Every Home Needs A Balcony

Every Home Needs A Balcony Rina Frank Ora Cummings This international bestseller tells the bittersweet story of one family, one home, and the surprising arc of one woman's life, from the poverty of her youth, to the intense love and painful losses of her adult years.Braiding together the past and present, Every Home Needs a Balcony relays the life story of a young Jewish girl, the child of Romanian immigrants, who lives with her family in the poverty-stricken heart of 1950s Haifa, Israel.Eight-year-old Rina, her older sister, and her parents inhabit a cramped apartment with a narrow balcony that becomes an intimate, shared stage on which the joys and dramas of the building's daily life are played out. It also a window through which Rina witnesses the emergence of a strange new country, born from the ashes of World War II. While her mother cleans houses and her father drifts from job to job, as the years pass Rina becomes desperate to escape her crowded, dirty surroundings. Eventually she falls in love with a wealthy Spaniard and moves to a luxury apartment in Barcelona.Yet although she enjoys money and status in her new land, it is not Israel. Longing for the past, Rina, now pregnant, returns to the simple life she has missed - a move that soothes her soul, but destroys her marriage. Alone, raising a new baby, comes the painful realization that no matter how much she yearns for the past, the old Haifa of her boisterous youth has gone.Told with the light touch of a humorous, incredibly dexterous writer, Every Home Needs a Balcony reveals how our choices shape us - and how we learn to survive life's most surprising turns. EVERY HOME NEEDS A BALCONY RINA FRANK TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW BY ORA CUMMINGS Dedication (#ulink_a597c95c-1f6b-5fa4-9afa-47c5b4aa4b07) To Sefi I can see you Laughing or crying Reading the book— If you were alive Contents Cover (#ude5401c1-1882-554e-bf4f-460132c8fb78) Title Page (#u358d4bd7-2624-503f-b584-2cd37a144ac9) Dedication (#ulink_786acc74-715b-54db-b8bd-4183609fc64c) The Day My Sister Saw God (#ulink_09017e2a-5011-56e7-a617-1baf475b9208) When Mother Met Father (#ulink_67f824fc-841c-58d5-b619-7a2e642f2072) When Father Met Mother (#ulink_082370c6-945a-500f-9d19-6a91d0c32e4a) Dirty Thursday (#litres_trial_promo) Recycled Clothes (#litres_trial_promo) Operation Sinai (#litres_trial_promo) Rummy (#litres_trial_promo) Our National Pride Day (#litres_trial_promo) New Shoes (#litres_trial_promo) August Disasters (#litres_trial_promo) Difficult Language, Hebrew (#litres_trial_promo) Circus Madrano (#litres_trial_promo) Riots in Wadi Salib (#litres_trial_promo) Moving House (#litres_trial_promo) Lies (#litres_trial_promo) Copyright (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) The Day My Sister Saw God (#ulink_a9a1ca65-af71-54dc-90d6-7e6921485379) I was born on the second day of the Jewish New Year. When I discovered that Yaffa, the third daughter of our Syrian neighbors, was born during Hanukkah, I assumed that children were born on holy days—as a special gift from God. When I realized that my sister, who is older than me by one year and eight months, was born in January and I could find no holy day in her vicinity, I became very worried and afraid that she was damaged. I shared my deep concern with her. My sister laughed and, with all the wisdom of a seven-and-a-half-year-old, explained to me that children are indeed born only on holy days; she, on the other hand, while still an embryo in our mother’s belly, had decided that she wanted to be special and different from everyone else, and so she persuaded God to arrange for her to be born on a regular weekday. And God agreed. Because my sister Yosefa knew God. Two families and Tante Marie lived in our three-room apartment and kitchenette. The apartment belonged to my father’s oldest sister, Aunt Lutzi, and her husband Lazer. They were lucky. They had emigrated from Romania in 1948, right after the War of Independence, and were already regarded as “veterans” because they had managed to take over apartments abandoned by Arabs who had previously occupied Stanton Street, which made them instant property owners. Actually, their son the policeman, Phuyo, who had immigrated to the Land of Israel at the age of fourteen, had set aside an apartment at 40 Stanton Street for his parents. When members of the local police force were allocated the best apartment block on Stanton Street, Phuyo immediately commandeered the first floor, and three of his colleagues took over the remaining floors; for several months thereafter they took turns guarding the empty apartments, to prevent any undesirable Jewish invaders from entering and occupying them before their parents and the rest of their families arrived in Israel. Vida, Father’s second sister, and her husband, Herry, also made a beeline to Wadi Salib in search of an apartment in which to set up home. At 47 Stanton, they found a two-story building abandoned by its Arab inhabitants. They didn’t fancy the furniture