by Tamara Avner
A few days after Purim, I was driving back from visiting the well-off family of some soldier who was arrested for smoking Hashish at the mini-mall in Reut, of all places, the suburb that is the literal heart of darkness of the military elite. When I reached the Shilat junction I decided to keep going straight towards Upper Modi’in, the Jewish Mecca of the Judean foothills.
On my way there, I called Oded, pretending to ask for his professional help with the forensic drug test.
“So, how are things with you?” I asked, trying hard to maintain a professional tone to the conversation.
“All good, where are you headed?”
“It’s a surprise…” the kindness in his voice goads me on, I can’t help myself. I want so bad to offer him my little tribute, to tell him about my quest for Zvika’s fate, but something inside is holding me back, the time isn’t right yet.
“Little Rakefet Aurbach, a virtual knight-errant”, his melodic voice raises my brain serotonin levels, dissolving for an instant all the stickiness that invaded our relationship.
If there’s one thing you can say about Jews, especially observant Jews, is that they know exactly where everyone is at any given moment, your regular human G.P.S. machines, they are. And that was the case with Haim Plotkin.
I knocked at the door to his humble apartment on 14 Tarshish Street in Upper Modi’in, as advised by a group of girls with braided hair who, through their shy smiles, gave me the exact address.
After curtly knocking on the white door, it was opened almost immediately by Haim Plotkin, in the flesh, who had the air of someone who was just standing and waiting by the door for quite a while.
“Could this be the messiah himself or mere trickery?” he asked, without a trace of surprise in his voice, and winked.
I fell for him right away.
“Well, well. What have I done to deserve the honor of having the entire IDF see fit to send me a special emissary on the eve of the holiday?”
“What holiday would that be?” I wondered aloud, trying to remember if the day after Purim is also a fast.
He smiled broadly, baring his teeth, and opened the door wide for me.
“Just please leave your bag here by the door, if you don’t mind. We’ve started cleaning for Passover and who knows what kinds of chametz you’ve got in there. Chametz is like a plague, you know, and my wife will not appreciate it one bit if I let any of those viruses into her house right before the holiday”.
I was digging him more and more from one moment to the next.
“So, what can I do for you?” He asked as we sat down at the little dining corner next to the kitchen, while his children, who were busy sorting their various toys in the living room, kept sending us side-glances, keeping tabs on the officer in IDF uniform who suddenly showed up at their doorstep.
“Tracking you down was no picnic”, I began.
“Tell me about it… The important thing is that I know where I am, everything else seems trivial in comparison”, he said, rolling his eyes to the ceiling.
“Zvika!” He called out unexpectedly and I nearly jumped out of my skin. How could he know?
“Zviki-Hirsch, get off your tuches and offer our guest, the officer, something to eat and drink. You never heard of Abraham? Didn’t they teach you about hospitality at the cheder?”
The eldest kid, who seemed about eleven, quit what he was doing and went to the kitchen with his head bowed, making a point of not looking at my face. It isn’t every day that an angel appears before Abraham’s tent.
Once little Zviki served us a bowl of dates and halved figs (“god forbid we should find a worm in there”, as Haim Plotkin explained with laughing eyes), he leaned over and removed all the prayer shawls, kippas and Sabbath and holiday challa covers that were spread out on the table.
“So, what can I do for you? You’ve finally decided that you do need me in the reserves? Maybe you’ve found some special pension with my name on it after all these years?”
“It’s about Zvika Aurbach. He was my brother”, I said, arranging my hair in a tight and neat pony tail behind my ears.
He let out a long, heart-wrenching sigh.
“It’s just that I saw what they published in Bamahane. They showed your picture with him. I knew the picture from before. I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to him for quite some time now”.
“The righteous, until they uncover the truth, will be constantly haunted and tormented by it”, he says, rubbing together his long and elegant fingers.
I couldn’t help but admire how accurate this proverb was. Beg your pardon, but I also couldn’t help contemplating the member that would match those perfect hands of his.
I nodded, swallowing hard and waiting to hear what he had to say.
“And what does this virtuous maiden know of the circumstances by which her brother, may he rest in peace, met his maker?”
“I know he wasn’t killed in the war. I knew he was shot or that he shot himself or whatever it was, but he definitely wasn’t killed in action”.
Haim Plotkin sighed again. “The lord watches over the innocent”, he mumbled and then repeated, “The lord watches over the innocent”.
A long silence settled comfortably between us. The only sounds heard were the mumblings of the children as they sorted their toys into three marked boxes – one had the word Charity written on it, one to my utter surprise had the word Death written on it and one I just couldn’t make out.
“My lovely maiden, it is a grave sin to be the harbinger of ill tidings, and it is certainly an even greater sin to pronounce even one letter of detraction, it is a crime through and through. But the truth must prevail, that’s what I always say. The truth must prevail”.
I looked at his graying hair and his brown beard, without so much as one white hair in it and noticed that I was sweating.
