by Philip Roth
How dare he! What chutzpah! Sabbath wanted to murder Matija. And why didn’t I? Why didn’t we? Uncircumcised dog! Smite him thus!
. . . One brilliantly sunny day back in February, Sabbath had come upon Drenka’s widowered husband up at the Stop & Shop in Cumberland. For the first time that winter it hadn’t snowed in four consecutive days and so, after donning an old knit seaman’s cap in which to swab down the bathroom and kitchen floors and give the house a vacuuming, Sabbath had driven up to Cumberland—blinded much of the way by the light off the gargantuan drifts banked at the side of the road—to do the grocery shopping, one of his weekly household chores. And there was Matija, almost unrecognizable since he’d seen him silent and stone-faced at the funeral. His black hair had gone white, completely white in just the three months. He looked so weak, so slight, his face emaciated—and all of this in just three months! He could have passed for a senior citizen, older even than Sabbath, and he was only in his mid-fifties. The inn was closed every year from New Year’s Day to April 1, and so Matija was out shopping for the few things he needed living alone in the Baliches’ big new house up from the lake and the inn.
Balich was directly behind him in the checkout line and, though he nodded when Sabbath looked his way, registered no recognition.
“Mr. Balich, my name is Mickey Sabbath.”
“Yes? How do you do?”
“Does ‘Mickey Sabbath’ mean anything to you?”
“Yes,” said Balich kindly after feigning a moment’s thought, “I believe you have been a patron of mine. I recognize you from the inn.”
“No,” said Sabbath, “I live in Madamaska Falls but we don’t eat out much.”
“I see,” replied Balich and, after smiling for a few seconds more, somberly returned to his thoughts.
“I’ll tell you how we know each other,” said Sabbath.
“Yes?”
“My wife was your son’s art teacher at the high school. Roseanna Sabbath. She and your Matthew became great friends.”
“Ahhh.” Again he smiled courteously.
Sabbath had never realized before how much there was in Drenka’s husband of the subdued and courtly European gentleman. Maybe it was the white hair, the grief, the accent, but he had about him the magisterial air of a senior diplomat from a small country. No, Sabbath hadn’t known this about him, the dignified composure came as a surprise, but then the other guy is often just a blur. Even if he’s your best friend or the fellow across the street who more than once has jump-started your car, he becomes a blur. He becomes the husband, and sympathetic imagination dwindles away, right along with conscience.
The only time Sabbath ever before had occasion to observe Matija in public was the April preceding the Kathy Goolsbee scandal, when he went over to the inn on the third Tuesday of the month—with the thirty or so Rotarians who gathered there for their luncheon meeting the third Tuesday of every month—as a guest of Gus Kroll, the service station owner, who never failed to pass on to Sabbath the jokes he heard from the truckers who stopped to gas up and use the facilities. Gus had a great audience in Sabbath, because even when the jokes were not uniformly of the first rank, the fact that Gus rarely bothered to wear his dentures while he was telling them furnished Sabbath with sufficient delight. Gus’s impassioned commitment to repeating the jokes had long ago led the puppeteer to understand that they were what gave unity to Gus’s vision of life, that they alone answered the need of his spiritual being for a clarifying narrative with which to face day after day at the pump. With every joke that poured forth from Gus’s toothless mouth, Sabbath was reassured that not even a simple guy like Gus was free of the human need to find a strand of significance that will hold together everything that isn’t on TV.
Sabbath had asked Gus if he would be kind enough to invite him to the meeting to hear Matija Balich address the Rotary Club on the topic “Innkeeping Today.” By then Sabbath already knew that Matija had been agonizingly preparing the speech for weeks—Sabbath had even read the speech, or the first short version of it, when Drenka had brought it to him to look at. She had typed the six pages for her husband, done her best to catch the errors, but she wanted Sabbath to double-check the English and amiably he agreed to help. “It’s fascinating,” he said after twice reading it through. “It is?” “It moves along the track like a goddamn train. Really, it’s wonderful. Two problems, however. It’s too short. He’s not thorough enough. It’s got to be three times as long. And this expression, this idiom here, is wrong. It isn’t ‘nuts and bolts.’ You don’t say in English, ‘If you watch the nuts and bolts. . . .’” “No?” “Who told him it was ‘nuts and bolts,’ Drenka?” “Stupid Drenka did,” she replied. “Nuts and bulbs,” said Sabbath. “Nuts and bulbs,” she repeated and wrote on the back of the last page. “And write down there that he stops too soon,” said Sabbath. “Three times as long, at least. They’ll listen,” he told her. “This is stuff nobody knows.”
