The Ministry of Special Cases Read online

  “That’s touching,” Kaddish said. “It fills me with hope. Now if we focus on the more immediate and pressing matter of your failure to pay how do you get out of your debt to me?”

  “Through your nose,” the doctor said. “That’s what I’ve been driving at.” He pulled open the drawer as Kaddish had hoped. He pulled out a hand mirror and pushed it Kaddish’s way. “Through that horrendous ax of a nose.”

  “Aside from the insult—”

  “A point, yes. This is the better-than-paid part. This is where I change your life. The nose, I admit, is likely one of a kind, but your symptoms are a medical cliché. A deviated septum, for sure. Trouble sleeping, I’m absolutely convinced. That’s likely from the size of that neck, but, I’d put money on it, it’s got to be aggravated by that tumor you’ve been breathing through. You must wake, I bet, a thousand times a night. The airflow stops, the heart freezes for a beat. It’s in those frozen moments that the dangers lie. It could be fatal at any time.”

  “Fatal? And you can fix that?”

  “Take up the mirror.” The doctor pushed it another centimeter. Kaddish picked it up. “Look at yourself. Look at that monstrous thing. I can take it down a few sizes. Lighten your load. Let me correct the medical malady and make you handsome to boot.” Kaddish looked at his reflection, turning his head from side to side. Handsome—he’d thought he was. He put the mirror down.

  “You said it’s always a failure. You said, even with plastic surgery, it can’t work.”

  “I said, until now. I said, in my experience it will always be imperfect even when made perfect.”

  “So why offer?”

  “Because I came to you. You live with enough nose for ten men and yet you accept your deformation. I’ve never met anyone less self-conscious.” It’s the doctor now who raised his voice nearly to a yell. “In you, my friend, is the possibility of success. You have the flaw without the failing. A pure specimen.”

  Kaddish considered the offer. He picked up the mirror again, studying his own nose as had the doctor, taking in what he’d thought was its regal length with the regal and unfamiliar background of the study wall and the empty fireplace behind him. It doesn’t take much to convince a person of the negative when he’s studying his own features and the idea of deformity has been put into play. It helps when a doctor of renown has made the diagnosis. Horrendous, the doctor had said.

  Scrutinizing himself in the mirror, Kaddish was pretty sure his nose wasn’t as bad as Lillian’s. He’d never thought—never seriously considered fixing it. It sounded vain. But if he was already handsome now, he wondered. Really, it was more about the sleeping and the saving of his life.

  “You’re honestly broke?” Kaddish said.

  “Destitute.”

  “And the breathing?”

  “Breathing, sleeping, snoring. I bet you think you have allergies that aren’t. I bet you never set foot outside the house without a hankie, forever draining that nose.”

  Kaddish didn’t, it was true. One in each of his back pockets: two clean hankies every morning, like putting on socks.

  “You could leave it at home,” the doctor said. “You may even see the world differently, attain binocular vision. Right now, you see like a toucan, turning your head to get the whole picture. We could combine the two worlds for you.”

  It was not that bad, Kaddish thought. It may have been close.

  “I’ve always been happy this way,” Kaddish said.

  At that the doctor guffawed and threw his weight back against the chair. The chair tilted with him and, just when it seemed it would flip, it righted itself, setting the doctor back where he was.

  “You can’t possibly be happy like that,” the doctor said. “The days of melancholia and black bile are over, the source of happiness finally isolated. It’s right here,” the doctor said. He poked at Kaddish’s face. “Happiness is contained in the nose. Like a diamond, it only crystallizes under pressure. In so much space”—he took another swipe—“happiness cannot form. This is why Jews, as a people, are dysthymics. In those ample noses happiness moves around like a firefly in a jar. It must be contained more exactly. One must keep it in place. Like a butterfly pinned to velvet, happiness run through. We can cure you, Poznan. We can liberate the man trapped inside the Jew.”

  “What is it worth?” Kaddish said. “How much in dollars?”

  “You said yourself, I’m the best there is.”

  “You owe me a hefty sum.”