on the first floor; in the second-floor apartment, however, not only was the furniture relatively new but there was an indoor toilet, rather than one in the yard, as was normal in Arab houses. They settled unanimously for the apartment on the second floor. Herry, who was multitalented and very resourceful, installed a tin water tank on the roof, and a solar collector. The result was a supply of free hot water almost all year. My parents, who lingered for a further two years in Romania in order to do it for the first time in their lives and produce Yosefa, my only sister, did not have this good fortune. And thus the Franco family, comprising Moscu, Bianca, and their eight-month-old baby girl, arrived in Israel and were given the kitchenette. It was an inner room with no window, and no access to the high-status balcony that overlooked Stanton Street. Moscu and Bianca did it for the second time in their lives in Tante Lutzi’s small kitchen, because they were depressed at having to live in a tiny, windowless room and because Father really wanted a son. When I was born, one year after they immigrated to Israel from Romania, Father was so disappointed with “that one who doesn’t know how to produce a son” that his sister Lutzi, who loved her attractive younger brother with all her heart, gave us the third room that faced the stylish balcony and connected between all the other rooms. The room had been reserved for Phuyo the policeman, who was responsible for our having the house in the first place. But Phuyo had married a Frenchwoman, Dora, who flatly refused to share a house with her mother-in-law, Lutzi, and that is how our occupation of the room with the elegant balcony became a fait accompli. From the balcony, you could overlook the entire Haifa port with its fleet of ships, as far as the yogurt-bottle-shaped oil refineries, and when you closed one eye you could even see Acre on your outstretched hand. There was no need even for binoculars; no boat or ship could infiltrate our little country via the port of Haifa without us noticing it from our balcony. Except, perhaps, a submarine. The houses on Stanton Street were built of good-quality local stone, not the usual crumbling gray plaster, but stone blocks that gave the buildings a special elegance and made them stand out in the surrounding landscape. And all the buildings had balconies, one balcony facing the other, with no difference between the outside and the inside. The stone walls had been designed as a buffer only against the cold or the heat, not between the people and the neighborhood and the families who lived there. There were no curtains in the windows, and everyone was able to see everyone else, as if on a conveyor belt. Your entire life was laid out there on the balcony, illustrated in the piles of bedclothes hung out daily on the banister for airing. All the neighbors knew how often, if at all, every family changed its sheets. And if it wasn’t enough that everything was visible to all eyes, there was also the laundry, pegged out to dry on ropes stretched along the length of the balcony, revealing the patched clothes and the underwear and nightgowns worn and faded from too much washing. It was as if all your belongings were displayed there each day for public auction. During the long summer nights, people sat out on their balconies. Father ran out an extension cord from inside our apartment to plug in a lamp, brought out a small table, and they played rummy every evening on the balcony. The game didn’t prevent my parents from engaging in conversation with the neighbors across the road, but even if they didn’t talk, we already knew everything that was going on, because every word shouted in every apartment could be heard all over the street, especially by anyone sitting on the balcony. Our street was very vociferous; it was as if the neighbors all knew that Mother was hard of hearing and did their best not to make her feel left out. Conversations from one balcony to another were a matter of routine. Sitting on the balcony was practically the same as sitting in an armchair and watching television. For us, the balcony was our television, and what we saw was real life, played out with authentic actors in real time. Stanton Street is the place where reality TV was first invented. Thursdays were the days on which bedclothes were not put out to air; instead, the carpets were brought out and laid over the balustrade. After being left alone to soak up a few hours of dry, hot, and dusty hamsin air, the carpets were beaten with the cruelty they deserved, so as to be clean for Shabbat. As if by mutual signal, in unison, with a rhythm that sounded like the beat of tom-toms, all the ladies of Wadi Salib thrashed the living daylights out of the carpets as they hung over the balconies of their homes. All the ladies and my father. There they all stood on the balcony railing, straining downward to reach the very edge of their carpet, potential shahids to cleanliness, until they caught sight of my father. As soon as Father stepped