Lies from the Attic

by Tamara Avner

  The catch-phrase adorning every newspaper and television screen come Memorial Day – “In their death, they bequeathed life to us”, was given a whole other meaning in our home. In his death he bequeathed life to me, and I, who did not have one insubordinate bone in my body, stood ready to obey.

  I stood ready like a good girl in kindergarten, I stood ready like a good girl at school, bringing home the best possible grades. I played piano and never once asked any unnecessary questions about Zvika or my mom’s intensive sexual liaisons with the neighbor.

  In exchange, I was given a warm bed, starched sheets, folded clothes in my closet, three meals a day.

  Apart from that, I remember little of my early childhood. Next to nothing.

  The only occasion imprinted onto my memory was my preschool birthday party, when a colorful scarf was used to blindfold my mother and she had to feel the hands of all the children, presented to her one by one, and guess – only by the texture of the hand – which one was her daughter. As an August baby, I had an entire year to test the skills of all the other mothers, who felt and felt until finally, just after their own private offspring was placed before them, had pulled off the kerchief at once and showered the fruit of their loins with kisses and cries of triumph, as the other kids roared in joy and relief. I, too, had awaited this cathartic spectacle.

  Except it never came. She held my hand – a plump suntanned paw, with whitish creases hiding between its padded layers of baby fat – she groped and groped and unequivocally pushed my hand away, reaching forward again to grab the mitt of the next kid who couldn’t wait in line.

  I think it was then that I became obsessed with the desire to have a cast on my arm. At least a bandage. Even orthodontic bracers. Something to commemorate this, a monument of sorts, a handstone, if you will.

  As a teenager, my most basic and unalienable right was robbed of me; I was absolutely forbidden to make any use of our bereavement for my own advantage. I was never allowed to skip school on Memorial Day, never ever allowed to talk about my dead brother, let alone tell people about him and invoke their sympathy to get some kind of special treatment. You would think my parents were ashamed of Zvika or of the fact that he died in action or who knows what. I started wishing I had lost a father to Israel’s military campaigns, which would have given me the ultimate excuse to hurt and flaunt my grief. There were two boys in my class in high school whose dads died in the war and they just reeled in all the glory. As time went by, I got angrier and angrier with my parents for not parading their bereavement. I hated him too, for leaving me to carry by myself the burden of two semi-neurotic, semi-anxious parents, who tried to make me in his image, after his likeness, a practically unachievable feat, while leaving me no privileges, nothing to hold on to or cash in on except his stupid tapes and his yet-to-be-opened box, whose present whereabouts are known to the almighty lord alone. I got so full of rage sometimes that I had to take a kitchen knife and make tiny little gashes on my arm.

  Getting the dope on Oded Stenger’s intern wasn’t a walk in the park. Not that I let that stop me.

  His name was Yaniv Swissa, lanky and lean, born in run down Beit Shemesh. He studied law at some college after being admitted through no merit of his own and with a little help from a handful of affirmative action quotas for residents of development towns, the likes of which every academic institution has to put on display every now and again. Yet another basket case that Stenger took up as a protégé, to prove a few things to himself and the world.

  I bumped into him on purpose one morning at the Tel Aviv District Court, as he was routinely lugging around some seven tons of files, spilling my diet coke all over him and his files and getting a bit on my uniform, too, for good measure.

  “Oh, sorry about that”, he mumbled, glancing about to make sure his master didn’t catch him misbehaving.

  “What do you mean, sorry? Strip”, I retorted dryly, taking out a tissue to wipe the sprayed coke off of him.

  A good deal of information, some of it even of surprising quantity and quality, flowed my way, especially after his hot dusky semen came gushing right between my thighs when we had sex in my Rishon apartment in the wee small hours of the night. He would come over with those jam-packed folders of his, trying to glean some profound forensic or legal insight to offer up as juicy tribute to his lord and master, as very rarely was the case.

  One time, while he was in the shower, I leafed through one of them. “Bequest of Mahanya Halil Ubeid”, Yaniv’s childlike handwriting was scrawled on the cover. A brief examination revealed that the case in point was a damages suit against the State of Israel, filed by Oded at the Nazareth District Court over some sniper who fired at the family’s residence in Bab el-Gehenna or whatnot, and ended up gunning down the mother, who happened to be outside hanging laundry. Now the children and the widowed father are suing the state and the Ministry of Defense for millions.

  “So, what’s in all these folders you keep hauling around?” I asked Yaniv as he stepped out of the shower with all the swagger of a wet puppy.

  “Damages, Palestinians suing the state”, he answered turning on the TV and flicking to the sports channel.

  “Is he making tons of money out of this?” I blocked his view.

  “Uh… No… He does it pro bono, like, without pay”, he replied and changed the channel a few more times. Five minutes later, my trusted hands were thrusting him out the front door.

  My third encounter with Oded Stenger was the one you already heard about. It’s the one with the piano in it.

  He was representing some defendant that he wanted out of custody and I just happened to write a detailed opinion listing all the reasons why that very same defendant should be exonerated, or the system will have hell to pay. When Oded came to the prison that day, I was already on my way home. He caught me on my cell phone while I was driving.

