Lies from the Attic

by Tamara Avner

  “But how did he die?”

  I felt light-headed, as if the trees in the boulevard across from us were closing in on me, encasing me with their rustling branches.

  “Anyway, if you think of anything… Well, there’s my bus, you can keep this poem for now, and if… you think about it, I’ll be in touch”.

  And just like that, he boarded his bus with his scintillating jacket and a look on his face like a chameleon that was hung by its tail to dry.

  And the following day, when the house was empty, there I was extracting the box from its current hiding place between the laundry detergents in the utility room, giving it a few shakes, picturing Zvika’s lush words rolling around with all kinds of other things that were kept hidden from me, having to make do with reciting Zvika’s depressed mantra, hearing his nasal voice in my ears at bedtime: “Weject love, Weject dream, weject pain, be thtill”.

  I stopped listening to the “thounding thots”. Doubt has its devious and sneaky little ways of getting under your skin and changing who you are. Maybe, just maybe, my war hero brother Zvika, the silver platter upon which we were handed the Jewish State, did not happen to hear any shots sounding. And maybe he wasn’t even killed in action, like people should when they’re in action. It’s crazy, but it’s pretty darn possible, with my luck, you better believe it. Maybe that’s why Mom and Dad are reluctant to join the big bereavement fest. For the first time in my life, I felt the bed drop from under me and I cursed my mother and my father and Zvika and myself for this miserable life that was handed to me on a measly plastic tray.

  After giving Oded Stenger a thorough rubdown with Chopin’s emotional memory capsule, we sat in my living room, enjoying the sea view.

  “The things you have in here about that Zehava Mezgano are downright daytime drama material”, he began, while going over my professional opinion, “never mind daytime drama, this stuff could get an academy award for best documentary”.

  “It could”.

  “Unbelievable. Wandering in the desert for months on end just to get to some refugee camp and try and make it to Israel. Her dad being captured and imprisoned by guerilla forces, her mom dying…”

  “Yep”, I nodded again. It really was a heart rending story, but not only due to the obvious objective circumstances.

  We were both silent for a while.

  I decided to take my chances. To tell him what I really think. What I feel. To show him why I went to study psychology.

  “Still, you know, it’s so interesting. With all those atrocities she had to live through, the death and the rape and what not, the thing that got her most was that, in the end, the Ethiopian guy she fell in love with on the flight here, once they were safely in Israel, he ends up falling for her sister. That’s what did it. Broke the camel’s back clean through”.

  Oded gave me an intrigued look. Truth be told, I wasn’t just trying to make an impression, I was genuinely curious about this. At the end of the day, it’s not the momentous tragedies that get to us, but the so called ‘little things’, unrequited love, a lean dark skinned fellow, as stupid as the rest of them, who ended up loving the wrong person back.

  Oded kept looking at me and we kept on saying nothing for a time.

  Then he got up and collected all the papers.

  “So, you’re not just pretty and manipulative, huh?” He said and I couldn’t help but notice, for the umpteenth time but now actually face to face, just how tall and striking he is.

  “My kind of gal”, he went on, running his fingers on the piano keys and then on Zvika’s box, whose dark raging secrets must have captured his as of yet unwitting attention. At last, he picked up his car keys, used his other hand to tap me on the cheek and left.

  I met Nicolai Gurvitz when he was doing time in solitary.

  You know those Russian guys that you only need one quick look into their eyes to know for a fact that they are godless and unruly creatures and, actually, to start wondering if this whole world isn’t godless and unruly?

  Not even the eyes. One glance at the tightened mouth, the tense body, the expressionless expression and you knew beyond a doubt that this being was created in the image of something else entirely.

  It’s not even a personality disorder. Not even sociopathy. It is what it is. And seeing as it’s so hard to define, it’s also shit scary.

  Not that these types scare me or anything. But stepping inside the lair of one of these no-souls is like bungee-jumping: if you make it out of there, you can run seventeen laps around the entire prison complex and feel alive.

