The Ministry of Special Cases (9 page)

“Polish,” Kaddish said. “It’s the name of a town.”

“You don’t look like a Pole.”

“Not my father’s name,” he said.

The soldier seemed satisfied with that. He straightened up, motioned with his chin to the soldier with the raised gun. The soldier lowered the barrel and moved aside, and for no reason he spit on the hood of their car.

Lillian shifted in her seat so she could stare at her son.

She found him watching his father, staring at the back of Kaddish’s head. She could see in the way Pato looked at him that he’d rather have been shot right there on the road than cry his way to safety. He was embarrassed and he was angry and she wondered, too, if he might be in shock. Pato blamed his father for it all. Considering why they were in the car right then, maybe there was a trace of that feeling in Lillian too. Maybe that’s where Pato found a vote of support for vengeance and that’s why Lillian didn’t stop him, why she let her son unleash a tirade
more serious than the ones he’d long trained on his father. Pato went at him as soon as the car made a little headway in the traffic. “You’re lazy. You’re a failure. You’ve kept us down. You embarrass us. You cut off my finger. You ruined my life.” In the grand Jewish tradition of the
dayeinu
, it was a list of his father’s deficiencies, each one building on the last. And central to the form is the notion that each accusation, if that had been Kaddish’s only shortcoming, still it would have been enough.

Lillian hadn’t gotten involved at the start and chose to stay out of it now. She took another glance, though, and saw Pato looking her way while he laid into Kaddish. Pato was testing her as well, feeling out his mother to see if she’d allow such an unbridled assault. He wanted to see if she’d let him go at his father with all that he had.

It was between them, is how she saw it. Though it wasn’t just. It was between the three of them, between a family—the same one the soldier had studied over the end of his gun.

Unwise in the ways of the world, Pato didn’t yet know his own strength. The only thing he was expert in was his father’s weakness.

Kaddish told the boy to stop. He yelled at him to stop. Pato continued long enough for Kaddish to give up his yelling and go silent, and then—Lillian tried to deny it—Kaddish drove on, weeping even more loudly and woundedly than Pato had. Kaddish cried and drove and wiped his eyes on a sleeve. Lillian understood that it had gone too far and decided to bring it to a halt.

She was really about to when Kaddish pulled the handbrake, stopping their lane completely, and, engine running, got out. “Too much,” he said, through tears. He then wove on foot across that wide and beautiful avenue he’d been admiring. He maneuvered the lanes, slapping at the hoods of cars, directing himself out.

She and Pato sat dumbfounded, thinking Kaddish would turn back. Kaddish’s keys were in the ignition, his ID still on the dash. When he didn’t, Lillian got out of the car and walked around to Kaddish’s side. She sat down in the driver’s seat and pulled Kaddish’s door closed.

“Should I get in front?” Pato said.

“No,” Lillian said. He shouldn’t get in front. He should stay right where he was in the back. Right where children belong.

“
DO YOU DROWN IN YOUR DREAMS?
” Dr. Mazursky said. “Do you die in your sleep?”

Kaddish did. The nightmares were vivid and he roused Lillian with his starts. Still only half-conscious in her waking, he never needed say more to her than “Bad dream.” With that, Lillian would sleep.

“Hands round the throat,” Mazursky said, pantomiming. “Do you wake up struggling to pull them free?”

They took their dinners together in relative peace: Lillian and Pato and Kaddish, all casting blame. The stitches were out and Kaddish’s heart broke every time he saw that raw pink fingertip, covered in tight skin. It really wasn’t much shorter than the rest, and barely noticeable. If one was looking for it, if the boy held his fingers to his lips, one might see. Kaddish couldn’t keep his eyes off it. When Pato caught him staring, he’d always ask about his share.

“Where’s my cut of the money?” he’d say. “When do I get my split?”

“It’s on its way,” Kaddish said, never giving him a day or telling him an amount. During one dinner, holding up a bowl of peas for his son, Kaddish said, “I have a meeting with the doctor on Friday.” When the
doctor pushed the meeting off until after the weekend, Kaddish told Pato he’d canceled it himself. “I tell you, this house will soon be overflowing with cash.”

