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

by Jeffrey Eugenides

  And the memories burned brighter and brighter. Whether from the

  voices of his children doing their homework, which reached him in his study in the evening quiet, or from hearing a romance, or an organ in a restaurant, or the blizzard howling in the chimney, everything would suddenly rise up in his memory: what had happened on the jetty, and the early morning with mist on the mountains, and the steamer from Feodosia, and the kisses. He would pace the room for a long time, and remember, and smile, and then his memories would turn to reveries, and in his imagination the past would mingle with what was still to be. Anna Sergeevna was not a dream, she followed him everywhere like a shadow and watched him. Closing his eyes, he saw her as if alive, and she seemed younger, more beautiful, more tender than she was; and he also seemed better to himself than he had been then, in Yalta. In the evenings she gazed at him from the bookcase, the fireplace, the corner, he could hear her breathing, the gentle rustle of her skirts. In the street he followed women with his eyes, looking for one who resembled her . . .

  And he was tormented now by a strong desire to tell someone his

  memories. But at home it was impossible to talk of his love, and away from home there was no one to talk with. Certainly not among his tenants nor at the bank. And what was there to say? Had he been in love then? Was there anything beautiful, poetic, or instructive, or merely interesting, in his relations with Anna Sergeevna? And he found himself speaking vaguely of love, of women, and no one could guess what it was about, and only his wife raised her dark eyebrows and said:

  “You know, Dimitri, the role of fop doesn’t suit you at all.”

  One night, as he was leaving the Doctors’ Club together with his

  partner, an official, he could not help himself and said:

  “If you only knew what a charming woman I met in Yalta!”

  The official got into a sleigh and drove off, but suddenly turned around and called out:

  “Dmitri Dmitrich!”

  “What?”

  “You were right earlier: the sturgeon was a bit off !”

  Those words, so very ordinary, for some reason suddenly made

  Gurov indignant, struck him as humiliating, impure. Such savage man-

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  ners, such faces! These senseless nights, and such uninteresting, unre-markable days! Frenzied card-playing, gluttony, drunkenness, constant talk about the same thing. Useless matters and conversations about the same thing took for their share the best part of one ’s time, the best of one ’s powers, and what was left in the end was some sort of curtailed, wingless life, some sort of nonsense, and it was impossible to get away or flee, as if you were sitting in a madhouse or a prison camp!

  Gurov did not sleep all night and felt indignant, and as a result had a headache all the next day. And the following nights he slept poorly, sitting up in bed all the time and thinking, or pacing up and down. He was sick of the children, sick of the bank, did not want to go anywhere or talk about anything.

  In December, during the holidays, he got ready to travel and told his wife he was leaving for Petersburg to solicit for a certain young man—and went to S. Why? He did not know very well himself. He wanted to see Anna Sergeevna and talk with her, to arrange a meeting, if he could.

  He arrived at S. in the morning and took the best room in the hotel, where the whole floor was covered with gray army flannel and there was an inkstand on the table, gray with dust, with a horseback rider, who held his hat in his raised hand, but whose head was broken off. The hall porter gave him the necessary information: von Dideritz lives in his own house on Staro-Goncharnaya Street, not far from the hotel; he has a good life, is wealthy, keeps his own horses, everybody in town knows him. The porter pronounced it “Dridiritz.”

  Gurov walked unhurriedly to Staro-Goncharnaya Street, found

  the house. Just opposite the house stretched a fence, long, gray, with spikes.

  “You could flee from such a fence,” thought Gurov, looking now at the windows, now at the fence.

  He reflected: today was not a workday, and the husband was prob-

  ably at home. And anyhow it would be tactless to go in and cause embarrassment. If he sent a message, it might fall into the husband ’s hands, and that would ruin everything. It would be best to trust to chance. And he kept pacing up and down the street and near the fence and waited for his chance. He saw a beggar go in the gates and saw the dogs attack him,

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  then, an hour later, he heard someone playing a piano, and the sounds reached him faintly, indistinctly. It must have been Anna Sergeevna playing. The front door suddenly opened and some old woman came out,

  the familiar white spitz running after her. Gurov wanted to call the dog, but his heart suddenly throbbed, and in his excitement he was unable to remember the spitz’s name.

  He paced up and down, and hated the gray fence more and more, and now he thought with vexation that Anna Sergeevna had forgotten him, and was perhaps amusing herself with another man, and that that was so natural in the situation of a young woman who had to look at this cursed fence from morning till evening. He went back to his hotel room and sat on the sofa for a long time, not knowing what to do, then had dinner, then took a long nap.

  “How stupid and upsetting this all is,” he thought, when he woke up and looked at the dark windows: it was already evening. “So I’ve had my sleep. Now what am I to do for the night?”

  He sat on the bed, which was covered with a cheap, gray, hospital-like blanket, and taunted himself in vexation:

  “Here ’s the lady with the little dog for you . . . Here ’s an adventure for you . . . Yes, here you sit.”

  That morning, at the train station, a poster with very big lettering had caught his eye: it was the opening night of The Geisha. He remembered it and went to the theater.

