Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  He parked at the entrance to the cemetery, not thirty yards from Drenka’s grave. On the back of a garage repair bill that he dug out of the glove compartment, he composed his will. He worked by the gleam from the dashboard and the overhead lamp. His flashlight batteries had petered out—juice enough for just a pinprick of light, but then, he’d been going on these batteries since she died.

  Outside the car the blackness was immense, shocking, a night as challenging to the mind as any he had ever known at sea.

  I leave $7,450 plus change (see envelope in jacket pocket) to establish a prize of $500 to be awarded annually to a female member of the graduating class of any of the colleges in the four-college program—500 bucks to whoever’s fucked more male faculty members than any other graduating senior during her undergraduate years. I leave the clothes on my back and in the brown paper bag to my friends at the Astor Place subway station. I leave my tape recorder to Kathy Goolsbee. I leave twenty dirty pictures of Dr. Michelle Cowan to the State of Israel. Mickey Sabbath, April 13,1944.

  Ninety-four. He crossed out 44.1929–1994.

  On the back of another repair bill he wrote, “My brother’s things are to be buried with me—the flag, the yarmulke, the letters, everything in the carton. Lay me unclothed in the coffin, surrounded by his things.” He slipped this in with Mr. Crawford’s receipts and marked the envelope “Additional Instructions.”

  Now, the note. Coherent or incoherent? Angry or forgiving? Malevolent or loving? High-flown or colloquial? With or without quotations from Shakespeare, Martin Bubet, and Montaigne? Hallmark should sell a card. All the great thoughts he had not reached were beyond enumeration; there was no bottom to what he did not have to say about the meaning of his life. And something funny is superfluous—suicide is funny. Not enough people realize that. It’s not driven by despair or revenge, it’s not born of madness or bitterness or humiliation, it’s not a camouflaged homicide or a grandiose display of self-loathing—it’s the finishing touch to the running gag. He would count himself an even bigger washout to be snuffed out any other way. For anybody who loves a joke, suicide is indispensable. For a puppeteer particularly there is nothing more natural: disappear behind the screen, insert the hand, and instead of performing as yourself, take the finale as the puppet. Think about it. There is no more thoroughly amusing way to go. A man who wants to die. A living being choosing death. That’s entertainment.

  No note. The notes are a sham, whatever you write.

  And so now for the last of last things.

  He stepped out of the car into the black granite world of the blind. Unlike suicide, seeing nothing was not amusing, and, proceeding with his arms before him, he felt as old a wreck as his Tiresias, Fish. He tried to picture the cemetery, but his five-month-long familiarity with it did not prevent him from wandering off almost immediately in among the graves. Soon he was breathless from stumbling and falling and getting back to his feet, despite the cautious tiny steps he was taking. The ground was drenched from the day’s heavy rain and her grave was up the hill, and it would be a shame, having come this far, if a coronary beat him to the punch. To die of natural causes would be the unsurpassable insult. But his heart had had enough and would haul the load no more. His heart was not a horse, and it informed him of this, malevolently enough, by kicking him in the chest with its hooves.

  So Sabbath ascended unassisted. Imagine a stone carrying itself, and that should give you some idea of how he struggled to reach Drenka’s grave, where, in what was to be his grand farewell to the farfetched, he proceeded to urinate on it. The stream was painfully slow to start, and he was fearful at first that he was asking of himself the impossible and that there was, in him, nothing left of him. He imagined himself—a man who did not get through a night without three trips to the toilet—standing there into the next century, unable to draw a drop of water with which to anoint this sacred ground. Could what was impeding the urine flow be that wall of conscience that deprives a person of what is most himself? What had happened to his entire conception of life? It had cost him dearly to clear a space where he could exist in the world as antagonistically as he liked. Where was the contempt with which he had overridden their hatred; where were the laws, the code of conduct, by which he had labored to be free from their stupidly harmonious expectations? Yes, the strictures that had inspired his buffoonery were taking their vengeance at last. All the taboos that seek to abate our monstrosity had shut his water down.

