The Ministry of Special Cases

by Nathan Englander

  A neighbor too cowardly to show himself screamed down to Kaddish, “Poznan, come in already or go.” Rude as it was, Kaddish accepted it as sound advice. He knew Lillian wasn’t home, that she wasn’t either watching or teasing or sitting in her chair at the window ignoring. He also knew she was and that she’d never call down.

  It took madness, he felt, for two conflicting realities to exist at once. For Lillian and Kaddish in Argentina, it also did not. Everything and its opposite. As in the case of a son that is both living and dead.

  By prying up the staples that ran along the baseboard and unscrewing the jack, Lillian had freed enough cable to get the telephone to the table so she could join Frida there. Frida had protested when Lillian was down on hands and knees pulling staples up with a screwdriver, but Lillian kept saying, “A celebration,” tempered as it was. Lillian had asked Frida to bring over ham sandwiches and beer. That’s what she wanted, actual cravings. Lillian hadn’t wanted something for herself in so long.

  Aside from the telephone and the beer, Lillian had put what little jewelry she had out on the table. There was also a small bronze statue from India that Gustavo had once given her; she was convinced it had some value though Frida wasn’t sure. “You can sell it all for me,” Lillian said. She added her wedding ring to the pile and put her car keys on top. “I don’t know where the car is, Kaddish has it. You hold the keys, though, and then, if I find where it is you can go get it and sell that too.”

  “That’s a plan,” Frida said, thinking that it wasn’t. She opened her mouth two different times, trying to figure a way to say it and missing the opportunity. Lillian launched into the story again.

  There was the short version of the priest’s call, as well as the walls-have-ears rendition, full of “my friend” and “your friend” and meticulously avoiding any damnable phrasing regarding money or detention centers or contacts inside. Both of Lillian’s accounts ended with the critical, “He’s alive.” Frida practically swooned at the news each time, while Lillian repeated the story in a loop, giddy with the telling. That part was pure delight. It was the rest of Lillian’s response that Frida wasn’t sure how to process. The priest had told Lillian to stay by the phone and she’d agreed. That Lillian was willing to turn her whole brave search into cradling that phone in her lap and hiding out at home, Frida couldn’t believe. This was what she most wanted to say, and she knew Lillian wasn’t going to let her.

  Lillian could see the way Frida was seeing her. So Lillian fed Frida sensible, grounded thoughts at intervals. At the end of each telling, Lillian expressed either skepticism or concern. “I know he’s not safe yet,” Lillian would say. Or, “These are very shady people. I don’t even know where he’s being held.”

  Shady people, Frida knew, did not include the priest.

  When it was time to leave, Frida gave Lillian everything she had in her wallet. Lillian didn’t hesitate in taking it, a sign of their friendship. Neither did Frida protest about taking the jewelry and the statue and the keys. She left the ring for last. “Are you sure?” she said. Lillian was. Frida slipped it on her finger, pressing it up against her own wedding band.

  Frida hadn’t said enough and—her last chance—she did no better than asking Lillian, “What’s next?”

  “Pato home,” was her answer.

  “The priest said that?”

  “No, I’m saying it. The priest said he could maybe do more and maybe he couldn’t.”

  Frida wondered how, in a hundred tellings, this part had escaped untold.

  “Then why sit and wait like this?” Frida said.

  “It’s nothing to worry about. That’s how he talks. No promises made, no results guaranteed. Even if nothing happens, he said to be by the phone—because at nothing we might only get one chance.”

  A beautiful girl with a skirt to the floor led Kaddish through an apartment not much different from his. A granddaughter, Kaddish supposed, or maybe “great” even; it was possible when he considered all the years gone by. He couldn’t believe the girl let him in looking as he did, though, sweeping her skirt behind her, she kept an eye.

  The girl poked her head into what looked like a study. She stood on the threshold nodding and then answered in Yiddish. Not since childhood had Kaddish heard a lovely young woman speak it so well.

  The rabbi stood in the study’s entrance, practically panting with upset.

