The Ministry of Special Cases

by Nathan Englander

  Lillian spent Friday night in her chair by the window, watching the corner around which Pato might turn. Kaddish watched TV too loudly drank too much, and smoked until the taste in his mouth went stale. He went into the kitchen at ten-thirty to freshen his drink and only came out again just before midnight, carrying a salad in a bowl.

  “I’ve mashed potatoes,” Kaddish said. “I’ve burnt you a steak.” His own he took bloody, touching it fleetingly to the griddle.

  “I’m fine,” Lillian said.

  Kaddish laid out place settings and served the rest of the dinner. He said to Lillian, “Come eat.”

  “If we’re having Friday night, let’s have it.”

  Lillian put three candlesticks in the center of the table. Two candles for Shabbos and the third a minhag from Lillian’s house. Some mothers light an extra candle for each of their children. Lillian’s mother had lit one for her, and Lillian did the same after Pato was born.

  At least she had for the first weeks until Kaddish had used them to light one too many cigarettes, until he’d made her feel it was nothing but superstition, nonsense to light candles when they did nothing else.

  Kaddish hadn’t felt like he was being a brute. He had no use for laws that saw him a bastard, and less so for traditions passed on. Let them take the rules that made him mamzer and outcast and use that extra candle to push them deeply up their collective ass.

  “You have to do that before dark,” Kaddish said.

  “Now you’re a stickler for things you don’t believe in?”

  “It’s the one Jewish tradition I keep—a hypocrisy that traces back.”Lillian held his gaze. “It can’t hurt to light a candle for Pato.”

  “No,” Kaddish said. Lillian put out a hand for his lighter and he gave it to her. “Sounds more Catholic than Jewish, but no.”

  Kaddish stood quietly while Lillian lit the candles and then covered her eyes. Because of the bandage, the whole of her face was hidden but for her mouth. She mumbled the blessing and she made a wish. They sat at the table and Kaddish had to admit—strange compliment though it was—that he’d not seen her looking better since Pato was taken.

  “I added a layer of gauze,” Lillian said. She smoothed the ends of the tape down against her cheeks. “A bit of clean dressing on top always brings out my eyes.”

  Kaddish went and opened a bottle of wine, trying to maintain the spirit. He poured for both of them and quickly drank. He wasn’t about to say a prayer.

  “It’s not hypocrisy,” Lillan said of the candles. “It’s what lapsed Jews do in times of trouble. They make amends and beg help from God.”

  “I’m not going to, if that’s all right.”

  “To ask?”

  “To beg,” Kaddish said.

  “That’s all right.”

  Kaddish ate and Lillian didn’t. She sat with her lips pressed tight as if Kaddish might try and feed her off his fork.

  Kaddish said, “Please, Lillian.”

  “What if he walks in right now and finds us like this, having a feast, drinking wine?”

  “He’ll think we were keeping up our strength so we could find him, and it will be the sweetest moment of our lives.”

  “But we won’t have found him. It doesn’t look right. I’m not even watching from the window; he’ll take us by surprise.”

  Kaddish nodded. He stood and went into the kitchen. He returned with another place setting, the wineglass rolling in an arc around the plate.

  “There,” he said, and set out the dishes, folding the napkin, putting the silverware in line.

  Lillian’s bottom lip shook. This is why she had long ago married him, these were the things he could do.

  Kaddish sat. Lillian took the wine bottle and filled Pato’s empty glass.

  “He can’t really surprise us,” she said. She pointed to the scalloped shelf where Pato’s keys rested next to the gold. “What if he gets back when we’re out looking?”

  Kaddish got up again and went to the front door. He turned the key in its center, unscrewed the knob, and pulled the door open a few centimeters. “Who’s left to kidnap with our son already gone?”

  Kaddish sat down at the table and cut a piece from his steak. He reached over to set it on Pato’s plate.

  Lillian stopped him. “I won’t ask you to take it that far.”

