The Ministry of Special Cases (16 page)

“I’ll sit on him if I have to.”

“Superb,” Lillian said. Kaddish had Pato’s ID in his back pocket and knew, at least while the experience was fresh, that Pato wasn’t going to storm out without his papers again.

There wasn’t much time. Kaddish wanted things perfect for Lillian, and there was still some fatherly business to attend to. He wanted an explanation, a story to tell Lillian when she walked through the door. High with his success and with hers, Kaddish didn’t want to find himself staring at the floor when Lillian asked for the rest of the details, he didn’t want to tell his wife, “I don’t know.”

Kaddish went straight for Pato’s room, entered without knocking and demanded his due from Pato, who sat, legs crossed, on his bed.

“The least you could say is thank you,” Kaddish said. This was enough to get them right back on track, as if not a moment had passed, as if Kaddish had just set fire to the books and Pato had taken the swing that hit his father in the nose. Except now it was Kaddish who burst through the door and stood over his son. It was Kaddish who slowly flexed a red and swollen hand. The scales were finally set right.

“My room,” Pato said.

“At the very least,” Kaddish said, “is thank you.”

Kaddish delivered the words like a threat. This wasn’t his original intent but Kaddish heard the difference in tone and committed to it. He moved close and repeated, “At the very least,” with menace.

There was a father in the room and a son. If Pato never wanted to acknowledge it again, he wouldn’t have to. Tonight Kaddish was demanding capitulation. He wanted the boy to give in.

Pato clamped his headphones over his ears and dropped the needle onto an album. He flicked on the hi-fi at the end of the bed and closed his eyes. Such disrespect, as if his father weren’t there.

Kaddish yanked out the headphone’s plug.

Pato got up off his bed. “What do you want from me?” Pato said.

“What do I want?” Kaddish said. “I want basic respect.”

“Then earn it.”

“I’m your father. I don’t have to. That’s the whole point.” Kaddish reached for the headphones. Plugged in or not, they were an affront.

Pato pulled them off on his own and threw them on the bed. “Fine,” he said.

“Fine, what?” Kaddish asked him.

“They’re off, is all. I’m agreeing with that. Nothing more.”

After too long a pause, Kaddish said, “Nothing more?” It was another retort that was only repetition.

Pato shook his head, disappointed. He always found a way to condescend.

“You want to know what to agree on? You want something to agree with me about? I’ve got a list for you: Enough of the mouth and the bad behavior. Enough of the shady friends and the slinking around. Whatever you did to get yourself pinched, it’s got to stop. Whatever you’re involved in has to come to an end. You can’t go on messing around.”

Pato had been terrified by his quiet stay in a clean, quiet cell. He was happy to be back in his bedroom and couldn’t wait for his mother to come home. He was happy, too, that his father had saved him and, over his dead body, he’d never let anyone know. He couldn’t help but scream in response with his man’s voice and little-boy indignation. “I wasn’t doing anything. I didn’t do it. I didn’t do anything at all.”

“For nothing? For nothing they pick you up. For nothing they toss you in a cell so I’ve got to go down there and fetch you.”

“I didn’t do a fucking thing,” Pato said. “They grab us for no reason.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Kaddish said.

Pato heard this and pressed at the sides of his head, a tantrum coming on.

“Fuck you,” he said to his father. “We didn’t do anything.”

“Now it’s
we
? Now the whole bunch of you is innocent? I want to know what you’re into,” Kaddish said. “And I want you out of it before your mother gets home.”

“Fuck you,” Pato said. “The only crimes I’ve ever committed are the ones for your whores.”

“You watch your mouth,” Kaddish said. “Not under my roof,” he said.

The age-old responses, the words now only for rhythm. It was the eternal father-son fight. Pato rocked back and forth. To each threat from his father he responded with a hearty, “Fuck you.” The thanks Kaddish sought had mutated into this. He redoubled his efforts to find out what Pato had done. “Not right or wrong,” he said, “no one’s accusing. Tell me, only, what did you do?”

It was a poor strategy, Kaddish’s forte. How could he have known there was no answer for Pato to give?