  “And that’s quite a hefty nose. If I charge by the kilo you’ll end up paying me. It’s a fair trade.”

  “Who wants to trade anything?” Kaddish said. “I came here for cash.”

  “Be selfish then. Keep it on your face. Understand, though, from that single nose I could make many to distribute to the poor and needy.”

  “Are you even allowed to talk like that?” Kaddish said. “You’re a fucking doctor.”

  “How many patients come in and I can say nothing? It’s rare I get to be the client. You’re the professional here today. Take the deal, make me your physician, and—considering that nose—I’ll do the best I can.”

  “How about the operation in exchange for the interest you’d owe?”

  “Please,” the doctor said. It was a dismissal, not pleading. “You can’t imagine how much debt I hold. Some of the capital has got to go.”

  “Debts of my own,” Kaddish said. “We’re all feeling the strain.” He wanted to reach for the mirror again; he was sorry he’d put it down.

  The doctor had been rude, and the doctor had swindled him, but beyond that, as restitution, this was the kind of rich-person luxury Kaddish could never consider. It was an extreme indulgence offered by the best there was. Then it hit him. And he chided himself in the moment, knowing Lillian would say he was selfish and thought it too late. This was also the kind of indulgence he’d never been able to provide for his family. Kaddish took a long breath. He was feeling magnanimous, like he was finally doing something right. “My wife,” Kaddish said, “is similarly well endowed. My son, as the fruit of such a union, is blessed from both sides with the attribute.”

  “Don’t even—” Mazursky said. He waved a hand. “The whole debt and much more. You’d have to pay me.”

  “Thirty-three percent,” Kaddish said. “One third for each nose. A clean slate for the set.”

  “I couldn’t.” Mazursky took back the mirror. He returned it to the drawer.

  “That’s what I’m asking,” Kaddish said. “Or we go back to the old deal.”

  “From the old deal you get nothing.”

  “I’ll sell the debt,” Kaddish said. “I’ll hawk it to those who’d relish beating it out of you.”

  “And who do you think I owe my money to? Notwithstanding that, I couldn’t do three unbilled noses in my clinic.” The doctor paused and fixed his eyes on the middle distance over Kaddish’s head. Then he grimaced as if crunching numbers and consulting with himself. “For my fellows, for my class—if you let me do it at the hospital where I teach, it could be managed.” The doctor extended his hand and Kaddish shook it. “It really will change your life.”

  Kaddish was convinced he’d found his way out of a rotten situation and negotiated better terms. He pictured his family seated at a center table at La Estancia, laughing and pouring wine; then, after a particularly smart remark he’d made, Kaddish would fork a piece of steak up under his tiny but masculine nose. Kaddish turned the deal upside-down in his head. He tried to find an angle, something he’d missed, where it could possibly go wrong.

  When Kaddish got up to leave, Mazursky asked him one more question. “The name,” he said. “It’s really gone?”

  “From everywhere but here,” Kaddish said, and he tapped two fingers to his temple.

  “Coming home empty-handed is one thing,” Lillian said, “but to come home at your proudest!” Her dismissal would usually have struck Kaddish to the core.

  It wasn’t a restaurant, but Kaddish couldn’t have be
en any more content sharing dinner with his family. He’d brought home a celebration, right down to a half kilo of Freddo: frutilla on the bottom and chocolate suizo on top. For himself, he’d opened a good bottle of wine. “I am proud,” he said. “And it’s not empty-handed at all.”

  “No,” Lillian said. “It’s worse than empty-handed. How is it that your finest hour will leave us with less and not more?”

  “I’ve lost enough on this deal already,” Pato said. He waved his pink finger at Kaddish. “The nose stays. It’s enough what this government forces on us already; we don’t need to volunteer to make ourselves look the same.”

  “You shouldn’t even consider it,” Kaddish said. “With a nose like that, you could qualify for disability. A person could retire off such a thing.”

  “Leave him alone,” Lillian said.

  “He doesn’t have to leave me anything,” Pato said. “I want to know why he thinks it a wise idea for the whole family to go out and get a new face. Even a top-of-the-line, first-quality, next-season’s-model face.”

