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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  If one considers the situation for a moment, one can see how difficult it was for him to grasp this. ‘From the practical point of view. . . .’

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  If you go to a business man, not with a commercial proposition that will appeal to his profit-making instincts, but to harangue him about the spirit of the times and the moral obligations of the rich, he will know you have come to get money out of him. On that point he will never be mistaken, although there is of course always the possibility that you might have come quite unselfishly, just to give him some good advice.

  Similarly, a judge will not have a moment ’s doubt when the accused tells him that the incriminating article found on his person was given to him by ‘a man he had never seen before ’. And yet there is no reason why this should not really happen once in a while. But the management of human affairs rests on the fact that there is no need to reckon with all the possibilities, because the most extreme cases practically never do occur.

  But theoretically? The old doctor to whom he had first taken Tonka, and whom he had seen alone afterwards, had shrugged his shoulders.

  Was it possible? Well, of course one couldn’t say that it was entirely impossible. . . . There was a kindly, mournful look in his eyes, and what he evidently meant was: Don’t let us waste time talking about that—it ’s much too improbable to be worthy of serious consideration. A doctor is, after all, a human being, and rather than assume that he is dealing with something that is medically quite improbable, he will assume the cause to be a human lapse. For freaks of Nature are rare.

  So the next phase was that of a kind of medical litigiousness. He went to doctor after doctor. The second doctor came to the same conclusion as the first, and the third to the same conclusion as the second.

  He argued with them. He tried to play off against each other the views of various medical schools of thought. The physicians listened to him in silence, sometimes with a tolerant smile, as though he were a lunatic or a blockhead past praying for. And of course he himself knew, even while he was arguing, that he might just as well have asked: ‘Is there such a thing as immaculate conception?’ And they would only have been able to tell him: ‘We have no medical evidence of it.’ They would not even have been able to produce a law excluding the possibility. All they knew was: There was no evidence. And yet if he were to accept this, he would be a cuckold past praying for!

  Perhaps, indeed, one of the doctors whom he had gone to see had

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  told him so to his face. Or perhaps he himself had thought of it; after all, there was no reason why he should not have thought of it. But it was as if one were to exert oneself thinking out all the possible combinations and permutations of relevant finger-movements just because one could not fix a collar-stud—for all this time, while he was producing theory after theory, he was confronted by the irrefutable experience of Tonka’s face. It was all a walking through cornfields, a sense of the air, the swallows dipping and darting, and in the distance the spires of the town, girls singing . . . remote from all truth, in a world that does not know the concept ‘truth’. Tonka was now living in the deep world of fairy-tale.

  It was the world of the Anointed, of the Virgin, and of Pontius Pilate, and the doctors said that Tonka would need to be nursed and cared for if she was to survive.

  V I I

  Still, he went on trying, of course, every now and again to wring a confession out of Tonka. After all, he was a man, and he was no fool. At this time she was working in a big, trashy shop in a working-class district.

  She had to be there at seven in the morning and could not leave before half-past nine in the evening—kept there often merely for the sake of some belated customer’s few pence. She never saw the sun. She did not sleep at his place, and there was no time to thrash out their emotional problems. They could not count on even this scanty source of income for any length of time, for sooner or later her pregnancy would be noticed. And they were already in financial difficulties. He had used up the money provided for his studies, and he was not capable of earning anything; this is always particularly difficult at the beginning of a scientific career, and besides, he had come so near to solving the problem he had set himself—though the solution still just escaped him—that he felt he had to concentrate all his energies on this work.

  Living like this, never seeing the daylight and perpetually in anxiety, Tonka began to fade. Poor Tonka, of course she did not fade beautifully, as some women do, radiating an intoxicating splendour in decay;

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  she wilted like some dim little herb in a kitchen garden that turns an ugly yellow and shrivels away as soon as it loses the freshness of its green.

  Her cheeks grew pale and hollow, and this made her nose look too big and prominent, her mouth seemed too wide, and even her ears seemed to stick out. Her body grew gaunt, and the full, curving flesh wasted away, letting the peasant skeleton peer through the skin.

  He, whose well-bred face wore better under hardship and whose store of good clothes lasted longer, noticed, whenever he went out with her, that passers-by would sometimes cast an astonished glance at them. And because he was not without vanity, he bore Tonka a grudge for not having the pretty clothes that he could not buy her. He was angry with her for being so shabby, although it was his own fault. But actually, if he could have afforded it, he would have bought her pretty, floating maternity-clothes and would only then have charged her with her infidelity.

  Every time he tried to extract a confession from her, Tonka would utter the same denial. She said she did not know how it had happened.

  When he implored her, in the name of their old affection, not to lie to him, an anguished look would come over her face. And when he stormed at her, she merely said she was not lying. And what was anyone to do then? Should he have beaten her and sworn at her? Should he have abandoned her in her dreadful plight? He no longer slept with her. But even on the rack she would not have confessed, if only because she could not talk to him since she had realised that he mistrusted her. And this dumb obstinacy was all the more frustrating for him because his loneliness was no longer alleviated by any element of grace. He had to be tenacious, to watch and wait.