Gus came by Brick Furnace Road to pick up Sabbath in the tow truck, and no sooner were they off than Gus started in entertaining him with what he knew to be taboo for what Gus called the “churchy guys” in town.
“Can you take a joke that’s not too appreciative of women?” Gus asked him.
“The only kind I can take.”
“Well, this truck driver, whenever he goes away, his wife, she gets cold and lonely. So when he comes back from a trip he brings her a skunk, a big, furry live skunk, and he tells her that next time he goes away she should take it to bed with her and when she goes to sleep she should put it between her legs. So she says to him, ‘What about the smell?’ And he says, ‘He’ll get used to it. I did.’
“Well, if you like that one,” said Gus when he heard Sabbath’s laughter, “I got another one along the same lines,” and so in no time they arrived for the meeting.
The Rotarians were already milling around in the rustic barroom with the exposed beams across the low ceiling and the cheerful white tile hearth, all of them packed closely together in the one smallish room, perhaps because of the cozy fire burning there on a cold, gusty spring day or perhaps because of the platters, on the bar; of evapii, a Yugoslav national specialty that was also a specialty of the inn. “I have to feed you with evapii,” Drenka had told Sabbath when they were still newly lovers, playing post-coital pranks in bed. “Feed me anything you want.” “Three types of meat,” she told him, “one is beef, one is pork, then is lamb. All is ground. Then some onions are added to it and some pepper. It is like a meatball but a different shape. Very small. It is obligatory to eat evapii with onion. An onion cut into small pieces. You can have little peppers, too. Red. Very hot.” “It doesn’t sound bad at all,” said Sabbath, full of pleasure with her, smiling away. “Yes, I am going to feed you evapii,” she said adoringly. “And I, in turn, will fuck your brains out.” “Oh, my American boyfriend—that means you will fuck me seriously?” “Quite seriously.” “It means hard?” “Very hard.” “And it means what else? I have learned to do it in Croatian, to say all the words and not be shy, but never anyone has taught me to do it in American. Tell me! Teach me! Teach me what all the things mean in American!” “It means every which way.” And then, as conscientiously as she had explained to him how to make evapii, he went ahead to teach her what every which way meant.
. . . Or perhaps they were in the barroom because, tending bar, Drenka was wearing a black crepe blouse that buttoned up to a V-neck and that did her plumpness full justice whenever she ducked down to fill a glass with ice. Sabbath stood back by the door for close to half an hour watching her flirting with the chiropractor, a strong young fellow with a loud bark of a laugh who didn’t do at all well hiding his sexual orientation, and then with the former state representative who was owner of the three branches of Cumberland BanCorp, and finally even with Gus, who, fully fitted out now in his uppers and lowers and for the occasion wearing a string tie at the neck of his coveralls, was just the man he’d like to see her fuck to be assured that she was a
s wonderful as he thought she was. Oh, she was jolly, all right—the only woman amid all these men, the blissful stimulus serving their blissful stimulant, plainly ecstatic just to be living on earth.
When Sabbath pushed through the hubbub up to the bar and asked for a beer, she registered her surprise at his presence by instantly turning white. “What kind do you like, Mr. Sabbath?” “Do you have Pussy from Yugoslavia?” “From the tap or a bottle?” “Which do you recommend?” “More foam from the tap,” she said, smiling at him, now that she had recovered her wits, with a smile that he would have taken for a startlingly open proclamation of their secret had he not seen the same smile bestowed earlier on Gus. “Draw me one, will ya?” he said with a wink. “I like the foam.”
