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PDF FormatAnd it is here, in his description of the moment of Pato’s disappearance, that Englander’s real talents as a writer shine through. In a paragraph reminiscent of Kafka’s The Trial, Englander’s simple, straightforward prose is at chilling odds with the surreal scene being described:
A man in a sharp gray suit walked out the door into the darkness of the hallway, a book tucked under his arm. A second man followed, two books, like dead weights, one hanging from each hand. A third and a fourth man walked out the door with Pato, Kaddish’s son, standing between them. They held him very firmly by the elbows, grasping tightly, so that his arms were bent and his hands straight in front. As he passed out of the apartment he smiled at his father, who hadn’t moved from his place by the heavy door, holding it open (needlessly) with a foot.
One immediately notices the precise attention to detail—the gray suit, for example, the most nondescript of outfits and the perfect metaphor for the opacity surrounding Pato’s arrest. So, too, does the emphasis on the weight of Pato’s books bely the absurdity of the “crime” for which he is being arrested. Then there is the drawn-out pacing, marked by short clauses whose interruption elongates the action, making the paragraph a feat of dramatic tension and suspense. Finally, by referring to Pato throughout the rest of the passage only by means of a pronoun, Englander shows that his disappearance has already been effected: Pato the individual is no more. From this moment on, he is merely another victim of a system—much like the elevator upon which Englander’s description lingers—that is machine-like in its disregard for a person’s humanity:
Kaddish heard it all clearly. He also heard the elevator gate open and the hum of the old motor in the dark, since no one pressed the button for the hallway light. The gate to the elevator slid back, teeth caught gears, and then, along with the motor, there was the click of the release as the car lowered and the five bodies started to descend.
Just as the narrative quickly shifts from the act of Pato’s disappearance to Kaddish’s efforts—heartbreakingly pitiful in their randomness—to process the event (“The second man had a windbreaker on between his suit jacket and shirt, mostly hidden, but Kaddish caught a glimpse of nylon: Red and black, Newell’s colors. Kaddish was a Boca fan”), so too does Englander seek to shift our focus from Pato to the real subject of the novel. For this is not, in the end, the story of the desaparecidos; it is, rather, the story of those they leave behind, and of the different ways in which they choose to respond to the sudden and devastating absence of their loved ones.
It is at this point that Englander’s Buenos Aires becomes a world in which answers are never granted, uncertainty is never resolved, and the quest for control over one’s fate leads to the brink of madness. Absurdity abounds, most notably at the Ministry of Special Cases, “a bureaucratic dumping ground” and the last resort for the families of the disappeared: Each morning, hundreds of numbers are given out to the people lined up outside, and although only a fraction of those will be called before the office closes, the numbers start all over again the next day. The clerks insist on a writ of habeas corpus, even though there is no body. And in a particularly cruel twist, Lillian is finally issued such a writ, only to find that it is for a girl she doesn’t know:
It was the right date and the right time. It was the right description of Pato’s abduction at the right address. All was exactly as it should be but the name.“This is a lie,” she said.“What’s a lie?” he said. It was that much more frustrating for Lillian to talk with someone who gave the impression of understanding. “You’re not saying the arrest you reported was a fake?”“No,” Lillian said.“I wouldn’t think so, because it has produced an individual. A habeas corpus has been granted you and the turnaround has been amazingly fast. Beyond that,” he said, “it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that receiving one is rare.”“It’s supposed to say Pablo Poznan,” Lillian said. “You can’t expect me to believe this girl was taken from my block, from my home. You can’t expect me to accept that I’ve lost my mind.”“I make no judgment,” he said, taking back his clipboard.
At the Ministry of Special Cases, as in Englander’s Argentina as a whole, hope leads down corridor after endless corridor, only to dead-end at yet another closed door.
Yet, in the midst of this unbearable tragedy, Englander strikes a strange comic note. The free nose jobs Kaddish and Lillian accepted (Pato refused to participate in this act of “conformity”) prove problematic: Kaddish’s new nose is strikingly handsome, but Lillian’s, done by the surgeon’s apprentice, has been botched. While she sobs in the wake of Pato’s disappearance, it gives way. The couple’s grief thus abruptly interrupted, Kaddish confronts the surgeon in an exchange that borders on slapstick:
“The kid’s nose collapsed,” Kaddish said.“The kid’s?”“My wife’s,” Kaddish said. “The kid’s work is no good. The bone-”“Cartilage.”“It’s hanging loose on her face.”“That’s a different story,” Makurzky said. And as quickly as he’d turned stern, a flash of empathy set in. He passed a coffee to Kaddish. “Was she hit?” the doctor said. “Did she walk into a wall? Frisbees-ever since the Frisbee made its way south, they break many a nose.”“Crying actually. She was upset and crying and it fell.”“It collapsed on its own?”“Came loose, more. She feels-we feel-it should be under warranty.”
Just as we prepare to share in Kaddish and Lillian’s pain, a farcical interlude derails our efforts. In the ensuing comedy, we cannot help but forget the larger—and far more important—tragedy that is beginning to unfold, and our return to it will inevitably be on a lesser emotional footing. And while Englander does attempt, however briefly, to tie the nose job debacle into the narrative of Pato’s disappearance (when a police officer, comparing a picture of Pato to his parents, insists that they cannot possibly be related, Lillian is horrified that her new nose has “erased” her one visible link to her son), the ultimate effect of this subplot is to undercut the seriousness of a novel we should, by all counts, be taking seriously.
There are other problems with the book as well, such as the noticeable absence of historical detail. Apart from the main characters’ all too brief observations of Buenos Aires’ increasingly charged climate—-Lillian sees a tank stationed in the town’s main square on her way to work; Kaddish and Pato stumble upon a young boy with his throat slit in the cemetery—and some snippets of dialogue about therapists and professors gone missing, we are offered little insight into the political upheaval that resulted in one of recent history’s ugliest episodes. Instead, Englander’s focus is determinedly narrow, revealing only that which directly affects the Poznans’ plight. True, Englander has not set out to write a historical novel. Rather, his is a philosophical work, concerned with the meaning granted to one’s past and one’s identity. But surely these things apply equally to society as a whole. How much more powerful, then, might his work have been had it permitted, through an occasional widening of scope and a closer attention to detail, an exploration of the effects of the kind of tragedy suffered by one family on an entire nation?
