The Ministry of Special Cases

by Nathan Englander

  Apparently there was a man sitting above him. Kaddish did his best to keep silent, which was no easy task for a lifelong smoker. He tended to greet each day with a racking fit of coughing. Kaddish studied the fine silk socks the man wore and thought of sinking his teeth into an Achilles tendon and then making a graceless scrabbling escape.

  The heel of the left shoe rose up and then came down with a clack, sending a swirl of dust right into Kaddish’s face.

  “I know you’re awake, Poznan. A terrible actor.” It was Mazursky Kaddish’s heart beat heavy; Kaddish should have known. “You’re either awake or dead, Poznan. Both the snoring and farting have come to a stop. You’ve got to breathe from somewhere.”

  Kaddish stifled a cough, keeping silent.

  “We’ve got to get a look at those sinuses again. It really is an ungodly noise. The other end I won’t touch. You’ll have to find a braver doctor to stick his nose in that.”

  Kaddish wasn’t sure what to say. “Are you going to let me out?” was all he came up with.

  The feet came together and slid over. Kaddish pushed a pile of prayer books out of his way and slipped through, taking the curtain he used as a blanket with him. He stood up and dusted off, a hand now holding two corners of the parochet to his chest. All the red velvet draped around him added a touch of the kingly to an otherwise undignified moment.

  Kaddish sat next to the doctor. He threw the excess curtain over his legs to keep away the chill and fumbled for a cigarette.

  “How did you find me?” Kaddish said.

  “It’s your son that’s disappeared,” the doctor said. “The condition you suffer from is completely different. With you, Poznan, no one is looking.”

  “Still, this a very odd place at which to arrive.”

  “It’s not the first spot I checked. Trust me, though. I didn’t go far. You’re a man avoided mainly for the fact that you might end up here. I’d have walked right back out, if not for the snore.”

  Kaddish knew what question he’d asked of the doctor, and, as much as he wanted an answer, he was afraid of what it was.

  “I appreciate the risk you’ve taken in showing up here.”

  “This is the synagogue, not the cemetery. If it was to save your son’s life, I can’t promise I’d have come to find you there.”

  “Is it to save his life?”

  “I don’t know,” the doctor said. “I spoke to a gentleman who spoke to a gentleman who’s willing to meet. I was making a different point. It’s that Toothless’ name wasn’t screwed into the wall over here.” The doctor put his elbow over the back of the pew, looking around. “There was never a leaf on that tree for my father.”

  Kaddish took the opportunity to have the coughing fit he’d fought off underneath. The doctor watched as Kaddish’s eyes bulged. He listened as whatever was sticking to Kaddish’s lungs came loose in an amazingly audible sound.

  “Time to go,” the doctor said, when Kaddish recovered.

  “Like that?” Kaddish said.

  “Just like that. And it was no small feat to arrange such a rendezvous.”

  “With who?”

  “The only man I’ve ever heard of that’s more pitiful than you. But you’ve got to get going, he’s not easy to pin down and even more rarely coherent.”

  “He sounds like a prize.”

  “Have mercy. It’s difficult to live with the answers to the questions you ask.”

  “Is he close by, this man?”

  “Jesus,” the doctor said. “Did you walk out on your wife without taking the car?”

  “With nothing,” Kaddish said. “Why else would I be sleeping under a bench?”

  “I still can’t understand why you’d leave.” The doctor took out his billfold. “You’re a man with a hard life. Why on earth do you go around making it harder? The top of the bench would do you better.” The doctor handed Kaddish three American ten-dollar bills. “I’ll drop you by the golf club.”

  “You want me to go golfing with him?” Kaddish said.

  “Your man is at the Fisherman’s Club. The golf club is for me. If I’m up this early, I might as well get in a round.”

  “The pier is a good three kilometers from there.”

  “You’re enough of a prize your own self, Poznan. I don’t need to be spotted near the both of you together. Anyway, you look near death. A brisk walk down Costanera, a bit of park time, a stroll along the river—it’ll cure what ails you.”

