The Ministry of Special Cases (37 page)

“I can’t go to the Ministry of Special Cases?”

“I’ve never met anyone yet who was upset to hear that. But, no,” the priest said. “If you want me to help, then for everyone’s sake you need to stay away. At this stage, even if I manage to get some information it’ll be very little. If the money gets into the right hands, it may be possible to find out where your son is and how he fares and no more.”

Lillian’s mouth fell open. She tried not to scream. She went over and grabbed the priest’s face in two hands, squeezing as she had squeezed Kaddish’s on the night Pato was taken. She did it with the same fervor—but, happy now, with joy—and she leaned in and kissed the priest on both cheeks. “How much?” Lillian said, letting him go.

“It’s always too much, and that’s how it will be every step of the way.”

“Anything. I’ll pay any price.”

“You mustn’t say that,” the priest said. “They’ll ask. And negotiations can be long.” Here he stopped himself. “It’s better that you don’t hope. It’s better that we first find out where Pato is and confirm he’s alive.”

“More?” Lillian said. “There are other steps? Other hopes to have?”

“Let’s first do this,” the priest said, patting the air, trying to be calming.

Lillian knew every last peso she had in the house and imagined that it still wouldn’t be enough. She made the rounds collecting. There was a stocking with a roll of bills in the bedroom and, in the kitchen, the tin under the sink. In the living room, she pulled out one of Pato’s books, money fluttering as she shook it from the leaves. Finally she went over to the scalloped shelf and brought over Kaddish’s gold. This the priest put right into his jacket. Then they sat on the couch together and counted.

“Not enough?” Lillian said.

“No, not really,” the priest said.

“It’s all I have,” Lillian said. And then remembering, slapping her head, she emptied the contents of her purse. “I can call my friend Frida if you need more this second. She’ll be able to get.”

“I hate to say this, but maybe we shouldn’t bother starting. I’d assumed that a Jew would be a homeowner—that there’d be collateral of some sort. Tactless as it sounds, if you’re already emptying your purse, what do we do if things progress afoot? What if we were discussing, say, buying freedom, how will you get more? We’re talking about serious sums.”

“It could go that far—where we could buy him back?”

“It could,” the priest said.

“I’ll manage anything. Truly.” Lillian knew she was being tested, and she knew she had to lie. “My boss is very powerful now,” Lillian said. “You wouldn’t believe the business he does. He has resources. From him I could get any amount—we’re like family. He thinks of Pato as his own son.” The priest looked skeptical, and Lillian began naming the new clients: factory owners, diplomats, the general, and the judge.

“For now, though,” Lillian said, “for this part, is it enough?” She pointed at the money.

The priest waved her away. “I’ll make them take this. I’ll make them understand.”

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s really everything. Please tell them it’s the truth.”

Lillian picked up the money and put it in order. She then pressed the fat roll into his hands. The priest stood up to receive it. He pushed the
money down into his left pocket. As he did so, he pulled his own wallet out from his right.

“Let me give you something to tide you over,” he said.

“No, I couldn’t.”

“I insist. You’ll pay me back one day, I know it. I’ll come,” he said proudly, “and collect it from Pato if need be.”

“You’re too generous,” Lillian said, “too kind.”

“A small contribution,” he said, handing her two crisp green American twenties. “We must all bear this burden together.”

KADDISH DROVE TO THE UNITED JEWISH
Congregations building intending to punch Feigenblum as hard as he possibly could in the face, this somehow as a message to Lillian, though Kaddish would have been hard pressed to say what the message was. Feigenblum, lucky for him, didn’t exit the building while Kaddish was idling outside. From there he drove to Rafa’s mother’s, thinking she could answer the difficult questions he had. When she wouldn’t let him in, Kaddish leaned his head against the doorframe, and didn’t exactly heave, nor would he say he cried, but made some ugly motion, a broken breath and whine. He’d run out of cigarettes and didn’t have a cent to buy them, and the maddening craving further aggravated his despair. All together Kaddish had the distinct sense, maybe the only thing clear to him, that he was losing his mind.

