Every House Needs a Balcony (2 page)

It wasn't love at first sight with the man, even though he was tall and handsome and she had always been attracted to tall, handsome men.

“I thought all the men in Spain were short,” she challenged him in English, in the kitchen, two weeks after he'd joined the staff of the Jerusalem engineer Ackerstein, where she too was employed. At first she had little faith in the amount of height taken up by a six-foot space—he gave the impression of being out of reach and exuded a cultured European scent. Over those two weeks when their eyes met, she had made do with a light nod of the head that instantly ruled out all options.

“I'm the proof,” he replied in English and shook her hand firmly. She didn't know that it was possible to shake hands quite like that; she was used to handshakes that were more limp and involuntary. She wondered if he was
Jewish and delved into the depths of her memory to try to discover if any Jews had remained in Spain after the Inquisition over five hundred years ago. She remembered that none had.

“Perhaps it's because I'm a Barcelona-born Jew,” the man said, as if reading her thoughts.

“First time in Israel?” she asked him with uncharacteristic courtesy.

“Seventh time in the last three years,” he replied.

Man of the world, she thought to herself. She herself was twenty-two and didn't even own a passport; at that time the Sinai Peninsula was still under Israeli control, and that was the most “abroad” she had ever visited.

“What's there to love about Israel?” she asked enviously. He had flown so many times, and she had never seen the inside of a plane, not even on the ground.

“The women,” the guy answered, “they are all so beautiful and so tall.” He dropped his glance from his six feet down to her five-foot-nothing. “And I haven't been to Haifa yet. I'm told that Haifa women are the most beautiful of all.”

“Whoever told you must know,” she replied, expecting him to ask her if she was from Haifa, but he didn't.

“So, what is about Israel that you love so much and makes you fly here every couple of days?” she asked, and he replied, “The fact that they are all Jews. I find it very exciting to think that everyone you see in the street is Jewish—even the street cleaners.”

“The street cleaners are more likely to be Arabs,” she said, trying to put a damper on his enthusiasm.

“Still,” he said, “everyone speaks Hebrew, and that makes me very proud. The bus drivers are Jewish, the owner of my local grocer's shop is Jewish, all the staff in this office are Jewish. You are Jewish.”

She gazed at him in amazement. It was during those days of euphoria following Israel's huge victory in the Six-Day War and before the humiliation of the 1973 Yom Kippur War; and here before her stood a Jew, a Zionist heartthrob emanating a scent of Europe, and perfect English. To her, he appeared absolutely unobtainable.

Later, in the kitchen, Maya the secretary told her that he was an engineering student who came to work in Israel for the summer so he could immigrate formally after completing his degree, and he was staying in Jerusalem with his sister, who was also a student.

When she returned to the rented room in the apartment she shared with two young women who always patronized her because she wasn't a student like them, she asked one of them if she had any reading material on Barcelona.

“My subject is China,” the student replied in a faintly condescending tone.

“Is it far from there?” she asked her arrogant roommate, who didn't bother to reply.

The following morning she spent a long time in front of
her open wardrobe before choosing a red miniskirt and a knit top that emphasized her figure.

She walked into the office with joy in her heart and was soon called to Ackerstein's room, where the boss explained that she couldn't come to work dressed in a red miniskirt. He said nothing about the top but studied her firm breasts as he said nonchalantly, “You've got to dress modestly.” She ignored his impertinent glance and walked out of the room.

“Where does he get off telling me to dress modestly?” she complained later in the kitchen to Maya the secretary. “It's a democratic country, and I'll dress however I want.”

“Anything wrong?” asked the man as he walked into the kitchen to make himself coffee.

“Jewish wars, that's what's wrong,” she explained, her face flushed with anger, to the man in whose honor she had dressed that morning. This is not the way she wanted him to see her, red-faced and eyes spewing fire. “I was asked not to turn up at work in a miniskirt.”

“With legs like yours it's nothing short of injustice,” he said immediately, agreeing with her. “But why?” he still wanted to know.

