The Ministry of Special Cases (4 page)

She also wanted to give him the new start that she couldn’t manage for herself. It was for Kaddish that Favorita became a Poznan. It was for her son that she kept silent about who she’d once been. Because Favorita saw her own life as a bridging, a continuation of what was: It had a beginning followed by a journey and it would come, she always knew, to a bad end. As much as her adopted country would one day try and split the present from what precedes it, a person put on this earth lives her life straight through. With a child, though, Favorita believed, a new line could be started. The rabbi had his wish for Kaddish and this was Favorita’s. She wanted him to have a future as limitless as his past.

This was another reason beyond loyalty and love that Kaddish wouldn’t give up on his mother. Not only was she his connection to the past, she was also its start. Favorita was as far back as the Poznan name would ever go.

For his grandmother, Pato mustered a little reverence. Since it was important to Kaddish that he did so, it was as close as he got to showing his father any respect. This was all Kaddish wanted. He didn’t ask it
often and, when he did, Pato always came through. They each picked up a rock and set it upon Favorita’s headstone, as is the Jewish custom. Then, in deference to Western fashion, Pato reached into the tool bag and pulled out fresh flowers. It was a small bouquet to leave on his grandmother’s plot, and it was the only blooming bunch in the graveyard.

“Hammer,” Kaddish said, and put out his hand.

Pato looked at it. “It’s a desecration,” he said, and then did as he was told.

Kaddish took a breath as he raised up the hammer and exhaled into the swing. The chisel struck and the energy, like a shock, didn’t transfer to the stone but raced back up into his arms. He’d hardly made a mark.

“No one is desecrating anything,” Kaddish said, and wiped a forearm against his head. “We are here to prevent further damage. I’ll tell you what this job is. It is work that needs to be done in a world that runs on shame. Guilt feelings or no, they’d have smashed this place to rubble without us.”

Kaddish took another swing at the stone, thicker and darker than the others around it. It belonged to Babak “the Sephardi” Lapidus, and it was the nickname that Kaddish started with. He hit, the chisel slipped, and he scraped his knuckles.

“Losing your touch,” Pato said.

Kaddish offered his son the tools.

“I won’t have any part of it,” Pato said.

“You already do. Unless you’ve got another way to feed and clothe yourself against three-hundred-percent inflation?” Kaddish shook out his aching hand.

“It’s extortion,” Pato said.

“It’s called work.”

“No,” Pato told him, “not when it’s against my will.”

“All work is against your will. Some Marxist you are. So quit working. Go eat one of your books.”

“I hate you,” Pato said.

As with so many conversations of late, it ended as it began. Nothing
accomplished, nothing understood. Father—son time, Kaddish appreciated either way.

Kaddish took another useless swing. “It’s a stone that would do better shoring up a chimney. Better suited,” Kaddish said, “than sitting on the Sephardi’s head. He was a good man.”

“He was a pimp and a murderer and a thief like all the rest.”

“How would you know except if I’d told you?” Kaddish pushed Pato aside and took out the heaviest hammer. He set the chisel against the slab at a sharp angle and set his feet wide apart. He didn’t want to make too great a noise but raised up his arm and struck with force. The blow took all of
Babak
away. With the name freed, a stink filled the air, a fetid odor that made Kaddish turn his head. It was there and then gone, like tracking a burst of sound. He struck again, and with the chip came the smell.

“You’ve stirred him up,” Pato said.

“Nonsense,” Kaddish said. “It’s the stink off the stone.”

“You’ve unleashed something. You’ve finally done it. You let loose the pimping stench of the dead man’s deeds.”

The whole office consisted of two rooms. Lillian and Frida shared the central area and Gustavo had the back. In the central area, two extra desks faced the ones in use, ready for the new hires that Gustavo never made. Lillian and Frida’s work spilled over onto those desks, as is natural. A visitor to the office could only assume that Gustavo had in his employ a staff of four. No one was ever disabused of this notion.

Lillian had started as Gustavo’s secretary and over time he’d taught her the business. She’d learned it, mastered it, and finally turned Gustavo into the man of leisure he’d always wanted to be. He lunched with his favorite accounts and wooed new clients, neither of which took that much time. To fill it he played golf every Wednesday, and on Monday mornings he swam and then took a late breakfast at the Equestrian Club. He’d brought in Frida a decade ago to answer phones and manage the office and to assume all administrative duties from Lillian. And from this promotion, Lillian had kept her chin up for the last ten years.

