Every House Needs a Balcony (4 page)

For the next two months she and the man met every day at work and every evening in each other's arms in the apartment he was renovating for his sister, who was away in Barcelona. She spent the weekends with Leon and her parents and didn't bother to invite the man, although he showed some interest.

She didn't want to bring him to her modest little room in the apartment she shared with the arrogant students. The room was actually the living room, which opened onto the kitchen and was separated off by a one-inch-thick sheet of plywood that Leon had installed with considerable flair.

The man either trumpeted in her ear or sang to her in English, and she wept silent tears as she counted the days to their separation. No man before had ever trumpeted in her ear. She had been sung to in Hebrew, and some rhymes in Turkish repeated themselves occasionally, but there had been no trumpeting in English.

On the final weekend before he was due to leave, she promised to return from Haifa on Saturday night so they could spend his last night in Israel together, but Leon insisted on driving her all the way to Jerusalem, so she wouldn't have to take a bus. Throughout the journey, she was troubled by her promise to the man and the knowledge that she wouldn't be able to say good-bye to him before he returned to his fiancée in Barcelona.

“Would you like me to stay in Jerusalem so that we can go house-hunting together?” Leon asked her, knowing how much she hated her two roommates.

“I'm not sure,” she replied, irritated with him for insisting on driving her.

“You're not sure you want us to live together, or that I should stay the night in Jerusalem?” asked Leon, hurt by her sharp tone.

“Both,” she replied, “I think I'm fed up with Jerusalem. My sister has suggested I come and live with them in Tel Aviv, and I think I might just take up the offer.”

“And that's how you thought you'd tell me? After I've already informed my work in Haifa that I'm leaving and moving to Jerusalem?” Leon was in shock.

“What do you want? I didn't plan it.” The only reason she was being nasty to him was that he was preventing her from saying good-bye to the man from Barcelona.

“And when exactly were you planning to tell me?” he asked.

“I've only just thought that I might move to Tel Aviv.” She squinted at his angry face. “Are you annoyed with me?”

“I am furious with you for not taking the trouble to include me in your plans,” said Leon, who was making arrangements to join her in Jerusalem, at her request.

“Would you like me to get out of the car?” she asked.

“Why not?” he replied, and to her surprise, he pulled up sharply in the middle of the climb up the Kastel.

She alighted, vaguely insulted that he was allowing her to walk away, rather than fighting to keep her with him—even stopping for her to get out halfway up the Kastel in the middle of the night, knowing of the terrorists and rapists roaming the region. She got out of the car and started walking, not looking back. In the corner of her eye she saw him overtaking her. She tried to hitch a lift, and the second car stopped for her.

The driver asked if she wasn't afraid to be hitchhiking at that time of night, and she asked him if he was planning to rape her.

“No,” said the kind driver.

“Then I'm not afraid,” she said, and within twenty minutes he had pulled up at the entrance to her block.

Leon was waiting for her in the darkened stairway. She jumped when she saw him and said, “You frightened me.”

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. I didn't think you'd get out of the car,” he said.

“I didn't think you would leave me in the middle of the road,” she replied.

“I love you,” he said.

“I know. Would you like to come in?” She considered having sex with him, a final act of mercy.

She unplugged the phone in case the man from Barcelona decided to call her to say good-bye. They walked into her room with its thin plywood divide and undressed quietly, not uttering a word or a groan.

When he'd finished, he asked her if she'd slept with him out of pity, and she told him that she had met someone and was very confused.

Leon got dressed quietly and left without saying good-bye. She'd wanted to ask him to stay the night, not to drive all the way back to Haifa, but she said nothing.

She was at work the following day when the man called her from the airport, disappointed at missing her the previous evening; she lied and said she'd been obliged to spend the night in Haifa and had come straight to work from there.

She remained in Jerusalem, and two months after he returned to Barcelona, promising that he would write to her, the Yom Kippur War broke out. He wrote her letters and even phoned a few times, but she didn't feel like replying. He was sitting there nice and safe, locked in the arms of his fiancée, while here her chances of ever getting married were decreasing drastically as her friends were killed off daily. Once she even called Leon in Haifa, only to be told that he had moved away. She didn't have the nerve to call his mother
and ask for his new number. She was ashamed and imagined that his mother was angry with her—and rightly so.

Every day she went to Nahlaot to visit the parents of Kushi, so as not to be alone with all this tension. They had two sons in the war—Kushi, who was with the paratroops and had been her best friend since way back, when he was a boarder at the military academy in Haifa, and his brother, who rescued wounded soldiers by helicopter.

Ten days into the war, Kushi's brother came home on a twelve-hour furlough.

He described a horrific war in which soldiers were falling like flies, and she wondered how it would feel to be a mother whose son was returning the next morning to take part in a battle, with no way of knowing if he'd come out of it alive or on a stretcher, like the wounded and the dead that he evacuated every day. She decided she had to make her own contribution to the war effort, and especially to this Yemenite family she was so fond of, and who made her feel she was one of theirs. She was still watching him and listening to his horrible war stories when she decided that he would go back to the battle for the motherland with a personal gift from her. She decided to sleep with him, so that he would at least go back to that foolish war with a good taste in his mouth. Or in his memory.

As soon as she had made her decision, she knew that Kushi, who was fighting at that very moment in the Chinese Farm, would not be overjoyed by the idea that she was
seducing his little brother, but the little brother would be happy to receive a good screw as a farewell blessing. And indeed, he responded to her first overture.

“Shall I make you some coffee the way I like it?” she asked him.

“How do you like it?” he asked in return.

“Strong. Really strong; so strong it penetrates deep down into my bones.”

“Sure,” he replied. He wasn't interested in wasting his last night on sleep.

