Lies from the Attic

by Tamara Avner

  “Grab whatever you want”, he said, “and make me an espresso please”, he added, pointing at a silver machine.

  I walked up to the fridge and opened it. Neatly piled packages of smoked and molten cheeses, odorous sausages in various colors and pickled fish, all wrapped in fine paper from Youji’s Delicatessen, awaited me like obedient dogs on the top shelf.

  I looked at Aner, who was wiping the sweat off his face even though the entire floor was air conditioned.

  “So it was you?”

  “I was who?”

  “The one who kept bringing my parents food all those years”.

  You have to give it to Aner and maybe even to the entire honorable brotherhood of gay men – they are neither judgmental nor self-righteous. Especially when they’re drunk.

  “It was me”, he said dryly. “They did good by me, your parents”, then he let his head droop down and covered it with his hands. “That and, to tell you the truth, I really felt sorry for them”.

  All in all, this Aner fellow was a good kid. He could have shoved my head deep down into the pile of shit I left for my parents, like you would a dog that pooped on the carpet, but he chose to completely disregard my utter disavowal of them. And I definitely gave him credit for that.

  He didn’t sit around waiting for me to make him coffee. Instead, he got up and got himself over to the compact espresso machine, pulled out a capsule, put it in one of the chambers and then placed a small cup under the silvery nozzle and waited for the hot black liquid to come pouring down. “Remember the time we met and exchanged letters from Zvika?” He asked.

  “Sure”, I answered, recalling how I recycled Pablo’s poems to hold up my end of the bargain.

  “I ended up getting the English poems Zvika wrote me after all”, he casually mentioned, as if he could read my mind.

  “You did?”

  “A few months before your parents moved to their nursing home, I paid them a visit. Your mom gave me a metal box with all his stuff inside”.

  The box.

  But the box is still in my apartment! Battered and barely in one piece, but still there, on my bedroom floor.

  “You mean like a kind of office security box?”

  “Yeah”.

  That bitch. She gave the box to Aner.

  I was trying to make sense of things. If she gave him the box, it means the one I’ve had all these years was just a fake that she planted for me to find.

  Which means that my box, the one I embraced again and again, the one I kept pulling out of the various hiding places she put it in, the one I kept bringing back to the warm lap of our attic, ended up in Aner’s possession.

  I swallowed hard and my eyes floated upwards with the steam rising from his coffee.

  Out of the corridor that led to the rest of the apartment stepped an older man in shiny black spandex riding pants that gave nothing away and no shirt on, which only made him look older. He sat down on the long couch next to the western wall and lit himself a cigarette. He completely ignored our presence and Aner didn’t so much as glance at him.

  “All those songs that I’ve been dreaming about all these years. They made their way to me after all”.

  “So, you got some kind of closure?” I asked, trying to keep in check this raging feeling of anger and insult over him being the one to take home the prize.

  “Yeah… You could say that”.

  “What else was in that box?” I finally asked, timidly. It’s strange but I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to know.

  “Oh, some official report by some general, maybe even the Chief of Staff himself, yeah, I guess it was Dado or even Moshe Dayan… Do you remember who was Chief of Staff back then?” He turns to look at me. “Whatever… It was about how he was shot in the head after he went bananas. That’s what he says in the report, the Chief of Staff or the Prime Minister or whoever, that they had no choice or something like that, that they had to take him down because he was a threat, something like that”.

  The geezer on the couch looked up at me. I might have turned blue without even noticing.

  “What did they do to him? What do you mean? What did he do?”

  “From what I can remember, he went into the unit’s canteen…” Aner said and then stopped for a minute. I swallowed some saliva.

  “He started shooting all over the place. He yelled at them that he would have his vengeance, that they were out to get him, a psychotic breakdown, you know, something like that, I think that’s what the report said”, he dryly finished and took a sip of espresso.

  “Can I see it?” I heard myself whispering.

  “See what?” He casually asked.

  “Like, the report?”

  “Oh, that. I chucked that whole box when I moved in here with Yan”, he told me flatly, pointing his chin at the older man who was lighting another cigarette.

  “What? What are you, stupid? Are you retarded or something?”

  “What’s wrong? Relax, Rakefet, what’s come over you? You shouldn’t talk like that”.

  I got off of my bar stool so I could face him. I was very close, a little too close to his nipple ring.

  “What, you think it’s all yours? You think it all belongs to you? You’re nothing but an aging faggot. Where do you get off throwing away things that don’t belong to you? Where do you get off trying to own people that have nothing to do with you? Don’t you have your own parents? Your own brothers? Go take it up the ass from grandpa here!”

  What became crystal clear to me at that moment was that I will never know the truth. I will never have any closure because I’ll never know who’s lying to whom, who’s hiding what from whom and who has scores to settle with whom. Maybe Aner was offended by that stunt I pulled back in the 80’s, giving him those fake poems at that Ramat-Gan bus stop. He was probably offended for my parents, outraged that I didn’t provide them with the same care he thought bereaved parents deserved. He might also be telling the truth. But it’s just as likely that he was stoned out of his mind when he read that report and now he’s giving me some bogus account.

