The Ministry of Special Cases

by Nathan Englander

  “You think it’s the same?” the priest said, furious. “The same would be me successfully defusing, instead of that man being brutalized, possibly beaten to death. That would be different from your experience, wouldn’t it? It would also be your fault.”

  “Not mine. I only came looking. And good that I did. What were you doing with that man? How do you leave me to rot?”

  “What do you think happens in that building? Parents figure out there is another side and the guard goes mad, and I do my best. What did I tell you? Stay by the phone and stay away from the ministry. Look what it does to you, two seconds here and already you’re full of accusations, as if I didn’t do my best.”

  “You did, and then you left me, forgotten. You’ve given up on Pato and didn’t have the decency to call.”

  “A permanent victim,” the priest said. “Why not add me to your list of disappointments and be on your way. I said we shouldn’t start down this route and I should have listened to myself. You’re not to be trusted, Mrs. Poznan. I’m better off trying to help someone else.”

  “You can’t do that. I’ll stop you. I’ll tell.” Lillian didn’t even know what to threaten. She pointed toward the ministry. “I’ll tell them what I saw.” And then, frantic: “If you help anyone it has to be me—you were already helping.”

  “Go tell whoever you want, you have my blessing. They may even believe you,” the priest said, “but they won’t admit it and they’ll despise you for taking witness. These are the things this country wants desperately not to know.”

  The priest made a big show of being dumbfounded by Lillian. It was meant for an audience and Lillian peered up into the buildings around them to see if the generals were looking down.

  “I apologize,” Lillian said. “I’m sorry for coming down here and sorry for accusing. Your help, that’s all I’m after. I trust you. I won’t question anything again.”

  “Be thankful for what I already gave you. There’s no more to be done,” the priest said. “Sometimes one should be thankful with less.”

  “Please,” Lillian said. She wanted to beg. She looked to the sidewalk and the priest looked with her. She was considering getting down on her knees.

  “Why don’t you go home with the confirmation that Pato is alive and with an honest-to-goodness military priest to loathe for your troubles. This way you’ll sleep at night like everyone else. This way your life will go on.”

  Lillian couldn’t help it. She had to ask. “Is he dead? Is that why you’re acting like this?” Lillian gritted her teeth, pressed them so hard she felt one break.

  “Dead?” he said, and seemed confused. “No, that’s not it. He’s alive, I already told you. It’s enough to be thankful for. Now go home.”

  “He can be freed?” Lillian said.

  “What does it matter when you have no one to help you do it? I’m done, and there’s no one else who’ll try.”

  “I’m begging,” she said, “for your help, for the truth, for whatever it is that you’re keeping from me.”

  “It’s not me you’ll hate if I tell.”

  “Is it my husband?” she said. “Is it Feigenblum, who speaks for the Jews? Did he mess things up with his list?” Lillian thought her head might break like her tooth, so sharp and quick were the swings between hope and hopelessness, a hot-cold leap she was sure would kill her.

  “It’s you,” the priest said. “You’ll hate yourself.”

  Lillian yelled so loudly that passersby turned. “What could that possibly mean?”

  “It means, better that this rests on me than on you. That’s my only motivation. If your son doesn’t make it, you’ll live better hating me. I’ve seen it before,” the priest said. “They don’t recover. The mothers who know they failed their children are never the same.”

  “I won’t fail,” she said.

  The priest sighed. “One can arrange to get a son freed from a secret prison even in the middle of a secret war. The apparatus is imperfect; it can be gotten round.”

  “How do you not call me with this? How do you not give me the option?”

  “Because I know,” the priest said. “Because I took all your money to buy one question. I know your situation, and it’s too much for a mother to bear. It’s better that you believe yourself abandoned.”

  “Tell me what I need to do.”

  “Nothing. That’s the horror. All you have to do is pay. That’s why I didn’t call and didn’t tell, that’s why it’s painful to share. You could free your son right now, Mrs. Poznan, except that you can’t. Except that now you must sit and wait and pray, knowing you failed him, knowing there was a price to pay and you couldn’t manage it. Now it’s on you, Mrs. Poznan. Your burden to bear.”