  “What about the rush?”

  “I wouldn’t stop for breakfast on the way,” the doctor said. On second thought, he gave Kaddish another ten. “Treat the man to a meal.”

  Lillian stood outside the Ministry of Special Cases deep in a line that ran the length of the block and snaked around the corner. She’d sworn that another visit to that building would kill her. With the habeas corpus fallen through, she’d returned without pause. She would show up at Feigenblum’s the same way, just as she’d visit police stations and hospital wards, roam the parks and misery towns, and stand in the morgues of the city, not looking for Pato—as he was alive—but to count the bodies herself, to rule out each one with her own eyes, the dead porteños that were not her son. She added to this roster the foreign amnesty groups and the Israeli embassy. If they could find and kidnap and sneak Eichmann out, how much harder could it be to track down Pato? Let those commandos roll her son up in a carpet and spirit him off, too.

  When she got to the hall it was packed worse than she’d ever seen it. They were in the aisles today, sitting on the floor. And why shouldn’t it fill to overflowing, Lillian thought, if people kept disappearing and so much work went into getting even one boy home?

  Lillian spied an old couple who’d staked a good claim. With their knees together and backs turned out, a bag between them and one each on the outside, there was room for another person on that bench, maybe two. The woman moaned as she took a shoe off, so that, staring at a swollen foot, her neighbors did their best to shift farther away.

  Lillian was over, Lillian was pointing and reaching, a hand on a bag. “On the floor,” Lillian said. “I could sit if you move them.”

  The old woman took Lillian’s hand off the bag. “I’m getting settled,” she said. “I can see how crowded on my own.”

  The woman took her time getting off the other shoe, a heavy thing with a heel that looked as if it were cut from a two-by-four. The husband went into the middle bag and produced a pair of slippers and then went back to ignoring Lillian and his wife.

  “Bad circulation,” the woman said. Then she shifted and organized and Lillian sat down.

  It was when Lillian checked the crumpled number from in her pocket that the old woman spoke. “How high?” she said.

  “Too high, I’m afraid.” Lillian put the paper back and pressed her pocket closed as if to signal that their conversation was done.

  “Is it your husband?” the woman said. She stared at Lillian’s wedding band. Lillian stared at it too. It had been so long since she saw it as a symbol of any tie to Kaddish.

  “No,” Lillian said. “It’s my son.”

  “Snatched up?” the woman said. She inquired with great concern.

  Lillian answered. She told them what had happened and was surprised to find that she was happy to talk and be listened to, to have her story—to have Pato—believed by strangers. When she finished the husband said, “Hardship all the way.”

  It was as Lillian wondered why they didn’t all share their troubles that she learned her telling would warrant a listening. The woman told her their names—Rosita and Leib—and launched into the story of their own absent son. Lillian wasn’t sure why she didn’t see this coming or, more curiously, why she thought it so unfair.

  “It’s killing us for real,” Rosita told her. “It’s killing Leib.”

  “I’ve been in the hospital,” he said. He pointed to his heart.

  Lillian didn’t feel generous, and she didn’t feel bad. What she did feel was repulsion, visceral and sharp
. The buffer was there for a reason. The customs of silence and solitude for a reason. The Ministry of Special Cases didn’t need, with all its other tortures, the mixing of hopelessness and hope.

  “Until this, he was always healthy, and now he has heart failures all the time. Not even attacks,” she said. “It’s different. The heart doesn’t try anymore. We’re packing it in. We’re moving to Jerusalem before Leib dies. The strain can kill us over there just as easy.”

  There was a look of horror on Lillian’s face.

  “We’ll come right back if there’s a miracle,” Leib said. “It doesn’t help our son if we die from the waiting. It’s time to move on.”

  “Yes,” Rosita said, agreeing. “How many ways can they tell us to give up? For how long?”

  “If we don’t protect ourselves a little.”

