Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  Yes, it was time that he and Balich met—to go through life without meeting him face-to-face would be making life too easy for himself. He would long ago have died of boredom without his extensive difficulties.

  The putrid coffee was poured from the Silex by a sullen, stupid girl in her late teens who had been a sullen, stupid girl in her late teens ever since Sabbath had begun dropping in to smell Flo ’n Bert’s some fifteen years back. Maybe they were all from the same family, daughters of Flo and Bert who successively grew into the job, or maybe, more likely, there was an inexhaustible supply of these girls turned out by the Cumberland school system. On-the-prowl, insinuating, unselective Sabbath had never been able to get anything more than a grunt out of any of them.

  Involuntarily Balich made a face when he tasted the coffee—which turned out to be about as cold as the day—but politely said, “Oh no, very good, but one is enough,” when Sabbath asked if he’d like a second cup.

  “It has not been easy for you without your wife,” Sabbath said. “You look very thin.”

  “These have been dark days,” Balich replied.

  “Still?”

  He nodded sadly. “It’s awful still. I’m right at the bottom. After thirty-one years, I’m in my third month of a new regime. Somehow in some ways every day it gets worse.”

  That it does. “And your son?”

  “He’s in a bit of a state of shock too. He misses her terribly. But he’s young, he’s strong. Sometimes, his wife tells me, in the dark hours of the night . . . but he seems to be coping.”

  “That’s good,” Sabbath said. “That is about the strongest bond in the world, the mother and the little boy. There couldn’t be anything stronger.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Balich, his soft gray eyes growing teary from talking to somebody so understanding. “Yes, and when I looked at her dead, with my son at the hospital in the middle of the night . . . she was lying there with all the tubes and when I looked at her and I saw that it was broken, that bond with our son, I could not believe that this strongest thing in the world that you say was no longer in existence. There she was, all her beauty lying there, and that strongest thing wasn’t anymore. She was gone. So I kissed her good-bye, my son did and I did, and they took all the tubes out. And this piece of human sunlight was there, but dead.”

  “How old was she?”

  “Fifty-two. It’s the most cruel thing that could have happened.”

  “Of all the people in the world who would have died in their fifties like that,” said Sabbath, “I would never have imagined your wife on the list. The few times I ever saw her in town, as you say, she lit up everything. And your son works with you at the inn?”

  “Innkeeping is not on my mind at all. Whether that comes back ever, I don’t know. I do have a staff of good workers, but innkeeping is not on my mind. Our whole marriage was tied up with the inn. I am thinking of leasing the business. If some Japanese corporation wanted to come along and buy it . . . Every time I go into her office to try to deal with her things, it’s awful, it makes me sick. I don’t want to be there and I go.”

  Sabbath had not been mistaken, he thought, to have never written Drenka a single letter or to have insisted that it should be he, and not she, who filed away for safekeeping the Polaroids he’d taken of her at the Bo-Peep.

  “The letters,” Balich said, looking imploringly toward Sabbath, as though to make an appeal. “Two hundred and fifty-six letters.”

  “Of consolation?” asked Sabbath, who, of course, had not himself received a single one. When Nikki disappeared, however, he’d got mail about her care, of the theater. Though by now he’d forgotten how much—maybe fifty letters in all—at the time he’d been stupefied enough to keep a careful count, too.

  “Of sympathy, yes. Two hundred and fifty-six. I shouldn’t have been amazed at how she lit up everyone’s life. I’m getting letters still. And from people I can’t even remember. Some came to the inn when we first opened at the other end of the lake. Letters from all kinds of people about her and about how she affected their life. And I believe them. They are true. I got a long two-page letter, a handwritten letter, from the ex-mayor of Worcester.”

  “Really?”

  “He remembers our barbecues for the guests and how she made everyone happy. How she came into the dining room at breakfast and talked to everybody. She just touched everybody. I am strict, I have a rule for everything. But she knew how to treat the guests. Everything was always possible for the guests. For her to be pleasant it was never an effort. One owner is strict, the other is flexible and pleasant. We were a perfect pair to make a successful inn. It’s amazing what she did. A thousand different things. She did it all gracefully and always with great pleasure. I can’t stop dwelling on it. There is nothing that can take away even a little of this misery. It’s impossible to believe. One minute here, the next minute not.”