Kaddish had come to collect. He’d found the doctor at his clinic, somber and lacking good cheer. The nurse who’d barged in the last time led Kaddish to the same examination room as before. He didn’t sit up on the table when left to himself; he stood in front of the mask brought back from the doctor’s travels and wondered what all the patients waiting for new faces thought of such a thing—and if the doctor had thought about it himself.

When the doctor arrived, the two of them took the same positions as when they’d closed the deal. They stood at the foot of the table and the doctor stared at Kaddish’s nose.

He brought down the steel bowl of an adjustable light and took Kaddish’s chin in his hand. There was no surprise, just, again, his slow doctorly reaching. He turned Kaddish’s chin this way and that in the light.

Kaddish couldn’t figure what it was in the doctor’s reach—the confidence or boundarylessness, the entitlement to touch—but it made him ashamed of the way he’d snatched at his son. Kaddish took the man’s hand from off his chin and did not immediately free it, but with steady grip (and still steady pulse) lowered it for the doctor to the doctor’s side. He did not like that the doctor knew how he dreamed.

“It’s just,” the doctor said, “your fee. I don’t keep such sums in my office. It’s a lot of cash to have around.” He smiled. “You must understand?”

“Not very well,” Kaddish said. “You’d think exactly such a sum might be here waiting when you knew I was coming to get it.”

“Next Tuesday night. Come to my house. That’s where my safe is, and your money.”

“It sounds like a very complicated combination if it takes a week to open it.”

“Not a week to open. But a week to find the right amount inside.”

.   .   .

The doctor’s private study was all heat. Wood and heat and low to the ground. Hatchet-marked beams pressed down from the ceiling, bucket chairs with leather buttons kept guests close to the floor. The fireplace was empty. Three birch logs, peeling back on themselves, sat out next to the andirons.

Kaddish had waited patiently until Tuesday and come out to the doctor’s fancy house in his fancy neighborhood expecting to be paid. He’d imagined it all week and didn’t think the doctor would really open a safe in front of him, cupping a hand around the dial. What he’d imagined was a desk just like this one, at least the formality of it. And he’d also imagined a drink (that hadn’t been offered), the fake camaraderie of it, and then an envelope fat with cash, not handed to him but slid slowly his way.

The doctor was already harping on the same questions from his office the week before. Was there congestion; was there choking: “Do you feel as if your heart forgets to beat?”

Kaddish was seated lower than the doctor and looking up at him across a deep wooden desk, looking beyond at the oil painting behind him on the wall, he saw them: four horses flying across a field with jockeys on their backs.

He still wouldn’t tell the doctor about his sleeping, but those horses on the wall were enough to get his heart to skip a beat now. In the next thump, with the tock and retick of it, an adjustment in Kaddish’s rhythms was made. Kaddish felt awake. The droopy-eyed warmth of the room no longer affected him. And, more important than awake, he was aware. He’d been down and out too many times not to see where this was headed.

Kaddish recalled the picture from the other office, the frame leaning against the wall. A horse with a hunter saddled on its back. He knew he wasn’t getting paid today. The doctor wouldn’t be pulling open any drawers; no envelope fat with cash would be pushed his way. A gambler. It hadn’t crossed Kaddish’s mind. And Kaddish knew why. He’d been too impressed by the name he was being paid to protect.

The doctor asked finally, “Do you snore?”

“Do I snore?” Kaddish said, his patience worn down.

“Yes, when you sleep.”

“To wake the devil,” Kaddish said.

“I think, from the size, from the width of that bone—your nose does not break, does it, when hit in the face?”

“This is not about the width of my unbreakable nose—though it’s true, I’m quite proud, it withstands. It’s about money for a job well done.”

“A job well done indeed. And that’s what I want to talk about. This
is
about your nose actually. This meeting is about that big fin of a kosher nose.”

Kaddish was less offended than confused, trying to figure out how, when he was trying to puff himself up, he was losing so much ground. Kaddish leaned farther forward as the doctor melted back into his chair, unimpressed. Kaddish did his best. “This meeting is not about anything but getting paid.”

“There is no money,” the doctor said, matter-of-fact. “I promised you a fortune to erase my father’s name because that’s what the service was worth to me. Now I don’t have a cent to give you for your fine work.”