out with his carpet beater, all the ladies in the street started flirting with him. “Hey, Moscu, when are you coming over to bang my carpet with me?” “Hey, Moscu, is Bianca so worn out after last night that you’re out here banging in her place?” When the ladies laughed at him, Father smiled back kindly and said that they were clearly dying to swap their husbands for him—and none of them ever denied it. The main room in Lutzi’s apartment in Wadi Salib’s Stanton Street belonged, of course, to Tante Lutzi and her husband, Lazer. Lazer was a barber. He owned a barbershop downtown, next to the only decent caf? in the area. To tell the truth, the barbershop was more a hole in the wall, with two chairs and a single shared mirror. Since he was always appropriately dressed in a barber’s coat, the local gentlemen stepped in for a haircut, although he never failed to botch up their appearance with a phenomenal lack of talent. We girls had our hair cut at home. We refused to go to his shop, claiming that it wasn’t fit for ladies. Lazer would place a kind of round plate on our heads, which served as a template around which to snip off the ends, and we’d finish up with a haircut that was a perfect circle. Until we revolted and no longer allowed him to touch us, my sister and I looked like a pair of round satellite dishes with bangs. In fact, with our Uncle Lazer, “touch” was the operative word. He used to sit me on his lap and say that, as an uncle who loved his nieces, he was responsible for checking my growth, to make sure that everything about me was in order. His examination focused mainly on the glands on my chest, rather than on my height, which was measured against an inch tape and markings on the wall. My sister, apparently, wasn’t fooled by Uncle Lazer’s honeyed words and told him to go measure the growth process of his own children, because only our mother and father and the school nurse had the right to check ours. It was obvious that black-haired Yosefa, with her brown slanting eyes, was the smartest child in the neighborhood, and I was just pretty. There was an ongoing debate in our home over what would best suit my sister, who was destined for greatness, a future as a physician or a career in law; as for me, they just prayed that someone wealthy would marry me. One day I was playing jacks downstairs when my sister called me from the balcony to come up immediately because Grandmother Vavika had died. “So what?” I shouted back, even though I was almost six and had only one grandmother. I threw the ball vigorously and knocked over all the stones. When I saw the ambulance parked at the entrance to the building, I stopped throwing the ball at the stones for a moment and watched as two white-uniformed male nurses got out, carrying a wooden stretcher. They entered the building, carrying the stretcher in an upright position as if it were a ladder; I lost interest and went back to my game. I went up to our apartment only when I had beaten all the others as usual. My sister was very agitated and said I had missed something important. “What was there to miss at home, where everyone is miserable, whereas downstairs I squashed seven jacks singlehanded?” I asked indifferently. “You missed God,” she said reproachfully. Yosefa was proud of the fact that she was the only one who had seen God, because she was standing alone on the balcony when the entire family was indoors beside our dead grandmother and I was stupidly playing jacks downstairs. And it’s a well-known fact that God reveals Himself on balconies. My sister told me that she was standing on the balcony when suddenly a ladder descended from the skies; it was very, very long, like Jacob’s ladder, and two angels dressed in white went up to Grandmother and grasped her on both sides, and together, the three climbed up the ladder that reached up to the skies, not forgetting to wave good-bye to the lone girl standing on the balcony and watching their every move. When they had reached the very edge of the sky, my sister, who was older than I by two years minus four months, told me that the heavens had opened, and God’s kindly face peeked down to welcome them home. “So what does he look like?” I asked my sister grudgingly, piqued that she had seen God and I hadn’t. “Very handsome,” answered my all-seeing sister. “He’s got black hair and green eyes. Looks a bit like our dad.” Ever since, I have lived with the knowledge that I missed seeing God and His angels, and only my sister had the good fortune to see them. And she had even called me home, but I wasn’t listening. 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. “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 entrec?te. 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. When Mother Met Father (#ulink_e37dcf6f-58c9-5ff5-8efe-3def5c138311) 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. 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 fianc?e 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 goodbye. 