  “Vandal!” the rabbi said. “How do you come into my house?” The statement gained gravity as the rabbi stared and sniffed and took a step back, further startled by the condition of the Kaddish in front of him.

  “I have a request,” Kaddish said.

  “Do you want me to hire you? Are you off to Europe to knock down my parents’ graves? Done already, I promise. The job done free of charge.” The young girl looked fraught. The rabbi signaled to her and, obedient, she retreated down the hall.

  “A second favor,” Kaddish said. “I’ve come to ask it.”

  “A second favor? From me? I don’t even know about the first.”

  “For my mother. You came to Talmud Harry’s. You gave me my name.”

  “That favor was for her, not for you. Even if—how do you merit a second?”

  “Merit?” Kaddish said. “You’re a rabbi, not a king. A Jew comes to you respectfully—”

  “Not any Jew,” the rabbi said.

  “No. A Jew you punished for the sin of being born and then excommunicated for refusing to forget from where he came. Now we’re going to balance the scales. I need your advice,” Kaddish said, “that’s the favor. I don’t know what to do when one is without.”

  “Without what?” the rabbi said, no patience from the start.

  “Without a body,” Kaddish said. This was the question he’d wanted to ask all day, a version prepared for his wife and Rafa’s mother, for Feigenblum and the navigator, for each one a different facet of the problem that was eating at him. He wanted to know how to make a funeral when there wasn’t a son.

  The rabbi took a better look at Kaddish’s face, at the scruff and dirt, and, under his filthy parka, the worn and filthy suit. Here he saw the lapel Kaddish had torn a second time, and he looked back up into Kaddish’s eyes.

  The rabbi stepped aside and motioned into the study. Kaddish went. It was a room like Pato’s: narrow, a desk where the bed would go, and, covering half the window at the end, a bookshelf full of books. What Kaddish wouldn’t have expected, what he hadn’t noticed, was the music. Behind the rabbi was a turntable spinning and an opera playing. There was no second chair in the room and the rabbi offered his. Kaddish fell into it and stared, bewildered, toward the music as if he could see it in the air.

  “It’s to be appreciated,” the rabbi said, reading Kaddish’s surprise. “The overture to Die Meistersinger. A gift from God”—and he held up a finger—“a gift from God through man. The music is not the person, I also deeply believe. But that’s a discussion for another time.”

  Kaddish nodded, as if to say it was for another time, or to acknowledge the beauty of the music, or simply a reflex, utterly numb.

  “I’m in mourning,” Kaddish said, “for my son.”

  The rabbi rushed out the blessing, baruch dayan emes. What else but death could have brought this man into his home? He said, “I’m sorry. I hadn’t heard.”

  “Would it have made a difference?”

  “It would,” the rabbi said, fully somber. “I would have made a shiva call if I knew you’d been sitting.”

  “I have nowhere to sit,” Kaddish said. “I carry the grief around with me.”

  Already confused, the rabbi didn’t think this an actual physical claim. He was more interested right then in learning where the grave was. He hadn’t heard from the burial society and wondered if Kaddish’s son was laid to rest as a Jew.

  “Where’s the boy buried?” he said.

  “The junta,” Kaddish said. “They are murdering the children. This country runs out of control.”

  The rabbi straightene
d up and lifted the needle from the record and whispered, “You’re forbidden to hear music at such a time.” He twisted and retwisted the tip of his beard. Letting go, it held its form for a few seconds and then untwined. “The wife,” he said, “your Lillian. I can still make a visit if the shiva is done.”

  “There’s no need to visit,” Kaddish said. “She wouldn’t appreciate it.”

  “There is an unfortunate history between us,” the rabbi said.

  “Not because of that,” Kaddish said. “Because to her the boy, our Pato, is alive.”

  “Alive?” the rabbi said. What other choice was there but flabbergasted? This was not a conversation of which one could make sense. Reformulating, the rabbi asked, “How can a mother deny that her son is dead?”

  “It’s very sad,” Kaddish said. “I feel the same way.”

