Every House Needs a Balcony (10 page)

“Too late. Tell him the truth,” suggested her sister, but she explained that if her sister had seen the way they live there, she would understand how impossible the truth would be to tell.

The designated day arrived, and he came to pick her up to go to their wedding in his sister's VW Beetle, dressed in a deep green velvet suit and a blue bow tie. He was the handsomest bridegroom she had ever seen, and she was so proud that he was her bridegroom.

They entered the hall where his parents awaited them, festive and elegant, and her small parents beside them, slightly lost in the fancy function hall.

His mother told her that her dress was very beautiful, and his father asked with anger in his eyes who had changed the catering they had chosen together from a free buffet to a sit-down dinner with waiter service. She wanted to tell them that they hadn't decided together, and that it had been more their decision, but she didn't know what they were talking about and looked straight at her mother.

Her mother told her that they had made the change because they felt that people were naturally bashful and would therefore refrain from going up to the free buffet to serve themselves.

“I'm sorry I took it upon myself to change the catering. But you aren't familiar with the mentality of people in Israel. They are used to being served at the table, not standing in line to get their food,” she said, attempting to excuse the last-minute change she had decided on without involving any of the others.

“But how did you have the nerve to change things without even telling me?” she asked her mother quietly afterward in Romanian.

“I've cleaned a lot of houses to arrive at this moment, and no one is going to take it away from me. You know I'm right, and that it's much more respectable to be served at the table by a waiter.”

His parents were furious at her mother, and his father didn't exchange a word with her throughout the wedding, except for a “Mazel tov” after the chuppah. His mother was more forgiving. And she herself, by the time everyone came up to her to kiss and congratulate her, had forgotten the unpleasant incident.

After the chuppah, she and her husband were lifted up in chairs, and they looked into each other's eyes from the heights of their wedding hall, and she thought in her heart, For better or for worse. The food seemed to have been good, even
though very polite waiters served it straight to the tables, but they didn't taste any of it because they were too excited to eat. And when everyone had loosened up from the wine that flowed like water, his father handed out cigars to the men. It was a complete surprise, and all her friends went around with cigars in their mouths, feeling like men of the world. She looked at her parents, who had given birth to her at the age of forty in order to arrive at this moment when they could boast about their daughter and her impressive bridegroom, and especially because they had not been able to boast about their older daughter's wedding, which was only a meal in a restaurant without a chuppah and a wedding service and all their card-playing friends. And when had they ever been to a wedding where they handed out cigars?

When the rabbi came up to her, because he could see that the groom didn't speak Hebrew, and asked who was paying, the father of the groom or the father of the bride, she said, “Whoever has it,” and pointed to the father of her new husband from Barcelona.

The last of the guests left at one in the morning, and they drove to the nearby Dan Hotel, where he lifted her up according to tradition, and when they crossed the threshold they spread the checks they had been given all over the bed and the floor. They lit a cigarette and enjoyed calling each other “my husband” and “my wife,” and she wanted him to stay in his green velvet suit because he looked so handsome in it.

But when he wanted to have sex with her, she said she wasn't able to.

“Why, are you menstruating?” he asked, disappointed.

“No. It's just that I can't have sex in a regular way, going to bed before going to sleep. I hope our sex will be a surprise, and not in the evening, at the end of the day, before falling asleep.”

She had surprised him suddenly with this response. Maybe if he'd known that this is how she felt, he wouldn't have married her.

“For example, if I'm frying schnitzels and you come up to me and hold me and pull my panties off me and then, you know, surprise me. In the middle of my frying schnitzels.”

“In our home, Laura fries the schnitzels. Would you like me to surprise her?”

She burst out laughing, grabbed his hand, and rolled him over the floor over the pile of checks, all the while pulling off his green velvet suit and he removing her cousin's wedding dress.

The following day they went to say good-bye to old Duchovny. On the way she met Batya and her little daughter, who promised her that they would come to visit them in Barcelona, since her husband was a seaman, and they could join him on one of his voyages.

“Is she a friend of yours?” her husband asked her, and she told him that she had no idea what their family connection was, but that Batya had been a part of the landscape of her childhood.

At night, my sister and I dreamed the same dream. Exactly the same dream.