  “And the door? You’ll be able to sleep with it open?”

  “Better, if anything. Better if I manage to sleep at all.”

  This time Lillian stood up. She went around the table and kissed Kaddish on the back of his neck, lingering there.

  Kaddish stayed frozen. He was trying to keep that kiss in place. It was the same kind of energy with which Lillian tried to move her son around the corner time and again.

  After dinner they had coffee, Lillian in her chair and Kaddish in front of the TV. They stayed up until the candles went out, with Lillian glancing over, watching to see which one would go out first, praying it wasn’t her son’s.

  When Kaddish turned off the television and went to the bedroom, Lillian followed. When he sat down on the corner of the bed, when he unbuttoned his shirt and pulled his undershirt over his head, when he leaned down with a grunt to pull off his socks, he was hoping in the least selfish way he knew how that Lillian might replace that kiss.

  And she did. She pressed her lips to his neck.

  It was like it had been when Pato was a newborn, like making love with Pato’s bassinet by the side of the bed. It was a mix of passion and wonder and, for Kaddish, recognition of responsibility and consequence in the world.

  [ Twenty-seven ]

  THE CRY WAS SO STRONG, Kaddish sprinted down the hall to meet it. He found Lillian in the bathroom with the bandage in her hand. It was clear from the side as he stared at his wife in profile, clear before she turned to face him head on.

  Again Lillian screamed with despair and, when she said it, Kaddish only nodded. What was there to do but agree? How else to respond when Lillian said, “I’m beautiful!”

  Mazursky had done a magnificent job by Mazursky’s standards. The swelling and the black eyes did little to hide it. Lillian was transformed. Transformed, and even in Kaddish’s imaginings he’d never pictured this. He’d thought so always but now, to look at her, Lillian was right. She was nothing short of beautiful.

  “Murder,” Lillian said, her old nose gone, Pato missing from the mirror. “To change a face it is murder.”

  Lillian stopped at the fountain as she crossed the Plaza de Mayo. It was turned off and empty even of rainwater, so that when she threw her coins in she heard them hit and watched them roll. Lillian wasn’t sure of the rules, if it was the fountain or the water that counted, or, as a homeless woman walked toward her, if the money had to sit for any length of time. A wish is a wish, is what she decided. On her way to the Ministry of Special Cases, Lillian would take what she could get.

  That she was going to the ministry didn’t mean that what the lawyer said or what Kaddish said or what Cacho feared was right. Maybe people waited too long to go because of the rumors, and, having missed their window of opportunity, the building’s reputation proved true. Maybe the other families were making spurious claims and that’s why they found no recourse—it wasn’t for Lillian to judge. And if what the lawyer said was accurate, if it was like getting water from a rock, so be it. She wasn’t trying to find all the missing. She was trying to get one son back. Kaddish thought she was afraid to face reality when it was the other way around. This was the place the parents, the husbands and wives, the children of the missing went. And Lillian was headed there alone.

  She looked at her watch when she got to the building. The Ministry of Special Cases didn’t open for another hour.

  Except that it did.

  The door was open and the lobby was packed with people. They pushed and shoved, all trying to reach the lone security guard behind the counter. He stood on his chair, then up on the counter itself, yelling at the crowd.

  Lillian worked he
r way into the mix. “It’s not supposed to open for another hour,” Lillian kept saying, a form of apology as she pushed and was pushed back.

  “It’s the numbers,” a lady told her as they were pressed up against each other. “They give them out ten minutes before one hour before.” And then they were separated and then they were back. “But only the first fifty. If you don’t get one now, you better hustle when they open. We wait outside and then there’s another line upstairs.” They were pushed apart and the lady was gone. Lillian was by then close enough to the guard to see better and understand.

  He wasn’t yelling Order, please, or Line up, or Who was here first? He was picking people at whim, saying, “You,” and, “You there.” He was feeding the frenzy. It was a cruel game.

