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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  They were now spending nearly as much time together as in earlier days. They did not talk much, but they liked to be near each other, for her pregnancy was advancing like the hand of a clock, and they were helpless in the face of it. They ought to have talked the whole thing out together, but they did nothing about it, and time moved on. The shadowy being, the unreal element on him, sometimes struggled for words, and the realisation that everything ought to be measured by quite different standards almost broke surface—but, like all understanding, even this was ambiguous and without certainty. And time was running on, time was running away, time was running out. The clock on the wall had more to do with reality than their thoughts had.

  It was a suburban room where nothing of importance could happen.

  There they sat, and the clock on the wall was a round kitchen clock, telling kitchen time. And his mother bombarded him with letters proving everything up to the hilt. Instead of sending money to him, she spent it on getting opinions from doctors, in the hope of making him see reason.

  He quite understood this and no longer resented it. Once she sent him a medical statement that made it really clear to him that Tonka must have been unfaithful to him at that time. But far from upsetting him, it was almost a pleasant surprise. As though it had nothing to do with him, he wondered how it had happened, and all he felt was: Poor Tonka, she has had to pay so dearly for a single passing aberration! Yes, sometimes he had to pull himself up short, on the point of saying quite cheerfully:

  ‘Listen, Tonka—I’ve only just realised what we ’ve been forgetting about—who it was you were unfaithful to me with, that time!’ So everything petered out. Nothing new happened. There was only the clock.

  And the old familiar bond between them.

  And even although they had not talked about it, this brought back the moments when the bodies desired each other. They came like old friends who, returning after long absence, will simply walk into the room. The windows on the far side of the narrow courtyard were eye-less in the shadow, the people were all out at work; down below the yard was dark as a well; and the sun shone into the room as though

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  through frosted glass, making each object stand out sharply, in a dead gleam. And there, for instance, lay a little old calendar, open as though Tonka had just been going through it, and on the wide expanse of

  one leaf, like a memorial erected to that one day, there was a small red exclamation-mark. All the other leaves were covered with everyday domestic entries, shopping-lists, sums, and the like, and only this one was empty except for the one sign. Not for an instant did he doubt that this betokened the memory of the incident that Tonka denied.

  The time just about fitted. His certainty was like a rush of blood to the head. Yet certainty itself merely lay in this vehemence, and in the next instant it had again dwindled into nothingness. If one was going to believe in what this exclamation-mark might signify, then one might just as well believe in the miraculous. What was so appalling was, after all, the very fact of believing in neither.

  There was a startled glance exchanged between them. Tonka had

  obviously seen him looking at that page in the calendar.

  In the queer indoor light all the things in the room now looked like mummies of their former selves. The bodies grew cold, the fingertips became icy, the intestines were hot coils of tubing in which all vital warmth was contained.

  True, the doctor had said that Tonka must be spared any sort of

  stress if complications were to be avoided. But at this moment doctors were the very people whom he must not trust. And yet all his efforts to trust in something else were also futile. Perhaps Tonka was not strong enough? She remained a half-born myth.

  “Come here,” Tonka said gently.

  And they shared their anguish and their warmth, in mournful resignation.

  X I I

  Tonka had gone into hospital. The turn for the worse had come. He was allowed to see her at visiting-hours. So the time had slipped away, irrevocably.

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  On the day she left the house he had his beard shaved off. Now he was more like himself again.

  Later on he discovered that that very day she had lost patience, lost her head, in fact, and had gone and done something she had been putting off all this time for the sake of saving money: as though making a last gesture of independence before going into hospital, she went and had a decayed molar extracted. Her cheek must now be sadly sunken, and all because she would never let herself be properly looked after.

  Now his dreams began to intensify again.

  One dream recurred in many forms. A fair, plain girl with a pale

  complexion was telling him that his new girl—some invented figure in the dream—had left him, at which he became curious to hear more and exclaimed: “And do you think Tonka was any better?” He shook his

  head, with an expression of doubt on his face, to provoke the girl into making some equally vehement protestation of Tonka’s virtues, and he already had a foretaste of the relief he would get from her decisive answer. But then he saw a frightful slow smirk gradually spreading over the girl’s face. And she said: “Oh, her! But she was a dreadful liar! She was quite nice, of course, but you couldn’t believe a word she said. She always wanted to be a smart woman of the world.” What caused him most anguish in this dream was not that dreadful smile, which was like a knife cutting into his flesh, but the fact that he could never ward off the eager platitudes at the end of it: powerless in his sleep, he heard them being uttered as though out of the depths of his own mind.

  And so when he went to visit Tonka, he would often sit at her bedside with nothing to say. He would gladly have been as magnanimous as in certain dreams he had had earlier, and he might actually have brought himself to be so if he had devoted to Tonka some of the energy with which he was working on his invention.

