Lies from the Attic
Page 21
“Yes, your honor”.
“And it is your contention that the suspect sent Nicolai Gurvitz to break into the deceased’s apartment and then assault her and her partner, Mr. Stieger?”
“Stenger”, I blurted out.
“Yes, your honor”, he replied without so much as a look in my direction.
“And what was the relationship between these two?”
I thought she was asking about us, about me and Oded and I felt my ears prick up like a hound’s.
“She was his therapist when he was detained at Prison 4, eighteen months ago”.
Rakefet four-eyes rises up to the challenge. “There is not a single piece of evidence linking them apart from the fact that he was detained for several hours at the prison. All Prison Four records were lost in a fire four months ago. This is all mentioned in the case materials, so there is no solid evidence of any relationship between said Gurvitz and the suspect”.
It’s true, the prison records really were lost in a fire.
“And other than that, your honor”, Rakefet four-eyes presses on, “there is no motive”.
Judge layered-bob turns to prosecutor Bamba, “what kind of relationships are you claiming existed between the suspect and the deceased and between the suspect and the man who was injured?”
“Friendship, your honor. Mr. Gideon Sagie and Mrs. Sharon HaCohen have offered statements to the effect that the deceased engaged in friendly rapport with the suspect, while the latter impersonated another woman… Someone named Iris Lanker…”
Rakefet four-eyes gets up on her hind legs. “What do you mean, ‘another woman’? ‘Another woman’, please!” She snorts scornfully. “It is another woman! You’ve arrested the wrong person!”
“We’ll have to arrange a line-up”, the police prosecutor moans. “She was identified by her picture in the paper and by her bandaged arm”.
Everyone stares at my two bare arms.
“And what bandaged arm would that be, exactly?” Rakefet four-eyes mockingly inquires.
Prosecutor Bamba ignores her. “About the man who was injured, he is still in no condition to be questioned. The two were professionally involved, that much is certain”. He sits down then gets back up.
“Nicolai Gurvitz claims that the suspect paid him eighteen thousand shekels to commit the assault. We have checked the suspect’s bank account and a similar amount was indeed withdrawn in the past week. Regarding the burglary in February, he claims that the suspect made a deal with him by which he would keep any stolen jewelry or cash in exchange for delivering the computer to her possession”.
Rakefet four-eyes takes another look at the documents in front of her. “Kindly inform the court who this Nicolai Gurvitz is – a homeless drug-addict – and the police chose to base its entire case on this man, whose reliability is questionable, to say the least…” I notice that she really likes ending her sentences with ellipses. She sits down contented. The judge nods her head.
“We need more time to conduct the investigation, your honor”, the prosecutor squirms. “We are missing just one more link in the chain and it is precisely on this matter that we have issued a suppression order, as your honor can see”.
Judge layered-bob goes through the material again. “Yes, I see”.
And then she looks back at me.
“You’ve been awful quiet, Ms. Aurbach. These are very serious charges you’re facing … Is there anything you’d like to say?”
I keep my mouth shut. Then I hear myself say, “I’m a bereaved sister”.
“Oh”, she says and then adds, “you do realize, though, that according to this file here the prosecution is likely to indict you for conspiracy to commit murder, solicitation to aggravated assault, aiding and abetting burglary, larceny, passing information to enemy hands, obstruction of a police investigation… This is something to be reckoned with”.
“My brother was killed in the Yom Kippur War”, I continued. “He was missing in action for more than a month and my dad drove around every day for a month with this major, a woman major named Ahuva in her old Carmel Ducas car to try and find out if and where he was killed, because they didn’t even know which front he was sent to, the north or the south one. They would call up all those brand new army bases that were put up over-night – Balusas, they used to call them – to try and talk to the soldiers, to get any piece of news, to see if anybody knew anything. Every day my mother would go to her hairdresser to get a chignon before the informers came. She knew. He died in a tank that was hit by friendly fire from our troops who flanked the opposite hill and all that was left of his burned down tank were his charred dog tags. I spent my whole life living in his shadow”.
Rakefet four-eyes sighs and eases into her seat like a pile of bones.
Judge layered-bob extended my arrest by four days. By then, she told the police prosecutor, they better have some more solid evidence, proving that there’s a good chance for conviction and demonstrating the danger the suspect might pose to the general public.
They took me back to the ward, not before sending me to see the prison psychiatrist, a little Russian woman named Olga.
“You are very very lucky that the wheels of bureaucracy grind so slowly and no one had a chance to tell the court this morning what you did last night in your cell with all your menstrual blood”, she tells me.
“You can quit the act, sister”, I say to her, sitting on the stool next to her desk, “I’m a psychiatrist too”.
“You’re a psychiatrist?” She shrieks.
“I see, you’re a psychiatrist”, she repeats herself like an echo, this time one octave lower.
“I am. See for yourself”, I tell her.
“Okay, so you say that you’re a psychiatrist…” She comes to her senses and sits down at her desk. “And what else?”
“That’s about it. I am a military psychiatrist. My signature is on hundreds of expert psychiatric opinions. My opinion calls all the shots in military courts all over this country”, I answer dryly.