Veins throbbed visibly. Teeth were clenched. And, as if they planned to butt heads, they scratched their feet at the floor. Kaddish and Pato stood chest to chest. So as not to tear each other to pieces, both knowing violence would go unrestrained, they found the only way out. They reversed course, giving their meaningless words all the meaning they could bear. They put the bite back into their yelling. They engaged all their socialized, civilized, higher human faculties. They barbed up their language and said what they meant and felt what was said.

With careful modulation and pitch-perfect sensitivity, Pato said, “Fuck you,” to his father. He said it slowly and full of feeling and, tweaking, went at it again. “Fuck you,” Pato said. “I wish you were dead.”

And Kaddish, his father, stepped back at the words. How much, how much can one man take after doing everything he could and doing it
wrong in the eyes of his son? There were tears in Kaddish’s eyes. He thought he might cry.
Fuck you. I wish you were dead
. He’d heard it before. This time, though, the tone was right, the intonation was right, and he heard it personal. He heard it as truth.

Kaddish heard it and accepted it. He was bowled over by it and, wounded—that’s all he could tell himself, that it hurt him to the core—he returned it to his son. Kaddish dished it right back.

“Fuck you,” Kaddish said to Pato, his son. And—with all his might, with all his hurt feeling—“Fuck you,” Kaddish said. “I wish you’d never been born.”

He said it. And it left them both standing for a moment in silence.

Before there was time for either of them to absorb it, while the curse still hung in the air between them, there was, most clearly, a knock at the door.

And Kaddish went to get it. And Kaddish got his wish.

It was, in an instant, as if his son was never born.

A MAN IN A SHARP GRAY SUIT
walked out the door into the darkness of the hallway, a book tucked under his arm. A second man followed, two books, like dead weights, one hanging from each hand. A third and a fourth man walked out the door with Pato, Kaddish’s son, standing between them. They held him very firmly by the elbows, grasping tightly, so that his arms were bent and his hands straight in front. As he passed out of the apartment he smiled at his father, who hadn’t moved from his place by the heavy door, holding it open (needlessly) with a foot. He said to Kaddish, “A very poor note to end on,” and for this comment grips tightened and hands pointed higher in the air. They were not walking fast; Kaddish heard it all clearly. He also heard the elevator gate open and the hum of the old motor in the dark, since no one pressed the button for the hallway light. The gate to the elevator slid back, teeth caught gears, and then, along with the motor, there was the click of the release as the car lowered and the five bodies started to descend. Kaddish closed the door behind them and turned the key in its center.

The first man’s suit had wide lapels. The second man had a windbreaker on between his suit jacket and shirt, mostly hidden, but Kaddish caught
a glimpse of nylon: red and black, Newell’s colors. Kaddish was a Boca fan.

Kaddish didn’t read much but was sure the second man, the wind-breaker man, didn’t either. It was the way he let the books hang in his hands as if there were nothing inside, nothing there at all but the weight of the things themselves. The book closer to Kaddish had a picture on the cover. He didn’t recognize it then but would know the book and the photograph when he saw it, also in Spanish translation, on the shelf of a fellow Argentine living in Jerusalem ten years down the line. He would, in mid-sentence, stop talking and, remembering, ask to sit down.

There is no need to repeat that these books—all the books in the house, really—belonged to Pato. Kaddish and Lillian preferred the TV.

Lillian Poznan had tried to prevent this. She’d gone out and bought the door. It wasn’t what she wanted kept out but what she wanted kept in. She had worried for her son.

Kaddish Poznan had also tried to prevent this. He walked down the hallway and into the bathroom. He closed and locked the door and sat down in the dark, leaning his head against his arm and his arm against the tub. He could feel with his fingers the rough enamel within. He smelled the burnt smell and saw, in his mind’s eye, where the tub was black, where the paint on the ceiling peeled, which tiles were sooty in the grouting, and how the small window onto the air shaft was greasy black on the glass slats and around the edges where the wallpaper bubbled and warped.

Kaddish Poznan had burned his son’s books in the bathtub. He just hadn’t burned all the right ones.

KEYS JANGLING, SMILE FADING
, Lillian’s purse hung over her arm. She stepped into the middle of the room and put down her briefcase. She was calling for Pato all the while. The joy of coming home to her son, of the raise at work and her night on the town, still circled round her.

