Every House Needs a Balcony (3 page)

“Eight months after I return to Barcelona,” he replied, frugal with details, as if they were of no importance. She looked dolefully at the plate of excellent schnitzel that was emptying before her eyes.

“And when exactly are you going back to Barcelona?” She needed to put some order into her life.

“In two months' time, when I finish the renovations. But what does it matter? I'm here now, and you are here, and I enjoy looking into those laughing eyes of yours, and I'd love to know why they are enveloped in sadness.” Maybe it's because of Menashe's rolls, she thought to herself, but she knew that he didn't know Menashe or anyone like him, and wondered why he didn't ask her if she had a boyfriend.

He held her hand, and a tremor passed through her body. A woman who gets turned on quickly gets turned off just as quickly, she thought.

“And I am thinking,” the man went on, scrutinizing her
eyes, which had become even sadder, “about your lovely legs in a miniskirt and your angry face when you are asked not to come to work in a short skirt and your laughter—you make me laugh.”

“I'm glad I make you laugh.” She didn't take her hand away from his.

“So I've noticed,” he said, and began suddenly to make trumpeting sounds with his mouth and playing the theme song from
Love Story
. She looked at him and started to laugh. He trumpeted the song so nicely, it sounded as if he really was playing a trumpet; he even blew out his cheeks like a real trumpeter.

Then he covered both her hands with his and brought them to his chest.

She had to escape this confusion. “Are there any other specialty restaurants you know of, in other parts of the world?” she asked, wishing for this moment, with him holding her hands in his, never to end.

“There's one in Zurich, and of course in Paris.” He said “of course” as if it was as matter-of-fact to her as to himself. “There's a restaurant there that serves only entrecôte. There's no menu, and the only thing you get asked is how you'd like your steak, medium or medium rare.”

“What about well done?” she asked

“No such thing.” He grimaced in disgust at the very suggestion.

When he returned her to the apartment she shared with
the two revolting students, he floated a kiss on her cheek and went off with a “See you tomorrow.”

“Where?” she asked enthusiastically.

“At work. Tomorrow morning,” reminding her that they worked in the same office, which is actually how they met.

My mother didn't speak Hebrew. When they arrived from Romania, Dad joined an
ulpan
to learn Hebrew and Mom went out to clean houses; for this you don't need Hebrew. In Wadi Salib you didn't need to speak Hebrew for people to understand you. During the 1950s, with the huge assortment of languages in common use—from Moroccan to Romanian, Ladino to Yiddish, Arabic to Polish—everyone understood everyone else.

But not only did Mom not know Hebrew, she was also hard of hearing, which made it impossible for her to pick up the language of the street.

In Romania, apparently, they'd wanted to correct her slight hearing impairment; a “simple little operation,” they'd told her when she was thirty, “one hour under the anesthetic—you won't feel a thing, and you'll be able to hear.” But Mom wasn't listening to them. She knew you couldn't trust the doctors in Romania.

When she was twenty, Mom had had an attack of appendicitis and was rushed to an operating theater in Bucharest, but not before the doctors had explained to her worried parents that it was a very simple surgical procedure, she wouldn't feel a thing under the anesthetic and she'd come out of the whole thing as good as new. Two hours later the grim-faced doctors emerged and explained to my grandfather and grandmother, whom I never met, that something had gone wrong with the anesthetic, and the chances of Bianca ever recovering were extremely slim. Grandfather Yosef stayed by Bianca's bedside, while her mother returned weeping to their home, where her ten-year-old younger daughter was waiting alone. She collapsed in the middle of the road, and a passing car drove over her.

And so my grandmother's dead body was returned to the same hospital where her beloved daughter Bianca lay recovering from a botched appendectomy—a recovery that had to be swift, because she was now left to care for her widowed father, her seventeen-year-old brother, Marco, and her ten-year-old sister, Aurika.

Bianca raised Aurika as if she were her own daughter, with love and devotion that knew no bounds and with an overwhelming feeling of guilt.

One day, when she was twenty-eight, Mom walked into David's photography studio and laboratory and summoned him to the cemetery to take a photograph of her mother's gravestone. David's parents had died and bequeathed the
photography studio to him and his brother, Jacko. David scrutinized the very thin, very elegantly dressed woman in the long brown coat and red hat, set at a jaunty angle. Mom had very curly brown hair, deep, highly intelligent brown eyes above high cheekbones, and fair skin. In those days women took great care to avoid tanning their faces, and a pretty woman was one who was interestingly pale. When they arrived at the cemetery and David saw that Grandmother had been fifty when she died, he asked Bianca what had been the cause of her death, and Bianca, out of a profound sense of guilt, replied that it had been “an appendectomy that went wrong.”

