The Ministry of Special Cases (26 page)

“I can’t say I’m convinced anything has happened that you can be helped with.”

Lillian said, “Children don’t just vanish as if they never were. The same as they don’t just appear.”

Teresa, working at an oyster, slipped and pricked her finger with a knife. She rushed her finger into her mouth and then, pulling it out, studied the droplet of blood that formed. “There’s always something rotten inside when they are locked that tight.”

She reached under the table and, with the corresponding finger of the other hand, she pressed an invisible button connected to a bell they could not hear. The maid arrived, walking at a clip, and reacted as if her mistress’ head had been cut off. She then, sweetly, kissed the cut. “Patch me up in the drawing room,” Teresa said, and she left the table without even a nod good-bye, her arm raised above her head.

“You can do this,” Lillian said to the general, as soon as Teresa was gone. “You are the only one who can get him back.”

“Go home, Lillian.” It was the first time he’d said her name. “Powerful as I am—I admit it—I can’t undo what’s not been done. I can’t make your son from nothing. You are Jews,” the general said. “Go to the river and mix him from clay. People from nothing is a Jewish affair.”

“That’s what I came to hear,” Kaddish said. He stood up and slid past Lillian on the bench. “My wife expected help. I came looking for clarity.” Kaddish offered Lillian a hand, addressing her. “When you want to
see which way the wind blows, always talk to a frightened general. You won’t find any bravery but at least you’ll learn the truth.”

And then it was Lillian who was shocked by Kaddish. She didn’t believe that what he said was inappropriate or rash. She thought it was strong.

“I can only pity you,” the general said. “It’s hopelessness that makes you talk this way.”

“I’m not hopeless,” Kaddish said. “Everybody better pray that it doesn’t get to that.” The general, amused, leaned back in his chair.

“You go on my list,” Kaddish said. “The government has its list. You go on mine.”

The general was holding his stomach as Kaddish threatened him, his eyes welling up. He was afraid he might fall from his chair. The general watched the tough little man leave with his tough little wife, and he laughed and laughed and laughed.

KADDISH JOINED LILLIAN
at the Ministry of Special Cases on the day her number was called. Kaddish had come late. He’d slipped out to buy cigarettes and then again for the papers, and finally to fetch them lunch. Still, when the number hit in the afternoon, he was by Lillian’s side.

On the way to the front of the room, a woman thrust her number out at Kaddish. “Trade,” she said. “Please.” Kaddish sidestepped her and walked on with his head turned, keeping an eye on the lady. The woman kept her eye on Kaddish too. When he sat down in front of the clerk, the woman stood up and, a final try, waved her number back and forth in the air.

Lillian gave him a pat and acknowledged their good fortune. She said to Kaddish, “You’re a charm.”

They sat across from a young man who didn’t bother to look up. He was sharp-faced and bespectacled, and Kaddish felt he was staring down the blade of a knife. After some time the clerk raised his eyes long enough to say, “Number?” Lillian handed him the slip of paper, which he dropped into the wastebasket without a glance.

“Passports,” the man said, this time without looking, only the hand outstretched.

“We don’t have our passports,” Lillian said.

“No passports?” he said. “Is this travel related?”

“No,” Lillian said.

“Then let’s see the letter.”

“Which letter is that?” Kaddish said.

And in the way the weary bureaucrat fills his days so he’ll have something to be indignant about when reflecting at night, he said, “Sir, I will not sit here and argue with you.”

Kaddish, honestly confused, looked to Lillian.

“We don’t understand,” she said.

“The letter. The letter from the Ministry of Special Cases, what did it say? In relation to what issue was your presence requested? Have you been abroad in the last six months? Have you requested a visa for travel within the Soviet bloc?”

“No letter,” Lillian said, “no travel, no visa. We’ve come on our own. We were told—we have heard—”

“Stop,” the clerk said. He pressed his fingers into his eyes as if to relieve a headache, but he pressed so hard, Lillian thought he might have been trying to give himself one or worse. “I already know,” he said, dropping his arms and engaging Lillian properly for the first time. “I swear the others make sure it works out this way. I don’t know how they manage it. A thousand, thousand things to deal with, and always they send the parents to me. Am I right? Someone’s flown the coop? Someone’s missing at home?”

