Lies from the Attic

by Tamara Avner

  With my leafing fingers, I went over the pile of tapes: The Roosters, the Southern Command Band, The Beatles, Cliff Richard, Neil Sedaka. The very last one, which had no case, said “piano” in a slow and clumsy handwriting, which, though foreign-looking, seemed somehow familiar and resembled the writing in the notebook.

  I placed it in the tape recorder and pressed play but nothing happened. I flipped the tape recorder over and saw that it had no batteries. I ran to the utility closet, got two batteries and shoved them inside, minus to minus and plus to plus. I pressed play again.

  “Nate at nite, thots thound in de dithtanth”.

  “Wonderful. But this time, try just like I taught you, with your tongue touching the palate, not the teeth - Shots-sound. Shots-sound - Late at night, shots sound in the distance”.

  “Nate at nite, thots thound in da dithtanth”.

  Pause.

  “Nate at nite, thots thound in da dithtanth”.

  “Good. Good”.

  “I’th not good?”

  “Let’s try the rabbit. Do you remember the rabbit?”

  “No, I don’t wemembe”.

  “Listen carefully: The rabbit ran ran ran, hit the Subaru, jerked and jerked”.

  “De wabbit wan wan, hit the Tubawoo, gwercked and gwercked”.

  “Good. Good. Just try the R from your throat– rrrr, rrrr, not the lips, rrr, rrr…”

  “Wwwr, wwwr”.

  “Great, Zvika, keep practicing your…”

  Someone’s at the door. I turned off the tape recorder and shoved it back in the drawer, I opened and shut the door behind me and walked into the bathroom. Mom came in, put down her bag, walked over to her bedroom, lingered at the door then turned around and called my name.

  I was sitting on the toilet, listening to my mom, listening to myself. Who would have thought? Who could have imagined that a war hero brother killed in action could sound like a retarded kid with the enunciation of a four year old. He must have been about twelve when he made that tape, maybe right before his Bar-Mitzva. They were probably hysterical, worried that he might read his Haftara in the synagogue with “thots” and “wunning wabbits”.

  The next time I entered Zvika’s room, I had to go through mom’s nightstand, where she hid the key after she started locking his room. Not that that could stop me. I waited until the time was just right, then I opened the door again, took out the recorder and the cassette, which had been removed, and once more, I could hear Zvika’s idiotic voice, with the thots and the wunning rabbits all gwercking.

  He kept repeating those sentences over and over again, not making any progress, utterly oblivious as to what he was doing wrong. Then there was some rustling and then you could hear the sound of piano keys being struck. Zvika was playing one of Chopin’s preludes. He only made one mistake and corrected himself right away. Maybe he did deserve some credit after all. Someone was applauding in the background.

  This time, I took the cassette with me, hiding it next to the bullet and the retainer. Just because, so I would have some kind of proof, just in case. I kept them hidden in my wardrobe, right behind the shoes. In terms of mom’s theory of tidiness, that’s probably the best and most sensible place to store a cassette, a bullet and an orthodontic retainer.

  And still, there was Zvika’s closet. A whole new continent was waiting for my conquests at the very end of our apartment. Right on the edge, in the extra-territorial zone, in Zvika’s room. Tvika. Tvika Ithrael Auwbach.

  Are you getting all this down, so far?

  At the very least, have you gathered that I’m due for some serious issues in attaching myself to normal men, with these fucked up precedents of masculinity in my family? The way I see it, they either die or they’re weak or they’re in sublimated denial or they’re heroes – and then they die – and even then, after the fact, you still find out that something was seriously wrong with them.

  At some point, when I was in university, dating this nerdy engineering student named Eldad, my mother conclusively stated, “every man who comes near our family, his days are numbered”. She was hammering chicken breast for schnitzels in the kitchen and as she was banging down on the tender flesh, she repeated herself, just in case anyone failed to hear. “What I’m saying is that all the men in this family…” Dad looked up at her, even he was surprised this time, and went right back to minding his own business. Mom went off on a tangent and kept going, “it’s just a marvel, the men in this family, simply a marvel”.

