Lies from the Attic

by Tamara Avner

  Lies from the Attic

  Tamara Avner

  All rights reserved. Copyright © 2016 Tamara Avner.

  Reproduction in any manner, in whole or in part, in English or in other languages, or otherwise without written permission of the publisher is prohibited.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  Translated from English by Amir Atzmon

  In memory of

  Lt. Col. (Reserve) Roy Ginot, R.I.P

  Proud and esteemed officer, trained in law

  Had the soul of an artist, loved and was loved

  “But love covereth all sins”

  Proverbs, 10:12

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 1

  So, shall I begin?

  Don’t mind if I do.

  If I must begin, then why don’t I open with the scene where I play the piano for him, in my apartment. He loved it. The scene, that is. The apartment too, actually. And he loved me, in that apartment and in that scene. And especially, he loved the music. I played Chopin’s waltz opus 64 number 2. What a killer. A winning horse. It’s got something downright dissolving. Music which precedes words, precedes emotions even. An axe blow straight to the brainstem, the most primordial, most primal of all the lobes. It’s like a memory capsule, the childhood memories come flooding in, the feelings we had even before we knew how or were able to express them. There they are, hiding, bare and defenseless, enclosing the writhing victim with their nakedness.

  It’s just so much better than going after their stomach, than making them dinner: Caprese salad as an opener, something hot, sautéed, for afterwards – Zucchini Béchamel, toasted eggplants in yogurt and tahini, all served with freshly baked bread and butter. Personal fruit bowl as an optional side. A little bit of whipped cream, if he likes.

  The army marches on its stomach. The way to a man’s heart is through his belly.

  Set all that aside.

  If you can play, if you can strum on your piano and you sit down, just so, so casually on the chair, making sure your profile is as long and as reclining as it ought to be, if you can improvise, if you have the virtuosity to go from the crescendo to the piano, from the tempo giusto to the tempo lento, never even glancing at him as you play – if you can do all that as a chaste Victorian maiden – then you have him in the palm of your hand. And such a spell I put on him, indeed, and he, like a moth, flew straight to the purple neon light fixed on my balcony, the very first time he came to my apartment in Rishon LeZion. Or so I thought.

  So where should I begin?

  Begin at the beginning.

  That is not, however, what I recommend to patients who are clueless as to where to start their stories. They sit there silent, hesitating.

  I don’t know how to begin, how to start, trust me, I’d rather not be here in the first place, I don’t even see why I have to, this is, this is fucking unbelievable, if this made it to the papers it would blow this entire army sky high.

  That’s when I’m supposed to say: just start wherever you’re comfortable. Even in the middle or the end, start with whatever went through your mind a moment before you came here, a moment before I entered your cell. Close your eyes, take a deep breath and just start with the first thing that comes to mind.

  And then I’ll simply stop talking. I’ll let him simmer it, Let it simmer, I tell myself, and then he will begin. Here it comes.

  But me? Oh, I’ll begin right at the beginning. At the beginning’s beginning. Who knows how long I have left to write up all this, better start right away and go through each and every step, hoping I can finish before the authorities decide that even more restrictions are in order, before they crush me entirely. So, now, I begin.

  With my childhood. No, even earlier. I will begin with the moment of inception. Hold your horses, in my case, it explains quite a lot.

