“If my wife were here, she’d say, A man who’s made so many different fortunes over the years must be able to point us toward one.”
“Actually, it’s how many you lose that matters, and I’m a fortune in the hole.” The doctor rubbed his face in his hands to wake himself up and then turned his bloodshot eyes to Kaddish. “Your expectations are too high. I’m a plastic surgeon. A specialist. I think you’re looking for the country doctor. Marital troubles and bunions and toothaches no longer come in one man.”
“No,” Kaddish said. “But you’re a stubborn hijo deputa, and they generally know how to survive.”
“Is it a pep talk you’re after, Poznan? Tell me what it is you need that I can give you. Otherwise let me fall asleep on my book.”
Kaddish took out the paper from Lillian and laid it on top of the cards.
“Jesus,” the doctor said. “Even the greedy have gotten greedier. That’s a lot of money to ask when they won’t deliver you a son.”
“Wouldn’t it be great if they did, though?” Kaddish said.
“Enough of that,” the doctor said. “We’re figuring now. Practical. What is it you can do?”
“I can get the money,” Kaddish said.
“If you had a way, you wouldn’t be here,” the doctor said, frustrated. “We need to deduce, to think from the abstract to the specific. The money is the end point, not the start. Back up in your head, Poznan. What is it they’re asking?”
“For ransom,” Kaddish said.
“Fine,” the doctor said. “And if one needs to pay a ransom, what would be the best way to get it?”
Kaddish snatched back the paper.
“Tell me what you want me to say,” he said, “and I’ll say it. If you’re hinting, I don’t know.”
“How did we end up with this government in the first place? Not the coup. The coup is like saying money when you mean ransom. The people of our beloved country, why did we let it happen?”
“Did we?” Kaddish said.
“No government can do anything to a nation when the whole nation wants it otherwise.”
“I guess, terror,” Kaddish said. “Before they took Pato, I think I’d have said it: Worse than this government was the violence and the terror. If it hadn’t touched my family, if they’d stayed out of my home, I’d say we were better off now.”
“When the rebels were running wild and making chaos, how did they finance it?”
“Kidnappings,” Kaddish said. “Kidnapping and ransom.”
The doctor leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head.
“You want me to kidnap someone?”
“I don’t want anything,” the doctor said. “I haven’t even said the word. It was your idea.”
“That’s the government’s dirty business. For me to disappear someone,” Kaddish said. He couldn’t.
“Do not confuse the two,” the doctor said. “This disappearing is an evolutionary refinement, a political variant to an industry Argentina has always held dear. It’s the junta that destroyed the kidnapping trade. They think they’re idealists, and evil always follows when people stop taking cash. It’s a capitalist truism. Beware when your leaders can’t be bought. If they really were ransoming Pato, I’d give a sigh of relief. I’d say there was hope for us all.”
“It’s too big,” Kaddish said. “I couldn’t do it.”
“Not to save your own son?”
“It’s not to save my own son,” Kaddish said.
“Your wife believes it is.”
“I was born into a house where people were bought and sold. You come from the same place.”
“It could be over in a day,” the doctor said. “It’s a simple transaction.”
“Nothing goes simple with me. To tear a hole in another family, even by accident,” Kaddish said. “A kidnapping gone wrong is murder.”
“Murder is a category of intent,” the doctor said. “You think I don’t end up with bodies of my own? They come in for their noses, their tits. I could tuck tummies, if I wanted, all day and all night. Do you think I haven’t buried ladies, mothers of small children, who only wanted a little less crinkle to their smiles? Does that sound like murder to you? Come, Poznan, such risks are part of every undertaking. People kill every day just driving their cars.”
“I really can’t risk any life but my own,” Kaddish said. “Worthless as it is, it’s all I can gamble. I don’t have the stomach for this.”
