Lies from the Attic

by Tamara Avner

  Rotem nods. “Thank you, Or, thank you for sharing”.

  But Or was just getting warmed up. “I also remember this one time when we busted somebody’s wall with ten-pound sledge hammers. I was in engineering then. We just busted clean through that wall for no good reason, we could have just used the door. So we take down their wall and we lock the family up in one of the rooms. It was about ten at night. So this woman who was just cooking soup, you know, the mother, she starts talking trash at the Battalion Commander, so one of the soldiers just walks up and spits into her pot of soup and then takes a step back and knees her husband in the groin”.

  Rotem keeps nodding.

  “I’ve been in therapy for like a year now. My therapist tells me that if they had let us have girls, I mean, us religious soldiers, then we wouldn’t be taking all our energy out on the Palestinians”. He looks up and studies the faces of everyone around him. “But I know it wasn’t just us, I mean like the religious soldiers. Because even the soldiers who had girls would beat them up and set up sniper ambushes to teach them not to throw stones. So what do I know?”

  I looked at Elad Stenger. He kept silent so far and his silence thundered in my ears. He looked so much like his dad that I could eat him right up.

  Trust the Stengers to be buzzkills even at sad party like this.

  He got up and kindly asked Rotem for permission to speak. “I was a lookout in Golani’s Raven Company, I saw some crazy shit, but you know, war is war, you’re bound to see some shit. You see detainees, with their arms and legs all tied up, being beaten. You see detainees put up against a wall for hours on end, just for kicks. I’ve seen it all. There’s one thing, though, that I can’t get out of my head. Every single night, I saw this Palestinian man threatening to beat his wife with a stick, while she ran away screaming around the entire house. I saw her go from room to room, while he’s chasing her with this stick, and their two little girls just stand there in the corner, watching helplessly. Then he locked one of the girls in one of the rooms and just like that, without even turning off the light, he would rape her or make her blow him. His own fucking daughter. These girls were like eight, ten years old. At that point, the house would go all quiet. I didn’t even hear the wife. That went on practically every single night”.

  He sits down.

  “I had to watch all that every single night and that’s something I never should have been exposed to. What I’m saying is that violence and brutality are everywhere. The human spirit – well, that’s just what it is”.

  He turns to Or, who sits across from him, his mouth open and his eyes gaping like the buckets that Palestinian women do their laundry in. “And it makes no difference if you’re getting any pussy or not”.

  Around the circle, everyone’s faces are either blushing or turning pale, by the light of the heater’s red spiral.

  Nothing, nothing like an heir to the Stenger name to break the breakers.

  To break the breakers’ silence on the flip side.

  I sneaked out that night before anyone could ask me who I was and what I was doing there. I climbed down the stairs knowing I had found the goose that laid golden eggs – this info was worth a fortune and even daddy didn’t have it.

  “The most terrible thing I’ve been thinking about is that now I’ll never have any children, now that I don’t have Yoni”.

  “Sure you will, Iris, it’s only a matter of time”.

  The sun sent prickly rays to rag-doll Ruthie’s roof balcony, where we sat painting mandalas like little girls at a joint kindergarten for Jewish and Palestinian children, from which peace will simply dawn one fine day, astride a white donkey - or so they teach those gullible midgets who have some rude awakening waiting for them in a few years, when they end up either killing each other in al-Bireh or stoned out of their wits in Goa, to their parents’ dismay.

  “I just don’t know anymore…”

  Huge tears started falling from her eyes, right onto the mandala, whose colors started blending together, making her painting look like a mushy pile of goo.

  “What is it? Are you okay?”

  “I lost a baby. I mean I had a miscarriage”.

  “You did? Before Yotam? After?”

  “No, not with Shaul. With this other man that I’m seeing. It happened four years ago…”

  My water colors went splashing every which way.

  “No, it’s okay, you don’t need to take it so hard. It was a long time ago. You’re so empathic, Iris, that’s really something, how you take things to heart like that”.

  I sat down heavily on the wooden stool and with my shaking hands tried to put the overturned paint bottles back in place.

  “I was near the end of my second trimester. I already had several ultrasound scans done and I saw what it looked like. At first, the fetus looked like a little schnitzel and then it grew and grew, the hands and the feet and the beating heart and the head with its eyes and its lips, all so crystal clear – it wasn’t like that with Yotam, they didn’t even have ultrasound scans back then… Then, all of a sudden, poof! All gone. It stopped moving. No matter what I did, which side I lay on, I couldn’t feel it anymore. We ran to the emergency room and they scanned me and told me they had to induce labor and deliver a dead baby. And that’s what they did, Iris, that’s what they did. I gave birth to a dead child”.

  Look at that hypocrite, spinning that story around so that she’s in the spotlight. Within seconds it was all about her. My story was twisted into this melodrama about her pregnancy, her delivery, her fetus, her pain, her death. I so desperately wanted to be pregnant with Oded’s child, I went off the pill for months expecting it to happen, waiting for the privilege of bearing him a child. Even if I had to have a miscarriage, I would take that deal without batting an eyelash. From that moment on, I decided to add that little piece of life into my own life story. Okay, Enough with the dutiful raising of eyebrows. As if you’ve never done that yourselves, assimilating details from other people’s lives into your own CV, it’s part of a natural process of identification with others and it’s a perfectly healthy example of normal human behavior.