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 fianc?e, 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 caf?s. 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 fianc?e. 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, Bianca’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. “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. When Father Met Mother (#ulink_b229fc6d-e232-51ba-b34e-5a699b50ee49) 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 caf?, 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 caf? 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 caf? 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 advertising 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 warmblooded 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. My mother, who saw my father’s extravagant use of heaping spoonfuls of coffee as an affront to the taste buds as well as to the family’s pockets, would lie in wait for him to step out of the kitchen for just a second, when she would skip over to the finjan to rescue a few spoonfuls of coffee, which she returned to the brown paper bag, before they had time to melt into the boiling water. She didn’t always succeed, however, because as soon as Dad’s eagle eye caught sight of the reduced coffee level in the finjan, he would replace the spoonfuls she had returned to the paper bag, plus an extra heaping teaspoon, to get his own back at Mom. Mom was forever yelling that his extravagance was gnawing away at his daughters’ dowries, but we always knew that, because of our father, neither of us would ever have a dowry, so what were we missing anyway—and apart from that, he had a knack of getting us on his side in all his quarrels with Mom. What did he want, after all? All he wanted was to enjoy life here and now; unlike Mom, who was forever thinking of her daughters’ futures. On Saturday nights we went to the movies. Every Saturday the whole family went to see a movie. It was the only thing my parents had in common—their great love for cinema. And they always took us along with them so that we too could soak up this culture. When the movie The Ten Commandments arrived in Israel, Mom was sure she could make a small fortune. She went out a week before the first showing and bought up twenty cinema tickets; on the day, when a long queue had formed at the box office and most people had no chance of obtaining a ticket, Mom sold hers at an exorbitant price. In short, here in Israel and with no command of the language, my mother, who had once been a movie house owner, turned into a ticket scalper. How proud we were of her; even Dad was proud of her. Of course we were sorry we hadn’t bought up fifty tickets; the demand was huge, and hundreds of people queued up in front of the movie house without a hope of getting in. We saw the movie Oklahoma! three times. But the first time we saw it, we didn’t enjoy ourselves at all. The movie was being shown at the Tamar in the Upper Hadar neighborhood, close to the Carmel and very far from Stanton, which was located on the slopes of Haifa’s downtown region. By the time Dad, Fila, and I had climbed up hundreds of stairs and arrived, breathless and pale, at the entrance to the Tamar cinema, it became apparent that Dad had only enough money for two tickets and no more; it was a three-hour movie, and consequently the price of a ticket had been doubled. All of Dad’s pleas and explanations—that we had come a very long way to be there, that he had no more money on him, and how could they allow two little girls to go into the movie house alone?—were of no avail. The stone-hearted usher would not relent; my sister and I went in on our own, leaving our father outside to wait for us. In the intermission we rushed outside to him, and with tears and pleas we tried to persuade the usher to at least let our father in to see the second half of the movie—surely he’d been punished enough, forced to sit outside for an hour and a half. The usher refused to relent, while we, our hearts breaking at the thought of Dad having to spend a further hour and a half outside, just didn’t enjoy the movie. When it was over and we were making our way out, we cursed the usher with a visit to the grave of the black-hearted Hitler. At the tops of our voices, we said it, so he’d hear! On Thursday our mother left us in the bath for a full two hours—as if the longer you soak yourself in the water, the more likely you are to be thoroughly rid of all the dirt. “We’re expecting an important visitor tomorrow,” Mom explained to us as we were falling asleep in the water, as usual. “The famous playwright, Eug?ne Ionesco, is coming to visit us.” “What’s a famous playwright?” I asked my mom. And even Yosefa, who was wiser than anyone, didn’t have an answer to my question. “It’s someone who writes plays,” Mom explained. And I didn’t understand how you could write plays. You watch plays, like you see movies, don’t you? It’s not a book that you can read. “Why is Ionesco coming to visit us?” my sister asked my mom. She’d always been practical, my sister. “Because he’s a friend of Tante