The Ministry of Special Cases Read online

“Mazursky,” the doctor said, as if there had been an error in pronunciation. There was no difference to be heard. “I apologize for the variations. I wasn’t at my father’s unveiling. His associates,” and this with disdain, “his coterie arranged for the monument and its inscription. I’ve never myself set eyes on the stone.”

  The doctor finally turned. He was a plastic surgeon and Kaddish sensed that the doctor was seeing not a whole man but only the collection of faults of which Kaddish was constructed. Stopping when he caught Kaddish’s eye, a sexy eye, he’d admit, but too close to the broad bone of that horrendous nose, the doctor approached. Coming closer, he said, “A figure? How much?”

  He bent at the hips and brought his face near to Kaddish’s ribs as if something suspect had crawled into his line of sight. There was a scar there, raised and long, a childhood accident. The doctor reached out with three fingers pressed together and his thumb tucked. It was a papal gesture. He applied a little pressure, moved Kaddish a step back into better light, and did it again. He straightened up for his pronouncement.

  “That scar could be hidden.”

  “It is,” Kaddish said, “when I’m wearing a shirt.”

  The doctor didn’t miss the point. He had made Kaddish strip down. “For discretion,” the doctor said, explaining.

  “For discretion, of course. I should be thankful you didn’t go for the pants.”

  “I still might,” the doctor said, and Kaddish picked up the shadow of a smile.

  “Even a first-day prostitute keeps her shirt on until some money has changed hands,” Kaddish said. He resisted crossing his arms.

  “You were going to quote me a figure.”

  Kaddish was, but it was essential, he believed, that it be done from the right position. It is always better to be embarrassing than embarrassed.

  “If you’re really interested in scars, there is something that I’ve been wondering about.” Kaddish opted for the pants on his own. He undid his belt and dropped them to his knees when the doctor stopped him.

  “We can schedule a proper appointment,” the doctor said. “I’d be happy to see you in that context.” His eyes displayed a warm bedside manner, but he was looking at Kaddish’s nose.

  “Sure,” Kaddish said, buckling up and scanning the room. He’d had a number in mind in the waiting room, and another when he was led into this fancy consultation room with its feeling of polished surgical precision—not a bit of personality in it except for one heavy-looking mask up on the wall. An old framed print leaned against the wall below it, a woodsy scene with a man on a horse marked, in English, The Hunt.

  “Nice piece,” Kaddish said, signaling the mask and not really caring. He was figuring his sum.

  “I was in Asia fixing cleft palates.” The doctor looked at the mask and to his picture on the floor. “After months of taking nipples off and sewing them back on, the palates are a salve. They fly you over to fix the poor kids, to put their heads back right. It’s funny there. They only bring you boys.” He paused to consider his own statement, as if someone else had brought it to his attention. “I stopped in Hong Kong on the way back and picked the mask up there.”

  “Looks expensive.”

  “It’s from the New Year’s festivities. They celebrate just now. In China the new year comes late.” Again the doctor seemed friendly, and again he considered his own statement, rapt by his observations. “The Year of the Dragon and their first in forever without Chiang Kai-shek. I was lighting off firecrackers and thinking, We should be so lucky. Isabelita should choke on a bone”

  “Looks like you’ll get your wish.”

  “It’s no wish of mine. To dream of one government ending doesn’t mean you’ll want the one that comes in its place.”

  Kaddish pictured the before-and-after photographs from the album in the waiting room: mug shots of rejuvenated cheeks and chins, breasts and thighs. Taking it all into account, he doubled the figure in his head.

  Kaddish moved to the middle of the table. He wrote the number in the center of the white paper, this time careful not to rip. It was another of Kaddish’s rules: a verbal agreement, deals closed with handshakes, should always be made over figures written down. Dr. Mazursky circled to the other side, planted his hands against the paper, and, leaning in, read the number upside down and raised his head, eyes wide.

  The doctor had a wronged look about him. Kaddish couldn’t tell if he’d gone too far, so he halved the number, crossing it out and writing down the new figure. “Half off today,” Kaddish said, backing up to his initial price.

