Sabbath’s Theater (2 page)

The blow in the family had been delivered by Drenka. At twenty-two, an assistant bookkeeper with the national railway, she married Matija Bali
, a handsome young waiter with aspirations
whom she had met when she went for her vacation to the hotel that belonged to the railroad syndicate workers on the island of Bra
, just off Split. The two went to Trieste for their honeymoon and never returned home. They ran away not merely to become rich in the West but because Matija’s grandfather had been imprisoned in 1948, when Tito broke with the Soviet Union and the grandfather, a local party bureaucrat, a Communist since 1923 and an idealist about big Mother Russia, had dared to discuss the matter openly. “My both parents,” Drenka had explained to Sabbath, “were convinced Communists and they loved Comrade Tito, who is there with his smile like a smiling monster, and so I figured out early how to love Tito more than any other child in Yugoslavia. We were all Pioneers, little boys and girls who would go out and sing wearing a red scarf. We would sing songs about Tito and how he is this flower, this violet flower, and how all the youth loves him. But with Matija it was different. He was a little boy who loved his grandfather. And somebody told on his grandfather—is that the word? Reported. He was reported. As an enemy of the regime. And the enemies of the regime were all sent to this horrible prison. It was the most horrible time when they were like cattle thrown into the ships. Taken by ships from the mainland to the island. And who survives survives and who doesn’t doesn’t. It was a place where the stone was the only element. All they had to do, they had to work those stones, cut them, without a reason. Many families had someone who went to this Goli Otok that means Naked Island. People report on others for whatever reason—to advance, for hatred, for whatever. There was a big threat always hanging in the air about being proper, and proper is to support the regime. On this island they didn’t feed them, they didn’t give them water even. An island just off the coast, a little bit north of Split—from the coast you can see the island in the distance. His grandfather got hepatitis there and he died just before Matija graduated from high school. Died of cirrhosis. He suffered all those years. The prisoners would send cards home, and they had to claim in the cards that they were reformed. His mother told Matija that her father was not good
and that he did not listen to Comrade Tito and that’s why he has to go to prison. Matija was nine. She knew what she was telling him when she was telling that. So at school he would not be provoked to say something else. His grandfather said he would be good and love
Drug
Tito, so he was only in jail for ten months. But he got hepatitis there. When he came back, Matija’s mother makes a big party. He came back, he was forty kilos. That’s ninety pounds or so. And he was, like Maté, a big man. Totally destroyed physically. There was a guy that told on him and that was that. And this is why Matija wished to run away after we married.”

“And why did
you
wish to run away?”

“Me? I didn’t care about politics. I was like my parents. During the old Yugoslavia, the king and all that stuff, before Communism, they loved the king. Then Communism came and they loved Communism. I didn’t care, so I said yes, yes to the smiling monster. What I loved was the adventure. America seemed so grand and so glamorous and so enormously different. America! Hollywood! Money! Why did I go? I was a girl. Wherever would be the most fun.”

Drenka shamed her parents by fleeing to this imperialist country, broke their hearts, and they too died, both of cancer, not long after her defection. However, she so loved money and so loved “fun” that she probably had the tender attentions of these convinced Communists to thank for whatever impeded the full, youthful body with the tantalizingly thuggish face from doing with itself something even more capricious than becoming enslaved to capitalism.

