Every House Needs a Balcony (5 page)

“You could tell your sister that my parents have made a special journey from Haifa in order to meet you,” she said, still trying to persuade him, peeved at the dozens of phone calls he had made, insisting on meeting her parents. Over the phone, she could hear him talking to his sister in French, and her angry response in the same language.

“She says that my parents made a special journey from Barcelona for us all to be together,” he told her in English, and she was obliged to explain to her parents in Romanian why the “intended” had canceled his participation in their seder.

“I can come over for coffee later on,” he said, but she refused; she thought to herself that there was no point in everyone sitting around nervously until eleven o'clock at night in the hope that he might turn up. “We can meet tomorrow,” she said, repressing the disappointment he had caused her family.

He arrived at her sister's home the next day with a huge bunch of flowers, and they set off for a tour of the country
in the tiny car that belonged to her sister and brother-in-law. Needless to say, they had a puncture on the way, and no one protested at all when he offered to change the tire. They felt they deserved some kind of reparation for the disappointment of the night before and had no pity for him when his hands stayed black and sooty throughout the rest of the trip. They were cramped together in the backseat, but when he wanted to put his arm around her, she told him that his hands were dirty and she was wearing a white shirt.

For ten days he courted her with a European fervor that she found very flattering: he opened the door of her sister's car for her; he opened the door to their building; and he was on her right side when they walked in the street, so that if God forbid, a building should blow up nearby, he would take the main brunt of the explosion. When they visited a well-known fish restaurant, he cut the fish down the middle, pulled out the spine, and taught her how to cut into the sides of the fish to get rid of the small bones. Then he fed her fish from his own plate, so she should at least taste it.

On another occasion, he ordered shrimp for her—something she had never tasted before—and showed her how to pull off the heads and peel off the hard crusty outside, and when they were brought lemon-scented water in a small bowl and she asked how they were supposed to drink out of something so small, he explained that the lemon water was for dipping their fingers in after handling the shrimp. He poured wine for her—when she had ordered cola—pulled out the cork
and poured it into her glass and her heart skipped a beat. He was a man of the world, thoroughly versed in all the niceties; at night, after devouring her body without bothering to first remove her bones, he sang her lullabies as she fell asleep happily in his strong arms. She felt protected and loved, and she loved him for it.

After a week of shrimp, sex, and lullabies, he returned to Barcelona with his parents, but not before making her promise that next time she would come to visit him. Almost every evening for the next three months he called to say how much he missed her, but she was too tired to miss him. Working at two jobs in order to save money for the airfare and a pair of contact lenses left her completely exhausted.

She lived with her sister and brother-in-law in Tel Aviv during the entire period; they too were working hard to save enough money for postgraduate studies in New York, and when they all returned home at night, tired and starving, the only thing they found in the fridge was some 9-percent-fat white cheese. Only when their mother came to visit and filled the fridge did they realize that they were putting away every penny they earned toward their trips abroad—she to her “intended,” and they to further their education.

She paid the equivalent of a month's salary for a pair of contact lenses and loved the fact that people could see her eyes at long last. Over the phone she informed the man that he wouldn't recognize her without the glasses that had been stuck to her nose since she was fourteen. She was so strung
up on the night before her flight that she closed the cover down on one of the lenses as she was replacing them in their small plastic container, and tore it right in half. All through the flight to Barcelona, her first ever flight, she cried her heart out over the ruined contact lenses. She had so wanted to impress the man who would be waiting for her with all his family. A whole month of hard work had gone down the drain, and now she would have to arrive in Barcelona looking ugly and bespectacled; and she was especially upset because she had promised him that he wouldn't recognize her.

He recognized her easily, with her ugly glasses and red-rimmed eyes.

“Come on,” he said, “let's go and buy you some new glasses. But first you must promise that when we do, you'll smile for me.”

She chose frames that didn't appear too expensive, but he picked out some black ones with tiny diamonds in the corners and asked her to try them on.

They suited her perfectly.

“We'll take these,” he said to the saleswoman, and she noticed that they cost three times as much the ones she had chosen.

She smiled at him, feeling pretty again.

“The laughter's come back to your eyes, just as I remembered,” he said and hugged her.