In our dream we found a coin on the sidewalk. We bent down happily to pick up the coin and found beneath it another coin. We took that one too and, again, found another coin underneath it. That's what they mean when they say you've got a penny in your pocket. We stood up to leave and suddenly stopped, went back to the spot of the hidden treasure, and began digging. We dug further and found another coin, and then we found coins of greater denomination, a huge pile of coins. Like someone who wins the jackpot in a casino and jumps in the air with victorious cries of joy; that's how we felt in the dream, except that we had to dig in the ground to find our jackpot.

Two sisters with a single dream.

And so we wandered the length and breadth of Stanton,
playing, inventing stories, and jabbering our childhood gibber, conducting our lives along the line that separated imagination from reality and everything that came in between.

Fantasy plays an important role in poverty. It has the ability to slightly soften the deprivation, and I believe my parents were aware of this and never tried to bring us back to “reality.” I think that when they called us, for example, back for supper and we didn't respond, Mom and Dad knew that we were in the midst of our fantasy time. Like today's children have their “story time.”

I loved my father's story about the two fishermen standing on the edge of the pier, catching fish. One of them is exceptionally well dressed, the other very simply. The elegant fisherman asks his down-to-earth counterpart what he's doing. The man replies that he's doing what the other guy's doing, fishing for fish. Says the elegant fisherman: since you're here already, wasting your time with your fishing rod, waiting patiently for a fish to bite, why don't you do as I do and set up two fishing rods; that way you'll be able to catch twice as many fish.

The simply dressed fisherman replies: And what will I get out of it?

Says the elegant fisherman: You'll have more fish to sell, and you'll have more money to spend.

The simply dressed fisherman asks: And what will I get out of it?

The other fisherman replies: With the additional income, you'll be able to buy a good fishing net; you'll be able to spread out your net and catch a lot more fish.

The simply dressed fisherman asks: And what will I get out of it?

The elegant fisherman says: You'll have even more fish, and then you'll be able to buy yourself a big fishing boat, to employ thirty people to work for you, and you won't have to work anymore.

And what will I do all day? the simply dressed fisherman asks the elegantly dressed fisherman.

I know, says the gent; you'll be able to sit all day and fish to your heart's content.

The plain fisherman responds: And what am I doing now?

Dad used to tell us all the stories until Rosi came and replaced him. Rosi was an amazing storyteller. She remembered every detail of every story and never left out a single magic princess, locked by a wicked stepmother in a narrow, windowless turret, with a tiny slit in the wall that only an eagle's beak can get through.

The Rosenberg family consisted of Rosi, the mother; Johnny, the handsome father; and Batya, their skinny daughter. Either Rosi or Johnny was a distant relative of my dad's, and after they had scoured the country in search of work, Dad arranged a job for Johnny as a dockworker at the port and persuaded his sister, Lutzi, to rent the Rosenbergs
Tante Marie's kitchenette. It was out of respect for the elderly, Dad explained to his sister, and Tante Marie moved into the spacious room that faced the balcony, the room that had become vacant when Dorie went into the navy. Batya, Sefi, and I crowded ourselves into the Rosenbergs' narrow bed, because the windowless kitchenette had no room for two beds, and floated off on a broomstick fueled by Rosi's magic spells.

We rode away on Rosi's stories to cold and far-off lands, with kings and counts, princes and frogs, and knew that only love could save the world from evil.

Smiling from ear to ear, we all fell asleep in the narrow bed, happily dreaming our dreams, certain that tomorrow morning our lives would be much nicer.

In the morning we awoke to hear Rosi screaming and yelling. Johnny, her husband, had come home as drunk as a lord, exuding stinking alcoholic fumes, and full of inebriated cheer, he rounded off his evening by beating his wife to a pulp for daring to ask where he'd been all night.

Batya, who was thin to the extent of plainness, used her small fists to separate her mother, the storyteller, from her father's murderous fists. But Johnny shook her off as only general security agents know how to shake off people and started beating her to a pulp, too—taking it in turns, laying off one to lay into the other. We stood aside, watching, our bodies trembling with fear and, especially, insult. We felt insulted to the core; how could anyone be so cruel? We had
gone to sleep with hope in our hearts and awakened to this horror.

Fila and I tried to push Rosi out of reach of Johnny's blows, but we didn't succeed even in tickling the ends of his fingers, and he pushed us off with the ease of a sumo wrestler flicking off a feather.

