The Ministry of Special Cases (7 page)

Pato was over at Rafa’s apartment, where he and his friends mostly hung out. Rafa’s mother had long ago decided she’d much rather accept the kids’ lifestyle and keep them home. In terms of motherly rights, she knew she lost much in the trade. They smoked pot in her living room and made out on her couch. She couldn’t get into her own bathroom or leave cash lying around. More than once she’d found some girl in her clothes, so that upon introduction the first thing she did was check what they wore.

It was not a big apartment, a touch smaller than Pato’s and exponentially so if one accounted for her father and her daughter as well as her son. The master bedroom had gone to them, where she’d fit a bunk bed and two trundles, one on each side. The room slept Rafa and his younger sister Mufi, as well as her own father, their grandfather, who’d
moved in sometime after her husband moved out. The kids didn’t think he was a bad roommate for eighty-two. He slept through anything and didn’t fight for space in the bureau that ran along the fourth wall.

Rafa was rummaging through the top drawer of that bureau, while Pato sat on one of the trundle beds. Their friend Flavia made pleasantries with Rafa’s mother and they heard Flavia laugh from the other room.

Rafa was looking for a new screen for his pipe. The last one, now discarded, kept popping out and so he’d glued it in place. It was a solution whose ramifications Rafa hadn’t considered until he’d taken a deep glue-laced hit and understood his mistake. Flavia and Pato had held him down until what they guessed was a sort of temporary psychosis had passed. Strolling through San Telmo the next morning, he’d bought them all matching rings as thanks. Rafa wasn’t sure for a number of days if how he felt in his head when he thought was how he felt thinking before.

The three of them sat on the living room floor. Rafa’s mother completed the circle, sitting on the couch. The pipe moved around. Rafa’s mother ignored the pipe and accepted a glass of Coke with a nod.

Pato thought he should call home. He was going to and then he lay back and watched the bubbles of paint on their ceiling where the rain came through.

Pato forced himself to stand and was about to ask if he could use the phone (he was the only guest who still made overtures toward manners). Instead he said, “Where’s your cigarette?”

“I don’t have one,” Rafa said. To prove it, he showed Pato two empty hands.

“You were smoking,” Pato said. “You changed your socks and then you were smoking.”

“Definitely maybe,” Rafa said, considering. Rafa’s mother gave him a little kick and he got up off the floor. The boys went back and searched the room and then Rafa remembered the screen. He pulled open his top drawer, and a little cloud escaped. “Shit,” he said, fishing out the lit cigarette and making sure his socks weren’t on fire. He put the cigarette in his mouth and they went back outside.

“You’ll burn the house down,” his mother said. “You make yourself retarded from smoking drugs. What kind of person forgets a cigarette in the drawer?”

“It wasn’t in the drawer,” Rafa said. “It was in the ashtray. Ask Pato.”

She turned to Pato and started laughing. She reached up and pinched his cheek.

“If only my own son couldn’t lie.”

Lately their stories had turned odder and more sinister. When they switched fully to politics and their conspiracy theories, Rafa’s mother would get up and leave the room. She hated when they stopped talking in front of her and always tried to excuse herself before they did. Rafa’s mother listened to this last story from the edge of the hallway, ready to move on.

“They switched out my sociology professor,” Flavia said. She was lying on the floor with her head propped against the base of the couch. She stared up at Rafa’s mother while she spoke, half looking for help and half holding her responsible,
all adults the same
. Rafa’s mother held her ground. “We were waiting around in lecture hall and he just doesn’t show. Right after the first kid stands up everyone else grabs for their bags, and that’s when this moth-eaten man comes in. He’s maybe two hundred years old. He says he’s the new professor while he’s still shuffling toward the blackboard. Then he starts reading his lecture word for word off a stack of yellow cards.”

“You sat quiet?” Rafa said.

“I didn’t talk when I
liked
the professor. It was Matalón—he screamed it out. ‘Where’s Professor Gómez?’ he yells. ‘Where’s Dr. Gómez?’”

Pato stared wide-eyed, as if he was watching this on TV.

“So what happens?” Rafa said.