“Disappeared,” Lillian said.

The clerk looked at the other clerks, as if they really had it in for him, as if he were the butt of some joke.

“Rapscallions,” he said, referring to his co-workers.

The man then shook it off and extended a hand.

“Habeas,” he said.

Lillian kept her own hands on the bag in her lap. She blinked. Kaddish pulled at the legs of his pants and exhaled.

“Do not threaten me, sir,” the clerk said. “This is not a barroom, it’s a ministry of the government. It’s the same as assault, the threat. It’s exactly the same as far as I’m concerned.”

Again Kaddish turned to Lillian.

“He means nothing by it,” she said. “We have no habeas corpus. Our son has disappeared.”

“A police report,” the man said, clipped.

Lillian just shook her head.

“Room two-sixty-four,” he said. “Down the stairs, back to the lobby you entered but on the other side, another door, another stairwell, to this floor on that side.” The man then sneered at his co-workers, giving them a look through hooded eyes. In the quickest turnaround Lillian had witnessed, he then waved at the man who called numbers and another number was called.

Lillian and Kaddish found themselves going down and across and up, then opening a stairwell door onto the narrowest of corridors. There was a desk, its drawers facing them, directly in their path. Had someone been sitting at it, they’d not have been able to enter. This also was likely the reason that the gentleman on the right side of that desk, on its short side, had placed himself there. His feet, invisible from the stairwell, were up on the desk’s corner and the man had a brown Borsalino tilted over his face, ostensibly to aid in sleep. There was a fan of three short feathers, blue as a bluebird’s, arranged in its band.

Kaddish and Lillian stood on the left side of the desk. Before they could clear their throats, the man righted his chair and tipped back his hat. At first glance Lillian thought he was a woman, so fine were his features. She imagined this was why he had cultivated a sparse mustache—to help nudge people toward the right guess.

“We have been sent to room two-sixty-four,” Kaddish said.

The only thing on the desk was a stapler. Before answering, the man tapped out a nervous little rhythm on it as if he was answering them in code. He then pointed behind them. “Down that way and around.” He tipped his hat forward again and pitched back his chair. Lillian thought, This is why he wears the hat. Even more than the mustache, the hat made her think, Man.

When they found two-sixty-four, the office was locked. They knocked on the door and its neighbors. They gave it a few minutes, tried again, and then slowly made their way back to the corridor with the man in the bird-feather hat.

They’d somehow entered the hallway from the other direction, coming up behind him. Lillian and Kaddish slid by, pushing a desk drawer closed to pass. The man neither gave a start nor acknowledged them. He held a wide slice of provolone in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other. He cut it in half and then reached for a ruler and a slice of bread.

“It’s locked,” Lillian said. “No one’s in room two-sixty-four. No one answers the door.”

“Of course not,” the man said. “It’s my office, and I’m sitting here.”

“You didn’t just—” Lillian said.

“Didn’t just what?” the man said, spreading butter unperturbed.

“Send us,” Lillian said. “You didn’t send us to find your office while you were sitting here?”

“I work hard!” the man yelled. “I’ve earned citations for hardness, for temerity!”

He replaced the top slice of bread on his sandwich. Kaddish half expected him to staple it closed.

“Are you on lunch break?” Lillian said.

“It’s a snack,” he said. “Would you eat lunch in a hallway? I should hope I’d be able to do better than that.”

Lillian wanted to scream at this man. She wanted to tear into him. Kaddish pulled out a handkerchief and wiped the whole of his face.

“So you’ll be returning to room two-sixty-four?” Kaddish said.

“After my refreshment.”

“And we should wait for you there?”

“No,” he said. “You shouldn’t.” He took a bite of his sandwich and with his mouth full, said to Lillian, “You should really learn to hate from inside. It is very off-putting when it’s all there on the face to be seen.”

“You misread me,” Lillian said.

“I’m sure,” he said. “Nonetheless. Let’s deal with the matter now.” He aimed his sandwich at them. “Is this in reference to compulsory military service?”

“No,” Kaddish said.