  “So much?” the doctor said.

  “So much is much less than the first figure.” And then he used the name he was being hired to save. “You’ll agree, Dr. Mazursky?”

  “It is hardly a few minutes’ work.”

  “What you are paying for is the discretion that you so prize. I provide respect for the dead and confidentiality for the living.” With some flamboyance, Kaddish tried out, “Dr. Mazursky, what I offer is a face-lift for the family name.”

  The doctor seemed to be considering. It was a considerable sum.

  “With inflation,” Kaddish said, “by the time I get downstairs, I’m already losing money.”

  The doctor stepped over to the counter. He lifted the top off a jar and fished out a cotton ball. “All right,” he said, pressing the cotton to the mouth of a bottle of iodine. “Hold still,” he said. Mazursky swabbed the iodine across the base of Kaddish’s neck, carefully painting a cut that was not there. The doctor blew lightly on the tincture. He put a plaster over the spot, the red of the iodine reaching out from underneath on all sides, and called for the nurse.

  “One more thing,” the doctor said, taking a finger and smoothing the edge of the bandage down.

  “Yes.”

  “About Toothless Mazursky. About that name in particular. My father, until the day he died, had, but for a single gold crown, a full set of teeth.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  “I am a cosmetic surgeon.”

  “A national service in Argentina.”

  “A ruckled mouth, my father would never have.”

  “A nickname is all,” Kaddish said. “It’s only a nickname.”

  “Quite,” said the doctor.

  Pulling on his undershirt, Kaddish poked his head through with a ready idea. “They were a tough bunch, the Society members. Maybe he left the other guys toothless, is what it was.” Kaddish threw an uppercut and checked it mid-swing.

  “Maybe so,” the doctor said. He was not amused.

  The nurse returned, this time without knocking. Kaddish started on the buttons of his shirt and the nurse headed straight for the table. In a practiced motion she pulled a length of paper as long as a man. The roll whistled as it unfurled, and then she zipped the paper across the metal teeth. Already in a ball—no joy on her face—she stuffed it into a garbage built into the counter. Kaddish watched his numbers disappear.

  The nurse replaced the lid on the jar. There was a chart next to the jar that didn’t have Kaddish’s real name.

  “Charge him for a biopsy and an office visit,” the doctor said. Kaddish raised an eyebrow. He pressed at the bandage on his neck and then at Lillian’s checkbook in his pocket. He didn’t currently have his own.

  The nurse looked from the counter to the examination table and back to the counter.

  “The specimen, Doctor?”

  “I’ll label it myself.”

  The streetlights were on before dark, and Kaddish wondered if they came on earlier over here. He walked along the doctor’s tree-lined street, on the fancy side of town, far from Once and his apartment and the rest of the Jews—Jews that came here to visit Dr. Mazursky because they heard the Gentiles visited him, and the Gentiles visited because they like a Jewish doctor on a high floor. A beggar sat in a doorway. In this neighborhood he looked twice as poor. Kaddish fished for change but had passed before he came up with something small. He walked on and spent the money on a Clarí
n, scanning the front page and shaking his head. Everything is coming apart around them and his newspaper runs a picture of an Uncle Sam up on stilts; the Yankees always happy to throw a party for themselves. The only thing Argentina will have to celebrate on its two hundredth anniversary is the miracle of turning back the clocks. The Stone Age would reach Buenos Aires before the future did, of this Kaddish was sure.

  There was a breeze but it only blew heat. The street was quiet and then a Ford Falcon trolled past. The driver had his elbow out the window, like he was cruising for girls. There were no plates on the car and it kept moving slowly. Two men in back both turned their heads, giving Kaddish the once-over. He crossed the street in the wake of the car and flipped his paper to the sports.

  In the United States they celebrate a bicentennial, and in China they ring in the Year of the Dragon. Kaddish kicked a bottle along the curb. Here all we get is the Year of the Falcon. A bird of prey. A Yankee car.