  He had made up his mind to ask his mother for financial help. But his father had for a long time been hovering on the brink of death, and this meant there was no money to spare. He had no means of checking this, though he did know his mother was frightened of the possibility that he might intend marrying Tonka some day. Indeed, she was worried by the thought that any other marriage would be made impossible because Tonka was in the way. And when it all dragged on for so long, his studies still unfinished, success not yet achieved, his father still lingering on his death-bed, and all the domestic cares she had to cope with into the

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  bargain, it seemed in some way or another to be all Tonka’s fault. Tonka seemed to be not merely the cause of all that was going wrong now, but positively something like an ill omen, a herald of misfortune, in that it was she who had first disturbed the normal tenor of their life. This obscure conviction of his mother’s had become apparent to him, both from her letters and during his visits home. What it came to fundamentally was that she felt it was a blot on the family honour for her son to be more attached to a girl ‘of that sort ’ than was generally the case with young men. Hyacinth was made to give him a talking to on the subject.

  And when the young man, taken aback by the implicit superstitiousness of this attitude, which reminded him of his own painful, irrational experiences, put up vehement opposition Tonka was referred to as ‘an ungrateful creature ’ who had had no consideration for a family’s peace of mind. Awkward allusions were then made to ‘amorous arts’ by means of which she kept ‘a hold on him’. In short, what came to light was every respectable mother’s entire
ignorance of real life. The same thing was manifest in the answer that he got now, as though every single coin that helped to keep him with Tonka could only contribute to his undoing.

  At this point he decided to write again and acknowledge himself to be the father of Tonka’s child.

  By way of answer his mother came in person, ‘to straighten the

  whole thing out ’.

  She did not come to his lodgings, as though she were afraid of

  encountering something intolerable there. She summoned him to her hotel. By taking refuge in her sense of duty she had rid herself of a certain amount of embarrassment, and she spoke of the great concern he was causing them all, of the added danger to his ailing father’s life, and bonds that would last a lifetime. With clumsy cunning she pulled out all the stops of proper feeling. Yet a note of indulgence pervading all she said kept her listener, bored though he was by the maternal tactics he could so easily see through, in a state of mistrustful curiosity.

  “You see,” she said, “this misfortune might make everything turn

  out for the best, even now, and that would be a lucky escape for all concerned. The main thing is to prevent any recurrence of such incidents in future.”

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  To this end she had managed to persuade Father to provide a certain sum of money. So—she explained, as though it were a great benefac-tion—all the girl’s claims could be settled and the child provided for.

  To her surprise her son, having calmly asked how much was being

  offered and having heard the answer, shook his head and merely said, in the same calm tone: “It can’t be done.”

  Clinging to her hopes, she retorted: “It must be done! Don’t go on deluding yourself. Many young men commit similar follies, but they let it be a lesson to them. This is really your chance to free yourself. Don’t miss it out of a misguided sense of honour. You owe it to yourself and to us.”

  “How do you mean, it ’s my chance?”

  “It ’s quite obvious. The girl will show more good sense than you are doing. She knows very well that such relationships always come to an end when a child arrives.”

  He asked for time to think about it—until the next day. Something had flashed upon him.

  His mother, the doctors with all their smiling reasonableness, the smooth running of the underground train by which he made his way back to Tonka, the steady movements of the policeman’s arms regulat-ing the traffic, the city’s roar like the thundering of a waterfall: it was all one and the same thing. He stood in the lonely hollow space under the cascade of it—untouched by even a splash, but utterly cut off.

  He asked Tonka if she would agree.

  Tonka said: “Yes.” How terribly ambiguous this Yes of hers was! In it there lay all the good sense his mother had predicted, but round the mouth that uttered it there was the twitching of bewilderment.

  The next day he told his mother point-blank, before she could ask him any questions, that he was perhaps not the father of Tonka’s child, that Tonka was ill, and that for all this he would rather consider himself ill and himself the father of the child than abandon Tonka.

  His mother smiled in defeat, confronted with such wilful self-deception, bestowed a last, fond glance on him, and left. He realised she would dedicate herself to saving her flesh and blood from shame, and he now had a powerful enemy in league with him.

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  V I I I

  Finally, Tonka lost her job. He had been growing almost uneasy over the fact that this misfortune was so long delayed. The shopkeeper for whom Tonka worked was a small, ugly man, but in their distress he had seemed to them like some superhuman power. For weeks they had been guessing: “He must know by now. . . . Well, obviously he ’s a decent sort and doesn’t hit someone who’s down. . . .” and then again: “He hasn’t noticed, thank heaven he hasn’t noticed anything yet!” And then one day Tonka was called into the office and asked, point-blank, about her condition. She could not get any answer out, her eyes merely filled with tears. And this practical man was quite unmoved by the fact that she was too upset to speak. He gave her a month’s wages and dismissed her on the spot. He was so furious that he shouted at her, complaining that it was all her fault if he was now shorthanded and that it had been dishonest of her to conceal her condition when she took the job. He did not even send the typist out of the room before saying such things to her.