“Is it about your tax assessment?” he said. “I don’t handle tax assessments, either new cases or existing complaints. Not military-service deferments either.”

Lillian left Kaddish to answer the questions. She was looking across the span of the desk and wondering how every interaction of even the most minor import took place with a desk in between, as if without a desk keeping people apart, every meeting would end with the weaker party strangled dead. And it might, Lillian thought. She would strangle this man.

“It’s none of these things,” Kaddish said to the clerk. “Why would it be?”

The man looked baffled.

“Because I don’t deal with them,” he said, “and because this is where they’re always sent.”

“We are here about a disappeared child,” Lillian said.

“That we deal with,” the man said. “That is here.”

“And you’re going take care of it in a hallway, with nothing in front of you but a sandwich?”

“Better on a full stomach than empty.”

“Then, sir,” Kaddish said, as polite as he got, “we’re asking for your help.”

“The child,” the man said. “How old?”

“A son,” Kaddish said. “Pato. Age nineteen.” And then, remembering where they were, he said, “Pablo Poznan.”

“Has he been gone more than seventy-two hours?”

“Yes,” Kaddish said.

“If, indeed, a citizen is incarcerated for matters relating to national security, a file is made, a copy comes to me, and it’s held for forty-eight hours to allow for legal intervention through the Ministry of Special Cases, which is separate from the Ministry of Justice and the courts (it’s
a copy of their file that we get). Then—and this taking into account the twenty-four hours it could take to be delivered—after three business days then, the file is closed and sent down to the archives. This part I shouldn’t tell you, but I do—you see the advantage in talking to me on break? It eases me up; I feel like a regular guy. The archives are under this very building, and this building runs deep.” He stopped and took a bite. “So to get it back is like in the National Library. Like any place with underground stacks—we are the same.”

“I’ve never been,” Kaddish said.

“You’ve never been to the library?” Kaddish nodded. “There is a slip to be filled out. The slip you put in a tube, the tube goes down, and it is dealt with by some extremely pale clerks who are consigned to the archive.” Here he laughed. “If you weep over a trip to a locked office, let me tell you, this is the promised land up here. We are the bureaucrats of goodness and light; down there is the bureaucracy of the netherworld. Down there, who knows how long until a file is located. If it turns up, there is a little elevator, like for people but tiny, just for files—VIPs the files. We may abuse people at the ministry, but the files we treat right. They don’t ride with riffraff. They don’t take the stairs. They have their own private elevator, where they’ll be left to themselves.”

“So when—” Lillian said.

“If the slip is in by eleven in the morning, the file is often up by eleven the next day. But slips sent down this late in the afternoon are often lost.”

“So tomorrow we should—” Lillian said.

“Nothing tomorrow. That’s my job. I’m explaining my part. You give me the habeas corpus—”

Here Lillian interrupted. “We don’t have one,” she said.

“You don’t? They sent you over without it? Nobody is supposed to be up here without a habeas corpus, and even those people aren’t allowed up anymore.”

“Why,” Kaddish said, “would we even be here if we had one?”

Lillian looked at her husband. He was right. Why would they?

“It has happened that both files exist, the original and the copy, that the police report is submitted, the habeas corpus issued, but it is the
detainee that is misplaced. That’s not my job, but those people are sometimes sent this way.”

“So what do we do?” Lillian said.

“What do you do? You get the right paperwork, or you fail to get the right paperwork in the right way, and you open a file. You don’t come empty-handed and expect results. You don’t come here with nothing, and you don’t come to me during lunch,” he said. Then, correcting, he said, “Snack.” He pulled open the bottom drawer and pulled out a Coke. “Either way, it’s the other clerk’s fault. Next time they send you, ask first if it’s right.”

“Every last one of you will end up in hell for this,” Lillian said. It didn’t sound the least bit aggressive. It was a simple statement of fact, and the man seemed to receive it as such.

“This country is at war,” he said. “There are things that are done to ensure victory. Right things.” Here he put the cap of the soda bottle against the edge of the desk and brought a fist down on it. The cap rolled off and the bottle gave a hiss. “When the country is safe, the victors will choose their own fates. And I don’t think, as compensation, we will choose for ourselves hell. We’ll choose better for ourselves. Something nice.”