  I was destined to live in the shadow cast by Zvi Israel Aurbach. Zvika. The one and only Zvi Israel who, as I wish my parents, so riddled with regret and hyped up with hope, had known at the time, was and will forever remain irreplaceable. But I – of all the shriveled up, disgruntled ova in my mother’s uterus, of all my father’s anxious little sperms, swimming terrified and obsessed to make it first and satisfy my mother’s insatiable will, to sate her unimaginable hunger – I was the one chosen to live in his stead. I was the one assembled in mother’s pain-stricken womb in order to serve as a drawn sword to ward off the yearning hunger that rears its monstrous head in the trying hours of the night, in unexpected moments through the day, at birthdays, at memorial anniversaries, when the fallen soldiers memorial day siren blares, when the holocaust memorial day siren blares, when the Shofar is blown on Yom Kippur, when the civil defense drill sirens rise and fall in alarm and then send the all-clear, when a truck pulls its emergency brakes, when a motorcycle roars down the freeway, when the clock ticks and the alarm goes off – a guided missile against the exigent ogre of yearning, who finds ample reason to rear its head at every occasion, even, maybe especially, when it is unwanted. I was the one standing at attention, heeding the call to slake the agonizing desire of Miriam Aurbach, formerly Schulweiss, for a child. It so happened that I, Rakefet Aurbach, was created through the encounter of a sweaty sperm, straining for some peace and quiet, and a bitter and angry ovum, which grabbed hold of it in one final plea for sanity, that I was conceived on some cool winter night, chosen to carry the torch of Zvi-Israel, a.k.a. Zvika, my war hero brother, slain on thy high places, who had left his room in a hurry as Yom Kippur of ‘73 was drawing to a close and who never came back.

  And please excuse my pathos. I apologize if this sounds sarcastic or ironic or anything like that. I’m oh-so-sorry. Because that’s what it is and that’s what it’s supposed to sound like. And that’s how I am, or at least that’s how I can be – as eager and as eloquent as a premenstrual school-mistress, so you’d better start getting used to it or just go ahead and close this book, that you got on sale at your local book retailer anyway, and go back to your dull bourgeois life.

  In that time, after the war, all the military’s social services – the Family Liaisons Department, the Terms of Service officers and the Casualties Department – weren’t so dog-gone quick to stick a needle of semen and quivering Petri-dished ova up the bereaved family’s ass. The Holy Trinity, that’s what I call them today. In the years following October of ‘73, they made do with frequent visits, which then gradually diminished. Only a handful of bereaved parents sought psychological therapy, with all due discreetness and secrecy lest they god forbid be labeled abnormal, and little by little, the labors of the military’s Casualties Department amounted to nothing more than a monthly bank check, anniversary meetings, an official ceremony at the memorial park, with maybe the random phone call in between.

  Today, they have already learned their lesson, their care for the individual has been augmented, and roughly around the second or third meeting, promptly after the unveiling of the headstone, they – all parts of the Holy Trinity – are already asking the bereaved mothers why not have another baby. Applying their moderate physical pressure so that the substitute-sibling would remove from their own shoulders the pressure of these families, which just gets worse and worse as years go by, families that, as far as the trinity is concerned, do nothing but drive them up the walls, asking for more and more information, apologies, concern, money, respect; so that this well-oiled system, that wants nothing but industrial peace and quiet, won’t have to deal with families th
at are mere nuisances - poking their noses into the formal investigations of their son’s death, wanting the headstone inscription changed against army regulations, demanding indictments against negligent commanders, forestalling promotions in rank and causing the dishonorable discharge of regiment and brigade commanders left and right. With the syringe literally in their hands, the trinity is ripe and ready to pluck out your ovum and suck the miserable father’s sperm out so that the baby could distract you from the onerous void that’s tearing your house apart, causing all this hurly-burly that’s driving the system insane.

  As far as I was concerned, it happened spontaneously. An uncontrollable urge, fucked up and impromptu, for two parents who, before their son’s blood had dried on his uniform, already saw the crusting of semen on their cotton bedding. I swear it. I was born eleven months after he was killed. You can do the math.

  All summer long, Dad would eat his watermelon pantsless on the balcony. And it wasn’t the watermelon that had no pants. There he was, in his white underwear, sitting on a plastic chair in a six by six foot balcony on Uziel St., Ramat Gan, with reddish melony juice dripping on his hairy chest. In winter, when he wasn’t just sitting there, staring at some random spot in the street, the smell of sausages stuck to him and everything near him – from the inside of the old Subaru car, to the TV’s control, to the soap in our bath, to their bedroom blankets, even to the very fibers of my toothbrush.

