by Tamara Avner
“I just feel like I can’t meet anyone new. After Yoni, I can’t find anyone else who’s interesting”.
I lobbed this little provocation into the room like a hand grenade.
“Yes, it takes time…”
“How long did it take you?”
I went for a three-pointer shot.
“Look, it’s not always like that… It happens, but very gradually, I wasn’t looking for it, but sometimes the universe just showers us with gifts…”
“So how long have you been together?”
Slam dunk.
“About two-three years…
“So, how come you never told me about him? Who is he? What’s his name? What does he do?”
“It’s a little complicated, Iris. I’d rather not talk about it right now”.
She catches the rebound. “You tell me, what was your cosmic connection with Yoni like? What about him really drew you in?”
Okay, I get the picture. Land for peace. Fair deal.
“I guess it was his dreams. They were so sweet, so child-like. One time, right before he fell asleep, I remember that he told me, ‘okay, so you be the she-giraffe and I’ll be the he-giraffe’. That really won me over”.
She nods eagerly, “Yes… I can totally see that”.
“I think it showed that his dreams were the result of a kind of internal hygiene, a purity of spirit that is the only thing that could create such dreams”.
She is nodding a little less eagerly now, still wrapped up in my tales of dreams.
“What about you? What drew you to him?”
“Oh, Shaul was one of a kind. He had everything I ever wanted in a man. The perfect sabra, rough on the outside, sweet on the inside – that description fit him perfectly”.
“And the other man, the one you’re with now?”
She rises and walks to the kitchen. “What kind of herbal tea did you say you wanted?” She calls out from the stove.
Sometimes they leave you no choice but to hit them where it hurts. This woman’s been given the royal treatment for long enough. I have things to find out and all these evasions aren’t getting me anywhere near my goal.
“I’ll be going then”.
“Excuse me?”
“If you can’t share anything intimate with me, after I’ve been so candid with you, after three months of being like born sisters… I just don’t understand why this is so one-sided”. Manipulation always does the trick with these spiritual types. Like a charm.
“It has nothing to do with you, my dear. Or with me. It’s just that he is, oh, I hate to say it, to have to put it so bluntly and clearly, but he is not entirely single, I mean…”
“What? Is he married?”
“Not exactly. I mean, technically he is, but he’s separated, they sleep in different rooms, he’s going to end it, but she’s awful sickly and has a few loose screws too, she might end up hurting herself, you see?”
“What’s his name?”
“Dedi”.
Point blank to the head.
“So you’re this Freddie’s mistress, Ruthie? You do all the kinky stuff his wife never even dreamed about? You make all his bizarre fantasies come true?” I could feel my voice trembling.
“Why would you put it like that? It’s not like that at all. He loves me dearly. He gives me everything, we go out to restaurants outside the city…”
“That just makes you his high-maintenance mistress…” Sweat was dripping down the back of my neck.
Her eyes blazed.
“I am nothing like that thing you just said. I am the only thing keeping this man going. I am everything to him. We go abroad together, he’s taken me to Berlin, London, Greece…”
Hot winds are blowing through my head.
Three days in Greece.
Six months ago.
Big important business trip to close a deal.
And all that time he was with the great whore of Babylon.
For some inexplicable reason, while me, the social worker and my parents made our way to their new home, I felt utterly elated.
The social worker sat next to me with her stern expression, while Mom and Dad sat in the back, staring glassy eyed into the windows.
“Okay, listen, do you know this one?”
“What?”
“How many people does it take to change a light bulb?”
“Oh, that. Spare me”.
“Behavioral psychology says two. You know why?”
“No”, she answers uncertainly.
“One to change the light bulb and one to give them positive reinforcement”.
Not so much as a smile out of her.
“Systems theory says you don’t need to change the light bulb – you need to change the system”.
She keeps quiet, looking at Mom and Dad through the rear view mirror.
“The psychodynamic approach would say – why change the light bulb? Let’s talk about the significance of burnt light bulbs in your life”.
Her upper lip starts twitching and she clears her throat.
“Do you even know what the psychodynamic approach is?” I couldn’t hold it in any longer. She sharply turns around and asks my mother, “Mrs. Aurbach, are you okay? Are you feeling alright back there? Miriam?”
There you go. The traditional social worker approach – if it’s a challenge, it’ll probably kill you.
I had no choice. I was all alone on this journey and now I didn’t even have a hint of proof, except for Zvika’s death certificate, that for some reason I took with me to my apartment in Beer Sheva and from there to Rishon.
My relationship with Oded was slipping between my fingers, due to the toxic presence of Mrs. Salmonella. I had no choice but to pull out my doomsday device – Zvika.
My nights were spent repeatedly conquering the body – and through it, the soul, of Oded Stenger, which I still had saved on my phone’s contacts list as ‘Oded the bearer’. I started spending my days in laborious pursuit of my brother Zvika’s death.
The next step was finding out everything I could about that unit of his – 367, and track down someone who was there with him and could possibly shed some light on the circumstances of his death.