  “I’ll pay it,” she said. “Just tell me a number.”

  “You won’t,” the priest said.

  “How much could it be?”

  “More,” the priest said, “than you’d ever imagine.”

  [ Forty-five ]

  KADDISH WAS HUNCHED FORWARD on his bench in the courtyard, smoking butt after butt, cigarettes of strangers pulled from public ashtrays and picked off the street. His tool bag was at his side.

  Mrs. Ordóñez peered down from her balcony and called into the dark, “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Kaddish,” Kaddish said.

  “You don’t look like you,” she said, and, with a huff that carried down, she moved her giant body back inside.

  Kaddish wasn’t wearing his own clothes, and he had what was almost a beard. Thinking of it made his face itch and he scratched it. Neither of these changes was so drastic that Mrs. Ordóñez should call down to him as if to a stranger after all these years. Destitution was enough, he figured. The sight of him set women to clutching their purses and crossing the street.

  Kaddish leaned his head back and took in his patch of stars. What he hadn’t expected to discover was that he could survive hungry and survive filthy and live while feeling so cold. Without a peso in his pocket, he could manage. It was without Lillian, he’d discovered, he couldn’t go on.

  It wasn’t about love.

  If Kaddish had a body to bury and Pato’s grave to visit, he might be able to take it all on his own. To be without his son and without his wife, and to be alone in his belief, this was too much.

  He couldn’t will Pato back any more than he could make Lillian believe him gone for good. The only thing within Kaddish’s power was to draw on his powerlessness. He could live as Lillian asked. He would live a lie for the right to return home.

  Kaddish fished out another butt and lit it with the last. If he’d smoked a touch more, tried a little harder, he maybe could have struck a single match when he was a boy and kept that flame going until now.

  Kaddish took the stairs in the dark and reached for a key out of habit. He could see the chink of light from his apartment as he turned on the landing from the third floor. When he pushed at the door, the door pushed back. Lillian stepped into the open space. She was forcibly blocking his way.

  “Have your senses become so attuned?” he said. “Did you pick up my scent?”

  “I heard you call up from the air shaft.”

  Kaddish took a step forward, and Lillian took one back, though she planted a foot behind the door.

  “You look—” she said, and Kaddish finished for her.

  “Like a rabbi. I know,” he said, thinking it was his beard and (under the navigator’s parka) the rabbi’s jacket.

  “No,” she said. “Like a bum. Like a real one.”

  “That’s because I am,” Kaddish said. Lillian seemed to hear it as an admission and Kaddish rushed to add, “That’s not what brought me back.”

  “I’m sure that’s exactly what brought you. You’d starve to death before taking honest work, and now you’ve tested it to its limits. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t matter. I’m not taking you in, Kaddish. This is as far as you go.”

  “I’m not back out of laziness,” Kaddish said, “and not out of h
unger. I’m back because I can’t do this without you, Lillian. Your roof, your rules—I said it before. Now I’ve learned my lesson,” Kaddish said. “I’ve even been to the Jews.”

  “Who?” Lillian said, not believing.

  He showed her the jacket.

  “I went to the rabbi, Lillian. He said I’m wrong. That it’s a sin the way I live. He said I should do like you, that the waiting is right.”

  “The old rabbi said that?”

  “He did. And I thought about it. And I’ll try.”

  At that Lillian started closing the door.

  “I won’t try,” Kaddish said. “I’ll do it. I’ll wait with you for Pato to come home.”

  “You’re a man who needs to be saved,” Lillian said. “Unfortunately, I’m no longer capable.”

  “I honestly don’t think I can make it.”

  “That’s a shame,” Lillian said, “because I can’t take you back anymore.”

  “I’ll beg if I have to,” Kaddish said.

  “A truly brokenhearted man would already be begging. You raise the option. Always it’s the least that can be invested, the minimum at stake.”

  “Then I beg you,” Kaddish said.

