The Ministry of Special Cases

by Nathan Englander

  “Yes, Father—sir,” the guard said.

  “Yes,” Lillian said.

  “Excellent,” the priest said. “You eat your chocolate,” he said to the guard. “You come for a walk with me,” he said to Lillian. “And when we get back, a test for everyone, we will see how good we all are at keeping a promise.”

  “You should be more cautious,” the priest said. “Is it really worth it to die over that?”

  “I don’t think he’d have killed me right there in the lobby.”

  “It’s not conjecture. I’ve seen someone beaten to death in that lobby before.”

  The priest had a talent for listening and Lillian wondered if receiving confession was an actual skill. Lillian spoke more openly to him than she had to anyone other than Frida and went as far as sharing her dream of an Eichmann-style rescue, which she’d never said aloud.

  “The Eichmann abduction was a more complex operation than you make it seem. Let’s say there were people who looked the other way so that it could be such a well-publicized success.”

  “Those are the people I’m trying to get to,” Lillian said.

  “They don’t do favors,” the priest said. “And they can’t be bought with a cookie.”

  “But they can be bought?” Lillian said. She thrust out her sheaf of papers. The priest stepped back and Lillian only reached out farther. The priest’s arms were nothing; Lillian would reach across the city if need be.

  The priest took the papers and began patting himself down. Lillian, preempting, offered her own glasses. Testing them out, he moved them forward and back on the bridge of a perfect triangle of nose. “More or less,” the priest said. He crossed his eyes and took the chain that hung below his chin like a bridle. He lifted it over his head. The priest tsk-tsked and pulled out another chocolate coin. He unwrapped it, snapped it in two, and offered Lillian half.

  Lillian took it. “Is this your cure for everything?”

  “In this case it’s about all I can do.” He licked his thumb. “I’m a military chaplain in a Catholic army. I split my loyalties between God and country. Even if God takes precedence, I think yours is beyond my jurisdiction.”

  “It’s all the same when it’s about saving a boy.”

  “In this world, maybe. Most of what I do is focused on saving people for the one to come.”

  “Now is when I want him. Save the boy in this life and you can have his soul in the next.”

  “I wish I could,” he said. “I can’t.”

  Lillian didn’t believe him. “Then you wouldn’t have gone this far,” she said. “I’ve learned enough in these last weeks to know good Samaritans don’t just materialize. Priest or no priest, there’s something in it for you.”

  “That’s an extremely cynical view of the system. We should get you into a uniform. I think you’d do well.”

  “I only want one thing from it,” she said. “Whatever your deal is, if it’s guilt or God or dirty money, anything you can do to keep my son out of his grave, I’ll take with me to mine.”

  “I really can’t help you,” he said. And then, handing Lillian her glasses, “I really shouldn’t.”

  Kaddish walked through the park to the water. Not a great naturalist, while looking at trees Kaddish was reminded that there were trees, and heading out to Avenue Costanera to walk the promenade he saw the great river, and acknowledged—even with cars passing by—that it was something to behold. Kaddish rubbed his hands together. It was still very cold.

  Walking along the river, Kaddish couldn’t help but see it as an ocean. It was an idea Talmud Harry had put into his head as a child. Harry would say, “Take every river and lake from the Bible, gather them up and drop them into our Río de la Plata, and guess what? They wouldn’t even make a splash. Tell me though, little Poznan, if God himself isn’t afraid to have His storied seas look like puddles upon inspection, why must the Argentine fake a river that is a sea?” Kaddish, of course, had no answer. “Hubris,” Talmud Harry would always say. “It is dirty pride and hubris that spur such a deception.” Practically fifty years later, Kaddish still thought it every time. Who wants the planet’s tiniest ocean when he can have a river that makes men weak in the knees?

  Fishermen began to dot the path, and planes from the airport nearby took off, rippling the air behind them with the heat off their engines. Kaddish was surprised that the fishermen didn’t look up as the jets roared overhead. It’s amazing what people get used to.