I called the IDF archives and asked to speak to the officer in charge. Israel’s leading pollster Mina Zemah herself answered with a piping voice, or at least that’s what the woman sounded like. I told her I was calling from the IDF History Department, that I was charged with conducting research of routine security measures and that we were looking into troop activities in the southern arena during the first days of the Yom Kippur War and wanted their assistance.
“Who are you, exactly?”
“First lieutenant Dikla Primor from RSM research. We’re preparing this report about…”
“Yes, I got that”, she interrupted me. “But, as your boss Uzi certainly knows, most of the Yom Kippur material is classified”.
“Of course”, I answered confidently, “but still, everything that’s not…”
“Get the head of your department to issue me an official request. This whole subject is highly sensitive, I don’t know what you guys are up to with this inquiry, plus, I find it a little bit strange that this is the first I hear of this and that Dori didn’t talk to me directly and sent you instead”.
What choice did I have?
I went to the archives two days later and when one of the staff members went in – a guy named Avi, a cute civilian IDF employee, divorced plus one, as I later found out – I gave him a smile with my eyes at the secured entrance. I made sure one too many buttons on my uniform’s blouse were open as I waved about my official request from the Head of the History Department at the IDF Operations Directorate that I printed in my office earlier that day, and he signed me in.
I told him I only had clearance to take out unclassified material, of course, and carefully namedropped Uzi and Dori and Yael Hanegbi too – their very own Minah Zemah – in every other sentence.
The lord watches
over the innocent. He let me into their holiest of holies and pointed at a locked and bolted room – the safe where they kept all the classified material from the Yom Kippur War. Another secured box that I had no way of opening. It drove me crazy.
I looked at rows upon rows of shelves, jam packed with cases and folders, each of them just about ready to burst with so many documents.
I could picture myself lighting a match and setting it all ablaze, standing there, watching the past go up in flames, flickering for a moment and then leaving us alone, here and now, with a pile of ashen memories.
“All I need is some background material. Mostly about training units, about the recruits who didn’t really take part in the actual fighting”, I explained to Avi as I ran my pen back and forth between my collar bone and my cleavage.
“Which unit are you looking for, exactly?” He asked. “There were a whole lot of them…”
“Unit 367, for instance”, I said quickly, “do you have any details about it?”
When he finally logged in, after entering endless codes and passwords, he typed in the unit number – 367.
A tide of data came pouring into the computer screen.
“There’s a whole bunch of stuff here, you see? It’s going to take me all day to get half these documents out, some of these are adjutancy papers, some are operational briefings, some are even infirmary records”, he pointed at the screen. “This is a unit of physically deficient recruits. What do you want to know exactly?” he suddenly gave me a suspicious look. “This is a lot of material, I’m not even sure I’m cleared to start working on this… It’s going to take forever and I need clearance…”
“Just the roster. Just the unit roster from right before the war. Say, October fourth, 1973”, I hurriedly replied.
Thirty minutes later I was skipping along between the little lanes, marked with silly little red and white picket fences, that the unit’s disciplinary NCO bothered to fix up and paint every month, for no apparent reason, and stepped into my office with three lines from a computer printout, listing the command staff of unit 367, right before the war. To my dismay, there were only three names on that list – the commanding officer, first lieutenant Yoash Dagan, the deputy commander, second lieutenant Haim Plotkin and the Disciplinary NCO, Azarya Shamila. Everything else there was to know about remained sealed inside the archives. Avi the divorcee grew more suspicious by the minute and finally, after spotting Zvika’s name on one of the roster print outs in the long since archived unit adjutant file, he made sure I was at his side when as he photocopied it in the wobbly old copy machine and then carefully cut out the three names of the only potential witnesses to my brother’s death.
“I can’t just hand these over to you, that’s irresponsible and I need my commanding officer to give the okay”, he got all dutiful and examined me with suspicion that apparently exceeded his apparent urge to pin me to one of the ramshackle shelf-posts and have his way with me.
These are the men guarding the IDF archives. The finest and most innocent, those of tender and chaste spirit and overflowing male hormones – just try and sneak so much as a glance at that cream they’re guarding so zealously. I’d like to see you get more than a slip of paper with three names on it out of those tight asses. Still, as my dear departed grandfather used to say, beggars can’t be choosers and that was certainly enough for me.
When I saw Oded that night, I couldn’t wait to tell him about all the progress I was making with Zvika, but I held my tongue like a scarecrow in the middle of a dry field in wildfire season.
“You know, I was down at the IDF archives today”, I began, peeling my bandage clear off my arm to inspect the little pimples that started coming out across it.
“Nice…” He answered, pulling my toes apart from each other and carefully examining each one.
“And I had this thought, what if it all burned down, what if there isn’t even one measly piece of paper left of all these endless records – what then? How will our lives be any different? Maybe everything will be simpler then”.
“Right…” He said, pressing his erect member to my right thigh.
“We would be able to define ourselves by our bodies alone and wouldn’t have to resort to those mounds of paperwork, that we protect as if they actually said anything significant, just so we could pull a slip of paper out one day and prove something to someone. Just so we could justify ourselves to someone”.
He looked up at me. “What are you getting at, Rakefet?”
