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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

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  all the more affectionate the more profoundly it was disappointed; for like the beard it was inwardly so good because of the outward ugliness.

  Tonka did not like the beard and did not know what it meant to him.

  And without her he would never have known how ugly this beard was, for one knows little of oneself unless one has someone else in whom one is reflected. And since what one knows is really nothing, might it not be that at times he wished Tonka dead so that this intolerable existence might be over and done with? And perhaps he liked the beard simply because it was like a mask, concealing everything.

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  There were still times when he would, as it were, try to ambush her: he would ask what seemed to be a perfectly harmless question, hoping that the smooth sound of the words would take her off her guard. But more often it was he who was taken unawares and defeated.

  “Look, it’s absolutely senseless going on denying it,” he would say coaxingly. “Come on now, tell me. Then everything’ll be just the way it used to be. How on earth did it happen?”

  But her answer was always the same: “Send me away if you won’t

  believe me.”

  That was, of course, her way of making the most of her own helplessness, but it was also the most genuine answer she could give. For she had no medical or philosophical arguments to defend herself with: all she could do was to vouch for the truth of her words with the truth of her whole being.

  Then he would go with her whenever she went out, because he did

  not dare to leave her alone. There was nothing definite that he feared, but it made him uneasy to think of her alone in the great alien streets of the city. And when he would meet her somewhere in the evenings, and they walked along, and in the dusk they would pass some man who gave no sign of knowing them, he would sometimes have the feeling that the man’s face was familiar, and it seemed to him that Tonka blushed; and all at once he would remember that there had been an occasion when they

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  had been together with this man. Instantly, then, and with a certainty equal to the certainty he felt when gazing into Tonka’s innocent face, he would have the conviction: This is the one! Once it seemed to be a well-to-do young man who was learning the business in an export firm and whom they had met a few times. Once it was a tenor who had worked in a café chantant until he lost his voice and who had a room in the same lodging-house as Tonka. They were always such ludicrously marginal figures; they were like dirty parcels thrown into his memory, tied up with string, each parcel containing the truth—but at the first attempt to undo it, the package would disintegrate, leaving him with nothing but an agonising sense of helplessness and a heap of dust.

  These certainties of Tonka’s infidelity had, indeed, something of the quality of dreams. Tonka endured them with all that touching, dumbly affectionate humility of hers. But how many different meanings that could have! And then, going through his memories, he began to see how ambiguous they all were. For instance, the very simplicity of the way she attached herself to him could equally well mean that she did not care one way or the other or that she was following her heart. The way she served him could indicate either apathy or a delight in doing it. Might that dog-like devotion of hers not mean that she would follow any master like a dog? This was something he had, after all, sensed in that first night. Had it in fact been her first night? He had only paid attention to her emotional reactions, and certainly there had been no very perceptible physical signs. Now it was too late. Her silence was now a blanket over everything, and might equally well indicate innocence or obduracy, it could equally well mean cunning or sorrow, remorse, or fear; but then too it might mean that she was ashamed on his behalf. Yet it would not have helped him even if he could have lived all of it all over again. Once a human being is mistrusted, the plainest signs of faithfulness will positively turn into signs of unfaithfulness. On the other hand, where there is trust, the most glaring evidence of unfaithfulness will seem to be signs of misunderstood faithfulness, crying like a child that the grown-ups have locked out. Nothing could be interpreted on its own merits alone, one thing depended on the other, one had to trust or mistrust the whole of it, love it or take it for deceit and delusion. If one was to understand

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  Tonka, one had to respond to her in one definite way; one had, as it were, to call out to her, telling her who she was. What she was, depended almost entirely on him. And so Tonka would become a blur, mildly dazzling as a fairy-tale.

  And he wrote to his mother: ‘Her legs are as long from the foot to the knee as from the knee to the hip, long legs that walk like a pair of twins, without tiring. Her skin is not delicate, but it is white and without blemish. Her breasts are almost a little too heavy, and the hair in her armpits is dark and matted, which looks charmingly shameful on that slender white body. Her hair hangs down in loose strands over her ears, and at time she thinks she has to take the curling-tongs to it and do it up high, which makes her look like a servant-girl. And that, surely, is the only harm she has ever done in her life. . . .’

  Or he would write in answer to his mother: ‘Between Ancona and

  Fiume, or perhaps it is between Middelkerke and some town whose

  name I don’t remember, there is a lighthouse, the light of it flashing out over the sea at night like the flick of a fan. One flick, and then there is nothing. And then another flick. And edelweiss grows in the meadows of the Venna valley.

  ‘Is that geography or botany or nautical science? It is a face, it is something that is there, solitary, quite alone, eternally—and so in a way, too, it isn’t there at all. Or what is it?’

  Naturally he never posted these senseless answers to his mother’s letters.

  There was something impalpable missing, something that was needed to make his certainty complete.