Marie’s, and he’s coming to visit her.” “And will he live here with her?” My sister went on being practical and suspicious, knowing that it was crowded enough already in Lutzi’s house. “No. He’s a tourist. He’s not immigrating to Israel. He’s only coming for a visit,” Mom replied, and left us too long in the bath. The important guest arrived the following day. So important was he that even Tante Lutzi opened wide her red room, with all its chairs; she ran out the red carpet, as they say. Tante Marie was my father’s aunt, as well as Lutzi’s and Vida’s. When she immigrated to Israel to live out the rest of her life near her nieces and nephew, she was housed in the kitchenette, and when Dori, Lutzi’s younger son, was recruited into the Israeli navy, she moved into the elegant room that faced the balcony; because she was elderly and because she was well educated, she deserved to have a room of her own. Before World War II, Tante Marie had been a teacher of French in Paris, and it was there that she met her Christian husband, who was later appointed French consul in Tunisia. They had a daughter, Odetta, and Tante Marie continued to teach French to the children of the French colony in Tunisia. In time, she fell deeply in love with a Tunisian army officer and spent more time alone with him than was respectable for the wife of a consul. When her husband discovered her betrayal, he sent her packing and returned with their young daughter, Odetta, to Paris. A sad Tante Marie went back to Romania without her daughter, who had been torn from her suddenly; she obtained a decent position in Bucharest as headmistress of the French school for daughters of the Romanian aristocracy. She reverted to her maiden name—Franco—and when war broke out, she was known by that name. Franco, which had a non-Jewish ring to it, enabled her to continue in her post in the school for Christian girls, despite the war. She met Eug?ne Ionesco at the school in which she taught; he taught literature in the same school. Now that she was retired, she had come to live in Israel to be near the only family she had left, her nephew Moscu and nieces Lutzi and Vida. Convinced that French was the international language that all educated people should be able to speak if they are to get along in the big world, she undertook the task of teaching French to the princesses of the house of Franco: Yosefa and me. She decided to instill in us—the last known members of the Franco dynasty—her accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Tante Marie told us that in Spanish the name Franco means freedom and generosity. She also told us that our family had been among the most established in Spain, and when the Spanish Inquisition began, the family had moved to Turkey and from there, one part of the family settled in Bulgaria and another part went to live in Romania. Once we understood that Dad was the last in line of the Franco dynasty—since our mother didn’t know how to make sons—my sister and I were riddled with guilt for cutting short this aristocratic line; so I agreed to learn French. Yosefa agreed because she wanted to learn everything. Because we were having private French lessons, Mom forbade us to go around looking like urchins and insisted that we had to be suitably dressed. So we got ourselves spruced up in the clothes we owned, washed our faces, and crossed the landing from our room to Tante Marie’s. Over ten lessons we learned to how to say “Bonjour,” “Comment ?a va?” and “Fr?re Jacques,” until I rebelled and refused to continue with the lessons. Having to give up a whole hour of playtime out of only three at my disposal every afternoon between four and seven o’clock, coupled with the pungent smell of age that emanated from Tante Marie, just to learn a subject that was not included in the official school curriculum was just too much for me. Also, I had told my sister that in all the movies we went to see, they always speak English and not French, a sure sign that French was not so important a language as Tante Marie made it out to be. The lessons were discontinued. I don’t know why Tante Marie didn’t continue teaching my sister, who wanted to learn everything. She probably felt that teaching only Yosefa was too much like a private lesson, whereas having me there gave her more of a feeling of being in a classroom, which she must have missed. My sister never forgave me; because of me she never learned French, because of our poverty she never learned to play piano, and because of the steep streets of Haifa she didn’t know how to ride a bicycle. And then Ionesco arrived in Israel in search of the stimulation he hoped to find in our tiny little country. As a famous playwright, he was sure that the post-Holocaust Jewish state would provide the perfect inspiration for a new play, and the new landscapes would expose him to materials he could never have found in Europe. For five full days, my father took Ionesco all around Haifa step by step and on foot. Ionesco was shown the vista from the top of Mount Carmel, spreading