Lies from the Attic

by Tamara Avner

  “See this stone?”

  “Yeah”.

  “Well… What is it shaped like?”

  “The Buddha?” I gave it a shot.

  “Where are you getting Buddha from? It’s a heart. A heart. Can’t you see?”

  She picked up another one. “What about this one?”

  “It’s also shaped like a heart”.

  “Iris, are you alright?” she neighed, “it’s a horse. You need to look a little more closely to see it. Shaul used to go horseback riding. He did it for years. Back when he used to live in Michmoret, by the sea”. And she held that stone up to my face for me to nod, approving that it really was horse-like.

  God help me, the things I had to go through with her.

  Once, on one of the first times we met up, she opened her laptop and showed me the poems she wrote in Shaul’s memory. She also told me there were other poems of hers on it, poems that she wrote about the man that is now in her life, the man she doesn’t want to tell me anything about, in order to protect his privacy.

  I’m no literary critic or anything, but those poems could have been written by a dyslexic teenage girl. Not that I said anything to that effect. Au contraire, I told her how lovely they were and asked to read the ones she wrote about her present man, just to compare style and idioms. She staunchly refused, closed her laptop right away and put it back in her bedroom.

  She paid for that alright.

  Take a minute to listen to the most childish bits of poetry you’ve ever heard, written for Oded by Mrs. Concubine.

  Time had frozen still.

  The smell of your soap

  Reminds me that I must live.

  I feel that I must ache less, agonize less

  And every time we meet

  You birth in me

  The joy of these sensations

  Pumping in me from before.

  I am burning from inside,

  I am the fire that destroys

  I am all femme, all flame

  And only you bring me the waters of solace.

  Well? Isn’t that the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard?

  Here’s another one:

  Let me once again feel the tremor of gladness.

  From your flight, bring me the olive branch

  That I may feel peaceful and whole again.

  I never thought I will see again

  The Ararat Mountains

  After the dreadful flood.

  But it is you who led me to a safe shore,

  To solid ground…

  All these poems were saved in a single file named “Oded”. And they were dated, too. The first ones are from 2004 and some of the others are quite recent.

  Just so you get it, this hussy had a hot-bed. As soon as her husband was tossed into a grave inside his coffin, she jumps right into bed with the first man to show his face at her door. But me, I’m a sphinx. None of this shows on my tabula rasa face.

  I let her tell me about studies examining the relationship between attitude towards death, exposure to death and the degree of violence of each test subject. “Because they’re incapable of containing what is foreign or different, they can’t contain their fears so they project it all on what’s outside of them”.

  Well, look who’s a dime-store psychologist.

  “I see death as an acid test for maturity. We each have to go through it alone and the experience makes us stronger and more whole”.

  “How does that work exactly?” My inner yawn is barely concealable.

  “You see, it forces you to deal with nothingness, with the void. You need to feel that space, that nothingness, you know what I mean?”

  “Not really”.

  “Take me for example: when I sculpt, I work on the spaces between objects. This link between ‘empty’ and ‘present’ allows me to be more perceptive, more accurate, I can be with the thing itself, with the void that was opened inside us. It makes me bigger, stronger, do you see, Iris?”

  She takes a sculpture of a naked woman down off the counter and reverently hands it to me.

  “Yes, I think so…”

  I turn the sculpture this way and that, feeling her eyes studying me through the space between its arm and chest.

  Her hand darts out to take the sculpture away from me.

  “No, you don’t. I’ll try to put it differently. It’s like a house, okay? You have your walls and your windows and your doors. That’s what makes a house, right? Wrong. It’s the exact opposite of that. The house is the inner space, it’s what’s inside, it’s something indefinable, so we shouldn’t limit ourselves to the definitions we created for ourselves, do you realize how absurd that is?”

  I try to change the subject.

  “Why don’t we go out for a drink? Catch a movie, maybe?”

  “You know, I saw this wonderful play this week. It’s called The Woman who would not Kneel, it’s about a woman who was murdered in the holocaust. She kept a diary, in which she described how she was preparing herself for the difficult times ahead. She says, ‘even if they put me in a dungeon, I will always have an infinite stretch of sky within me’, you see what that means, we are not confined to the physical dimensions of our body, there is an entire sky inside us, can you see how beautiful that is? We carry an entire stretch of sky within us!” Her eyes start welling up with tears again.

  I look out the window. The sky is growing darker, A Jerusalem rain is going to fall.

  Enough is enough.

  She grabs my hand and pulls me up off the sofa.

  “That’s why I meditate. To get in touch with these moments, to connect with these intervals in our mind - that is always so obscured by thoughts and feelings - so that we could finally see the light of clarity. Because, really, this place where our sadness is – that’s also where our joy comes from, do you understand? It’s the exact same place”.

  After leaving her apartment, I did not go straight back to my car. Instead, I walked down to the end of the street, where some kids wearing decade old sweatpants have just caught a street cat and were trying to see how close they could hold their lighter to it before it catches fire. Then I walked to my car at the edge of the wadi, started it and drove all the way to Rishon with pouring rain smashing down on my windshield. I stopped the wipers, which could barely fend off all that water anyway, and drove with rain washing all over my windshield, barely seeing the road ahead.