  As far as I can remember, what attracted me most about Eldad were his plain, childish dreams. He had the sweetest dreams – about animals, about flying, about dwarves, and he had no qualms about eagerly telling me all about them the next morning. With my rare psychoanalytic talent, I interpreted them as attesting to the purity of his psyche, to an internal hygiene that was utterly unknown to me.

  I even remember that one night, before he fell asleep, right after a vigorous fuck on my futon, in my third-floor apartment in the slum right across from the Beer Sheva University, he said: “you be the giraffe and I’ll be the kid-giraffe”. Well, you try warding off such innocence.

  In short, everything was going more or less hunky dory with Eldad, except that the first time I brought him over for dinner, he chewed so loud, clicking his tongue and shifting his entire mouthful from side to side with such zesty smackings of saliva that my mom stopped to stare at him. We all followed suit and stopped and stared, unwittingly fulfilling her doomsaying prophecy, which didn’t seem to disturb his strange sonic presentation at all. And thank god for that. Seeing as he was spared our age-old male curse after I chucked him from here to next Tuesday that very night.

  But that emasculating line of hers came back to me several years later, when I said goodbye to the fetus I never even met, after having a miscarriage five months in. I had grown attached to that little schnitzel (that’s what it looked like, in the few ultrasound scans I managed to get before it passed away from me and the universe - like a little beating schnitzel) until it suddenly decided to cash in on the ancestral Aurbach will and disappoint me with its sudden death. After inducing labor, contractions, the works… I gave birth to a dead child.

  The baby was Oded’s. Oded is the piano guy. Oded Stenger, attorney at law, if you don’t mind. The one I thought I had eating off the palm of my hand like a little cockerel, the one I thought I would have wrapped around my little finger because of my well rounded ass and my perky, practically twenty years younger, breasts that I put on display for him like a San Francisco gay pride parade. Oded Stanger. And it wasn’t just the tits and the ass. There was something else between us, something sacred, an altar of control and worship that was entirely our own. Or, at least, so I thought. The same Oded Stenger who drove me out of my mind, who made me do things I never believed I could do for another person, with all my kind heartedness and willingness to take one for the team. I really outdid myself with him. And see where that got me.

  But we’ll get to Oded in due time. Remember that one. Oded the cheat. Given that time stays on our side, of course. If the authorities don’t mess up my plans.

  Back to the sewing box condoms.They must be driving you crazy. There must have been a reason for me to tell you about them, they must surely serve as some epic clue as to what is about to be revealed. And you expect me to go ahead and spill it all… Not a problem. Everything will be revealed, I’m the real deal, I tell it like it is, no omissions, no remissions. Straight up like a cream pie to the face.

  So picture this girl walking twice a week with her old man to her piano lessons, ‘cause it’s a thirty minute walk and the lesson is at six in the evening and he doesn’t want her wandering around Ramat-Gan alone at dusk, ‘cause this is the eighties we’re talking about, and some kid was already kidnapped in Savion and little girls were already raped in stairwells and my teacher lives all the way up on the fourth floor with no elevator. So there we are walking together, talking a bit, keeping quiet a lot, and my dad comes up with me and waits
on the living room couch, reading a newspaper until I finish my lesson and put all the sheet music away in my backpack, all covered in notes that my piano teacher Alina wrote in her slow, awkward, somewhat foreign handwriting, that somehow seemed familiar to me, and we go down and head back home and get a pizza or falafel on the way and mostly never say a word.

