Lies from the Attic

by Tamara Avner

  Everything and right away.

  About a week after the board meeting, almost one whole minute after the form was signed, I gave Adv. Stenger a call, letting him know the Base Commander’s decision.

  “So, who do I have the privilege of speaking to?”

  “The MHO, the one who told you after the board meeting that she would do anything to keep your man in the service”.

  Instant recall.

  “The cutie with the cigarettes?”

  That’s what he called me early on. “The cutie with the cigarettes”. But even back then, we both knew exactly what was really on his mind. We both felt the seismic waves about to break out and fuel our eruption. And you know the difference between true love and plain old love, don’t you? You take any little old love - one gush of wind and its fire goes out. Take a big burning love – and the wind only fans its flames. But wait, let’s not jump ahead to all the wind and fire parameters. Meanwhile, I was playing the game.

  “That’s me. The Base Commander decided to reverse the board’s recommendation, well, after I explained to him the alleviating circumstances, the soldier being a bereaved brother and all”.

  “Well, I just want you to know… what’s your name?”

  “Rakefet. Rakefet Aurbach”.

  “Well, I just want you to know, Major Aurbach, that you’ve done a noble thing here, cutie. Not every girl gets to do something like this”.

  He can call his aunt ‘cutie’. He still had no idea what he was up against.

  Oh, the way he rolled my name, “Rakefet”, between his so-very-thin lips. Not only that, he gave her cuteness a promotion in rank.

  And that was the beginning of such love, such passion, the kind of love that moves the sun and other stars, said Dante.

  And love, after all, is the only weapon capable of breaching our pathological egocentrism.

  I hung up, put the cell phone in its mount in the Renault I shared with another officer and looked straight through the window pane at our very own Oded Stenger, cruising peacefully to shore, alone this time, without his all-too-scrawny intern, as he left his office and crossed the busy Jerusalem street.

  The next time we crossed paths, consciously this time, Oded pretended not to recognize me.

  It was several months after our meeting at Tel Hashomer, at a point when I knew practically everything there was to know about him, at least on paper, including all of those young girls he stapled to his life like so many fleeting memos, girls who sat beagle-eyed across from him in cafés in Jaffa or Jerusalem, where he would take them before or after skewering them in various nameless downtown apartments, owned by god knows who. By then, I was Prison Four’s mental health officer, up to my neck in inmates with personality disorders, and those who didn’t have any disorders when they first joined the detainment company, were guaranteed to undergo at least one neurotic, if not downright psychotic, breakdown, by the time they left the prison walls behind.

  Company A was mostly made up of deserters, absentees and detainees awaiting trial. Company B were the more serious criminals – those doing time for drug abuse, violence, unauthorized use of firearms, sexual offences and manslaughter. Company C was mainly reservists incarcerated for desertion. The buildings, if you could call them that, were old and dilapidated and always smelled of mold, urine and cheap Noblesse cigarettes. The cells were overcrowded and poorly ventilated, but were still pretty okay compared to solitary confinement and the dungeon, meant for those prisoners who posed a danger to themselves or others. The label of ‘dangerous’ was arbitrarily handed out by the chief warden –of a Moroccan origin, with a smooth shiny face, beady eyes and hands he just couldn’t keep to himself. He had close connections to the Criminal Investigations Division Commander and the Chief of the Military Police Corps, both manipulative Moroccans who were carried up the ranks by tidal waves of flattery on the one hand, and eel-like evasive currents, on the other, paying little attention to investigating officers and inquiry committees which sprang up – pardon my cliché – like mushrooms after the rain. In short, inmates of Russian origin - Slava, Vladi, Yevgeny and Sergey often ended up in solitary, with their hands and feet bound and nothing but a barred little hatch connecting them to the rest of the world. The only time they were let out of their handcuffs was when meals were served; no silverware, of course. The strict criteria for posing a danger unto others and yourself were often found quite pliable as far as any Machluf, Biton, Vaknin or other Jews of North-African descent were concerned, providing of course, that they had some relation, blood or otherwise, to the cronies of the high command (anyone living in Kiryat Ekron, some neighbor of President Katsav in Kiryat Malachi, or a former Afula city council member’s sister in law’s son will do), except in severe cases of schizophrenia or serious attempts at suicide. Any ‘goodfellas’ gone bad were usually transferred to Prison 6, so that it was a rare occasion to come across an inmate without some kind of mental disability or personality disorder.

