The Ministry of Special Cases

by Nathan Englander

  “He asleep?” Lillian said.

  “Out,” Kaddish said.

  With a tilt of her head, screwing up her face, she stared hard at her husband, trying to understand.

  She stared hard at her husband and was already mad at herself. On Coup Day, on this day, how had she not raced straight for his room to check? Then there was Kaddish, this man who understood nothing, whom she could not for a few hours trust.

  “Out?” Lillian said.

  “With the hairy one. That kid that looks like an octopus—all head.”

  “Rafa,” Lillian said. Then as an afterthought, distracted with worry, “It is time you learned your son’s friends’ names.”

  “He came by, Rafa did, and they went off to some bar.”

  Lillian pushed Kaddish’s legs off her lap so that he sat up straight, so that she could stand up and face him.

  “What bar do you think is open tonight? How could you let him leave?” She looked toward the door, as if Pato might come through it. And then she asked Kaddish, quite calmly, “Don’t you have any sense of your own?”

  “I told him. He doesn’t listen.”

  “Then tie him up. Hold him down. If your son doesn’t listen, why didn’t I find you by the door sitting on his back?”

  “Uncontrollable,” Kaddish said. “By his father, uncontrollable. Rebellious Jewish boys only listen to their mothers. For fathers they have no use.”

  [ Seven ]

  IN THE FIRST WEEKS after the coup, Lillian’s office received the people who had what to insure and the money to do it. Business rose steadily, and the caliber of the clientele rose with it. Gustavo was the epitome of Argentine politeness as still-stunned citizens took out policies on themselves. They repeated questions, asked the obvious, and all touched upon the central point: What happens if I die?

  “Covered,” Gustavo would say. Then, after a God forbid, he’d offer a withered smile. When asked about the money, Gustavo spoke with a comforting detachment. “The insurer issues the payment,” he would say. “You—that is, the surviving family—send us proof of death. We alert the company, and then….”

  And then Gustavo would make one hand motion or another, signifying ease and flow and continuity. He was not deceiving them. The process was to be that smooth—that is, for those with proof of death. Gustavo had heard whisperings of his own. That is why, in each instance, he made sure to state this point out loud. The customers noted it or they didn’t.

  It was Lillian writing up these policies, and Frida typing the forms, who dealt with the addresses where payments were to go. In the event of misfortune the beneficiaries were in Havana and Miami, Manhattan and Rome. Every foreign street name depressed Lillian more. It did not bode well. The men and women who’d fallen out of favor had already sent their families away.

  Lillian watched Gustavo lead one of these people out of his office, a diputado she recognized from the TV. Without the lights and the pancake makeup he simply looked old. Gustavo walked close to this man with his arm raised as if he were about to hug him. But the arm never came down. It served as a guide so that, when his client bumped into it, he redirected himself as he shuffled to the door.

  As delicate as Gustavo was when dealing with truncated prospects, he was equally deft when managing windfalls, the steady stream of acquisitions that were hard to explain. That is why, more and more, the upper crust turned to him as an agent.

  There was also the matter of his parentage. With a change in government comes a change in fashion. Though he’d done little with it, somewhere—generations back—introduced into Gustavo’s line was a very fine, very un-Perón last name.

  Some sounds are unmistakable even if you’ve never heard them in real life before. With the first gunshot, Lillian knew she’d been waiting. She sat up in bed, not yet awake and absolutely sure. There was another shot and then a steady burst. Kaddish snored through it and Lillian let him. She got low out of bed and crawled to Pato’s room, though there were no windows anywhere in the hall. Pato was under the covers and asleep and Lillian crawled over to his window. She peeked out through the space under the curtains, too afraid to pull them apart. There was no yelling or footsteps. She couldn’t hear any cars. Then it would come, another tattoo of it, and Lillian tried to figure if it was people taking turns—a shootout—or if it was one man with one gun taking his time.