  The ex-mayor of Worcester? Well, she had secrets from both of us, Matija.

  “And what is your son’s occupation?”

  “A state trooper.”

  “Married?”

  “His wife is pregnant. The baby will be Drenka if it is a girl.”

  “Drenka?”

  “My wife’s name,” said Balich. “Drenka, Drenka,” he muttered. “There will never be another Drenka.”

  “Do you see him much, your son?”

  “Yes,” he lied, unless since Drenka’s death there had been a rapprochement.

  Balich suddenly had no more to say. Sabbath used the break to smell the moribund market’s smell. Either Balich did not want to talk about his grief over Drenka with a stranger any longer or he did not want to talk about his grief over his state trooper son who thought innkeeping was a stupid business.

  “How come your son isn’t a partner in the inn? Why doesn’t he take over with you, now that your wife is gone?”

  “I see,” said Balich after carefully setting his half-full cup on the counter beside the register, “that you have arthritic fingers. This is a painful disorder. My brother has arthritic fingers.”

  “Really? Silvija’s father?” asked Sabbath.

  Openly surprised, Balich said, “You know my little niece?”

  “My wife met her. My wife told me about her. She said she was a very, very pretty and charming child.”

  “Silvija loved her aunt very much. She worshiped her aunt. Silvija became our daughter, too.” In his quiet voice there was little intonation now other than the unmistakable intonation of sorrow.

  “Is Silvija at the inn in the summertime? My wife said she was working there to learn English.”

  “Silvija comes every summer while she is in university.”

  “What are you doing—training her to take over your wife’s job?”

  “No, no,” said Balich, and Sabbath was surprised by how disappointed he was to hear this. “She will be a computer programmer.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Sabbath.

  “That’s what she wants to be,” said Balich flatly.

  “But if she could help you run the inn, if she could light up the place the way your wife did . . .”

  Balich reached into his pocket for money. Sabbath said, “Please—” but Balich was not listening any longer. Doesn’t like me, Sabbath thought. Didn’t take to me. Must have said the wrong thing.

  “My coffee?” Balich asked the sullen girl at the register.

  She answered with as few sounded consonants as possible. Other things on her mind.

  “What?” Balich asked her.

  Sabbath translated. “Half a dollar.”

  Balich paid and, nodding formally at Sabbath, concluded his initial encounter with someone he clearly did not wish to meet ever again. It was Silvija that had done it, Sabbath’s modifying “very” with “very.” But that was as close as the puppeteer had come to telling Balich in their first five minutes together that the woman who had vomited after having had to fuck him had had every reason to vomit, because all the while she had been as
good as someone else’s wife. Of course he understood Balich’s feelings—for him, too, the shock of her death was only getting worse by the day—but that didn’t mean that Sabbath could forgive him.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Five months after her death, a damp, warm April night with a full moon canonizing itself above the tree line, effortlessly floating—luminously blessed—toward the throne of God, Sabbath stretched out on the ground that covered her coffin and said, “You filthy, wonderful Drenka cunt! Marry me! Marry me!” And with his white beard down in the dirt—the plot was still grassless and without a stone—he envisioned his Drenka: it was bright inside the box and she looked just like herself before the cancer stripped her of all that appealing roundness—ripe, full, ready for contact. Tonight she was wearing Silvija’s dirndl. And she was laughing at him.

  “So now you want me all to yourself. Now,” she said, “when you don’t have to have only me and live only with me and be bored only by me, now I am good enough to be your wife.”

  “Marry me!”

  Smiling invitingly, she replied, “First you’ll have to die,” and raised Silvija’s dress to reveal that she was without underpants—dark stockings and a garter belt but no underpants. Even dead, Drenka gave him a hard-on; alive or dead, Drenka made him twenty again. Even with temperatures below zero, he would grow hard whenever, from her coffin, she enticed him like this. He had learned to stand with his back to the north so that the icy wind did not blow directly on his dick but still he had to remove one of his gloves to jerk off successfully, and sometimes the gloveless hand would get so cold that he would have to put that glove back on and switch to the other hand. He came on her grave many nights.