Gustavo rubbed a palm across the top of his head, smoothing and resmoothing his hair. “We’ll count it against your vacation,” he said, and gave Lillian a smile. Lillian had saved up a thousand early afternoons and still sounded apologetic in asking. She knew Gustavo took advantage and that without her he was lost. But since Gustavo knew that as well and was sometimes cowed by it, Lillian saw his selfishness as a harmless personal flaw.

Lillian kissed Frida on her way out and walked quickly toward home. Despite her rush, she paused outside a bar to watch a street performer play. Two men drank beers at a sidewalk table, and the musician sat at their feet on an overturned crate, his hat on the ground at his side. He played the guitar beautifully. Lillian rested her briefcase on an empty chair, listening with the men until the owner came out and told the musician to move on. “Take it into the subway,” he said. “They’ll adore you down there.” Lillian dropped all her change into the hat and walked off. She arrived at the apartment well ahead of the workmen coming to install the door.

She made the two workmen maté before they’d even thought of a break. Then she set out her files on the kitchen table, slipped on her half-glasses, and set about her business as on any other day. When they called for her, she straightened her skirt and went out, handing the older of the two the tip. Lillian took a good look and decided they were brothers. The younger one lifted the old front door as if it were made of cardboard, flimsy thing that it was.

They left and Lillian locked her new door behind them. She felt secure and she felt relaxed—partly because she had the apartment to herself and partly, guiltily, knowing no one could get in. It was the first time in her life that she was alone in a house, the only one holding the key.

She went back to her files, waiting for that first knock. When it came, she was on her feet, ready to face Kaddish and explain how and why she’d paid a fortune to buy a door for an apartment they didn’t own. She peered through the peephole at the bubbleheaded man outside. It was her neighbor Cacho from across the hall. It’s never who you think.

“This is really something,” Cacho said, when Lillian let him in. He
stuck out his bottom lip and gave the door a playful kick, as if testing the tire of a car. He ran his fingers along the frame, this time more serious, brows knit. “I’d say it’ll serve its purpose. It should safely drive intruders across the hall.” He signaled his own apartment with a tilt of the head.

“God forbid, Cacho,” she said. “That’s not my intent.”

“I’m kidding, of course,” Cacho said. He laughed to prove it and then averted his eyes. Lillian’s gaze followed Cacho’s to the small scalloped shelf mounted on the wall behind the door. Her mother had carried it from Europe, and it was the only keepsake Lillian had taken from her old life when she’d left to marry Kaddish. It’s where they left their keys. The new ones rested there. They were large curious things.

“I’d have broken in myself if I knew you’d go to such lengths to protect what you had.”

“Yes,” Lillian said. “Great treasures. And I worry that someone will run off with my Kaddish in the night.” Lillian ushered him out and then leaned back against the door, feeling it twice as thick.

It took her a long time to relax again after Cacho left, but when she did the calm felt deeper than before. She made herself tea and cooked dinner for one, assuming Kaddish and Pato would miss it. Then, utterly unlike her, she stretched out on the couch to watch television. She turned the volume low. She adjusted the pillows and wiggled her toes, and, as she had seen Kaddish do on a million nights, she let herself fall asleep fully dressed, one foot on the floor.

Kaddish sent Pato upstairs with the tools, and for the first time that night his son was happy with the arrangement. Pato was glad to be rid of him and Kaddish knew if he raced up to the apartment right then, Pato would already be safely ensconced in his room, headphones on and needle dropped.

Kaddish had kept on across the narrow lobby, past the stairs and the elevator and through another door onto a crumbling patio. A Moorish tile bench ran along one of the building’s walls. Because of this, Kaddish referred to that space as the courtyard, though to the rest of the building’s
residents it was the bottom of the air shaft and nothing more. Kaddish leaned back against the wall and smoked a cigarette. It was the highlight of his day.