“How can you not have any money? You’re a goddamn legend of a plastic surgeon in the land of limitless plastic surgery.” Kaddish’s voice was all desperation. “There isn’t an adult left in this country with an original part. I passed a dog on the street today that had its ears clipped.”

“They do that with certain breeds. Tails as well. The tails are docked.”

Kaddish raised an eyebrow. He took hold of the edge of the desk.

“I thought I was protecting your good standing. Where are all the millions? Sell something from that clinic of yours. Take another picture off the wall.”

“You were hired to protect the name, exactly that. And why do you think an assault on my very good name is feared?” He gave Kaddish a moment to answer. “Because there’s nothing behind it,” the doctor said. “I’ve lost it all. If I was at my best, I wouldn’t need help from you.”

“Horses,” Kaddish said.

“Among other things,” the doctor said. “A special love for the horses. But a fine résumé of other interests.” The doctor shrugged. “You’re not
the only one with a taste for high risk and bad business. Lately it’s been football, if you want to know where your money went. There was no intent to defraud. You were going to fix me from the outside and our national team was going to fix from within.”

“But I did my part,” Kaddish said.

“That’s not in dispute. It’s the national team that didn’t do theirs. I had a fairly gargantuan double-or-nothing in place for Poland. And the upside for me was the chance to owe nothing.”

“But they won,” Kaddish said. “What more were they supposed to do?”

“Lose,” the doctor said. “They could have managed that. It was an away game on the day of a coup. What kind of national team, playing in a foreign city, when there is chaos at home and their loved ones far way with that on their shoulders and evenly matched, who pulls it together to win on such a night? What kind of disconnect does it call for?”

“The blue-and-white sort, it seems. The magic of
la Selección.”

“There’s something wrong in this country,” the doctor said. “Something in us has gone dead for that to be possible.”

“You could have told me the same last week.”

“Every debt can be doubled. I made a wager on Atlanta. I thought, Who better than an Argentine team with some Jewish blood?”

“So when do I get paid?”

The doctor straightened himself up and leaned across the table, his face very close to Kaddish’s, who was already leaning in. “Tell me this. Look objectively. Am I a handsome man, Mr. Poznan?”

“No,” Kaddish said. “You are an unattractive man.”

“Good, good. This is my point. I spend my days changing people’s appearances but no one asks why I haven’t changed my own. It’s more than the shoemaker going barefoot. It’s because only failure comes out of it. The work that I do is futile. I’m a failure before I start.”

“Instead of paying me I’m getting a lesson that will send me out of here more satisfied than if I had been paid.”

“I will send you out feeling more than satisfied and more than paid. I promise.”

“More than paid?”

“Feeling it,” the doctor said.

“Do you know what this job cost me?” Kaddish said. He raised his voice. “Do you know what I already can’t get back? An injury. My son lost a finger doing this.”

The doctor thought for a second, then said, rather brightly, “Do you want me to put a toe there? Fingers can be traded. It works very well with the thumbs.”

“It was only the tip,” Kaddish said. And, holding his hand up in the doctor’s face, he wiggled the corresponding digit.

“No, nothing for tips. In that case there’s nothing really to be done.”

“There’s one thing. You can pay me what you owe. You can send me home with the money we need to live. I’m afraid of being put out onto the street,” Kaddish said. He looked around the room. “Being ruined doesn’t seem to hamper your quality of life.”

“Have you been to the misery towns on the edge of this city? There is a necklace of poverty that chokes Buenos Aires tighter every day, and I can swear to you, Poznan, the
porteños
in those shanties would think your rock bottom looked mighty good too.”

“Money, Doctor. I want what I’m owed.”

“I’ve got something better,” the doctor said. “I’ve got something that can fix us both. Until you, Poznan, everyone who came into my office was trying to repair something inside when they asked me to fiddle with the out. But you, my fake patient, are the chosen one. Now follow me here, Poznan: It’s not a matter of how far an ear sticks out from the head and how close I pin it back. The failure has nothing to do with my more than prodigious skills. It’s that the person is so bothered by a healthy hearing ear that she’s willing to risk death under my care to have it pinned down. No matter how superior my work, I can never get it close enough. As ridiculous as it sounds, those ears stick out in the soul.”