  “At the funeral,” the rabbi said (still curious about where the boy was buried), “she must have acknowledged the loss in some way.”

  “It’s about the funeral that I’m here. We haven’t yet had one. And I’m unsure,” Kaddish said, “exactly how to do it. I turn to you, painful for me as that is.”

  “How no funeral? Where’s the body?”

  “Disappeared,” Kaddish said. “They toss the bodies—” and here Kaddish bit at his thumbnail, looking distraught. “Not bodies,” he said. “Still living, they toss them from airplanes down into the river. There will never be a body, but a funeral is his right.”

  “I don’t understand,” the rabbi said, no judgment in it. “If there’s no body, how do you know he’s dead? How,” the rabbi said, slow and careful, “how do you know your wife is wrong and you are right?”

  “How do I know?” Kaddish said. He hadn’t expected such a question. “The navigator told me—the fisherman. I spoke to the man who did it, the one who throws the children from the planes.”

  “A fisherman did this to your Pato?”

  “He might as well have,” Kaddish said. “Of those he murdered, it’s possible Pato may have been among them.”

  “So there’s no proof?” the rabbi said. His voice rose up in the asking. Again, it was without judgment. The rabbi was trying only to grasp.

  “This is the way in which it’s Argentine,” Kaddish said, now animated, eyes open wide. “It’s neat and it’s clean and, more than anything, it’s well-mannered. The whole country turns away, as if they’ve caught the government with something in its teeth. It’s become crass even to acknowledge the loss,” Kaddish said. “You don’t think it impolite, I hope, that my son has been made dead?”

  The rabbi began to mutter a baruch shem kavod. It wasn’t a second bracha, it was instead the line mustered to undo the erroneous blessing. The rabbi dared not let a prayer over the death of a child stand when he thought the boy might live.

  What other conclusion could the rabbi draw, listening to this madness, talking to this madman, a son of a whore who always made trouble, who was born to it and now stood before him, filthy and stinking and wearing—Vashti-like—all his ugliness on the outside?

  It was no struggle choosing whom to trust between Kaddish and his pitiable wife.

  “She waits for him?” the rabbi said. “Lillian believes you’re wrong?”

  “She doesn’t wait. She searches and searches. Admirable behavior,” Kaddish said, “if Pato were alive, if there were a boy to find.”

  “And there’s no way you can see her side?” the rabbi said. “That it is good what she, as a mother, does?”

  “The way in which she is right is that she demands to see a body. And the way in which she’s wrong is that there isn’t one to find.”

  “Maybe,” the rabbi said, “you’re wrong in not waiting.”

  “Me? I’m the same as always. Not right or wrong, only deficient,” Kaddish said, “forever falling short. But this one thing, a father to a dead son without a son to weep over. This is an absence that’s not right and not fair.”

  “What am I to do?” the rabbi said. “I can’t produce him.”

  “I’m not a fool,” Kaddish said. “I’m not asking for a miracle. Only advice. How without a body do I make a resting place for my son? You tell me not to leave my house during the first week of mourning, and I tell you, without a grave, the mourning never ends.”

  “Abandon the mourning,” the rabbi said. “Go back to your wife. She’s a sensible woman, Poznan. It sounds like she does the right thing.”

  Kaddish wanted to scream.

  “How do you perpetually side against me, Rabbi? I come here alone and I give you the facts. I tell you my story and that Lillian is wrong and, as if it’s the only conclusion that can be drawn, you tell me she’s right.”

  “Maybe you tell a different story than you think.”

  “A grave,” Kaddish said. “A funeral.”

  “Are you going to persist with this? You can’t leave the dead alone and now you fiddle with the living. When will you turn serious, Poznan? You’ve said it yourself already there can be no funeral without the son. Be thankful. Be thankful that you don’t have him, that there’s still hope.”

  “How much more serious can I be,” Kaddish said, “if I’m willing to come to you?”

  “Serious or insane? I admit, I’m distressed at the sight of you.”

