The Ministry of Special Cases (35 page)

“You’re a murderer,” Kaddish said.

“Yes,” the navigator said. “A killer and a monster, and I can’t live with it.”

“I should kill you myself to put things right.”

“I’d be obliged. A murderer, and yet too cowardly to take my own life—it makes me that much more guilty. Still, I’m braver than I was before. It’s hard to admit such crimes.”

“I can imagine,” Kaddish said.

“Can you?” the navigator said. “It’s only the first minutes.”

“The first minutes of what?” Kaddish said.

“Of hearing the sound of them hitting,” Wollensky said. “Your first minutes living life with that terrible noise in your head.”

· · ·

Rushing down the pier, raising his gaze higher, it was already as if the news had come from another place, so incongruous and overwhelming was the view of Buenos Aires spread out before him, tall buildings rising up, a span of city as boundless as the river. For this reason, to remind and solidify, to keep knowing what he knew, Kaddish kept shooting looks over his shoulder, Wollensky still in sight and backed by emptiness, vast unframed water and sky. Kaddish pushed a man out of his way and pushed into the Fisherman’s Club. Picking up his pace, he felt someone’s grip slip off him as he ran the last two steps and was out the front door and back into his city.

Kaddish stopped for a moment to catch his breath. He took hold of the wooden railing and watched a carpet of gray clouds, lined silver, roll reflected on the water. The clouds moved one way and the current faster in the other as it slipped under the pier, the sky losing ground.

A skinny old man in a raincoat dropped his bucket by Kaddish’s feet and jammed a fishing pole in a space of rot between two planks. He held the hook in one hand and came up with a tiny
mojarrita
in the other. It was the raincoat that reminded Kaddish; he stuck out his arms, turned over his hands. The navigator’s parka—he still had it on. Kaddish looked toward the club building and then, with a confused expression, looked at the old man. The old man gave Kaddish a friendly nod and then pulled the hook through the fish’s eyes.

“They biting?” Kaddish said, the small talk surprising even him.

“Don’t know yet,” the man said. “What does it matter? The fisherman fishes whether they bite or not.”

“I guess so,” Kaddish said. The old man took up his rod and cast his line with a whistle. Kaddish thought of the hook and the navigator and the girl who snapped awake. He hugged the rail and tried to catch his own face in that mirror of water, but it was too far down. He turned his gaze back to the city rising up behind him. One day it’s all fingers, Kaddish thought, and another everything is hook and eye.

KADDISH’S GOOD SUIT
no longer buttoned but it still fit nice. He was showered and shaved, his shoes polished up with the shirt he’d spent the last days in, and, right before he hung a sheet over the bathroom mirror, he used its reflection to adjust his tie.

In the kitchen he took up a knife and went after the block of ice in the freezer, just enough chipped off to cool a drink. He toasted the air, drained his glass, and poured another full. He then took up the knife a second time and aimed it—with no intention of stabbing—at his heart. Lapel in hand, Kaddish made a cut with a sawing motion. He put the knife down and rent the fabric, giving a good tear.

This is how he did it, this is how it’s always been done: a sign of mourning. He smoked a cigarette and waited for Lillian. He had a vague memory from a lesson of Talmud Harry’s, and at one point, feeling foolish, he ashed the cigarette onto his head.

There was the thud of a bag dropped, heavier for having been dragged around all day. Lillian let out a groan as she hung up her coat. Neither the sound of the thud nor the echo of her despair came back with anything other than an empty-house feel, this despite Kaddish’s presence there.

Lillian didn’t start at the sight of her husband seated behind the little table in the kitchen. She noted the hair combed down and the clean-shaven cheeks, the smell of soap, and the suit he wore. “Have you wrapped yourself up like a gift for me to take you back?”

Kaddish, with head dropped, stared down at the table.

“Is it a party, then?” she said. “Should I get dressed up to celebrate your coming home?”

Kaddish raised his eyebrows and, as if that had generated the momentum, followed with his chin until his head tilted back.

Lillian looked down at him. There was a laxness to his skin that undermined all the grooming, and wet bloodshot eyes that were nothing but sad. With an open view of his broad chest, Lillian saw how the lapel hung down.

“No,” she said.

“Dead,” Kaddish told her. “I’ve spoken to a man.”