  By the time Lillian grasped this fully, the crush of people was thinning out. The guard climbed down and Lillian watched the last of the stragglers race back outside. When she looked over her shoulder, the security guard met her eye. He said, “We’re closed until eight.”

  Lillian exited the lobby. The guard locked the door behind her, and Lillian saw, stretched out and down the block, a line. She didn’t need to look for the slip in each hand to know when she’d walked by the last of the chosen and on to the dry faces that followed. She didn’t see the lady who’d explained so as to offer thanks.

  Lillian didn’t quite understand why they were all in line now, or at least, if they were, why those with numbers stood in the same one. Still, it was orderly and purposeful and so she stood at the end and waited.

  When the line began moving slowly ahead, Lillian followed. When the pace picked up, Lillian picked up hers along with it, and when those from behind, first one and then another, rushed past, she too broke ranks and ran the last steps.

  It was too late. Back again like before, everyone pushing toward a single door beyond the counter and off to the left side.

  This push was more suffocating than the last. It was pandemonium until one man, right at the street entrance and a few meters behind Lillian (she’d made some forward progress), began to call out in a confident but harried tone. “Can’t a man get to his office?” he said. “Coming through,” he said. “Late for work.” And in the midst of what seemed like complete chaos, now, so easy, a path was made. The man—smoothing down his mustache and mumbling insults—slipped right through the crowd.

  When Lillian reached the door, it led into a narrow stairwell. This was the reason for the jam.

  There was a smaller lobby two flights up and another counter, this time with a woman behind it. Mounted on the wall next to the counter was a battered red-metal ticket machine. From this the numbers were pulled.

  Lillian pulled hers. Number 456.

  She followed the others into the adjoining hall and found a place to sit among the fixed wooden benches and folding chairs. The clerks faced them from a row of desks on the far side of the room.

  Lillian sat holding her number tight with two hands. She’d look to it and look toward the clerks. Eventually one stood and called out, “Nine.”

  “Nine,” he said again. There was rustling up front, and a woman in a kerchief stood. Lillian looked around to see that she and the woman in the kerchief were the only two who’d paid it any mind.

  Lillian looked at her number again when they called for ten and eleven and twelve. She then asked her neighbor, “Do they stay open until they’re done?”

  The man laughed.

  “So tomorrow?” Lillian said.

  “What do you think?” the man said. “Take a guess.”

  “One,” Lillian said.

  “Yes. A natural. The day begins with one.”

  Lillian thought she might weep right then and would have if not for a distraction.

  “He has one-sixty-two,” an old man said. “El desgraciado has one-sixty-two.” The old man drew the attention of another couple, who also began to curse, which brought another lady into the fray. “Monster,” the lady said. And the man she called monster, the one the couple leered at, the guy the old man raised his cane at, was the very same man with the mustache who’d arrived “late for work.”

  He was, like them, waiting. He did not work there and had been late only for the line. He’d lied and, like suckers, they’d made him a path. There had to be another entrance for workers. How, in all that time waiting, could only one need to use the front door? How had they not caught on—caught him—on their own?

  The rage was unbelievable; Lillian thought they might kill the man with the mustache for real until the old man struck him in the mouth with the hook of his cane. As hard as the old man could hit was not hard enough to do much. The man with the mustache spit blood, though, and this seemed to satisfy the crowd. The man sat for the day looking ashamed but he held on and was called with his 162.

  Lillian had no book and no papers beyond the few documents she’d put together that related to her son. She spent the day staring at a very large woman in a very small chair who held a bottle of fizzy water and sweated the whole time. The woman was not a delicate woman but she did have a delicate bird’s tongue. This she’d dab into the neck of the bottle, never once sipping from it or tipping the bottle back to drink. Only, like a hummingbird, that tongue darting into the neck, dabbing endlessly, the whole of that woman spreading out from that point.