  “A good boy,” Rosita said.

  “A scientist,” Leib said. “We have letters on his behalf from Britain, from the United States. One was even sent from the Technion in Haifa. A name, our son. We weren’t the only ones working. Others have tried.”

  Old as they were, frail as they were, Lillian passed judgment. She held her tongue between her teeth, so strong was the urge to say, If it’s killing you, the waiting, it’s nature’s wish. Then it’s a person’s time to die.

  “We fought long,” Rosita said. “First in Salta, from our home. Then we came to the capital, to be near the government and near where Daniel lived, near the scene of this crime.”

  “We’ve been staying in his apartment,” Leib said. “Parents sleeping in a dead son’s bed.”

  “We’ve lived away from home so long,” Rosita said, “there’s no reason to go back. At our age when you’ve been uprooted, when you’ve broken the routines of a lifetime, what difference is it to keep on to Jerusalem? It’s the same thing for us, ten kilometers or ten thousand.”

  “My heart is no good,” Leib said.

  If they can run from their son, Lillian thought, why couldn’t she run from them? Lillian bent to separate her bag from theirs, to get her things and move on.

  “The intent wasn’t to burden,” Rosita said. “You go,” she said. “Be well.”

  “I’m not judging,” Lillian said, unnerved. “I’m just going. You be well,” Lillian said. “You have good luck.”

  “You’re new,” Rosita said. “I understand, I remember. You shouldn’t know from it,” Rosita said, “but two years on this bench is enough.”

  Lillian was in the midst of backing away. This stopped her, Rosita’s You shouldn’t know. Who more than her? How could anyone claim more than Lillian, to suffer?

  “Two years?” Lillian said, angry now, ungenerous. “It’s hardly two months since this nightmare has befallen us. There’s no need to make it worse than it is.”

  “She’s all piss and vinegar,” Rosita said to her husband. “It’s the only way to start out.”

  “You can fly away if you need to,” Lillian said. “But you don’t suffer any more than me.”

  “Maybe you suffer more, maybe less. Either way, it’s the same two years for us. You can’t imagine yet—no matter your claim—what two years will bring. In ’74 our Daniel was taken.”

  “The troubles go back a ways,” Leib said. “Before the junta, before Isabelita, still with Perón it started.”

  “Not true,” Lillian said. “Then it must be something else. A different matter than disappeared.”

  A sweet, sweet smile from Rosita, at Lillian and then at her husband.

  “Even now,” Leib said. “Even still, it is hard for us to imagine that maybe, before our Daniel, there was another.”

  “We know how it is,” Rosita said. “Everyone is like that. The troubles always start when they start for you.”

  Lillian did run from them. She ran out of the hall and down the stairs. She wasn’t going to sit there turning into that woman while the hours ticked by. She knew full well that a marred habeas corpus with names scratched out was neither a document issued on behalf of her son nor proof of the rejection of such a request, either of which—according to the clerk in the hallway—was the province of the ministry’s other side. And even that she no longer had. Kaddish took their copy when he left. She’d find the bird-feather man regardless; she’d make him help. Lillian headed for the stairway on the right.

  The door was locked and Lillian tried to force the knob. Then she began banging with her fists. The lobby was empty except for Lillian and the guard. He came straight over to ask what it was she thought she was trying to do.

  “To get upstairs,” was her answer.

  “That part I figured,” he said. “Except I’m not really interested, because you’re not allowed up there, not without special permission—and if you’d been given it, they’d have called me. I’d have been the one to escort you.”

  “It’s not nice the way you give out the numbers,” Lillian said. “It’s cruel. You could make a line and hand them out, one to fifty, in the order in which people arrive.”

  “I don’t think that’s what we’re discussing.”

  “We are discussing sadism. It’s sadistic the way you hand out the numbers and a further indication of that trait when you come over to harass me instead of simply unlocking that door.”

  “No one gets up there without approval and without me leading the way.”