  Although the doctors had never been able to find any trace of the disease in him, he was linked with Tonka by the possibility of some mysterious connection: he only had to believe her, and instantly he would be diseased. And perhaps (he told himself ) that would have been possible in some other age. He was beginning to enjoy letting his imagination rove back into the past, telling himself such things as that in some other

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  age Tonka’s fame might have spread far and wide and that princes would not have disdained to woo her. But nowadays? This was something he really ought to think about at length some day.

  So he would sit at her bedside, being kind and affectionate to her, but never uttering the words: ‘I believe you.’ And this although he had long believed in her. For he believed her only in such a way that he was no longer able to be unbelieving and angry, and not in such a way that he could face the rational consequences of it. This not believing kept him immune and safely anchored to the earth.

  The things that went on in the hospital tormented his imagination: it was all doctors, examinations, routine. The world had snatched Tonka away and strapped her to the table. Yet he was almost beginning to regard this as her own fault; if she was indeed something of deeper significance, under the surface of what the world was doing to her, then everything in the world ought to be different too, so that one would want to fight for it. And he was already beginning to surrender. Only a few days after their separation she was already a little remote from him, for he was no longer able to make daily amends for the strangeness of her all too simple life, that strangeness which he had always felt, in however slight degree.

  And because he usually had so little to say when he visited Tonka in hospital, he wrote letters to her, saying a great deal that he otherwise kept to himself. He wrote to her almost as seriously as to some great love. Yet even these letters stopped short of ever declaring: ‘I believe in you.’ He was quite disconcerted to receive no answers from Tonka, until he realised that he had never posted the
se letters. The fact was, he could not be sure that he meant what he wrote; it was simply a state of mind that he could do nothing about except write it out of his system. That made him realise how lucky he was, despite everything—he could express himself. Tonka could not do that. And the moment he saw that, he saw Tonka for just what she was; a snowflake falling all alone in the midst of a summer’s day. But the very next moment this no longer explained anything. Perhaps it all amounted to no more than that she was a dear, good girl. And time was passing too quickly. One day he was horribly overtaken by the news that she would not last much longer. He

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  reproached himself bitterly for having been so careless, for not having looked after her properly, and he did not attempt to hide this from her.

  Then she told him of a dream she had had a few nights earlier. For Tonka also had dreams.

  “In my dream I knew I was going to die soon,” she said. “And it ’s a funny thing, you know, but I was very glad. I had a bag of cherries, and I said to myself: ‘Never mind, you just gobble them up quick before you go.’ ”

  The next day they would not let him in to see her.

  X I I I

  Then he said to himself: ‘Perhaps Tonka wasn’t really so good as I imagined.’ But that again only went to prove how mysterious her goodness was. It was the kind of goodness that a dog might have had.

  He was overwhelmed by a dry, raging grief that swept through him like a storm. It went howling round the solid walls of his existence, crying: ‘I can’t write to you any more, I can’t see you any more.’ ‘But I shall be with you like God Himself,’ he consoled himself, without even knowing what this was supposed to mean. And sometimes he could simply have cried out: ‘Help me, help me! Here I am kneeling before you!’

  Sadly he said to himself: ‘Think of it, a man walking all alone with a dog in the mountains of the stars, in the sea of the stars!’ And he was agonised with tears that became as big as the globe of the sky and would not come out of his eyes.

  Wide awake, he now dreamt Tonka’s dreams for her.

  Once, he dreamed to himself, when all Tonka’s hope had gone he

  would suddenly come into the room again and be there with her. He would be wearing his large-checked, brown tweed travelling-coat. And when he opened it, underneath it he would be quite naked, nothing on his slender white body but a thin gold chain, with tinkling pendants on it. And everything would be like one single day, she would be quite sure of that.

  This was how he longed for Tonka, as she had longed for him. Oh,

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  she was never a loose woman! No man tempted her. If someone pays court to her, she will rather give him to understand, with slightly awkward mournfulness, that such affairs are likely to come to a bad end. And when she leaves the shop in the evening, she is quite full of all the noisy, jolly, annoying events of her day, her ears are full of it all, inwardly she goes on talking of it all, and there is no scrap of room for any stranger.

  But she knows too that there is a part of her that remains untouched by all this: there is a realm where she is grand, noble, and good, where she is not a little shop-girl, but his equal, deserving of a great destiny. And this was why, in spite of all the difference between them, she always believed she had a right to him. What he was concerned with achieving was something of which she understood nothing at all; it did not affect her. But he belonged to her because at bottom he was good; for she too was good, and somewhere, after all, there must be the palace of goodness where they would live united and never part again.

  What then was this goodness? It did not lie in action, nor yet in being.

  It was a gleam when the travelling-coat opened. And time was moving much too fast. He was still clinging to the earth, he had not yet uttered the thought ‘I believe in you!’ with conviction, he was still saying: ‘And even supposing everything were like that, who could be sure of it?’ He was still saying that when Tonka died.

  X I V

  He gave one of the nurses a tip, and she told him of Tonka’s last hours and that she had sent her love to him.

