Lies from the Attic

by Tamara Avner

Almond-cake. Pookie. Teddy-bear.

  He gave me an astounded look and immediately turned off his phone.

  “What is it?” I asked, trying to keep my cool.

  “Nothing… It’s one of my clients… Her computer was stolen… Someone broke into her house, this Russian kid, he punched her in the shoulder and ran off”.

  “Since when do your clients call you this late at night? What does this have to do with you?”

  “Pookie, what is up with this interrogation? She’s an old client of mine, she’s unmarried, all alone, it’s a very unsettling experience…”

  I could feel my brain literally blow a gasket.

  “Don’t you ever call me that! Don’t ever call me pookie again or I’m gonna let you have it!”

  I sent the plastic lawn chair that was placed between us flying in his direction.

  That whorecubine. Not a shred of dignity in her, pretending to be a damsel in distress to rob him away from me, pushing all his compassionate buttons. And now he’s already on his way to her, after quickly picking up his things, though not before turning to me and saying, “I don’t know this side of you, Rakefet, I never thought you had this in you…”

  Like, duh, you had nooo idea…

  I sat down on the edge of the bed. I felt air blowing into my head. That’s actually what I felt, like my entire brain was filling up with ice cold air. I felt pain beating in my bandaged left arm and I set it so tightly that my hand got all swollen and red. I thought I was losing my mind. But there was no time for that now. No choice but to keep on planning my very own prisoner-release operation, cold air or no cold air around my brain.

  Two days later, I was invited to attend a conference held by the Chief Military Defense.

  The first lecture featured a lie detector machine and they asked for two volunteers. To make a long story short, the conclusion I drew from that experience was that no one should ever take that test. Remember that. It’s the greatest con-job in the world. Best thing you can do with that paper that notes all your bodily vibrations while you’re busy lying like there’s no tomorrow: wipe your ass.

  Then came professor Nicks from the Forensic Medicine Center. All the lights in the lecture hall were turned off and an ancient slide projector showed a series of slides, all showing the bodies of people who died unnatural deaths. The professor explained, as the light from the projector illuminated his face from below and seemed to flip it around – his beard became his forelock and vice versa, his wrinkled forehead turned into a mouth and the bags under his eyes became creepy wide open sockets – how he could infer from the size of the injury, the spot where the blunt instrument hit the skull or by the shape and coloration of the bruise, the height of the car’s bumper etc. etc. what actually killed the poor schmo in the slide.

  Practically half the people in the audience left the hall coughing and chocking, their hands over their mouths as if they are about to throw up.

  Not me. You can show me those pictures for breakfast, I have an iron stomach. And then, some great zipper in the sky came flying open.

  The next slide showed the body of a man who supposedly committed suicide. Small entry wound with tight edges at the back of the neck, right below the hairline, large exit wound with torn and cleft edges at the throat.

  Silence in the hall.

  “That’s impossible”.

  “Finally, someone with a bit of common sense. Now, why is this impossible, young fellow?”

  “Because if he killed himself, then how could he hold a gun and shoot himself in the back of the neck?”

  The sky is falling.

  “Correct. Taking into account the fact that the rifle that discharged the bullet, an M-16 assault rifle, measuring twenty-four inches from the tip of its barrel to the trigger, it is utterly out of the question for a human arm to hold the gun and shoot himself, let alone from behind. Therefore, this clearly isn’t a suicide, and some other agent must have fired the weapon”.

  “Cause of death: 6 mm bullet to the head. Entry wound behind right ear; exit wound on left temple”. Signed by Dr. Leonid’s Polansky.

  God almighty.

  They killed him, that poor fuck. They gunned him down from the side.

  Or did they? Maybe the guns they used in the Yom Kippur War had shorter barrels? No sense rushing to conclusions. Still, it’s elementary, even if the barrel is a little shorter, it’s still impossible… But why would anybody want to kill him? What does that even mean? Our own troops did him in? Jews? Thoughts went flying through my head like flies around a rotting corpse.

  I rose to my feet and ran out of the hall with my hand on my mouth, rushing to the restroom to hurl out the rogelach I had for breakfast before the conference started.

  Now, don’t you go thinking I’m some kind of nutcaseor anything. I’m pretty much the most stable and well-balanced person in this entire mess.

  I also want to make it perfectly clear, in case you’re still harboring any doubts, that as part of my training at the university, I had to undergo psychotherapy and I really did give it my best shot. I can’t help it that, being the genius that I am, I went ahead and applied all the theories I learned about in school to my own therapy. So that when my gangling skeleton of therapist asked me if I thought there was any correlation between my relationship with my mother to my relationships with men I replied, “there must be a link between your relationship with your mother and your attitude towards women”. Or, when he asked whether it was Zvika’s death that may have urged me to risk life and limb by embarking on all kinds of strange episodes and adventures, I asked him if he thought that the utterly boring and uneventful life he was leading made him conduct such uninspired conversations with his patients.

  “Have you noticed that you seem to be deflecting every question I ask you back to me?”

  “I have”.

  “I’m just trying to serve as a mirror for you here, okay?”

  “You might wanna peek into it yourself, every now and then”.

