Lies from the Attic

by Tamara Avner

  I told him about my miserable childhood, living in the shadow of my inarticulate brother and agonized parents. Once I told him about the talk I had with grandpa Eliahu, who spent his final days blind from glaucoma. It happened when I was in the ninth grade, working on my family tree for a class assignment.

  “What was the most exciting moment in your life?” I read the question off the worksheet, expecting the most banal answer to reach the tip of the pen I was holding.

  “The day I went blind and couldn’t see anything. The day the disease ran its course and I became completely blind”.

  That was unexpected, you must admit.

  “What do you mean?” I raised my head and gave him a look, a look that belonged to the psychologist that was already starting to see the inside me.

  “I mean that I was no longer in decline. I no longer had to struggle to see anything, I could finally rest”.

  He sank into his armchair and, sitting in front of him, I did the same.

  “I will never forget that”, I told Oded, “that moment of giving up. It brings such relief. But you need so much courage to reach it”.

  Every now and then I got him melting like a popsicle on a summer day by telling him about coping with bereavement and my precocious insights about life. Then he would say things like, “You know something? You have so much beauty inside you”, or even “you have so much beauty when I’m inside you”, or better yet, he would tell me about his mother, Marcella, who was the toughest woman he ever met, and used to snatch the blankets off him and his sister during the cold nights of Jerusalem’s winter if they so much as dared talk to each other past their bedtime and would still call herself Marshmella, considering herself to be the softest woman alive.

  “She drove people insane. She would drag me along to go shopping for shoes on King George Street and would never be content until she made the salesmen bring out everything they had in stock, surrounding herself with dozens and dozens of shoes. Only once the entire store was full of capsized shoes of every color, shape and size, only once the saleswomen finally collapsed, sweaty and tight-lipped, would she take me by the arm and say, “come, we’re going”, leaving behind our little daily hurricane and stepping outside with a snort of contempt, while I was being dragged along, so ashamed that I wished for the earth to swallow me whole there and then. You know what? I’ll never stop missing that two-headed beast. Come to think of it, I’ll never even want to stop”, he said, pushing out his belly and gently strumming on it with his fingers.

  I knew exactly the kind of woman he was talking about, those rare two-headed beasts who leave hurricanes behind in their search for the real thing, those bona fide women, the kind they don’t make anymore, the kind that comes into this world once or twice a generation to fix things up. Women like me. When that typhoon starts blowing in our brain, we are unstoppable. So don’t even try.

  And yet, even when he cradled me in all those distant childhood stories, that sounded (to both of us) so innocent and fanciful, he was already waist deep in his sick relationship with his widowhore, and has been for years, while I still didn’t suspect a thing. Had I known, I would have bitten his ear off and maybe even take my teeth on tour further south.

  But what’s the rush, people? We still have plenty of time.

  Ahuva Lustig greeted me with a big hug.

  Where do you get off hugging me?

  After years of coming way too close to other people’s grief, they just lose all their inhibitions, these Casualties Officers. They’re all big unregulated fluffy balls of feeling.

  I stepped into her beautiful home in one of Tel Aviv’s posh suburbs and she sat me down in the ample living room, whose walls were all covered in oil paintings she painted herself over the past few years. Carpets of various sizes were spread out on the floor and French windows opened onto a well-kept little garden, where the gardener was presently busy trimming the leaflets of their ficus trees. She herself is short and stubby, just as I thought I remembered her.

  “My, how you’ve grown! I remember you with your pig tails and your tight little mouth”.

  “I grew up…”

  “And those eyes of yours…”

  She ogles my eyes with her own pair of round little pea-size peepers.

  “I remember, at one of the memorial services in honor of you brother, Zvika, you put a little stone on his grave. And you came over and asked me if the stone will grow until next year, when you would come see him again… Remember that, Rakefet?”

  I was smiling on the inside. Well, I told you what a brilliant mind I had. It took me eighteen seconds to solve the Rubik’s Cube when I was in sixth grade.

  The funny thing was that I had a different recollection. I remember myself standing next to her and my mother at one of the memorial services – I must have been about six or seven – and after the service ended and everyone started looking around for stones to place on the grave, I put down two stones that I found in advance and kept in my pants pocket. Mom and dad said nothing, but I remember Ahuva asking me if I knew why we put stones on graves. I told her that I did, that it was like putting candles on a birthday cake. I remember her looking at me and asking, “So why two?” and I said, “Don’t you have any kids? It’s for good luck and making wishes!” She laughed and Mom impaled her on one of her famous looks-that-could kill until she scurried off.

  “How are your parents?”

  “Fine”.

  “Is your father still working as a printer for that newspaper?”

  “No, he went on early retirement”.

  “And what about your mother?”

  “She’s fine”.

  “What is she doing now?”

  Come on, motherfucker, just give me the papers so I can split.

  “This wasn’t easy, you know. I had to go to our archives. The file itself was transferred almost entirely to the main archives at Tel HaShomer, but we still kept a secondary file at the Manpower Directorate”.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  Outside, the gardener turned off the lawnmower. The room fell silent.