  Once he had been travelling by night with his mother and Hyacinth, and in the small hours, out of the depths of that inexorable fatigue which makes the bodies in a train sway to and fro in search of some support, it seemed to him that his mother was leaning against Hyacinth, and that she knew she was, and that Hyacinth was holding her hand. His eyes had widened with anger at the time, for he was sorry for his father. But when he leaned forward, Hyacinth was sitting at some distance and his mother’s head was inclined to the other side, away from him. Then after a while, when he had settled back in his seat, the whole thing happened all

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  over again. That seeing and not seeing something was torment, and the torment itself was a darkness through which it was hard to see. Finally he told himself that now he was really sure, and he resolved to challenge his mother about it in the morning. But in broad daylight the whole thing had vanished like the darkness itself.

  And another time, again when they were on a journey, his mother

  fell ill. Hyacinth, who had to write to Father on her behalf, said irritably:

  “But I don’t know what to say.” This from Hyacinth, who wrote reams to Mother whenever he was away! Then there was a quarrel, for again the boy had grown angry, and his mother began to feel worse: she seemed to be seriously ill. Something had to be done for her, and Hyacinth’s hands kept on getting in the way of his, and he kept on pushing them aside. At last Hyacinth asked rather mournfully: “Why do you keep on pushing me away?” The note of unhappiness in that voice quite shocked him.

  How little one knows what one knows, or wants what one wants.

  That is not difficult to understand. Yet he was capable of sitting in his room, tortured by jealousy and telling himself that he was not jealous at all, that it was something quite different, something out of the ordinary, something oddly invented; and yet this was himself and his own feelings. When he raised his head and looked about him, everything seemed to be the same as usual. The wal
lpaper was green and grey. The doors were reddish brown, with faint gleams of light reflected on them.

  The hinges were dark, made of copper. There was a chair in the room, brown mahogany and wine-red plush. But all these things seemed to be somehow tilted, leaning to one side. There was a suggestion, in their very uprightness, that they were about to topple over. They seemed endless and meaningless.

  He rubbed his eyes and then looked round again. But it was not his eyes. It was the things. The fact was that belief in them had to be there before they themselves could be there; if one did not look at the world with the world ’s eyes, the world already in one ’s own gaze, it fell apart into meaningless details that live as sadly far apart from each other as the stars in the night-sky. He only needed to look out of the window to see how the world of, say, a cab-driver waiting in the street below was suddenly intersected by the world of a clerk walking past. The result was

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  something slashed open, a disgusting jumble, an inside-out and side-by-side of things in the street, a turmoil of focal points moving along their tracks, and around each of them there extended a radius of complacency and self-confidence, all aids to walking upright through a world in which there was no such thing as above and below. Volition, cognition, and perception were like a tangled skein. One noticed this only when one tried to find the end of the thread. But perhaps there was some other way of going through the world, other than following the thread of truth? At such moments, when a veneer of coldness separated him from everything, Tonka was more than a fairy-tale: she was almost a visitation.

  ‘Either I must make Tonka my wife,’ he told himself, ‘or I must give her up and give up these thoughts.’

  But no one will blame him for doing neither one nor the other, despite these reasonings of his. For although all such thoughts and feelings may well be justified, nobody nowadays doubts that they are very largely figments of the imagination. And so he went on reasoning, without taking his reasoning seriously. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was being sorely tried, but when he came to himself again and spoke to himself again, as it were, man to man, he had to tell himself that this ordeal consisted, after all, only of the question whether he would force himself to believe in Tonka against the ninety-nine per cent probability that she had been unfaithful to him and that he was simply a fool. Admittedly this humiliating possibility had by now lost much of its importance.

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  It was, oddly enough, a period in which his scientific work went remarkably well. He had solved the main problems involved in his project, and it could not be long now before he got results. There were already people coming to see him, and even if it was chemistry that they talked about, they brought him some emotional reassurance. They all believed that he was going to succeed. The probability of it already amounted to ninety-nine per cent! And he drugged himself with work.

  But even although his social existence was now taking on firmer out-

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  lines and entering, so to speak, the state of worldly maturity, the moment he stopped working his thoughts no longer ran along in definite grooves.

  The faintest reminder of Tonka’s existence would start a drama going in his mind: figures in a play, one taking over from the other, none of them revealing its meaning, all of them like strangers daily encountering each other in the same street. There was that commercial traveller of a tenor whom he had once suspected of being the man with whom Tonka had

  betrayed him. And there were all the others to whom he had ever pinned his certainty. It was not that they did anything. They were merely there.

  Or even if they did do that frightful thing, it no longer meant much.

  And since they were sometimes two or even more persons rolled into one, it was no straightforward matter being jealous of them. The whole situation became as transparent as the clearest air, and yet clearer still, until it reached that state of freedom and emptiness which was void of all egoism, and under this immovable dome the accidents of terrestrial life pursued their microscopic course.