  I remember it all. I was eight and a half when we had his heart attack. I remember the smell of sausage that kept oozing off all our stuff at home, long after he was carried outside on a stretcher, climbing each and every step down our dark staircase. I stood there like the master of ceremony on independence day at Mount Herzl, pressing the light switch time and time again, until they could maneuver the stretcher, with the two pale feet dangling out beyond its edge, and sirened him off down the street. I remember, I was standing right there. I was eight and a half and Dad threw up on the living room carpet and then he said Miriam Miriam, I’m not feeling well, Miriam, and then he dropped. It was night, right after dinner and right before TV time. I was eight and a half. I remember it all.

  After Dad came back from the hospital, the very first time he came in the door, ignoring the shrine immediately to his left, and heading – without so much as lowering his head or observing a moment of silence – straight to the bedroom to change into his underwear and tank-top. When I say shrine, I mean the picture of Zvika, 12” by 16”, that was always on display above the chest of drawers, on top of which, in meticulous order, were his certificate of appreciation for volunteering as a paramedic, the silver medal he won at a chess tournament, his graduation diploma – with honors – from the local music conservatory and a fossil found in his jeans pocket, some-time after he never came back. And, naturally, a bouquet of seasonal flowers, as if it was a Japanese altar or something.

  More things happened after Dad came back.

  The smell of sausage was gone. Along with the anxiety that was habitually lodged between his eyebrows and the constant need to placate my mother – not a trace of them left. Instead, a somewhat perplexed smile was spread on his face and the look in his eyes was eternally amused. Today, with the clinical experience I have amassed, I can offer you three different explanations for these symptoms – denial, survival mechanisms and depressive repression, for example – but it would be a bit inappropriate to start bragging about my diagnostic capabilities just now. You’ll get your chance to see exactly how proficient I am in the depths of the human psyche. Just give me a little time, it’ll all be clear as a bell.

  Besides, Mom started wearing pants that bravely embraced her enormous ass and that she had refused to wear before, due to the prodigious size of her stern. Also, two colorful condoms were found in her sewing box.

  Found by me, that is. Ever since I can remember myself, I used to go on search raids throughout the house. I started in mom and dad’s bedroom, then the living room, then the top cupboards in the kitchen and the utility room, working my way up to the attic. I climbed the wooden ladder that usually rested on the balcony’s window blinds, slid the attic door open – a considerable effort for a girl so young – and rummaged away. There I found, wrapped in moisture-ridden parchment paper, my dead brother Zvika’s orthodontic retainer. I put it right back, practically aghast.

  I went back to plundering mom and dad’s bedroom. It was surprising to discover how devoted that woman was to placing irrelevant things in the most inappropriate places.

  In her underwear drawer, I would find money every now and then – both bills and coins – and not always in local currency. Among her dresses and her skirts, I found transparent bags with letters that looked like poems in English, or some other language that I couldn’t read because the writing was all jumbled and joined together. In between the shoe boxes – where winter shoes were stored in summer and summer sandals in winter – I found all manner of jewelry boxes, mostly colorful necklaces from South America, or some other obscure vibrant land on some distant lush continent. One day, during an extensive ‘Operation Barbarossa’, which did not spare her folding sewing box, I found the two condoms, one purple and one red, and immediately knew what they were from having watched the classic Lemon Popsicle. Not that, as a nine-year-old, I knew precisely what they were for, and even in retrospect I can’t imagine their purpose – my mother was at least forty-six at the time, so what exactly was she worried about, immaculate conceptions? In any case, I knew it was something really dirty that had no business being in my mother’s sewing box.