  And me, the one willing to see everything, even my mother’s enormous quivering behind, the one willing to experience everything, hear everything, break into every room, every file, everything that had a lock on it, the one living silently next to a mother and a father who, like the proverbial apes, lived with their hands covering their mouths, ears and eyes, and hold and hold and hold my tongue, and swallow all the bitter pills they had to offer, including the great box hoax, just to find the truth, just so any of this might bring me to nirvana, me, the one destined to keep on living with this maddening, unsolvable stirring inside me until my dying day.

  All these things crossed my mind while the old man on the couch shook his head in my direction and then threw a slipper at me.

  This time, the tables have turned: Aner was the one holding me by the collar of my blouse and kicking me out of his and his master’s apartment.

  And so the fate of Zvika, my miserable, screwed up brother, finally came to an end.

  Zzzipp. That was the sound of my internal seam, finally torn apart.

  I came home, picked up the beat-up box from the corner of the room, grabbed a pair of pliers and got it open in a matter of seconds.

  Two days later, some thirty-seven years after Zvika’s death, the headlines said that Oded was arrested for taking top secret material from the Military Advocate General’s Office and attempting to deliver it to hostile parties for his own professional benefit and in the name of his radical political ideology.

  He was questioned at the national police headquarters and was released after one night in custody. God knows how he managed to get out so fast, how he managed to turn night into day, to wash his hands off the entire affair and walk away squeaky clean.

  It drove me nuts. That and our little rendezvous when he reduced me to mere dust. And him living with her. And him denying everything. Not remembering a thing, having no idea of how important he is in th
e grand shitty scheme of my life.

  For five days after his release I couldn’t sleep. Five days and five nights I lay awake, rolling cigarette after cigarette.

  On the fifth night, I turned on the television and all my hairs stood on end from the static electricity.

  I stared and stared at the screen until it suddenly showed the Salmon’s place in Wadi Joz, with that wretched little tree in the yard and those ridiculous planters she waters on her roof.

  The announcer went on about some ‘murder for nationalistic reasons’, as they like to call it when some Arab terrorist ups and offs a Jew. There was a shot of a pool of blood right at the entrance to her apartment. Some Arab guy was interviewed on Channel Two about the incident.

  “If you sleep with dogs, don’t be surprised if you get up with fleas”, as my mother would have said.

  One Itbah al-Yahud shout and all their Arab neighbors slaughter them one crisp Jerusalemite evening. That’s all I have to say about co-existence.

  I went on not sleeping and moved out to the kitchen balcony, where I sat waiting and watching the street below.

  The next day, some military policemen came by, parking their car next to my building. Two minutes later, I heard them knocking at my door. It occurred to me that something might have happened down at the prison, some mass suicide or something and they needed me to come by ASAP, but that was just a thought.

  They had come to arrest me.

  They arrested me and immediately transferred me to the civilian Abu-Kabir facility in Jaffa. They had orders not to send me to a military prison. “What do you think? You’re going to be your own shrink?” They found that funny.

  “You are under arrest for conspiracy to commit murder and solicitation to commit aggravated assault”, the tall officer from the Arava Military Police District told me while his partner, a stocky man from the North District kept waving about an arrest warrant signed by the President of the Court of Appeals and a matching search warrant to boot. “Anything you say can be used against you. You’re entitled to one phone call”.

  For a moment, I felt the winds in my head die down. I could see clearly, as if the clouds finally yielded for just a minute, offering relief.

  It didn’t last very long though.

  They brought me to the facility at Abu Kabir.

  Welcome. At first, I was taken from the paddy wagon and put in a steel cage right outside the main building. Nine square feet of concrete floor surrounded by metal bars, a tin tray and benches made of galvanized iron. This cage, which offered a view of the high walls of the detainment facility and the thick, razor-wire concertinas adorning it, was where I waited for them to kindly take the time to process me.

  I was the only one there. I walked over to the north-eastern corner of the cage and peed into the stainless steel toilet bowl. Then I drank some water from a tap installed some twenty inches above the ground. I lay down on the bench. I got up and drank some more water then peed in the toilet again. This time, I got some on my pants because I didn’t crouch low enough.

  The sun had gone from its zenith to the tops of the trees in the faraway boulevard, by the time I was admitted into an elongated cell for a cavity search. I took off all my clothes. A woman guard examined every inch of my flats, my pants and my T shirt. Then, she asked me to turn around and bend over, in case I had a condom full of cocaine up my anus or something. She asked what the bandage on my arm was for and I said it’s just for show. She took out a huge pair of scissors and cut it off. My pale bony arm gave off a pungent smell of moldy sweat. Then they let me put my clothes back on.

  I was led to a room where a police officer sat at a desk and gave me my biometric scan. I placed one finger after another on the electronic pad, watching pictures of my finger prints fill the screen. Then I smiled a huge smile at the camera, even for the side-view photo.

  The smell of Lysol and antiseptics struck me as I entered the clinic.

  A scowling medic asked me if I had any medical conditions they should be aware of.

  I told her that they had taken away my bandage, that my arm was about to fall off and that it will all be their fault.