  But that wasn’t it.

  Her laptop also held some very interesting correspondence between her and her bearer, Oded Stenger.

  Lustful emails spelled out the details of how they did it, saying everything, even the bondage stuff. Everything.

  I could just get up and murder her right then and there, and even worse, I could skin him alive with my bare hands. But I restrained myself. For now, at least.

  Remember how she told me about that moment when the news of death hits you, how that moment gives birth to a new life, how it’s connected to the moment of birth and all that crap?

  So right after she chews my ear off telling me how our entire lives are designed to reach that moment of nothingness, from which everything becomes real and everything is born and I went ahead and asked her if that person who brought on this moment of death was also the delivery doctor. Remember?

  The next time I saw her, I broached that subject again.

  “So, you’re still in touch with that man who informed you of the moment of death and helped you be birthed again?” I casually asked, jingling the wind chimes out on her balcony.

  “What’d’ya mean?”

  That’s my line, copycat.

  “Like, what I’m asking is, if he had such an important role to play in your life, you probably wanted to stay in touch with him, didn’t you?”

  “But that’s impossible. It’s against regulations”.

  “So, you just never saw him again?”

  “Oh… I may have run into him a few months later, yes, I think I bumped into him at my garage and he helped me square
things out with my mechanic. Us widows, we have so many things to take care of all by ourselves, don’t we?”

  “Tell me about it… So he was nice to you?”

  “Why, of course. He was a real gentleman”.

  “And did you talk to him?”

  “Yes, you know, we chatted a bit “.

  “Who was he?”

  “Some lawyer or something, I don’t really remember…”

  “What did he say? Did he recognize you?”

  “Oh, sure, he said he couldn’t stop thinking about me…”

  She suddenly paused and bit her lip.

  “And that was it?”

  “What do you mean by ‘it’?”

  “I mean, like, have you come across this striking gentleman lawyer again since then?”

  “Well, Jerusalem is a small city, really. I must have run into him a few more… But, Iris, what are you getting at here?”

  “I just want to know, you see, I’ve had these thoughts about my bearer…”

  “That’s a bad idea, Iris. It’s like having fantasies about your delivery doctor, it happens to a lot of women in labor, but it’s a bad idea”.

  Did I mention what a whore she was?

  The first thing I did after leaving the Military Defender’s conference was to head to my parents’ house.

  I took bus number 68 that got me from Tel Hashomer straight to Ramat Gan. The thick, moldy smell of old age struck me when I opened the door.

  It’s been a long time since my last visit.

  The chrysanthemums in the vase by the shrine have long since wilted, giving off a scent of decay. Dad sat staring at the television. Mom sat across from him, staring at him. Her knuckles were all swollen and deformed, she had elastic bandages on her knees and the joints in her feet were so swollen that she could only wear flip-flops. I knew she had arthritis, but I didn’t remember it was that bad.

  First thing’s first. I headed to the fridge. I opened it and was surprised to find an assortment of cold cuts and hard cheeses, pickled olives and herring all wrapped up in thin paper bearing the “Youji’s Delicatessen” logo.

  I closed the refrigerator door.

  “Who’s been buying all this stuff?” I hurled a question into the living room while trying to open the jammed roller shade.

  Mom never so much as glanced at me. “There are those kind enough to care for us”, she let out, stressing each and every word to make sure none of her nuances were lost on me.

  It took me a moment to remember why I was there in the first place. I ran to my room. I searched and searched but it wasn’t there. Then, I ran to Zvika’s room. It was unlocked and a thin layer of dust was hibernating undisturbed on the furniture. I ransacked the closet and the chest of drawers, I crawled under the bed. Nothing.

  “Where is it?” I roared at her.

  “Rakefet, are you here to grab a bite? Sit down, eat something. There’s plenty of food in the fridge”.

  “Where is it?!” I roared again.

  “Where’s what?”

  “The bullet from his rifle! Where is it?”

  “Whose?”

  “Zvika’s, my dead brother’s. Zvika. You remember? Sbika? Shvika? Thots thounding? Do you remember anything? Anyone?” I looked up at the corridor light bulb, the one that was always on like some eternal flame. It was burnt out.

  Mom went back to staring at Dad and gently cracking her knuckles.

  I ran back to what used to be my room. The closet was empty. There was nothing under the bed. The bullet, the cassette, even his poem and his “vengeance of the Jews” letter – not a shred of evidence left. They destroyed it all, my only hope for a modicum of sanity.

  “Where’s all my stuff? What did you do with all my stuff?”

  That calm of theirs, that ostensible indifference, that sea of oblivion that had swallowed up all memory and that silence that I simply had to break.

  I walked up to her and gave her one hell of a shake.

  Desperate times call for desperate measures.

  So don’t get all mushy on me.

  The next time I saw them was after they changed the locks. The social worker opened the door for me and we both took them out to their nursing home.