“Where are we going?” she asked as they climbed into his small SEAT car.

“To the apartment you'll be staying in—just so that you can drop off your things—and then I'll take you to my home, where my parents are waiting.”

“Aren't we going to be living together?” she asked, horrified; after all, he'd invited her to spend three months in Barcelona so they could get to know each other.

“That was what I had intended, but when I told my parents that I wanted to live with you, they objected strongly and said that it's not done here for a young man to leave home before his wedding.

“My father was furious with me,” he told her naively, “for thinking that it wouldn't matter if you were to spend the nights in a room of your own. Anyway, we'll be spending all our days together.”

A man of good intentions, she thought, doing her best to console herself.

“The room I've found for you is in the home of my secretary, who has been looking for someone to share her apartment,” he said. “She's very nice; her name's Mercedes, and her boyfriend's called Jorge, and their neighborhood is also nice and not far from where I work.”

“So how come Mercedes and Jorge are living together?” she couldn't help asking.

“Well, they're not Jews. It's more complicated for us.” She didn't really understand why a twenty-eight-year-old man, who had been engaged to be married for five years and who supported himself financially, couldn't simply inform his
parents that he wanted to move in with his Israeli bride-to-be, who had left her homeland for the sole reason of being with him in a foreign country.

“Your sister left home when she was twenty.” She was finding it hard to understand the man she had fallen in love with.

“She immigrated to Israel in order to go to college. If I'd left Barcelona for the same reason, there would have been no problem. But my parents object to my leaving home to move into a rented apartment with you. It's just not done here. Spain is a very conservative Catholic country,” he added.

“But you're a Jew,” she said, so quietly that he didn't hear. Or perhaps he did.

My father didn't have a regular job and was forever changing professions. Well, not really professions; jobs. He didn't have a profession. That was the problem.

When he entered a real estate partnership with someone, it was he who did all the work; he was familiar with all the houses in Wadi Salib and downtown Haifa and was brilliant at persuading people to buy; he ran around all over town, but in the end, his partner screwed him and threw him out of the business that Father himself had established.

Father then opened a restaurant, and he was once again screwed over. He opened a garage that sold tires, and Mom yelled that no one in the region owned a car.

He went into partnership with a Moroccan and opened a café, brought in the whole neighborhood to play backgammon, brewed strong Romanian coffee as only he knew how, poured his soul into that
finjan
, together with the best-
quality ground coffee; the café lost money and had to be liquidated at a loss.

Between jobs, Father was the neighborhood graphic artist, painting store signs in colorful stylized Hebrew letters on cardboard marked out with lines, so the letters shouldn't spill over. Whatever was asked of him—a barber here, a cobbler there, a café and a real estate office. Father was paid no money for this work but was rewarded in other ways, such as free movie tickets or ice cream for his girls.

Our dream was for Father to have permanency. To us,
permanency
was a word that held promise, and smelled of money; we loved our father so much, but knew that without permanency it was hard to rely on him—and the guy suffered from an excessively good heart. It just spilled out of him in all directions, and he was quite prepared to give away everything he owned—except his daughters—if it would help the human race. He was charming and charismatic and very, very funny. And everyone loved to spend time in his company.

With his black hair and slanting green eyes that dipped slightly at the corners in a kind of self-conscious sadness, my dad was an extremely good-looking man. It was no coincidence that my sister thought he resembled God. He bestowed his green eyes on me; Yosefa, whom I called Fila, got their slant. We both inherited the sadness.

In Romania they had owned a movie theater—Nissa—near the Ci
migiu Gardens. Back then Mom and Dad had
been important people, especially since they got to see all the movies and were familiar with all the actors. At home they spoke about Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, and Frank Sinatra as if they'd been to school with them. In a way they felt some kind of patronage over the shining Hollywood stars, since without their movie theater, the people of Romania would have never been exposed to all that glamour.

Before the war that began in the late 1930s and came to an end in the mid-1940s, when he was twenty, Dad and his brother-in-law Herry did odd jobs in Bucharest.

