The Ministry of Special Cases

by Nathan Englander

  “It is a war, though?”

  “I think it might be,” the rabbi said. “But your worry is your son.”

  “I won’t live as if Pato does. I already need his forgiveness for too many things.”

  The rabbi stuffed his tefillin inside the tallis bag and zipped it up. “It’s Lillian’s forgiveness you should be getting.”

  “I know what it is to be a husband,” Kaddish said. “I want to make peace with my son.”

  “Why do you come here asking questions if there’s only one answer you’ll accept? If you want forgiveness from Pato, join Lillian and pray he returns. Forgiveness can only be asked in person or, God forbid, at the grave, both of which—”

  “Call for a body,” Kaddish said. “Living or dead.”

  “Yes,” the rabbi said.

  The granddaughter returned with a black suit jacket and a white dress shirt. Kaddish thanked the girl and took the clothes down the hallway to change.

  Kaddish came back wearing the jacket over his own shirt. (The rabbi’s was too narrow to button.) He put the navigator’s parka on over that, ready to go.

  “For the food, for the clothes, for your kindness, I thank you,” Kaddish said. “Your advice, though, leaves me as always on the outside.”

  “It’s the law,” the rabbi said. “I can’t change it for you.”

  “I’m pretty sure you could,” Kaddish said. “I’m pretty sure you could read it in a way that would fit with my life, instead of forcing my life into the law.”

  “That’s your opinion,” the rabbi said. “And I already gave you mine. I’ve told you only what I think to be right.”

  Kaddish shook his head.

  “It’s not enough,” he said. “It’s coldhearted.”

  The rabbi shook his own head, disappointed in turn. What was left for him to give this man? Everything Poznan does is wrong and the only comfort he will accept is to be told he’s right. The rabbi had done his best. He’d opened his home to this vandal, this—forgive him—son of a whore, and it wasn’t enough. And still, in this instant, the rabbi found more.

  “If the boy is dead,” the rabbi said, “if the body is recovered, it would be my honor to perform the funeral myself. I will make you a beautiful ceremony, the first Poznan on the right side of the wall.”

  “There’s only one right side,” Kaddish said. “I’ll help you climb over the wall myself. Otherwise, I don’t see any charity in dressing and feeding and housing a Jew who came to you desperate only for wisdom. No more than offering bread to a man dying of thirst.”

  “I gave you an answer,” the rabbi said. “It wasn’t the one you wanted to hear. For that you fault me. And after I welcomed you into my home.”

  “A funeral,” Kaddish said. “A grave. All I need from you is to know how.” Here Kaddish’s voice dropped and, the rabbi felt, turned threatening. “You can’t understand how excruciating it is for me that I even care. Mistreated by you forever, Rabbi, and still I want to do what’s right.”

  “What’s right, Poznan?” the rabbi said. “Forget a funeral. You’re forbidden in these circumstances even to mourn.”

  [ Forty-three ]

  HATEFUL, A HATEFUL PREDICAMENT: fearing one’s neighbors. Apartments, vertical living, it’s unnatural. Never meant to be. This is what Cacho thought, rushing in and pressing the button for the lobby while he pulled the gate closed. Worse, he could never tell when one of them was coming or going, that door always ajar.

  Then, what else to expect, Lillian calling, “Hold the elevator, hold it.” Cacho winced. He could pretend he hadn’t heard. Except Cacho could not pretend. He felt guilty. Innocent of wrongdoing and guilty, guilty inside. The latch was a hair’s breadth from locking and he slid the gate back.

  Cacho stared at his grip on the handle. Lillian stepped in and he could feel her facing him, feel the proximity of her crossed arms. Every floor down, Cacho believed, would shave another year off his life.

  The elevator started and he gave Lillian a sidelong glance and nod. He couldn’t help but acknowledge her, torturous as it was.

  Surprisingly, Cacho didn’t register any hatred. As the elevator descended he found that he was getting a fairly friendly response. Cacho let his shoulders relax, rolled them back, and turned to face her.