  Perfect metaphor: empty vessel.

  And then the stream began . . . a trickle at first, just some feeble dribbling, as when your knife slices open an onion and the weeping consists of a tear or two sliding down either cheek. But then a spurt followed that, and a second spurt, and then a flow, and then a gush, and then a surge, and then Sabbath was peeing with a power that surprised even him, the way strangers to grief can be astounded by the unstoppable copiousness of their river of tears. He could not remember when he had peed like this last. Maybe fifty years ago. To drill a hole in her grave! To drive through the coffin’s lid to Drenka’s mouth! But he might as well try, by peeing, to activate a turbine—he could never again reach her in any way. “I did it!” she cried, “I did it!” And never had he adored anyone more.

  He did not stop, however. He couldn’t. He was to urine what a wet nurse is to milk. Drenchèd Drenka, bubbling spring, mother of moisture and overflow, surging, streaming Drenka, drinker of the juices of the human vine—sweetheart, rise up before you turn to dust, come back and be revived, oozing all your secretions!

  But even by watering all spring and summer the plot that all her men had seeded, he could not bring her back, either Drenka or anyone else. And did he think otherwise, the anti-illusionist? Well, it is sometimes hard even for people with the best intentions to remember twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five days a year that nobody dead can live again. There is nothing on earth more firmly established, it’s all that you can know for sure—and no one wants to know it.

  “Excuse me! Sir!”

  Someone tapping from behind, someone at Sabbath’s shoulder.

  “Stop what you are doing, sir! Stop now!”

  But he was not finished.

  “You are pissing on my mother’s grave!”

  And ferociously, by his beard, Sabbath was swung around, and when the light of a powerful lamp was turned on his eyes, he threw up his hands as though something that could pierce his skull was flying into his face. The light passed down the length of his body and then upward from his feet to his eyes. He was painted like this, coat upon coat, six or seven times, until at last the beam illuminated the prick alone, seemingly keeping an eye out from between the edges of the flag, a spout without menace or significance of any kind, intermittently dripping as though in need of repair. It did not look like anything that would have inspired the mind of mankind, over the millennia, to give it five minutes of thought, let alone to conclude that, were it not for the tyranny of this tube, our species’ story here on earth would be altered beyond recognition, beginning, middle, and end.

  “Get it out of my sight!”

  Sabbath could easily have tucked himself into his trousers and pulled up the zipper. But he wouldn’t.

  “Stash it!”

  But Sabbath did nothing.

  “What are you?” Sabbath was asked, the light blinding him once again. “You desecrate my mother’s grave. You desecrate the American flag. You desecrate your own people. With your stupid fucking prick out, wearing the skullcap of your own religion!”

  “This is a religious act.”

  “Wrapped in the flag!”

  “Proudly, proudly.”

  “Pissing!”

  “My guts out.”

  Matthew now began to wail. “My mother! That was my mother! My mother, you filthy, fucking creep! You depraved my mother!”

  “Depraved? Officer Balich, you are too old to idealize your parents.”

  “She lef
t a diary! My father has read the diary! He read the things you made her do! Even my cousin—my little kid cousin! ‘Drink it, Drenka! Drink it!’”

  And so swept away was he by his own tears that he was no longer even lighting up Sabbath’s face. The beam pointed, rather, to the ground, illuminating the puddle at the foot of the grave.

  Barrett’s head had been smashed open. Sabbath was expecting worse. Once he realized by whom he had been apprehended, he did not believe that he was going to walk away alive. Nor did he want to. It was played out, that thing which allowed him to improvise endlessly and which had kept him alive. The nutty taw-driness is over.

  Yet once again did he walk away, as he had from hanging himself at the Cowans’, as he had from drowning himself at the shore—walked away, leaving Matthew sobbing at the grave, and, propelled still by the thing that allowed him to improvise endlessly, stumbled through the blackness down the hill.