“Nothing. The old guy doesn’t stop reading. And Matalón gives up, and then this other girl screams it out. And then another couple of kids chime in. And finally the geezer—he’s nearly blind, the cards are pressed up against his face—he puts them down, and looks around as if
he’s surprised to find us sitting there. He says, ‘I’m the teacher in this class.’ We all just shut up then. It was clear. The guy is our teacher now.”

Lillian was at the table in the kitchen sitting over a folder, an adding machine on one side, a cup of tea on the other. Kaddish came in and kissed Lillian on the top of her head.

“You brought home work with you?”

“When do I not anymore?” Lillian said. She was wearing half-glasses on a beaded chain. She put them on when her eyes felt tired. Lillian looked too young for them, and they complemented her in the contrast. Kaddish rubbed at her shoulders and Lillian took the glasses off and let them dangle.

There was a split lemon Kaddish had left on the counter. He fixed himself a fresh drink and stirred it with a finger.

“Where’s Pato?” he said.

“Out with Rafa, I guess.”

Kaddish raised an eyebrow. He disapproved. “That head is too big,” he said. “Too big to be of any use to anyone.”

“He’s a bad influence, it’s true. But no worse on Pato than Pato is on him.” They both smiled at that.

“It’s not so easy to keep the boy in the house,” Kaddish said. “You didn’t do so well yourself.”

“He was gone when I got here.”

Kaddish took a sip of his drink and then held it up to the light, looking through it.

“I’m going to take him out when he gets back.”

“Leave him alone, Kaddish. He hates the work. It helps no one to drag him along.”

“What helps no one is a university education. That’s what’s a waste.”

“It’s an indefensible position. You know it’s not so.”

Kaddish put his glass on Lillian’s folder and sat down across from her. “The university is the worst place to be right now. You think I don’t get it, but I do. The men who run this country are more like me than like Pato.”

Lillian laughed out loud.

“Seriously,” Kaddish said. “Angry intellectual types make them nervous. I know it, because I feel the same way. If they’re as afraid of the boy as I am.”

“You do a fine job of torturing him for someone who’s scared.”

“When a government is scared, do you think it’s any wiser? I tell you, they’re not messing around this time. Order is what they’re after, and order is being restored. They’ve got everyone working double shifts, the goon squads and the garbagemen both.”

“And that’s the night you want to sneak off into with your son? It makes no sense. You contradict yourself all the way through.”

Kaddish adjusted his legs at the table. His knee passed Lillian’s, and she moved her feet so he could extend his leg between hers.

“It’s safe for us,” Kaddish said. “Safe for people who mind their own business and dangerous for the ones who threaten them.”

“Like university students,” Lillian said, taking Kaddish seriously, thinking it through.

“Yes,” Kaddish said. “Politicals and revolutionaries and hippies and university students.” He reached across the adding machine and pressed at the keys. He liked the clicking of the paper roll.

“What about bogeymen who roam the graveyards in darkness?”

“Not even on their radar,” Kaddish said. “The only danger from that cemetery is to those who don’t protect their names.” Kaddish could see that he was losing Lillian’s attention, problems appearing in her head. “I want to give him something, Lillian. The world flips: Good people with everything, comfortable people in a flash out on the streets. To survive one must have a skill. A bunch of facts won’t protect Pato, not if he reads every book in the world.”

Lillian didn’t need to hear this from Kaddish. She knew better than him what a person could lose. Every permutation of bad fortune made it across her desk. She was also the one whose parents were both struck down by illness within the same month—her parents gone, and she’d never gotten to reconcile. Not once had they seen Kaddish with her as her husband. She couldn’t match him for sad family history. This didn’t mean she was oblivious to the hardships in the world.

“I’m taking him with me tonight,” Kaddish said.

Lillian stretched out her fingers and stared at her hands.

“That Rafa is too fast,” she said. She put her hands on the table, her fingers spread wide. She raised her eyes to Kaddish. “You should take it more seriously, who your son hangs out with. It is no good these days to mix with the wrong crowd.”

“You want me to tell him, his father with a whorehouse education? This is what strikes fear into a college boy? He didn’t listen to me when he was six and thought I was the greatest thing in the world.”

“He didn’t think it at six.” Lillian replaced her glasses and straightened up her papers. Kaddish lifted his drink. “If you can drag him to that cemetery, you can convince him of this. Anyway, he is your son. Still you should try.”

Kaddish bit an ice cube in half.

“Trying is the one thing I’m good at. When have I ever stopped trying?”

