Every House Needs a Balcony (8 page)

We hum the song “Que Será, Será” from that movie and sing the words
Whatever will be, will be, the future's not ours to see, que será, será
, and gradually fall asleep in the bathwater.

Later Mom enters the bathroom, pulls our heads out of the water, and we emerge soft, fluid, and wrinkled. She dries us, gives us clean underpants for the whole week, dresses us with a lot of love, and sends us off to sleep in our double bed.

“So how much is it?” I wake my sister to ask.

“How much is what?” she asks in reply, half asleep.

“Seventy minus forty-five,” I tell her.

“I think it's thirty-five,” says my sister, who is already in second grade.

Our mother strips off and gets into the bath after us. Into our water, of course.

When Mom has finished her mud bath, she puts the weekly wash in the tub and gives it a thorough soak. In the
same water, of course. By the time all our dirty laundry has been washed in the grimy water and my mother has wrung it out thoroughly with her powerful hands, the water level in the bathtub remains the same as when we first entered it two hours before. Mom gives Dad the wrung-out laundry for hanging on the grand balcony that overlooks the port, fills buckets with the water from our joint ablutions, mine, my sister's, my mother's, and the laundry, and swabs down the floor of our room. Dad hangs the laundry outside, and my sister and I sleep.

When Dad is done hanging the laundry, Mom goes out to the balcony.

On the balcony she washes only our side. She doesn't touch the side belonging to Lutzi or her son, Dori.

After a tour of the house, they all sat in the living room to watch the TV news in Spanish, and Laura the housemaid served them coffee with cake that his mother had baked. His father nodded off in front of the TV, and his mother sipped her coffee, each time dipping a sugar cube in the hot liquid. Noticing her watching, Luna said that it was a Polish habit she'd had since childhood, to dip a cube of sugar in the bitter coffee.

The man informed her that they owned a chain of laundries and dry-cleaning establishments throughout Barcelona, which they managed together with his mother's twin sister and her French husband, Jean, and that his mother and her sister worked afternoons in the various shops.

Luna, who wanted her to feel a part of the family, told her that they had started the laundries and dry-cleaning establishments thirty years before, straight after World
War II, and in the days when no household owned a washing machine, their business boomed.

“It's harder nowadays.” She sighed gently. “Everyone does their laundry at home, but they still hand in their clothes for dry cleaning.”

“Where did you meet your husband?” She asked one of the questions that are of interest to all women.

Luna immediately obliged. “At the university in Paris. He had come from Bulgaria to study; we met and fell in love and were married within a year,” she said, giving her a seal of approval to marry her son in less than a year. “And then war broke out, and we escaped here from Paris.

“It was love at first sight,” Luna added, and looked adoringly at her husband, who was dozing in front of the television.

“It's understandable,” she said to her, “he's very good looking.”

“Isn't he?” His mother's blue eyes beamed at her sincerity.

“So you are Polish, not French?” she asked his mother.

“I was born in Poland. But when I was a year old, my parents took all their four children and moved to Berlin, and ten years later, we moved to Paris, and my children were born in Spain. We're a typical family of wandering Jews. My husband's father and grandfather also arrived in Bulgaria from Italy. It's down to them that we all have Italian passports. But we also have a real Italian in the family—
my sister-in-law, Paula, who's married to Alberto's brother. She's from Milan.”

She thought it would take her a year to come to terms with all the foreign names in this extended family.

In the meantime his father awoke, smiled at her, and asked her, How's life in Barcelona? She smiled back at him bashfully.

Then his parents got up to go back to their work, informing her that the whole family would be there in the evening to meet her, and the man took her to Plaça de Catalunya. She fed pigeons in the palm of her hands and felt she was in heaven. Afterward they went to El Corte Inglés, Spain's largest department store chain, where she tried on three summer shirts and two pairs of cropped trousers at end-of-season prices.

“For this price, I'd only be able to buy one shirt in Israel,” she said to the man, overjoyed. “How come the stores offer end-of-season prices at the height of the season?” she wondered, and he smiled at her, glad that she was happy. He went to the checkout desk to pay for the things she had tried on.

They walked through the Passeig de Grácia, and he told her about Gaudí and his architecture. They sat in a café and ate tapas and she told him that her sister, who was studying architecture, would love to see Gaudí's buildings.

“Don't worry, she'll still be able to see them,” he said, and she smiled at him happily.