  “It’s a great deal, that’s why. It’s a small fortune’s worth of work. Not to mention the overhead. For you he’ll need to hire outside contractors, rent industrial tools. Let me tell you,” Kaddish said. He raised up his own accusing finger. “Princes fly in from Saudi Arabia. Fine Yankee ladies come down from New York. From Manhattan! This for the service of our doctor.” Now he whispered. “It’s said that, before she passed, he did the eyes of Evita. What is being offered is offered by the best.”

  “¡Hijo de puta!” Pato said. “The best of your sons of whores.”

  “And so what about it,” Kaddish said. He thought about slapping his son. Instead, Kaddish wiped his mouth with his napkin and then his forehead and then his face—everything short of putting it over his finger and corkscrewing it deep in each ear. Kaddish lifted but did not drink from his wine. “You cost us money if you don’t get one,” he said. “You sour the deal by a third. It’s ungenerous. It’s ungrateful.”

  “You’re a sick man,” Pato said. “Go get someone else.”

  Kaddish considered this. Maybe he could trade it for cash, or at least give a gift to one of their own.

  “What about Frida?” Kaddish said to Lillian. “Last time I was by the office I was thinking she could use a little off the top.”

  “I’m not offering my friend a nose job,” Lillian said. “It’s insulting.”

  There was an audible yelp from Pato, frustrated to an insane degree.

  “Then why aren’t you insulted? Why isn’t it rude and insulting and barbaric to offer it to you?”

  “Because we’re family,” Lillian said. “There’s a difference.”

  “No,” Pato said, “there isn’t.” He turned back to his father. “Why is it acceptable with us?”

  Kaddish looked at Lillian and then down at his plate. “Because we’re ugly,” he said quietly. “For exactly the reasons you complain about. Because we look different and this is our chance to look like everyone else, to look better than everyone else. We can, with this, fit in.”

  “You’re hateful,” Pato said. He stood up from the table. “You mangled my finger and you owe me my share.”

  “You’ll have your cut,” Kaddish said. “Maybe you misunderstood, since you’ve never done any real work. The nose jobs are nothing more than interest paid against a debt. It’s vig on the money he owes me. In the loan business, they set up such payments all the time.”

  “That’s not what you said before.”

  “Well, it’s what I meant. You think I’m stupid, Pato? You think your father would walk out with nothing?”

  Pato turned to his mother. “Do you believe him? Do you even believe a word of it?”

  Lillian pictured Kaddish’s keys in the ignition and him crossing the avenue, running between those cars. She looked at the proud face he had on now.

  “Are you telling the truth?” she said. “Did you mean he was paying the interest and then will provide us with cash?”

  “Absolutely,” Kaddish said.

  Lillian turned back to Pato. “Then I believe him,” she said.

  “The perfect couple,” Pato said. “Who would think there could be a woman so perfectly matched to such a man?”

  Pato went down the hall to his room and slammed the door. Then there was music. Loud, loud music. Pink Floyd blasting out of the speakers and through the door and down the hallway, Pato’s music from a high-end high-fidelity stereo that was bought with part of Kaddish’s payment from the Habenbergs, one of his earliest jobs. This Pato would take.

  “Everyone has a price,” Kaddish yelled into the music. Then, to Lillian, he said, “Everyone, for everything, has a value. Even for themselves.”

  “We must be worth a lot, then,” Lillian said. “For our noses alone you give away a king’s ransom.”

  “The noses are big,” Kaddish said. “I didn’t mean to say ugly. I don’t know how that word got into my head.”

  “It’s out of your mouth that’s the problem. It’s what you say.”

  “You’re a beautiful woman,” Kaddish said. “Pato is a handsome son. He presses my buttons, that boy.”

  “Since he was born,” Lillian said. “A shame you can never manage sense when he’s in the room. I’d fetch him back if I thought you could repeat that with feeling.”

  “Not worth it,” Kaddish said.

  “No,” Lillian said. “And the offer, he’s right, is insulting.”

