Liar

by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

  You shouldn’t be here, Maya.

  She opened the wardrobe and looked inside: blouses, trousers, dresses. Various items of clothing that fashion shops had sent Nofar in the hope she would be photographed wearing them and then post the pictures on the Internet. “Your daughter is a trendsetter,” a messenger told their mother, who was shocked by the parade of clothes that streamed into the house. Maya remembered it well: the messenger didn’t mention Nofar’s name. He simply said, “Your daughter,” and it was clear to everyone which daughter he meant. Gently, Maya moved the tower of folded trousers in the wardrobe. She looked behind the shirts. She unfolded the tank tops. It wasn’t there.

  Maya closed the wardrobe door and sat down on the bed. The smell of her sister’s sleep rose from the sheets. She decided to search the drawers. In the first one she found the jewellery box each of them had received from their parents for their bat mitzvah. There were two necklaces in it, one with a heart pendant and the other with a teddy-bear pendant, and they both looked outrageously childish to Maya. Also in the box was a bottle of pale-pink nail polish that Maya had never seen on Nofar’s nails, and a half-bottle of nail-polish remover. There was no time for that now, she had to close that drawer and open the one under it. A smile of surprise spread over her face when she found a packet of condoms, as yet unopened. She checked twice to make sure – the wrapper said a package of eight, and there were eight inside. Four interesting stones lay next to the condoms; Maya recognized one of them from the family trip they took years ago, a vague memory of a fight between her and Nofar about who the crystal belonged to, and in the end their father decided – it’s mine. Nofar must have asked him for the stone again when they reached home. And although Maya hadn’t remembered the crystal, the fight and their father’s intervention until that moment, she was suddenly hurt, as if it had happened yesterday. Perhaps she needed that hurt in order to open the third drawer. She found two cigarettes hidden in a box of perfumes and wondered whether Nofar had bought them or stolen them from their hiding place in Maya’s room. Next to the box of perfumes was a wrinkled ticket from a performance by a singer they loved in the Yarkon Park. They had sung together there until their voices were gone. Their mother sat behind them and pretended to be enjoying herself, but they both knew she was suffering, and that only made them love her even more that night.

  Maya closed the bottom drawer. She had to get out of there. She wouldn’t go back to school today. She would go into her room, cover herself with her blanket and go to sleep. No one would notice she had disappeared. But instead of leaving the room, Maya lay down on Nofar’s bed and pulled the blanket over her head. This is where Nofar sleeps every night. This is where her body rests. If she closed her eyes, maybe she could feel what it’s like to be Nofar. She breathed in her smell. Ran her hand over the cotton sheets. A pleasant sleepiness began to caress her, and she abandoned herself to it. Daylight entered through the half-open shutters, and Maya turned her back to that light and pressed up against the cool, dark space between the mattress and the wall. In another moment, sleep would come. And just then, as her hand landed heavily in the narrow space between the wall and the mattress, at that precise moment, she felt the notebook.

  Now she was wide awake. The room was the same room – the gentle afternoon light coming through the window, the cool cotton sheets with the smell of Nofar rising from them. Maya’s body was curled up on the mattress in exactly the same position, her fingers resting in the space between the mattress and the wall. But sleep spurted out of her like sparks, her fingers were no longer heavy with tiredness, the notebook under them was shooting small electrical currents into them.

  You can still leave. Get up and go.

  But you can’t. That notebook owns you. Even before you look at it, it is already looking at you. Showing you the real Maya.

  It took her less than ten minutes to read everything, and less than a minute to understand what had happened. On the first few pages her big sister still had the same handwriting she knew, more beautiful and rounder than hers, but after some empty pages Nofar’s handwriting reappeared, looking suddenly different. The letters had become angled and small, and they pushed right up against the edge of every line on the page, as if someone were chasing them. And there were tears too – those places where the purple ink smeared, then dried again. It’s not true. Everything I said. I made it all up. And he’s the one paying the price.