He watched the shifting lights from the apartments and the eerie shadows thrown by the laundry overhead. He could see his underwear drying on the highest line and Mrs. Ordóñez’s gigantic bloomers hanging below them, waving in the breeze as if she were trying to signal her surrender. Kaddish had sat out there at all hours, and there was always life in that building. Beyond the lights there were the noises, general and specific, the telephone rings and barking dogs, the nightmare yells and late-night fights, all the wafting farts and flushings.

Kaddish walked back into the lobby and just missed the elevator. A neighbor was getting home late. He rounded the first landing and the hallway lights went off, leaving him in the dark. He grabbed the banister, gave himself a pull, and took the last flights in blackness.

He fished out his keys. He reached for the keyhole and—accompanied by the sound of metal against metal—discovered that there was no hole to be found. Kaddish ran the backs of his fingers against the door, ran the key along it to catch the lock’s edge. He fumbled for the button to the hallway light (the switch had long ceased to glow). Squinting now, half blinded, he looked back down the stairs and then up toward the roof. Kaddish was on the right floor—after twenty years, how could he have made a mistake? He looked over his shoulder at Cacho’s apartment, exactly where it belonged. Kaddish then faced forward and squared off. With the key between thumb and forefinger, he let his hand drop to his side. Kaddish’s home, Kaddish’s apartment, and there it was, moved out of place. There was a lock, like a heart, in the center of the door.

IT WAS IN THE SPANKING-WHITE
private clinic of the illustrious Dr. Julio Mazursky that the good doctor, looking through the window as if reading from the sky, shared with Kaddish Poznan an intimate detail or two. Kaddish, standing—not invited to sit—wrote the names in ballpoint pen on the nubbly sanitary paper that covered the examination table. The table itself was upholstered in fine leather and padded, so that in jotting down the names twice Kaddish’s pen poked through. There was a knock and Kaddish vaulted up onto the table. He planted himself at the foot end, sitting on his details, an open pen in his hand.

A nurse entered—having waited for a moment to pass but not for an answer—and there was Kaddish grasping the edge of the table, swinging his legs. The doctor looked out the window as if alone in the room, hand holding hand behind his back.

Kaddish thought this must be a popular position, that the doctor did his thinking this way, as the nurse approached him with a chart and wordlessly he took it, still not turning round. The doctor flipped a page. The nurse gave an order into an intercom mounted on the wall.

“Take your shirt off, please,” the doctor said.

Kaddish stopped his legs.

“My shirt?”

“Your shirt, yes, please,” the doctor said, with the confidence of a busy man.

Kaddish took his shirt off and threw it onto a chair.

Now it was the nurse’s turn. Looking up at him, she said, “Your undershirt as well, please.” Kaddish took off the undershirt and sat up straight. He had strong arms and shoulders. He had a gut, but it looked solid. The nurse gave it a glance and dismissed him.

“I’ll be in four,” she said. The doctor nodded to the window and the nurse left. Kaddish followed her out with his eyes, jumping from the table before the door had closed behind her.

With the particulars down, first pulling the left side, then the right, Kaddish worked the paper through the metal guide at the foot of the table. He gave it a yank, jamming all the paper to one side, and coming away with a jagged strip. He reached back and yanked off the rest, a tail of paper with the last of the names. “Fat fingers,” Kaddish said.

The offices had a commanding view and the doctor lowered his gaze to the city below, Buenos Aires spread out before him like a puzzle. Something wasn’t right. Dr. Mazursky hadn’t noticed anything on his way to work that morning. He’d walked from his house to the open car door. There was a book in the backseat that he left there for his commute. And, as he did every day, he read it as he was driven to his office, sometimes sharing a smart passage with his driver. Dr. Mazursky hadn’t been aware of anything beyond the time. He’d said, “What is taking so long?” and received the answer—“Detours, sir”—in reply. Looking down at the city he saw that the puzzle had shifted, traffic patterns switched. A great swath of empty city was visible where it should have been congested. There was too much military green and too many helicopters in the sky.

“The list,” the doctor said, “would you please, Mr. Poznan, read it back to me.”

Kaddish tried for the same tone the doctor had used, as if he were ticking off the names of a disease in all its forms. These are the names as Kaddish read them: “Pinkus Mazursky, Toothless Mazursky, Happy
Mazursky, and,” from the second piece of paper, uncrumpling the scrap in his fist (a smile and cough, acknowledging), “Pinkus ‘Toothless’ Mazursky.”