Lies from the Attic

by Tamara Avner

  “Yeah, I bet they don’t”.

  “Okay, so the recruits in training courses and the P.D.’s all went down from Zrifin to the training base in Shivta for a change of uniform, right as the war broke out. We never even thought they were gonna make it further south, but then the order came to take everybody down to Refidim, in the middle of the Sinai, and from there to the actual front. I think there must have been some mistake. They were completely unqualified for that, they were anything but ready”.

  Shivta. Refidim. I am hanging on to every word.

  “After the first day down at the front, they sent them in too deep, by mistake, and then they pulled them out when they realized they weren’t up to the task. Look, they were having problems with all the troops back then, we kept hearing it on the field radio. So, anyways, we get the whole company back up to Zrifin. The boys were a mess. Spirits were low, as they say”.

  “Then what happened?”

  “With Zvika? Look, I don’t know what you were told, but you said you already knew that he was hit by a stray bullet…”

  “A stray bullet?”

  “Yeah, that’s what you said, didn’t you?”

  I immediately come to my senses, “Yes, I just didn’t know that was the official term”.

  “Look, everything was helter-skelter, the guns, the ammo, they weren’t checked properly, we were loading and unloading gear, what happened was that he got hit by accident and he ended up dead”.

  The two dogs start running amok all of a sudden, darting across the lawn like bullets fired from a gun.

  “So he wasn’t injured when you were down by the Suez Canal?” I ask after taking a moment to pull myself together.

  “No, not at all. Not at the canal. It was after we got back. When we were unloading. I remember it like it was yesterday”.

  A text message beeps from my black handbag.

  Oded the Bearer. “Looking for me?”

  I take a deep breath.

  “You know, I once saw this letter that he wrote from that base you ended up in…”

  “From Zrifin? No, that would be impossible…”

  “It said something about ‘the Vengeful Jews’, it looked like he was…”

  “See here, we saw some crazy shit down at the canal. He must have written it on the way and then had it sent out”.

  He takes a long look at me.

  “Still, ‘the Vengeful Jews’? I don’t know about that, I sure don’t. Listen, he was a really sensitive kid, you can never tell”.

  For some reason, he’s starting to sound like he’s trying to absolve himself.

  I move uneasily on the bench. Something about this doesn’t make sense.

  “Look, I’m just trying to piece all this together and it doesn’t really add up”, I blurt out quietly.

  “Listen, sugar, it doesn’t add up for any of us”. And then he suddenly rises to his feet.

  “Wait one minute”. Several moments later, he comes back, holding a black and white photograph. “Look, this me and this is Zvika”, he points at a young man with a chubby, moon-like face, who’s smiling faintly at the camera.

  “And who’s that?” I ask, the words coming out of my mouth defiantly, barely sounding like a question.

  “This is us at Refidim. Yes, this was taken in Refidim, or was it Shivta? Maybe it’s even in Zrifin, before the troops were mobilized”.

  “And who’s that?” The words come out again.

  “Oh, that’s my second in command, Haim”.

  “Haim Plotkin?”

  He hurriedly hides the picture in his pants pocket and his eyes fill with insult, as if I cheated him into something.

  “Yeah, Plotkin. How would you know that? What, did you go and talk to that meshigene?”

  “No,” is my laconic answer.

  “And you never will. You might as well accept that. He turned religious and now he’s a real fanatic. Last I heard of him, he was working for Chabad International, spreading Judaism in the tiniest country in the world, I don’t even remember which one it was. What a meshigene kopf. You know what a meshigene kopf is? Oh, you do? Not a lot of people do”.

  Oded is drifting away. Meanwhile, I’m drifting into madness.

  Almost.

  We still had the less-than-occasional meaningful conversation.

  “How did she die?” I asked him one night while I was holding Zvika’s box that had proudly made its home on top of the bedroom TV set.

  “Who?” He asked in a frenzy of channel flicking, trying to create another universe with his static electricity.