  [ Six ]

  AS FOUR MEN FROM THE NAVY threw a career army man from the window, he was thinking his last thoughts. A retired colonel, his uniform covered in the ribbons and medals of a military regime—all those decorations were upended along with him as the blood rushed to his head. A medal came loose and clanked against the street. A chest full of honors and what good did it do him? I should have served in the air force, he thought. Then I would have wings. With that, not even the time for a cynical upturn of the lips, he hit the Avenue of the Liberator; and along with the countless motions that make up a late night in Buenos Aires, that together are the heartbeat of any city in the world, Lillian Poznan turned her head on the pillow to have her last deep sleep before her fears turned real.

  Lillian didn’t feel the city was light one resident when she woke up. She didn’t feel, as she often did in the kitchen with her bills, that the country was united in spinning out of control. Looking into the street, she didn’t sense that there were right then a million more working stiffs in front of a million more windows, all in it together—all but the colonel, his window still open, a cat curled up on its ledge.

  Lillian had slept well. She’d woken up rested to find that Kaddish still hadn’t come home and, miracle of miracles, Pato had already left for school. She took her time getting ready. El Golpe, “The Sting,” played on the radio, and she tried to remember what theater she saw the movie in. She stood in her stockings eating a pastry over the sink as she decided on the Beta—the Beta on Lavalle.

  Lillian waited for the old cage elevator that ran up the center of their building like a spine, the staircase snaking around it. She waited with a hand on the gate, one knee locked and one knee bent, to compensate for the weight of her briefcase.

  The door to Cacho’s apartment opened. Her neighbor was still in his pajamas and had a worried look on his face. He scratched furiously at one of his eyebrows, and because of this Lillian noticed that the other one was chapped and red.

  He was an early riser, a militant in his lifestyle. She’d never before seen Cacho in his bedclothes, never with a wrinkle in his shirt, even at the end of the day. She’d always felt he must keep an iron at the office hidden in his desk.

  “Are you home from work today, Cacho?”

  “Work today?” he said, and went back to scratching. “Work today,” he repeated, standing up on his tiptoes to look behind Lillian and keeping an eye on the stairs. That’s when the question turned entertaining, the best thing he’d heard in a while. Cacho gave a quick laugh. “Work today. Would you?”

  “Obviously,” Lillian said, and held up her briefcase, heavy with files.

  “It’s rhetorical,” Cacho said, almost screaming. “The question is, would you go to work if you were me? Would you go out this morning if you were me?” Lillian had never seen Cacho like this, and, waiting for an answer to his rhetorical question, he switched to the other eyebrow and she saw that on the first there was blood. He had scratched himself bloody. “If you were in my position, would you even leave the house today?”

  “I don’t know,” Lillian said. “What is your position?”

  “What does it matter? You’re already in it and still you go.” With this he dropped his hand from his eyebrow, only to throw both arms up in frustration. He retreated into the apartment and slammed the door. Lillian was so intrigued by this she didn’t notice for another couple of minutes that the elevator was out again. She had slept well. She was happy and took the stairs.

  It wasn’t long before Lillian understood the position she and Cacho were in, the one Kaddish and Pato were in, the position they all were in, especially—but not really any more especially—that their leader Isabelita was in—or already out of—that morning. Lillian was walking down Avenida de Mayo toward the Pink House and the plaza in front of it, the route she took every day. Except there was a roadblock up ahead and beyond that a tank, a tank in the middle of the city. It was preposterous, and Lillian looked to her right and her left to see if there was anyone to share this with. She saw a man going the other way who would not make eye contact, and then in an empty parking lot a little way down she spotted a Dodge pickup. In it were eight soldiers in uniform, in helmets even, crouched down, covering the directions of the compass. Three were facing her from the back end where DODGE was stamped in large letters and a pickax mounted across the name. The muzzles of the boys’ machine guns stuck out over the truck’s rear. Lillian looked behind her for the war, for the onslaught, and then again at these young boys, the kind that came knocking on the door for Pato and then slunk off with him, record albums in a stack under their arms. These boys were neater, short-haired. And they were crouched down, guns at the ready.