  “Rakefet?”

  “Who’s calling?” I feigned ignorance. His number was already saved under ‘The Bearer’.

  “Listen up, sweetheart. I need to get my hands on your professional opinion regarding Zehava Mezgano. Are you coming down to Jaffa tomorrow?”

  “Nope”.

  “This isn’t good. This isn’t good at all…”

  “Why don’t you come over to Rishon, I’ll pick it up from the office. It’s 14 Tabenkin St., second floor, apartment seven”, I casually mentioned, knowing full well that as we speak he is leaving the Ramle courthouse, where he was appearing before the on-call judge, Moti Fink, for an arrest-hearing.

  Two years earlier, I had moved into a four bedroom in Rishon LeZion. It was a sea view apartment. With a balcony to boot, of course, so that I could keep up my scantily clad watermelon eating habits and confess to them according to need.

  When I moved, I took the piano and the box from the attic. After a quick shake, I deposited it in my suitcase with the rest of my belongings.

  And here he is. As charming as only Adv. Stenger can be. Tall. Silver forelock. Pointy nose. Thin upper lip. “No-lip”, I started calling him a few months later. A surprising little chin. A little potbelly, tucked away under a white shirt, sometimes with a mandarin collar, long thin legs.

  The television was on in the background. Some newsmagazine… Left-wing protesters at the controversial Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem.

  He stood in front of the screen and gazed at one of the activists. The wind was blowing her hair as she was talking to the camera with her husky voice and piercing blue eyes. I didn’t like all his attention being focused on such esoteric matters. This called for some drastic measures.

  “This is just unbelievable. ‘Radical left’ they call them. I tell you that in every other country this would be considered mild liberalism. Only here, the second you do something for a minority group, poof - you’re labeled as a radical”. I could see his upper lip gradually disappear, which only made the sexy indentation connecting his nose to his missing lip all the more prominent.

  I didn�
�t like where this conversation was going. In general, I wasn’t a fan of politics. Still ain’t. Major booboo on my part. Big mistake. Maybe if I had a clue about politics I wouldn’t have ended up in this here fine mess.

  I just had to take his liberal mind off those affairs and that required some radical means. Sliding like an eel, I rubbed against him, tightening the elastic bandage on my arm, sat down at the piano and burst into Chopin’s waltz. That’s the thing about radical leftists, they’re so cultivated. Give them music, dance, poetry, haiku readings – and they just melt. These aren’t your ordinary men, who get all wound up by a little cooked food or a steamy soup. These aren’t your socks and undies folded in the drawer kind of men, the spread your wife’s legs twice a week kind. These are refined men, men who don’t play around in the dirt, but who engage the profound connection between the sublime and the obscene. The connection between fighting for human rights – and the more those humans are exploited and oppressed the more they get turned on – and a woman who will let them take her tampon out with their teeth and then sniff it. That kind of guy.

  So here I was, sitting at the piano that was moved, with all due ceremony, from my parents’ apartment, after they were already living in an old age home. I started playing the only thing I could remember from my mother’s enormous ass era. And so began his dissolution, his addiction to me, and so I started paving the high road from my pretty duplicitous heart to that of Oded Stenger, an enterprise that many a woman has attempted before me, except that I had no intention of falling short of full and utter conquest, of exclusively autonomous control over the heart and body of the man who was, and still is, my soul-mate. I wanted to be another kind of woman, the one who would chop through the thicket right into his innermost heart, into places where no other woman was ever admitted before. The one and only who would palm his physical and psychic testicles, tightening her hold until he groans in liberating pain. And that’s how it was, or at least that how I thought it was, until it all came tumbling down on my head.

  One day, in the winter of 88’, Aner Schwartz showed up at our doorstep. He was my brother Zvika’s best (and perhaps only) friend.

  There was a shroud of mystery enveloping his exemption from military service and to be honest, if you asked me today, that shroud was threadbare to those who knew what kind of magazines Aner had hidden under his mattress or counted how many erections he sported in the boys’ locker room. Back then though, and this is the early 1970’s we’re talking about, unless you were walking down main street in high heels and lingerie, no one would have dared to think that you were ‘rooting for the wrong team’, that god forbid you were anything besides a fearless male specimen who rushes off to protect his homeland with his weapon drawn and cocked.

  To make a long story short, Aner came to visit my parents about once a year, usually around his birthday, which was exactly two days before Zvika’s. And it’s not that my parents were thrilled with joy to see him standing at our door like a question mark, with his stylized blond-streaked George Michael hairdo and a shoulder-padded jacket dangling off his coat-hanger physique, making sure this isn’t a bad time and saying that he just popped by and asking if they needed any help with anything.

  During his visits, I would usually curl up in my room. Something about him disrupted the already volatile equilibrium of our home. Mom reacted to his presence with nothing but a sour smile and Dad started pacing from the balcony to the living room, asking him the same questions over and over again with slight variations, while scampering about and staring nervously at the clock.

  “So, what are you doing these days, Aner?”

  “Me? I’m still working for Shmulik. Working, you know, making a living”.