  Nicolai Gurvitz was god’s faux-pas, the man was born accidentally, but I already told you all about that.

  Nicolai Gurvitz fell through all the diagnostic cracks during his preliminary tests, and was drafted accidentally.

  Nicolai Gurvitz was sent to prison two days after being drafted, for picking up his platoon commander along with his little illusions of grandeur, turning him upside down and literally throwing him, head first, into a pile of muck at the entrance to the staff toilets at the basic training facility.

  Nicolai Gurvitz was put in the Prison Four solitary some six hours after being admitted, for tying his cellmate’s hands together with a piece of gun-cleaning cloth which he then proceeded to set aflame with a lighter that he smuggled – god only knows how and where – into the prison.

  These are the various milestones of Nicolai Gurvitz’ life.

  (I left out years of wandering from one military base to the next because his father was the equivalent of a Brigadier General in the soviet army, when the only toys he ever knew were assorted implements of war that he and his friends had gathered; I left out the finger that he lost to that kind of ‘Lego’; I left out the fact that at ten, while attending a joint school for the children of both officers and prisoners, he was stabbed fighting over an apple and while he was a bony little thing, he was acclaimed as the school’s fighting champion and was already carrying a weapon, all this at ten; I left out the years in which his father moved out and Nicolai was stranded with his mother – questionably Jewish but a definite whore – whose name, Marina, he had tattooed on his neck and who, as I later found out, had died of an overdose and, as they were putting her in a coffin in the Russian Orthodox church of some Ukrainian village, suddenly sprang back to life; I left out the four years in which he ended up as a member of the UNA-UNSO, the youth section of the Ukrainian Neo-Nazi party, that had banded together after six decades of soviet occupation and oppression; I left out all the years he spent singing ethnic folk songs, attending bonfire boxing lessons and orienteering in leopard fatigues with a lion’s-head badge; I left out the years he spent convinced that Jews were the root of all capitalist evil, taking part in pagan rituals, smashing watermelons, spraying graffiti on walls, urinating in cemeteries and shattering Jewish headstones. When he watched that scene in American History X where Edward Norton is caving some black guy’s head in on the curbstone, he thought, “what, that’s it?”; I left out five years in a Ukrainian youth-at-risk facility, where he bravely withstood risks far greater than any lurking outside its walls, as well as his discovery, at sixteen, that he is actually Jewish from both sides. But that, too, is irrelevant right now. Naturally, this long line of fuck ups did not end at the local police post, when he hit seventeen, which was when they decided to bring him to Israel, as part of the “Na’ale” project for Russian teens of Jewish descent, hoping to train him for a life of good manners and observance of Jewish laws in the holy land. Needless to say, they failed, at least so far).

  In short, there I was in Nicolai’s lion den. The two inmate supervisors who were supposed to accompany me inside were shaking outside the heavy door as I stood on his reeking mattress and looked straight into the reddish white of his eyes, a shade reserved only for grim reapers like him.

  There was more to it than my engrained sense of purpose in helping wretched prisoners. I admit it, I felt a need to tame those tormented by fate, and through them, to reach what lay bey
ond, the source, the hand that rocks the cradle, fate itself, whose fickle and peculiar ploys landed me on this earth, just so destiny could get its kicks out of it.

  He stared right back at me, unblinking.

  “Private Gurvitz, you think you’re so tough, don’t you? You think you’re god himself, or is it the devil himself?”

  He smirked, his rotting yellow teeth climbing all over each other.

  “I know a thousand more just like you, baby. A thousand little Jesus Christs like little Niki”.

  The tips of his ears rippled as restlessly as a German shepherd’s. There were two ways this could go down. Either very good or very very bad.

  “Private Gurvitz, you’re nothing but a frightened little boy. You can’t handle the slightest frustration, you’re in shambles, do you know what shambles means? You’re nothing but a baby – kicking and screaming because there’s nothing he can do about anything”.