  Maya put the notebook back. There was an entire orchestra playing in her mind: it didn’t happen it didn’t happen it didn’t happen. The suspicion that had flickered inside her at the President’s residence had now become a proven fact: he hadn’t touched her. He hadn’t even tried. Avishai Milner had never attacked Nofar. The fame, the embrace of the entire country, the boys who at this very moment were certainly encircling her sister – all that for something that never happened.

  Maya’s head was spinning. She had to sit down. She thought she would be able to get to her room, but the weakness overwhelmed her in the hallway. She flopped down on the floor. It had to be stopped. They can’t allow that man to go to jail for no reason. It’s not right. It’s not fair. She already began to write the words in her mind: “The accuser’s sister reveals the truth – Avishai Milner was unjustly accused.” Such courage. Such honesty. Such profound moral obligation to everything that is just and worthy. She would cry on morning TV. She would cry on the evening news. She would cry on the cover of the latest gossip magazine. She knew she had to overcome her mental block and act immediately.

  Nevertheless, she continued to sit on the cool floor tiles for a few long minutes. Unconsciously, her fingers stroked her ankles in a repetitive, soothing movement. Their fingers were different – Maya’s were delicate and Nofar’s were coarser. Nofar had once tried to take her ring, and couldn’t get it on. But their ankles were identical. Maya had noticed it when their mother took them to buy shoes. She didn’t know why it mattered now, but still she thought about it, making a precise list in her mind of the similar and different parts of their bodies, from toenails to eyelashes.

  She was so deep in thought that she didn’t hear the sound of the door opening. How frightened she was when Nofar and her mother bent over her with worry in their eyes: “Maya? Is everything okay? Why are you on the floor?” Hands reached out to help her up, and they sat her on the couch. Her big sister brought her a cup of tea, and as their mother touched her forehead to see if she had fever, Nofar put her arms around her in genuine concern, asked her whether she wanted another cup of tea, and perhaps that would have been enough if Nofar hadn’t spiced the tea with the events of the day: the people she met on the panel, the invitations she received to which programmes, and even the possibility that she would be the spokesperson for a chain of fitness clubs that offers a kick-boxing course for young girls. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  “Amazing,” Maya said.

  But if it’s so amazing, why are your eyes so dark, Maya? Why are you sitting on the couch and not speaking, so silent that later that evening their parents asked if everything was all right? Why are your eyes so dark, Maya, and what shapes are your fingers drawing as they wander around your ankles during the entire evening news?

  35

  NOFAR’S MEETING WITH DETECTIVE DORIT was set for two-thirty the next day, but by the time they left the house it was already two o’clock, and it was clear to both her and her father that they were going to be late. The air outside was cold and wet, and her father turned on the heater as soon as they got into the car. He lowered the heat a bit, asked twice, “Okay for you?” as if he were an attentive hostess in a gourmet restaurant and not her father, the eternal chatterbox. Since the business in the alley had exploded they had barely spoken. Until now, Nofar had been sure it was because of her. After all, she came home late almost every night, and in the morning she was too tired to communicate. But now, when she saw him so totally immersed in changing the radio station, she suddenly realized that her father was embarrassed around her. And she
was right, because her father truly did not know how he was supposed to act regarding what had happened to his older daughter. Damn it, he didn’t even know exactly how it had happened. One morning Ami sent his daughter off to her summer job in the ice-cream parlour, and she came back surrounded by policemen and cameras. His head was bursting from all the appalling possibilities. All the stories he had ever read in the newspaper or seen on TV seemed absolutely possible now. It terrified him. It filled him with guilt. Why hadn’t he been there? Why hadn’t he given her the tools to keep herself safe? What tools? It doesn’t matter. Somewhere in this world there was a set of tools, and he hadn’t given them to his daughter. If men could be fired from being fathers, he would have been out of a job a long time ago. There were things Ami wanted to ask her, but he didn’t know how. What happened? Where exactly did he touch you? All the questions racing around in his head caused his feet to freeze, a layer of cold that climbed up his body, sending his fingers to turn up the heat. Nofar, on the other hand, felt as if she was about to suffocate from the heat, but she didn’t dare open the window. Neither of them said anything, and it was unbelievable now that he was the man who had taken her in his arms when she emerged from the womb. That man, now sitting beside a teenage girl and unable to summon up the courage to look at her, once knew every small wrinkle of her skin. Why, despite all that, or perhaps because of it, because he had known her so completely, the way a father knows his daughter, couldn’t he just come out and ask her what happened? Police investigators, TV reporters, the kids at school could ask that question, but not him.

