Every House Needs a Balcony
Read Every House Needs a Balcony Online
Authors: Rina Frank
A Novel
Translated from the Hebrew by Ora Cummings
To Sefi
I can see you
Laughing or crying
Reading the bookâ
If you were alive
I was born on the second day of the Jewish New Year. When I discovered that Yaffa, the third daughter of our Syrian neighbors, was born during Hanukkah, I assumed that children were born on holy daysâas a special gift from God. When I realized that my sister, who is older than me by one year and eight months, was born in January and I could find no holy day in her vicinity, I became very worried and afraid that she was damaged. I shared my deep concern with her. My sister laughed and, with all the wisdom of a seven-and-a-half-year-old, explained to me that children are indeed born only on holy days; she, on the other hand, while still an embryo in our mother's belly, had decided that she wanted to be special and different from everyone else, and so she persuaded God to arrange for her to be born on a regular weekday. And God agreed.
Because my sister Yosefa knew God.
Two families and Tante Marie lived in our three-room apartment and kitchenette. The apartment belonged to my father's oldest sister, Aunt Lutzi, and her husband Lazer.
They were lucky. They had emigrated from Romania in 1948, right after the War of Independence, and were already regarded as “veterans” because they had managed to take over apartments abandoned by Arabs who had previously occupied Stanton Street, which made them instant property owners. Actually, their son the policeman, Phuyo, who had immigrated to the Land of Israel at the age of fourteen, had set aside an apartment at 40 Stanton Street for his parents. When members of the local police force were allocated the best apartment block on Stanton Street, Phuyo immediately commandeered the first floor, and three of his colleagues took over the remaining floors; for several months thereafter they took turns guarding the empty apartments, to prevent any undesirable Jewish invaders from entering and occupying them before their parents and the rest of their families arrived in Israel.
Vida, Father's second sister, and her husband, Herry, also made a beeline to Wadi Salib in search of an apartment in which to set up home. At 47 Stanton, they found a two-story building abandoned by its Arab inhabitants. They didn't fancy the furniture on the first floor; in the second-floor apartment, however, not only was the furniture relatively new but there was an indoor toilet, rather than one in the yard, as was normal in Arab houses. They settled unani
mously for the apartment on the second floor. Herry, who was multitalented and very resourceful, installed a tin water tank on the roof, and a solar collector. The result was a supply of free hot water almost all year.
My parents, who lingered for a further two years in Romania in order to do it for the first time in their lives and produce Yosefa, my only sister, did not have this good fortune. And thus the Franco family, comprising Moscu, Bianca, and their eight-month-old baby girl, arrived in Israel and were given the kitchenette. It was an inner room with no window, and no access to the high-status balcony that overlooked Stanton Street.
Moscu and Bianca did it for the second time in their lives in Tante Lutzi's small kitchen, because they were depressed at having to live in a tiny, windowless room and because Father really wanted a son. When I was born, one year after they immigrated to Israel from Romania, Father was so disappointed with “that one who doesn't know how to produce a son” that his sister Lutzi, who loved her attractive younger brother with all her heart, gave us the third room that faced the stylish balcony and connected between all the other rooms. The room had been reserved for Phuyo the policeman, who was responsible for our having the house in the first place. But Phuyo had married a Frenchwoman, Dora, who flatly refused to share a house with her mother-in-law, Lutzi, and that is how our occupation of the room with the elegant balcony became a fait accompli.
From the balcony, you could overlook the entire Haifa port with its fleet of ships, as far as the yogurt-bottle-shaped oil refineries, and when you closed one eye you could even see Acre on your outstretched hand. There was no need even for binoculars; no boat or ship could infiltrate our little country via the port of Haifa without us noticing it from our balcony. Except, perhaps, a submarine.
The houses on Stanton Street were built of good-quality local stone, not the usual crumbling gray plaster, but stone blocks that gave the buildings a special elegance and made them stand out in the surrounding landscape. And all the buildings had balconies, one balcony facing the other, with no difference between the outside and the inside. The stone walls had been designed as a buffer only against the cold or the heat, not between the people and the neighborhood and the families who lived there. There were no curtains in the windows, and everyone was able to see everyone else, as if on a conveyor belt. Your entire life was laid out there on the balcony, illustrated in the piles of bedclothes hung out daily on the banister for airing. All the neighbors knew how often, if at all, every family changed its sheets. And if it wasn't enough that everything was visible to all eyes, there was also the laundry, pegged out to dry on ropes stretched along the length of the balcony, revealing the patched clothes and the underwear and nightgowns worn and faded from too much washing. It was as if all your belongings were displayed there each day for public auction.