  And don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against people with mental illness or personality disorders. Quite on the contrary, we’re all up there on that spectrum, it’s just a question of magnitudes. And even though I didn’t technically finish my clinical training, through no fault of my own (more about that, later), I had and have such a phenomenal diagnostic ability that after just a five minute conversation I can tell you if you have unipolar depression (almost always accompanied by some kind of anxiety) or bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, or hypomania, which is the less acute version of full blown mania, or if you’ve been afflicted by a bona fide mental illness like schizophrenia (so that you’re convinced you’re the Messiah, if you were born in Israel, or Genghis Khan, if you’re of Soviet descent) accompanied by paranoia (so that the Mossad is after you, using your dentist to implant microscopic tracking devices in your fillings, assuming you’re Sabras, or the KGB is bugging your cell walls, for those of us born in Russia) or just a plain old “vanilla” personality disorder: you might be narcissistic, you might have ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) or ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder), you could be dependent or avoidant, passive-aggressive, anti-social, obsessive, or just endowed with a borderline personality disorder, which is the great big dump in which we throw anyone who doesn’t fit the other classifications and has the ability to annoy everybody they meet to the point of wrist-cutting.

  Let’s get one thing clear straight away: if mental disorder is your thing, go for the full-fledged illnesses. These are easily diagnosed and altogether treatable – with medication and even electroshock therapy, that really does help, in spite of its reputation, and most importantly, psychotic and schizophrenic patients usually acknowledge their illness and are willing to seek treatment. The real issue is all those people with personality disorders walking among us – co-workers, fellow students, love-interests – who will never ever admit to even having a problem.

  This saturated soil was a fertile ground for me to start issuing punishment mitigation recommendations for military tribunals, recommendations that were almost always requested by the Advocate General’s Defense counsels. From there, it was only a hop, a skip and a jump into the masculine arms of Oded Stenger, who was a retired army defense counsel of great seniority and repute. I was so damn good at my job and at securing the esteem of my superiors that at some point, due to certain cutbacks in available positions for military psychiatric doctors and a reduction in reserve days for the Mental Health branch, there was a shortage of psychiatrists and I got special permission from the Mental Health Headquarters to write up official psychiatric opinions regarding competency to stand trial. These were later signed by some other psychiatrist, who trusted me wholeheartedly. Oh, yes, just like that. That’s how impressed they were with my abilities. So, please, keep your dutiful eyebrows unraised. This is how things are run in the finest organizations, and anyone who’s not completely blind will tell you – that’s how the world works.

  So, are you keeping up? You’ve got a mental
health officer with senior psychiatric capacities, a kind disposition and a desire to save the world and you’ve got a charismatic attorney who started out quite the same, but ended up crazy enough to take advantage of poor little yours truly to further his own egotistic interests. In a nutshell, that’s all there is to it.

  Look, I’m going to be completely honest with you right now. I’m starting to get a bad feeling about you. I’ve been revealing all my cards, leaving nothing to the imagination, and you… How should I put it… You’ve been acting as if you think I’m still hiding something. I can feel it in my bones and I don’t like it one bit. I might have to start censuring here and there. My faith in you, well… it’s been breached. With every minute, with every word, I am growing more and more convinced that you are unworthy of being my confidants. Nevertheless, I shall persevere. Perhaps there is someone out there that is still unbiased, that hasn’t been affected by this whole conspiracy against me, by the fact I was framed, in spite of all the good I’ve done.

