by Tamara Avner
But then again, why do I even need to recall all this, dredging up my past and everything that happened since, throughout these two infernal years? Why undertake all this delving, this tedious regurgitation, as if everything I went through wasn’t enough, just to prove to everyone that I’m okay? Those who know - know, and those who don’t can go stick themselves in the nearest hole in the ground and rot along with whatever it is they think about me, for all I care.
But that’s a lie. What they put me through was a damn Dreyfus affair. What they did to me ought to be spelled out in this country’s history books. Just like that, step by step, an entire conspiracy was hatched against me and everyone gave me the cold shoulder. That’s why I have to keep spilling all the beans and even if they send me to the inquisition and force me to admit I was wrong, even if they dishonorably rip off all my ranks, I have to tell the story of what really happened, I must explain, I must exclaim “J’accuse!”, I have no choice but to insist “and yet it moves”. At the end of the day, it is you who will judge me.
Now, you must not think that I was all about sex sex sex. It’s not like that at all. I’ve got plenty to say about a lot of things. I’m a woman who’s well versed and involved in society and politics. I can’t help it, though – sex sells. Sex makes the world go round, as you probably know by now. Can I help it if, in order to draw your attention to my genuinely bona fide incredible story, so that you could take a stand on this whole Kafkaesque saga that has been dominating my life for the past two years, I have to use the oldest trick in the book?
I need to get all this down in the next four days. I know, even Voltaire wrote in prison, but who knows how I’m gonna end up. Some things must be proven. “Quod Erat Demonstrandum”, just like we learned in high-school trig. Four days. After that, who knows.
I seem to have this magical effect on men, this magnetic charisma that makes me simply irresistible to them. I’ve had this all my life, from the second I became self-aware and realized that I had certain natural resources that I could utilize to rule the world around me.
It started out in high-school with Gil Kosovsky up to and including Yariv Dana, Dudi Sluk and Eldad Nissim – who already had the chance to impress you with his musical eating talents at our dinner table. One after the other, I had each of them wrapped around my little finger and then thrown to the wolves. Then, after I received my undergraduate degree in behavioral science at Ben Gurion University as an IDF academic reserve officer, came the moment I was waiting for ever since my mother conceived: I enlisted in the army. No, not in order to fulfill the testament of my dead brother, duh.
For a girl like me, the army was a goldmine. In terms of my magnetism and charisma, I mean.
First off, I was assigned to be something like an assistant Terms of Service NCO at Camp 80, because they couldn’t find me a position in my actual profession. In less than a fortnight, I bedded the regiment commander, Lieutenant Colonel Yaron Ezra, with the blue eyes and the pistol always pressed against his loins, like an auxiliary pecker. I met him some years later at some IDF convention, when all the regiment commanders were already sporting their personal Motorola cell-phones, about as big as army radios, while he was still walking around with his good old 8 mm. You can imagine what he looked like: the pistol to one side, the Motorola to the other and, in between, the all-natural prick. The father, the son and Holy Spirit.
Then, I went on to serve at the IDF Manpower Directorate, under the chief Women’s Corps officer, in some undefined administrative position, where I lethargically compared the physical exertion scales for women and men, in preparation of admitting women into combat units following a Supreme Court ruling.
Later on, I was allocated to the Medical Corps, where I served as Assistant Chief Medical Officer in charge of mental health of army candidates, then as a Mental Health Officer at the Central Induction and Sorting Base for new recruits, also in charge of draft and discharge review boards. From there, with the kind help of the base commander, Colonel (soon to be Brigadier General) Harel Minerva, I was bumped up to the position of Mental Health Officer for Prison 4, located at Zrifin.
That’s where I met Oded, I mean, Adv. Stenger, whom we will shortly attend to.
But for now, I want to dwell a little deeper into Colonel Harel Minerva, the Central Induction and Sorting Base Commander: Three daughters. Lives in a wealthy suburb. Got married at the luxurious Ronit Farm in the early 90’s. Married to a teacher with hair that is permanently straightened and streaked and neurosis in her eyes. Scared to death of her. Now there’s a mystery for all those social science faculties and mental health departments – the hysterical fear of men in very high public service positions, who tremble right down to their bellybuttons at the mere shadow of their neurotic come borderline psychotic wives, who seem to have their husbands on a leash with their paranoid neuroses, checking in on them every fifteen minutes, despite the fact that at the bottom of their souls they know full well what perfidious rascals they have on their hands, or maybe precisely because of it. And the more these women tighten their protective noose, the more their men go on a rampage, under the cover of their public office and endeavor, to fuck more and more women. And the greater their cheating frenzy, the more afraid they are of their she-wardens, developing a hateful and malicious attitude towards the wives they go to bed with every night, while also becoming curiously and incomprehensibly dependent upon these selfsame women, showing them off as the best thing ever to happen to them and humanity at large, fondling them in public to the point of gagging in disgust, having to wear belts on top of suspenders just to prevent the exposure that would topple their little world, until all their sexual encounters turn into such coordinated operations that the Mossad and the Security Services, either alone or in concert, would take pride in them. With every rise in rank, sex becomes a clandestine, nearly impossible mission, as the neurotic wife increasingly feels just how much her husband depends on her. The husband’s fear that she would send his world crashing down on him if ever she was to uncover his shameful infidelities skyrockets and, in response, the wife steps up her surveillance, her phone calls and her constant demands to know what’s going on, occasionally breaking out in hysterical screams that are heard all around the neighborhood or on the other end of the line, and that he must expend every bit of his energy and potency to assuage her, until finally, his belts on top of suspenders and trousers stifle his cock altogether and he’s out of the race.