The doctor held up his hands. “I was asking, not advocating. No one is recommending that you commit a crime. I was simply making a cultural observation. If you’re after easy money, it’s my feeling that the sole resource with guaranteed value, the only thing a good Argentine won’t piss away, is family. We’ll burn down all our forests and drown ourselves in lakes of cow shit; we will rape this blessed land of plenty until we’ve squeezed out every last peso and not give a fuck. But for sisters or sons, for our dear mothers, a ransom will be paid.”
The doctor turned toward the fire. Kaddish followed his gaze and both stared at the logs, at the flames dying down and the fitful burn to the coals.
“What is it, then,” the doctor said, “that your delicate constitution can handle?”
Kaddish stared, Kaddish thought.
“Cemeteries,” Kaddish said. “Bones.”
The doctor knit his brows and, considering, nodding slowly, he brightened up. He reached across the table and gave Kaddish a good solid pinch on the cheek.
“Where else but in Buenos Aires would such an idea make sense?”
Kaddish shrugged. He wasn’t sure any idea had been proposed.
“Well done,” the doctor said. “In this city the dead are worth more than the living. In Buenos Aires bones will work just as good.” The doctor smiled a warm, almost loving, smile. “Here bones can be ransomed too.”
[ Forty-six ]
HOW IS IT THAT A MAN who’d strolled down Avenida del Libertador countless times did not once in his life end up visiting the Cementerio de la Recoleta, a treasure in Buenos Aires and one of the most famous in the world?
For Kaddish, it was a sense that he’d had since boyhood. It was a matter of pride. He didn’t need to see how much better the dead lived than the living. He had no reason to pay any notice to the opulent city they’d built within that cemetery’s walls. The tops of the soaring monuments and mausoleums were enough for Kaddish. With a wall between himself and the rest of the Jews for most of his life, Kaddish had always felt he should be allowed his own graveyard to deny.
When the doctor had asked Kaddish, “Whose bones?” the answer was at the ready. The general was the first person Kaddish mentioned; when that garnered no reaction, Kaddish suggested the wife.
“There’s a fortune behind her,” the doctor said. “You couldn’t pluck a better name from the society pages if you tried.”
“Her father’s dead. He’d have a grave in this town for sure.”
“Now I believe you haven’t been to Recoleta. Everyone in Buenos Aires knows that crypt. This is high profile, Poznan. If you don’t get killed doing it, it’s turning into one hell of an idea.”
“You think this can work then?”
“If you’re going to do such a thing, I don’t think you could dig up a better man.”
Kaddish swung his stiff leg forward in a counterclock step. He held one hand to his chest, as if his heart might go, and the other to the small of his back, as if it too might fail him and was causing great pain.
He stayed close to the wall even in darkness; he hung in the shadow when the moon broke cloud.
A healthy man (more or less). The chest, the back, the gimpy step deceiving. Back in the Benevolent Self shul, Kaddish had pressed a shovel face to his chest and a pick head to the small of his back, girdling them as best he could with a canvas sack. He’d given his steel chest a knock, remembering a tough guy’s youth. Then he’d slid the wooden handle down a pant leg—clutching the grip between arm and ribs like a crutch—before buttoning it a
ll up under his shirt.
Kaddish was out after bones, aristocratic bones made hard on heavy cream and caramel and coddled unbroken through brittle age. He wanted well-behaved picture-perfect bones that would lie like an anatomy-class skeleton in their coffin and clink like castanets when poured into his sack.
Moving away from the Iglesia del Pilar and sneaking in between the trees along the cemetery’s outer wall, Kaddish looked for a place to enter. When there was enough streetlight or moonlight or headlight from a car going by, he caught glimpses of the bits of statue and mausoleum that stuck out above the wall. He saw outstretched wings and haloed heads. There were many raised fists, holding aloft crosses and laurels and giant bronze swords. Kaddish stopped alongside a barechested lady who looked inspired and sturdy and like she might support him on his way down.
Kaddish reached into his shirt and slid out the wooden handle that had hobbled him. In the night, by the cemetery, it looked as if he were pulling some central structural bone from his own chest—as if, with its removal, he would collapse into a pile of ribs and limbs, clinking (as he’d imagined the skeleton would) to the ground.