Lillian checked both bedrooms and the kitchen where, as usual, the split lemon sat. Maybe they were out in Kaddish’s courtyard having a cigarette, the two of them stamping their feet against the chill. Lillian went out onto the service balcony, leaned over the railing, and yelled down. There was no answer from the bottom, only a half-deaf Mrs. Ordóñez with a, “Yes, dear” and an invitation for tea.

Kaddish lay on his side on the floor, his knees pulled up and pressed into his chest. He hung his arm over the lip of the tub and picked at the charred enamel. He was confused about exactly what had transpired. It had all happened so fast and yet, quick as it was, there was an enormous amount to absorb.

Here are the things that may have been said to his son: “We’ll cut your little cock off and choke you with it, this is how they’ll find you;” “Montonero, we’ll cut out your tongue and sew it into your father’s
mouth;” and also, “We’ll cut off your father’s cock and plug your asshole with it.” So many odd things he may or may not have heard. Kaddish thought, Why so sexual? In the moment it was happening he’d wanted to say,
Begging your pardon, is there any need to speak this way? Is it part of the job?

Kaddish couldn’t remember which one had spoken. Was it the wind-breaker man or the sharp gray suit? Oh, but there was a nice part. He remembered a nice bit that he could share with his wife. Such a tough boy, his Pato, but, in the moment, so sweet. On the way out, he’d said, “Fathers are always fathers. Sons always sons.” Kaddish repeated it aloud. Lillian might like it, but he couldn’t be sure.

Kaddish paid no mind to Lillian, mashing her fists, pulping her fists, screaming for him to open the door. At another time, in another Argentina, such a ruckus would have brought one neighbor running, set another complaining. There would have been a boot against a common wall, a broom handle in answer from Mrs. Ordóñez—ricochets and reactions and eventually police called in. Now it was assumed the police were to blame.

When people heard noise they didn’t make more. They stopped what they were doing and turned their eyes to the floor. And, more and more, they kept on with their business. The neighbors heard nothing, no matter how loud.

Here was Lillian down on her hands and knees, her mouth at the space under the bathroom door. In her panic, she’d been calling for Pato. Lowering her voice to a whisper, she then called, instead, Kaddish’s name.

Lillian not only said, “Kaddish,” but also, “What have you done?”

That question, Kaddish heard. After a pause to consider the forked path of errors from the start of his life until that day and, from that day the errors that led up until that moment, Kaddish raised himself up a bit. He hung his head over the slightly cooler emptiness of the tub. To Lillian’s question, he formulated the best answer he could.

“I locked myself behind the wrong door.”

Kaddish spoke into the hollow of the bath and the sound spread out, amplified by the tub, reflected by the tiles, filling the bathroom until it spilled out through the space Lillian spoke into, so that she heard Kaddish’s answer less from him than from the house itself:
The wrong door
, carried out on an infinitesimal current of air.

“What is that?” Lillian said. “What does that mean?”

“I thought it was you,” he said. Kaddish got up, unlocked the door, and, coming out, moved slowly past. Lillian followed him down the hall.

“You opened what should stay closed, what I told you to keep closed—”

“And closed what might as well be open,” Kaddish said.

“And?” Lillian said.

“Three books,” Kaddish said. “I missed three books. They took them along with Pato.”

“God help us,” Lillian said.

In the living room, Kaddish pointed to an empty space on the top shelf. “A place to start looking. From all the books in the world, I’m nearly sure one that we are missing went there.”

“Lost your mind,” Lillian said. “Lost our son.”

“Yes,” Kaddish said. “And I held it for them.” Here his voice broke hard. “I held open the door.”

Lillian then took Kaddish’s face in her hands, and to get the attention of her addled husband, she squeezed that face as hard as she could. She pressed her nails into the side of Kaddish’s head. But Kaddish didn’t feel it. The pressure was already immense.

Lillian said, “Did you call the police?”

“Oh, my,” Kaddish said. And he laughed. He laughed so hard his head shook and Lillian’s nails, unmoving, broke skin. “No,” Kaddish said. “The police,” he said. “I didn’t think to call them. I would have, my dear, my sweet.” He kissed his wife on the cheek, leaning down, so that now her hands on his face resembled a grasp of great passion.