  By now, I was good and ready to tell you all about how and when and where I opened Zvika’s box and what was inside. But for all I know, you would just stand there and snigger, you might think I’ve been making all this up, that I’ve been spinning yarns, and that just makes me so sad. Sadder than you could ever imagine. So you just lost yourself the opening of the box, and we’re going to move on ahead with the plot, which is the main issue here, anyway. So keep in mind what I just said, yes? Let that be a blinking little light for you, okay? And we’ll simply carry on as if nothing happened. But don’t you forget, I’ve got my eye on you.

  So, we made it to my second face to face meetingwith Oded Stenger, with him pretending that he had no idea who I was.

  On that day, I came to the Jaffa military courthouse because the prosecution wanted to question me about some professional opinion I gave in a case that had nothing to do with Oded, but there he was in the courtroom, waiting for his hearing. I certainly gave a stunning performance when the prosecution gave me the third degree, trying to prove that I interviewed the defendant for a total of ten minutes and that it would have been utterly impossible for me to come up with an opinion so supportive of the defense’s demand for immediate release from custody, in so little time. I’ll spare you the details. I don’t want to get sidetracked and you know me already, I prefer not to brag unnecessarily.

  Anyway, when Stenger’s hearing started he sedately rose from his seat and informed the court that he was motioning to postpone the hearing and that evidence could not be presented today as planned, since he just got an urgent message from the Jerusalem City Officer, saying he should get there immediately to perform his duty as an IDF volunteer. Looking up from his papers for virtually the first time that day, the judge suddenly became interested, blinking curiously at Stenger. (Judges are a bunch of gossipmongers and I tell you this as an aside, but with full reliability). Adv. Stenger had to reveal to the honorary judge presiding that he has been volunteering as a bearer, informing families that their loved ones were killed in the line of duty, and since we are talking about the time around military operation “Cast Lead”, he had to drop everything and rush off to carry out his mission.

  Naturally, the court gave him leave right away, seeing that military bereavement precedes the grinding wheels of justice, and I went up to him as he was handing some papers and notes that he was scribbling on during the hearing to his intern, who meticulously filed them inside a bulky folder.

  “I’m Rakefet, remember me?”

  He raised his head to give me an over-the-glasses-frame look.

  “Yes…” he replied laconically.

  “I’m the MHO. From the Substance-abuse board…” If he wants to play ball, let’s play ball.

  He had that kind of look that seemed to undress you. He always gave me that look of his, until I felt like I was standing center stage with my panties down around my ankles. I told him that once, several months later, when we were in bed together. He let out a laugh that sounded like coins tinkling inside a piggy-bank. It’s funny, that time I really did have my panties around my ankles, and he was deep inside me.

  “Of course I remember. Kineret. Cutie-pie”.

  I smiled the broadest smile humanly possible. You’re such a cutie-pie yourself, I thought, pretending not to remember like that.

  “Rakefet. Rakefet Aurbach”.

  “Of course, Rakefet”.

  Now leverage, dammit, leverage.

  “I come from a bereaved family, too”.

  “You do?” He looked up at me and this time, his eyes had something more in them besides undressing me.

  “I do. My brother Zvika was one of the first casualties of the Yom Kippur War. He was missing for about two weeks and my parents had to keep hosting the casualty notification officers until word came that his body was found. I was just a kid. I remember everything”.

  Bingo. That was his Achilles’ heel. Bereavement. Death. Unnecessary wars. The pain and suffering of families.

  I saw the corners of his mouth start to twitch.

  He gave me a long look. “Now you tell me, Ms. Aurbach, do those eyes of yours come with a matching heart?”

  This would be a good place to mention my eyes, which are probably my trademark – one of them is brown and the other is almost entirely green. Plenty of good reason to burn me at the stake had I lived in the middle ages.

  “That’s for you to find out…” I said and smiled with nothing but my eyes. It’s been years since I last smiled with my lips, ever since mother, that light unto the nations with the sensitivity of a sardine can, said whatever it was she said.

  “Oh, but I must be going, no choice, you know how that is”.