David sympathized, “Those doctors, you can never trust them.”

“And what about photographers, can they be trusted?” Mom asked in rebuke.

“Of course,” he replied, “the pictures will be developed by evening. I'll deliver them to you in person.” David was instantly invited to dinner and told to bring his younger brother with him. Because at that very moment, Mom had made up her mind that David was the man she was going to marry.

What's more, Mom had already decided, even before she'd met David's younger brother, that this was going to be a double wedding, hers with David and his brother's with her sister, Aurika.

That evening David delivered the pictures, and everyone
was thrilled at how sharp they were and how clearly Grandmother's name showed up on the headstone.

Mom laid a tasteful table for dinner and served a carefully prepared meal, since it's a well-known fact that there is no better way to a man's heart than through his stomach.

Mom told David and his younger brother that she wished to send the photographs to her two older siblings in Palestine. She spoke with great pride of her brother Niku and sister Lika, who lived in Hadera and were engaged in drying swamps.

David showed a lot of interest in the situation in British Mandate Palestine and the ways in which the inhabitants made a living, and even asked if he could correspond with Niku and Lika, since he had been raised on the Zionist ideal, and now that his parents were no longer alive, he wanted to follow in their footsteps by realizing their great love for the Land of Israel.

Mom's endeavor had succeeded. After that family dinner, David asked if he could meet her again. At their fourth meeting, he asked her to marry him, and Mom accepted happily, but made her acceptance conditional on waiting for Aurika to come of age so she could marry his younger brother, Jacko. David agreed to this very logical arrangement.

In 1941, David told Mom that he had made up his mind to leave Nazi Europe, to emigrate to Palestine, and to set up a photography studio in Hadera, since her brother Niku had
written that Hadera was now dry of swamps, there was a dearth of professional people in the country, and there was a demand for practically everything—or so he wrote. Mom knew that he simply wanted them all to join him in Israel, and that things weren't quite as rosy there as he wanted them to think.

It was agreed that David and his brother would be the first to go, and after they had settled in, Mom would join them with the rest of her family—and that is how my mother's life was saved.

David and his brother boarded the ship
Struma
in the Black Sea port of Constanza, together with a cargo of Jews wishing to make their way to Palestine. With its engine inoperable, the
Struma
was towed from Istanbul through the Bosporus out to the Black Sea by Turkish authorities with its refugee passengers aboard. It was torpedoed and sunk by a Soviet submarine on February 24, 1942, and all but 1 of its 768 passengers perished.

Even after marrying Dad three years later, Mom refused to become pregnant—something that was virtually unheard of in those days—until Aurika found a husband to replace the one she had lost at sea.

Dad, who was head over heels in love with a non-Jewish Romanian woman, was persuaded by his sisters to marry Bianca because she was single and had a dowry and because his mother, Tante Vavika, the one who died when I was nearly six and my sister saw God and the angels when they
came to carry her off to the heavens, would never, but never, have allowed him to marry his Romanian shiksa.

By the time Dad learned that Mom had no dowry and Mom found out that Dad didn't know how to take photographs, it was too late and they were already married.

When Yosefa was born in 1950 in the Romanian capital Bucharest, Dad swore at Mom and accused her of not even “being capable of giving me a son.”

Still, when he looked at the baby girl who had been born with the same black hair and slanting eyes as his, his heart melted, and he decided to raise his family in the land of the Jews. Mom protested fiercely; she didn't believe that anything good could come out of a small country surrounded by hostile neighbors, especially since ships were being sunk on the way there, but Dad was adamant. He wanted his children to grow up in a Jewish state. My father, who was probably the only Jew in the whole of Romania never to have experienced anti-Semitism, because everyone loved him, didn't want his children to ever know the humiliation of persecution merely for being Jewish.

All his life Dad was loved by everyone, except by Mom. But he didn't really deserve my mom's love, because he loved everyone except her.

In Wadi Salib my parents and my eight-month-old sister, Yosefa, were given the small kitchen, which lacked windows, air, and an outside view.

Mom whined to Dad, What could they expect already
from his side of the family? And to shut her up, they had sex for the second time in their lives.

When I was born, and Father was annoyed with “that one who doesn't know how to produce sons,” we were given the room that opened onto the balcony.