  Lillian thought the woman would die of thirst. She’d never get anything that way. Lillian wanted to run over and grab the bottle and drink it down herself. She wanted to push that woman’s giant head right into it, to shove her inside and set the bottle back on her seat. It was too much: the waiting and the sweating and the numbers not moving and that woman, with her tiny private purpose and flicking tongue.

  Lillian watched the whole bottle disappear, one dab at a time.

  That this woman’s blank face and her sharp raspberry tongue could so fill Lillian with hate unsettled her. They were all of them waiting, all in this together. Lillian still couldn’t stand her, but she forced herself to wish the woman well in her mind.

  When the ministry closed, Lillian still hadn’t been called. She did not know if that day was special or if they’d closed earlier than on most. Her own office was still open and, reminded of it, Lillian decided it would be good to go by. On her way out, as had the others, she let her number—worn through—flutter to the floor.

  Gustavo approached at the start of their embrace but Lillian and Frida didn’t let go. Lillian wept on Frida’s shoulder, and Frida whispered into Lillian’s ear. “No, you don’t,” Frida said. “Not from me.” When it seemed the embrace was about to end, one or the other would give a good squeeze and shore it up. “Hide all you want,” Frida said. “But this is the longest you go without seeing me again.”

  “I swear,” Lillian said, and then they moved apart.

  Gustavo pulled Lillian by the shoulders and kissed her on both cheeks.

  “A visit?” Gustavo said. “What a nice surprise.”

  “I thought I could do a couple of hours’ work,” Lillian said. She motioned, shocked to see it, at the mountain of files on her desk. “I’ve got to keep the job in order,” she said. “I’ve got to keep the job.”

  “Don’t be silly,” Frida said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Gustavo said. “The important thing is Pato. Are things moving along?”

  Frida took one of Lillian’s hands and held it between her own.

  “Poorly,” Lillian said.

  Being back in her office, stepping into what was so recently her day-to-day, was enough. Answering the question was too much. It unmoored her. Lillian didn’t consider it to be crying, but when she said, “Poorly,” the tears began rolling from her eyes.

  “Things will normalize,” Lillian said. “When Pato is home—exactly as before. I won’t let things slide too far.”

  “We are very busy without you,” Gustavo said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Frida said. “You shouldn’t come in at all.”

  “Yes,” Gustavo said. “We’re doing
fine.”

  This was followed by silence. Lillian was trying to maintain composure. Gustavo and Frida didn’t know what to say. Certain observations simply aren’t appropriate to certain moments, but neither can they be ignored.

  It was Gustavo who spoke. “You look, Lillian, absolutely gorgeous.”

  “I have a new nose,” she said. With that, she went to her desk and set to work.

  Lillian arrived earlier at the ministry the next day. Kaddish had offered to come, his face buried in a pillow. Lillian told him to stay home by the phone.

  Again Lillian failed to get a number in the first rush. In the second—toward the stairwell—she fared a little better but still found herself back on the benches holding 401. Lillian did not see the lady with the raspberry tongue or the man who was late for work, but already many of the faces were familiar. The lady who had told Lillian “ten minutes before” passed by. She smiled at Lillian but did not stop.

  Lillian brought food. She brought one of Pato’s books from the shelf.She sat and read and did not look up when they called numbers. The ministry stayed open a half hour later than the day before and still they didn’t get to Lillian. She called home from the corner. Kaddish answered. There was nothing to say and she stood there in silence feeling the weather, until Kaddish finally said, “I’ll cook.”

  They were whispering by the extra desk when Gustavo came out. “Two days in a row,” he said. “Such dedication, Lillian, it really means a lot. This is the last thing to worry about.”

  “I can’t lose this job,” Lillian said. “Look at milk. Look at butter. How much with inflation will it cost to get my son?”

  Gustavo smoothed his tie.

  “Who is talking about lost jobs?” Frida said. She gave Gustavo a threatening look, as if he’d raised the idea. Gustavo threw up his hands. He took a step back.