“How could your sister have left such a beautiful city for Jerusalem?” she wanted to know.

“My sister is the clever one in the family,” he said, and she thought to herself, Welcome to the club. “She always got top grades in everything. Every year she was awarded a ‘Student of Excellence' certificate and all possible grants.” He was obviously proud of her. “She graduated high school with the highest grades across the board. That's why no one cared when I got eighty percent, even though I'm the firstborn. She decided to study at the Hebrew University when she registered and was awarded all the grants. Apart from that, I've already told you that we are a very Zionist family, and it's always been clear that one day we'll go to Israel. My parents are happy that she has a boyfriend in Israel. Here the chances of her finding a Jewish husband weren't so good.”

“Will she be coming here?” she asked him, a little apprehensive about this brilliant sister, whom she didn't know and had only heard over the phone, shouting at him in French on the eve of Passover.

“She'll be in Barcelona in a month's time with her boyfriend, and together we'll go on a tour of southern Spain.” He was arranging her life for the next couple of months.

“Your sister will probably get on very well with my sister,” she said, and he said he was sure she would with her, too. “Everyone loves her,” he added.

That evening his mother's twin sister came to meet her, together with all the rest of the uncles, aunts, female cous
ins, and cousin Roberto. It was a close and warmhearted extended family, in which every possible language was spoken, from Spanish, French, and Italian to Bulgarian, Polish, and German. They all kissed her three times on the cheeks, and she, in spite of the kisses, which she found hard to accept, fell in love with them at first sight. She'd never been the yielding type. Even as a child, when her parents told her to kiss a relative of theirs, she refused. Her sister used to try to persuade her that it's not polite to refuse to kiss relatives, and she used to say that she didn't care, and she hated the feel of those wet lips on her face.

“And anyway, I don't like their smell,” she would say.

“What smell?” her sister asked.

“Of old people,” she replied.

They made love that evening when he returned her to the apartment she shared with Mercedes, and she asked him if he would be spending the night. But he said that didn't want to upset his parents, and he had to go home.

“I'll come by tomorrow morning to take you touring,” he said. “I've taken a week off work to spend time with you.”

She slept happily through the night. She had this feeling that something wonderful was happening to her, the same feeling that she had had when she was eight and her parents bought her a pair of new shoes for Passover, the first pair that were bought just for her, with no partners to share with. She fell asleep with joy in her heart, tempered by fear that it would turn out to have been only a dream. But when
she awoke and saw the shining new shoes under her bed, she picked them up and placed them next to her pillow; she wanted to feel and smell their newness close to her head. Nothing equals the smell of something new.

She awoke at seven thirty to the sound of Spanish music on the radio and remembered that she was living a dream, and thought how happy her parents and sister would be for her.

Mercedes served her a cup of coffee and a fresh croissant, which she understood, from her sign language, had been bought earlier that morning. Mercedes tidied up the mess left by her boyfriend in the living room—whiskey glasses and a large empty bottle alongside saucers of nibbles—and left for work at eight o'clock.

She didn't know the man's home phone number, and waited until eleven, when he rang her to apologize and explain that he had overslept. In the car he told her that he had a problem waking up in the morning. Alarm clocks and telephone alerts were of no use; to awaken, he needed someone to give him a thorough shaking.

“Are you any good at shaking people awake?” he asked her.

“I'm not sure,” she replied, wondering why anyone would need to be shaken awake. Indeed, what could be nicer than waking up to a new morning?

She remembered how, after years of shifting from one job to another, her father was hired to guard the gate at Auto
cars, the first and last car manufacturing plant in Israel. He was so pleased at having at long last achieved tenure that he woke up the cockerels at half past four every morning, and an hour later was already at his post, defending the factory against any possible intruder. From her bed on the balcony she could hear him getting dressed in the piercing, bone-chilling cold of a winter morning. Outside, the rain was coming down in torrents, and when he came to see that she was completely covered, although she was already sixteen years old, she pretended to be asleep, to avoid being saddened by her father having to go out in the cold. It was the same when she was riding in a bus and her eyes filled with tears at the sight of youngsters disrespecting an old person by not standing up; the tears rolled down her cheeks at the thought of her mother, laden with shopping bags from the market, having to stand in a bus, and no one getting up to offer her a seat.