  A flatbed truck with a tank on its back crawled across the next avenue. Another one followed behind. These trucks, moving through the city at a speed fit only for funeral processions, lumbering along. Where is the surprise at this speed? Trouble does not break out anywhere in the world, Lillian thought. War is not unleashed. It is slowly, it is carefully, installed.

  Lillian looked toward her neat little soldiers in their parking space. It’s almost as if there should’ve been something to say. If they were not pointing guns—that is, if they were not in the military—she’d have said, There are tanks up ahead. But they probably knew that—could see them just as well as she did. Lillian turned around and went back to the last corner and took a different way to work.

  It seemed they were having a coup.

  It seemed they were having a coup, and for this Cacho stayed home to scratch out his eyes.

  Frida was at her desk when Lillian walked in. She said, before anything, “Isabelita is trapped in the Pink House. It’ll be over before it starts. A day at the most, Gustavo is saying. We’re going back to a military government.”

  “You’d think they’d have come home,” Lillian said. “Kaddish was gone and Pato off to university before I got up. Classes must be canceled. Where would the kids go?” Lillian shook her head. “When do I ever sleep late?”

  “Adaptability,” Gustavo said. He was out of his office and inserting himself into the conversation as if Lillian had been talking to him. It was Gustavo’s way of being boss, of owning everything there. He stood between them and smoothed down his hair. “We have inbred ourselves into supreme adaptability, and now it’s become a detriment. We’ll get used to this government same as the last—and if it turns on us we won’t even see it coming. We’ll go down, thinking All is well.” Gustavo said this as if the three of them were observing it from Switzerland. He spoke with a certain glee.

  Lillian nodded a thank-you and turned her back to him and said, very clearly to Frida alone, “A truckful of men point their guns at me, and still I go on my way.”

  Gustavo circled around and returned himself to the conversation.

  “After the soldiers, who else should come to work more than you? We sell insurance. Today is what we are about. It’s our big gamble. We pay out. Others pay in.”

  “And?” Frida said, dragging out the word.


  “Life. Property. All the values shift. You’ll see when things settle; much will have become precious, and many will have no worth at all.”

  Frida gave up. She asked for the advice that he’d dispense regardless.

  “So then what do we do? Sit here and wait?”

  “We get down to business,” Gustavo said. “Life and death you can’t control now. It is only profit that can be arranged absolutely during a war.”

  “Who are we having a war with?” Frida said.

  “That’s the point. Figure out the sides and begin to earn.”

  With that, Gustavo went back into his office.

  Lillian took Frida’s hands.

  “You’d think Pato—he’s very sensitive. You’d think he’d have turned back from school.”

  A glass floated above the floor, held steady by five fingers pressed, from above, around the rim. The fingers were of a hand, the hand of an arm, and the arm hung disembodied behind the back of the couch.

  Lillian dropped her keys on the little antique shelf. She dropped her purse, loudly, by the wall underneath. The glass held steady; the arm did not move. The television visible beyond the couch showed the Liberators Cup, River Plate vs. Portuguesa. The little men ran back and forth. Lillian couldn’t see the ball through the smoke, a thin gray cloud in front of the black-and-white of the set.

  Lillian approached, leaning over and kissing Kaddish on the head. He put his cigarette in the ashtray resting on his stomach and placed the glass on his chest.

  “I’ll know you’re dead,” she said, “if I ever come home and find that cloud missing or that glass knocked over on the floor.”

  “What’s wrong with ritual?” Kaddish said. “It doesn’t hurt for some things to stay the same.”

  “No,” Lillian said. She agreed.

  Kaddish sat up with his back against the arm of the couch, his legs stretched out. He moved the ashtray to the floor.

  “Crazy day,” he said.

  “Very crazy.” Lillian smiled and went to sit. Kaddish raised his legs and Lillian slipped in underneath, then patted them down. She closed her eyes and let herself relax. She listened for the music that was always on and always too loud, emanating from Pato’s room. Lillian couldn’t hear it, and that only meant headphones or a grinding needle when the boy passed out. Creatures of habit, her husband and her son. They shared a great love for the comfort of sameness.