The Ministry of Special Cases (42 page)

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 all 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 bare-chested 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?

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.

Considering his options, Kaddish felt hot with shame. Only a son of
a whore from the Benevolent Self would bring a shovel to such a place. How was he to know that the rich bury themselves in the walls, that they don’t touch the dirt even after they’re gone? Kaddish pulled at the panel with his gloved hands and couldn’t get a grip. Without pliers or ratchet, Kaddish tried to force the bolts out with his chisel. They wouldn’t budge. Even if they had, the panel itself wasn’t even the size of the front of a coffin. What if they’d built this place around it and bricked the body in?

Kaddish affixed the head of the pickax to the shovel handle, a wobbly affair he should have tried before. He put the flashlight in his mouth and attempted to fit the blade’s edge between the plaque and the wall. His intent was to leverage it by pressing up on the handle and delicately prying the panel away. Kaddish worked at this for some time until he’d burrowed in behind it and the pickax caught. Kaddish bent his knees and gave a good even shove.

The sound of shattering stone as the panel gave way and smashed against the floor was greatly magnified in that tomb. It was as if Kaddish had brought the whole place down around his feet. Before he dropped his pickax, before he reached into the nook to see what was inside, Kaddish felt terrible about one thing. He harked back to what the rabbi had accused him of; it was never before true, but Kaddish had finally done it. He’d vandalized his first grave.

There was a cubby cut out of that wall and in it was a wooden box. Too small, Kaddish thought. It wouldn’t even hold the remains of a child. He pulled it out carefully and placed it on the floor. Working at the top with two hands, Kaddish lifted it off with ease.

He’d found what he was after. Here was his man, disassembled. There was a skull on top and below it two hands—the man taken apart and, it seemed, lovingly and carefully arranged. Kaddish lifted out the skull, feeling its heft. He put this in the bottom of his canvas sack, and then, lifting the box and holding the mouth of the bag to its edge, it was very much like what he’d dreamed of as he poured the bones inside.

It was not yet dawn when, on the other side of Recoleta’s walls, a man—straight backed and head held high—walked along with a sack thrown over his shoulder. He carried a staff and planted it against the
sidewalk with a click as he made his way down the street. Had anyone been watching from the start of the night and seen that stiff-legged man hobbling alongside the cemetery walls, only to witness the spring in the step of our friend with the sack, our observer wouldn’t have connected that poor specimen with Kaddish Poznan, full of pride and feeling, after a lifetime of failures, that he’d finally pulled off his first get-rich-quick.

THE GENERAL’S WIFE WAS RIGHTFULLY CONFUSED
. Each night she wrote out her list for the next day on a piece of stationery with her date book open in front of her. This way she could slip it into her tiniest bag. It was late morning and she was expecting to hear from the florist. This was the call she was supposed to receive at eleven o’clock. There was no one but the servants around, and when she’d finished her grapefruit she’d used her list as a place mat, putting the bowl on top so as not to leave a ring on the side table.

With the telephone in one hand she stretched across the couch to push at the bowl with her fingertips, sliding it over until the entry marked
Florist
was revealed. It was as if she was confirming that, no, indeed, she had not scheduled for this. She straightened up, feeling irritated, and moved back toward the base of the phone.