  She took it as a sign. She finally got up, went over to the chest of drawers by the door and handed me the large brown envelope that lay on top of it.

  “This is everything I could find. You’ll find copies of all kinds of recruitment and allocation documents as well as his death certificate”.

  I didn’t want to come off as too eager, so I remained seated.

  “Do you want us to open it together? Do you want me to explain to you about what those documents are?”

  “No. I mean, what do you know about how he died?”

  “A bullet hit him in the head. Didn’t your parents ever talk to you about him?”

  “Yes, I mean, sort of. But it wasn’t in the Sinai, right?”

  The Lustigette let out a sigh.

  “You’re right. It happened later, in a camp where they gathered all the new recruits who supported the troops during the war. He went down to the Sinai, stayed there for two days and then got recalled back to base. He was in very low spirits, he became depressed, you see, honey?”

  “You mean he…”

  “He saw some very troubling things down at the front. Those rookies were right off the bus, they had no training”.

  She sighed again, looking at me with her poodle eyes.

  “What I mean to say is that he committed suicide’’.

  “But, if that’s true, wouldn’t they bury him outside the fence?”

  The Lustigette put her unpleasantly hot hand on my knee.

  “Look, there was fighting going on. Everything was rushed. I mean, he was out on the front line, I think they tried to take that into…”

  “Or at least away from the military plot. I know that’s what they do with suicides. The Rabbinate would never have approved it, it’s a sin…”

  “Those were different times, love. Maybe it’s all for the better”.

  She turned her entire body towards me, sighed heavily and said, �
��it was plain madness, what went on there. I was there myself. Driving around with this girl for an entire month, going back and forth between the northern front in the Golan Heights and the Egyptian front down south. We didn’t even know where her husband was assigned to. We drove my old Carmel Ducas car from the Egyptian border to the Syrian one, stopping at the Heights to ask at every base if anyone knew anything. It was a nightmare. We telephoned the Balusa – one of those Sinai army bases that were put up overnight – trying to get any information based on his name or his appearance. It was terrible. Finally, we learned entirely by chance that her husband’s tank commander was seriously injured and was being treated at Ha’emek hospital in Afula. That’s how we learned that their entire tank burned down. Her husband was in that tank and they were hit by friendly fire when they came over the opposite hill. Even then, we didn’t tell her. We sent her out of the room and the tank commander whispered in my ear that her husband was burned alive. Nothing left. All the way home she kept asking me, ‘he’s dead, right? He’s dead, right?’ and I kept saying ‘no way, no way’. The next day the City Officer sent some folks to pay her a visit – me, a nurse with a syringe ready in her hand, a doctor, some guy from the Rabbinate and a few social workers – they sent all of us to break her the news, and she had just gone out. She went to her hairdresser to get a chignon. She came back… she looked so pretty, so neatly kempt, just to find all of us sitting there on her couch, ready to let death finally catch up to her”.

  The gardener turned on the leaf-blower. That was my sign to blow off and leave.

  I picked up the envelope, got up and went towards the door.

  “It’s very moving to see you again, honey. And good for you for taking the time and the effort to connect to the memory of your brother. Few people do”.

  “Thanks”.

  “It could be a painful process, maybe you should get some help, maybe you should see a…”

  “Thank you, so much”.

  Very slowly, I crossed the little path through her yard and once the gate was closed behind me, I sprinted like there’s no tomorrow until I made it to the end of the street and only then did I stop to open the envelope and bring its contents to the light of day.

  Eventually, they agreed to a plea bargain with that soldier who shot the Palestinian woman. The whole affair was over in a couple of days. After they scratched off the manslaughter charges and stuck to unauthorized use of firearms, the soldier only got several months suspended sentence and a reduction in rank. Oded was strutting around my apartment like a peacock. All he had left to do was bring all that moola to the Gazan family whose mother died at the altar of her laundry, so that more money could be poured into that well-oiled Palestinian machine that then blows up our shopping malls.

  But what do I care? He doesn’t even have the slightest idea that I made all that happen. Me.

  At that point, I saw him almost every day. We had our weekly fuck and the rest of the week I mostly spent stalking him.

  I have a question for you and please try keeping an open mind for a second, just let your thoughts roam free, if you’re even capable of that:

  What’s the difference between mad love and intense hatred?

  Practically none.

  What’s the opposite of loving someone to death?

  Being scared to death.

  What’s the opposite of life?

  Not death, but the pain of birth.

  Good. Now what’s the opposite of death?

  Oded Stenger.

  In their death, they bequeathed life to us.

  Did you get any of this?

  You didn’t get squat.

  Oded took out some loose tobacco from his gilded box and placed it on a piece of rolling paper. Then he took a lump of hashish and heated it over his lighter’s flame. He slowly broke the lump into little crumbs, scattering these over the tobacco, rolled up the thin sheet, licked off its edges and stuck them together. Then he lit up the joint, took two long hits and passed it over to me. We smoked two of them.

  The TV in my bedroom was on, but muted.

  “Did you know that the static electricity made by your television set is the energetic residue of the big bang?” He asked, putting out the last rolled cigarette in the ashtray.

  I absolutely loved him.