  “Don’t,” she said. “It’s not up to me anymore. While you were with the rabbi, I went out and found myself a priest.”

  “A priest is in charge?” Kaddish said. “A priest deciding? It’s hard to say which is more shocking, your visit or mine.”

  “Together they’re no shock at all. Forever at cross-purposes. What did you expect when you showed up here ready to see things my way? It’s too late. I’ve come to see them in yours.”

  “About Pato?”

  “God forbid!” Lillian said. “I’m talking about money, Kaddish. If you’re really here to wait on Pato, I’ll take you back this second. The problem is, I can’t let you in for nothing. Entry into this house now has a price. Living here is no longer free.”

  “I don’t have a cent,” Kaddish said. “And I’ve no way to get money anymore.”

  “A shame,” Lillian said.

  “That’s it?” Kaddish said. “Everything a shame?”

  “How long have I believed in you, Kaddish? Through how many schemes and get-rich-quicks? Through how much of your gimme-six swagger and it’ll-be-OK talk? All of it. I saw you through everything, believing when I didn’t. Now it’s your turn. Go out and find us a fortune, Kaddish. Not what comes from chipping a name off a headstone. If you leave that cemetery blank, if you wipe every grave clean—that’s the kind of money they’re asking to get Pato back.”

  “How am I supposed to manage anything,” he said, signaling his current condition, “like this?”

  “If it’s really life or death, your survival or Pato’s, I’m sure you can manage it.”

  “Please, Lillian. This is madness.”

  “Good,” she said. “You’re a wellspring of that. From the million plans you’ve had over the years—every one a winner—you can’t tell me there’s not a single flimflam left. Go back to your underworld and talk to your cronies. I give you my blessing. Seek out all the people I begged you to stay away from since the start of our marriage. Don’t look so confused,” she said. Then she went off, vanishing into the apartment. Kaddish stayed right where he was. Lillian brought back a piece of notepaper. “A new nose won’t do it this time,” she said, and pressed the paper into his hand. “Your way, Kaddish. Everything as you like. All you have to do is succeed.”

  Kaddish looked at the sum. He was stunned.

  “The way you like to do business,” Lillian said. “Figures written down.”

  A pair of dogs strained at its leashes trying to get at Kaddish through the doctor’s fence. It was night, though there was plenty-enough light for Kaddish to make out the doctor in his robe—open and revealing the doctor naked underneath. On his feet he wore a pair of unlaced boots, the tongues hanging out, lolling.

  “If you’re so hungry,” the doctor said, “why don’t you reach that head around and take a bite out of your ass. That should feed you for a while.”

  “If I want to feast on my own fat ass, it appears I’ll have to get in line.” Kaddish pointed at the dogs. With his arm that much closer, the dogs reared up like a pair of horses, front legs scratching at air. The doctor wrapped the leashes tighter and leaned back, his heels dug in.

  “Since when do you have guard dogs?” Kaddish said.

  “Let us say things have deteriorated.”

  “My report,” Kaddish said, “is more or less the same.”

  The doctor gave a yank to the leashes and the dogs responded instantly, as highly trained animals do. One dog heeled on each side of him, looking as if carved from stone. “I tried to get rentals,” the doctor said. “Apparently that’s not the way they do it. And I have to say, I’ve become attached.” The dog on the doctor’s left lifted its head from between its paws and stared back at its master. The master, following the dog’s gaze, tied the front of his robe. The dog sneezed and put his head down. “Loyalty is loyalty,” the doctor said. “Still doesn’t mean I should dangle my pija in front of them.”

  “Is that why you don’t invite me in?”

  “Because you’d bite off my penis?”

  “Because you don’t trust even those you trust.”

  “That makes my head ache, Poznan,” the doctor said. “I’m not going to unravel it. The reason I didn’t invite you in is because it didn’t cross my mind. What I was mulling over was whether to release the dogs on you or not. I’d have called the police and been rid of you forever but I no longer have the luxury of acting the good citizen. They might just take us both.”