  “But the thing is that the ‘uterus’ is called that because you need to trust. And if your body ends up rejecting your baby, it means there’s no trust in you. That was a turning point for me. I realized that I had to listen to my inner guidance, to follow my heart. That was when I sold my house in Ein-Carem and moved here to East Jerusalem, to live with my Arab friends. I started to understand and love and trust every single human being. Such growth, such vitality, came from such a dark place”.

  On my part, I felt a kind of internal combustion, like a kettle that’s about to burst.

  “What if it had lived? Do you think that Dedi of yours would have left his wife and moved in with you?”

  She wrapped her shawl around her shoulders, raised her head, stretched her neck out to meet the sun and, as nonchalant as a gecko, she rolled out, “I’m sure that we would have. I know he would. But it makes no difference, he’s with me anyway”.

  Chapter 5

  Time to take it up a notch.

  Let’s see what one anonymous phone call to Hava-Nagila Gila can do.

  “Hello…”

  “Hi”.

  “Are you sitting down?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Your husband, Oded, has been cheating on you. For the past five years he’s been having an affair with an IDF widow named Ruth Solomon”.

  “Oh!”

  “Yes, she lives in East Jerusalem. Last October he took her to Greece, and before that, they flew to Berlin and London together”.

  Silence.

  “He was the one who informed her of her husband’s death eight years ago… hello?”

  “Yes, I’m listening…” She says with an unmistakable Anglo-Saxon accent.

  “They’ve been having this affair for years, he even got her pregnant. She’s younger than him, much younger than you. Her name is Ruth Solomon, she works at the
Municipal Welfare Department. Her cell phone number is…”

  “Hang on, just one second…”

  I wait leisurely. I have never been so calm.

  “Did you get a pen?”

  “Wait, who’s…”

  “Ruth Solomon”

  I slammed down the receiver.

  Now all I had to do was start the countdown.

  One thousand… Nine hundred and ninety-nine… Nine hundred and ninety-eight…

  What exactly are we waiting for? For the messiah’s donkey to call, all shook up.

  Meanwhile, I’ll just go over today’s list of new soldiers added to the prison’s companies, to check for any special problems.

  Six hundred and seven… Six hundred and six… Six hundred and five…

  Phone call from the Military Defender asking for an urgent professional opinion on one of the inmates. Another call from the infirmary – one of the inmates passed out.

  Two hundred and fifteen… Two hundred and fourteen…

  One of the inmate supervisors steps into the office. He’s sick and tired of everything, he wants a transfer to the Military Police, he has set his sights on the Traffic Department.

  Six… Five… Four… Three… Two… One.

  Ring.

  “That’s it, it’s over”.

  “What’s going on? What’s over?”

  “Gila found out I was having an affair”.

  “But how?”

  “Some woman called her”.

  “A woman called her?! Who?”

  “What do you mean who? How should I know? Some woman”.

  “So she knows about me?”

  “Umm… No. No names were mentioned. But this means we’re going to have to see a little less of each other for the time being. I need to…”

  “What do you mean a little less? Why do you sound so miserable? What’s wrong with you? You’re the one who keeps saying what a nag she is with her depression…”

  “It’s not like that. Come on, don’t you have any emotional intelligence? You didn’t even…”

  “You’re talking to me about emotional intelligence? You’re the one who doesn’t have a clue about what’s going on with the people who are closest to you. With your children who have to see shrinks and go to ‘Breaking the Silence’ meetings just to talk…” I was buying time with my golden goose, hoping he would finally swallow the bait.

  “I have to go”, he paid no attention to what I just said, completely ignoring all my subtle insinuations.

  “And don’t you yell at me. You hear? Don’t you ever yell at me”.

  “Okay, sweetie, I don’t know what’s gotten into you, I have to go, I need to calm her down…”

  “But won’t she try and find out who your lover is? What did that woman tell her?”

  “Bye, honey, she’s on the other line, I have to go”.

  He slammed down the receiver.

  Sometimes you think you’ve made the perfect move. You count on people to act like people, to react in a predictable way, to pull themselves together and do what their rotten little lives demand. You would expect Gila Stenger to pay her husband’s mistress a visit, whereupon she would threaten her that if she ever came within ten yards of her husband again she will make her disappear. In response, you would expect Mr. Stenger to finally and unequivocally end his relationship with that twisted hussy of his. You would expect him to come running back to you, his soul-mate, his shining ruby, to where he truly belongs, leaving that crazy old hag of his – both of them, in fact – and come live with you forever and ever and ever. But people are cowards. Or they’re nogoodniks. That’s it. Either they are out of their minds with fear, or they’re a bunch of miserable ne’er-do-well nogoodniks, who do nothing but sink deeper into their big black pool of misery, but dig deeper into their own sad pile of garbage and then sit there wondering why they’re so down on their luck and why they make other people suffer so much.