  A woman pushing a stroller stuffed with blankets veered toward Kaddish and said, unasked, “It’s the only way to get her back to sleep.” Kaddish nodded and walked on until he saw the Fisherman’s Club hovering on the mist above the water. In the dawn, with the pier hidden below, it was like walking into a fable. It was just the place one might approach when seeking answers from strangers to unknowable things.

  As Kaddish got closer and the mist lifted and the wind slowed, the pier came into view, stretching out a solid half-kilometer into the river. The club building appeared to be clamped onto it. It was broader than the pier and jutted from it on both sides. The building was constructed right on top of it, maybe fifty meters from shore. It was a handsome wooden structure, with high arched cupolas and fine detail. It looked all the finer for the functional pier it straddled, naked pile and beam.

  There was no one fishing in front of the building. Here and there he could see a rod visible on the other side. Walking through the club Kaddish tried to look purposeful, which was made more complicated by his lack of rod and tackle. And even for an early morning fisherman Kaddish’s stay at the Benevolent Self had left him differently rundown. Two separate people asked who he was going to meet. Without a name he said, “Out back,” pointing and following his finger and heading for the exit. Both stepped out of his way.

  The doctor had promised that Kaddish was expected, that he’d been described to the man. Kaddish assumed the man had been given a report as kindly as the one he’d received: Fatter than you but not so short, and with a bulldog’s face. So Kaddish searched for a stocky bulldog of a man, which covered basically each and everyone out there, including Kaddish himself.

  He was oddly unconcerned. Kaddish believed one look would be enough. Despite the litany of things that went wrong in his dealings, Kaddish believed his instincts were still spot on.

  At the end of the pier there was a small lean-to, and right before it Kaddish found his man: a corcho in a winter parka with one foot up on a rail. He had a mustache and, from what looked to be a general lack of grooming, also nearly a beard. As soon as Kaddish saw him, he did indeed know.

  Two fishing rods were fastened in place and the man stood between them drinking his coffee, the cup hidden in a meaty hand. It was a look the man had, familiar to Kaddish from his own face, that was the giveaway. It was the broken-man look that said, had Kaddish walked right up to him, grabbed his ankles, and tipped him over the edge, he wouldn’t have resisted for an instant—the acceptance that if his life came to an end it would simplify many troubling things.

  They nodded at each other and, taking his foot down, the man took up his thermos and refilled his cup. So much steam came off it, Kaddish wondered if all the haze he’d seen on the way had risen from there. He offered it to Kaddish. It was a tiny tin cup covered in chipped white enamel, a beloved thing.

  Kaddish said nothing, only staring back into the man’s bloodshot eyes. They were big and yellow and much larger than they seemed for being set deep behind heavy cheeks. They stood there sizing each other up and Kaddish, not uncomfortable even with a silence as painful as this, turned with the man back to the rail.

  The water below the pier was thick with oil and gas and industrial runoffs that gave it a glassy sheen. Every ripple and wave sent through it lifted up layers of purple and red and a yellowish runny-egg blue.

  Kaddish thought it beautiful. Though, following those fishing lines, he wasn’t sure he’d want to eat what was pulled from that water. There was the call of a horn as a tugboat limp
ed along, steering a barge into an invisible lane.

  Kaddish passed back the cup and lit a cigarette.

  He smoked some and then flicked his cigarette out over the edge, half expecting the water to catch and the river to go up, the whole of Buenos Aires lit with a shimmering chemical flame.

  The man shook his head as if to say, It won’t light; he’d tried it before. Then Kaddish decided he couldn’t possibly know what the man was thinking.

  It was enough of an interaction either way, and Kaddish reached out to shake hands. The man had a strong grip. He held on and said, “What’s your name again?”

  “I thought maybe I wasn’t supposed to,” Kaddish said. “That you wouldn’t want—”

  “Victor Wollensky,” he said.

  “Kaddish Poznan,” Kaddish said. “It’s more your name I thought we were protecting.”

  “Not at all,” he said. “A guilty man can’t get himself killed in this town. Only the innocent need to watch out.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I’m living proof,” he said, “by virtue of the fact that I should be dead.”

  “You escaped?” Kaddish looked back toward the club. The end of the pier was a good place to stand for a man who wants to see who’s coming his way.