Lillian stood up straighter, raised her own chin high. “Show me,” she said. “Get up and take me.” She grabbed the little table and pulled it to the side. The only thing on it, a glass, fell to the floor. Lillian covered her mouth. How sad Kaddish looked in the little chair. Not since their wedding, Lillian thought, Kaddish in a suit and a broken glass between them.

“There’s nothing to show,” he said. “Disappeared, the man said, is as it sounds. The children are gone for good.”

“Who?” Lillian said. “What man?”

“The navigator,” Kaddish said. “The man who tosses them from the planes.”

Lillian forced her mouth into a smile.

“Now I get the suit,” Lillian said. “Now I understand the celebration. With a husband who’s forever wrong, with a man whose every promise comes apart, whose word is no good, whose beliefs always bring the opposite, and, if they don’t, he’s been telling lies… I get it now,” Lillian said. “You’re celebrating. Because even if you really think the worst has befallen him, it can mean nothing more, my Kaddish, than Pato is surely alive.”

“Dead,” Kaddish said. “I believe it.”

Lillian brought her face right up to his.

“Not under this roof, husband. Under this roof Pato is still alive. In this house,” Lillian said, “live a mother and a son who is soon to come home. What is hazy, what is still unclear, is if a father lives here too.”

“How will it turn clear?” Kaddish said.

“If I can picture him with the mother waiting. If he is not waiting for the son to return, he is not not-waiting here.”

It isn’t fair, Kaddish thought. She couldn’t be asking this of him.

“I’m in mourning,” he said.

“No,” Lillian said, waving a finger. “No, we aren’t. I’m not. I’m not and you must decide. Waiting is the only option for under this roof. Waiting and wishing and helping to bring him home.”

“You can’t expect,” Kaddish said. He stood to face her.

“I can,” Lillian said. “I do. I’ve let you fail for a lifetime. And it’s a lifetime’s worth of expectations I’ve saved up. All for this, all for now.”

Kaddish breathed the short breaths that precede tears.

“Don’t,” Lillian said. “Forbidden. You’ve already said what you believe. And I want you to know, you’re thinking sick thoughts. Guilty thoughts. They contribute. They contribute to making real what is a lie.”

“I spoke to the man,” Kaddish said. “The navigator.”

“Invisible claims,” Lillian said.

Kaddish missed his son so dearly it was as if he hadn’t been feeling a thing before. He didn’t know what to do with Lillian’s ultimatum, he only knew he couldn’t face that pew again tonight, he couldn’t wrap himself in that curtain and make it through until dawn. Of all the bad odds and long shots Kaddish had bet on, of all the good enterprises gone wrong, it seemed this was another deal he was making. Another deal with no other choice. So Kaddish leaned over and kissed his wife on the cheek, whispered into her ear. “Your roof, your rules,” he said.

“Nothing less,” Lillian said, kissing him back. “Only alive, Kaddish. It’s the only way to keep it so.”

Kaddish didn’t know in that instant if he could believe a dead son alive, but he was sure he wouldn’t make it without Lillian. And in a country where everyone was forced to live one lie, what did it hurt—for Lillian, for her sake and for his own—to try and live another?

Kaddish made his way to their bed and lay down fully dressed. It was worth it, he thought. He could manage it if, when Lillian slept, he could lie beside her, his arm around her, and think the truth. This is what he told himself, not knowing that Lillian did not sleep, that she’d never return to bed without her son.

Lillian went to the sink in the bathroom to brush the taste from her mouth. The sheet over the mirror startled her. She grabbed it in her fist and was about to tear it down, when, staring into the whiteness, she decided it was better. Pato’s face, Lillian’s face, they were both gone from that reflection. What was left for her to see that memory didn’t better serve.

LILLIAN PRESSED MONEY
into Kaddish’s hand and rolled her fingers closed around his. She said, “You and I can live on our worries. A guest might need more to eat. Frida’s coming by. How about we have steaks?” When Kaddish nodded, she said, “Make sure at least one is a decent cut.”

They were already behind on rent. They didn’t have a single job between them. And the night after he’d come home declaring Pato dead, she was digging into the money he’d left on the table and catering for a guest. “A bottle of wine,” she said, as the elevator dropped. Kaddish kept his eyes straight ahead. A voice from above.

Kaddish went to the butcher’s and the butcher wasn’t there. His daughter, who sometimes worked the register, wore his apron. It nearly wrapped around her twice.