There are so many of these men, it’s alarming. In some of the most senior positions, in the topmost branches of government. I shit you not. I know. As high up as they come. You know who I’m talking about. Go ahead and connect the dots. You all know these men, some of you even fit the profile yourselves.
Harel Minerva was a fine specimen of this very breed. An adulterer right down to his core and a coward through and through. And also crazy about me in ways you can’t even imagine. So much so, that whenever I set foot in one of our staff meetings, or worse still, in an officer’s conference at the assembly hall, he would immediately begin to stutter, in mid-sentence, and all those attending would look up to see who just walked in and so unsettled the speaker’s psyche. As if they didn’t know…
It started one afternoon when he called me to find out something about some soldier who appealed the decision to kick him out of the service, made by a substance-abuse board that I was on. I calmly kept eating in my Kiryat-Ono apartment, overlooking the neighboring Tel HaShomer base.
“What is that? Are you eating while talking on the phone with me?”
“Well, of course, sir”.
“What’s that you’re eating there so eagerly?”
“A watermelon. With my bare hands”.
“Where are you? I can hear some traffic”.
“Out on the balcony”.
“And isn’t it dripping all over your clothes?”
“I’m not wearing any”.
“You’re buck naked on the balcony, is that what you’re telling m
e?”
“Uh-huh”.
“Get out of here”.
“You can come over and have a look, if you don’t believe me”.
Forty minutes later, he is standing at attention at my door, covered in sweat, after having parked his car half a mile away so that none of his wife’s KGB agents would get wise, running all the way up the stairs, huffing and puffing, checking seven times over that his cell phone is turned off, to make sure it isn’t being traced or any other psychotic delusion his paranoid psyche had conjured.
“You could have walked, you’d have gotten here sooner”.
He went back to the door and tested the handle.
“Are you sure it’s locked like this? Don’t you need the key?”
Smiling, I reclined against the oven.
“If I’d have walked, people would have seen that I left my car behind, asking themselves where I was, maybe even calling my wife, then god knows what”, he said, pressing my back to the kitchen wall after thrice making sure that the third infantry division, under his wife’s command, isn’t about to break in and charge at him.
“Have it your way”, I slipped away, as elegant as a lizard, toward the bedroom.
He liked it best up the ass. And I was happy to provide what he liked best. After that, he started stuttering whenever I entered, fashionably late, one of his meetings. After that, I could ask whatever I wanted of him, whether it had to do with assigning soldiers, discharging soldiers whose conduct was reprehensible and according to each and every criterion, had to be kicked out of the IDF’s ranks, as well as any other request regarding assignment of manpower or whatever kind of allocation or appointment. In short, I had the entire IDF personnel up my ass.
The second most important thing he was afraid of, after his wife of course, was any officer who outranked him. It so happened that one day, the Deputy Chief of Staff paid us a visit and every senior officer in the entire Base came to the official reception and stood at attention for him, after the traditional bourekas and coke. When the visit was drawing to a close and the Deputy Chief of Staff was just about to leave, he suddenly walked straight up to me. Now, this is the Deputy Chief of Staff I’m talking about here. He looked me up and down and I felt a fresh kind of excitement turning in my stomach.
“What are these? Velvet shoes?”
I glanced down at my feet.
“Suede”.
“Shuede?”
“Inverted leather, sir, suede”.
The Deputy Chief of Staff gives the Base Commander a reproachful look.
“Suede”, says the Base Commander.
“Shuede?”
“Inverted leather, sir, suede”.
The Deputy Chief of Staff gives the commander another reproachful look.
“Shuede”, he quietly mumbles again.
“It’s leather, sir, just inverted. Suede”.
Harel Minerva changes colors and the entire staff squirms uneasily.
“You’re insane, you’ll bury us all, you’re going to delay my promotion with your shenanigans”, he said later, as he was bending me over, “why can’t you be like everyone else?”
And I comforted him in the most shuede-like way I knew, inverted leather to boot, that was completely and utterly not like everyone else.
And don’t you worry about his promotion. He got promoted to Brigadier General, bumped me up to Prison Four’s Mental Health Officer and went right into the suspenders-belts-trousers loop that ended our relationship. Until he was asked to testify on my behalf in the whole affair that we will shortly get to, I hadn’t heard another word from him.
Oded Stenger was a different sort of man altogether. When he entered my turf, a whole new kind of infidelity emerged, an abominable adulterous mutation, which gave conventional adultery a different kind of meaning, harsher than anything you could imagine. He also feared nothing and no one. Except, naturally, his own shadow.
