Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth

Author:Philip Roth [Roth, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Contemporary, Classics, CALIBRE TORRENT
ISBN: 9781407018638
Google: RqqYrLmrcbYC
Amazon: 0679772596
Goodreads: 17552537
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1994-12-31T23:00:00+00:00

But yesternight declare

That he had found a text to prove

That only God, my dear,

Could love you for yourself alone

And not your yellow hair.

In only a few hours Kathy would be crossing the finish line. He could see her taping her breasts and falling into the embrace of the Immaculate Kamizoko. Breasting the tape. Kakizomi. Kazikomi. Who could remember their fucking names. Who wanted to. Tojo and Hirohito sufficed for him. Sobbing hysterically, she would tell the dean of his terrifying confession. And the dean might not resist believing it as Kathy had pretended to do.

Driving home he played “The Sheik of Araby.” Few things in this world as right as those four zippy solos. Clarinet. Piano. Drums. Vibes.

How come nobody hates Tojo anymore? Nobody remembers that killer except me. They think Tojo’s a car. But ask the Koreans about the Japanese sitting on their faces for thirty-five years. Ask the Manchurians about the civility of their conquerors. Ask the Chinese about the wonderful understanding shown them by those little flat-faced imperialist bastards. Ask about the brothels the Japs stocked for their soldiers with girls just like you. Younger. The dean thinks I’m the enemy. Ho, ho! Ask her about the boys back home and how they bravely fucked their way through Asia, the foreign women they enslaved and made into whores. Ask’em in Manila about the bombs, tons of bombs dropped by Japs after Manila was an open city. Where is Manila? How would you know? Maybe one day Teacher will take an hour off from harassment lessons to mention to all her spotless lambs a little horror called World War II. The Japaneez. As racially arrogant as anyone anywhere—beside them the Ku Klux Klan is . . . But how would you know about the Ku Klux Klan? How would you know anything, given whose clutches you’re in? You want the lowdown on the Japaneez? Ask my mother, also a woman harassed in life. Ask her.

Expansively he sang along with the quartet, pretending to be Gene Hochberg, who could really get a crowd of kids up and swingin’; delighting himself, Sabbath was, not just in the multide-meaning lyric of the old twenties anthem celebrating date rape and denigrating Arabs but in the unending, undecorous, needling performance, the joy of the job of being their savage. How could the missionaries puff themselves up without their savage? Their naive fucking impertinence about carnal lusting! Seducer of the young. Socrates, Strindberg, and me. Yet feeling great all the same. The glassy chiming of Hampton’s hammering—that could fix about anything. Or maybe it was having Rosie out of the way. Or maybe it was knowing that he’d never had to please and wasn’t starting now. Yes, yes, yes, he felt uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life. And a laughable hunger for more. More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis! More missionaries! God willing, more cunt! More disastrous entanglement in everything. For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence.

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