“So I see”.
I sit back, looking at the floor around me, wondering about the meaning of everything that’s been happening. All the legal procedures, all the chatter, all the papers and the documents you keep passing on from one person to the next – what is the core, the fundamental meaning of it all? I mean, we are all alone, we were all cast out of paradise and all we have is this hollow human existence that only we can endow with meaning, our entire existential being is frail and insignificant and you keep on thinking that your titles and your notes and your positions and your jobs and whoever it is you think you are all so important, without wondering for an instant what this might mean about your fragile existence. I think that when we try to hurt ourselves, it’s not because we are in too much pain, because we suffer too much, it’s just that we are ready to let go of this life before it is ready to let go of us.
Girrrrrrrz.
I can hear the birds through her office window. I hear them chirping to each other – what a lovely day it is, we had some rain last night, we better fly off to find some seeds, to catch some worms that will be out and about after this rain. I can hear one bird refusing, saying not yet and I can hear another bird, probably their leader, giving out orders. I can hear all that in the chirping of the birds and I understand everything.
Suddenly, another woman walks into the room behind me. The psychiatrist looks up from her paperwork, gives the other detainee a hollow glance and asks her what she wants.
“I want to die so I could live”, the woman says.
Here I am writing all this inside my isolated, 16 by 13 feet cell that has a huge camera broadcasting my every movement to the control room twenty-four hours a day. Here I am, lying on a sponge mattress, my eyes drifting from one corner of the room to the next, bouncing off the walls that are covered with beige colored padding.
Remember Birdy? Well, that’s me.
I am floating in and out of consciousness because of all the shots they give me
. They play me Elgar’s Cello Concerto, performed by Jacqueline Du Pré who still doesn’t know, as her bow quivers on the strings, that deep inside her tissues are already infested with the multiple sclerosis that will kill her when she reaches forty-two. Images of Oded and bits and pieces of a soundtrack featuring Thots Thounding, a pink spiral against a crimson background in Rosa’s terrribly prrricey carpet store, the drums beating at Sheikh Jarrah, the jangling of the crystal wind-chimes on Ruth Solomon’s balcony and images of my mother’s ass and my father, reeking of baloney, dropping to the living room floor, the dogs running around on the lawn down in Kibbutz Lahav, the two boars, Sparky and Turbo, sweeping for mines in the wilderness of the Negev, the charity boxes, life and death at Haim Plotkin’s - all these keep piling up before my eyes like a motion picture projected onto the beige wall that feels like cardboard.
You know who else was put in jail? Voltaire. And Pushkin. And Balzac. Dreyfus had his ranks torn off his uniform in a humiliating ceremony and was sent into exile. Others were burned at the stake. If you want to make a change, there’s a price you may have to pay.
I’ve been writing this whole manuscript for you inside my prison cell, without any access to the outside world. Just to let you know. To let myself know, too. To make you believe. To make myself believe. I had four days to write it all down so that my truth, my truth, could be published. I am going to stop writing now and everything that follows is just thoughts, reflections, ruminations. Not that it matters that much to you, but just to let you know that from now on, I’m no longer documenting, now it’s just me and my thoughts.
This is just me and my thoughts coming to you live on M.A.G.E.N., which is the ward for mental patients inside the Ayalon prison compound.
It’s actually very close to Zrifin. It’s a branch of the Beer-Yaakov Psychiatric Hospital. It’s also a stone throw away from where my brother Zvika met his maker.
A guard from the nearby Neve-Tirza women’s prison is in the room with me every single hour of the day.
I ended up remaining in custody until the trial. I wasn’t sure whether the police managed to get their hands on all the missing links, but the District Attorney eventually indicted me for a total of no less than thirteen separate charges. They somehow devised a whole indictment out of all the evidence. Well, even a blind hen eventually finds a grain of corn. My defense attorney, Rakefet four-eyes, which actually turned out to be a good kid behind all that attorney attitude, let me sneak a peek.
It mentioned Bruno the security guard. That little turd testified against me and Nicolai Gurvitz, saying that we stole his key to the safe, snuck into Stenger’s office and planted top secret material so that he would get arrested and accused of passing secret information to enemy agents, getting him disbarred. For that alone they pinned me with three separate charges.
The whole world is against me.
Even Oded came in to testify. No permanent damage to the motherfucker. He rose like a phoenix and gave a twelve-page testimony. I couldn’t really read it because my eyesight is a little blurry from the pills, but I definitely recognized his signature – it looks like the nose of a plane with wings. But what difference does it make, I know him. He would never have the balls to admit that what we had was the most real thing that ever happened to him. The real deal, worth dying for. I bet he chickened out anyway, saying it was a one-night stand, that we met another three-four times and that he has no idea what that crazy bitch wanted from him. As if he couldn’t remember anything, as if I was just the static electricity on the television screen of his life, just a distant echo of the big bang. As if he had washed his hands of the box that lay on top of that screen. His laconic testimony must have been the missing link they were looking for.
