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simple about being as misleading—”
    “Stop it! Stop it, please, being a maniac!”
    “Only if
you
stop it being an idiot! Why on this issue are you suddenly so stupid? Exactly what am I to do, Drenka? Take an oath? Are you going to administer an oath? What are the words to the oath? Please list all the things that I am not allowed to do. Penetration. Is that it, is that all? What about a kiss? What about a phone call? And will you take the oath too? And how will I know if you’ve upheld it? You never have before.”
    And just when Silvija is coming back, Sabbath was thinking. Is that what’s provoked all this, her fear of what she might be impelled to do for Sabbath in the excitement of the excitement? The summer before, Silvija, Matija’s niece, had lived with the Baliches up at the house while working as a waitress in the inn’s dining room. Silvija was an eighteen-year-old college student in Split and had taken her vacation in America to improve her English. Having shed any and all qualms in twenty-four hours, Drenka had brought to Sabbath, sometimes stuffed in her pocket, sometimes hidden in her purse, Silvija’s soiled underthings. She wore them for him and pretended to be Silvija. She passed them up and down the length of his long white beard and pressed them to his parted lips. She bandaged his erection in the straps and cups, stroked him enwrapped in the silky fabric of Silvija’s tiny bra. She drew his feet through the legs of Silvija’s bikini underpants and worked them up as far as she could along his heavy thighs. “Say the things,” he told her, “say everything,” and she did. “Yes, you have my permission, you dirty man, yes,” she said, “you can have her, I give her to you, you can have her tight young pussy, you dirty, filthy man. . . .” Silvija was a slight, seraphic thing with very white skin and reddish ringlets who wore small round glasses with metal frames that made her look like a studious child. “Photographs,” Sabbath instructed Drenka, “find photographs. There must be photographs, they all take photographs.” No, no way. Not meek little Silvija. Impossible, said Drenka, but the next day, going through Silvija’s dresser, Drenka uncovered from beneath her cotton nighties a stack of Polaroids that Silvija had brought from Split to keep from becoming homesick. They were mainly pictures of her mother and father, herolder sister, her boyfriend, her dog, but one photograph was of Silvija and another girl her age wearing only pantyhose and posing sideways in the doorway between two rooms of an apartment. The other girl was much larger than Silvija, a robust, bulky, big-breasted girl with a pumpkinish face who was hugging Silvija from behind while Silvija bent forward, her minute buttocks thrust into the other one’s groin. Silvija had her head thrown back and her mouth wide open, feigning ecstasy or perhaps just laughing heartily at the silliness of what they were up to. On the reverse side of the photograph, in the half inch at the top where she carefully identified the people in each of the pictures, Silvija had written, in Serbo-Croatian, “Nera odpozadi”—Nera from the rear. The “odpozadi” was no less inflammatory than the picture, and he looked from one side of the photograph to the other all the while that Drenka improvised for him with Silvija’s toylike brassiere. One Monday, when the kitchen at the inn was closed and Matija had taken Silvija off for the day to see historic Boston, Drenka squeezed into the folk dirndl with the full black skirt and the tight, embroidered bodice in which Silvija, like the other waitresses, served the Baliches’ customers and, in the guest room where Silvija was spending the summer, laid herself fully clothed across the bed. There was she “seduced,” “Silvija” protesting all the while that “Mr. Sabbath” must promise never to tell her aunt and her uncle what she had agreed to do for money. “I never had a man before. I