  “If you didn’t begrudge me every visit, if you weren’t so downright nasty, I wouldn’t believe your love was heartfelt. I appreciate it, Doctor. For a pair of fuckups, it’s a very special thing we have.”

  “First of all,” the doctor said, “you are a fuckup. I’m fallen. It’s a very big distinction. It means, at some point in the past, I achieved something. That can’t be taken away.” The doctor made a gesture, and the dogs jumped to their feet looking fierce. “Second, you look absolutely terrible, Poznan. You’ve taken what we call, in medical parlance, a turn for the worse. Now, make this leap with me if you can, follow along: The madman always thinks he has some deep bond with the focus of his manic obsession. That’s what makes him a madman. All the visits, the stalking, the loitering outside my office, it’s unwelcome. I’d rather have Toothless’ name back up and be a son-of-a-whore surgeon than a surgeon who hangs out with a son of a whore.”

  “Now you’re making my head ache,” Kaddish said. The doctor didn’t respond and Kaddish felt sick with the size of the favor he’d come to ask.

  “Even the rabbi let me in,” Kaddish said. He opened the jacket, trying to show it off. The lining shimmered. “The rabbi let me sleep over. He gave me his suit.”

  “Then there’s someone else who loves you, Poznan. Go back to him.”

  “I recognize that you’re the last man I should turn to during my time of need,” Kaddish said.

  The doctor nodded. “It’s for the nose I do it. If I could take that and leave the leftover Poznan outside, I would.” He unlocked the gate and, loosing the dogs off their leashes, led Kaddish around the back of the house, through a patio entrance, and into a wood-paneled den. There was a card table set up, and a deck of Spanish cards out on it, four hands dealt, as if Kaddish had interrupted a game. There were fresh logs burning high in the fireplace and a book was open facedown on the leather couch, a transistor radio stuck between the pillows at the side.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” the doctor said. And, following Kaddish’s gaze, “You think I don’t read? Nothing like a novel to knock a man out. Been reading the same two pages of this one for a year.”

  The doctor motioned for Kaddish to take a seat at the card table. He went over to warm himself by the fire. He crouched down and rested on his heels. “Was my man at the Fisherman’s Club to meet you?”

>   Kaddish picked up a card, the ace of swords, and tapped its edge against the table, turning it over and over again in his hand. It couldn’t be that he hadn’t spoken to the doctor since that morning. Kaddish pictured the doctor’s socks, his view from under the bench.

  “Yes, he was there,” Kaddish said, “Thank you for that.”

  “Then it was good news?”

  “No,” Kaddish said. “It was bad. The boy is dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” the doctor said.

  “Me too,” Kaddish said. “I miss him very much.”

  “I’d been wondering. I wanted to know what happened—I was hoping for good news.” The doctor stood up and joined Kaddish at the table.

  “It’s actually a good-news question that I came over to ask.” Kaddish spoke while staring at the face of the card. “I need help paying a ransom. It’s for Pato’s release.”

  He looked up at the doctor. The doctor looked back at him, displeased.

  “Is it shock value you’re after? You can’t want that to make sense.”

  “It’s Lillian,” Kaddish said. “She thinks the boy is alive. She’s found someone who swore, if a bribe is paid, that Pato could be gotten back.”

  The doctor took the card from Kaddish’s hand as if ending the game. He swept the others up and shuffled the deck, contemplating what Kaddish had said.

  “I have nowhere else. No one at all.”

  “That’s readily apparent,” the doctor said. “Tell me, though. You’re sure the boy is dead?”

  “Do you know about the flights? Do you know what they do with the missing?” The doctor stopped shuffling. He put down the deck. Kaddish wasn’t sure if he was acknowledging the flights or not. “They push them from airplanes high above the river. Unless there’s any way to survive it, I believe Pato is dead.”

  Again the doctor said, “I’m sorry,” and then, looking toward the ceiling, “It’s hard to believe.”

  “The navigator, the man at the pier, he said it’s the impact that kills them, that the water is like a brick wall when dropped from that height. Do you think,” Kaddish said, “is there any way a person could survive?”