  “Your mother, Marcella”.

  He sighed.

  “She had sarcopenia. It started in her legs, slowly moved up to her arms and then her head, until she was completely paralyzed. At some point, all she could do was lie in bed and we brought in a Philippine woman to take care of her, comb her hair, put on her body lotion and turn her over every other day to keep her from getting bedsores. Gila made cue cards and she would blink when we showed her the right one. Turn over, fluff pillow, change channel, that kind of stuff”.

  I gazed at him in utter curiosity.

  He stopped talking. I didn’t want him to lose his train of thought.

  “And then…”

  “She let me know in advance that she wanted to die at home. When her lungs finally failed, we hooked her up to a mechanical ventilator. Towards the end, when she was being ventilated, she drifted in and out of consciousness every few minutes”.

  “And finally…” I felt a tingle at the end of my bandaged left arm.

  “Finally, these lesions started appearing all over her body. I called the doctor. I remember that he came right when Wanda, the Philippine woman, was combing her hair, right after rubbing it with vanilla scented oil. He took one look at her and then one look at me. He said she had been dead for two days and those were post mortem lesions. How could we not have noticed that, he asked, as the Philippine woman was still combing her hair, you see?”

  I see perfectly. Sometimes death has its sneaky little ways of crawling inside your life, without anyone even noticing.

  Still, our sex got more alienated, poignant, scarce and violent.

  And that’s all I’m going to say about it.

  For two reasons:

  One, cause you’re just a bunch of voyeurs, watering at the mouth, waiting for me to do my perverse, bizarre sex number so you could masturbate right here on the manuscript.

  Two, because some of you are tender hearted women who “cannot bear such uncouth words”, and it is you, yes, you girls, of all people, that I’m counting on to take my side in the end. So why scare you off so early?

  Let’s just say that the bizarre wasn’t entirely beyond our bedroom pale. Word to the wise?

  All the baklava-sweet-talk practically disappeared. I felt I had no other options, no other ways of keeping him with me. Only perversion, only violence, I mean, he had that darkness in him and he had other women taking care of all the rest anyway.

  “What’s up, big Dedi?” I asked him while examining the darkening bruise on my thigh.

  “Nothing, I just have a lot on my mind”.

  “Like what?”

  “Never mind, Rakefet”.

  “So maybe you should go…”

  “Yeah, maybe I should”.

  I felt him slipping away, like hot spaghetti from the edge of the pot.

  I grabbed the end of his sleeve.

  “No. Stay a little longer. Tell me, it’ll help you relax”.

  He stayed put and kept silent. Then he said in a dry voice, “I’m a little worried about my son, Elad”.

  “What going on with him?”

  “Relationship trouble. His wife wants a baby and he won’t hear of it”.

  “Right now or ever?”

  “The whole thing just seems to put him off altogether”.

  “Strange, isn’t it? Do you think your divorce has something to do with it?”

  “He just started therapy. From wha
t I heard, some difficult stuff is coming out, but he won’t share any of it with either of us”.

  “Stuff having to do with you?”

  He suddenly turned to face me.

  “Why does everything have to be about me? What do I have to do with any of this? I’m telling you that he’s the one who’s upset, how the fuck is this about me?”

  “Okay…”

  Take a deep breath.

  “He feels like he won’t, like he can’t have a child. He’s not sure what kind of a father he’s going to be”.

  “Yes, I can see that”.

  “In short, now Einav wants a divorce”.

  “That’s a little hasty, isn’t it?”

  “Just tell me, where is this coming from? Was I such a terrible father? What can be so frightening about being a father? I don’t get it. Was I such a lousy role model?”

  I could see Oded’s little soul-rabbit, peeking out through the embrasures.

  I know he’s wrong. I know he’s not even close to finding out the truth. I know that I know everything, lock, stock and barrel. For a moment, the winds blowing through my head die down.

  These are your protagonists’ weak points. The blind spots that keep them from seeing, and you, as an external observer, as the omniscient narrator, you are, well… omniscient. Use that.