When the meal ended—big pork chops with apple rings in a Calvados sauce, chocolate ice cream sundaes, cigars, and for those who wanted an after-luncheon drink, Proek, a sweetish white Dalmatian wine that Drenka, as their charming Old World hostess, ordinarily served to paying guests compliments of the house—Matija was introduced by the Rotary president as “Matt Balik.” The innkeeper was wearing a red cashmere turtleneck, a blazer with gold buttons, new cavalry-twill trousers, and unworn, unmarked Bally boots polished to a high gloss. Snappily decked out like that, he looked more impressively brawny even than when he was working in a T-shirt and worn jeans. The allure of a heavily muscled male figure conventionally clothed for social intercourse. An animalistic appearance under the elegance. Sabbath had had it himself once, or so Nikki used to tell him when she urged him to buy a dark blue suit with a vest so the world could appreciate how gorgeous he was. Gorgeous Sabbath. Those were the fifties.
Matija’s passion was to rebuild the stone walls falling to pieces in the fifty acres of fields adjacent to the house and the inn. On the island of Bra, where he had relatives and where he had been working as a waiter when he met Drenka, there was a tradition of masonry, and while he was on the island he would spend his days off helping a cousin who was building himself a house of stone. And, of course, Matija had never forgotten the grandfather cutting stone in the quarries, an aging man imprisoned on Goli Otok as an enemy of the regime . . . which made lugging the big stones and setting them in place something almost of a commemorative rite for Matija. That was how he spent his breaks from the kitchen: outside half an hour moving rocks and he was ready for another three, four, five hours on his feet in a temperature of a hundred degrees. He spent much of each winter moving those rocks. “His only friends,” reported Drenka, sadly, “are the walls and me.”
“Some people,” Matija began, “think this business is fun. It is not fun. It is a business. Read the industry magazines. People say, ‘I want to get away from corporate life. An inn, this is my dream.’ But I am dedicated to this inn as though I am going every day to a corporate structure.”
The pace at which Matija read made it possible for his audience to follow without trouble, despite his heavy accent. At the end of every sentence he allowed them a long moment to consider all the implications of what he had just said. Sabbath enjoyed the pauses no less than the monotony of the uninflected sentences they separated, sentences that caused him to remember for the first time in many years a lonely archipelago of uninhabitable islands that the merchant ships passed leaving Veracruz for the south. Sabbath enjoyed the pauses because he was responsible for them. He had told Drenka to instruct Matija to be sure to take his time. Amateur speakers always rush. Don’t rush, he told her to tell him. There’s a lot for an audience to digest. The slower the better.
“For instance, we have been audited twice,” Matija told them.
From the large bay windows at the head of the rectangular dining room, Sabbath and the guests on his side of the table could see clear down to where the wind was whipping up Lake Madamaska. Their eyes could have traveled from one end to the other of that long washboard of a lake before Matija appeared to conclude that the impact of the two audits had been fully absorbed.
“There is nothing wrong,” he then continued. “My wife keeps our books straight and we go to an accountant for advices. So we run it as a business and it is our livelihood. If you watch the nuts and bulbs, the business works for you. If you don’t watch, and go out and talk with the guests all the time, you are losing money.
“Years ago we did not serve all the time through the afternoon on Saturday. We still don’t. But we make food available to the people. The smart thing is to give people what they want rather than say no, I have this rule, I have that rule. I am pretty strict about the way I think about things. But the public teaches me to be not so strict.
“We have fifty in staff, including part-time. Serving staff is thirty-five—waitresses, bus staff, dining room supervisors. We have twelve rooms plus the annex. We can take twenty-eight people and are full most weekends, though not during the week.
“In the restaurant we can seat one hundred and thirty inside and one hundred on the terrace. But we never seat two hundred and thirty people altogether. The cooking line can’t handle it. What we look for is turnover.
“The other serious problem comes with the staff. . . .”
This went on for an hour. There was a fire blazing in the main dining room, as well as the smaller one burning in the bar, and because of the cold winds blowing outside, the windows were all shut tight. The fireplace was only some six feet behind Matija, but the heat of it did not seem to affect him the way it did the Scotch drinkers at the table. They were the first to pass out. The beer drinkers were able to hold on longer.