  The old cemetery was six miles out of town on a little-used road that curved up into the woods and then zigzagged down the western side of the mountain, where it emptied into a superannuated truck route to Albany. The cemetery was set into an open hillside that rolled gently up to an ancient stand of hemlock and white pine. It was beautiful, still, aesthetically charming, melancholy perhaps, but not a cemetery that made you downhearted when you entered it—it was so charming that it sometimes looked as though it had nothing to do with death. It was old, very old, though there were some even older in the nearby hills, their eroded tombstones, fallen aslant, dating back to the earliest years of colonial America. The first burial here—of a certain John Driscoll—had been in 1745; the last burial had been of Drenka, on the last day of November 1993.

  Because of the seventeen snowstorms that winter it was often impossible for him to make his way up to the cemetery, even on nights when Roseanna had hurried off to an AA meeting in her four-wheel drive and he was all alone. But when the roads were plowed, the weather was good, the sun down, and Roseanna gone, he drove his Chevy up to the top of Battle Mountain and parked at the cleared entrance to a hiking path about a quarter mile east of the cemetery and made his way along the highway to the graveyard and then, using a flashlight as sparingly as he could, across the treacherous glaze of the drifted snow to her grave. He never drove out during the day, however much he needed to, for fear of running into one of her Matthews or, for that matter, anyone who could take to wondering why, at the coldest spot in the state’s “icebox” county, in the midst of the worst winter in local history, the disgraced puppeteer was paying his respects to the remains of the innkeeper’s peppy wife. At night he could do what he wished to do, unseen by anyone but his mother’s ghost.

  “What do you want? If you want to say something . . .” But his mother never did communicate with him, and just because she didn’t he came dangerously close to believing that she was not a hallucination—if he was hallucinating, then easily enough he could hallucinate speech for her, enlarge her reality with a voice of the kind with which he used to enliven his puppets. These visitations had been going on too regularly to be a mental aberration . . . unless he was mentally aberrant and the unreality was going to worsen as life became even more unendurable. Without Drenka it was unendurable—he didn’t have a life, except at the cemetery.

  The first April after her death, on this early spring night, Sabbath lay spread-eagled atop her grave, reminiscing with her about Christa. “Never forget you coming,” he whispered into the dirt, “never forget you begging her, ‘More, more. . . .’” Invoking Christa did not exacerbate his jealousy, remembering Drenka lying back in his arms while Christa maintained the steady pressure of the point of her tongue on Drenka’s clitoris (for close to an hour—he’d timed them) only intensified the loss, even though, shortly after the three had first got together, Christa began taking Drenka to a bar in Spottsfield to dance. She went so far as to make Drenka the gift of a gold chain that she’d lifted from her former employer’s jewelry drawer on the morning she’d decided she’d had enough of looking after a kid so hyperactive that he was about to be enrolled in a special school for the “gifted.” She told Drenka that the value of everything she’d walked off with (including a pair of diamond stud earrings and a slithery little bracelet of diamonds) didn’t come to half of what she was entitled to for having been stuck, sight unseen, with that kid.