  “I’ve already been up,” Lillian said. “My husband and I were there together. I’m returning to finish the business I’ve already started on that side.”

  “Take it back,” he said.

  “What?” Lillian said. She blinked, and was honestly startled, so perfectly infantile was the request.

  “If what you said was true, I’d get in a lot of trouble—serious trouble.”

  “But it is,” Lillian said.

  “But take it back,” the guard said, dead serious. “If you’d been there I’d have a record in my log and a note to put in the file that goes to the archive that lists all the citizens who’ve been up there that week, except that I haven’t had to send the file or use the log this quarter, because no one ever goes.”

  “I spoke to a man in the hallway. He was eating his lunch.” Lillian knew she should stop. If she had to keep coming to the ministry every morning, she’d never get one of the good numbers. “Let me up this time,” Lillian said, “and I’ll take them both back, this visit and the last.”

  “You’ve got two seconds to take everything back before I thwart your attempt to enter a secure area.”

  Lillian took this to mean that he meant her harm. But she really couldn’t imagine that he did. That’s maybe why she said, “Only the truth. That’s all anyone gets from me.”

  She really didn’t see it coming, that first swing. It wasn’t aimed at her but it made such a crack, and the crack, in that empty lobby, set off such a boom, Lillian actually screamed and jumped, and couldn’t in the intervening seconds get rid of the shakes. The guard had pulled his baton and swung it with all his might against that door. He raised it again and this time it was poised above Lillian.

  “You weren’t up there,” he said. “Take it back.”

  But Lillian couldn’t take it back, because she’d been there. It seemed insane even to her not to just say it when she knew a single blow would break her bones. “I was up there,” she said. “And you were here, like always, and didn’t stop me.”

  She tensed as she spoke, curling her shoulders and tucking her chin, preparing to be hit. All the guard did was slip the baton back in its loop. For an instant Lillian thought that the strength of her resolve had won him over. And then she straightened up, understanding that they weren’t alone.

  Lillian felt the man’s presence behind her. Then a hand was clasped over her shoulder in a kindly way, and—the strangest thing—he said, “Candy?”

  “No, thanks,” the guard said. “Not today.” He kept his baton hand by the baton, and the other one he raised, to wave the offer off.

  “Come on,” the man said. “You’re the only
one in the building with a sweet tooth worse than mine.”

  “I’m working,” he said.

  “From what I heard, it sounds like you need a break.”

  At that the guard’s cheeks turned red and he said again to Lillian, screamed it in front of this man, “Take it back!”

  “Have a piece,” the man said. And an extremely long arm reached out past Lillian, crossing the space between her and the guard. A chocolate coin wrapped in gold foil was pressed into the guard’s hand.

  “She’s lying,” the guard said. “She was never up there.” The guard seemed to be trying to frown, but only one side of his mouth turned down.

  “As expedient as caving in this woman’s skull would be, would you be amenable to another solution as a favor to me?”

  The guard nodded.

  “And you?” the man said. He was talking to Lillian. She already knew, from the length of the arm and the height from which the voice came, to look up when she turned. Still, Lillian fell short. She first saw his jacket and then, at his neck, the collar around it. He was a military priest. In those first moments she didn’t raise her eyes from there. “Yes,” she said.

  “This is excellent,” the priest said, and returned his attention to the guard. “Not to upset standard procedure too much, how about I give you a second piece, which we’ll call a bribe?” Again the long arm was extended and the coin, this one silver, was passed to the guard. “My version of events goes like this: This woman was never on the other side as she claims,” he squeezed Lillian’s shoulder to stop her before she spoke. “She never stood here right now, and I never gave you the second chocolate, only the first was given as a courtesy. Since nothing transpired, it would follow that there’d be no reason for bad blood between you, and there’d definitely be no reason to approach a stranger and ask if she ever was where she shouldn’t be—to which, being a stubborn stranger, she’d surely answer yes, starting a cycle that ends with a split-open head. Now that outcome doesn’t have to be. Problem solved.”