The noise and shouting drew our father, and he too caught a blow from the inebriated Johnny.

We had no telephone with which to call the police, and my sister and I ran to the balcony and started screaming at six in the morning, “Help! Help! They're murdering our dad.”

It was a warm morning, and all the windows on Stanton Street were open; from each house, there suddenly appeared a large number of heads, eager to see the source of our cries that our father was being murdered.

The first to arrive on the scene was Nissim, our Syrian neighbor from the floor above, and since he was a big expert at domestic violence and not a day went past without him taking his belt to all five of his children, he managed easily to release our small and beloved father from the terrifying fists of Johnny.

Dad told Johnny to take his wife and daughter and bugger off out of his sight as far as possible.

Beaten half to death, Rosi got down on her knees and begged Dad to forgive Johnny, because he didn't really mean it. He had accidentally drunk a little too much and lost control of himself.

“It won't ever happen again, I promise you,” Rosi swore to Dad.

Dad refused to listen and said that it was enough that people were beating each other in every other house on the street. In his own house, he wasn't going to put up with a man beating his wife and children.

Johnny lay on the small bed and wept like a child admonished. He said he was sorry and that he would never raise his hand again to anyone and that he had nowhere else to go.

“That's the reason you've been wandering all over the country. Everywhere you go you get thrown out after you've beaten the living daylights out of everyone there.” Suddenly my father understood why Johnny and his family had never managed to settle down in any one place.

“I only beat my wife and daughter to let off steam,” Johnny said in his own defense.

Bruised, tearful, and sad-eyed, Rosi looked at our dad the hero and whispered that if he threw us out of the house, Johnny would murder her and her skinny daughter.

Then Dad said to Johnny that they could stay, but the next time he beat Rosi and his skinny daughter Batya, he'd have him put straight in jail. “In jail you won't have anyone to beat. And you won't have anything to drink, either.”

Then Dad took us, his beloved daughters, to our own room and hugged us close to himself, where we fell asleep in his arms, protected from all evil.

The following evening, Rosi came into our room with her
skinny daughter Batya, and as we lay in bed, she told us her wonderful fairy stories.

When we fell asleep, she took her daughter and went back to the windowless kitchenette.

That night we heard the rise and fall of an air-raid siren.

Fila cried that Johnny was killing Batya again, but Dad said this time it wasn't Johnny. It was a siren, and we were at war.

The war in the Sinai Peninsula had begun.

A police car drove through the street with a loudspeaker, calling on the inhabitants to go down to the shelters. Haifa, our city, was being bombed.

Within seconds, Johnny appeared in our room with his daughter in his arms, took my sister and me by the hand, and led us down to the shelter. Dad took Grandmother Vavika, who was still alive but died a year later, and our sensible mother grabbed some blankets.

In the shelter, I discovered that one of my slippers had slipped off my foot during the great escape down the stairs, and I broke into an anguished wail—“I want my slipper. I'm going back up to look for it”—and tore myself free of Johnny, who was still holding on to the little girls as if he could protect them against the bombs.

The adults' pleas that the Egyptians were bombing us and that I would have no use for slippers if I were killed on the stairs had no effect on me.

Johnny offered to go up and bring me the slipper, and Mum asked him, if he was going up anyway, to bring some
Turkish delight down from the closet, second shelf to the left, where it was hidden for exactly such occasions. So we can at least die with something sweet in our mouths, Mum said to Johnny, and he went back upstairs.

After what seemed like an eternity, Johnny returned with my slipper and the box of Turkish delight.

“What took you so long?” my mother complained.

“You hid the Turkish delight so well that you yourself don't remember where you left it,” Johnny said. “I turned over the whole closet until I found the box on the bottom shelf on the right.”

We gobbled up the Turkish delight, and I said I was thirsty.

Johnny went upstairs and returned with two bottles of seltzer.

After drinking, all the children started crying that they needed peepee.

Johnny went back up and returned with a potty, and we all lined up for a pee. When the children had finished, the adults took it in turns to use the potty.

When the sirens went off again the following night, Dad said we might as well stay in our nice warm beds rather than spend the night chasing after a potty. Luckily for us, the war ended a few days later, and we went back to hearing Rosi's fairy tales at bedtime, until Johnny had earned enough at the docks to move his wife and daughter to another apartment, where he could continue beating them without my dad's constant interference.