The Ministry of Special Cases (20 page)

Lillian had lost control of the horror that had befallen them. She’d slipped into a world with no son.

She looked down into the street to see if maybe Pato was coming. She sat in the wingback chair and watched the corner. She tried to force Pato around it, tried to move him around the bend.

At the first sign of motion Lillian gave a start. It was only a dog. A dog and then a leash and then a man on the other end. She immediately wondered how many children the man had. She wondered if they were home. This is the world Lillian woke up into, a world of parents with children and those without.

There was a wisdom that came with her new position, and she couldn’t believe she hadn’t understood these things the day before. Here’s what Lillian had come to understand: They wouldn’t all get them back in such a place, they couldn’t all get back their sons.

Lillian wanted to apologize to the man with the dog, to throw open the window and scream down to him, If indeed they’ve taken one from you, I apologize, because I’ll be getting mine back. And this time it didn’t slip out; she kept it in her head:
I’ll get mine back
.

Lillian sat in that chair watching the street until Kaddish double-parked out front and stepped from the car. It was really something to see Kaddish this way.

When Lillian had wanted to bring Kaddish home to her parents, her father had asked, “Who is he?” and she’d had no answer. When they first got wind, they banned him from the house and then, heartbroken, demanded to know what she could see in such a man. Lillian told them. “I’m in love with what he’ll become.” Her father waved this off, her mother had
tfu-tfu-tfued. “A
golem,” her father said. “A
shaygets
, a man unformed.” He’d called him everything that day, everything but the one thing her Kaddish surely was. In that initial fight,
hijo de puta
wasn’t said.

Now look at him, Lillian thought. Had her father only lived until this dark day.

Lillian stood and leaned her forehead against the window. She couldn’t herself believe it. Her husband with his handsome new nose, the face after a lifetime finally right, and now, the final touch, his proper
boundaries had fallen into focus. The man coming toward her was sharper, more defined, more perfectly and painfully her Kaddish than any she’d set eyes on before.

It was the closest to him she’d ever felt, the clearest he’d ever been. Kaddish stepped between cars and onto the sidewalk. He craned his neck to look up into their window, as if remembering something, as if he’d sensed he was being watched. Lillian waved with both hands, sliding them back and forth across the glass. Kaddish gave a sad half smile. He raised a hand and waved back to his wife. He paused for a second before disappearing into the building. Her husband, her dear Kaddish, a perfect fit. Kaddish Poznan, father to a missing son.

KADDISH HADN’T WANTED TO WATCH
. He stood outside the hospital smoking cigarettes. The nurse, his nurse, came out to get him. She led Kaddish to a recovery room where he found Mazursky smiling and Lillian bandaged up. Swaddled in blankets and still looking unconscious, Lillian cursed at the doctor in an unceasing mumble.

“B’kiso, b’kaso, b’koso,”
the doctor said. “I didn’t learn much in Hebrew school at the Benevolent Self, but this holds up. There are three things that show a person’s true self when money is involved, when speaking in anger, and when drunk. In this case, I stretch drunk to apply.”

Kaddish looked over at his wife.

“A blue streak,” Mazursky said. “It’s good stuff too.”

Lillian was in fine form. “Doctor Stinky Penis,” she said. “Doctor Tiny Penis. Tiny tiny. Fat fat man.”

The doctor put a hand to his belly.

“Fat, I think, is unfair. The penis, though, would be a matter of opinion.”

Kaddish raised an eyebrow.

“The anesthesia occasionally makes for the foul mouth. The sentiments”—and here Mazurky laughed—“belong to her.”

“Bastard,” Lillian said.

“That could be either of us. For rambling it’s rapier sharp.”

“It went well?” Kaddish said.

“Wonderfully.”

Kaddish dropped his voice to a whisper.

“You made it big like she asked?” Kaddish said. “The old nose is back? With the old bump? She wants to see our boy in the mirror.”

“I guarantee this time that it will stay on her face. I’ve done my best work. There is a reputation to uphold.”

“Mamzers!”
This Lillian said loudly and, though pinched, with clarity. “Up,” she said. “Let’s go.” Both men turned their attention to her, looking dazed and trying to pull herself from the bed.