Kaddish had been shopping there forever and he’d never found the store open without the butcher, Julián, there to greet him, plodding over, a pair of giant flat feet slapping around behind the counter.

What to say in these days when nothing was said, when health or holiday were not assumptions, when only one conclusion was drawn? Kaddish couldn’t imagine what trouble a butcher might have got himself into. No more or less, he figured, than had his son.

Looking at her face, looking around the empty place, it seemed the situation was as he’d thought. The butcher disappeared and his customers along with him. And how many, like Kaddish, coming in, taking note, still walked up to the counter as if this always was?

Kaddish listened to what—even to his ear—sounded like a dull cleaver, the woman fracturing bones as if by malice. Her lips were pressed tight as she hacked. Kaddish knew what was in her mind. Each one a general, he was sure.

He peered over to see the cuts of meat, terrible and rough. He thought the steaks might come apart before she got the wax paper closed. Another student for Mazursky, this one. Ready for her first nose.

Kaddish nodded to the daughter. He ordered three steaks.

As he turned to leave, he had a change of heart. Maybe an attempt at solidarity was in order, maybe he could say something nice. Kaddish did nothing more than stand there. It wasn’t that his mind went blank. It was that, after the navigator, the only thing he could say to her was,
He’s dead. Your father’s not coming home
. That wasn’t Kaddish’s job. He wasn’t the grim reaper. Once a day, announcing death, was already too much.

A car ground its engine in the street. Kaddish clenched the change tighter as if Lillian still held his hand closed. He opened the door with his hip, the bottle of wine he carried banging hard against it.

The walk home was used for hating Frida. What kind of person would let herself be fed by those left desolate? What kind of friend would let the mother of a disappeared son—without money or prospects—treat her to steaks and a bottle of wine?

Kaddish wore the navigator’s parka and his suit jacket underneath. The torn lapel no longer hung down. Lillian had made him stitch it back right. Only the sheets stayed over the mirrors, which was good for a man who couldn’t look himself in the eye.

For all Kaddish’s thinking that Frida should know better, he got home to discover that Frida did.

“You’re our guest,” Lillian was saying. “A pleasure, when pleasures have gone rare.”

Frida was shaking her head and unpacking what she’d brought. The smells had already reached Kaddish and his stomach growled.

“Steaks,” Kaddish said. He lifted up the wrong hand, showing them the wine.

“You save those steaks for another night,” Frida said. “Make another meal out of it. Maybe Pato will be back in time to join you.”

“Let it be so,” Lillian said. “Amen,” as if it had been a prayer.

With Frida there and food brought, Kaddish felt like it was a condolence call. It pained him physically that it wasn’t. He stepped forward and kissed Frida on both cheeks. They had always loved each other, Kaddish and Frida. They hugged and it was warm.

Lillian reached into one of Frida’s bags and came up with a deep dish of chicken and rice. Uncovering it on the table, she plucked a green pea and popped it into her mouth. “Who comes to dinner with dinner?” Lillian said.

“A much better cook, that’s who.”

Frida brought out a bottle of milk, two-thirds empty and still cold.

“For my tea,” she said.

She went back to unpacking, unchallenged. Batata and pickles, a dented pear, and, from the bottom, a tray of empanadas, one with a bite in its side.

“I got hungry wrapping it up,” Frida said. She rubbed at her belly. “It’s a dangerous thing to be impressed with one’s own cooking. There is a price to pay.”

Lillian took the empanada with the bite missing and, considering it, sunk her teeth right on top of the ridge Frida had left, bite over bite.

With Kaddish’s chair pulled up to the table, a glass of wine before him, and sweet Frida putting a buttered roll on each of their plates, Kaddish already thought he would break. His shoulders rose and fell in two quick heaves. He tried very hard not to, though he thought he might cry.

Lillian, who would not brook it, raised her voice louder, told her story faster, pulling Frida’s gaze. Kaddish sniffed and wiped his nose. He was fine being boxed out of the conversation, absorbed as he was in marking the end of Pato’s first day passed. Kaddish took a sip of his wine. And thinking of his son, surely dead, and picturing the navigator,
who knew it was so, and staring at Lillian, who hadn’t believed him, and hating a government that would deny Pato had been, Kaddish recognized also that this was the end of the first day for him alone.