The man took her to Park Goel and Sagrada Familia, and they hurried back to his place in time for the sacred two-thirty lunch. Laura opened the door for them, and his mother served them each a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. This time too the meal was absolutely delicious and included a first and second course, a main course, a lettuce salad, cheeses, and a dessert; again, she was first to be served, like an honored guest. She looked at the statuette of the blue lady that had found its way to their dresser and felt herself wanted. His parents wanted to know if she was comfortable
in the apartment he had found for her, and she assured them that she was. And again, they had their coffee in the corner of the living room opposite the TV and watched the news, which she didn't understand; his father dozed on the sofa, and his mother got ready for her afternoon work.

Afterward they went to Tibidabo, where she ate sugar-sprinkled churros, and at nine o'clock in the evening they went back to his home for dinner. She liked the fact that it was still daylight at that time of night, and that dinner was eaten then, or even at nine thirty, and it only started getting dark at ten. She pointed out that it was fun to be able to enjoy daylight until so late in the evening; in Israel it was already dark at seven, and because of the ultra-Orthodox, the government refused to advance clocks for daylight saving time.

That evening they were joined at dinner by Ruth and Nahum Lilienblum, who were described to her on the way to the meal as his parents' best friends and owners of Banca Catalana, the largest bank in Barcelona. Ruth was a very beautiful silver-haired woman, whose trim figure gave her a particularly young appearance. Nahum looked old for his age, slightly stooped, with wise eyes. He looked at his wife in adoration, and although they were sitting in company, it seemed that he spoke only to her and not to the others.

Nahum told her that she was a pretty woman, and she thanked him for the compliment. He asked her if she spoke Yiddish, and appeared disappointed when she said she did not.

“How can that be?” he wondered. “Your parents are Ashkenazis, aren't they?”

“Yes, but I'm a mixed Romanian,” she told Nahum. “My father is of Turkish extraction, and although he was born in Romania, his family continued to speak Ladino, not Yiddish, like my mother's family.”

“There's no such thing as a Jew who doesn't speak Yiddish,” Nahum insisted.

“I'm Israeli,” she told him proudly. When they were sitting in the living room, drinking coffee, Nahum told her that as a young man in a concentration camp he survived because of his ability to calculate accurately the number of items in the different piles of property belonging to victims of the gas chambers—a pile of wedding rings, a pile of chains, gold teeth, glasses.

He told her this offhandedly, as if to say, I'm here now in spite of them, and not merely here, but as the owner of the biggest bank in Barcelona.

“God created us perfect,” said Nahum, who believed in God despite the Holocaust, looking at his wife and stroking her hand, and she watched him, fascinated. “Look at the female form—how perfect you are, except for one detail.” He turned to her.

“What detail?” she asked, not understanding.

“What we are missing is an eye in the tip of our finger, so that we can push a finger under the bed when something falls under it, and we can find it easily.” He demonstrated
how an eye located in a person's fingertip could find any loss, both above and below.

She started giggling, and Nahum watched her with his wise eyes and said, “You're misleading, aren't you?”

“I'm misleading, why?”

“Because you're a woman-child.”

She fell silent, embarrassed.

When Nahum and Ruth stood up to leave, they told her that they would surely see her in Haifa, which they visited at least three times a year because all their children had left Barcelona and settled there. They didn't give her the customary three kisses; they already had learned from their children that Israelis didn't like kissing every new acquaintance.

All that week the man toured Barcelona with her, showing her all the city's beauty spots, and she had to admit that Barcelona was much prettier than her hometown, Haifa. In the afternoon they made sure to turn up, in accordance with family tradition, for lunch at two thirty, with freshly squeezed orange juice, and to dinner at nine. Twice after dinner, they went back to her home early and stayed up chatting with Mercedes and Jorge, but he didn't stay the night.

She found it quite difficult to get used to the fact that she was required to show up twice every day at his parents' home for meals, but the food was always so tasty that she decided she shouldn't complain. She told him she wanted to learn Spanish, and he enrolled her at the university for a one-month intensive course for foreigners.

A month later she was already able to chatter whole sentences in Spanish; Mercedes was terribly proud of her and said that she had never encountered anyone who had learned to speak Spanish so quickly.

She reckoned that she had found Spanish so easy to learn because she knew Romanian from her parents, and the two languages are very similar. More than anything, she loved to talk with Paula, his Italian aunt, who also felt herself a foreigner, having lived in Barcelona for only ten years, and could sympathize with her occasional homesickness. She especially missed her sister.