Kaddish went back to the car. He turned the key and pumped the pedals and couldn’t get the engine to turn over. Out of gas and out of money, he abandoned the car and walked to his apartment. Kaddish paced in the street below, looking up at the window where Lillian always sat. He wanted her to look down and take comfort in one of her boys coming home. He wanted her to see he was no longer taking liberties. He was waiting for an invitation, nothing at all assumed or believed beyond the one thing that couldn’t be undone.

Kaddish cursed at a passing car that forced him from the center of the street. He stood on the sidewalk looking wounded and then went around the corner to peer back with stealth; Lillian might show herself if she thought he was gone. And she did. Kaddish saw her immediately. That is, he saw a sign of her. The lamp in the living room was now off, and only a moment before it had been turned on. Though, thinking about it, he couldn’t really remember seeing it lit and might even remember noting it was off. He still took it as proof of Lillian’s presence, reconciling the disparity with the knowledge that he was going mad—the awareness of which filled him with a kind of ease. It neutralized the confusion in his certainty that he’d seen two opposing things. How nice to hold in his head both the belief that he’d seen the lamp turned off and at the same time the one-hundred-percent conviction that it hadn’t been on. How easily accommodated he was.

Hands shoved into pockets, Kaddish rolled up onto his toes. He gave a whistle and tried to appear nonchalant as he returned to his original position in the middle of the street. He could tell Lillian was watching him from her chair, watching and ignoring, watching and cursing him. When it became too much, he cursed back up at her and, because Frida might well be up there, he cursed her too. Kaddish threw pebbles at the window. Never once hitting it, he managed to draw some of his neighbors to their own. They pulled curtains aside, and not one of them waved. All of them fuckers. “Fuck you,” he called. “Sister fuckers,” and “Mother fuckers,” and, oddly, cursing those fuckers felt like the least crazy bit of it all, because those blind and silent and complacent motherfuckers couldn’t see him or hear him just like they hadn’t seen his son. But Kaddish had no time to focus on them. He had a question for Lillian, the same one he’d wanted to ask Rafa’s mother, and Feigenblum (after he punched him hard in the face), and the doctor, and the navigator the same. It was critical that he ask it, and he wished any of them had answered. Kaddish more than anything did not want to ask the one man who knew best.

A neighbor too cowardly to show himself screamed down to Kaddish, “Poznan, come in already or go.” Rude as it was, Kaddish accepted
it as sound advice. He knew Lillian wasn’t home, that she wasn’t either watching or teasing or sitting in her chair at the window ignoring. He also knew she was and that she’d never call down.

It took madness, he felt, for two conflicting realities to exist at once. For Lillian and Kaddish in Argentina, it also did not. Everything and its opposite. As in the case of a son that is both living and dead.

By prying up the staples that ran along the baseboard and unscrewing the jack, Lillian had freed enough cable to get the telephone to the table so she could join Frida there. Frida had protested when Lillian was down on hands and knees pulling staples up with a screwdriver, but Lillian kept saying, “A celebration,” tempered as it was. Lillian had asked Frida to bring over ham sandwiches and beer. That’s what she wanted, actual cravings. Lillian hadn’t wanted something for herself in so long.

Aside from the telephone and the beer, Lillian had put what little jewelry she had out on the table. There was also a small bronze statue from India that Gustavo had once given her; she was convinced it had some value though Frida wasn’t sure. “You can sell it all for me,” Lillian said. She added her wedding ring to the pile and put her car keys on top. “I don’t know where the car is, Kaddish has it. You hold the keys, though, and then, if I find where it is you can go get it and sell that too.”

“That’s a plan,” Frida said, thinking that it wasn’t. She opened her mouth two different times, trying to figure a way to say it and missing the opportunity. Lillian launched into the story again.

There was the short version of the priest’s call, as well as the walls-have-ears rendition, full of
“my
friend” and
“your
friend” and meticulously avoiding any damnable phrasing regarding money or detention centers or contacts inside. Both of Lillian’s accounts ended with the critical, “He’s alive.” Frida practically swooned at the news each time, while Lillian repeated the story in a loop, giddy with the telling. That part was pure delight. It was the rest of Lillian’s response that Frida wasn’t sure how to process. The priest had told Lillian to stay by the phone and she’d agreed. That Lillian was willing to turn her whole brave search
into cradling that phone in her lap and hiding out at home, Frida couldn’t believe. This was what she most wanted to say, and she knew Lillian wasn’t going to let her.