  His intern finished gathering up all the folders and obediently stood beside him. He gave me a semi-interested look, taking me for just another girl, another notch in his master’s belt. And so they turned to go, the agile intern rushing ahead, waiting for Stenger to unlock the car with a beep, then hurriedly placed all the folders in the back seat and sat down in the passenger seat, though not before removing the sun shade from the windshield.

  All I knew was that if he only could, he would have probably stuck around and invited me to lunch at one of Jaffa’s finest Arab eateries or seafood restaurants, as he often did with the counsels from the regional defense of the court arbitrators or the whiny interns from the State Attorney’s Office or just some buck-toothed stenographer from whatever court he happened to appear before. But he couldn’t. A bereaved family is the ace that trumps every other card in the deck. Who would know better than I?

  And yet, I wondered whether he meant that I had a pretty heart to match my pretty eyes, or whether he was referring to their duplicity. Even today I’m still not sure. The only thing I knew was that I had no choice, I simply had to add him to my butterfly collection. Oh, he won’t be just one more specimen, oh no, he’s the butterfly that is the harbinger of spring, he is the harbinger of ill news, arriving at your doorstep in the dead of night, transforming entire unsuspecting families into perennial pupae. He is the butterfly who never came to my doorstep, who never brought me any news.

  Chapter 2

  Our family wasn’t your typical run of the mill bereaved family. In fact, as bereaved families go, ours had something of a split personality.

  Within the safety of our own home, the family behaved as any other bereaved family would. That included the shrine, with the various ceremonies conducted around it: the seasonal changing of the flowers in the vase – dried wheat sheaves come Shavuot, almond flowers from Jerusalem that Dad would bring home every spring and crocuses in autumn; the ritual dusting of Zvika’s pictures and assorted diplomas; making sure his sealed-off room stays exactly the same after his death, with the pressed uniform hung on the closet doorknob and his clothes carefully folded inside; leaving the light at the entrance on twenty-four-seven, even when we went on vacation, “so that we won’t forget”, as my mom put it, as if we ever could. And, as often is the case with
such families, all these rituals and ceremonies were conducted with a thundering silence regarding anything to do with the Yom Kippur War, the army and, come to think of it, all mention of any kind of death. Finally, there were the semiannual trips to the cemetery, one on Memorial Day and one on Yom Kippur eve.

  But aside from all this, they never talked about or reminisced about the live Zvika or the dead one. The yearly letters from the Minister of Defense, that came in a fancy Department of Defense envelope and contained the emotional appeal of the ever-changing minister to the “dear families”, concerning how “the lines of fresh graves in the cemeteries grow ever longer and the family of bereavement grows ever larger”, providing “grave testament to the fact that our war for redemption, national liberty and peace is far from over”, that “while such solemn loss proves inconsolable, our faith remains unshaken in the path paved for us by the fallen and we shall do everything in our power to be worthy of their memory” – all of which promptly ended up in the kitchen waste basket. Whenever I could, I would take these out of the trash and save them in my closet for next year. Sometimes, letters bearing the same DOD logo came, inviting me to attend summer camp for children of bereaved families. Once, when I asked my mother why I couldn’t go, she angrily let out, “it’s because you’re not his daughter. You’re only a sister. There’s a difference”. As I turned to go, letting my inferior position sink in, she called out again, “and stop poking around like that, you’re not some kind of street cat”, and we both knew exactly what she was referring to. By then, I had returned the box to its rightful place in the attic another several dozen times, salvaging it time and again from the folds of winter coats and down blankets, from Dad’s shoe cleaning kit and the bottom of the laundry hamper.

  Every now and again, my parents were asked to join some group, to be interviewed for some documentary the corps was producing or take part in some commemorational activity or other. Mom would indignantly pass on the phone to my dad, who always politely refused. Mom then began her usual tight mouthed mumbled rant about the death-festival those dog-eyed busybodies were callously conducting and why can’t they just let her be very well alone. Actually, it is more than probable that my mom was a petulant and irascible woman long before Zvika was killed and it is just as likely that my dad was an obedient blunderer long before he ever lost a son. As much as one would love to believe, it’s hard to say that their obnoxious behavior was the result of Zvika’s death.