“Zvika Aurbach was a righteous young man, as innocent and honest as a lamb, who took his own life under the most wicked and malicious of circumstances”.
One little anecdote, before we continue, a tragic-comic interlude, if you will.
I have known quite a few people who committed suicide during the course of my life.
A good friend of my father’s committed suicide after being diagnosed with cancer. He hooked up his exhaust pipe to the inside of his car and sat there with the engine running until he choked to death. His name was Naftali Fox.
Ricki Schwartz, who went to officer training school with me when I was enlisted, shortly after finishing my degree. She spent the entire training course going on and on about her cockatiels back home and how she hoped her parents were taking good care of them. On one of her furloughs, she went down to the cliff beach near Herzelia and walked right into the sea with her pockets filled with rocks. As far as we all knew, she had no special reason for doing what she did and we were all, every last one of us, questioned about her motives. We were later informed that her parents, who could no longer stand the whistling of these caged birds, wrapped them up in rustling cellophane and threw them in the garbage.
The poet and writer Rivka Keidar, who was our literature teacher in eighth and ninth grade. She killed herself for not being able to make a living off her writing.
Both my dentists.
Dr. Fairman jumped off the tallest building in Ramat-Gan, the one right above Bialik Square. Dr. Bennet, who must have heard about Dr. Fairman, jumped in front of a moving truck some two months later.
It’s a well-known fact that the suicide rate among dentists is greater than their part in the general population. With my luck, I landed on two jumpers.
It was then that I started realizing that maybe, when we kill ourselves, it’s not because we’re all alone in this world, not because we are so miserable. We’re just trying to let go of this world before it’s ready to let go of us, before we’re willing to give up on it.
“Zvika Aurbach was a righteous, innocent and honest young man”, he said again, looking over at his children, whose death box wa
s slowly filling up with dolls.
“The story I am about to tell you will make each and every hair on your head stand on end. And you should also know, with those keen tongue and sharp mind of yours, that I will never admit to having told you this”.
I nodded in approval.
With his x-ray vision, he probably already noticed that approving nods mean nothing to a girl like me, but he went on nonetheless. And now, I will present the entire story, beginning to end, just as I heard it from him.
“Zvika Aurbach went down to the front with the entire PD Company. I have no idea why they sent us there and in retrospect it must have had something to do with the rampant confusion that overtook the IDF, reaching all the way up to the top brass – people could barely tell left from right. I saw him a few hours after he had the misfortune of hearing the pleas of our soldiers whose tanks were burned down, right after the fighting started in the area, they were stranded out there, begging us to send in reinforcements. I don’t know if he actually saw something too, but just listening to them was unbearable. We got an order to send the rookies and trainees back up north and the commander took them up to Zrifin. Why him, you’re probably asking yourself. The commander should stay with his men rather than run off like some field mouse. Let me tell you this, only god in heaven knows. That’s all I’m going to say about that. Anyway, I stayed at the front for three more days, then I took some shrapnel in my eye and was sent up north to be treated for my injury at Assaf Harofe hospital. Now you must be wondering again, why did the commander go up and I stayed behind. Well, the good lord has the answer. Word to the wise, not every commander is a commander down to his marrow. When I rejoined the company five days later I found such low spirits, god help us. Every man was cooped up in his own corner, they had foot drills every now and then, just to keep looking like soldiers, but seeing all those men listlessly marching one after another was truly a sorry sight. The day I got back, I sat down to talk with commander Yoash, Yoash Dagan was his name. He told me that the night before, as he was walking past the men’s quarters, he heard a rustling noise coming from the top of one of the eucalyptus trees. When he looked up, he saw this soldier gobbling down an entire box of candy that he got from home all on his own. When he turned on his flashlight, he could see your brother Zvika’s chubby face full of surprise. The next day, just a few hours after the company commander told me all this, we heard a single shot coming from the shack that used to be the company canteen and was now completely empty, after regular shipments of canteen goods stopped coming in. He went into the canteen and shot himself. I was there thirty minutes later. I had just come back from a check-up at the eye clinic and when I came by the body was already wrapped in a sheet and taken outside”.
The children kept on sorting through the items on the carpet – who by fire and who by water, who by plague and who shall live in harmony – while Haim Plotkin’s words kept echoing in my mind, along with my cell phone’s annoying ringtone – I could have sworn that I turned it off when I came in.
“But… but that’s impossible”, I finally blurted out. “I know for certain that he was shot, that’s what the injuries show, that’s what Yoash told me…”
“You spoke to Yoash?” He asked, stressing the first syllable of his name for the first time.
“Yes, I saw him and…”
“You spoke to Yoash”. He said again, this time as a statement. “Well then, my dear maiden, I have nothing more to say. There’s nothing more I can add”.
He rose to his feet and then he changed his mind again. “There is one last thing I will add. People save their own skin, their own skin indeed. And one should tend to his own reckoning before the time comes to pay for one’s deeds”.