  “It ’s very likely that she goes to opening nights,” he thought.

  The theater was full. And here, too, as in all provincial theaters generally, a haze hung over the chandeliers, the gallery stirred noisily; the local dandies stood in the front row before the performance started, their hands behind their backs; and here, too, in the governor’s box, the governor’s daughter sat in front, wearing a boa, while the governor himself modestly hid behind the portière, and only his hands could be seen; the curtain swayed, the orchestra spent a long time tuning up. All the while the public came in and took their seats, Gurov kept searching greedily with his eyes.

  Anna Sergeevna came in. She sat in the third row, and when Gurov

  looked at her, his heart was wrung, and he realized clearly that there was

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  now no person closer, dearer, or more important for him in the whole world; this small woman, lost in the provincial crowd, not remarkable for anything, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hand, now filled his whole life, was his grief, his joy, the only happiness he now wished for himself; and to the sounds of the bad orchestra, with its trashy local violins, he thought how beautiful she was. He thought and dreamed.

  A man came in with Anna Sergeevna and sat down next to her, a

  young man with little side-whiskers, very tall, stooping; he nodded his head at every step, and it seemed he was perpetually bowing. This was probably her husband, whom she, in an outburst of bitter feeling that time in Yalta, had called a lackey. And indeed, in his long figure, his side-whiskers, his little bald spot, there was something of lackeyish modesty; he had a sweet smile, and the badge of some learned society gleamed in his buttonhole, like the badge of a lackey.

  During the first intermission the husband went to smoke; she

  remained in her seat. Gurov, who was also sitting in the stalls, went up to her and said in a trembling voice and with a forced smile:

  “How do you do?”

  She looked at him and paled, then looked again in horror, not be
lieving her eyes, and tightly clutched her fan and lorgnette in her hand, obviously struggling with herself to keep from fainting. Both were silent. She sat, he stood, alarmed at her confusion, not venturing to sit down next to her. The tuning-up violins and flutes sang out, it suddenly became frightening, it seemed that people were gazing at them from all the boxes. But then she got up and quickly walked to the exit, he followed her, and they both went confusedly through corridors and stairways, going up, then down, and the uniforms of the courts, the schools, and the imperial estates flashed before them, all with badges; ladies flashed by, fur coats on hangers, a drafty wind blew, drenching them with the smell of cigar stubs. And Gurov, whose heart was pounding, thought:

  “Oh, Lord! Why these people, this orchestra . . .”

  And just then he suddenly recalled how, at the station in the evening after he had seen Anna Sergeevna off, he had said to himself that everything was over and they would never see each other again. But how far it still was from being over!

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  On a narrow, dark stairway with the sign “To the Amphitheater,”

  she stopped.

  “How you frightened me!” she said, breathing heavily, still pale, stunned. “Oh, how you frightened me! I’m barely alive. Why did you come? Why?”

  “But understand, Anna, understand . . .” he said in a low voice, hurrying. “I beg you to understand . . .”

  She looked at him with fear, with entreaty, with love, looked at him intently, the better to keep his features in her memory.

  “I’ve been suffering so!” she went on, not listening to him. “I think only of you all the time, I’ve lived by my thoughts of you. And I’ve tried to forget, to forget, but why, why did you come?”

  Further up, on the landing, two high-school boys were smoking and looking down, but Gurov did not care, he drew Anna Sergeevna to him and began kissing her face, her cheeks, her hands.

  “What are you doing, what are you doing!” she repeated in horror, pushing him away from her. “We ’ve both lost our minds. Leave today, leave at once . . . I adjure you by all that ’s holy, I implore you . . . Somebody’s coming!”

  Someone was climbing the stairs.

  “You must leave . . .” Anna Sergeevna went on in a whisper. “Do

  you hear, Dmitri Dmitrich? I’ll come to you in Moscow. I’ve never been happy, I’m unhappy now, and I’ll never, never be happy, never! Don’t make me suffer still more! I swear I’ll come to Moscow. But we must part now! My dear one, my good one, my darling, we must part!”

  She pressed his hand and quickly began going downstairs, turning

  back to look at him, and it was clear from her eyes that she was indeed not happy . . . Gurov stood for a little while, listened, then, when everything was quiet, found his coat and left the theater.

  I V

  And Anna Sergeevna began coming to see him in Moscow. Once every

  two or three months she left S., and told her husband she was going to

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  consult a professor about her female disorder—and her husband did and did not believe her. Arriving in Moscow, she stayed at the Slavyansky Bazaar and at once sent a man in a red hat to Gurov. Gurov came to see her, and nobody in Moscow knew of it.

  Once he was going to see her in that way on a winter morning (the messenger had come the previous evening but had not found him in).

  With him was his daughter, whom he wanted to see off to school, which was on the way. Big, wet snow was falling.

  “It’s now three degrees above freezing, and yet it’s snowing,” Gurov said to his daughter. “But it’s warm only near the surface of the earth, while in the upper layers of the atmosphere the temperature is quite different.”