When his parents retired to their bed, they picked up their cups of strong coffee and went into his room, as if it was something they did every day.

He was very sensual, and she felt her contribution to the war effort giving her a great deal of pleasure.

Several days later she received a letter from the man in Barcelona, worried because he hadn't heard from her for a while and wanting to know what was happening in Israel; she replied that everyone was doing his or her best and went on to describe what she had been able to do, without stressing just how much she had enjoyed her efforts. The day after receiving her letter, he called to say that he had just that moment landed in Israel. She was on her way to hospital to donate blood because the mother of a friend of hers had to have surgery. He suggested going straight to the hospital and meeting her there.

For a full hour a nurse tried unsuccessfully to find a vein
in her arm from which to draw blood. And then the man appeared, engulfed in the scent of Spain, lacking the signs of the strain of war that were so evident on the faces of everyone in the hospital. He had lots of veins, he said, and volunteered to donate blood in her place.

For the next few days they met in the small bedroom with the plywood room divider that Leon had built, making no attempt to be quiet. Every evening the two students flirted and flattered and invited them to the kitchen for a meal, but they demurred in Spanish and stayed locked in her room.

He went back to Barcelona ten days later and called off his engagement; he wanted to make his own contribution to the war effort by raising her morale. In those days, everyone contributed to the war effort to the best of his ability.

Only after they were married did he tell her that for a long time he had been mulling over his engagement to that wealthy woman, who took herself far too seriously and was concerned mainly with how she looked and her designer clothes and with inane chatter with her girlfriends in Barcelona cafés. But although he had already fallen in love with her during those summer months they spent together in Israel, he didn't have the nerve to call off the wedding at the last moment. It was only when she wrote to him about her contribution to the war effort and he arrived in the country he loved so much and was suddenly in mortal danger and could actually feel for himself the awful tension of being in a war zone that he was able to muster the courage to face
his family and inform them that, actually, he didn't want to marry his fiancée.

His parents breathed a sigh of relief. It turned out that they hadn't really liked his choice, but had never dared tell him so.

But even before he made a formal proposal of marriage, and even before she had gone to spend three months with him in Barcelona, he called her at her sister's apartment, where she was staying because her brother-in-law had been called up for a long term of service, and informed her that he was coming with his parents to spend Passover at his sister's new apartment in Jerusalem and was inviting himself to the seder at her parents' home because he wanted to get to know her family.

“Wouldn't you rather be with your own family for the seder?” she asked, and he assured her that after spending most of his time with them, it was more important for him now to meet her family.

After some intense consultations with her sister, it was decided that if they were to avoid frightening off the prospective bridegroom right at the beginning, it would be best not to invite him to their parents' apartment in Haifa, but to conduct the seder at the home of their aunt who lived in Bat-Yam, the excuse being that it is easier to get to Bat-Yam from Jerusalem than to Haifa.

She remembered that just a few months earlier, Leon had told her how shocked he had been the first time he entered
her parents' apartment in Hapo'el Street in Haifa, by how stark, not to mention wretched, it had appeared; that same apartment that her parents had succeeded in purchasing after huge effort, mortgaging away their lives to move from downtown Haifa to the Hadar neighborhood on the Carmel.

Her sister had explained to their father that if they didn't move house, the little one was liable to turn into a
pushtakit
, or petty criminal, and there'd be no chance of her ever finding a wealthy husband. Alarmed, the parents hurried off in search of an apartment that would suit their means, and after much effort and crippling loans, they managed to find one in an excruciatingly ugly building on Hapo'el Street. And it was of this very apartment, which she and her sister saw as a significant step up the social ladder, that Leon, the bleeding heart, had spoken after a six-month relationship, telling her that he was shocked by its paucity when he visited it for the first time. Leon, together with his mother and sister, had immigrated to Israel straight from an opulent house in Istanbul, which they had left after their father abandoned his family and ran off with his young secretary; sensitive Leon persuaded his mother to move to Israel, in the belief that a change of location could well herald a change in fortune.

This time the sisters, not taking any chances, decided to hold the family seder with their distinguished guest at Aunt Aurika's in Bat-Yam.

Her parents took up residence at the home of Aurika, Bian
ca's sister, about a week before the seder in order to dust away every crumb of unwanted
chametz
, and Yosefa sewed them both new dresses. She didn't like the look of her own dress, and even though she didn't want to offend her sister, she went to a stall on Dizengoff Street where the prices were similar to those in the Carmel Market and bought herself a gray-green dress the same color as her eyes that flattered her figure, despite its below-the-knee length. Her sister was wise enough not to take offense, and they managed to persuade their mother to have a new dress made and to go to the hairdresser.

“But my hair is so sparse,” Bianca said, trying to convince them that a professional haircut, which would last for three days at the most with her fine hair, was a waste of money, but they insisted, waiting at the entrance to the hairdressing salon in Bat Yam until she emerged with her hair stiff with spray. The whole family, including her uncles, invested an entire month's salary in making a good impression on the tall man from Barcelona and waited, squeaky-clean and dressed to the nines, beside the table that had been laid to the very best of their ability. At seven thirty, instead of the doorbell, the telephone rang, and he said that he was terribly embarrassed, but his sister was furious that he wasn't staying at her place for the seder, especially since she had been slaving the whole day so that they could all sit together around her table in Jerusalem.

“Didn't you tell them you'd be spending the seder with me?” She tried hard to understand.

“I didn't expect my sister to be so incensed about it,” he admitted truthfully.

She told him that it didn't matter and glanced at her mother's elaborate coiffeur. Her sister's husband smiled and said that in Spain people apparently obey their parents, and that he'd grow out of it, but she was terribly upset because she had worked so hard for this holy day to be perfect, to make a good impression on him.