The room was a hundred and fifty square feet in size and had all the advantages of a studio apartment. It had a separate entrance from the yard that opened straight into the kitchen. There was a kitchenette that included a slab of marble worktop, with a length of fabric hanging from a wire spring down to the floor, behind which, next to the sink, the laundry basin used for boiling the baby's diapers was hidden from sight.

Nearby stood the tiny refrigerator. When there was enough money to buy a quarter block of ice, it even managed to cool the watermelon that took pride of place inside it.

There was no need to store food, since the flour, sugar,
mamaliga
, and coffee were kept on the worktop, and everything we ate,
chorba
soup or
mamaliga
, was cooked and eaten on the day. Thursday, the day of the big clean, we ate chicken soup. Mom made the chicken soup from the wings and feet, after Dad had first chopped off the chicken's toenails with an ax.

Yosefa and I ate the wings with our soup, Mother ate the feet, and Dad ate out. Mom saved the choice pieces of chicken, the breast and drumsticks, for Shabbat dinner.

A single stair, hinting that the kitchenette began two steps
away, led into our front room. The room was chronically overcrowded, without a scrap of exposed wall. There were three beds in the room, a double for the girls and two singles for the adults; these were pushed up against a wall, for fear of not being stable enough to stand on their own. Dad refused to share a double bed with Mom because she snored. The brown wardrobe leaned against the third wall and contained clothes and various objects; among them, hidden carefully in a used and oily cardboard box, was the Turkish delight that Mom kept for special guests. Loosely scattered next to the Turkish delight were a number of pungent-smelling mothballs that even as candy-deprived children we never mistook for anything other than what they were, even though they were round and white and just the right size to fill a mouth yearning for something sweet.

In the middle of the room stood the brown wooden table with the elegant slab of glass on top, as if it was the glass that protected the table from scratches or fading. The table was the focus of the room and fulfilled all the household's needs—a space for dining, regular games of rummy, and three-monthly painting of the rummy cubes; our drawing board and Dad's poster graphics table; and a place to sieve rice or flour, shell peas, or trim spring beans—and all this was conducted on top of the glass, above the family's photograph album.

Mom and Dad, handsome and elegant on their wedding day, looked out from beneath the glass on the table.
Mom in Romania, striking various poses, always fashionably dressed in a warm coat and a hat placed at a jaunty angle on the side of her head. A picture of her in her white summer dress showed off her very shapely, very slim figure, which may not have been considered pretty in those days, but Mom, like Dad, was ahead of her time by being thin at a time when being thin was tantamount to being poor. Family pictures from Romania showed Mom's extended family, including her five brothers; we girls were provided with an extensive description of the three who stayed behind in Romania because the Communists refused to grant them emigration permits, and the two who had come to Israel in the 1930s and drained the swamps in Hedera. In time, the Romanian pictures were joined by others taken in Israel, especially of us in our Purim costumes. In the corner of the room Mom's sewing machine stood under a pile of sheets and blankets that had been aired on the balcony earlier in the day before being folded neatly. At night, when we went to sleep, the sewing machine was freed of its burden of bedclothes and Mom was able to repair whatever needed to be mended, reinforced, patched, or turned.

The apartment's western wall faced the sea, with tall windows to the ceiling, rounded arches over the windows in keeping with modern Arab architecture, and a glass door that opened onto the balcony and provided a view of everything that was happening below or opposite; we could
thoroughly scrutinize every movement or sound made or uttered by the inhabitants of the street.

 

The third time they had sex was on the day that Grandmother Vavika died. The noise woke me up in the middle of the night, and I saw Dad naked, with his bum in the air, lying on top of Mom.

The following morning I asked him crossly if he was beating Mom, the way our Syrian neighbor upstairs, Nissim, spent his days beating up his wife.

Dad told me that he was massaging Mom's back, which ached from all the housework she had to do, and because we were selfish girls who didn't take care of our mother during the day, he was obliged, when he returned from a day's work, to rub spirit into Mom's sore behind.

I told Dad that it wasn't true that he came home late from work, and that Mom always comes in later than he does, and I went to play hide-and-seek downstairs.

They quarreled all day. Not a day went by without my parents quarreling at least once. Their quarrels were loud, and the whole of Stanton could hear them yelling and screaming at each other. But there was never any violence; not like in other families, where they didn't shout at each other, only beat each other up. And because they didn't beat each other, my sister and I believed that Mom and Dad were very happy.