  So many waves washed over their beautiful city. There’d be a wave of quiet before a wave of crime. They’d get a wave of kidnap and ransom, of political promise, then leftist terror followed by rightist death squads. With the new government, the clean streets, and a safe high-strung city, Lillian had been waiting for this. This was the wave of scores settled, and maybe of what Lillian feared most. Pato had said it after they’d found that boy murdered. What if this was the wave of innocents shot dead?

  You cannot ever let your guard down in Buenos Aires. It’s like standing in the ocean and facing the beach. It’s up to you to know what’s behind you. Always there’s another wave coming, building in force and crashing down.

  The shooting stopped. Lillian looked toward Pato’s clock. It was barely after midnight. The whole incident couldn’t have taken more than three minutes or four. And as agitated as she was (or maybe because of it), Lillian fell asleep there on the floor between her son’s bed and the window. She awoke again after dawn. She got showered and dressed and went down to the bakery and to pick up the news. This time, she didn’t know how, it was already in the paper that morning. Seven bodies of seven rebels were found dead on different streets. Lillian wondered how far sound could travel. None of them was discovered on their side of town.

  Lillian often tried to imagine what her parents would say if they weren’t already buried in respectable United Congregations plots. No great success, her life no better or worse than the one they’d struggled to give her. But together she and Kaddish had produced a wonderful son, tall and handsome and smart, and ten times more independent than she’d been. And even if Kaddish didn’t stop as he went by, no son-in-law spent more time around his in-laws’ graves. “Such beginnings,” they’d said, when she started seeing Kaddish. “Such a past.” They’d harped on this while Lillian pointed out in each and every argument that the past they abhorred wasn’t his.

  With all her years in insurance, Lillian had become a great believer in statistics. Anything could happen to anyone anywhere, but if you didn’t want your car broken into, Lillian could tell you on which block not to park. That said, Lillian still made room for possibility. When she was young and Kaddish was courting her, it was his ambition that had won her over. Not only did he dream without limit but he got Lillian to believe as well. And from their first date onward it had always been a we from Kaddish. All those dreams realized included her at his side. When Lillian flipped through women’s magazines, she couldn’t stand the photos of the mousy society wife on the corner of a settee, ankles crossed, with a fat-and-happy husband smiling for the camera and looking like he was a meter closer to the lens. The cheerfulness of those ladies’ interviews was what maddened her. How delightful the hard years were. Lillian believed every great success and wondrous achievement was based on bad judgment and recklessness, and more often than not on selfishness and the endangerment of more than one life. The successful ones were simply afforded better chances or had better luck. After spending as many years with Kaddish as she had apart, somewhere in herself Lillian still believed he could do it. What were the choices (what was her life) if she believed he could not?

  In any new friendship, the question that accompanied the first trace of intimacy was always the same. They wanted to know why she’d married him. (Lillian, who’d sneaked off to find a rabbi who’d rejoice in their union and who didn’t know the Poznan name.) She always answered with a question of her own: “What would you ask me if his dreams had come true?”

  This is why, even with the head-splitting pressure she felt during the change of regime, it was at these times she loved him best.

&nbs
p; “They don’t order my services yet,” Kaddish said, “but when they feel safe enough to whisper the names again, I’ll be busy like never before. A government fifty times more Catholic than the last and a civilized class being built around it. To be part of it they’ll pay me the same and fifty times more.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said.

  “When it feels quieter at night I’ll finish with the doctor’s job and then you’ll see the kind of cash I bring home. The shame industry is about to bloom.”

  He was a man on the cusp and acted like it. Lillian had come home these last weeks to find that Kaddish had been to the vegetable man and the butcher. She’d step in the door to find Portuguese rolls laid out in a basket with a napkin underneath. She’d find Kaddish in the kitchen, his glass of vermouth covered in greasy fingerprints on the counter, bent over a skillet flipping croquettes. He’d even defrosted the freezer himself. Kaddish was a pleasure, full of compliments and kisses, and if he still watched the same amount of football, it was while sitting up and leaning into the television, chanting and full of good humor, not flat on the couch as if someone had aimed the set at a corpse.