“We are not absentee owners. I am the main fellow. If everybody else leaves, I am still standing here. My wife can do everything except two cooking-line jobs. She can’t work on the broiler, because she has no idea how to cook. And she can’t do the sauté, where you are basically frying in pans. But all other jobs she can do: the bartender, the dishwasher, serving, bookkeeping, working the floor. . . .”
Gus, on the wagon these days, drank Tab, but Sabbath saw that Gus was out. Just from Tab. And now the beer drinkers were losing their grip and beginning to look enfeebled—the owner of the bank, the chiropractor, the big mustached guy who ran the gardening center. . . .
Drenka was listening from the bar. When the puppeteer turned in his seat to smile at her, he saw that, leaning over the bar on her elbows, her face balanced on her fists, she was crying, and this was with half the Rotarians still clinging to consciousness.
“It is not always nice for us that our staff doesn’t like us. I think some of our staff likes us a lot. A lot of them don’t care for us at all. In some places the bar is open to the staff after hours. We don’t have that kind of thing here. Those are the places that go bankrupt and where the staff is in terrible auto accidents on the way home. Not here. Here it is not party time with the owners. Here it is not fun. My wife and I are not fun at all. We are work. We are a business. All Yugoslavs when they go abroad, they are very hardworking. Something in our history pushes them for survival. Thank you.”
There were no questions, but then there were barely a handful at the long table still capable of asking one. The Rotary president said, “Well, thanks, Matt, thanks a million. That took us through the process pretty thoroughly.” Soon people began to wake up to go back to work.
On Friday of that same week, Drenka went to Boston and fucked her dermatologist, the credit-card magnate, the university dean, and then, back at home, just before midnight—making a total of four for the day—she was fucked, holding her breath for the few minutes it lasted, by the orator she was married to.
♦ ♦ ♦
Now, down in the abandoned center of Cumberland, where the movie theater was long gone and the stores mostly vacant, there was an impoverished wreck of a grocery where Sabbath liked to get a container of coffee and drink it standing up right there after he’d done the weekly shopping. The place, Flo ’n Bert’s, was dark, with dirty, worn wooden floors, undusted shelves largely empty of goods, and the most wretched potatoes and bananas Sabbath had ever seen for sa
le anywhere. But Flo ’n Bert’s, grisly mortuary though it was, smelled exactly like the old grocery in the basement of the LaReine Arms, a block away from their house, where Sabbath used to go first thing every morning to get two fresh rolls for his mother so she could make Morty sandwiches to take to his high school for lunch—cream cheese and olive, peanut butter and jelly, but mainly canned tuna, the sandwiches double-wrapped with wax paper and stuffed in the paper bag from the LaReine Arms. Each week, after Stop & Shop, Sabbath walked around Flo ‘n Bert’s with his coffee container in his hand, trying to figure out what the ingredients were that went into that smell, which was also like something he smelled up at the Grotto in late autumn, after the fallen leaves and the dying underbrush had been dampened down by the rains and begun to rot. Maybe it was that: damp rot. He loved it. The coffee that he had to drink there was undrinkable but he could never resist the pleasure of that smell.
Sabbath stationed himself outside the door to Stop & Shop and, when Balich emerged carrying a plastic bag in either hand, he said, “Mr. Balich, how about a hot cup of coffee?”
“Thank you, sir, no.”
“Come on,” said Sabbath good-naturedly, “why not? It’s ten degrees out here.” Should he convert that into Celsius for him, as he would for Drenka when she telephoned, before going up to the Grotto, to ask what it really was outside? “There’s a place down the hill. Follow me. The Chevy. A cup of coffee to warm you up.”
Leading Balich’s car between the one-story-high snowbanks and across the railroad tracks agleam from the frost, Sabbath had to admit that he had no idea what he was planning to do. All he could think of was this guy daring to lie across his Drenka, moaning with pleasure as though he were crying, penetrating her with a dog-red cock that afterward made her throw up.