  I could see him deliberating whether or not to reconfigure my bone structure and use it as a decorative lamppost for his cell.

  I decided that a change of tactics was in order.

  “Listen, bub, I can get you out by sundown. I can get you out of here, out of the army, before dusk. But you’re gonna need to find some other place to be in. See what I’m saying? What do you think you have waiting for you out there? I give you a year, maybe two, even three, and you’re neck deep into drugs, cutting your friends’ fingers off, running some little crime ring down south”.

  “You can’t do shit for me. You’re full of it, just like everyone else”.

  “Try me, you little dipshit. If you get out of here today, I’m personally taking you somewhere that will admit you”.

  “I not go anyplace. I go back to Russia”.

  “Go ahead, stick around. See if I care”.

  I turned to leave, quite against regulations, which require that you stand facing solitary inmates at all times.

  The jinglers jingled their keys.

  Nicolai Gurvitz was not a man who liked being told the last word. Some found that out by losing a testicle or two.

  “You take me out today, I go”.

  That coolness, that icy gaze, these came straight from the realms of no return, and me, I wanted me a foothold right there, in the place from which none came back to tell the tale. But other than that, there was something so genuine, so raw about him. He reminded me of myself. Two phone calls and three faxes later, and the Command’s General Advocate authorized his immediate release from custody; several hours after that, the head of the IDF Manpower Directorate signed into effect his discharge from service for reasons of maladjustment. By now, you’ve got a pretty good idea of who had to oil up pistons to make them turn in time. You’ve got a nice clear picture of who gave what to whom to make sure it all ticks like a well lubricated clock. Or, in other words, who needs favoritism when you’ve got strings to pull…

  And Private Nicolai Gurvitz? Well, clear as rain, he made like a banana and split as soon as he was discharged. I gave my word that I would take him to a rehabilitation facility, I even had in mind one whose manager owed me a favor. But, before the ink on the fax even had a chance to dry, Nicolai Gurvitz was long gone, deep into the dark recesses of the Russian mafia.

  How fortunate that the world is round, how fortunate indeed – as I was later told by the widowed-mistress Ruth Solomon, the spiritual whore who bedded Oded Stenger behind my back – how fortunate to have your good karma come around, how fortunate to have that happen in the very same lifetime. So it was that I did run into Nicolai Gurvitz again, and that he had a chance to run into our little old Levite’s concubine, even if it was such a brief rendezvous. “The Levite’s concubine”, that’s what I called her. I know, the original concubine was the victim in that story and she is anything but. Still, in a topsy-turvy kind of way, you’ll see exactly why this was the most appropriate epithet for her.

  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Grab hold of the reins, this just gets better and better.

  Naturally, the first thing I did the second I laid eyes on Oded Stenger, right after our first meeting at the Induction and Sorting Base, was to get as much info on him as possible.

  This is exactly why the IDF has such advanced and sophisticated data systems, why the IDF has officers working in sensitive positions who can get clearance from the Human Resources Automation Center, like me, for instance.

  So, what would you like to know about him?

  Fifty-six years old, born in Jerusalem.

  Member of the bar association since 1977.

  Authorized to serve as a military defense attorney in the army’s tribunal system since 1985.

  Full-fledged partner at Stenger, Farber & Shani Law office in Jerusalem. Business and Commercial.

  Member of the Movement for Quality Government and good friends with its red head founder.

  Previously a member of the old leftwing Ratz party and its subsequent incarnation as Meretz, he later made an even sharper left turn. He was there at the demonstration where left wing demonstrator Emil Grunzweig was murdered.

  Likes his food raw. Thirty-seconds steak, smoked fish, five-minute lobster.

  Is in his third marriage.

  He first married a woman named Shifra, the most beautiful girl in Rehovot, who never went to the army and who, after he left her one night with an eight months old baby, got remarried to a religious guy from Yavne and had four more children, all lovely little mitzvah-keepers, who pay their taxes and try never to leave the country, enjoying their vacations in Ein Gedi and Squalor Hills.