  “You know”, she told me and I could see from her face that there was a good chance my mother went right ahead and told her how I roughed her up, “they’re so lucky to be getting this support from the state for being bereaved parents. If that wasn’t the case, they probably would have ended up being dumped in some third rate home”.

  I did my best to ignore that tub of lard with lipstick on her overbite who stood there sweating in front of me and I took my mother’s deformed hand in my good hand. “Come on, Mom, come on, you’re going to have a ball there”. We slowly went down the stairs, though not before she suddenly remembered to ask me to leave the light on in the corridor, “for memory’s sake”, she said. When I asked her, “for the memory of what?” she went all quiet again and I added, “anyway, that light bulb burned out weeks ago”. Sitting silently in my car, we followed the truck that carried all the boxes the packing company packed that morning, under my supervision and the big watchful eye of big brother, down to the nursing home, their new home from now on. I held her deformed hand, the same one that all those years ago failed to recognize my chubby little palm, with its crevices of whitish, untanned skin, the one hand in all the kindergarten that was left unchosen, neglected by the hand-fates of cheerful little birthday girls… I grasped the hand that forgot and that was now paying the price for forgetting.

  One Friday afternoon the concubine invites me to attend a demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah. “This is where we sow the seeds of the joint struggle, Israelis and Palestinians, side by side”, she said. It was a hot day in the neighborhood garden as a quirky bunch of leftists gradually assembled, some of them wearing T shirts exclaiming A City Occupied Cannot Be Sanctified and donning colorful kafiyas on their heads. She introduced me to Gideon, Hesky and Sharona. Gideon was wearing a green T shirt showing the portrait of Sigmund Freud, with the inscription Pink Freud. Sharona was wearing a black T shirt showing the image of a palm with two erect fingers, under which it said: I love you Silwan. Hesky was wearing a red T shirt with the portrait of Marx and the inscription Marx was Right. He was holding a large drum and started playing a beat, to which all the other protesters started calling out slogans, demanding the liberation of Bil’in and Palestine and the end of the occupation and fascism, in both Hebrew and Arabic. The Salmon walked around between the protestors in a long dress and a wide straw hat, around which she tied a red and white kafiya. She said her hellos and kissed them on both cheeks, as if this was nothing short of her son’s wedding day.

  I was hot. I sat down on a bench in the middle of the garden, under a canopy of grapevines, right next to three little Arab girls who came up with a clever business plan and were selling - at exorbitant prices - some snacks and big cellophane wrapped lollypops that they bought dirt cheap at the nearby “Al-Quds” kiosk. I bought a local bag of chips, outrageously priced at five shekels, and munched away while gazing at the merry band of protestors, waving their signs and chanting their solidarity slogans out into the pre-Shabbat Jerusalem air. It took me a few minutes to realize what it was about, this display of indignation that rubbed me the wrong way. It finally occurred to me: except for one stocky Palestinian man with a thick beard and a backwards baseball cap who was being interviewed by some anti-occupation activist with a camera, there wasn’t a single Arab in sight. All this commotion for five or six Palestinian families who were evicted from their homes by a court order, leaving them to be invaded by settlers, and not a single pissant Arab bothers to show up and protest. Only the leftist bleeding heart Jews, waving around posters and Palestine flags.

  Then they started walking on the sidewalk towards the disputed houses and I lazily followed suit.

  One of the houses next to the centuries old tomb of Simeon the Just had Israel flags flying over it and the wall surro
unding it had stars of David with the word Hai sprayed on it – the people of Israel live on. On the roof of another house up the street, some settlers in large kippas had placed several loudspeakers and were playing Hassidic music at full volume. The closer the protesters came to this area, the more Hesky’s drumming was drowned out by the music.

  I stood there staring at them.

  One party drumming and calling out for the liberation of these houses from the yoke of Fascist Jewish occupation, and the other party, prancing about to Hassidic music with some kid occasionally hollering out “Allah is dead!” There they were, at each other’s throats, while the disputed lamb wasn’t even in sight.

  I was hot. I walked down towards the tomb, entered through the narrow gate, sprinkled some water on my face and my chest from the holy site’s ablution faucet and hiked up the street towards the demolished “Shepherd Hotel”, then past the Spanish Consulate and then by bus back to the central station.

  Sometimes I got to thinking that I might be off by a mile.

  Maybe Zvika was the one who was too small to fit inside the shoes he was supposed to fill, those of uncle Zviki.

  Maybe he also lived another man’s life, trying to meet the standards set by his parents, who are also my parents, maybe deep down inside, there was another Zvika altogether – a limp, groveling, placating coward.

  Maybe his death was just the tip of the iceberg, leaving the damaged, ignominious life my parents set up for him in the darkness of the deep.

  Maybe he also lived his life feeling like someone’s understudy, someone’s substitute, feeling that his parents wanted him to be something else, expected a greatness of him while he ended up a walking-talking disappointment, making them more and more depressed as time went by, opening a gulf between them, the same gulf that was gaping between me and them since the day I was born.

  There was no way for me to know. No way I could ask. But somehow, I felt that by tracking down his final moments I might get just a tad bit closer to him, to the only relative I have who might be able to figure me out, even a little.