  “Look, jumping from one wife to the next probably didn’t do him any good. I mean, a child needs some stability”.

  His melancholic eyes seek mine.

  “Do you think that has something to do with it?”

  Sometimes the greatest con-artists fall for the most innocent traps. The closer it is to them, the more it concerns their own miserable little corner of the world, the more impaired their vision is. As if they’re hyperopic and objects start to blur when they’re too close.

  “Of course it is. A child needs to know that mommy and daddy are there forever. And I don’t care what all these new age psychologists say, using their studies to justify their own dysfunctional families – children need stability”.

  He keeps quiet for several long moments.

  Finally, I break the silence.

  “So, what do you say?”

  He swerves to the left.

  “He’s supposed to start his army reserve duty now and I advised him to try and get a lower profile”.

  “You did what?”

  “Listen, the only place he needs to be now is home with Einav. This is no time to be going off anywhere. Besides – the whole thing is endless. We hurt them, they hurt us, but most of all – we hurt ourselves”.

  “But if he lowers his profile, the same burden just lands on someone else’s shoulders”.

  “I’m starting to think that if he lowers his profile, maybe they will do the same. Maybe that’s how we end all these wars between us. Maybe we can lower the rate of violence, eliminate fear…”

  I could hear that worm of a widow rearing its head, slithering out and speaking through his mouth. I finally understood what turned him into such a radical leftist. They couldn’t possibly have made him a military defender with those opinions. This change had to have happened recently and it’s all because of those little drops of cyanide she administers to him along with those sweet-and-sour odorless bodily fluids of hers.

  “I find that a tad extreme, don’t you? I think it’s just a bunch of spiritual mumbo jumbo and hippie teenage fantasies. Still, you’re the one handling all those operation reports, you know what’s really going on out there… Listen, if you start talking about lowering profiles and conscientious objection like this they’re going to kick you straight out of the Military Defender’s Department. You do realize that, don’t you?”

  He started tying his shoelaces.

  “And you’re simply dying for that to happen, aren’t you, Rakefet?”

  “What?!”

  “Forget it, I’m outta here”.

  “No, what did you say?!”

  “I said that you would simply die if that ever happened”.

  “Oh. I thought I heard something else…”

  “Good night, I’m beat”.

  And he took the elevator down and went out the front door and turned off his car alarm and got in and slammed the door and started the engine and drove away.

  I can’t get in touch with Oded.

  Time is running out.

  I can get some cautious bits of information from Yaniv, but even those come out like drippings from an over-squeezed lemon.

  “Where is he?!” Yaniv finally answers my call to the intern desk at Oded’s office.

  “Who, Oded? What about me, don’t you care about me anymore?” Oh great, now I managed to hurt his feelings.

  “Of course I care. I just wanted to know where he is, I need something from him”.

  “Oh. Some family thing, I don’t know…”

  “His wife?”

  “No, his son, I think… He canceled his Tel Aviv meeting… Say, have you got any more of those panties?”

  “I do. So where is he?”

  “Chillax, Rakefet, I’m not keeping tabs on his every move…”

  “Do me a favor, pretty boy, check his appointment book and see where he is”.

  “What is up with you, I can’t just…”

  “Yes you can, my stallion, my panties are waiting for you at the manger, can you come grazing tonight? Now, go and take just a teeny-weeny peek, lovey, I have something really urgent that I need to get to him, giddy-up, Yanivi-boy”.

  Bait Vagan Street, Jerusalem.

  After endless wanderings through the alleys of Jerusalem’s Bait Vagan neighborhood, with my army Renault’s side window open wide, I finally spot his black BMW, cruising like the titanic along the narrow streets. In the passenger seat sits his son, Elad, whom I recognize from his Facebook profile pic.

  Oded drops him off at the entrance to a stone house with an inner courtyard all adorned with grapevines. Elad rushes inside while Oded parks, crosses the road and sits down at a nearby café. He orders his usual double espresso and waits, leafing through a newspaper.