  Later, when I was lying with my legs spread underneath him, when the box looked angrily down at us from its place on the night stand, and he did that thing that he does to me with two fingers and his tongue and I was right on the verge, all dizzy with the dope and all the excitement that was bubbling between my legs, he rose and said to me, “okay, now tell me everything that’s going through your mind, right now, come on, my black gold bar, tell me”.

  An old woman cycling at breakneck speed, storming out of a huge greenhouse, cycling so hard that she’s almost rising in the air above the greenhouse, that’s starting to go up in flames, and laughing wildly. That’s the image I saw.

  “A rainbow”, I said.

  He turned me over on my stomach and came in from behind.

  When I was a girl, the thing I wanted most was a cast. Then I wanted braces. Then a bandage, then a band-aid and finally, painkillers. A bullet to the head, that’s what I should have wanted. Really. A bullet shot in the first act will reappear in the last one. Something like that. I’m just saying this to give you all fair warning. Sort of.

  Right about that time, several weeks after I met Oded, I started going to the Medicine Corps clinic in Zrifin every week, to get my arm bandaged. I started out by seeing the orthopedic doctor and complaining about pains in my arm. Even though they never found anything in the x-rays or all the other tests they ran, he told me I should have my arm bandaged. Later, when I had already gotten personal with nurse Yelena, she gave me a prescription that said I could get my bandage renewed weekly, without having to see the doctor again. And so I did. I walked around with my left hand in bandages and gave very vague answers when people asked me how I got hurt.

  I’m starting to realize that when people hurt themselves, it’s not because they’re all alone in this world, it’s not because they’re having such a hard time. We’re simply trying to break it off with this world before it’s ready to break it off with us, while we’re still unwilling to give up.

  Time to take it up a notch.

  At twelve fifteen, I left the Templar shack that served as my prison office these past two years. I left a note saying that I went out to visit the family of one of the inmates. On my way out, the disciplinary NCO yelled at me for parking with my car facing the exit again, contrary to his instructions. I gave him the finger and set a course to Jerusalem. East Jerusalem, to be exact. I knew the street, the two-story building with little balconies hanging from its walls like lice eggs on shafts of hair. An olive tree was planted in the middle of the empty yard, that was strewn with used diapers and peach pits that only aggravated its desolation. There being no footpath, I skipped along several cursorily placed pavement stones, suggesting some future walkway, and made it to the entrance. It’s not that I expected any mailboxes or a list of the tenants. There were none. I started climbing the stairs. From behind the closed doors, I heard babies crying in Arabic and could smell the aroma of meat cooked in cumin, turmeric and hawayij. When I reach the third floor, I was in for a surprise: I was welcomed by a colorful Fimo-clay door sign with the name Ruth Solomon written in English. What do I mean by ‘in for a surprise’? What did I expect, knocking on one of the doors and having some Kafiya-clad Arab open the door and immediately confess to his dealings with Oded, handing me all the material he already sent Hamas, seconds before they start bombing every single IDF outpost? To be honest, that was more conceivable to me than seeing the name of Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, whose Bougainvillea bushes hung down from the window like red cords to signal the spies that the coast was clear.

  I understood everything then. The whole shebang.

  I went back the way I came and got into the car. I started the engine and dr
ove to the only place I knew in Jerusalem, King George Street, the Ben Yehuda promenade, then Zion Square, basically feeling like a fish in an aquarium, out of touch with the world outside, out of sync with the watery sensations that went through me.

  And suddenly there he was, standing right in front of me.

  What do you mean, ‘who?’

  Nicolai Gurvitz, in the flesh.

  Nicolai fucking Gurvitz.

  Like Elijah the prophet, he emerged from a chariot of fire, standing before me in all his glory: his eyebrow, his nose, the tattoo on his neck commemorating his mother – who died from an overdose and came back to life two days later, twice as crazy – his lip and every other possible part of his face pierced, from the bottom of his earlobes to the top of his ears. Despite the cold in Jerusalem, he was wearing a thin T shirt, had a devilish smile spread across his chapped lips, his tight fists ready for any kind of trouble, big or small, and his knuckles all red with cold or brawling.

  Still alive. Snorts every now and then, but won’t shoot up. Makes his living doing odd jobs: breaking into cars and houses, sustaining himself on vodka and cigarettes. Playing cops and robbers with the cops. The salt of the earth.

  I felt myself rising from the darkest depths.

  You could say that was the continuation of a beautiful friendship.

  Here are some details that you are probably dying to know about that whorecubine Ruth Solomon, who still deserves a little more respect from you since, as it turns out, she is a veritable pillar – mind you – of the Israel bereavement aristocracy.

  Forty-eight years old. Looks younger.

  A seventh generation Israeli, her family is from Jerusalem, twice removed from Jabotinsky.

  For twenty-two years, she was married to Shaul Solomon, oops, excuse me, Colonel Shaul Solomon, famed F-15 pilot and squadron commander, who kicked the proverbial bucket during a field training exercise in October 2002, after diving straight into the Mediterranean Sea.

  She met him (unavoidably) when she was the squadron’s clerk.