Once was enough for Lillian. Two nose jobs she could handle, but waking a second time without thinking of Pato—that wouldn’t happen again. The waking itself was just as bad, mind you. It was just as painful coming back to consciousness and accepting Pato gone. This time, though, nothing would stop her. If the nose was back in place, she’d had her last rest.

“Please,” the doctor said. “Slowly.”

“Is it fixed?”

“It’s fixed,” the doctor said.

“Then there’s no time.”

Kaddish looked to the doctor while rushing over to support his wife. Lillian stood herself up, but her feet wouldn’t really hold.

“Is this all right?” Kaddish said.

“I won’t stop a mother,” Mazursky said.

Kaddish helped her dress and the doctor went off and returned with a wheelchair. “At least sit until you get to the car.” Lillian sat and the doctor pushed her to the elevator. When the doors opened, Kaddish took the handles.

“Good luck,” the doctor said. As Kaddish rotated the chair and started to back away, Lillian reached out and gave Mazursky’s hand a squeeze.

· · ·

Tired of begging, Kaddish banged and banged and banged. I should have been as vigilant, Kaddish thought. How hard was it to ignore someone outside your door?

If Lillian had been feeling better, if she wasn’t leaning on his shoulder trying to keep on her feet, she might have said the same. He was glad she didn’t; he wouldn’t have been able to take it as they pleaded for Rafa’s mother to let them in.

Kaddish knew the police would have broken down their door in the end. They would have gotten in regardless. But how much better, how much better for them all, Pato too, if Kaddish had at least held them at bay, if he’d at least forced them to make a little noise.

“I just want to talk to him,” Kaddish said. “A word with your son.” Kaddish did want to talk to him. He intended to do this while sitting on Rafa’s chest and knocking his head against the floor. It was Rafa he blamed. However self-righteous the kids were, they were up to something. And Rafa was the instigator, Kaddish was sure.

Rafa’s mother told them to keep their distance through a closed door. She told them to stay out of their lives. “You’ve done enough,” she said. And Lillian was comforted. Whatever the accusation, Rafa’s mother was the first of the opinion that Lillian had accomplished anything at all.

Eventually Rafa’s mother opened the door. A look of concern spread across her face as soon as she caught sight of Lillian’s. She didn’t ask what happened or even say
Come in
. Rafa’s mother hadn’t seen Kaddish since his nose job, and it was only after absorbing Lillian that she focused on him. Had she bumped into them on the street, she wouldn’t have known who they were.

Kaddish got Lillian to the couch and went, without pause or permission, into both bedrooms. In one a teenage girl did her homework and didn’t bother giving Kaddish a second look. In the other an old man in heavy black shoes and two or three sweaters—with ample holes to see from one down into the next—was asleep on the bed. Kaddish walked back past Rafa’s mother and then on into the kitchen.

When he returned, the two mothers were staring at each other in silence, Lillian still seated on the couch.

“Where is he?” Kaddish said.

“It’s on your Pato,” Rafa’s mother said. “I loved him like a son, but this is on your kid.”

“What is?” Lillian said. She did not like the word
loved
. “Love,” she said out loud. “You love.”

“I’m truly sorry,” Rafa’s mother said. “I was sorry to hear.” She was about to cry but held it and, Lillian couldn’t help but notice, her healthy nostrils flared.

“I welcomed him in,” she said, “made him a home. He lived here when there was no place else.”

“There was always a place,” Kaddish said. “Whatever he liked to believe.”

“Pato didn’t so much think so. He spent a lot of his time with us.”

“Discipline,” Lillian said. “Often the children mistake discipline for cruelty and so they congregate in the homes with no rules.”

Rafa’s mother bent at the knees and screamed in Lillian’s face, which to Kaddish looked all the more desperate with Lillian’s bandage, and that bandage stained with blood. “A single mother,” she screamed. “A single mother!” She straightened up and Kaddish was surprised that neither the old man nor the girl came out of their rooms. “I slaved to make them a place, killed myself for these kids and now”—she raised up her voice again—“gone.”

“Who is gone?” Kaddish said.

“Rafa,” she said. “Flavia.”

“Arrested?” Lillian said. “The police?”