The only man she would ever admit to having charged for the night was the puppeteer Sabbath, and over the thirteen years this had occurred only once, when he had presented the offering of Christa, the runaway German au pair working at the gourmet food shop, whom he had scouted and patiently recruited for their joint delectation. “Cash,” Drenka had informed him, though for months now, ever since Sabbath had first come upon Christa hitchhiking into town, Drenka had anticipated the adventure
with no less excitement than Sabbath and needed no urging to conspire. “Crisp bills,” she said, prankishly narrowing her eyes but meaning it all the same. “Stiff and new.” Adapting without hesitation to the role she’d so swiftly devised for him, he asked, “How many?” Tartly she answered, “Ten.” “Can’t afford ten.” “Forget it then. Leave me out.” “You’re a hard woman.” “Yes. Hard,” she replied with relish. “I have a sense of my worth.” “It’s taken some doing to arrange this, you know. It’s not been a snap setting this up. Christa may be a wayward child but she still requires a lot of attention. It’s I who ought to be paid by you.” “I don’t want to be treated like a fake whore. I want to be treated like a real whore. A thousand dollars or I stay home.” “You’re asking the impossible.” “Never mind then.” “Five hundred.” “Seven fifty.” “Five hundred. The best I can do.” “Then I must be paid before we get there. I want to walk in with the money in my purse knowing that I’ve got a job to do. I want to feel like a real whore.” “I doubt,” suggested Sabbath, “that, to feel like a real whore, money alone will suffice.” “It will for me.” “Lucky you.” “Lucky
you
,” said Drenka defiantly—“okay, five hundred. But before. I have to have all of it the night before.”

The terms of the deal were negotiated while they manipulated each other manually on the tarpaulin up at the Grotto.

Now, Sabbath had no interest in money. But since arthritis had finished him off as a performing puppeteer at the international festivals, and his Puppet Workshop was no longer welcome in the curriculum of the four-college program because of his unmasking there as a degenerate, he was dependent for support on his wife, with the result that it was not painless for him to peel off five of the two hundred and twenty hundred-dollar bills earned annually by Roseanna at the regional high school and hand them over to a woman whose family-run inn netted $150,000 a year.

He could have told her to fuck off, of course, especially as Drenka would have participated as ardently in the threesome without the money as with, but to agree for a night to act as her john seemed to do as much for him as it did for her to pretend to be his prostitute. Sabbath, moreover had no right
not
to
yield—her licentious abandon owed its full flowering to him. Her systematic efficiency as hostess-manager of the inn—just the sheer pleasure, year after year, of banking all that dough—might long ago have mummified her lower life had not Sabbath suspected from the flatness of the nose, from the roundness of the limbs—from nothing more than that to begin with—that Drenka Balich’s perfectionism on the job was not her only immoderate inclination. It was Sabbath who, a step at a time, the most patient of instructors, had assisted her in becoming estranged from her orderly life and in discovering the indecency to supplement the deficiencies of her regular diet.

Indecency? Who knows? Do as you like, Sabbath said, and she did and liked it and liked telling him about how much she had liked it no less than he liked hearing about it. Husbands, after weekending at the inn with their wives and children, phoned Drenka secretly from their offices to tell her they had to see her. The excavator, the carpenter, the electrician, the painter, all the laborers assisting around the inn invariably maneuvered to eat their lunches close to the office where she did the bookkeeping. Men wherever she went sensed the intangible aura of invitation. Once Sabbath had sanctioned for her the force that wants more and more—a force to whose urging she was never wholly averse even before Sabbath had come along—men began to understand that this shortish, less than startling-looking middle-aged woman corseted by all her smiling courtesy was powered by a carnality much like their own. Inside this woman was someone who thought like a man. And the man she thought like was Sabbath. She was, as she put it, his sidekicker.