I also rose to my feet. Haim Plotkin’s words were still buzzing like mosquitoes in my head, but as I was walking to the door, passing next to the children who immediately stopped sorting their toys – trying hard not to stare at me as I walked by – I noticed something. The cardboard box that said death had a few extra letters at the end of the word. On closer inspection, it actually said Daughters. The third box, whose label was hidden from my sight, had the word Sons scrawled on it in crooked letters.
Just as I was reaching down to grab my bag from the door step, Haim Plotkin’s wife came in. She didn’t seem so thrilled with my surprise visit either.
“I felt a commotion as I came near”, she said, “I was certain that the messiah is upon us”.
“Only the birth-pangs of the messiah”, Haim Plotkin replied and gave me a wink.
“Oh well”, she sighed, “I thought he was here already, to save me from cleaning the house for the holiday”.
She clapped her thick meaty hands together and then ran her plump pink fingers on her cap. I was struck by the complete and utter difference between her hands and his.
I left Plotkin’s apartment and went down, somewhat dizzy, to the street, where boys with big black kippas and girls with braids and long sleeves stared at me. I took out my cell phone and was delighted to see that the annoying call I missed during my visit was from Oded. He was actually looking for me. There was that serotonin again, rushing through my bloodstream, everything is going to be alright, may this be Thy will, speedily in our days. Happy as a clam for the first time in a long while, I skipped and jumped light heartedly back to my car.
The disappointment was all the more painful. The voice mail he left had a dry, laconic tone: “Why are you calling me so much? Time to start damping down”.
The end of April is upon us.
In bereaved homes, this is a time of preparation for the impending spring time of commemoration.
There is a kind of frenzy in the air – the renewal of bereavement, getting ready for the ceremonies, photo albums are taken down from the shelf, the flag with the black ribbon is dusted off, home videos are played, the locked room is open and allowed to air out, phone calls from the Casualties Department, bracing oneself for the grief and the “rapid transition” to a joy of victory that is nevertheless tinged with sadness. Because in their death they bequeathed us and so on and so forth, flying the flag at half mast, keeping one’s chin up and whatnot. The spirit of “they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old” is carried on the lips of the masses at commemoration rallies. In the last few years, I noticed that this was the time of year when I finally severed all ties with my parents, leaving them to chase their own tails with their Memorial Day ceremonies, if they even still remembered that they had a son who killed himself or got killed in action or God knows what in that war; sitting there like a herd of glazed-eyed sheep while the staff of their nursing home plays ballads by the Gevatron folk singers and every few hours shout in their ears, “Meal time, Miriam”, thrusting spoonfuls of mashed potatoes into their gaping mouths.
Not for the mistress, though. A second before committing herself to a mental hospital, she decided that this year she is going to celebrate her own private memorial day in a different, more spiritual way. It will bring people together in commemoration. It will edify and unify.
Sabra and Shatila.
For weeks she had been trying to tempt me into doing headstands with her. In general, she started talking about how you have to go through the body to bring change to the mind. “Because the body remembers everything, don’t you think?” She asks me, putting on this hand cream that she concocted all by herself in a kitchen pot with all kinds of stinking herbs.
“Come on. Even for a little bit. Try it. It’s super basic for anyone practicing yoga and you’ve been telling me how much you want to sign up for a yoga class”.
I don’t know why I let her talk me into it. It must have been part of my efforts to get under her skin, to understand how that screwed up mechanism installed in her body and mind ticks.
Look, I’m not an un-athletic person or anything. I have a great body and well-toned abs, but somehow standing on my head doesn’t strike me as natural. It’s a position from which you can’t really react if anything were t
o happen. And for us, at least in my life, things are happening all the time, you can’t let your guard down even for a second.
So I’m giving it a shot. It’s all about focusing inwards, she says. All you need is to relax your mind and it’ll happen.
After several failed attempts, I manage to swing my legs up above my head and fall down.
“It’s all in your head, Iris. You don’t need to swing them like that, there’s no need to exert yourself. You’ve got it all coming from here”, she taps on the top of my head. “It needs to come from here”, she places her warm hand on my stomach and makes little clockwise circles.
“Look”, Ruth told me, “I think that the way Memorial Day is celebrated in this country only keeps people away from remembering. What’s up with this siren, forcing everyone to stand at attention? What’s up with this one moment when we all have to remember only those who were killed in war and not everyone else?”
She rolls her eyes.
“Sometimes I can really understand those orthodox people who make a point of walking around right in the center of town while the siren is on. Why did they turn it into something holy?”
“So, what are you proposing? That we should just forget? We need it. It’s a kind of national catharsis”.
She smiles at me.
“It’s anything but that. Memory is something very private. Loss is something very private, and it shouldn’t be designated and defined by the authorities as a moment in which we have to force ourselves to remember only those who died in war. What we need is an entirely different experience of remembering. It has to lead to something, it has to have a point”.
“Well…”
“So what I am proposing is an alternative Memorial Day. Since no one can escape the blare of that damned siren, this year I’ve invited all of my friends to a physical-spiritual head-standing ceremony downtown at Sacher park”.