down toward the sea. He saw the golden dome of the Baha’i temple, a source of pride to the city, and went down the myriad stairs and slopes that led from the Carmel to Haifa’s downtown region, while the scent of coffee (from my father, no doubt) filled the air. Together they wandered among the laborers of downtown Haifa, a complex blend of colors, languages, and people; Arabic, Romanian, Yiddish, Polish, and Turkish ruled the street. And Moroccan—a lot of Moroccan. And everyone was friends with everyone else, everyone went to the same place, even though they had not come from the same place, and most important of all, they were all Jews—well, apart from the Arabs, who in our eyes were also Jews. Ionesco was very keen to know how a nation that had lost six million of its sons had succeeded in building such a state, albeit surrounded by enemies, but a homeland nonetheless. And Dad told him that he didn’t for a minute regret having left the fleshpots of Romania, the movie house that the Communists had confiscated from him, so that his daughters could grow up as proud Jews in Israel; and it made no difference that, just for the time being, he was making his living selling cups of coffee. After five days, Ionesco informed Dad that all the material he had accumulated would enable him to write ten plays about Israel. In the end, after everything that he saw and absorbed and smelled and was impressed by in Israel, Ionesco wrote the play The Chairs, about my aunt Lutzi and uncle Lazer’s front room. The room was described in great detail: the double bed at its end, the long table—about ten feet of heavy mahogany—with many, many chairs all around, as many chairs as such a long table can accommodate. And along the room’s western wall, as if these chairs were not sufficient, there stood a further row of chairs belonging to the same dining room suite. The chairs were heavy, their edges decorated with a carved circular pattern, hand carved, of course. And most important, their red velvet upholstery had the soft, embracing feel of a loving chair. Like soldiers, Tante Lutzi and her husband Lazer’s chairs stood regally along the wall, and this is what Eug?ne Ionesco wrote his play about. The play tells the story of an elderly couple setting up chairs, arranging and rearranging them like soldiers, in anticipation of the arrival of invisible guests. The Chairs is 40 Stanton Street; at least that’s the story that was repeated proudly in our home. And my father, who spent five whole days taking Eug?ne Ionesco all over Haifa to provide him with inspiration, waited a long time for the play to be released, only to discover that he didn’t get so much as a credit in the list of acknowledgments. Mercedes was smiling broadly as she opened the door for them. “Hola,” Mercedes said, and kissed her on the right cheek, then the left, then the right again. She recoiled, jumped back, not understanding exactly—since when was she supposed to be kissing strangers?—and the man told her that in Spain people say hello and give each other three kisses. To her, it appeared very odd, and he went on to explain that in France the habit is to give two kisses, one on each cheek. In Spain it was three. At night, when she was introduced to Jorge, who also kissed her three times, she asked the man if she was supposed to kiss all the men in Barcelona, and he said that such was the custom, and it seemed a much nicer one to him than the limp handshake meted out by Israelis, as if they were doing you a favor. She agreed, recalling his firm handshake when they were first introduced and how impressed she had been by it. “So why didn’t you kiss me three times when we were first introduced?” She laughed. “Believe me, I wanted to.” “Well, why didn’t you, then?” she insisted, laughing. “Because you would certainly have slapped my face.” Beyond the mandatory kisses, the two women were unable to exchange a single word. Like many Spaniards, Mercedes spoke no other language than Spanish and Catalonian. Mercedes was gorgeous and kindly and dressed in well-cut jeans, a button-up shirt, and killer heels, her taste exactly. The man took her suitcase into the very small bedroom she would be using. Mercedes’s room was much more spacious, and the living room was very pleasant. The apartment was extremely clean, and it was only after she’d learned to say a few consecutive sentences in Spanish and stayed for lunch with them a few times that she witnessed how the efficient Mercedes came home from work at lunchtime carrying shopping, stuck a chicken in the oven, washed down the floor, and served her boyfriend, Jorge, a glass of whiskey, straight to the armchair in which he was sitting watching sports on TV. When the meal was over, Mercedes would quickly wash the dishes and tidy up the kitchen; if Jorge was feeling horny in the afternoon, she would follow him into her bedroom and emit a few moans and groans before rushing off back to work, to unlock the office from four thirty until eight thirty in the evening. She could never understand where this