But maybe, maybe he defended me, risking his own life and his own limb. Maybe he got some sense into him and for once in his life decided to dance on a razor’s edge and go all the way with our ‘which do you prefer’ games. Maybe, just maybe, he told them that I was the best thing that ever happened to him, that there was nothing but truth between us, that he and he alone was my bearer and that I was the only person he needed to inform of the death-tidings that enveloped my life, that he is willing to be flayed alive with iron combs rather than say one bad word about me.
Oh, please. I am not completely out of my mind, if that’s what you’re thinking.
Rakefet four-eyes pops in for a visit. She wants us to plead insanity. I say no way. I was the one who sent Nicolai Gurvitz, I was the one who paid him and that makes me guilty as charged, I keep telling her that, and then that women who keeps standing at the doorway says, “yes, she just wants to die so she could live”.
“That might very well be the case, Rakefet, but they’re going to have a hard time proving it. Besides, why not try and plead that you’re unfit to stand trial. I set an appointment for you with the district psychiatrist for Thursday”.
My my, I’d like to see you manage not to succumb to such temptation. It’s not every day that one gets a shot at a district psychiatrist.
Two prison guards escort me to his office at the Beer-Yaakov psychiatric hospital. His name is Dr. Cohen, how original. As I walk into his practically bare office, he steps forward to greet me. “Hello, Rakefet”, he says, “I’m Dr. Cohen”.
His voice is so squeaky that I can barely keep from bursting into laughter. But I guess he’s used to uncontrollable outbursts of laughter so he pretends that nothing is happening.
The chairs are made of a metal frame with brown plastic.
I take my seat and he asks the guards to wait outside. I can feel my mouth drying up. I mean, the guy is a district psychiatrist after all.
“How old are you, Rakefet?” He squeaks out.
“Thirty-seven”.
“And do you know why you’re here?” He slides his glasses back up his nose and looks at me with pupil-less eyes.
“Do you?”
He writes something down on the page in front of him and looks back up at me.
“Do you realize that you’ve been accused of committing a crime?”
“Yeah. Conspiracy to commit murder and aggravated battery. That and making off with classified documents, maybe even espionage…”
“And are these serious charges, you think?”
“Well, it’s all in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?” I answer with equanimity.
He twists and turns in his padded chair. Even after weeks of failed therapy, I still get them right below the belt.
He jots down another line on his sheet of paper. “Tell me, Rakefet, what should your attorney focus on to best defend your interests?”
My eyes dart to the window and then back to Dr. Cohen’s desk, which has two pictures of him and his wife and kids out skiing, a telephone, a computer and a little magnet game that his wife probably got him to celebrate his new position.
“So what do you say, Rakefet?”
“I say that my interests don’t need defending. The righteous one shall live by her faith”.
“Do you know what’s facing you?”
“I live so I could die”.
He looks up. “Excuse me? What was that?”
“I die so I could live?”
He quickly writes this down in a handwriting that no one else will ever decipher.
“Can you tell me the difference between good and bad? Between good people and bad people?”
“At this point, all I can tell you is that good people are like the dead. They linger”. I answer him and raise both my hands so I can take a better look at my cracked fingernails.
Boy, is he excited about getting all this down.
“Do you understand the difference between pleading innocent and pleading guilty, Rakefet?”
I wonder whether this is a good time to tell him that I was acting psychiatrist for the entire Prison 4.
“What I understand is that I am not going to make a fool of myself. Do you understand that you are making a fool of yourself, Doctor Cohen?”
I think this pretty much sums up our session. Back I go behind them bars, to my cozy little nest.
Once a day, they let me go out with my guard, Nicole, to the densely barricaded third floor balcony. “The cage”, they call it here. And I can look out on the entire prison compound from there. From there, I can see the inmates in their orange clothes go out to work at the prison production center. It helps endow their human existence with meaning. Work sets you free and all that. From there, I hear the daily count, with its four daily announcements: “the count is finished, good afternoon”, then a few hours later, “the count is finished, good evening”, then “the count is finished, good night” followed by “the count is finished, good morning”, the following morning.
I talk to Nicole, the guard, I tell her things like, “you know, when God counted the Israelites before they entered the land of Canaan, it was because he loved them so much. Is it the same idea here?”
She never answers me. She keeps a cell phone in her guard pocket and waits for the moment when she thinks I’m taking a nap in the blue-jeans-colored uniform I got from Neve-Tirza, so she could call home and talk to her kids or her widowed dad.
She asks them if they had eaten and if they finished their homework before watching television and tells them to take the karate clothes out of the laundry before class and not to pick on the little one. And, respectively, she asks her father if he had eaten and when did he wake up that morning and whether he is watching television or not. I almost choke myself laughing and sometimes I suddenly jump up and tell her that all those calls aren’t worth jack shit, that it’s all a cover, that it’s all false, all just a game, that her life is utterly meaningless, that she’s like some soldier in the occupied territories fooling around all day, shooting window panes off abandoned buildings so that his commanders will think he’s a real hotshot. I tell her that those words she’s saying really hurt. She immediately hangs up and puts her cell in her pocket, right under the belt, where she keeps her elastic headbands. Sometimes she yells at me to keep my mouth shut and sometimes she tells me to watch my mouth or she’ll get the doctor to give me another shot.