How could he, in good conscience, say no to the five hundred bucks? No was not a part of the deal. To be what she had learned to want to be (to be what he needed her to be), what she needed from Sabbath was yes. Never mind that she used the money to buy power tools for her son’s basement workshop. Matthew was married and a state trooper with the barracks down in the valley; Drenka adored him and, once he became a cop, worried about him all the time. He was not big and handsome with porcupinish
black hair and a deep cleft in his chin like the father whose anglicized name he bore but much more patently Drenka’s offspring, short in stature—only five feet eight and 135 pounds, he’d been the smallest guy in his class at the police academy as well as the youngest—and at the center of his face a bit of a blur, the noseless nose a replica of hers. He had been groomed to one day be proprietor of the inn and had left his father desolated by quitting hotel management school after just a year to become a muscular, crew-cutted trooper with the big hat, the badge, and lots of power, the kid cop whose first assignment running radar with the traffic squad, driving the chase car up and down the main highways, was the greatest job in the world. You meet so many people, every car you stop is different, a different person, different circumstances, a different speed. . . . Drenka repeated to Sabbath everything Matthew Junior told her about life as a trooper, from the day he had entered the academy seven years earlier and the instructors there began to yell at them and he swore to his mother, “I’m not going to let this beat me,” until the day he graduated and, little as he was, they awarded him an excellence pin in physical fitness and told him and the classmates who had survived the twenty-four-week course, “You’re not God but you’re the next closest thing to him.” She described to Sabbath the virtues of Matthew’s fifteen-shot nine-millimeter pistol and how he carried it in his boot or at the back in his belt when he was off duty and how that terrified her. She was constantly afraid that he was going to be killed, especially when he was transferred from the traffic squad to the barracks and had to work the midnight shift every few weeks. Matthew himself came to love cruising in his car as much as he’d loved running radar. “Once you’re gone on your shift, you’re your own boss out there. Once you get into that car, you can do what you want out there. Freedom, Ma. Lots of freedom. Unless something happens, all you do is ride. Alone in the car, cruising, just driving the roads until they call you for something.” He’d grown up in what the state police called the North Patrol. Knew the area, all the roads, the woods, knew the businesses in the towns and found an enormous
manly satisfaction in driving by at night and checking them out, checking out the banks, checking out the bars, watching the people leaving the bars to see how bad off they were. Matthew had a front seat, he told his mother, at the greatest show on earth—accidents, burglaries, domestic disputes, suicides. Most people never see a suicide victim, but a girl whom Matthew had gone to school with had blown her head off in the woods, sat under an oak tree and blew out her brains, and Matthew, in his first year out of the academy, was the cop on the scene to call the medical examiner and wait for him to come. In that first year, Matthew told his mother, he was so pumped up, felt so invincible, he believed he could stop bullets with his teeth. Matthew walks in on a domestic dispute where both of the people are drunk and screaming at each other and hating each other and throwing punches and he, her son, talks to them and calms them down so that by the time he leaves everything is okay and neither of them has to be pinched for breach of peace. And sometimes they’re so bad he does pinch ’em, handcuffs the woman and handcuffs the man, and then waits for another trooper to come, and they take the couple in before they kill each other. When a kid was showing a gun in a pizza place on 63, flashing it around before leaving, it was Matthew who found the car the kid was driving and, without any backup, knowing the kid had a gun, told him over the loudspeaker to come out with his hands in the air and had his own gun drawn right on the guy . . . and these stories, establishing for his mother that Matthew was a good cop who wanted to do a good job, to do it as he’d been taught to do it, frightened her so that she bought a scanner, a little box with an antenna and a crystal that monitored the police signals on Matthew’s frequency, and sometimes when he was on the midnight shift and she couldn’t sleep, she would turn on the scanner and listen to it all night long. The scanner would pick up the signal every time Matthew was called, so that Drenka knew more or less where he was and where he was going and that he was still alive. When she heard his number—415B—boom, she was awake. But so was Matthew’s father—and enraged to be reminded yet again that the son he had been training
every summer in the kitchen, the heir to the business he had built from nothing as a penniless immigrant, was now an expert in karate and judo instead, out at three in the morning stupidly trailing an old pickup truck that was going suspiciously slowly crossing Battle Mountain. The bitterness between father and son had grown so bad that it was only with Sabbath that Drenka could share her fears about Matthew’s safety and recount her pride in the amount of motor vehicle activity he was able to produce in a week: “It’s out there,” he told her. “There’s always something—speeding, stop signs, taillights out, all kind of violations. . . .” To Sabbath, then, it came as no surprise when Drenka admitted that with the five hundred dollars he had paid her to complete the trio with Christa and himself she had bought, for Matthew’s birthday, a portable Makita table saw and a nice set of dado blades.