pleasant woman got all the energy to do so much work singlehandedly, while her boyfriend just sat there watching TV, and even to smile at him. Sometimes he’d get through half a bottle of whiskey during a single afternoon break. On such occasions, when he pushed Mercedes into their room, she would hear her moaning—but not with pleasure. She wanted to unpack her suitcase and hang up the clothes she had brought for the next three months, but the man said that his parents were longing to meet her and had been waiting from the moment of her landing in Barcelona. She felt guilty for the time she had wasted buying glasses. She was hungry, a hunger accumulated over three months of going without food in order to save enough money to fly to the country of her bridegroom-to-be. The arrived at a swish apartment block, and he pulled into an underground parking garage, where he parked next to a brand-new BMW. “This is my parking space,” he explained, “and that’s my father’s car,” and when they stepped out of the car and into an elevator, she felt she as if she were in a movie. On the tenth floor, the man opened the door, calling out “Mummy” and announcing in French that they had arrived. She was sorry now that she had stopped her French lessons at Tante Marie’s, but she understood a little, because it wasn’t unlike Romanian. They entered a square hall, with one wall covered in mirrors and green marble pedestals; the other side had two shiny wood doors with painted flowers. Next to the entrance stood a red-velvet-upholstered chair, on which the man placed his briefcase. The hall was the size of her parents’ living room. A plump woman with ingenuous blue eyes walked toward them, smiling, and he went up to her to give her three kisses. Next, a distinguished-looking man with piercing blue eyes and a Kirk Douglas dimple in his chin came up to shake her hand. He introduced his parents, Luna and Alberto, and they remained standing, a little embarrassed, in the elegant hall. His father spoke fluent Hebrew and explained that he had learned the language when he belonged to the Hashomer Hatza’ir youth movement in Bulgaria. She spoke a stilted English with the mother, but the father and the man broke out in simultaneous translation as soon as she opened her mouth. They entered the salon, and she caught her breath. It was very large, with two separate reception areas, one with a television, where they sat most of the time, and another, for guests, with wall-to-wall red velvet furniture. Leading off the salon was a dining area, containing a long table with enough room to seat sixteen. So there would be enough room for anyone wanting to eat. She remembered that when they’d had all the uncles and aunts over for the seder, they’d had to spill over into the neighbors’ apartment to accommodate all sixteen diners. The table was laid for a festive meal—a white tablecloth embroidered with delicate pale blue flowers and matching napkins, on which the cutlery had been laid. Each place setting consisted of a large plate under a smaller one and two kinds of drinking glasses, one for wine and one for water. A stainless steel bowl lined with a white napkin contained small slices of baguette; several other small bowls contained diced red pepper, tomatoes, cucumbers, and onion; and there was another bowl filled with croutons. She looked up at the crystal chandelier hanging from the dining room ceiling, at the beautiful pictures hanging in the salon, at the large ceramic figure on the parquet floor in the corner of the room, and at the elegant dishes on the dresser and wondered if her gift would appear pathetic among all this splendor. Still, she put her hand into the bag she had carried close to her heart throughout the flight and pulled out a small blue porcelain figurine, which she had bought with her sister on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street. They had picked out the unique little piece simultaneously as soon as they laid eyes on it. The figurine was of a woman in profile, her head dropped sideways, a hand raised in doubt or pleading. Her body was soft, and her entire pose said, “Here I am, whether you want me or not.” A gentle woman, powerful, her clay eyes filled with compassion. The figurine pleased his parents, and his mother gave it a place of honor on the dresser in the dining area. She felt wanted, and they sat down to eat their lunch. His mother sat at the head of the table, her usual place, and his father to her left, her son to her right, and she next to him. Laura, the housemaid, brought in a large stainless steel soup tureen and laid it beside Luna at the head of the table. Luna served them all soup, first their guest, then herself, then her son and husband. She was surprised to be served first; at home she had become accustomed to the men being served first, and only after them did the women get their food. Maybe it’s because I’m their guest, she thought, but in the evening, when the extended family arrived for dinner, she discovered that his mother made a habit of serving the