  “So, how are things at Shmulik’s these days, eh?”

  “Oh, the usual. You know Shmulik. Things pretty much stay the same with Shmulik”.

  “What, now with the intifada and everything, I bet a lot of the boys are off on reserve duty”.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty much holding the place together”.

  “Good, it’s a good thing that you’re making a living”.

  “Yeah, you know, gotta make those ends meet somehow”.

  “So all these years you’ve been with Shmulik, huh? Interesting, that’s interesting”.

  “Well, it’s not the most exciting job you could imagine. But you can’t be too picky these days. You take what you’re offered. That’s what my dad keeps saying, if you’re offered something, take it”.

  “Yeah, well, with Shmulik at least you know who you’re dealing with. So how is Shmulik, that old son of a bitch?

  By the life of me, they could have gone on like that until Zvika’s next birthday.

  My mother interrupted the conversation to serve tiny little bourekas that she quickly heated up in her brand new toaster oven and which she was saving precisely for unwanted guests like Aner. After the bourekas, we knew the countdown could officially start – ten to fifteen minutes and out he goes for yet another year.

  Except that, this time, he took an interest in me as well.

  “So, how old are you now, Rakefet, like fourteen?”

  “Fifteen”.

  “What grade is that, ninth, tenth?”

  “Ninth”.

  He gave me a long look that had to traverse a strand of hair that suddenly fell on his forehead.

  “Ninth grade. I would die seven times over rather than go back to ninth grade”.

  Mom and Dad squirmed uneasily on the sofa. Not the most politically correct thing to say in the house of the hanged man.

  I stared at him.

  Mom got to her feet. Dad stood up next to the armchair, clutching so hard at the armrest that his knuckles turned red.

  Aner reached out to take another bourekas, changed his mind and carefully withdrew his hand.

  “Well, okay then. If you need anything, just say the word. You know where to find me. I’ll be at Shmulik’s, then at my apartment. You have my number, right? Just in case anything happens, right?” and he sent my mom an almost pleading look.

  Both my parents were already standing by the shrine. Mom was holding a kitchen towel and leaning against the bookstand and Dad was throwing worried glances at the clock.

  Suddenly, an unexpected plot twist. A major turn of events.

  “Do you feel like walking me back?” he asks me out of the blue. Mom almost lost her balance. “She’s got homework to do. She’s got a history exam in two days, I really don’t think that…”

  “Sure thing”. I got up and passed under their somber faces. Seconds later we were outside the building.

  Actually, I thought he wanted to hit on me. I thought it would be so cool to kiss a real man and not some zit-faced kid from my class, even though he didn’t go to the army like he was supposed to.

  We walked in silence up to HaYarden Street. By then, I was pretty sure he was gay and feeling a little sorry that I even agreed to go with him.

  We stood and waited at the bus stop for number 35.

  “The truth is that I wanted to ask you about Zvika”.

  “What’d’ya mean? I don’t know anything about Zvika”.

  “No, I mean… I wanted to show you this letter he sent me. Here, I made you a copy”.

  And he reached into one of the pockets in his glistening organza jacket and pulled out a sheet of paper, folded in four.

  I unfolded it and my eyes engorged themselves on the faint curled handwriting.

  October 9th, 1973.

  Be still.

  Lie back

  Be air

  Don’t volunteer.

  When you can, go to sleep

  Don’t talk

  Answer only when asked

  Eat little

  Be air

  Faint often

  Reject love

  Reject dream

  Reject pain

  Be still.

  It took me two hours to learn the entire poem by heart.

  I memorized it on the
way home and then in my room, in my bed, finally hiding it next to the bullet.

  “But what does it mean?”

  “He wrote this to me after he was injured in the Sinai, from that base where they sent him to recover”.

  “What’d’ya mean, recover?”

  “Rakefet, you really don’t know anything, do you?”

  “What’d’ya mean?”

  “Well, look, I’m not sure exactly what I am supposed to tell you…”

  “What’d’ya mean?”

  “Like, your brother didn’t actually get killed in the war. He died after it was over. They must’ve told you that”.

  I managed not to say what’d’ya mean again.

  “Yes, I know all about that. What do you take me for? Of course I knew. I just wasn’t sure that… like, that…”

  “Look, I know for a fact that there are poems in your house that he wrote me before the war. He told me so. This is really really important to me. Especially now, when things in the territories are starting to escalate, things have been resurfacing, I just thought…”

  That was the first intifada he was talking about. Everything was given new meaning. Everything became more of what it was before. Even in our home, everything happened as if a piano was about to come crashing down on us. Even I, who usually couldn’t care less about my parents’ soft spots, was walking on egg shells with every radio announcement, with every news bulletin about our soldiers wallowing in Gaza’s mud.

  “It’s just that I’ve been asking your parents for ages if they have any, I mean, if they can give me those poems he wrote me, I just don’t think it’s right for them to keep them. It didn’t have anything to do with what happened to him. He wrote to me in English, just words he heard in the songs that were playing on the radio. He spoke such beautiful English, it was as if he was a different person. I was thinking, maybe, maybe you could talk to them…”