Lillian could see the way Frida was seeing her. So Lillian fed Frida sensible, grounded thoughts at intervals. At the end of each telling, Lillian expressed either skepticism or concern. “I know he’s not safe yet,” Lillian would say. Or, “These are very shady people. I don’t even know where he’s being held.”

Shady people
, Frida knew, did not include the priest.

When it was time to leave, Frida gave Lillian everything she had in her wallet. Lillian didn’t hesitate in taking it, a sign of their friendship. Neither did Frida protest about taking the jewelry and the statue and the keys. She left the ring for last. “Are you sure?” she said. Lillian was. Frida slipped it on her finger, pressing it up against her own wedding band.

Frida hadn’t said enough and—her last chance—she did no better than asking Lillian, “What’s next?”

“Pato home,” was her answer.

“The priest said that?”

“No, I’m saying it. The priest said he could maybe do more and maybe he couldn’t.”

Frida wondered how, in a hundred tellings, this part had escaped untold.

“Then why sit and wait like this?” Frida said.

“It’s nothing to worry about. That’s how he talks. No promises made, no results guaranteed. Even if nothing happens, he said to be by the phone—because at nothing we might only get one chance.”

A beautiful girl with a skirt to the floor led Kaddish through an apartment not much different from his. A granddaughter, Kaddish supposed, or maybe “great” even; it was possible when he considered all the years gone by. He couldn’t believe the girl let him in looking as he did, though, sweeping her skirt behind her, she kept an eye.

The girl poked her head into what looked like a study. She stood on the threshold nodding and then answered in Yiddish. Not since childhood had Kaddish heard a lovely young woman speak it so well.

The rabbi stood in the study’s entrance, practically panting with upset.

“Vandal!” the rabbi said. “How do you come into my house?” The statement gained gravity as the rabbi stared and sniffed and took a step back, further startled by the condition of the Kaddish in front of him.

“I have a request,” Kaddish said.

“Do you want me to hire you? Are you off to Europe to knock down my parents’ graves? Done already, I promise. The job done free of charge.” The young girl looked fraught. The rabbi signaled to her and, obedient, she retreated down the hall.

“A second favor,” Kaddish said. “I’ve come to ask it.”

“A second favor? From me? I don’t even know about the first.”

“For my mother. You came to Talmud Harry’s. You gave me my name.”

“That favor was for her, not for you. Even if—how do you merit a second?”

“Merit?” Kaddish said. “You’re a rabbi, not a king. A Jew comes to you respectfully—”

“Not any Jew,” the rabbi said.

“No. A Jew you punished for the sin of being born and then excommunicated for refusing to forget from where he came. Now we’re going to balance the scales. I need your advice,” Kaddish said, “that’s the favor. I don’t know what to do when one is without.”

“Without what?” the rabbi said, no patience from the start.

“Without a body,” Kaddish said. This was the question he’d wanted to ask all day, a version prepared for his wife and Rafa’s mother, for Feigenblum and the navigator, for each one a different facet of the problem that was eating at him. He wanted to know how to make a funeral when there wasn’t a son.

The rabbi took a better look at Kaddish’s face, at the scruff and dirt, and, under his filthy parka, the worn and filthy suit. Here he saw the lapel Kaddish had torn a second time, and he looked back up into Kaddish’s eyes.

The rabbi stepped aside and motioned into the study. Kaddish went. It was a room like Pato’s: narrow, a desk where the bed would go, and, covering half the window at the end, a bookshelf full of books. What Kaddish wouldn’t have expected, what he hadn’t noticed, was the music. Behind the rabbi was a turntable spinning and an opera playing. There was no second chair in the room and the rabbi offered his. Kaddish fell into it and stared, bewildered, toward the music as if he could see it in the air.

“It’s to be appreciated,” the rabbi said, reading Kaddish’s surprise. “The overture to
Die Meistersinger
. A gift from God”—and he held up a finger—“a gift from God through man. The music is not the person, I also deeply believe. But that’s a discussion for another time.”

Kaddish nodded, as if to say it was for another time, or to acknowledge the beauty of the music, or simply a reflex, utterly numb.