although she could not have explained why she rejected it. And yet she lacked any urge to rise beyond her own orbit into a higher sphere.

  She remained pure and unspoilt, like Nature herself. But loving this simple creature was by no means so simple.

  And at times she would startle him by knowing about things that must be almost outside her ken, such as chemistry. When, preoccupied with

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  his work, he would talk of it, more to himself than to her, he would suddenly find that this or that was something she had heard of before. The first time this happened he had been amazed and had asked her about it.

  She told him that her mother’s brother, who had lived with them in the little house where the brothel was, had been a student.

  “And what ’s he doing now?”

  “He died. Right after the exam.”

  “And how did you pick it up from him?”

  “Well, I was quite small, of course,” Tonka recounted, “but when he was studying he used to get me to hear his lessons for him. I didn’t understand a word of it, but he used to write the questions out for me, on a piece of paper.”

  That was all. And for ten years all that had been hidden, like pretty stones whose names one does not know, kept in a box! That was the way it was now, too. Sitting quietly in the same room with him while he worked was all she needed to make her happy. She was Nature adjusting itself to Mind, not wanting to become Mind, but loving it and inscruta-bly attaching itself to it. She was like one of those animals that actually seek man’s company.

  His relationship to her was at that time in a queer state of tension, equally remote from infatuation and from any wish for a casual affair.

  Actually they had got on for a remarkably long time at home, without the temptations of sex entering into their relationship. They had been in the way of seeing each other in the evenings, going for walks together, telling each other of the day’s little happenings and little annoyances, and it had all been as pleasant as eating bread and salt. True, after a time he had rented a room, but only because that was part of the whole thing and, anyway, one can’t go walking about the streets for hours on end in the winter. There they had kissed for the first time—rather stiffly, more as though to set the seal on something than for the pleasure of it, and Tonka was very agitated and her lips were rough and hard. Even at that time they had talked of ‘entirely belonging to each other’. That is to say, he had talked and Tonka had listened in silence. With that painful clarity in which one ’s bygone follies insist on recurring to one ’s memory, he recalled his very juvenile and didactic exposition of why it would

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  have to come to that. It was only then, he had explained, that two people really opened up to each other. And so they had remained suspended between emotion and theory. Tonka merely begged a few times that it might be postponed for some days. Finally, he was rather affronted and asked if she thought it too great a sacrifice. So then a day was fixed.

  And Tonka had come: in her little moss-green jacket, in the blue hat with the black bobbles, her cheeks pink from the brisk walk through the evening air. She laid the table, she made the tea. The only difference was that she bustled a little more than usual and kept her eyes fixed on the things she was handling. And he himself, although he had been waiting impatiently all day long, now sat on the sofa, watching her, immobilised by the icy stiffness of his youth. He realised that Tonka was trying not to think of the inevitable, and he was sorry he had insisted on fixing a day for it—it made him feel like a bailiff. But it only now occurred to him that he ought to have taken her by surprise, that he ought to have enticed her into it.

  How remote he felt from any joy! On the contrary, he shrank from

  taking the bloom off that freshness which was wafted to him like a cool breeze every evening they spent together. But it had to be, sooner or later. He clutched at the necessity of it, and while he watched Tonka rather mechanically bustling about, it seemed to him that his intention was like a rope tied round her ankle, shortening at every turn.

  After the meal, which they ate almost without speaking, they sat

  down side by side. He attempted a joke, and Tonka attempted a laugh.

  But her mouth twisted, her lips were tight, and the next instant she was grave again.

  All at once he asked her: “Tonka, are you sure it ’s all right? Have we really made up our minds?”

  Tonka lowered her head, and it seemed to him that her eyes were

  veiled for a moment. But she did not say yes, and she did not say that she loved him.

  He bent down to her, speaking softly, trying to encourage her, though he himself was embarrassed. “You know, at first it ’s all rather strange, perhaps even rather unromantic. After all, you know, we have to be careful. I mean, it isn’t just. . . . So you’d better shut your eyes. And so——?”

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  The bed was already turned down, and Tonka went over to it. But

  suddenly irresolute again, she sat down on the chair beside it.

  “Tonka!” he called out to her.

  She stood up again and, with averted face, began to unfasten her

  clothes.

  An ungrateful thought remained associated with this sweet

  moment.

  Was Tonka giving herself of her own free will? He had not promised her any love. Why did she not rebel against a situation that excluded the highest hopes? She acted in silence, as though she were subdued by the authority of ‘the master’. Perhaps she would also obey another who was equally determined?

  There she stood in all the awkwardness of her maiden nakedness. It was moving to see how the skin enclosed her body like too tight a garment.

  His flesh was wiser and more humane than his youthfully pseudo-

  sophisticated thoughts, and he made a move towards her.

  As though she were trying to escape from him, Tonka slipped into

  bed, with a movement that was oddly clumsy and unlike her.

  All he remembered of what happened after that was that in passing the chair he had felt the thing he was most intimate and familiar with had been left behind on that chair, with the clothes he knew so well.

  When he came by, there rose from them the dear fresh smell that he was always first aware of whenever they met. What awaited him in the bed was something unknown and strange. He hesitated a moment

  longer.

  Tonka lay there, with her eyes shut and her face turned to the wall, for an endless age, in terrible lonely fear. When at last she felt him beside her, her eyes were wet with warm tears. Then came a new wave of fear, dismay at her ingratitude, a senseless word uttered as though in search of help, as though stumbling out of some infinitely long, lonely corridor, to transform itself into his name—and then she was his. He hardly grasped how magically, and with how much childlike courage, she stole into hi
s being, what simple-minded strategy she had worked out in order to take possession of all she admired in him: it

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  was only necessary to belong to him entirely and then she would be part of it all.

  Later, he could not in the least remember how it had all happened.

  V I

  And then in a single day, in a single morning, it was all transformed into a tangle of thorns.

  They had been living together for some years when Tonka one day

  realised that she was pregnant. It was not just any ordinary day. Heaven had so ordained it that if one counted back from that day it appeared that the conception must have taken place during a period when he was away on a journey. Tonka, however, claimed to have noticed her condition only when it was no longer quite possible to establish the beginning of it with certainty.

  In such a situation there are certain obvious ideas that will occur to anyone. On the other hand, there was no man far and wide whom one could reasonably suspect.

  Some weeks later destiny manifested itself still more plainly: Tonka fell ill. It was a disease that the mother’s blood had been infected with, either by the child she had conceived or directly by the child ’s father.

  It was a horrible, dangerous, insidious disease. But whatever way she had been infected, the curious thing was that in either case there was a discrepancy between the various dates. Apart from this, as far as could be medically established with certainty he was not suffering from the disease himself. So there was either some mystical bond linking him with Tonka or she was guilty on an ordinary human level. There were, of course, also other possible explanations—at least theoretically, ideally speaking—but practically speaking their probability was as good as nil.

  On the other hand, from the practical point of view the probability that he was neither the father of Tonka’s child nor the cause of her illness amounted to a certainty.