  “Any news,” he said, “about Pato?”

  Cacho thought he might pass out. He’d received a grimace or maybe a flash of a grin.

  “All good,” Lillian said. “He’s been located. Someone has found him. It won’t be long,” she said. “Home soon.”

  Let’s make it clear that it’s a girl from the start. There should be no expectation of its being Pato when we see the body, long and lank (and living still). It would be an easy mistake. The boys so much like girls these days, all long hair and slouchy posture—and posture anyway irrelevant in her position; the space cramped and suffocating, the girl lying down. She, the girl, shifted a knee, rolled onto a hip. The cell is so low and narrow it’s like being laid out on a morgue tray. It’s like already being dead.

  The prisoner, the girl, is in a man’s bunk. She can feel this, smell it, sense the occupant before. It’s not Pato’s smell alone that she’s smelling. It’s that the traces of the one before her and all those before him have melded and been breathed up and breathed out and that breath grown into mold and those molds into heat, making an air, generating an actual feel. If we see things as a continuum, if, at this time of unbroken murder and unbroken torture, we see it as a chain, then it is fair to say that Pato somehow lingers even before she finds what he has left.

  The girl does not yet know where she is or where she is headed. Where she came from has broken down and simplified itself only to before and now, above and below. That is, she does not connect herself to her name and her life, to her studies and her friends, to her family and her dog and the last book she read. The girl wouldn’t have guessed that in being disappeared she would find it easier, better, to disappear herself—complicit in her nonexistence. It is too much to be as was. For her it was like being terribly old, when there is nothing left but the body, nothing to concentrate on but am I cold or am I hot, hungry or full, and, most importantly, how much does it hurt.

  When the girl says, out loud, “I wish I was dead” or “Let me die” or “Kill me now,” it holds no meaning. It’s reflex, a tic. She only manages a little emotion to it if she is up on the torture table, if they’ve got her out in one of the cinder-block rooms, if they’ve got her strapped down and she believes that specific torturer might do it, that if she says it good and strong or says it properly hopeless, her tormenter might turn up the knobs, turn up the current until it all just ends.

  The previous place she was held was more like a house than a dungeon. There was contact and chatter and the occasional group meal, all under watch. She slept on a cot in a tiny room with a window and once, for an hour, she was allowed to stand outside with her face in the sun. Everyone there knew more than her, and the other disappeared, always changing, whispered useful information when they could. Almost every fact she was told she then heard in a contradictory version, every truth with an opposite truth spread throughout that place. So that one prisoner, wide-eyed and flat-stomached, told her she’d been nine months pregnant when they arrested her, and another, who looked to be nine months pregnant herself, swore she was brought in a virgin and was a virgin still. Word was—and the girl had believed it—that no one is ever freed, until they brought in a man twice freed and twice rearrested. It was from him that she picked up the jargon, and when she was transferred she already knew the torture table would be stainless steel and that her cell was called a tube. The only constant was that everyone claimed innocence. Innocent her own self, she could not believe that for all these people, that for each and every one, such a nightmare could be true. She lived like an amnesiac inside that tube and managed this mostly well until she’d found the notes.

  It was the same man in the last place who’d told her the notes were called caramel
s, this because they were swallowed when they were to be moved. She’d thought maybe it was caramel because when one is suffering from greatest isolation, to find such a treasure—there could be nothing more sweet. She wasn’t sure how one knew when to swallow them, how she was to judge if she was being moved from the tube back to the house, or the tube to freedom, or on to death—which would mean destroying the notes herself. Since the dead never returned, she didn’t know how it might come.

  During the endless hours locked away, her fingers had found their own boredom, their own energy, her body breaking down into its own animal parts. They went off searching. They found a hole in the foam pad she lay on and, exploring it, burrowing inside, they came upon something. In her brain, in her head—with its own separate workings—she seized on the thoughts of caramels and figured what to do. The fingers kept working as she pulled out caramel after caramel, balls of paper wrapped in plastic, and it was hours, she’d guess, hours of considering before she connected with her own self, before she connected up all the disparate parts of herself and unwrapped them and read.