  In short, therapy was a dead end and it remained the one part of my training that I never got to finish.

  Why, I couldn’t possibly have told him about that incident at kindergarten, with the little hand that was left unidentified and slipped right between her mom’s groping fingers, like some useless object, could I?

  I couldn’t possibly have told him how, shortly afterwards, when they were hoisting me in the air on the birthday-girl chair, I jumped and fidgeted so hard that at the very last, “this one’s for next year” hoist, I actually fell off, hurting my elbow. I couldn’t possibly have told him that this was my life’s desire, my dream come true, to walk around with my arm in bandages for a whole month, a sign, a monument just for me and my mother – a bound arm that immortalized my blemished birthday, my everyday existence before the bewildered face of a mother who hadn’t the slightest inkling of what all this meant.

  He may have had a point.

  It was my third year as a student living in Beer Sheva. In order to afford the apartment I shared with two other flat-mates, I signed up for every single experiment advertised on the notice boards of the various faculties across the university.

  I started out in the sleep lab. They hooked me up to electrodes and woke me up every fifteen minutes for seven minute stretches, asking me to solve all kinds of math questions, then back to sleep for another fifteen minutes and so on and so forth. I think I displayed some dazzling cognitive abilities, but that’s a different story and again, I’m not here to brag.

  Then, I volunteered for this experiment at the Medical School, testing the effectiveness of sun screens with UV protection.

  My freckled back was divided into squares, each of which was applied with a different sun screen that had a different UV protection factor. I lay topless in the sun and at the end of the day I looked like a checkerboard, with some of the tiles even reaching second degree burns, keeping me from wearing a bra that entire week (which ended up in two one night stands, with Nohi from Social Work and L
eor from Economics, who dug my erect nipples and hit on me in the cafeteria).

  Then, I offered myself as a guinea-pig for any experimental drug they were testing at the Medical School and the Chemistry Department, after signing all the official wavers. I took anti-depressants which made me catatonic for about two weeks; I took appetite suppressants that almost made me jump off the university administration building; I took drugs that affected the amounts of insulin released by my pancreas, making me so hungry that I ate all the food my flat-mates’ families had made for them for the entire week, by Monday; I took drugs that changed the rhythm of my heartbeats, and couldn’t fall asleep for a week. There wasn’t a pill I wouldn’t pop and I was raking in the dough, so I could keep living in relative comfort in my Beer Sheva apartment and stock up on clothes and cosmetics. It was definitely more profitable than waitressing (a job I could never hold for more than a single shift, because I ended up letting my bosses know exactly what I thought about them after the very first day. Not that I have a problem with authority or anything).

  So, he might have been right about the whole voluntarily putting myself in danger bit.

  And about my relationships with Mom and Dad?

  I barely even remembered that I had parents.

  About once a month, I came home from Beer Sheva to Ramat Gan, schlepping all my dirty clothes for Mom to do laundry for me.

  Take my word for it, my room was starting to look exactly like Zvika’s. Another little museum opened at chez Aurbach. The door to my room was permanently closed, with Mom coming in every now and then to dust the dolls on my bed and the books on my desk. In short, they had clearly signed off on me. And it seemed they were ready to check their own lives back in to the quartermaster. Dad was sitting in front of the TV with two daily newspapers, reading and rereading the obituaries until he knew all of them by heart, occasionally comparing between the two papers to check if the printer did a good job, if there are any errors that only he and the stricken family would notice, in which case he would joyfully leap up to show Mom what incompetent morons they now had filling his shoes at the paper’s print department. And Mom, all frayed around the edges, her hair grown wild and gathered in a childish ponytail, was talking on the kitchen wall phone with Mirta, the only friend she had left. Even if you put a gun to my head, I wouldn’t be able to repeat a single word of what she said.

  As for the box… the attic box was safe and sound, seeing that the little hamster moved out and was no longer trying to dispossess the senior squirrel of its ownership of it, still waiting for someone to open it someday and do something, for fuck’s sake, with her lame brother’s lame death.

  We were in my apartment. I was sitting in an armchair, facing the sea. Oded was behind me. He touched my shoulder, then my bandaged hand. Then he ran his palm back and forth along my arm, gently at first, then with greater and greater force, until I could feel the heat of his touch through the gauze.

  “What’s up with that arm of yours? Wasn’t it supposed to heal by now?”

  I said nothing.

  “Ever since I’ve known you, you’ve had this thing on you practically all the time. And sometimes, in bed and even just walking around, I think it’s just in your way…”

  “There’s nothing wrong with my arm”.

  I just said it, like that. Short and true and exposed.

  “That’s what I thought”.

  We spent a long moment looking at the sea, which seemed to catch its breath in front of us through the great transparent window.

  He kept running his hand over my left arm and I felt my hairs starting to stand on end and the tickle down in my fingertips.

  “Do you want me to change it for you?” He asked and I thought I noticed his booming bass voice tremor slightly.

  I nodded with a kind of shyness that was so foreign to me, but also somehow reminiscent of my distant past.