  Then it crossed his mind, casually, as one remembers a poem and

  wags one ’s head to the rhythm of it, that it was not really Tonka at all he had been living with: it was something that had called to him.

  He said these words to himself over and over again; he stood in

  the street with these words in his mind. The world lay around him. He realised, indeed, that he had been changed in some way and that in time he would be yet again another man, but this was, after all, his own doing and not really any merit of Tonka’s. The strain of these last weeks—the

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  strain, that is, of course, of working on his invention—was over. He had finished. He stood in the light and she lay under the ground, but all in all what he felt was the cheer and comfort of the light.

  Only, as he stood there looking about him, suddenly he found him-

  self gazing into the face of one of the many children round about—a child that happened to be crying. There in the full blast of sunlight the face wriggled and writhed like a ghastly worm. Then memory cried out in him: ‘Tonka! Tonka!’ He felt her, from the ground under his feet to the crown of his head, and the whole of her life. All that he had never understood was there before him in this instant, the bandage that had blindfolded him seemed to have dropped from his eyes—yet only for an instant, and the next instant it was merely as though something had flashed through his mind.

  From that time on much came to his mind that made him a little better than other people, because there was a small warm shadow that had fallen across his brilliant life.

  That was no help to Tonka now. But it was a help to him. And this even though human life flows too fast for anyone to hear each of its voices clearly and find the answer to each of them.

  j o n

  g e o r g e s a u n d e r s

  Back in the time of which I am speaking, due to our Coordinators

  had mandated us, we had all seen that educational video of It’s Yours to Do With What You Like! in which teens like ourselfs speak on the healthy benefits of getting off by oneself and doing what one feels like in terms of self-touching, which what we learned from that video was, there is nothing wrong with self-touching, because love is a mystery but the mechanics of love need not be, so go off alone, see what is up, with you and your relation to your own gonads, and the main thing is, just have fun, feeling no shame!

  And then nightfall would fall and our facility would fill with the sounds of quiet fast breathing from inside our Privacy Tarps as we all experimented per the techniques taught us in It’s Yours to Do With What You Like! and what do you suspect, you had better make sure that that little gap between the main wall and the wall that slides out to make the Gender Areas is like really really small.

  Which, guess what, it wasn’t.

  That is all what I am saying.

  Also all what I am saying is, who could blame Josh for noting that little gap and squeezing through it snakelike in just his Old Navy boxers that Old Navy gave us to wear for gratis, plus who could blame Ruthie for leaving her Velcro knowingly un-Velcroed? Which soon all the rest of us heard them doing what the rest of us so badly wanted to be doing, only we, being more mindful of the rules than them, just laid there doing the self-stuff from the video, listening to Ruth and Josh really doing it for real, which believe me, even that was pretty fun.

  And when Josh came back next morning so happy he was crying,

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  that was a further blow to our morality, because why did our Coordinators not catch him on their supposedly nighttime monitors? In all of our hearts was the thought of, okay, we thought you said no boy-and-girl stuff, and yet here is Josh, with his Old Navy boxers in hi
s hand and a hickey on his waist, and none of you guys is even saying boo?

  Because I for one wanted to do right, I did not want to sneak through that gap, I wanted to wed someone when old enough (I will soon tell who) and relocate to the appropriate facility in terms of demographics, namely Young Marrieds, such as Scranton, PA, or Mobile, AL, and then along comes Josh doing Ruthie with imperity, and no one is punished, and soon the miracle of birth results and all our Coordinators, even Mr.

  Delacourt, are bringing Baby Amber stuffed animals? At which point every cell or chromosome or whatever it was in my gonads that had been holding their breaths was suddenly like, Dude, slide through that gap no matter how bad it hurts, squat outside Carolyn’s Privacy Tarp whispering, Carolyn, it ’s me, please un-Velcro your Privacy opening!

  Then came the final straw that broke the back of me saying no to my gonads, which was I dreamed I was that black dude on MTV’s Hot and Spicy Christmas (around like Location Indicator 34412, if you want to check it out) and Carolyn was the oiled-up white chick, and we were trying to earn the Island Vacation by miming through the ten Hot ’n’

  Nasty Positions before the end of “We Three Kings,” only then, sadly, during Her On Top, Thumb In Mouth, her Elf Cap fell off, and as the Loser Buzzer sounded she bent low to me, saying, Oh, Jon, I wish we did not have to do this for fake in front of hundreds of kids on Spring Break doing the wave but instead could do it for real with just each other in private.

  And then she kissed me with a kiss I can only describe as melting.

  So imagine that is you, you are a healthy young dude who has been self-practicing all these months, and you wake from that dream of a hot chick giving you a melting kiss, and that same hot chick is laying or lying just on the other side of the sliding wall, and meanwhile in the very next Privacy Tarp is that sleeping dude Josh, who a few weeks before, a baby was born to the girl he had recently did it with, and nothing bad happened, except now Mr. Slippen sometimes let them sleep in.

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  What would you do?