  Not that he didn’t want to hear more from Matthew about Drenka’s diary, not that he wouldn’t have greedily read every word. It had never occurred to him that Drenka was writing everything down. In English or in Serbo-Croatian? Out of pride or incredulity? To trace the course of her daring or of her depravity? Why hadn’t she warned him in the hospital that there was this diary? Too sick by then to think of it? Had leaving it to be found been inadvertent, an oversight, or the boldest thing she had ever done? I did it! I did it! This was who was living under all the nice clothes—and none of you ever knew!

  Or had she left it behind because she had not the strength to throw it out? Yes, such diaries have a privileged place among one’s skeletons; one cannot easily free oneself of words themselves finally freed from their daily duty to justify and to conceal. It takes more courage than one might imagine to destroy the secret diaries, the letters, and the Polaroids, the videotapes and audiotapes, the locks of pubic hair, the unlaundered items of intimate apparel, to obliterate forever the reliclike force of these things that, almost alone of our possessions, decisively answer the question “Can it really be that I am like this?” A record of the self at Mardi Gras, or of the self in its true and untrammeled existence? Either way, these dangerous treasures—hidden from those near and dear beneath the lingerie, in the darkest reaches of the file cabinet, under lock and key at the local bank—constitute a record of that with which one cannot part.

  And yet for Sabbath there was a puzzle, an inconsistency, that he couldn’t fathom, a suspicion that he couldn’t elude. What obligation was she fulfilling, and to whom, by leaving her sex diary to be discovered? Against which of her men was she protesting? Against Matija? Against Sabbath? Which of us did you intend to slay? Not me! Surely not me! You loved me!

  “I want to see your hands up in the air!”

  The words boomed at him out of nowhere, and then he was fixed in the spotlight as though he were alone among the tombstones to perform a one-man show, Sabbath star of the cemetery, vaudevillian to the ghosts, front-line entertainer to the troops of the dead. Sabbath bowed. There should have been music, behind him the slyly carnal old swing music, ushering Sabbath onto the stage there should have been life’s most reliable pleasure, the innocent amusement of the B. G. sextet’s “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” Slam Stewart playing the bass and the bass playing Slam . . . Instead there was a disembodied voice politely requesting that he identify himself.

  Sweeping up from his bow, Sabbath announced, “It is I, Necrophilio, the nocturnal emission.”

  “I would not do that dip again, sir. I want to see those hands in the air.”

  The patrol car illuminating Sabbath’s theater was manned by a second trooper, who now climbed out with a gun drawn. A trainee. Matthew would be riding alone unless he was breaking somebody in. “When he breaks them in,” Drenka would boast, “he always wants them to do all the driving. Fresh from the academy, kids on probation for a whole year—and it’s Matthew who they used to break them in. Matthew says, ‘There are some good kids who really want to do the job and do it well. There are some assholes, too. Bad guys with a don’t-give-a-shit attitude, whatever they can get away with, and so on. But to do a good job, to do what you’re supposed to do, to keep your motor vehicle activity up and get your cases in on time, to keep your car the way it’s supposed to be kept . . .’ That’s what Matthew teaches them. He just rode with somebody for three months, and the boy gave Matthew a tie clip. A gold tie clip. He said, ‘Matt’s my best buddy ever.’”

  The trainee had him covered but Sabbath did nothing to resist arrest. He had only to start to run, and a trainee, rightly or wrongly, would more than likely drill him right through the head. But when Matthew made it to the bottom of the hill, all the trainee did was slap the cuffs on Sabbath and assist him into the back of the car. He was a young black man about Matthew’s age and he remained absolutely silent, uttered not a syllable of disgust or indignation because of what Sabbath looked like or how he was dressed or what he had done. He helped Sabbath onto the backseat, mindful to see that the flag did not slip from his shoulders, and gently recentered on Sabbath’s bald skull the God Bless America yarmulke, which had fallen forward onto his forehead as he ducked into the car. Whether this betokened an excess of kindness or of contempt the prisoner couldn’t decide.

  The trainee did the driving. Matthew was no longer in tears, but from the backseat Sabbath could see something uncontrollable working the muscles of his broad neck.