  The sun was crossing the horizon before us, and glowing moments of grace colored and filled out the space between where the sun was setting and the edge of the window we were facing, spreading onwards, spilling into the room as Oded removed the bandage and then, with rhythmic, circular motions, rolled it off my left arm so that my hand felt all exposed and cool. He took it, held it for a long moment and then brought his lips to it and kissed it. He then walked over to the overstocked medicine cabinet in the bathroom and took out a beige colored bandage, one of many that I had in store, placed its tip on the back of my hand and with a tenderness that I never knew possible slowly bandaged my outstretched arm, like a nurse, like an attentive father, like a mother.

  I almost whispered to him, “say it now”, but I kept silent, struck dumb by what was happening.

  That was the last time I had tears in my eyes.

  Chapter 4

  But back to the matter at hand.

  To tell you the truth, the one thing she lacked was the smell of a mistress.

  I can’t explain it, but mistresses have this sweet-and-sour smell.

  You will never recognize it until you’ve smelled it once, and then, only a tiny whiff of it will do to spot one. I tell you, I should have been a police detective instead of wasting my time on these mental patients.

  I knew that scent well. And she didn’t have it, that whore.

  That was downright annoying.

  Apart from that, she had it all.

  First, she had her hill and while I myself once lived on the border of the hilly Givataim, I now had an apartment in Rishon, a city as flat as a washed up jellyfish.

  Second, she had this elegant and high-society bereavement, she had a downed combat pilot, while I had a brother killed under suspicious circumstances and no one even wanted to mention the fact of his death.

  Dead brother versus downed pilot.

  Is it any wonder he chose her over me?

  Third, she had a deep raspy voice and big blue eyes that would well up with crocodile tears whenever she got excited over something she talked about or remembered, like refugees from Darfur or Arabs who got tear-gassed down in Bil’in, and I had two eyes, but one was brown and the other hazel.

  I had nothing. She had everything.

  I was born to fill the void left by Zvika and ended up as an understudy to both the first and second ladies. Honestly, just leave me out to rot, blot me off the face of the earth, no one would even notice. I grew up with old parents in a monument of a house, in a family that was a headstone of a family, with people who were the sad remains of people. I am nothing. I am a piece of slime oozing sweet and sour odors, spreading its reek wherever it goes. I am nothing. I am a dog-fart that even the dog who dealt it doesn’t even bother sniffing at. I was born on the ruins of something that I didn’t even know enough to try and emulate. I was the one extra candle for next year. When my mother stood before the shrine with her eyes closed and prayed for him to return as she was depositing this season’s flowers, I knew that when he came back I would be gone. My entire existence was provisional. I was a piece of tape to patch things up, a fill in, when the real thing was around I was no longer needed. I am air, I am cold air filling everything outside and in, I am not even the phantom pain beating in my left hand.

  So me and widow piranha are getting about as chummy as Hansel and Gretel, Bonnie and Clyde, Thelma and Louise.

  Almost every week she invites me up to her apartment or we go out for herbal tea at some café downtown. I would make a show of telling her the tale of my miserable widowhood (between you and me, she couldn’t care less about me; she was an egotistical narcissist who only wanted to talk about her, herself and she, as if the entire planetary system revolved around old Ruth), while she, in exchange, unfurled her life before me, like an ancient Persian rug that’s up for sale.

  First off, she tells me that death is a gift. It’s a life-guide. Because facing death brings life and love. She asks me if I too think that being completely open to life means being utterly aware and open to death. I stutter something out.

  “But you need to realize t
hat peeking in on the end of the line allows us to remove our fear of dying, to loosen its grip on us, you see?”

  Did I mention how condescending and full of it this woman is?

  One time she told me the story of this Indian woman called Kisa Gotami whose son died and the Buddha told her to go get sesame seeds from a house that had never known death. Obviously, since she couldn’t find such a house, the transience of human existence immediately dawned on her and she attained such a high level of spirituality that she became the Buddha’s assistant and achieved the state of “Arhat”, which naturally means perfectly free.

  Well, you get the picture about her loose bolts. Still, I paid attention to every word, knowing that what I was waiting for will come in due time and I could go on with my plan.

  On another occasion, she told me about her son, Yotam, who ran off to Japan so that he wouldn’t have to deal with the painful, never healing scar of his father’s sudden death. After Shaul died, how she went with him to each and every soccer match, even when she was dead tired after a long day at the municipal welfare department, just so she could cheer him on when he was playing and how he finally told her, “don’t bother, mom, you’re not dad”; how she went with him, at seventeen, to a tour of Poland’s death camps along with his entire high school class and how she got the tour-guides to go through the forsaken southern town where her mother grew up, which was way off course but it was so important for her to get that “closure”, that’s what she said, looking at me with her round pool-like eyes, and how when it started raining all the teachers rushed to hold an umbrella over her to keep her from getting wet and how she felt like the queen of grief, pain and agony.

  Oh, please.

  Her apartment in east Jerusalem also had a little shrine erected in memory of Shaul but it was far more subtle and minimalistic, a kind of Zen-shrine, as so befits our connoisseur queen of bereavement. It had a large picture of Shaul: piercing eyes, narrow eyelids and a big, prominent chin, surrounded by stones she had gathered on the mountains around Jerusalem and on her trips to the desert.