  She raised my arm and let it fall down. I felt it almost snapping off as it hit my thigh.

  “What is the problem, exactly?” The medic asked, looking at the paperwork in front of her.

  “It’s fractured. Dislocated shoulder. Dislocated elbow. Dislocated everything”.

  “Do you have any papers for it? Can anyone drop something off?”

  “No, I live alone. It’s all in my military medical records”.

  Which mention none of this, of course.

  “Do you want me to bandage it for now?” She asked after we were both silent for too long.

  I nodded.

  A warm tingling spread through my veins as she bandaged my arm, starting from the shoulder and all the way down to the palm in long, skillful motions.

  It cheered me up for my next meeting. The prison social worker.

  Piece of cake.

  This one was called Meira Chen and she told me, “I’m the prison social worker and I want to get to know you”.

  Strudel.

  “Rakefet, is there anyone you’d like to call?”

  Nutcake.

  “Rakefet, I just want to get some background information. You’re no regular detainee, you’re an army officer, right?”

  Baklava.

  “You really should talk to me, you know. I can make a lot of things run more smoothly, all the bureaucracy about your case, your family…”

  “I don’t have a family. My brother was killed in the war”.

  She couldn’t find a pen so she stepped out and came back with a red pen and I could see her jotting down all manner of things inside a file that had my name on it.

  Finally, with all due ceremony, I was led to the office of the prison’s king. The Intelligence Officer.

  Itzik, the prison’s IO. A Moroccan, if you had any doubts. A man consumed with his own triceps, which he occasionally flexed, gazing at them and sighing in delight, as if they were nothing short of his very own children.

  Beggar on horseback.

  I shit you not. He actually said I’m your guardian angel like four times.

  And I quote: “I’m your guardian angel in here. You got no previous history on you, you don’t belong in here. I’m your guardian angel, get it? Any problem you have, you come to me and I’m your guardian angel here. Get it?” He asked again when I started giggling uncontrollably and my entire body started shaking too wildly for me to stop. “Get it? I’m your guardian angel”.

  Once the laughing fit died down, some fifteen minutes later, I was taken through well-lit corridors with ceramic floor-tiles and walls painted so cheerfully, that I couldn’t help but run my moist hand on the bright oil paint, to a two-bed cell in the women’s ward. One of the guards kept saying on her radio, “twenty-four hours, I know, I know, dangerous, not to leave unattended, I read you”.

  So there I was, sitting on the bed, looking out at the yellow sky through the bars on the window, taking in the stench of sweat and cigarettes and feeling the air whirling inside me.

  Maybe that’s my inner sky, I said to myself. You will always have an infinite stretch of sky within you, I told myself again. Then I noticed that I got my period and then, at night, they brought in another detainee, some Arab woman that I heard the guard call Diana. She looked like she was pretending to be suffering from withdrawal – walking around in a daze from one wall to the next, not giving me a moment’s rest with all her shouting and swearing in Arabic. I sat up and sat up and sat up all night, unraveling the bandage and rolling it again around my arm and my neck and my privates and then unrolling it all at once and tossing it under the bed, waiting for the fragments of my soul to crawl back together.

  The following day, they took me to the District Court to extend my arrest.

  As they led me from the prisoner transport vehicle to the detention cell at the back of the court
, I spotted a couple of press photographers and a TV cameraman homing in on me.

  I was handcuffed inside the cell and a young woman came up to me. She had on a white blouse and black pants, dark square glasses and straight, shoulder length hair. She introduced herself as my defense attorney. Because the proceedings were held in a civilian court, I was not appointed a military defender. My attorney’s name (I swear on my brother’s grave) was Rakefet Shibboleth and she was with the Public Defender’s Office.

  She told me she only had a chance to review part of the case material but that right now, they can’t tie me to any of the charges.

  She looked at me with her little beady eyes through her stupid rectangular glasses and waited for me to say something.

  I said nothing.

  Rakefet four-eyes just shrugged her shoulders and asked the guard to let her out of the cell.

  The hearing was presided by the honorable judge Ariella Maor whose bench had a pile of files at least as tall as the frazzled layered bob hairstyle she sported.

  She looked at me quite intently, you could even say she stared at me and I think I caught the hint of a satisfied smile on her lips. This would make an interesting dinner conversation with her gay husband whom she hasn’t had sex with for the past four years.

  Then, she turned to the police prosecutor, who looked a little like the Bamba baby from the commercials. “What do we have here?” She asked.

  The police prosecutor rose to his feet, lightly tapped his pile of papers on the desk in order to straighten it, sat back down, got up again and then handed the judge a few memos.

  Rakefet four-eyes jumped up and asked whether those documents have been made available to the defense. Prosecutor Bamba said that some of the case materials are classified in order to prevent obstruction of the investigation and that he had made available to her everything that he was authorized to – all the rest is part of the ongoing investigation.

  Judge layered-bob looked down at the file and then looked up and gave me a bone-chilling glance.

  Then, still searing me with her gaze, she asked prosecutor Bamba, “Mrs. Solomon’s personal computer was found in the suspect’s apartment?”