They went from house to house and always found some broken gate or peeling plaster, crumbling paint or a wobbly table that needed fixing. Dad, with his honeyed voice, had no trouble persuading the Romanian housewife to prepare a surprise for her husband, who, on his return home, would find it stylishly renovated and revamped to the glory of the Romanian nation, and all in return for such and such a sum of Romanian lei and a cooked meal for two. The women were captivated by Father's smooth and charming tongue and Herry's skilled hands, and as the result of an aggressive marketing campaign of an intensity that was rare in those days in Romania, Father and Herry found themselves with a reputation for being efficient and reliable odd-job men.

One day they entered one of the more elegant buildings in Bucharest, and a very beautiful woman opened the door to them.

“We're in the odd-job business,” Father said and looked at Mrs. Dorfman with his piercing green eyes.

“I have nothing in the house that is out of order except my husband,” replied Mrs. Dorfman.

“I'd be happy to mend your husband,” Father told her and smiled a smile that melted her heart. He entered the house, his brother-in-law Herry dragging behind, and she led them to a dark room, where her husband, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, sat in a chair, his head drooping on his chest.

“Since you are here already, you can help me take him to the lavatory. It's quite difficult to do on my own,” Mrs. Dorfman said to my father and gave him a cheeky smile.

For two months, Father would drop by every evening after finishing all his odd jobs and help her take her sick husband to the lavatory.

After two months, Father persuaded Mrs. Dorfman to take him on as an active partner in her movie house, he being the only one who could save the business from bankruptcy, because her husband's illness had forced her to stay home to care for him.

Mrs. Dorfman, who was a very pretty woman, was a member of the Romanian aristocracy. She was a devout Catholic and came from a very well-connected family in Romania's high society, with close ties in high places. Mrs. Dorfman took on Dad as a business partner and as a lover. And indeed, Dad saved her business. He devised novel ad
vertising methods, and their movie house was soon bursting at the seams with patrons. His advertising campaign, with the slogan “Get out of the box and come see a movie,” promised two movies and a cabaret for the price of a single movie ticket. During the long intermissions, everyone ate at the bar, which his sister Vida, together with her husband, Herry, operated under franchise. It was in my father's movie house that all the young talent—stand-up comics, male and female dancers and singers—were discovered, performing during the intermission between one movie and another.

My father's friends included members of the Romanian Iron Guard, and he employed them as bouncers in his movie house. He paid them generously, as if knowing that one day he would need their services. And they in turn kept the place in immaculate order and made sure no drunks and hooligans found their way into the business.

When World War II broke out, all the men were sent away to forced labor camps except my father. His friends in the Iron Guard arranged for him to be issued the necessary documents recognizing his work in the movie house as vital to the war effort by maintaining Romania's morale and fighting spirit. This exemption did not prevent the Iron Guard from persecuting other Jews and handing them over to the Germans; they justified their sympathetic attitude toward my dad by saying, “Well, you're a different kind of Jew.”

My father's sisters, Vida and Lutzi, worked mornings for
an Italian company checking reels of film for scratches or tears; when any were found, they cut and pasted the film with gentle efficiency. This work was also regarded by Father's friends as being important to the war effort. In the evenings his sisters worked in Dad's movie house.

Vida and Lutzi were both very active in the Zionist movement in Romania, and throughout the war years they harbored Zionist activists on the run from the Iron Guard, who wanted to hand them over to the Germans. Under the noses of his Iron Guard friends and with Dad's full knowledge, the sisters hid Zionist activists and, later, youngsters who had managed to escape the death camps and made it to Romania on their way to Palestine.

For several months Vida's home provided shelter to four young Jewish youths who had escaped from Poland and Russia. During the day they were locked in the house; in the evening they went out to breathe some fresh air on a bicycle belonging to young Lorie.

Lorie was eight and desperately wanted to be accepted by her peers. When she was invited to the birthday party of the most popular girl in her class, she wore her best dress and brought an especially expensive gift. It was a birthday party in the middle of the war, in the middle of Bucharest, and they'd put on a magic show with a real-life magician. When the excited children clapped their hands, Lorie stood up in the middle of the room and said that she had some magic tricks of her own.

“What do you know how to do?” Lorie was asked.

“I can swallow medium-sized buttons and hairpins with nothing happening to me,” she replied, and promptly swallowed all the buttons and pins she was given. That night her temperature rose to 106 degrees Fahrenheit.

