Free Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth

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