  And sometimes all this turned into dreams. Or perhaps it had all

  begun in dreams, in a pallid shadowy realm from which he emerged the instant he shed the weight of his working hours, as though it were all meant as a warning to him that this work was not his true life.

  These real dreams were on a deeper level than his waking existence; they were warm as low-ceilinged, bright-coloured rooms. In these

  dream-rooms Tonka would be harshly scolded by her aunt for not having shed any tears at Grandmamma’s funeral; or an ugly man acknowledged himself to be the father of Tonka’s child, and she, when he looked at her queryingly, for the first time did not deny it, but stood there, motionless, with an infinite smile. This had happened in a room with green plants in it, with red rugs on the floor and blue stars on the walls.

  But when he turned his eyes away from that infinity the rugs were green, the plants had big ruby-red leaves, the walls had a yellow glimmer as of soft human skin, and Tonka, still standing there, was transparently blue, like moonlight.

  He almost fled into these dreams as into some simple-hearted happiness. Perhaps it was all mere cowardice. Perhaps all they meant was that if only Tonka would confess, all would be well. He was much confused

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  by their frequency, and yet they had not the intolerable tension of the half-waking state, which was gradually bearing him higher and higher, away out of it all.

  In these dreams Tonka was always as great as love itself, and no longer the care-worn little shop-girl she was in real life. And she looked different every time. Sometimes she was her own younger sister (not that she had ever had a sister) and often she was merely the rustling of skirts, the ring and cadence of another voice, the most unfamiliar and surprising of movements, all the intoxicating charm of unknown adventures, which came to him, the way such things come only in dreams, out of the warm familiarity of her name—and they gave him the floating sense of joy that lies in anticipation, even though still tense with unfulfilment.

  These ambiguous images made him feel a seemingly undefined, disem-bodied affection and more than human intensity of emotion, and it was hard to say whether these feelings were gradually detaching themselves from Tonka or only now really beginning to be associated with her.

  When he reflected on this he guessed that this enigmatic capacity for transference and independence that love had must also manifest itself in waking life. It is not that the woman loved is the origin of the emotions apparently aroused by her; they are merely set behind her like a light.

  But whereas in dreams there is still a hair’s-breadth margin, a crack, separating the love from the beloved, in waking life this split is not apparent; one is merely the victim of doppelgänger-trickery and cannot help seeing a human being as wonderful who is not so at all. He could not bring himself to set the light behind Tonka.

  The fact that he so often thought of horses at this time must have been somehow connected with this, and obviously was a sign of something significant. Perhaps it was Tonka and the sweepstake in which they drew blanks. Or perhaps it was his childhood—those beautiful brown and dappled horses, their heavy harness decorated with brass and fur.

  And then sometimes there would be a sudden glowing of the child ’s heart in him, the heart for which magnanimity, kindness, and faith were not yet obligations that one disregarded, but knights in an enchanted garden of adventures and liberations. Yet perhaps too this was merely the last flaring up of a flame about to die, the itching of a scar that was

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  beginning to form. For it was like this. The horses were always hauling timber, and the bridge was always echoing under their hooves, a muffled wooden sound, and the timbermen wore their short, checkered jackets, purple and brown. They all doffed their hats as they pa
ssed the tall cross, with the tin Christ on it, halfway across the bridge. Only a little boy who stood there by the bridge, looking on, in the winter, refused to doff his hat, for he was a clever little boy and didn’t believe in such things any more. And then he suddenly couldn’t button up his coat. He couldn’t do it. The frost had numbed his little fingers, they grasped a button and tugged at it, hard, but just as they were pushing it into the button-hole, it jumped out again, and his fingers were left helpless and amazed. However hard they tried, they always ended up in paralysed bewilderment.

  And it was this memory that came back to him so often.

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  Amid all these uncertainties Tonka’s pregnancy took its course, revealing the harshness of reality.

  There was the shambling gait, with Tonka seeming in need of a supporting arm, the heavy body that was mysteriously warm, the manner of sitting down, with legs apart, unwieldy and touchingly ugly: all the changing aspects of the miraculous process, steadily transforming the girlish body into a seed-pod, altering all its proportions, broadening the hips and pressing them down, taking the sharpness from the knees, thickening the neck, making the breasts into udders, streaking the skin of the belly with fine red and blue veins, so that it was startling to see how close to the outer world the blood circulated—as though that were a sign of death. All this unshapeliness was in fact a new shape, moulded as much by passivity as by main force; and the same distortion of human normality was reflected in her eyes: they now had a blank look, and her gaze would linger on things for a long time, shifting only with an effort. It would often rest for a long time on him. She was now keeping house for him again, waiting on him laboriously, as though she wanted to prove to him in these last days that she lived only for him. She showed

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  no trace of shame for her ugliness and deformation, only the desire to do as much as she could for him in spite of her awkwardness.