  “And why is there no thunder in winter, papa?”

  He explained that, too. He spoke and thought that here he was going to a rendezvous, and not a single soul knew of it or probably would ever know. He had two lives: an apparent one, seen and known by all who needed it, filled with conventional truth and conventional deceit, which perfectly resembled the lives of his acquaintances and friends, and another that went on in secret. And by some strange coincidence, perhaps an accidental one, everything that he found important, interesting, necessary, in which he was sincere and did not deceive himself, which constituted the core of his life, occurred in secret from others, while everything that made up his lie, his shell, in which he hid in order to conceal the truth—for instance, his work at the bank, his arguments at the club, his “inferior race,” his attending official celebrations with his wife—all this was in full view. And he judged others by himself, did not believe what he saw, and always supposed that every man led his own real and very interesting life under the cover of secrecy, as under the cover of night. Every personal existence was upheld by a secret, and it was perhaps partly for that reason that every cultivated man took such anxious care that his personal secret should be respected.

  After taking his daughter to school, Gurov went to the Slavyansky Bazaar. He took his fur coat off downstairs, went up, and knocked softly at the door. Anna Sergeevna, wearing his favorite gray dress, tired from

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  the trip and the expectation, had been waiting for him since the previous evening; she was pale, looked at him and did not smile, and he had barely come in when she was already leaning on his chest. Their kiss was long, lingering, as if they had not seen each other for two years.

  “Well, how is your life there?” he asked. “What ’s new?”

  “Wait, I’ll tell you . . . I can’t.”

  She could not speak because she was crying. She turned away from

  him and pressed a handkerchief to her eyes.

  “Well, let her cry a little, and meanwhile I’ll sit down,” he thought, and sat down in an armchair.

  Then he rang and ordered tea; and then, while he drank tea, she went on standing with her face turned to the window . . . She was crying from anxiety, from a sorrowful awareness that their life had turned out so sadly; they only saw each other in secret, they hid from people like thieves! Was their life not broken?

  “Well, stop now,” he said.

  For him it was obvious that this love of theirs would not end soon, that there was no knowing when. Anna Sergeevna’s attachment to him grew ever stronger, she adored him, and it would have been unthinkable to tell her that it all really had to end at some point; and she would not have believed it.

  He went up to her and took her by the shoulders to caress her, to make a joke, and at that moment he saw himself in the mirror.

  His head was beginning to turn gray. And it seemed strange to him that he had aged so much in those last years, had lost so much of his good looks. The shoulders on which his hands lay were warm and trembled.

  He felt compassion for this life, still so warm and beautiful, but probably already near the point where it would begin to fade and wither, like his own life. Why did she love him so? Women had always taken him to be other than he was, and they had loved in him, not himself, but a man their imagination had created, whom they had greedily sought all their lives; and then, when they had noticed their mistake, they had still loved him. And not one of them had been happy with him. Time passed, he met women, became intimate, parted, but not once did he love; there was anything else, but not love.

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  And only now, when his head was gray, had he really fallen in love as one ought to—for the first time in his life.

  He and Anna Sergeevna loved each other like very close, dear peo-

  ple, like husband and wife, like tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself had destined them for each other, and they could not understand why he had a wife and she a husband; and it was as if they were two birds of passage, a male and a female, who had been caught and for
ced to live in separate cages. They had forgiven each other the things they were ashamed of in the past, they forgave everything in the present, and they felt that this love of theirs had changed them both.

  Formerly, in sad moments, he had calmed himself with all sorts of arguments, whatever had come into his head, but now he did not care about any arguments, he felt deep compassion, he wanted to be sincere, tender . . .

  “Stop, my good one,” he said, “you’ve had your cry—and enough . . .

  Let ’s talk now, we ’ll think up something.”

  Then they had a long discussion, talked about how to rid themselves of the need for hiding, for deception, for living in different towns and not seeing each other for long periods. How could they free themselves from these unbearable bonds?

  “How? How?” he asked, clutching his head. “How?”

  And it seemed that, just a little more—and the solution would be

  found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far, far off, and that the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning.

  l o v e

  g r a c e pa l e y

  First I wrote this poem:

  Walking up the slate path of the college park

  under the nearly full moon the brown oak leaves are red as maples and I have been looking at the young people

  they speak and embrace one another

  because of them I thought I would descend

  into remembering love so I let myself down hand over hand

  until my feet touched the earth of the gardens of Vesey Street I told my husband, I’ve just written a poem about love.

  What a good idea, he said.

  Then he told me about Sally Johnson on Lake Winnipesaukee, who

  was twelve and a half when he was fourteen. Then he told me about Rosemarie Johanson on Lake Sunapee. Then he told me about Jane Mar-ston in Concord High, and then he told me about Mary Smythe of Rad-cliffe when he was a poet at Harvard. Then he told me about two famous poets, one fair and one dark, both now dead, when he was a secret poet working at an acceptable trade in an office without windows. When at last he came to my time—that is, the past fifteen years or so—he told me about Dotty Wasserman.