  There was a small vent at her head. It wasn’t the only source of air, as she’d covered it with her wet undershirt for a good long time and did not suffocate. Through it came light and sometimes noise, and it was up against that vent that she held the notes. Each one had a name at the top: PATO POZNAN written in block-letter print. It was exhilarating to see.

  From PATO POZNAN there came into existence a boy to go with the name. For that alone there came a gratitude mixed with yearning, infatuation and admiration and love. It was such a civilized act, writing one’s name, a concrete act. It made her think she could leave a history herself.

  She pictured Pato easily and pictured him all wrong. She saw him blond and hazel-eyed, with freckles across his nose. She saw a man more like her brother and father if the two were melded and then mixed with her last other-world crush.

  When she dreamed of being freed—which, with Pato’s notes, she now did—she imagined finding his family. She did not picture the right neighborhood, the Jewish neighborhood, or the right block. Nor did she imagine an apartment where the mother would already be waiting, fixed like a gargoyle and staring down. She saw herself outside a gate where a father (just like the son but white at the temples—and also, in a way, now her own father) would come to greet her, taking the notes from her and, before reading them, giving her a hug.

  There was another smell that lingered in the cell, this one distinct from the people who’d amassed it and so dominant that the girl didn’t understand how she’d ignored it until then. It was the smell of fear. And it helped her imagine the worst: Pato gone, Pato dead, and she, carrying a message, his final and only link to the world, doing for him this good deed and, by accident—the accident of her own death—erasing his name from above.

  What she could not know was that (as far as we are concerned, as far as those caramels are concerned) as much as the girl lived for Pato in that moment, she was linked to Lillian and Kaddish in equal measure. This is the point where the three of them came together, symbiotic, and the point from which they all three diverged.

  While the government did what governments do (taking ownership of the present, laying out visions of the future), this one also reached back into the past, to change what was, to deny what had been. And this was the junta’s great success—recognizing that to truly take control one must move back with the same fervor that one moves forward (infinity reaches both ways). Taking this into account, it was no small matter that, over what happened in the past, over what happened to Pato, this girl and Lillian and Kaddish all agreed. It was Pato abducted, Pato imprisoned, Pato in a cell.

  In the present is where things came apart. Lillian alone was convinced of Pato alive and Pato well and Pato held in some other place. Kaddish alone believed, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Pato was at the bottom of the river. Then there was the girl.

  She embraced, quite neatly, the conflicting positions of Lillian and Kaddish. She saw both their truths, believed ardently both their absolutes. By virtue of inhabiting a cell where Pato once was and now was not, Pato was to her as living as he was dead. There was, related to this, a decision to make. The girl had to decide the fate of the caramels by figuring her own, a future that was equally split.

  She thought about it and, inspired by the notes themselves, decided she would live, that she would go free. She memorized the notes, six in all, in case, for some reason, she survived without them.

  She rewrapped the caramels and pondered where to hide them: whether to stick them up and inside herself, where her tormentors were always probing, always checking, so that it seemed the only place on her body where anything should be put, or whether to take them by mouth, where she worried that in the swallowing, they might be swallowed-up, the caramels more easily lost.

  In the end, she pressed them into her mouth one after the other,partly because they were less likely to be found this way and partly in deference to the name. Where else would a caramel go?

  An obvious omission. It’s fair to wonder about the contents of those notes. It’s true that the girl got to read them and memorize them and swallow them down. It wouldn’t be right, though, to share Pato’s message when neither Kaddish nor Lillian will hear it, when neither parent will learn that those notes ever were.