  “How’s my partner?” the trainee asked as they started down the mountain.

  Matthew gave no reply.

  He is going to kill me. He is going to do it. Rid of life. It’s happening at last.

  “And where are we going?” asked Sabbath.

  “We’re taking you in, sir;” the trainee replied.

  “May I ask what the charges might be?”

  “The charges?” Matthew erupted. “The charges?”

  “Breathe, Matt,” the trainee said, “just do the breathing you taught me.”

  “If I may say so,” Sabbath offered overprecisely, in a tone that he knew to have driven at least Roseanna crazy, “his sense of effrontery is lodged in a fundamental misapprehension—”

  “Be still,” the trainee suggested.

  “I only want to say that something was happening that he cannot possibly understand. The serious side of it he has no way of assessing.”

  “Serious!” cried Matthew, and pounded the dashboard with his fist.

  “Let’s take him in, Matt, and that’s it. That’s the job—let’s just do it.”

  “I am not using words to confound anyone. I do not exaggerate,” said Sabbath. “I do not say correct or savory. I do not say seemly or even natural. I say serious. Sensationally serious. Unspeakably serious. Solemnly, recklessly, blissfully serious.”

  “It’s rash of you, sir, to go on like this.”

  “I’m a rash guy. It’s inexplicable to me, too. It’s displaced virtually everything else in my life. It seems to be the whole aim of my being.”

  “And that’s how come we’re taking you in, sir.”

  “I thought you were taking me in so I could tell the judge how I depraved Matthew’s mother.”

  “Look, you’ve caused my partner a lot of pain,” the trainee said, his voice still impressively subdued. “You’ve caused his family a lot of pain. I have to tell you that you are now saying things that are causing me a lot of pain.”

  “Yes. That’s what I hear from people all the time, people continuously telling me that the great thing I was called to do in life was cause pain. The world is just flying along pain-free—happy-go-lucky humanity off on one long fun-filled holiday—and then Sabbath is set down in life, and overnight the place is transformed into a loony bin of tears. Why is that? Can someone explain it to me?”

  “Stop!” cried Matthew. “Stop the car!”

  “Matty, get the bastard in.”

  “Stop the fucking car, Billy! We’re not taking him in!”

  Sabbath straightaway leaned forward in the seat—lurched f
orward without his hands to steady him. “Take me in, Billy. Don’t listen to Matty, he’s not being objective—he’s let himself get personally involved. Take me in so I can purge myself publicly of my crimes and accept the punishment that’s coming to me.”

  There were deep woods to either side of the road where the police car crept onto the shoulder. Billy stopped the car and turned off the lights.

  The dark domain of that night again. And now, thought Sabbath, the feature attraction, the thing that matters most, the unforeseen culmination for which he had battled all his life. He had not realized how very long he’d been longing to be put to death. He hadn’t committed suicide, because he was waiting to be murdered.

  Matthew leaped from the car and around to the back, where he opened the door and pulled Sabbath out. Then he undid the handcuffs. That was all. He undid the handcuffs and said, “If you, you sick freak bastard, if ever you mention my mother’s name to anyone, or anything about my mother to anyone—to anyone at any time anywhere—I’m coming after you!” With his eyes just inches from Sabbath’s, he began again to cry. “You hear me, old man? You hear me?”

  “But why wait when you can have your satisfaction now? I start for the woods and you shoot. Attempted escape. Billy here’ll back you up. Won’t you, Bill? ‘We let the old guy take a leak and he tried to run away.’”

  “You sick fuck!” screamed Matthew. “You filthy sick son of a bitch!” and, flinging open the front passenger door, he violently pitched himself back into the car.

  “But I’m going free! I’ve reveled in the revolting thing one time too many! And I’m going free! I’m a ghoul! I’m a ghoul! After causing all this pain, the ghoul is running free! Matthew!” But the cruiser had driven off, leaving Sabbath ankle-deep in the pudding of the springtime mud, blindly engulfed by the alien, inland woods, by the rainmaking trees and the rainwashed boulders—and with no one to kill him except himself.