If there had right then been a guard roaming near, Kaddish’s caper would have been finished before it began. For all the effort he made disguising himself, hiding his tools, and limping along, he made a ruckus clambering over the wall. There was grunting and huffing and more than one curse, drowned out by the wooden handle hitting and the shovel face clanking when he dropped them down. His chisel tumbled from a coat pocket along with the flashlight, which didn’t break (all Kaddish needed was to do this in the dark). While he reassembled himself on the cemetery side—all except for the wooden handle, which he held like a staff—Kaddish found he was calmed by the sloppiness of his crossing. If there was room for one error, maybe the night would forgive a few more.
The first thing that overtook him was the presence of all those Gentile dead. This was not his cemetery. When a cat’s eyes glinted as it slinked by and there was a distant creak and lonely whistle as the wind blew through, it all seemed loaded with meaning, as things must, Kaddish decided, when one is in a foreign cemetery to rob a grave.
Kaddish took out his flashlight and did not, as at the Benevolent Self, keep it cupped in his hand. He couldn’t resist—with a sense of jealousy and wonder—seeing this glorious city in the center of his own.
Knowing the cemetery’s boundaries hadn’t prepared Kaddish for what he found within. In the rashness with which he’d steeled himself and embarked on this plan, he hadn’t dreamed of what it would be like to face an avenue that stretched into the distance and was lined on both sides with tombs.
He set off down an alley of smaller monuments. It opened onto a broad thoroughfare edged with memorial statues, the flashlight’s beam spilling past to light stained-glass windows and reflect off polished stone. Kaddish considered that he might not find the bones that night with nothing to guide him but a name.
The monuments were more castle than crypt and the statues often so lifelike Kaddish experienced a feeling he’d thought lost to him—a regular graveyard fright. He even screamed once when his flashlight lit on a muscled back, a lone figure of a man in the middle of the lane. The figure was frozen in a crouch, a statue dropped down to one knee atop the single modest grave Kaddish had seen. He then turned down a peaceful tree-lined avenue that, he noted, its residents never roamed.
When Kaddish passed the tombs of the revolutionary heroes and the Guerreros del Paraguay, it was the kind of history he’d expected. What surprised him was the personal history and the great flurry of memory that came with it when he saw President Yrigoyen’s name. He would have sworn that his mother’s burial was the only funeral of his childhood. Seeing the grave, Kaddish remembered standing in the rain alongside his mother as the coffin of the president was driven by. He had so few memories of his mother, Kaddish couldn’t figure—so precious—how he’d lost this one: the rain, his mother’s skirt, the president’s coffin, and a parade. Talmud Harry always called Yrigoyen the last good man. He’d say, “We are fucked as a country from here on in.” The statement had held true.
Among the giant monuments there were a few, as one would expect, that stood out, dwarfing the others in size. Kaddish used them as beacons, navigating by them like stars. There was one tomb the size of a chapel, with a statue of, Kaddish felt, great beauty rising from a domed roof. It was initially his farthest marker, the statue no more than a solid black line sticking up in the distance. Kaddish had thought it was an obelisk, and then, as the night drew on and he drew closer, the statue came into focus. It was a Jacob’s ladder with an angel perched on top and cherubs somehow flying, literally circling above.
The nearer he got, the more confused he became. Whatever alley he turned out of, whatever avenue he chose, Kaddish found, in orienting himself, that the statue was facing his way—so that walking south, he was sure he’d gone north, and righting himself he’d be convinced the Iglesia del Pilar, forever east, now faced west. It was an illusion, Kaddish found, a four-sided statue, with four sleeping Jacobs at its base, and four ascending angels mounted face-to-face, their wing tips welded, so it appeared that they were stepping off the top rung into the sky.