  “Isn’t that proof enough? Isn’t this exactly how I should look in my predicament? Have mercy on me, Rabbi. I’m not asking you to agree, only to tell me how to make a funeral without the son?”

  The rabbi put a hand on top of his big black yarmulke and slid it forward. When he could formulate no conciliatory answer he dropped his hand. The rabbi looked down his nose at Kaddish, the silk edge of his yarmulke reaching to the middle of his forehead.

  “You can’t dig a grave,” the rabbi said, “without something to put in it. Beyond Jewish law, it’s basic logic. A grave must hold something if it’s to be a grave. Otherwise it’s just a hole filled in.”

  “You can do better. There must be more.”

  “You would need—” the rabbi said, and then stopped himself. He was not, God forbid, talking about Pato specifically, a boy who possibly lived. “One,” the rabbi said. “To have a funeral, to dig a grave, one would need something to put in it. Not even a whole body. Even a finger is enough.”

  Kaddish raised an eyebrow and leaned in as if trying better to hear what had already been said. He rolled his eyes as if considering and then the lids above them began to flutter. The rabbi was convinced it was some sort of attack and pressed a hand to his own heart in the witnessing. He then called Kaddish’s name so loudly and with such panic that, at the sound of it, his granddaughter came running.

  When she arrived she was startled to find her grandfather beside Kaddish gently stroking his hair. “Shhh,” the rabbi said. But Kaddish wasn’t hearing. He was very busy thinking. He was right then remembering what he’d had and what he’d left: Pato’s fingertip as if it were reaching, sticking up out of the sand. The one time God had blessed him and Kaddish was too blind to see it. Had he kept that fingertip, Kaddish would have had his one miracle and Pato his grave. Everything always done wrong.

  The rabbi kept on with his shushing and, with a glance to the girl, said, “It will be all right.” The girl moved back into the hallway, still watching, and the rabbi said to Kaddish, “But you must go home.”

  “I can’t,” Kaddish said, shaking his head, shaking the rabbi off.

  Even if Kaddish was willing to go home, the rabbi didn’t think anyone, even Lillian, could be expected to take such a specimen back.

  “When did you last eat?” the rabbi said.

  “Cigarettes,” was Kaddish’s answer. The rabbi arched his head, catching the eye of the lingering girl.

  “Go get cigarettes,” he said.

  The girl looked at her grandfather, her face blank.

  “Jockey,” Kaddish said. “Any kiosk. All of them sell.”

  The girl didn’t acknowledge him.

  “Go,” the rabbi said. “Do what he said.�
��

  The intensity had waned and the rabbi couldn’t say why he felt another touch was in order. Still, he reached out.

  “You must eat,” the rabbi said. He turned and dropped the needle back onto the album. Kaddish ignored the message in this, closing his eyes and listening to the music. “You can sleep it off,” the rabbi said. “We’ll put a blanket and a pillow on the floor in here. Rest tonight and tomorrow you’ll go home.”

  Kaddish rocked forward and back in the chair. He squeezed his eyes so tightly they burned and he ground his teeth together to keep back the tears, because never ever had he not been sent away.

  In the morning Kaddish stood before the rabbi, fed and cleaned and rested. Even in his beaten suit and stocking feet, he was much improved.

  The rabbi was slipping his tallis back in its bag and offered Kaddish his tefillin. Kaddish shook his head, no.

  “You’ve had enough to eat?” the rabbi said.

  Kaddish nodded.

  The rabbi pointed at Kaddish’s socks. “We wear shoes in this house,” he said. Worse, catching sight of that re-torn lapel without the parka to cover it, the rabbi knew it would not do.

  “Let me give you a change of clothes.”

  “I’m fine,” Kaddish said, but the granddaughter was called and given orders. She stared openly from her grandfather’s stomach to Kaddish’s gut.

  “It’ll be a tight fit,” she said. Then she went off.

  The rabbi affected a stern expression. “Jews don’t abandon their missing,” he said. “It’s best that you go back to Lillian. One can’t ever know who will return from war.”