  On that particular late November day, the wind was blowing as we left home. Five minutes in and it started drizzling, ten minutes in and we were getting soaked. We stood and waited under a store awning on Haro’eh Street. After two minutes, I told my dad that I was running home to get an umbrella and a jacket, otherwise we were never going to make it. When I got home, I simply intended to open the utility cupboard across from the shrine, grab the umbrella and run right back down, but then I heard a bleating noise from one of the rooms. You can probably imagine what’s about to come to light. That sound led me right to the closed door of mom and dad’s bedroom. One peek through the keyhole and a whole new world is unlocked before this eleven-year-old girl, who is just days away from getting her first period. Her mother’s enormous ass, white and bare and taking up almost her entire field of vision. Almost, as apart from it, her gaze is locked on to a male member, just as huge, that is rubbing against the butt-crack, while its owner moans in a heavy South-American accent, “Mirrrian, Mirrrian, you’rre drrrivink me crrrasey, crrrasey!” I jump up, then crouch again to take another peek through the keyhole. Yep, still there. That huge member. I leave the apartment, climb down the stairs and walk back to dad in the rain.

  “Well?”

  “What well?”

  I am positively sure that he can see it in my eyes, that huge member that’s been rubbing itself against my head for the past ten minutes.

  “The umbrella, Rakefet, what about the umbrella?”

  I don’t seem to have one. I don’t seem to have a jacket, either.

  We keep walking. By now, the rain is down to a slight drizzle. We climb the four floors to my piano teacher and Dad sits on the couch in front of the heater that the teacher plugged in for him. I take out my sheet music and play - Mendelssohn was it? - With a giant ass gyrating before my eyes.

  Now, the proud owner of this member, the one who gave my mom those colorful condoms that were never apparently put to use, was Pablo Grossman, our upstairs neighbor. He was an accountant who set up shop right there in his apartment. He always had two chairs placed right beside his door, just in case someone had to wait while he was seeing another client in his makeshift office. As far as I could tell, that never happened. There were quite a few times that I had to go up there and ask them to turn the hot water on or off, to see if it was just our boiler acting up, and not once did I see anyone sitting in his waiting room, in fact, the same holds true for his office as well.

  His wife, Rosa, was a scrawny little thing with reddish curls and a pale complexion, who always looked like she was about to faint. She worked mornings and afternoons at a “Carmel” carpet store, on the corner of Ben-Gurion Street. One time, we all came over to pick out a new carpet for our living room (to replace the one dad threw up on), a matching one for the anteroom (i.e. the temple steps) and another one for my room. She didn’t even seem to recognize us. Either that or she preferred to don a professional, unbiased expression. Dad pointed at a thick off-white rug and asked if they had it in 6’ by 9’. She said no. Mom examined a hanging rug that had a crimson spiral pattern on an antique pink background and asked for its price. Rosa said it was verrry verrry expensif. The one next to it and the one next to that were also too pricey for Rosa’s taste, either that or they were strictly for display, altogether discontinued or their quality wasn’t worth their cost. The three of us quietly left to find another carpet store, without even saying thank you.

  So there I was, determinedly sacrificing myself on the altar of boldly exploring the final frontiers of menopausal sexuality and beyond, every Sunday and Wednesday afternoon until the early evening with my piano lessons, bringing Dad along and leaving Mom and Pablo at the apartment, while Rosa persistently declines to part with her reassuring rugs from Carmel Carpets’ “colorful collection” and refrains from asking any unwanted questions.

  When I was about fourteen, I was diagnosed with excessive spinal curvature and was signed up for a remedial exercise class three times a week. This meant that I could finally get rid of all my stupid sheet music and, right alongside them, lay to rest Mom and Pablo’s weekly rendezvous, which may have already died of natural causes by then. Every now and then, I saw them together in the stairwell – Mom with her shopping bags, Pablo coming up behind her, taking one of her bags while mumbling, “sorrry, sorrry, Mirian, let me just grrrab your tomatoss”, and Mom would get out of his way and follow him up to the apartment, where he would put the bag down by the door, careful not to reenter the crime scene, and go on his merry way, though not before swiftly adjusting the front of his pants.

  The stores of chocolates, beads and foreign currency in Mom’s closet caches also began dwindling and, to tell the truth, I was less interested in what was new in stock around that time.