So where were we?
I’m an MHO at Tel HaShomer, subordinate to the head of the IDF Mental Health Department, offering my professional opinion on whether to retain or discharge soldiers and officers who were found guilty, mostly of drug-related violations, and chairing various boards charged with deciding whether to enlist candidates with histories of mental illness or criminal records.
Great job, loads of power, especially considering that I had our dear Minerva’s unconditional support.
Actually, the first time I met Adv. Stenger was in the shack that served as an office for the Head of the Base’s Regular Service Dept. at a substance-abuse board. It was a superficial encounter, but there was definitely love at first sight, or maybe lust at first sight, and you know how far apart love and lust are.
Anyway, I step out for a cigarette break, and there, in all his glory, waits Advocate Stenger after asking the secretary - completely against regulations - to be admitted into our discussion. He was bigger and taller than any man I ever met. And just to add a few more inches, a silvery forelock billowed at the edge of his forehead, as if he was a crew man from the war of attrition or some charismatic poet who, like a shooting star, steered off course and ended up of all possible places in this shack, with its linoleum floor and no AC except in the commander’s office. But he let none of this show. Neither his celestial journey nor the overbearing heat in the clerks’ office, one of whom I caught devotedly stirring a spoon of sugar into his coffee, while proudly noticing his gaze grasping at her breasts, as they swirled along with the sugar under her Dacron blouse. As I was leaving the room, he seized the opportunity and extended one long leg into her office, presenting his full glorious figure before her.
“I’m here about Private Malka Hemi”.
The HOD gave him a puzzled look.
“And you…? You’re his lawyer?”
Advocate Stenger suavely ignored the trap she tried to set him.
“I sincerely hope he’s still in the service. You do realize that you will be committing a grave injustice by discharging him”.
“We’re not authorized… You can’t just…”
The HOD stirred uneasily in her seat. It was clear that she was well aware of the fact that he gobbled up officers like her for a light bedtime nosh.
“Oh, of course not. I have no intention of influencing the committee’s position in any way. By no means. I know the procedure. I just came to see the good people at work. I have full confidence in your judgment, no argument here. Nevertheless, this case is important to me, it goes beyond mere client-attorney relations, I know the family, bereaved parents, the brother was a fighter in one of the elite counter-terrorism units, I’m sure you found this case just as moving. It’s a one in a million”.
Wham. And the HOD is caught in the devil’s snare.
She leafed through her papers and finally let out, “Still, you know, he’s got five drug uses while on-base, at least one of these during guard duty. According to the board’s criteria, he has to be dismissed. No two ways about it”.
He opened wide a pair of blue eyes that shone through his gold-rimmed glasses.
“No qualms here, Lieutenant Colonel Dannon, I have no qualms what-so-ever regarding your criteria. On the other hand, you surely know that man is beyond measure”.
Irit Dannon, who by now feels that she is quite in breach of board protocol by merely having this conversation, picks up her papers and starts making a neat pile by steadily tapping them on the table.
“Advocate…”
“I meant to say that you would no doubt agree that it is downright disgraceful to take a complex being such as man and simply tack a number on his back, even if this is the military”.
All of this doesn’t sound that impressive now that I’m writing it. I know, it’s hard to put his charm into words. Everything that I’ve been setting down in writing falls short of his magnetic personality. I’m going to have to deal with this problem later on. Still, his results speak for themselves.
Stenger has left the building. Through the window, I saw him cruising
like a ship’s mast towards his silver BMW, followed by what looked like an intern, a dark-skinned all too scrawny fellow. They got into the car one after the other, slammed the doors shut and slid out of the parking lot.
Eventually, just in case you were wondering, Private Malka continued his military service without interruption. And this is how it all went down, in the old fashioned IDF spirit and with a kind helping hand from your devoted servant:
The HOD and I were so deeply impressed by Private Malka Hemi, who stood before us but a few minutes later – a meager, passive little mongrel, flaccidly leaning on one leg with a stupid puppy-dog look on his face and a gaping mouth that will no doubt go straight back to sucking on bongs and smoking joints on base as soon as the next mickey falls in his lap, whether during guard duty or R&R, while storming the enemy or sitting on the John.
Unfortunately, most of the other board members (all of them male) recommended that the Base Commander should discharge him, even though the HOD and I, charmed as we were by his counselor, were convinced that he deserves a second chance, that one should go beyond the letter of the law, etc. etc., seeing that man is beyond measure, as we all know.
Still, Israel hath not been forsaken. At the end of the day, the Base Commander decided to keep him in the service, and guess who was behind that decision. I handed him the form reversing the board’s recommendation – from dishonorable discharge to continued service - with a big fat smile smeared on my face like the cat that ate up all the cream. He signed without even blinking.
This might be a good time to mention that the night before we celebrated our six-month anniversary at my apartment. The term ‘celebrated’, mind you, includes all the little surprises I pulled out from between my thighs and all the other tactical equipment that was harnessed onto his.
My nascent mutant traces, which led a life of their own inside my body, started coming to life.
That Stenger woke in me some dormant unconquerable urge – I simply had to know everything about him.