  By the time Kaddish was trying on the rabbi’s jacket and Lillian was descending in the elevator with Cacho at her side, the girl’s body had already been settled in the silt for some days under the pressure of a trillion liters of Río de la Plata. The notes were still protected in her stomach, still readable below all that water, hidden inside that girl, herself swallowed up in all that dark. There was no perverse miracle in the days that had passed when that poor girl’s body could have been caught in a net or snagged by a troller’s line, the moment in a thousand Jewish fables where the diamond appears in the fish’s belly, where the notes would be harvested (maybe by the navigator himself) and handed to Kaddish or delivered to Lillian in her chair.

  The memory is the girl’s alone, and that’s how it will stay. Still, in this horrible time when the junta would weave a nation’s truth from lies, Lillian would have been happy and Kaddish would have been happy that, independent of them, one fine girl for one fine day believed in Pato Poznan—both living and dead.

  Drugged and naked and slipping further into her own self, the girl thought about Pato and the short history in the notes that she carried inside. She wondered if he’d been taken on this same route or was right now on another, wishing for the best. All this took place before they reached altitude and before she lost consciousness; before the hold on the plane was opened and before the girl, who had already long ceased to exist in Argentina, was dropped, unresisting, from above.

  [ Forty-four ]

  JUST AS A CURRENT SHIFTED and a bubble moved and a note protected was flushed and eaten by the sea, Lillian Poznan stepped into the Ministry of Special Cases. She was looking for her priest. Had she known, Lillian wouldn’t have missed observing that the notes—as they shifted and wetted, opening out like fronds before disintegrating wholly—were until then protected in the belly of someone else’s daughter, whose parents right then waited and worried. Or didn’t. Or, like Kaddish and Lillian, split, did both.

  Four days he’d left her, another four days by that phone. Lillian sat there waiting for it to ring. When she couldn’t bear it any longer, when the thoughts she’d sworn never to consider threatened to be believed, Lillian got out of her chair by the window, went across the hall, and came back with Cacho, seating him in it. Then she went where she’d sworn she wouldn’t go.

  Lillian caught sight of her priest as he caught sight of her; what could be more fortuitous than that? He was right there in the middle of the lobby. Lillian’s exhilaration didn’t last through to the end of her head tilting and to the conclusion of her grinning. Her hip hadn’t fully locked and her hand hadn’t reached it, leaving Lillian’s where-have-you-been and
there-you-are stances less than fully expressed.

  It was the priest’s face, a frown forming, and the guard that was standing across from him, also turning, eyebrows crossing, and the man between them, a father—who Lillian was in the process of recognizing—whose eyes were widening; it was taking in the whole picture, three men watching Lillian watch them, that it was communicated back to her that she’d done something wrong.

  So similar was the man’s position to the one she’d held, Lillian wasn’t sure if she’d seen a flash of silver foil in the guard’s reaching hand, or if she was remembering the priest’s intervention on her behalf when she’d tried to get up to the ministry’s other side. Lillian didn’t have time to check as her attention was drawn to the guard’s far hand rising, the baton above it, and then focused on the priest rushing toward her. It was more than a rush. The priest, yes, he was running, and the guard (in the background) already swinging and the father—she’d missed that, he wasn’t falling but fallen, curled on the floor. Lillian remembered the distinctive crack from the baton striking the door back when she’d stood where the father now lay. The noise was just as loud in that great empty-but-for-them lobby when the baton hit against a man. Among the cracks that followed while the priest grabbed her and pulled her into the street, Lillian couldn’t differentiate which were new blows and which the echoes of the last, all of them intermingling with the unearthly and terrible screams. As scared as she was in that whirlwind moment, she couldn’t get the eyes of that father out of her mind. It was bewildering for Lillian to see on another parent that kind of fear.

  Already holding Lillian roughly, the priest jerked her toward him, lifting her off the ground. An apology wasn’t on the way.

  “How dare you,” he said. “You’ve no right to come chasing.”

  “The same thing—I saw the exact same thing. You gave him a chocolate. That’s why you keep me away. So I shouldn’t see.”