  Her father’s father had died five years earlier, putting an end to the in-between period when a man can be both a child to his parents and a parent to his children. Since his father’s death his mother had become a rebellious child, refusing to take her medication, taking offence at the most trivial things. Ami was no longer somebody’s child, but only a father to his daughters. In his sleep, he sometimes imagined someone running a familiar hand through his hair. Then he woke up and saw that he had forgotten to turn off the fan.

  In the car, Nofar listened to the bubbly voice on the radio announcing incredible discounts on electrical appliances. In another minute it would be two-thirty, and they would be officially late. Her father called the station to say there was a traffic jam on the highway because of the rain. That wasn’t true. They wouldn’t reach the highway for another fifteen minutes. But he was always like that, reporting with a slight deviation that would suit his needs. The person on the other end replied that there was no problem. They should take their time. Now that there was no longer any danger of being late, the silence in the car grew more oppressive. At first they had supposedly been allied by their battle against the clock, angry at the slow driver in front of them, cursing a sleepy traffic light, but now that there was no longer any reason to fight the battle, each of them was on their own again.

  A small chair in the police station. Black tea in styrofoam cups. A keyboard with letters faded from use and accumulated dust in the narrow slits between the keys. Detective Dorit was much less attentive than the last time. She answered the phone three times and sent texts almost non-stop. Nonetheless, she said once again that Nofar was a very brave girl. She said it twice, once to Nofar at the beginning of the conversation, and the second time to her father towards the end of their meeting. “You can be proud of your daughter, she’s a very brave girl,” she said in a formal, serious voice, like a teacher summarizing at parent-teacher day. The prosecutor from the district attorney’s office joined them and promised to demand severe punishment at the trial, no less than the maximum prescribed by the law. Normally there is greater leniency in such cases, but this one is high-profile and they would make an example of the perpetrator. The prosecutor said that, according to the law, the punishment for rape is up to sixteen years, for sodomy five years, and for indecent assault three. Those explicit words – rape, sodomy, indecent assault – were like fists pounding Nofar’s head. Her father sat beside her, his face grey. The prosecutor continued speaking, and though the words rolled lightly off her tongue, they were actually as heavy as iron weights shackled around Avishai Milner’s feet. Nofar found it difficult to follow and the prosecutor, who noticed, spoke more slowly. Finally, since this was an attempted felony, it would likely end with a four-year sentence. Perhaps five. Not enough, but that’s the situation.

  Detective Dorit walked them to the elevator. As the door closed in front of them, Nofar’s father asked if she wanted to stop for a hamburger on the way back. Like they used to when she was a little girl and he would take her to the doctor when she was sick. Her mother would complain mildly – the child has pneumonia, what good will a hamburger do? But her father insisted that it had healing powers. And he was right. When she had sat down beside him in the middle of the day, a hill of French fries in front of her, and behind her was the knowledge that all the other kids were at school now, she had truly felt better. Who knows, maybe that would happen this time as well. They drove to the shopping centre. They sat down. They ate. But there was no happiness in the conversation, only the sour sweat of effort. She hated him for his hollow laugh and he hated her for her evasive look, and their hatred frightened them so much that after the hamburgers they ate ice cream. All the way home in the car Nofar wanted to throw up. Until then, Avishai Milner’s trial had seemed like a distant spot somewhere on the horizon, so abstract that it was difficult to know whether it moved or was stationary and perhaps would never come. But now it was here, almost right here, and suddenly she realized that it was really happening, she was really accusing that man of attempted rape.

  Nofar leant her head on the window. Inside the suffocating car the glass was pleasantly cool, covered with vapour. The cars and the rain outside were invisible, and she could see only headlights. She pressed her nose against the fogged-up glass and drew shapes and letters on it with her fingers. She wrote, “Dad, it didn’t happen.” If her father had turned his head to the window at one of the intersections, he would certainly have seen the words written on it. But he looked straight ahead for ten traffic lights and four turns, and when he finally turned to her and said, “Ready to go?” it was too late, the letters had lost their shape and were dripping down the glass.