  Zvi-Israel was given the two most fucked up names my parents could have come up with. “Zvi” after my mom’s twin brother, who died of meningitis at the age of four. “Israel” after my dad’s uncle, who was in charge of locking and unlocking the gates of Auschwitz and who, several months after coming to Palestine on an illegal immigrant ship from Italy, fished himself a fish at the old Jaffa port and, while cleaning it, was pricked by one of the bones, ran a high fever for three whole days and snuffed it.

  So go ahead, name your kid after these two family icons and hope for the best. Why not add “lord of hosts”, if you’re still not sure the last nail in his coffin is hammered in deep enough. Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

  My maternal grandfather, Eliahu, never got over the death of his beloved son Tzviki, mom’s twin. Throw in two scoops of the fact that he began losing his eyesight shortly after the child died – glaucoma or something in that area, and maybe some traditional bereaved father screw-loosening – and voila! you have a grandpa who jumps out of his seat every time he hears a noise around the house, in the living room, kitchen and, god forbid, even his own bedroom and cries with a whisper: “Who’s there? Who goes there? Is that you, Tzviki?” and you have my mother, who then had to get up from crawling under her parents’ bed or turn away from tiptoeing to get a cookie from the jar in the kitchen and admit, “no, Dad, it’s me”.

  That old routine stayed very much the same. After my brother Zvika was killed in action and Grandma died, when Grandpa came to stay with us, sleeping in the living room, and mom would get up to pick up a fallen pillow or start rattling the pots in the kitchen, he would suddenly wake up with a startled look on his face and whisper out a yell: “Who is it? Who goes here? Tzviki, is that you, Tzviki?” and mom’s metallic voice would clunk out from between the pots and pans, “no, Dad. It’s me. It’s Mira. Go back to sleep”. The exceptional combination of his keen hearing and decrepit eyesight provided me with endless moments of sheer joy. I would ruffle some newspaper around him or walk by, waving my arms about, just to see him leap out of his chair, “Tzviki, is that you, Tzviki? Who’s there? Who’s there!?” and then sneak back to my room, leaving him bewildered and upset by the thought that Zvika or Tzviki or the archangel Gabriel finally paid him a visit.

  At first, Zvika’s room was well outside my theater of operations. I made do with the little shrine just beside the door, to the left, and the occasional ceremonial offering (a sea
sonal bouquet). His room remained forlorn at the end of the apartment, right opposite my parents’ bedroom. Until I found the parchment-wrapped retainer, it never even occurred to me to associate that living specimen slouching in the attic with the dead brother who was only one touch, one twist of one doorknob away. It happened after Dad came back from almost being dead, and it awakened some impulse in me that had already begun to germinate but now seemed to be mutating, proliferating and growing inside me. The house was desolate that day and I resolved to rummage through my mother’s things. I had even found a bar of Belgian chocolate between the heavy pullovers, when the closed door of Zvika’s room suddenly beckoned me near. Not even thinking, I walked over and opened it. It’s not that I never saw the inside of his room before – Mom would occasionally go in to dust, to iron the uniform that was hanging outside the closet. Still, the room was extra-territorial for me, I could not even imagine going near it. What’s more, as a veritable kingdom of the dead, I could not imagine there being anything worth finding in it. I went in and closed the door behind me. I turned to the chest of drawers that stood beside the well-made bed. To avoid upsetting its peacefully tight sheets, I crouched on the carpet to open it. The first drawer contained an army notebook with various jottings and numbers that I deemed uninteresting. Next to it were various keys, some pebbles and seashells, little locks, assorted tokens and buttons. Between these, at the bottom of the drawer, a few rifle bullets were rolling around. I picked one of them up, slid it between my fingers, pressed it against my lips and shoved it in my pants pocket.

  In the second drawer, I found audio cassettes, alphabetically arranged in several boxes, an old tape-recorder, some bus tickets, old movie stubs and a wallet. The wallet contained a picture of Zvika, identical to the one placed in his shrine, only smaller, and a black and white photo of a young girl with bright-colored braids who gave the camera a smile that was more exertion than anything else.