  “Escaped what?” the man said, an eyebrow raised.

  “The junta,” Kaddish said. “Their clutches.”

  “The junta?” The man laughed. “A naïf,” he said. “Can’t you tell by looking?”

  Kaddish looked. While he did, his teeth began to chatter. It was cold over the water with hot coffee swishing inside. Wollensky took off his parka and handed it to Kaddish and Kaddish put it on.

  Left in a heavy wool sweater, Wollensky pushed up the sleeves, revealing stretched and faded tattoos. “I’m to be escaped from. That’s the kicker: You spend a life chasing and when you want to run, you’re stuck. The one who chases can’t get away from himself. I tried. I hid all over. And guess what?” He closed those big eyes and then popped them open, first one and then the other. “Take a peek and there I was.”

  Kaddish listened. He nodded and kept glancing at the tattoos.

  “You’re a sailor?” Kaddish said.

  “Navy,” Wollensky said. “And what might a man in this upside-down country end up doing in the navy but flying on planes.”

  “A pilot?”

  Wollensky pulled down an eyelid. “Ojo” he said. “I’ve got big eyes for giving big warnings, but they don’t see so good.” He freed one of the rods. “Good enough to be a navigator. Good enough to see too much. I wish I was blind.”

  “A dark wish,” Kaddish said.

  “Not when you’ve seen what I have.” There was no tension to the fishing line beyond the pull of the current. Wollensky began to reel it in. The hook came up baited, and the navigator cast it back out.

  “What could be so terrible?” Kaddish said. He put his hand on the second rod and Wollensky nodded. Kaddish pulled it free.

  “I know what happens to the children,” Wollensky said.

  Kaddish took a step toward him. “How are you the one to know?”

  “By doing it,” Wollensky said. “I’m the monster who tosses them into the sea.”

  The fishing rods were again fixed in place and the two men stood at the rail, staring out over the water. Kaddish reached into his pocket. He took out a snapshot of Pato and slid it along the bar to the navigator.

  “Pato Poznan,” Kaddish said. “My disappeared child.”

  The navigator didn’t look. He turned his head.

  “Please,” Kaddish said. “He might be familiar. If not the name, maybe the face.”

  “It won’t matter,” the navigator said.

  Kaddish, pleading, said, “It does to me.”

  The navigator took it up, stared at it, pushed it back Kaddish’s way.

  “They all look the same and they all look like this. All in the same boat is the saying. But they don’t have one. They’re all at the bottom of the river.”

  “How can I be sure?” Kaddish said. “As a father, how do I trust?”

  “You want someone to swear for you? You need it to come from outside?” The navigator waited as if he expected a real answer from Kaddish. “You look like you already know the truth.”

  “What do I know?” Kaddish said.

  “That once they’re disappeared, it’s already done. None of them will ever come home.”

  “That can’t be,” Kaddish said. He couldn’t believe what he’d heard.

  “I’ve killed many. I may have murdered your son along the way.”

  “You wouldn’t admit it to me. You’d never say it.”

  “I told you at the start, I can’t get myself punished. I’ve tried to tell my story to the world, and you’re about the only one who’ll listen.”

  “If it was true they’d disappear you also.”

  “It seems to be the opposite. They’ve left me as the town crier. I’m a fat, ugly drunk and a general disgrace. There will always be truth that escapes, and when you make lies into truth and truth into lies, people like me serve a purpose.”

  “What purpose is that?” Kaddish said, still not sure what to think.

  “Exactly the one I’m serving now. So far-fetched, so impossible and unbelievable a claim, made by such a foul, stinking man”—here he smiled so his puffy gums showed—“and, more so, one who sleeps on the streets and lives off the fish that feed on the children, eating myself mad.” He scratched furiously at his ear, as if he’d been bitten. “The government sees me as a treasure. I’m the man who tells their secret and out of whose mouth it sounds like a lie.”

  This Kaddish understood. “Then tell me how it’s done.”