  Lillian felt guilty about enjoying her son in the same way. She was happy to see that Pato wasn’t totally senseless. During this same period, he actually listened to his mother. He didn’t stay out late, didn’t talk too much on the telephone. He got up early each day like honest people do and went to fetch the pastries without fail. At night he made it home for dinner and didn’t much bother his father, who hadn’t much been bothering him. She didn’t want to get hopeful, but outside the financial pressures that threatened to put them on the street, and the political uncertainty that kept them locked inside, it was the best in a while that their lives had been. With debts and threats and all their troubles rolled up together, she didn’t miss the opportunity to see the good. There was a roof over their heads. There was food on the table and her family around it. Worse or better, now was good. And when she was feeling anxious, she’d only wonder if she’d overdone it with the door.

  Pato was over at Rafa’s apartment, where he and his friends mostly hung out. Rafa’s mother had long ago decided she’d much rather accept the kids’ lifestyle and keep them home. In terms of motherly rights, she knew she lost much in the trade. They smoked pot in her living room and made out on her couch. She couldn’t get into her own bathroom or leave cash lying around. More than once she’d found some girl in her clothes, so that upon introduction the first thing she did was check what they wore.

  It was not a big apartment, a touch smaller than Pato’s and exponentially so if one accounted for her father and her daughter as well as her son. The master bedroom had gone to them, where she’d fit a bunk bed and two trundles, one on each side. The room slept Rafa and his younger sister Mufi, as well as her own father, their grandfather, who’d moved in sometime after her husband moved out. The kids didn’t think he was a bad roommate for eighty-two. He slept through anything and didn’t fight for space in the bureau that ran along the fourth wall.

  Rafa was rummaging through the top drawer of that bureau, while Pato sat on one of the trundle beds. Their friend Flavia made pleasantries with Rafa’s mother and they heard Flavia laugh from the other room.

  Rafa was looking for a new screen for his pipe. The last one, now discarded, kept popping out and so he’d glued it in place. It was a solution whose ramifications Rafa hadn’t considered until he’d taken a deep glue-laced hit and understood his mistake. Flavia and Pato had held him down until what they guessed was a sort of temporary psychosis had passed. Strolling through San Telmo the next morning, he’d bought them all matching rings as thanks. Rafa wasn’t sure for a number of days if how he felt in his head when he thought was how he felt thinking before.

  The three of them sat on the living room floor. Rafa’s mother completed the circle, sitting on the couch. The pipe moved around. Rafa’s mother ignored the pipe and accepted a glass of Coke with a nod.

  Pato thought he should call home. He was going to and then he lay back and watched the bubbles of paint on their ceiling where the rain came through.

  Pato forced himself to stand and was about to ask if he could use the phone (he was the only guest who still made overtures toward manners). Instead he said, “Where’s your cigarette?”

  “I don’t have one,” Rafa said. To prove it, he showed Pato two empty hands.

  “You were smoking,” Pato said. “You changed your socks and then you were smoking.”

  “Definitely maybe,” Rafa said, considering. Rafa’s mother gave him a little kick and he got up off the floor. The boys went back and searched the room and then Rafa remembered the screen. He pulled open his top drawer, and a little cloud escaped. “Shit,” he said, fishing out the lit cigarette and making sure his socks weren’t on fire. He put the cigarette in his mouth and they went back outside.

  “You’ll burn the house down,” his mother said. “You make yourself retarded from smoking drugs. What kind of person forgets a cigarette in the drawer?”

  “It wasn’t in the drawer,” Rafa said. “It was in the ashtray. Ask Pato.”

  She turned to Pato and started laughing. She reached up and pinched his cheek.