During the long summer nights, people sat out on their
balconies. Father ran out an extension cord from inside our apartment to plug in a lamp, brought out a small table, and they played rummy every evening on the balcony. The game didn't prevent my parents from engaging in conversation with the neighbors across the road, but even if they didn't talk, we already knew everything that was going on, because every word shouted in every apartment could be heard all over the street, especially by anyone sitting on the balcony. Our street was very vociferous; it was as if the neighbors all knew that Mother was hard of hearing and did their best not to make her feel left out. Conversations from one balcony to another were a matter of routine. Sitting on the balcony was practically the same as sitting in an armchair and watching television. For us, the balcony was our television, and what we saw was real life, played out with authentic actors in real time.
Stanton Street is the place where reality TV was first invented.
Thursdays were the days on which bedclothes were not put out to air; instead, the carpets were brought out and laid over the balustrade. After being left alone to soak up a few hours of dry, hot, and dusty
hamsin
air, the carpets were beaten with the cruelty they deserved, so as to be clean for Shabbat. As if by mutual signal, in unison, with a rhythm that sounded like the beat of tom-toms, all the ladies of Wadi Salib thrashed the living daylights out of the carpets as they hung over the balconies of their homes.
All the ladies and my father.
There they all stood on the balcony railing, straining downward to reach the very edge of their carpet, potential
shahids
to cleanliness, until they caught sight of my father. As soon as Father stepped out with his carpet beater, all the ladies in the street started flirting with him.
“Hey, Moscu, when are you coming over to bang my carpet with me?”
“Hey, Moscu, is Bianca so worn out after last night that you're out here banging in her place?”
When the ladies laughed at him, Father smiled back kindly and said that they were clearly dying to swap their husbands for himâand none of them ever denied it.
The main room in Lutzi's apartment in Wadi Salib's Stanton Street belonged, of course, to Tante Lutzi and her husband, Lazer. Lazer was a barber. He owned a barbershop downtown, next to the only decent café in the area. To tell the truth, the barbershop was more a hole in the wall, with two chairs and a single shared mirror. Since he was always appropriately dressed in a barber's coat, the local gentlemen stepped in for a haircut, although he never failed to botch up their appearance with a phenomenal lack of talent.
We girls had our hair cut at home. We refused to go to his shop, claiming that it wasn't fit for ladies. Lazer would place a kind of round plate on our heads, which served as a template around which to snip off the ends, and we'd finish up with a haircut that was a perfect circle. Until we re
volted and no longer allowed him to touch us, my sister and I looked like a pair of round satellite dishes with bangs.
In fact, with our Uncle Lazer, “touch” was the operative word. He used to sit me on his lap and say that, as an uncle who loved his nieces, he was responsible for checking my growth, to make sure that everything about me was in order. His examination focused mainly on the glands on my chest, rather than on my height, which was measured against an inch tape and markings on the wall.
My sister, apparently, wasn't fooled by Uncle Lazer's honeyed words and told him to go measure the growth process of his own children, because only our mother and father and the school nurse had the right to check ours.
It was obvious that black-haired Yosefa, with her brown slanting eyes, was the smartest child in the neighborhood, and I was just pretty. There was an ongoing debate in our home over what would best suit my sister, who was destined for greatness, a future as a physician or a career in law; as for me, they just prayed that someone wealthy would marry me.
One day I was playing jacks downstairs when my sister called me from the balcony to come up immediately because Grandmother Vavika had died.
“So what?” I shouted back, even though I was almost six and had only one grandmother. I threw the ball vigorously and knocked over all the stones.
When I saw the ambulance parked at the entrance to the
building, I stopped throwing the ball at the stones for a moment and watched as two white-uniformed male nurses got out, carrying a wooden stretcher. They entered the building, carrying the stretcher in an upright position as if it were a ladder; I lost interest and went back to my game.
I went up to our apartment only when I had beaten all the others as usual.
My sister was very agitated and said I had missed something important.
“What was there to miss at home, where everyone is miserable, whereas downstairs I squashed seven jacks singlehanded?” I asked indifferently.
“You missed God,” she said reproachfully. Yosefa was proud of the fact that she was the only one who had seen God, because she was standing alone on the balcony when the entire family was indoors beside our dead grandmother and I was stupidly playing jacks downstairs. And it's a well-known fact that God reveals Himself on balconies.
My sister told me that she was standing on the balcony when suddenly a ladder descended from the skies; it was very, very long, like Jacob's ladder, and two angels dressed in white went up to Grandmother and grasped her on both sides, and together, the three climbed up the ladder that reached up to the skies, not forgetting to wave good-bye to the lone girl standing on the balcony and watching their every move.
When they had reached very edge of the sky, my sister,
who was older than I by two years minus four months, told me that the heavens had opened, and God's kindly face peeked down to welcome them home.
“So what does he look like?” I asked my sister grudgingly, piqued that she had seen God and I hadn't.
“Very handsome,” answered my all-seeing sister. “He's got black hair and green eyes. Looks a bit like our dad.”
Ever since, I have lived with the knowledge that I missed seeing God and His angels, and only my sister had the good fortune to see them. And she had even called me home, but I wasn't listening.