“Because it might cause the pious to commit a crime.” She tried unsuccessfully to explain what she meant by “crime,” using a mixture of English and Spanish.

“You know Spanish,” he said, pleased.

“I learned from my father; he speaks Ladino. But I only
know a few words,” she added in English, before he got the impression that she really could speak Spanish.

“What do you expect? He has several religious clients, and David is only asking you to consider their feelings. You can't very well show a devout Jew a blueprint of his new home when you're sitting opposite him dressed in your miniskirt,” Maya the secretary explained to her with the logic of a forty-year-old.

“Then he should keep his eyes on the blueprint and not on my legs,” she retorted with the stubbornness of a twenty-two-year-old.

“You know, it's his office and it's his right to make the rules,” Maya explained, still patiently. “If you don't like it, you can always pick up and go.” She said this in a tone that made it clear that her boss could also tell her to pick up and go.

She got the message, and told Maya that she'd wear a miniskirt whenever she liked, after work hours.

“Would you like the chance to wear a miniskirt?” the man asked her. “Let's take in a movie this evening. I've heard that there's one worth seeing, not far from here.”

That evening, as they sat in the movie house, she felt she recognized the lead actress, but couldn't remember which movie she'd seen her in.

“She looks a lot like you,” the man told her when they were standing beside the bar during the intermission.

“Who does?” she asked, offended, noticing a girl standing by his side, holding a cola can in her hand and wearing
a minute miniskirt and a lace blouse that showed off her generous cleavage, her long hair spread artlessly over her back. The girl appeared so self-conscious as to provoke her instant aversion. Despite her promise, or maybe because of it, she herself was wearing jeans, a pale blue button-up shirt, and high heels—in an attempt to slightly reduce the difference in height between them, and so he wouldn't think she was tempting him to commit a crime by dressing immodestly. She had always been contrary. At home they called her “Little Miss Contrary.”

“The actress,” the guy replied, “you are very much alike. You both have small faces and very short hair and laughing green eyes, with a sad look about them.”

“Thanks,” she said, flattered, and thought that he might not be all that unobtainable, if he'd managed to notice the sadness in her face.

After the movie they went to a restaurant, and she busied herself with the drinks and dessert menu.

“They do a very good schnitzel,” the man told her. “I've eaten here a few times in the past.”

He, the stranger, had already been here several times, while she, who had lived in the town for eight months, didn't know any restaurant except Meshulam, because whenever she did have any money to spare, she preferred to spend it on a skirt or a new pair of jeans that were hers alone and didn't have to be shared with anyone else, or some dress for her mother or some underwear for her dad. She didn't buy
things for her sister, who had a boyfriend who took care of all of her needs. It seemed to her excessive to waste money on a single meal in a restaurant.

Still, when he mentioned the tasty schnitzels, she remembered that she had been too excited all day to eat anything.

“No, thanks,” she said. “I'm not hungry. I'd just like a cup of coffee.”

“Why?” he asked, surprised. “They do an excellent schnitzel, and they'll stuff it with cheese and ham if you ask them quietly. You're not kosher, are you?” He seemed alarmed for a moment.

“No, no. Don't you go worrying about whether I'm kosher or not. It doesn't worry me at all.”

He smiled, and she felt her mouth filling with saliva. Her mother and the Romanian food she cooked; schnitzel wasn't exactly a part of her repertoire, so to her, Wiener schnitzel was high-class gourmet food; moreover, she was hungry.

“I'm not really hungry,” she said.

“You must order something, I won't enjoy my own food if I have to eat alone,” he said coaxingly. “Did you know that there's a restaurant in Vienna that serves only schnitzel? Well, this restaurant doesn't fall short of that one.”