  “I’m not the only navigator. There is more than one plane, just as there is more than one prison or one city or one son. I can’t tell you what goes on in their dungeons, I don’t know what goes on underground beyond torture. I would wait in a plane on the runway. At night a bus would come, and off it marched the young people—they were almost always young, they were always naked, and they were drugged and on their way to passing out cold.”

  Kaddish gave no cues. He did not shake his head in disbelief or tsk-tsk or purse his lips. He waited for the navigator to go on.

  The navigator stuck out his hand. He pushed it out over the railing and then swooped it right up toward the sky.

  “We would take off,” he said. “We flew out over the river. The pilot piloted. The navigator, which is me, has no real job when there is no real journey, so I’d go back into the hold, where there was a different guard each time—a single guard but always different, a way to put blood on a different person’s hands. All in it together, all guilty just the same. It’s harder to pass judgment when one must pass it on oneself.”

  Here Kaddish responded. “Yes,” Kaddish said. “Then?”

  “Then we’d throw them down into the river.”

  “All of them?” Kaddish said.

  “Every last one. In the night. From the air to the river below. You couldn’t see anything or hear anything over the engines, and they were always asleep. Sometimes I’d pretend to hear screaming. Always I’d believe I’d heard the impact, the breaking of bodies. From that height it isn’t drowning that kills them, just hitting the water from that altitude at that speed—it pushes back with such force—it’s water but it’s like they’ve hit a brick wall.”

  “But you couldn’t see?”

  “But I know they’re dead even without seeing, same as you.”

  “What if one were to wake?” Kaddish said.

  “Wake and what?” he said, laughing, though it wasn’t funny at all.

  “What if one were to hit right and hit awake? What if one were to land in the cold water and land awake and swim away?”

  “Wake and fly is what is needed. It’s too far down and they fall too fast. If one of them knew how to fly, I’d say it’s possible he’s alive. None I ever saw was a flier, and only one awake. A very tough gir
l who did for me what I did for her. She ended any life I might have had left.”

  “Not in the same way, I’m guessing,” Kaddish said. “She is not now standing on another pier with another father telling this same story.”

  He took out a cigarette. The navigator reached for one of his own but Kaddish was wearing his jacket. Fuck him, Kaddish thought, and shook another from the pack. He wasn’t buying him breakfast but neither did he want a favor from this man. Kaddish would buy the story of his son’s death for the price of a cigarette. He struck a match and slipped it between the navigator’s cupped hands.

  A puff, and the navigator said, “Pushing them out, it was terrible but it wasn’t murder. It felt like discipline.” He paused and gestured with his chin. Kaddish had nothing to add. “That girl, maybe she was stronger than the others, maybe she got a smaller dose of whatever they give them or had better resistance. My guess—not so scientific—is that she sensed death upon her. But then every one of them should have woken at the hatch. When I was pushing her out, her eyes opened up like she was startled. Her legs out, her body half out, and then the eyes, bigger than mine,” he said, “they opened. She was practically airborne and she grabbed hold of my arm, she snatched my arm, and I screamed with holy terror, half out myself and on my way farther. The guard, he grabs my legs, and the girl has my arm, and it’s life or death for both of us.” The navigator gave his own cues. He stopped and shook his head. “I pulled those fingers, I broke her fingers, yanking them back—and then, like that, she drops. There was a flash, though, the two of us staring at each other, the girl in the air. And then gone. I was flat out on the floor of the plane, my arm hanging from its socket, my shoulder on fire, and I knew.”

  Kaddish made a questioning face. It was as much as he felt like giving.

  “Sharing that stare, seeing her eyes, I knew—logical, a navigator by trade—rate of flying, rate of falling, wind and visibility, it couldn’t have been an instant, definitely not long enough to see her judging, though I swear I did.” The navigator put a hand to his shoulder and demonstrated its limited rotation, giving the shoulder a poor half turn. “I knew my arm would never go back right and I knew the same for my head. Both no good for anything past fishing. That girl, I murdered. I had to kill her before she killed me and it would follow, would it not, I had troubles, heavy troubles, trying to keep the lies as truth and the truth as lies and not recognizing what I was really doing from then on. Because I was sure of one thing: I didn’t want to go out that hatch. Each time after, I knew.”