“No,” Rafa’s mother said. “They ran off. They took your call, took a few things, kissed me on the cheek, and left. ‘You don’t know us anymore,’ they said. What kind of good-bye is that from a son? And then Rafa said, ‘If they press you, if they torture, tell them exactly what happened. Tell them about right now. Tell them we got up and walked out the door.’” Rafa’s mother grabbed at the shirt on her chest and pulled as if she intended to rip it off with the skin underneath. “How am I supposed to live with that?”

“You’re lucky,” Lillian said. “They left on their own, and they can come back the same way.”

“How is that lucky when they won’t—when they can’t because of Pato?”

“The daughter,” Kaddish said. He had his own answer. “You’re lucky enough because there’s still the girl.”

“Get out,” Rafa’s mother said.

“Unfortunately, we can’t without answers.” Kaddish said this politely. “We need to know what the kids were up to. We need to know why Pato was taken. Tell us and we’ll go.”

“Up to? Don’t you know?” She studied them, incredulous. “You don’t even know about your own son.”

“What?” Kaddish said. “Are they Zionists? Is it communism?”

“I know what they’re guilty of,” Rafa’s mother said. She shifted her eyes to the left and the right. She leaned in to whisper. “Our children were deep into growing up.”

“That’s it?” Kaddish said.

“Nothing more.”

“There’s always more,” he said. “Things don’t happen without a reason. Maybe you too are missing a secret.” Kaddish gave Rafa’s mother a slow once-over. “You know where they are,” he said.

She ignored him.

“Please,” Lillian said. “Anything. You must have some idea where they went. An inkling.”

“No more than you,” Rafa’s mother said. “Go check their hangouts. Go ask around there.”

Lillian looked to Kaddish, and he slipped his arm behind her back.

“You don’t know,” Rafa’s mother said. “You really don’t have a clue.”

Kaddish didn’t move to speak. It was for Lillian—this had been placed before Lillian and Lillian, accepting, surrendered.

“We do not know about the children,” she said.

Rafa’s mother sat down. She sat and explained, telling them all she knew of the kids’ comings and goings, where they bought their beers and their books, where they ate and danced, on which blocks and against which streetlights they leaned.

It was wonderful to hear, like meeting a different Pato. How nice it sounded. It was a good and vibrant life. Their surly son sounded like a happy child, like the boy Lillian knew he was. They were a gift, these stories. New memories, new pictures, whole new dimensions to beef up the boy in her head.

“Thank you,” Lillian said when they left. She went to hug Rafa’s mother, who stepped away. She wouldn’t have it.

“I love him like my own,” she said, “but Pato’s the one that drove them out.”

“It could have been any one of them that got taken,” Kaddish said.

“That,” Rafa’s mother said, “is my fear.”

Lillian remembered playing her childhood games and all the ways in which they’d mimicked a sophisticated world. As she and Kaddish went from police station to police station, she wondered if Videla and the other generals had played those games the same. Maybe in their version the patient lifted the doctor’s shirt and, if the doctor resisted, the patient split her tiny little head with a rock.

Maybe all people are set in their ways that far back and it served to explain everything. Maybe that’s why she and Kaddish so differed in how best to respond. Kaddish also remembered games from his childhood, except Kaddish’s games were played by adults. If you asked him he’d tell you: when the policeman comes for the criminal, Talmud Harry offers him a drink, and some cash and lets him have his choice of the finest ladies in the house.

He’d tried explaining this to Lillian, as well as his beliefs about government offices and hierarchy and why he didn’t want to go along. “Make me a promise,” Lillian said. “We do this through proper channels. No more headstones, no more deals. No underworld contacts and no bright ideas. You’re a model citizen until we get our son back.”

At each station, as with the first, Lillian demanded to see holding cells and in more than a few the officers obliged. Kaddish was convinced that being led to the cells they’d never be led back, and one policeman looked at him with real violence in his eyes. Kaddish was
doing his best to try Lillian’s way. Lillian mistook his acquiescence for like-mindedness. This was partly because she believed this to be the single logical path and partly because she assumed Kaddish knew, deep down, that his pursuits were often futile. When night had settled in and there was literally nothing left to her, she said to Kaddish, “Even for me, it’s time to go home.” She was caught off guard when Kaddish proposed they try his way for a stretch. “What way is that?” Lillian asked.

“Roundabout and wrong-headed. But to me it looks right.”