  He then married Ophra, an eccentric artist and sculptor who had her own studio in Jaffa, divorced plus two kids, she gave him two more boys: Shavit and Elad who, despite the anti-militaristic atmosphere they grew up in, both signed up for combat units and who, to the dismay of their leftist, post-Zionist father (or “involved liberal” as he put it), spent most of their time in the service doing grueling patrols and reconnaissance around the Gaza strip, getting their cultivated little lefty psyches all messed up and who, sooner than anticipated, went and spilled their innermost beans on the internet forums they ran and on their Facebook pages, where a careful look would reveal yours truly – proud and supportive – on their endless list of friends.

  Although Ophra was plenty pluralistic and liberal, the scales were eventually tipped by nothing other than her husband’s magnetic personality and unshakable talent for parading like the pied piper into the homes of more than a handful of other women, including some of her very best friends. After many an attempt to bridge their gaps through couples therapy, polyamorous agreements (with swinging clauses and permits for sanctioned one night stands) and/or strict monogamy agreements, nothing seemed to work and she asked him to pack his bags and hit the road, while she herself travelled to Amsterdam, where she was picked up in some nice coffee shop by Piglet Rolf, who rolls her joints and makes love to her on his little yacht, at least that’s what Oded has been hearing from his sons, when they come back somewhat stoned from visiting her.

  Finally, he married Gila, a bland Anglo-Saxon woman, two years his senior, that no one, not even Oded himself could tell what it was that made her attractive. Perhaps her grim melancholy and the overt and covert depression she helplessly slumped into, like a black widow drawing in its prey, allowed her to lure the life-loving Oded into her web. They have no kids and practically no sex. Only a great bothersome commitment, like that of a father to his daughter, a strange Oedipal thing with streaks of neediness and a victim-victimizer theme that I still haven’t fully figured out.

  In any case, his marriage to Gila gave him a carte blanch for extra-marital activities, since as long as no one dropped a ten-pound hammer on Gila’s head and shouted right into her ears that her husband was having an affair, she never really gave these matters any attention – au contraire, her suspicions and speculations, fanning the flames of her dejected misery, only planted her husband deeper in the sour garden of the Stenger residence on 5 Bartenura str
eet, in the lovely Jerusalem neighborhood of Rehavia, a residence I scouted for hours on end.

  The ultimate bummer is that people like Stenger need the kind of offshoots and extensions of this kind of “savior-destroyer” model he practiced with his wife. Add to that his natural inclination to reach out and touch bereavement and its victims, calculate the square root of that, keeping in mind that the man has no scruples whatsoever and that all the instructions and guidelines - explicitly prohibiting any kind of relationship between City-Officer bearers and the bereaved families on whose doors he comes knocking at all hours of the night - don’t leave so much as a dent on his purposeful penis, and you have Ruth Solomon, the IDF widow with the long unruly hair, the huge bracelets and the jangling crystal wind-chimes. Voila! I present to you the mistress who, disguised as a containing, spiritual woman, tried to use that pair of big light-blue eyes of hers that she flutters every which way, keeping them closed most hours of the day in pseudo-meditation on a Zen cushion facing the old city walls, and the fifteen glasses of water she makes a note of drinking every day and her dried up cunt, to steal Oded Stenger right from under my nose. Lucky for me, I was there to save him from making that terrible mistake. That’s another thing you should know about Oded. With all his legal acumen and his ability to manipulate judges, juries and executioners, even with all that, deep inside I figured him for a naïve little boy who would be eaten alive by piranhas like our very own Levite’s concubine and who should thank his lucky stars for having a mother Theresa like me, ready to set out on daring last-minute Operation Entebbe to rescue him. What a shame that, like always, he did not appreciate my efforts and I did not get the reward that I deserved.