Her mother, Vida, was terrified of taking Lorie to the hospital; she was certain that, far from being cured, the Jewish child would be instantly put to death.

My father reassured his sister, told her not to worry, and informed her that one of the doctors at the hospital was a friend of his. He took Lorie straight to the doctor, his friends from the Iron Guard clearing the road for him with a motorcycle escort, horns hooting loudly all the way, as if the king himself was being rushed to hospital. Dad explained to his medical friend that this was his favorite niece and that he must operate on her immediately in order to remove the buttons from inside her abdomen. In any case, Dad promised the surgeon that he would “make it worth your while.”

That same evening, Lorie was taken to the operating theater, and the buttons and pins that she had swallowed in order to be loved by her school friends were removed from her belly. Later that evening, the pretty young vocalist who had appeared earlier in Father's cabaret could be seen lying replete in the arms of the kindly surgeon.

Lorie was released from hospital three days later, and no sooner had she walked into her home than a powerful
earthquake—nine on the Richter scale—destroyed half of Bucharest. As Lorie scrambled around on the staircase searching for somewhere to hide, all the stitches from her operation came apart. Father took her back to the hospital, and again she was rushed to the operating theater, where the incision was restitched.

Another earthquake shook Bucharest the next day, but this time Lorie stood, still as a statue, in the middle of the room, not daring to move. The fear of her stitches coming apart again was greater than her fear of any earthquake.

Dad's brother-in-law Lazer, Lutzi's husband, was sent to a forced labor camp, where he was put to work clearing away snow from the railway tracks outside Bucharest. He contracted a severe case of pneumonia and would have died were it not for Mom's younger brother, Marko, who was a dental technician and “served” in the same forced labor camp. Marko nursed Lazer with great devotion and fed him antibiotics from the supply he kept in the dental clinic. Lazer was saved, although he had very nearly crossed the line.

In return for saving Lazer's life, my mom's younger brother, Marko, wanted to find his big sister a respectable
shidduch
. My mother was thirty-two already and decidedly unmarried, when Lazer announced that he had a brother-in-law, albeit a disheveled one, who was a thirty-four-year-old bachelor and ran his own movie house. Needless to say, he neglected to mention Dad's non-Jewish mistress, Mrs. Dorfman.

Marko hinted to Lazer that a substantial dowry was on the books, and my father agreed to meet with the new prospect. He was annoyed at that time with Mrs. Dorfman for refusing to leave her sickly husband and marry him, even though he knew full well that his mother and sisters (and their husbands) would firmly oppose his marrying any woman who wasn't Jewish.

Mom was a trim and slender woman, elegantly dressed and well educated, who was employed as an accountant. And although Dad's family didn't really fall in love with her, she made a good impression on them.

“She's an Ashkenazi snob,” they told him, “not a warm-blooded woman like us Sephardis, but she's obviously intelligent and well educated and you can tell by her clothes that she's well off.” And so Dad agreed to step under the chuppah with Bianca.

They got married without too much enthusiasm for each other, and Mom began immediately to manage the movie house, putting the books in order. She imposed her kind of order and made sure none of Dad's many impoverished friends were allowed in without paying full price for a ticket. No free rides here, she would say.

Father employed his entire family and circle of friends in the movie house. He was used to making people feel good; when he came to live in Israel, he continued to help everyone. Except that he forgot that he no longer owned a movie house.

So he went into the coffee distribution business.

He would wander around in downtown Haifa with a three-tier conical tray, selling extra-strong Romanian coffee with an aroma that wafted all over Wadi Salib. He made a point of buying his coffee only from the Arab Nisnas brothers, who, while the coffee beans were being ground, would invite us in to taste their baklava and pistachio nuts before packaging the coffee in small brown paper bags.

The preparation of Romanian coffee was a very accurate and measured process. In a small
finjan
you measure the water and add two heaping teaspoons of sugar. To the carefully measured water, you add a heaping teaspoonful of coffee for each serving cup, and then you turn on the Primus stove. The coffee grounds take several minutes to sink into the water, and it is then that you have to stir carefully so as to prevent the viscous coffee that has been joyously incorporated into the black liquid from boiling over.