  The second to last time I saw Pablo was during the Gulf War. Several months later, the Grossmans moved away. They were both standing next to the truck that was stuffing all their belongings, including the two forsaken waiting-room chairs. While he was rushing the porters and making sure nothing was damaged, Rosa, with her martyr’s eyes, was constantly about to faint on the hot sidewalk. Needless to say, I did not see a single carpet loaded into the dark recesses of that truck.

  The next time I went into Zvika’s room, after having had to look for the key for two whole days again – this time, it had been buried under mom and dad’s mattress – was also the last.

  The last and most mysterious. I removed the hanger with the uniform from the round knob of the already frayed green Formica closet. I opened the twin doors and rows upon rows of clothes, all at attention, saluted me from within.

  At the bottom of the closet, under a rickety shelf, stood a pair of Adidas shoes, a pair of biblical sandals and a pair of plaid slippers. Behind these, was a square metal box, secured with a four-digit combination lock, I picked it up and shook it about. Some papers seemed to move from side to side, then nothing. I tried forcing it open but it wouldn’t budge. I quickly scanned the rest of the closet and, having found nothing else of interest, I grabbed the box in one hand, closed the closet, put the uniform back in place, left the room and locked the door. I placed the key right back where I found it, under the mattress, but the next day, when I went on another treasure hunt, it was no longer there. Instead, when I came home from school, I found the room barred and locked with a bolt, especially designed to keep away snoopy little siblings such as myself, much like some medieval princess’ chastity belt.

  I stood before his door, accepting my fate, my defeat in that campaign of conquest for the chambers of my brother Zvika’s heart. I turned away from the corridor and headed back to the living room, bumping into my mother, who stood there, watching me unflinchingly.

  “Wipe that smile off your face, you look like a crazy person when you smile”, she said.

  Obviously, we had never uttered a word about me breaking into Zvika’s room or her installing an additional lock. Luckily for me, there was also no mention of any items missing from the room, which is all for the best, as I would have denied everything anyway. After that encounter in the corridor, nothing more was said about my smile, either.

  I was left with the conundrum of how to open the box. I scoured my memory, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not conjure up any kind of code that would fit. Every now and then, I tried breaking it, systematically at first – 1111, 1112, 1113 – but I soon gave up. I calculated that there should be about a hundred thousand possible combinations (it’s called a factorial, for those of you who happened to forget), so I would occasionally try all kind of random combinations – birthday dates, Kabalistic numerology figures and eventually even the date of Zvika’s own death,
thinking the code might have been some prophetic revelation, but to no avail. And so the box just lay there, forlorn in the attic above the utility room, where no one in our family ever ventured, myself included, until that boundary too was breached. From time to time, when I had the house to myself, I played the cassette with the rabbit and the Subaru under the blankets in my bed, listening again and again to poor Zvika trying, with his throat too dry and tongue too long and cumbersome, to sound like a real person, then to his prelude and the applause that always followed (23 claps). I would also get the ladder and climb up to the attic, just to make sure there were no other sneaky little rats like me around, who might have decided to liberate the robber of her stolen goods, and put the box right back, though not before thoroughly shaking it to make sure its contents are still intact and hoping for it to miraculously open all of a sudden. No miracle ever happened, but eventually, as you’ve already guessed no doubt, eventually it opened.

  Before that, however, it vanished. One fine day, during a standard afternoon rummaging, it turned out that the box wasn’t lazily sprawling in the attic. Someone moved it.

  She.

  I went berserk.

  It took three frantic hunting days to locate it, inside the empty shoe box where we kept the Passover Haggadahs that Mom used to pilfer from various relatives across the country after each Seder night. Not once did we hold a Seder at our place. I held the box tight against my heart and shook it in accordance with our long established custom. It obediently answered and I put it back, like a lost ostrich egg, in its warm nest in the attic. Seder or no Seder – some things cannot be passed over.