The Ministry of Special Cases (2 page)

Their faces went long. They turned to the rabbi, but he couldn’t support them. A solid two-meter wall was a separation by any standard: It would suffice for
mechitza
or
sukkah
or to pen a goring ox. While the finer points were being argued, Talmud Harry gave the nod. A jittery Two-Blades began to reach, and Shlomo the Pin rolled the fingers of his right hand into a tight cudgel-like fist. Feigenblum, the first president of the United Congregations and father to the second, saw this out of the corner of his eye. He took it as an excellent moment to declare the young rabbi’s word binding, and a speedy departure was made.

The pimps didn’t want to be second-class any more than their brothers who’d demanded a wall in between. When they put up the façade to their cemetery they commissioned a replica—but one meter higher—of the grand domed entrance that welcomed mourners into the United Congregations side.

Thank God again that it was settled. It allowed Talmud Harry to die in peace and be spared the sight of his own sons, lawyers both, facing Kaddish in the living rooms of their big houses and denying whence they came. It was the same when meeting with One-Eye’s daughter and the son of Henya the Mute. All that these children had was fought for and paid for the Benevolent Self way.

It was Lila Finkel—whose mother, Bryna the Vagina, was said to have an incisive perspicacity as well as a cunt of pure gold—who took it upon herself to set Kaddish straight. “Take a breath,” she said. Kaddish took one. “Do you smell it in the air?” she asked. Kaddish thought he might. “That’s what good fortune smells like, Poznan. It’s the season of our prosperity and it’s never come this way before.”

It was the heyday of Evita, of the liberated worker and her shirtless ones. Factories were rising up under Perón, and Lila drew for Kaddish a picture of the middle class rising with them and making room for the Jews. All she asked was that he join them in looking forward. No reason to dwell on ugly memories soon forgotten. Kaddish wasn’t convinced, and Lila’s patience began to wear. “Think,” she said, and gave a good solid tap to her temple. “Which man is better off”—another riddle—“the one without a future or the one without a past? That’s why the wall went up. So that one day the Jews might join together, so we could stand in the United Congregations Cemetery out of joy, not sadness, and all of us, looking toward that wall, might together forget what’s on the other side.”

Except that, for Kaddish Poznan, the future looked no brighter than the past. He’d not yet met and married Lillian; it was before the birth of his son. Without his mother Favorita’s grave to visit, Kaddish had no one at all.

“So what?” Lila said. “In every people’s history there are times best forgotten. This is ours, Poznan. Let it go.”

Among the children who didn’t acknowledge their parents’ existence, someone else aside from Lila had been unnerved by what Kaddish said. When he went back to the cemetery bent on getting in, Kaddish found a chain had been added to the gate, a sloppy weld applied, and, for good measure, tar used to gum up the keyholes in both locks. He gave it a kick that echoed off the dome and sent a pigeon swooping down from above. Kaddish thought about what Lila said and went around to the United Congregations side. He entered through its always-open gate, he walked through its manicured grounds, and reaching it—reaching up, Kaddish scraped his shoes against brick as he pulled himself to the top of that wall. Perched there and taking in the
Benevolent Self, Kaddish wondered if there’d ever been a wall built that someone hadn’t managed to cross. This one wasn’t much of a challenge. It wasn’t meant to stop the living but to separate the dead.

As a solution it was fine with Kaddish and, as word spread, with the rest of the Jewish community from both sides of the wall. Kaddish was occasionally spotted climbing over to the Benevolent Self or dropping back down between United Congregations plots. No one acknowledged he was there. If they could forget every last person buried in that ruffians’ graveyard, it wasn’t difficult to add one more. From then on, it was as if he wasn’t. The Jews forgot Kaddish Poznan too.

This is how it stayed for a very long time. It was how Kaddish was treated after he fell in love with Lillian and when she, God bless her, fell in love right back. The Jews of Buenos Aires made room for her in their forgetting—no small matter, considering her family aligned itself on the United Congregations side. (Pity also the parents. What to do with a daughter who insists on marrying an
hijo de puta
? Why did Lillian have to find herself the only Jew proud to be a son of a whore?) This is how the situation remained for them when Evita died two years later, and in five, when Perón was driven off. Kaddish’s visits to his mother’s grave became ever more frequent after Pato was born. His mother was the family’s single unbroken link to a past.