  “If only my own son couldn’t lie.”

  Lately their stories had turned odder and more sinister. When they switched fully to politics and their conspiracy theories, Rafa’s mother would get up and leave the room. She hated when they stopped talking in front of her and always tried to excuse herself before they did. Rafa’s mother listened to this last story from the edge of the hallway, ready to move on.

  “They switched out my sociology professor,” Flavia said. She was lying on the floor with her head propped against the base of the couch. She stared up at Rafa’s mother while she spoke, half looking for help and half holding her responsible, all adults the same. Rafa’s mother held her ground. “We were waiting around in lecture hall and he just doesn’t show. Right after the first kid stands up everyone else grabs for their bags, and that’s when this moth-eaten man comes in. He’s maybe two hundred years old. He says he’s the new professor while he’s still shuffling toward the blackboard. Then he starts reading his lecture word for word off a stack of yellow cards.”

  “You sat quiet?” Rafa said.

  “I didn’t talk when I liked the professor. It was Matalón—he screamed it out. ‘Where’s Professor Gómez?’ he yells. ‘Where’s Dr. Gómez?’”

  Pato stared wide-eyed, as if he was watching this on TV.

  “So what happens?” Rafa said.

  “Nothing. The old guy doesn’t stop reading. And Matalón gives up, and then this other girl screams it out. And then another couple of kids chime in. And finally the geezer—he’s nearly blind, the cards are pressed up against his face—he puts them down, and looks around as if he’s surprised to find us sitting there. He says, ‘I’m the teacher in this class.’ We all just shut up then. It was clear. The guy is our teacher now.”

  Lillian was at the table in the kitchen sitting over a folder, an adding machine on one side, a cup of tea on the other. Kaddish came in and kissed Lillian on the top of her head.

  “You brought home work with you?”

  “When do I not anymore?” Lillian said. She was wearing half-glasses on a beaded chain. She put them on when her eyes felt tired. Lillian looked too young for them, and they complemented her in the contrast. Kaddish rubbed at her shoulders and Lillian took the glasses off and let them dangle.

  There was a split lemon Kaddish had left on the counter. He fixed himself a fresh drink and stirred it with a finger.

  “Where’s Pato?” he said.

  “Out with Rafa, I guess.”

  Kaddish raised an eyebrow. He disapproved. “That head is too big,” he said. “Too big to be of any use to anyone.”

  “He’s a bad influence, it’s true. But no worse on Pato than Pato is on him.” They both smiled at that.

  “It’s not so easy to keep the boy in the
house,” Kaddish said. “You didn’t do so well yourself.”

  “He was gone when I got here.”

  Kaddish took a sip of his drink and then held it up to the light, looking through it.

  “I’m going to take him out when he gets back.”

  “Leave him alone, Kaddish. He hates the work. It helps no one to drag him along.”

  “What helps no one is a university education. That’s what’s a waste.”

  “It’s an indefensible position. You know it’s not so.”

  Kaddish put his glass on Lillian’s folder and sat down across from her. “The university is the worst place to be right now. You think I don’t get it, but I do. The men who run this country are more like me than like Pato.”

  Lillian laughed out loud.

  “Seriously,” Kaddish said. “Angry intellectual types make them nervous. I know it, because I feel the same way. If they’re as afraid of the boy as I am.”

  “You do a fine job of torturing him for someone who’s scared.”

  “When a government is scared, do you think it’s any wiser? I tell you, they’re not messing around this time. Order is what they’re after, and order is being restored. They’ve got everyone working double shifts, the goon squads and the garbagemen both.”

  “And that’s the night you want to sneak off into with your son? It makes no sense. You contradict yourself all the way through.”

  Kaddish adjusted his legs at the table. His knee passed Lillian’s, and she moved her feet so he could extend his leg between hers.

  “It’s safe for us,” Kaddish said. “Safe for people who mind their own business and dangerous for the ones who threaten them.”