THE DOCTOR’S INFORMATION
was as good as his name. The stone read
PINKUS
“
TOOTHLESS
”
MAZURSKY
in Spanish and had an epitaph in Yiddish underneath:
Hang a scarlet cord from the gates of Heaven, as Rahab did from her wall
.

Pato dropped the tool bag and it hit with a clatter. Kaddish asked for nothing. He got down on his knees. He pulled a chisel with a crenellated end and then switched it for another.

“A toothless chisel for a toothless job,” he said. And, like a
shochet
, Kaddish ran his thumbnail along the cutting edge, searching for nicks. “An inscription half again as old as you are, Pato. Not a very long life for such a thing.”

When there was one good swing left to the job, Kaddish turned to his son and offered him the tools.

“I won’t do it,” Pato said.

“I’m pretty sure you will. You’re an easy mark, Pato. Always you say no, and always you come along.”

“Fuck you.”

“That you always say too. I’m your father, and I don’t even feel it anymore. Come, this is a big money job. Finish the name and this time I’ll give you real cash, a real cut.” Kaddish held out the hammer. “By the
looks of you, it’ll be painless—stoned out of your gourd.” When Pato wouldn’t take it, Kaddish placed the tools at his feet.

“It’s like you don’t hear me at all,” Pato said. “I won’t live your life, and I don’t understand why you’re living theirs.”

“Whose?” Kaddish said. He had no idea.

“The Jews,” Pato said. “They reject you since birth and you still play the role they gave you. A son of a whore for your own self is your concern, why would you want to be that for somebody else? Why not be done with them completely? Get out of this business and out of the neighborhood and start a new life.”

“You’ll see in time. There’s no running away,” Kaddish said. “If you do, when you’re old it’s much worse. You’ll forget your name. You’ll forget what you’re saying as the words come out of your mouth. Then, without anything left, you’ll remember who you are and you’ll find yourself afraid and alone among strangers. Better to struggle at home.”

Pato pointed up through the fence in the direction from which the sun would rise. It was almost dawn. “Why not finish before we get arrested?” he said.

Kaddish switched off the flashlight and dropped it in the bag. “Swing or we stay. We can go off to jail together for all I care.” He stood face-to-face with his son. “Take the swing and we get home safe and tomorrow you’ll have money to spend.”

“You can’t make me,” Pato said.

Except Kaddish thought that he could.

He snatched his son’s wrists and, with embarrassing ease, turned the boy around and pushed Pato down beneath him. He got in position before Pato had the sense to struggle.

Kaddish squeezed Pato’s narrow rib cage between his legs and put his whole weight on Pato’s back. He slipped his strong hands off Pato’s wrists and up around his son’s hands and, clamping down with those thick fingers, Kaddish forced Pato to pick up the chisel in one and the hammer in the other.

With all his strength, Kaddish forced Pato to move the tools in place, and with all Pato’s strength, Pato kept his father from wielding them.

“You’re insane,” Pato said.

“Swing and it will be over.”

Pato pushed one way and Kaddish pushed the other and neither one moved. “It’s a deadlock,” Pato said. “Let’s both let go on the count of three.”

“Then it wouldn’t be a deadlock anymore. It would be that you’d won. How about on three you finish chipping away at the name?”

“I know why you’re doing this,” Pato said. “I’m not going to be like you. I won’t live your life.”

“Swing,” Kaddish said. “Swing and it’s over, and you can play psychologist the whole way home.” He pressed his chin against Pato’s skull. “It’s for your own good,” is what Kaddish said.

They’d maximized their respective positions and both understood they’d arrived at the point of action. Their muscles were so long tensed there was almost a hum.

In the instant when Kaddish yanked the hammer hand back with all his might, Pato knew he’d been overpowered. His smart son, his university son, already had a strategy prepared. Stronger arm to stronger arm, he’d never defeat his father. But two hands against his father’s weaker, this he could win. When that yank came, Pato let his arm go without resistance. He let it go so limp that when the hammer reached its apex and he gave his hand a yank straight down, Pato managed to pull it free. While his father bobbled the hammer in that crucial moment, Pato moved his right hand over his father’s left, trying to free his other arm and run. Pato felt a boy’s nervousness. He nearly giggled as he peeled his father’s fingers back.