Not even Kaddish’s name was family given; it was the young rabbi who’d picked it and, no more than a half kindness, it was the most the upstanding Jews had ever shown. Sickly, weakly, and grasping at survival, Kaddish barely lived through his first week. His mother—a faithful woman—begged that the rabbi be summoned to Talmud Harry’s to save him. The rabbi wouldn’t cross the threshold. Standing in the sunlight out on Cashew Street, he peered into the vestibule at the infant in Favorita’s arms. His judgment was instant. “Let his name be Kaddish to ward off the angel of death. A trick and a blessing. Let this child be the mourner instead of the mourned.” Assuming no fathering beyond the physical (and commercial) act, the rabbi gave Kaddish the last name that goes with the legend—it’s from Poznan we know that a man’s offspring through a prostitute will come to no good. Favorita repeated the name: Kaddish Poznan. She held out Kaddish and gave him a turn, as if trying
it on for size. The rabbi didn’t smile or take leave. He simply stepped out into the gutter, feeling he’d done right by the child. Let the name Kaddish save him. And if the boy is righteous, let him get out of the other one on his own.

Had Kaddish known the origins of his name, he wouldn’t have felt cursed. He was happy with his family. He believed in a bright future for his son. And as creaky as his knees were when he climbed that wall, as lightly and with as little
oomph
as he tried to land, he hadn’t given up on his own self either. If she’d acknowledged him in the intervening twenty-five years, Kaddish would have told Lila Finkel she was partly right. Hard as life got, there was something to living it with a little hope. Maybe that was why Kaddish never needed his fellow Jews any more than they needed him.

This was the balance maintained through the Montoneros and the ERP and after Onganía was overthrown. During those two decades, the community prospered and attained status. And Kaddish was convinced he’d have prospered most of all had any of his schemes worked out.

The Jews didn’t feel any great need to take stock when Perón returned to power. It surely didn’t make them think about Kaddish Poznan’s treatment all those years. The community did give a collective twitch when, during Perón’s welcome home, there was a small massacre in the welcoming crowd. There were some in Once and Villa Crespo who bounced their knees nervously throughout Perón’s short reign and two brothers in two big houses in Palermo who began to bite their nails in earnest when he died.

Perón had left his nation with a dancing girl in the Pink House failing to run their lives. At this time of great uncertainty and deadly rumor, a number of the fortunate feared that the envious and ill-willed might start looking into the past. Though bodies mounted, there wasn’t yet any real burying. It was a period better defined by what was dug up. So many secrets were being unearthed in Buenos Aires, anyone might by accident stumble onto another. It was then that the children of the Benevolent Self acknowledged what Kaddish had always known—the wall separating those two cemeteries wasn’t so high. So desperate were they then not to be linked to the Benevolent Self that they turned to the
only one who wouldn’t let it go. They hired Kaddish Poznan to cross over the wall. They paid him good money to erase the names.

Pato crouched down behind Hezzi’s marker. He planted his knees in the dirt and pressed his shoulder to the stone. Grabbing hold of its sides, he braced himself, ready for Kaddish’s first blow. Pato was providing resistance. “The one thing you’re good at,” Kaddish had said. “We might as well put it to use.”

It was a delicate job. Kaddish didn’t want to knock that headstone over. And Pato was happy enough to take shelter from his father any way he could. He did not want to be there. He did not want to cross through the United Congregations Cemetery, did not want to carry the tool bag or climb over the wall. He wanted no part of his father’s cockamamie and perverse and misdirected plans. At nineteen, a college boy Pato was learning sociology and history, important things that can only be taught in a university setting. He had no interest in the thuggish world Kaddish came from.

To get anywhere with such a child, it’s best to do as Kaddish did and take Pato’s presence as acquiescence enough. Kaddish didn’t expect much more. For a boy who wants to see himself as tough and independent, who wants to believe, while in the presence of his father, that he’s a self-made man, certain emotions are confusing and shameful. Pato tried to keep them packed down. Despite the many traits that he couldn’t brook, the infinite points of disagreement, and the day-to-day ways he and his father would collide, beneath it all and defying logic, Kaddish was the father he loved. “Swing,” Pato said, pushing back against the marble. “Swing already. Let’s get this done.”