  Afterwards, Tonka felt very wicked, and even he secretly admired

  that sordid nameless little tradesman, who had not hesitated for a minute but had sacrificed Tonka to his business sense, and with her her tears, a child, and heaven alone knew what inventions, what souls, what human destinies—things of which the man had no notion, things in which he had no interest.

  Now they had to have their meals in small, working-class places, amid dirt and incivility, where for a few pence they got a kind of food that did not agree with him. He would call for Tonka punctually and fulfil his duty by taking her to have these meals. He cut a strange figure, in his well-made clothes, among the labourers and market-porters, grave, taciturn, and constant at the side of his pregnant companion. Many sneering glances were cast at him, and many respectful ones, which were no less painful. It was a strange life he was leading, with his invention in his head, and with his conviction of Tonka’s infidelity, amid the flotsam and jetsam of the great city. He had never before felt the common beastli-ness of mankind so intensely: wherever he walked through the streets, there it went, yapping and growling like a pack of hounds, each person

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  alone in his greed, but all of them together one pack—and only he had no one to whom he could turn for help or to whom he could even have told his story.

  He had never had time for friends, doubtless indeed had taken little interest in them, nor had he himself been attractive to others. He went through life burdened with his ideas, and that is a burden dangerous to the very life of him who bears it, so long as people have not realised there is something in it that they can turn to their own advantage. He did not even know in what direction he might have searched for help. He was a stranger in the world. And what was Tonka? Spirit of his spirit?

  No—perhaps a symbol, some cryptic correspondence to himself, an

  alien creature who had attached herself to him, with her secret locked within her.

  There was a little chink, a far-off gleam towards which his thoughts were beginning to move. The invention he was working at would in

  the end turn out to be of great importance for others as well as himself, and it was clear that something else was involved besides the intellectual processes—a courage, a confidence, an intuitive sense of the future, that never deceived him, a healthy urge to live, like a star that he followed.

  And in all this he too was only pursuing the greater probabilities, and always in one of them he would find what he wanted. What he relied on was that everything would turn out to be the way it always was, so that he could hit upon the one thing in which he could discover the desired otherness. If he had set out to test every possible doubt, as he was doing with Tonka, he would never have come to the end of it. Thinking means not thinking too much, and no invention can be made without sacrificing something of the boundlessness of the inventive talent. This half of his life seemed to be under the influence of the star of a happiness or a mystery beyond proving. And the other half lay in darkness.

  Now he and Tonka bought sweepstake tickets. On the day of the

  draw he met Tonka and they went and bought the list of results. It was a miserable little sweepstake with a first prize of only a few thousand marks; but that did not matter, it would have tided them over the immediate future. Even if it had been only a few hundred marks, he could have bought Tonka what she most needed in the way of clothes and

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&
nbsp; underclothes, or have moved her out of the unhealthy garret where she lived. And if it had been only twenty marks, it would have been some encouragement, and he would have bought more sweepstake tickets.

  Indeed, even if they had won no more than five marks, it would have been a sign that the attempt to restore contact with life was regarded with favour in unknown regions.

  But with all their three tickets they drew blanks. Then, of course, he had to pretend he had only bought them for fun. Even while he had been waiting for Tonka there had been an emptiness in him that heralded failure. The truth probably was that he had been wavering between hope and despair all the time. In his circumstances even a few pennies wasted on a newspaper meant a real loss. He suddenly felt there was an invisible power that wished him ill, and he felt himself to be surrounded by hostility.

  After that he became downright superstitious. The man who became

  so was the one who called for Tonka in the evenings, while the other man he was went on working like a scientist.

  He had two rings, which he wore alternately. Both were valuable, but one was a piece of fine old workmanship, and the other was only a present from his parents, which he had never particularly cherished. Then he noticed that on days he was wearing the newer one—which was only an ordinary expensive ring—he seemed to be spared further deterioration of his situation rather more than on days when he was wearing the good, old one; and from that time on he could not bring himself to put it on again, but wore the other, like a yoke laid upon him.

  Again, one day when he happened not to have shaved, he had good

  luck. The next day, when he did shave in spite of having observed the omen, he was punished for his transgression by another of those trivial sordid misfortunes that would not have amounted to anything more than absurdity in a situation less desperate than his. From then on he could not bring himself to shave any more. He grew a beard, doing no more than carefully trimming it to a point, and he continued to wear it through all the sad weeks that followed.

  This beard disfigured him, but it was like Tonka: the uglier it looked, the more anxiously it was tended. Perhaps his feeling for her became