  People are such cowards. That’s what’s wrong with humanity today. Fear runs the game. Come on, if you’re perfectly honest with yourselves, most of you are cowards too. You wouldn’t even risk the tip of your little pinkie to feel truly alive for a single moment. Take my word for it, life is a whole different ballgame when you go beyond the frightened little world you’ve been pushing on your little hamster wheels in your sad little cages.

  What did I get out of all those meetings with the mistress? I agree, it’s a perfectly legitimate question.

  I mean, I could have confronted Oded myself, I could have made his life a living hell until he agreed to leave her. I also could have kept my mouth shut and carried on my plan of seduction – oh, the things I had in store for him, that harlot never even dreamed of and I’ve already forgotten. I also could have blackmailed him, threatening to tell Gila everything, forcing him to leave Ruth if he wanted to maintain his marital harmony. I also could have spilled the beans to the mistress, getting her right where it hurts, telling her all about Oded and me and wait for her to leave him in a lurch. I also could have told Oded about the KGB-style third degree the prosecutor and the head of the CIC gave me, asking me about my relationship with him and everything I knew about him, hinting that they might not be done with me yet and that I’m not sure I’m still staunchly devoted to defending him anymore. Or, I could have told him how I kept him and his righteous humanitarian soul safe, refusing to tell them how he got his hands on the classified material for the case of that poor soldier who was only following orders. I could have done any of these things, but I ended up choosing my own way. Get under people’s skin like a mole and be ready to pay the price, to burn for it. Know every little detail. See how low I could go, getting myself neck deep into the most painful, most difficult places, go through the weekly eternal torments of the Salmon sessions just to uncover another layer of their relationship – her poems, his phone calls to her, their nauseating codependency, the domination-based intercourse (I thought I had exclusive rights to that) – everything, just to uncover the truth. Because that’s what people with guts do. Because that’s what you do when you really want to know everything about everything and make the right call at the right time. Well, with all the pros and the cons, that’s who I am. Face it, you wouldn’t change one thing about me. Not a thing.

  Once, a long time ago, I asked Oded why he chose to become a lawyer.

  “To find the truth”, he told me, without a hint of cynicism.

  “But trials are the antithesis of objective truth”, I argued.

  “And why is that, my special angel?” he asked, giving me his sharp yet glazed look.

  “Because they’re all about stories. Everything is based on how people see things, on their perspectives. That can’t be the truth, never ever. It’s just so distorted”.

  “Well that means our entire existence is distorted. That’s how we live, through the stories that we tell ourselves, through the stories our parents told us about the way things are and how things used to be. So all human history is distorted, it’s all a lie, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying”, I told him.

  “You know, Rakefet, Aristotle said that anything you say about something is true. Korzybski said that anything you say about something is false. The resolution of the paradox lies in perspective. That’s how I see the work I’m doing, the entire course of my life, in fact. I try looking at things from the right vantage point and on a case by case basis”.

  His eyes suddenly darted wildly about the room and came to rest on my box. “The pursuit of truth, any truth, gives us meaning, doesn’t it? Without it, we are doomed to a life of chaos”, he said after a long silence.

  That’s what he said and that’s one of the reasons, maybe even the only one, that I loved him so much.

  At the end of the day, he too must have known that this pattern of pursuing truth that we shared, this most cruel, most Sisyphean, most impossible of patterns was even stronger than the karma that predetermined my relationshi
ps with all the men in my life. The men of the Aurbach women. The men who are hammered down like schnitzels on the kitchen counter, who haven’t the slightest chance of surviving once they’re thrown into the pan in the Aurbach matriarchy’s cursed kitchen.

  You should, you really should start pulling the wool off of your eyes and pricking your indifferent ears, you might find truth right at your bare feet, rolled up like the morning paper.

  It appears that somewhere around the globe, the earth really did open up and swallow Haim Plotkin whole for a very long time, along with my obsession about Zvika, which died down and went into remission for several years.

  But one day he simply reappeared between the pages of the IDF weekly, Bamahane, a periodical whose subscription I could not cancel to save my life, no matter how many notices and threats I sent to the Manpower Directorate.

  One brisk October day, right before Yom Kippur, a special anniversary issue of Bamahane came out, marking so and so many years since that terrible war. As I was sitting at the dentist’s office, leafing through the pages of the latest issue, I suddenly came across that old picture, the one I saw in Yoash Dagan’s bony suntanned hands at the kibbutz several months earlier.

  Plotkin sent that picture to the paper and gave a short interview as part of a piece about soldiers who found religion after the war.

  Today, he lives in Upper Modi’in, has six children, is married to Nurit, another woman who became religious later in life and, blessed be his name, makes an honest living selling ritual items.

  It took me several weeks to track him down. The people at Bamahane said he wasn’t even interviewed and that he sent in the material they quoted. There was no land line listed under his name and all the cell phone companies gave me numbers that belonged to different Haim Plotkins.