  “My apologies,” Kaddish said. He drank from his wine.

  Lillian moved a spear of asparagus across her plate.

  “Against my better judgment,” she said. She cut the asparagus in half and raised her eyes to meet her husband’s. “Somehow I’m looking forward to my nose.”

  [ Ten ]

  KADDISH WAS SURE HE WAS CRYING but he couldn’t feel the tears. There were two steel rods up his two large nostrils, and the good Dr. Mazursky stood over him, holding their ends. The doctor pressed down on those rods and began to push across. It was as if he were trying to loosen a bolt, turn on a hydrant, as if the doctor were gearing up to turn those rods the whole way around. It was the Mazursky method he was trying, engineered for the extra-walloping nose.

  They were not up on stage as Kaddish had expected. He thought dozens of students would watch from a gallery, taking copious notes and peering through glass. There were only five students, two girls and three boys, gloved and masked and looking like children. Lillian was among them. She was also in scrubs, and, not counting the nurses and the anesthesiologist, she rounded out the audience to six.

  The doctor turned to face the students. “It’s a steady motion,” he said. Then he raised up his elbows and shoved.

  Before the operation, the doctor had come into the room where Lillian and Kaddish waited in surgical gowns. Those five children in white coats were standing behind him. “Do you want to draw straws?” he’d said. “As dexterous as I am, I can only do one nose at a time.” Lillian looked to Kaddish and gave a quick and panicked shake of her head. “I’ll go first,” Kaddish said. He kept his eyes on Lillian as he said it, making sure he’d read her right. The doctor then asked Lillian about the strength of her stomach. Fortified, is what she told him. “Then come watch me make history,” the doctor said. “A rhinoplasty like this is as serious as detaching Siamese twins. There is a chance,” and for this part he addressed the students that trailed him, “that we may lose one of them after separation.”

  Lillian watched it all until the insertion of the rods. When the doctor gave that push, Lillian turned to the side. The student beside her was up on her toes.

  Kaddish blinked quickly. At least he thought he had, the view was so wet and fuzzy, he wasn’t sure if his lids had moved. Again there was the question of tears. Kaddish still wasn’t sure if he was feeling anything, though he thought maybe his head had split in two. He felt a line up the middle of his forehead, a soft separation or something like. It made the oddest noise, so very distinct�
�an internal sound. He wondered if this was what deaf people heard, if, with the world around them turned off, they got such wonderful sound from within. It was like an egg cracking. And that’s what Kaddish saw. It was as if his eyes were in backward, peering into the blackness of his empty head, and in its very center floated a large white egg, so white as to be throbbing in its whiteness, so that against the blackness its edges seemed to glow.

  A three-minute egg floating in the middle of his head.

  When the doctor had given his quick turn, a heavy silver spoon came down into the darkness. That was the sound Kaddish heard emanating from the inside of his head: the perfect echo of spoon against shell.

  He was sure he was crying, or that blood (the egg still glowing but now red) was running from his eyes. He said something, a joke, but even Kaddish wasn’t sure what it was. Then, “Bad dream,” he slept.

  When the rods were out the doctor said, “Second nature. Like making your way into a lobster claw.” The doctor’s trusted nurse held forceps at the ready while the doctor worked his scalpel up inside Kaddish’s nose. He put out his hands for the forceps, inserted them, pinched, gave a little shake to the wrist, and pulled them back out, holding them high. “And there’s the meat—all but the butter.” He held aloft the bump from Kaddish’s nose. Lillian kept her eyes averted and felt nauseated nonetheless. The more she tried to get it out of her head, the more she saw butter trickling down.

  Kaddish was out cold but would surely have enjoyed hearing the doctor. Two peas in a pod. Both thinking of food. That is, one thinking of an egg and one of a lobster—both thinking of things that we crack open and eat.

  The doctor lifted his arm a bit higher when a student interrupted.

  “Crab,” the student said. Eyebrows arched over the mask, the doctor’s eyes darted around trying to isolate the source of the comment, as if his students were dressed this way to confound him.