  I call him and I can see him taking out his phone, giving it a long look and then pressing one of the keys. At my end, the call is disconnected.

  I start itching all over.

  After about forty-five minutes, Elad leaves the courtyard, closes the gate behind him and joins Oded at the table.

  After they drive off, I hop over to the other side of the street to read the sign that was fixed next to the doorframe. “Shmuel Helman, Psychologist”.

  What wouldn’t I give to be a fly on the ceiling during Elad Stenger’s sessions with his shrink. What wouldn’t I give for a few more tidbits of information about his father, a few more dainty anecdotes about his conduct.

  I had no choice but to infiltrate the leftists’ stronghold.

  I went to a meeting of “Breaking the Silence” held at a small apartment in Kfar Saba. A meeting I knew Elad Stenger was also going to attend.

  Some fifteen former combat soldiers were gathered in the small living room. A late winter downpour was wreaking havoc outside, while inside, the apartment was heated by a little heater that occasionally let out a few sparks that looked like somnambulant embers, fighting for their lives in a dying fire.

  Some retired officer, a lanky woman named Rotem, facilitated the discussion. She also brought in a cameraman to film the testimonies but he couldn’t get his focus to work or something, so they decided to record just the audio.

  One by one, the men threw their kartofalach into the bonfire, telling of abuse, illegal arrests, checkpoint humiliations and violence against Palestinians.

  The evening started off with a soldier who identified himself as Ofer from Ra’anana. He served in the Nachal Brigade and was stationed in Bethlehem in 2004. Today, he’s a married man, marketing consumer electronics. His scraggy exterior was misleading. When he opened his mouth to speak, a deep bass voice came pouring out, making everyone in the circle look up to see what hidden inner sound box is emit
ting these thundering decibels.

  With his eyes downcast, he told us that today he is ashamed of having spent his entire regular service fooling around. Of feeling that his entire term made no contribution whatsoever and that his service was redundant, irrelevant and meaningless. He said, “we used to go into random houses, without any warrants or suspicions or anything, and clear them out, just so that the Battalion Commander could show the Brigade Commander that we had a stake out, so if anyone ever happened to fire from there, we could say that we staked the place out. So, we would go into these houses and sit around watching TV. One time my buddies from the support company saw a walking cane in the corner and kept it as a souvenir”.

  Another soldier asked to be the one to speak next. He said that he has been having trouble sleeping since he was discharged in 2007. He had long curly hair, thick eyebrows, also curly and, if he were to take off his sweatshirt, we probably would have seen the all-natural sweatshirt covering his chest, shoulders and back, that had kept him warm throughout his tour of duty in frosty Hebron.

  “We would use preemptive fire, or whatever else you wanna call it. You pick a window or a couple of windows that you already fired on, now, the sector commander comes in, or in Hebron that could be just some border-police guy, and start the procedure: okay, for the next sixty seconds, let her rip. All positions open fire. Holding fire, I don’t know for how long. Rapid fire MAGs, grenade launchers, M-16s, the whole shebang. You know, like a symphony of fire”.

  The room went all quiet. Only the spiral heater kept firing its barrages at us.

  One of the young men sitting next to me started sobbing.

  Rotem, the retired officer, asked him if he would like to speak. He shook his head. Once again, the room grew silent. Once again, she said he should give it a shot. Once again he shook his head but then started speaking in a voice choked with tears, with snot coming out of his left nostril, which was looking right at me. “I remember them catching this kid, he was about eleven or twelve, I don’t know, about as old as my little brother. I remember one of the guys took him into the toilets, he was in my company so I couldn’t say anything. He took him into the toilets and shoved his head into the bowl. I remember him being so proud of it and everybody else laughing. They snorted like pigs, I remember that. And I come from a religious family, too. They kept him locked in the toilets all day. At least, they said, at least he could pee whenever he wanted”.