  36

  LUCKILY FOR RAYMONDE, she took pity on the cats that day. She hadn’t gone outside to feed them since coming back from Poland, but on that day she felt bad about it because of Rivka. She collected bones from the soup at lunch, sat with a small plastic bag on her lap and put them inside without anyone seeing. She could have asked Areh’le to buy her one of those bags of cat food, he always asked if she needed anything, but she felt awkward about asking something from a man who didn’t really know her name.

  They had met two weeks before at a get-together of survivors from Theresienstadt. He went to get some soda water for his heartburn and poured for her first and then for himself, then said he didn’t remember that there had been so many Filipina prisoners in Theresienstadt. His joke about all the foreign carers in the room made her laugh so hard that she spilt her soda water. A nice Filipina standing nearby left the old woman in her care and came to help, but Areh’le told her in Yiddish that they were fine, and that made Raymonde laugh even harder. Since Victor, no one had ever made her laugh like that.

  It frightened her, laughing so much. Too much good all at once. Like polishing off a whole bag of cookies in half an hour. Piggishness. And to laugh like that at a meeting of Theresienstadt survivors. So she told Areh’le she was going to the ladies’ room – Rivka’s words – and stayed there long enough to give him a chance to leave. And also to give him a chance to stay. She straightened her hair, applied more pencil to the most beautiful eyebrows in the country, and the nice, cheap lipstick her daughter-in-law the bitch had brought her. She heard the master of ceremonies outside say that they were about to begin, but suddenly she felt pressure in her bladder. She’d been so busy making herself beautiful that she’d forgotten to pee, and by the
time she came out everyone was sitting and it was very embarrassing. The emcee stopped talking while he waited for her to sit down, and her heels made the loudest racket in the world, clacking on the floor while everyone else was sitting and waiting. But the worst thing was that she couldn’t find a seat no matter where she looked. There were only serious faces staring at her, thinking she had some nerve coming in so late and wondering who she was. No one there knew her. In a minute someone would call out and there would be one hell of a commotion. Raymonde felt her legs getting heavy, like just before the time she fainted during Feldenkrais. What if she fainted now and they took her to the hospital and found out that Rivka Kanzenpold died a few months ago? The room started spinning, and suddenly, in the sea of serious faces, she saw a hand waving in the air. His hand was delicate, like a woman’s.

  Later, he told her that those hands were the only reason he survived. He knew how to carve so well with them that the Germans queued up with blocks of wood for him to make toys for their children. Most of all, he loved to carve rocking horses. To imagine the kinderlach riding them. He didn’t care that they were Nazi babies. Children are children. On the stomach of each horse he carved the initials of someone who had been taken. Until one of the officers discovered it and smashed his thumb with a hammer. Luckily, it happened right at the end of the war. The German children stayed on the home front, rocking on their horses, and he was sent to Theresienstadt. After the war they actually tried to find him, and one Holocaust Day there was a newspaper article about his horses. That’s how he found out that they still talked about them after the war. The German officers used him as an example of their humaneness, after all, they looked after him, and a museum collected his work and tried to decipher the message in the initials. But he didn’t tell anyone that it was him, and when Raymonde asked why, he said he didn’t want anything at all to do with those horses. And anyway, why should anyone believe it, because after that hammer blow he never carved anything else again. (Except for avocado pits – she would find out about them later. He extricated them from the soft flesh and turned them into expressive faces, a different one every time. Raymonde wanted to ask who they were but didn’t. All she did was keep her avocado pits on the windowsill and got excited when, one day, a tiny stalk sprouted from one of them.) But at that moment, in the hall, she still didn’t know about avocado pits or rocking horses. She didn’t even know his name. All she knew was that his raised hand rescued her from that sea of faces, and, as if it were a lighthouse, she navigated her way to him until she dropped down into the seat beside him, the one he’d saved for her, and the emcee of the Theresienstadt survivors’ meeting resumed speaking.