Kaddish would forever say he knew this was the grave he was after, that the statue had beckoned him all night, a sign. Of course, if this were so he might have gone straight to it instead of gawping and gaping while he circled, lost for hours.
There was a brass plaque set into the mausoleum’s front wall. Kaddish brought the flashlight up to it, and when he saw the name he’d been searching for, it felt to Kaddish ordained, nearly religious—the mission felt right. What he could not believe was that it was the only name there. Such a huge mausoleum must hold more than one body inside.
Kaddish slipped on a pair of gloves and touched his fingers to the name sticking up in relief. It was a beautiful cast. The raised letters, each one ridged, stuck out a solid centimeter.
Kaddish tried the double doors without real effort, knowing they’d be locked. He slipped his chisel in the gap between the doors, rocking it in place against the bolt and—the only real noise he’d made since clambering over the wall—he hammered and hammered until the bolt gave way. He waited outside to see if any alarm had been raised. Hearing nothing but a distant bark, Kaddish opened the doors and quickly closed himself inside.
With his flashlight pointed straight up at the domed ceiling, and before he’d gotten his bearings, Kaddish was convinced that the mausoleum was ten times larger than it looked to be from outside. The doors he stepped through seemed tiny upon consideration. He couldn’t remember—an instant before—if he’d bowed his head to get in.
Taking a step forward there was a rasp, along with the sensation of sinking, as a flagstone settled under Kaddish’s weight. The echo built on itself and the sound picked up, growing louder and louder before fading away.
Kaddish moved forward and back, planting his heel, testing the sound, and calming himself (he wasn’t sure against what) with the thought, It’s only the drop and rise and rasp of loose stone. He aimed the flashlight at his feet. He circled the whole room, with that echo rolling back at him after each step. Weather was all he could come up with. Only weather that finds more energy before petering out. Then he came up with longing and loneliness and, feeling himself turning maudlin, Kaddish—annoyed—shook it off. Like the four-faced statue crowning the roof, it wasn’t anything but an illusion, a trick of the room. Kaddish battled the same feelings nightly when he slept under his pew. These hallowed halls and holy places were all erected to make us seem small, so that we should always feel as if we’re in the belly of a whale. It was nothing more than a geometry applied so one couldn’t help but turn inward, to fear God and fear death.
More importantly, Kaddish hadn’t found a place to dig. He feared, right then, another plan gone wrong. What if this whole massive monument was built because there was no body? What if this man had suffered a fate similar to his son’s?<
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Kaddish turned back toward the doors and began to scour the walls centimeter by centimeter, wondering if, as at the general’s house, they’d built a servant’s entrance behind which the coffin was hidden, a butler mummified along with it to serve in the world to come. What Kaddish found unfolding before him was a mural covering the walls. It was, he thought, a twisted history of Argentina. The family had built itself a pyramid painted in nationalistic style. There were bodies and babies and heaps of people clawing and climbing over each other toward some totalitarian ideal. There were mothers nursing and old people dying and funeral pyres burning so that Kaddish, picturing the man cremated and sprinkled over his oyster beds, again worried that he’d find nothing that night. Pointing his flashlight toward the ceiling, he saw now that the gray was mottled, it was part of the painting: a sky blotted out with smoke. Passing the light’s beam over it as he’d done with the floor, the gray gradually brightened into the purples and oranges of dawn. Breaching these colors from the side walls were horns of plenty and overfed cattle, smokestacks floating above assembly lines, missiles flying and military men saluting below, all the signs of prosperity and might. It culminated on the far side with an enormous sun painted half on the ceiling and half on the wall. At the base of this giant sun, in the middle of that back wall, was an alabaster panel, marbled through with pink. It was so fine and delicate a specimen that, in the light, it was nearly transparent, so that Kaddish could separate out the veins in front from those spreading behind. The name was chiseled in the panel’s center and four brass bolts held it to the wall, each one rounded and smooth. Kaddish couldn’t figure how they’d been screwed into place or how he’d pull them free.
2007 - The Ministry of Special Cases Page 33