  Christa lived in an attic room on Town Street, overlooking the green, just above the gourmet food shop where she worked. Her rent was free, lunches were free, and in addition she was paid twenty-five dollars a week. For two months, on Wednesday nights, Drenka and Sabbath would go, in separate cars, to lie with Christa in the attic. Nothing was open on Town Street after dark, and they could get up unobserved to Christa’s by an outside back staircase. Three times Drenka had been by herself to see Christa there but, fearful that Sabbath would be angry with her if he knew, she did not tell him until a year after Christa had turned against the two of them and moved out to the countryside, into the rented farmhouse of a history instructor on the Athena faculty, a woman of thirty with whom Christa had begun a love affair even before she had undertaken her little caprice with the elderly. Abruptly she stopped answering Sabbath’s phone calls, and when he ran into her one day—while he pretended to be studying the window display of the gourmet shop, a display which hadn’t changed since Tip-Top Grocery Company had evolved in the late sixties into Tip-Top Gourmet Company to accommodate the ardor of the times—she said to him angrily, her mouth so minute it looked like something omitted from her face, “I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” “Why? What happened?” “You two exploited me.” “I don’t think that’s true, Christa. To exploit someone means to use someone selfishly for one’s own ends or to utilize them for profit. I don’t think either of us exploited you any more than you exploited either of us.” “You’re an old man! I am twenty years old! I do not want to talk to you!” “Won’t you at least talk to Drenka?” “Leave me alone! You’re nothing but a fat old man!” “So was Falstaff, kiddo. So was that huge hill of flesh Sir John Paunch, sweet creator of bombast! ‘That villainous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan’!—” but she was by this time already into the shop, leaving Sabbath to sadly contemplate—along with a Christaless future—two jars of Mi-Kee Chinese Duck Sauce, two jars of Krinos Grape Leaves in Brine, two cans of La Victoria Refried Beans, and two cans of Baxter’s Cream of Smoked Trout Soup, all of them encircling a bottle fancily wrapped in a sunfaded whitish paper shroud and positioned on a pedestal at the center of the window as if it were the answer to all our cravings, a bottle of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce. Yes, a relic much like Sabbath himself of what was considered oh-so-spicy in a bygone era less . . . in a bygone era more . . . in a bygone era when . . . in a bygone era whose . . . Idiot! The mistake was never to have given her money. The mistake was to have given Drenka the money instead. All he’d slipped Christa—and this only to get a foot in the door the first time—was thirty-five dollars for a quilt she’d made. He should have been slipping her that much per week. To have imagined that Christa was in it for the fun of making Drenka crazy, that Drenka’s coming was for her remuneration enough—idiot! idiot!

  Sabbath and C
hrista had met one night in 1989 when he’d given her a lift home. He saw her out on the shoulder of 144, wearing a tuxedo, and he circled back. If she had a knife, she had a knife—did it matter living a few years more or less? It was impossible to leave standing all alone on the side of the road with her thumb lifted a young blond girl in a tuxedo who looked like a young blond boy in a tuxedo.

  She explained her outfit by saying she had been to a dance down in Athena, at the college, where you were to come wearing “something crazy.” She was petite but hardly childlike—more a miniaturized woman, with a very crisp, self-confident air about her and a tightly held little mouth. The German accent was gentle but inflammatory (for Sabbath, any attractive woman’s accent was inflammatory), the haircut was short as a Marine recruit’s, and the tuxedo suggested that she was not without the inclination to play a provocative role in life. Otherwise the kid was all business: no sentiment, no longings, no illusions, no follies, and, he’d bet his life on it—he had—no taboos to speak of. Sabbath liked the cruel toughness, the shrewdness of the calculating, mistrustful little German mouth and saw the possibilities right off. Remote, but there. Admiringly he thought, Unbesmirched by selflessness, a budding beast of prey.

  As he drove along he had been listening to a tape of Benny Goodman’s Live at Carnegie Hall. He and Drenka had just parted for the night at the Bo-Peep, some twenty miles south on 144.

  “Are they black?” the German girl asked.

  “No. A few are black but mainly, Miss, they are white. White jazz musicians. Carnegie Hall in New York. The night of January 16,1938.”

  “You were there?” she asked.

  “Yes. I took my children, my little children. So they would be present at a musical milestone. Wanted them beside me the night that America changed forever.”

  Together they listened to “Honeysuckle Rose,” Goodman’s boys jamming with half a dozen members of the Basie band. “This is jumpin’,” Sabbath told her. “This is what’s called a foot mover. Keeps your feet movin’. . . . Hear that guitar back there? Notice how that rhythm section is driving them on? . . . Basie. Very lean piano playing. . . . Hear that guitar there? Carryin’ this thing. . . .That’s black music. You’re hearin’ black music now. . . . Now you’re going to hear a riff. That’s James. . . . Underneath all this is that steady rhythm section carrying this whole thing. . . . Freddie Green on guitar. . . . James. Always have the feeling he’s tearing that instrument apart—you can hear it tear. . . . This figure they’re just dreaming up—watch them build it now. . . . They’re workin’ their way into the ride-out. Here it comes. They’re all tuned into each other. . . . They’re off. They’re off. . . . Well, what do you make of that?” Sabbath asked her.