women first and the men later, which she thought was an excellent arrangement. The first course was gazpacho, and it was accompanied by a detailed explanation from Luna that this was a Spanish dish, a cold soup made from all the vegetables on the table, finely blended, with added water, vinegar, and ice cubes. The red soup looked especially refreshing to her and was eaten together with the diced vegetables on the table and the fried croutons. She watched the man to see what he was doing and did as he did, exactly as her sister, who had accompanied her to the airport, had instructed her. So as not to make a fool of herself, she was to watch everything the others did and do the same; place her napkin on her lap, take up a small amount on her spoon—not so little as to appear insulting or so much as to appear a glutton—take note of the cutlery they were using for each course, and of course, not confuse the water glasses with the wineglasses. The soup was delicious, but when his mother asked if she wanted a second helping, she was too shy to accept. She was glad in retrospect that she hadn’t had another helping, because she was already full up after the second course, a Russian salad consisting of cooked vegetables in mayonnaise and coarsely cut pickled cucumber. Laura came around and collected the soup plates before handing the woman of the house the bowl of Russian salad, which she proceeded to serve first to her, then to herself, and finally to her son and husband. The salad was tastier than the dish her mother made at home from cooked vegetables left over from the chicken soup. Here, obviously, the vegetables had been cooked especially for the salad. “Is this a Spanish salad?” she wondered, and Luna explained that she cooked an eclectic variety of dishes from recipes she had picked up over the years. “The salad is a recipe I got from Ruth, my friend,” she said, “and I always make my own mayonnaise.” She didn’t understand how you could make your own mayonnaise, rather than buy it in the grocer’s shop. The mayonnaise salad she ate with the small slices of baguette was so delicious that she was no longer annoyed at not being allowed to live with the man in a separate apartment. Without asking, his father poured her a glass of wine, and they all said, “L’chaim.” The man asked her if she liked the wine, and she said, “Very much,” although she had no idea how to tell if a wine was good or not. And again, Laura came in to collect the salad-soiled plates, and she didn’t know if she should get up to help; as the man didn’t stand up, she didn’t either. She thought later that she should have helped, and at dinner she did stand up to clear the table in spite of the housemaid, which in retrospect salvaged her reputation in his parents’ eyes. Luna saved a portion of everything she had served for Laura, who ate her meal in the kitchen. And again, Laura came in with a long stainless steel carving dish containing tender veal, which his father carved and his mother served out. Two small bowls, one with peas and the other with potatoes and onions, arrived alongside. The man piled her plate with generous portions of everything, as if suspecting that she was too shy to help herself; the veal was the most delicious meat she had ever eaten in her life. She made a point of chewing everything carefully, as per her sister’s instructions, and most important—but really most important—not to forget to eat with her mouth closed. With every bite, she repeated over and over not to forget to keep her mouth closed. It’s very difficult to chew with your mouth closed. She didn’t say a word, worried that if she opened her mouth, she would forget to close it again when she was chewing. In any case, she was quite shy about saying anything, so she sat there, meekly listening to those who were wiser than she. This too was in accordance with her older sister’s orders to avoid making embarrassing gaffes in the home of a bourgeois family abroad, one of the pillars of the Barcelona Jewish community. “Would you like to have some more garlic?” His mother interrupted her closed-mouth drill. “No, why?” she said uneasily. “Because I don’t cook with garlic. Alberto doesn’t like it, but I know that Romanians eat a lot of garlic.” “Bulgarians, too,” added his father. “It’s just that I hate garlic.” “Does your mother cook with garlic?” Luna asked. “Yes, a lot of garlic,” she said. “My mother starts her morning with three cloves of garlic. For her blood pressure.” “It’s healthy, garlic,” said Luna, “and really good against high blood pressure. I, personally, like garlic.” Later, with time, she taught Luna how to introduce garlic surreptitiously into her cooking without her husband noticing it; after all, good meat really does need to be cooked with some added garlic. “Alberto has diabetes, so nothing we eat contains sugar.…” His mother continued to share the family secrets with her. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/ora-cummings/every-home-needs-a-balcony/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.