But she was embarrassed; after all, her mother had told her often enough that people were usually just being polite when they offered things, and perhaps he didn't have enough money and was just being courteous, and she went on insisting that she wasn't hungry because she'd had a big
lunch. And maybe her real reason for refusing was that she felt uncomfortable about Leon, her boyfriend, who cooked schnitzels for her every weekend, and she didn't want to feel she was betraying Leon's schnitzels by eating Wiener schnitzel in a fancy Jerusalem restaurant.

The man ordered Wiener schnitzel with mashed potato, and she sat facing him with a cup of coffee and an apple strudel that he'd ordered without asking her.

She started playing her daily game of signs. If he eats a piece of schnitzel together with some mashed potato, she thought, that's a sign that he's broad-minded and there might be a chance here. If he eats his schnitzel first and his mashed potato at the end, or the other way round but still one thing after the other, he's boring and a waste of time, and if he cuts off a piece of schnitzel and piles a lump of mashed potato on top, there's no chance of even a quickie with such a glutton.

He held his knife expertly between his long fingers, cut off a piece of schnitzel and popped it in his mouth, followed by a forkful of mashed potato. He cut off another piece and offered it to her: “Why don't you try some after all? We can still order one for you if you like it.”

She scrutinized his plate enviously, remembering the sandwiches she used to take to school. Most of her friends bought a roll and cheese from Menashe's grocery store, and she would watch them, her heart sinking. She had never asked her father for money. He always wanted to give her
some, even though he had none to give and she insisted that she didn't need any. She accepted only enough for her Carmelit tram fare to school on Hillel Street, and that was to avoid having to climb up those steep Haifa streets. On the way home she would leap down the stairs at a gallop, her schoolbag on her back. She remembered how she had wanted to buy a roll from Menashe; only in retrospect did she understand that it was with envy that the others had looked at her homemade sandwiches, those sandwiches that her dad had prepared with so much love out of Bulgarian cheese and thin slices of tomato that absorbed some of the cheese's saltiness and added moisture; or that excellent
kashkaval
cheese that the Romanians love, not just any old dry yellow cheese.

Years later, when they were already married, she told the man about the rolls with yellow cheese that she had remembered with such longing on their first date, and he wanted to take her to Menashe's grocery store and buy her all the rolls with yellow cheese in the world, to prove to her that she hadn't missed out on anything, but Menashe was dead and the grocery store was now occupied by an upholsterer. Once the school had been transferred to the French Carmel, there was no longer any need for it—neither for Menashe, nor for his rolls.

“How did the Jews end up in Barcelona?” she asked on their first date. And he told her that some Jews had escaped there from a burning Europe during World War II. His
parents, he said, had lived in France, and when war broke out, his father had stolen across the border to Spain and lived there for three years until his wife joined him. “With their blond hair and blue eyes,” he explained, “my mother and her twin sister looked like Aryans. So they remained in France with their parents, until my mother crossed the border on her own and joined my father and his brother.”

“So, all your family lives in Barcelona?” she asked.

“My sister moved to Israel three years ago, when she was twenty. My parents have just bought her an apartment here in Jerusalem, and I've been given the job of fixing it up.”

“And what about you,” he asked, “have you ever been to Barcelona?”

“I've never been out of Israel,” she said.

“I'm not surprised,” he said. “With the kind of salaries they pay you here, I don't see how anyone can even finish the month. Life in Barcelona is much cheaper, and salaries are much higher. Do you know that the nine-hundred-square-foot apartment they bought here cost more than the twenty-seven-hundred-square-foot one we bought in Barcelona?”

“Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked him suddenly. She was more interested in his response to this question than in real estate prices in Israel. In any case there was no way she could ever afford to buy an apartment of her own, even if she saved everything she earned for the next twenty years.

“Yes,” he replied, and she almost choked. Luckily she didn't have any schnitzel in her mouth. So much for the romance; still, he was obviously broad-minded.

“Steady?” she asked, disappointed.

“Five years,” he replied. “We're engaged.”

“So when's the wedding?” She was annoyed that he hadn't bothered to volunteer the information in the first place. Then she remembered that that she hadn't actually asked him until that moment.