IT WAS ALWAYS LIKE THIS
for Kaddish Poznan, always something gone wrong. He shook his head and, acknowledging nothing beyond that, spit between mounds.

“It’s a body,” Pato said.

“We’re in a cemetery. This is where they keep them.” Seeing that they were on the United Congregations side, Kaddish stamped his foot. “We’re standing on another right now.”

“This one’s different,” Pato said, highlighting it. “You’ll notice, unique in its positioning, this one’s above ground.”

“Where?” Kaddish said. He raised a hand to his brow to better see in the dark and knocked the flashlight loose from Pato’s grip. After fifty-two years in that city, Kaddish’s blindness was as sharp as his sight. He’d learned not to see any trouble that didn’t see him first.

They’d chipped Two-Blades’ name away and left his headstone intact. They were back over the wall and on their way home. All Pato had needed to do was walk a straight line. Instead, he’d taken them down a row they wouldn’t have passed and had waved the flashlight around. Kaddish could have strangled his son right then—leave a second corpse with the first, God help him.

Pato fetched the light and headed toward the body. He was already leaning in when Kaddish grabbed him hard by the back of the neck.

“You’re going to touch it now?” Kaddish said. “You want your fingers all over it, because it’s so easy to explain how we came to be here in the middle of the night? Murdered—I see it same as you. But I promise, Pato, there’s no murderer out there. Everyone would be more than happy to have us volunteer.”

This is why Kaddish didn’t want to see, and why he didn’t want to walk down the row to the body, because half looking from a distance was so much different from standing right over this kid.

The body was a young man’s, belly up and shirtless. Its feet touched the ground on one side of the headstone and its head did the same on the other. The throat was slit clean and the body drained of blood. There wasn’t a drop to be found.

“Somebody moved it here,” Pato said.

“You think they’ve been moving themselves around the city? You think they pop out of the ground like tulips? The police kill them and dump them and the paper reports nonsense to go along. It’s a tragedy among tragedies. Now let’s get home.” Kaddish slipped between graves. Pato didn’t follow. “This is the single worst place in Buenos Aires to be standing.”

“For us, yes,” Pato said. “And for this boy to be lying.” He then raised the flashlight and lit the Jewish stars and etched hands and Hebrew dates on the headstones.

“Should we drag him to the car and drop him off in Pompeya? Is that the plan? Trust me,” Kaddish said, “if they want to start slitting Jewish throats, they won’t bother drumming up an excuse.”

“How do you know he’s not Jewish?”

Kaddish snatched the flashlight and brought it close to the murdered boy’s head. “Such a nose as this God hasn’t set on a Jewish face in two thousand years. It’s smaller than yours on the day you were born.” Bringing the lens up to his chin, Kaddish lit his own face like a sundial. In the Poznan family it was understood (and oft pointed out) that Kaddish’s ample snout was the smallest of the three. Unscientific a proof as it was, Kaddish thought his point was made. He lowered the flashlight and took Pato by the arm. “Time to go home,” he said. “Let
Feigenblum and his board deal with the Jews on this side. We, my
hijo de hijo de puta
, have Jews of our own.”

Kaddish coughed his morning cough and scratched the parts that needed scratching. He made his way into the kitchen, surprised to find his wife still there. The paper was spread across the little table, and Lillian, holding a section, looked up at him over half-glasses.

Kaddish kissed her on the cheek and sat down at her side. “It won’t be in today’s papers.”

“How do you know what I’m looking for?” Lillian said.

“An ambush is my only guess if you’re not at work.”

“Everyone is always against you.”

“They usually are,” Kaddish said. He patted at the newspaper on the table. Lillian brought out the ashtray from underneath.

“You’re going to get yourself killed,” she said.

“You’re opposed then?”

Lillian reached underneath a second time. She passed the lighter to Kaddish but she didn’t let go, his hand clasped over hers.

“I’m worried for my son.”

“The greater everyone’s fear of the future, the more they want the names gone.”

“At some point it becomes too much.”