“Nothing, never mind”, I answered, and we had a quick mechanic fuck, as if we were skipping over a few pages in the big book of our correspondence.
Yoash Dagan.
I had number one right between my sights.
He was the first one anyway, but as I later found out, the other two weren’t even relevant. According to digital IDF records, first sergeant Azarya Shamila died in 1994. And as far as Haim Plotkin, ID number 034472772, was concerned, he was gone without a trace. There were no records of him whatsoever, not in the military files and not even in that ministry of interior software that I illegally downloaded several years ago. So we were left with Yoash, who would gush and flush, who would rush and blush (as the famous nursery rhyme goes) and whom I was quite prepared to crush.
Yoash Dagan, though flushed and blushed, was a pig farmer down in the Negev, in Kibbutz Lahav, as I discovered the first time I called him.
He was all nice and cooperative until he finally caught on to the fact that I wanted to see him to discuss Zvika’s death, rather than simply shoot the breeze about his merry days in the Suez.
“Look here”, he said dryly, “that was a long time ago. I lost so many friends, so many brothers in arms out there, I’m not sure I wanna think back to those times”.
“But that’s exactly it”, I said, my voice growing hoarse. “He didn’t die out there, he was killed later…”
“Yes, I know that. But you must have heard all about it from your parents, didn’t you? What did they tell you?” He asked, raising his tone to a yell.
“It’s just that they didn’t, they didn’t tell me anything. Listen, I have this document that suggests that he was killed, that he was shot from behind”.
The phone line grew still.
“What are you implying?”
I swallowed hard and tried to get my trembling vocal chords under control. “Please agree to meet with me, I’m begging you. Let’s meet, I really need some closure on this, you’ve got to help me”.
And all this even without the eyes and the extra button on my blouse. He agreed.
All the way south to Yoash Dagan’s kibbutz I tried reaching Oded on the phone and he wouldn’t answer. I try reaching Yaniv as well, to no avail. I finally made it to the kibbutz harrowed and out of breath.
Yoash Dagan really was flushed and blushed. Five foot five and weighing a hundred and twenty-five pounds, as he bothered to tell me for some reason, after shaking my hand with incredible force with his bony paw, adorned with veins and tendons that seemed ready to burst out like the roots of some menacing ficus tree. I sat facing him under an acacia tree on a lawn bench next to his house.
“Contrary to popular opinion”, he tells me, his voice rising and falling with the native Kibbutz-dweller intonation, “pigs are very clean animals”.
“They are? I guess you’re right. I didn’t know that”, I muttered.
“Look, I told you on the phone that I was a pig-farmer. But that’s not my main line of work. Personally, I’m not a big meat fan, not at all, and I never eat any of the animals I raise”.
“Oh”, I say, wondering how long it will take us to get from zoology to ballistics.
“Fifteen years ago, I went to Croatia, I used dogs to clear out their minefields”. He gave me an expectant look, waiting for another impressed reaction. “There were plenty of boars roaming around the area and I noticed that they can be a lot better at finding mines and explosives than dogs. What I noticed was that they keep sniffing the ground,
their nose, you see, it’s always just a few inches above the soil. Not a lot of people know that”.
“No, I for one didn’t”.
“Plus, they’ve got a great sense of smell. Even though they live in sties”, he says and giggles. “You get it? Even though they live in the stinkiest place. Not a lot of people know that”.
I look out at a pair of dogs that are running around the lawn.
“Anyways, I called the Kibbutz, they have a wildlife research institute, and offered them to train wild boars to detect landmines. They agreed and I started training me some sows. I buried some mines out in the desert and believe it or not – they’re even better than electronic mine detectors. The electronic ones sometimes get set off by other kinds of metal. Not a lot of people know that”.
The dogs grew tired of chasing each other’s tail and lay down to rest under a nearby awning.
“After that, I moved out here. Now I take Sparky and Turbo out to the minefield and whenever one of those girls finds a mine they sit down, stick their noses up in the air like so”, he sticks his head out and pricks up his nose, “and wait for me to give them their treats, right in their mouths”.
From his pants pocket, he takes out a ragged little picture that he cut out of a local newspaper, showing his meager body groping the succulent curves of Sparky and Turbo, just a moment before they were rescued from a shipment en route to the nearest slaughterhouse so they could bravely serve their country.
“I’ve been in touch with the army, but you know, it ain’t all that simple to get a pig into the ranks of the IDF”, he guffaws and gestures to the sky, as if hinting at god and all the other beings who didn’t know that.
“So, do you remember Zvika Aurbach?” I timidly ask.
“Zvika Aurbach. Sure, sure. Zvika Aurbach. I was his company commander, he was one of the physically deficient boys. Sure. Zvika Aurbach. He was a good kid, let me tell you. A good gentle kid. You’re really taking me back here, you know…”
“So, I gathered that you all went down to the canal…”
“Look, I was trying to jog my memory after we talked on the phone. And every year, on Yom Kippur, the memories, they come back to me. You wouldn’t know it to look at me, but I go to the memorial services, too, every year. With my kippa and my tefilin and everything. Not a lot of people know that”.