Every Home Needs A Balcony

EVERY HOME NEEDS A BALCONY

RINA FRANK

TRANSLATED FROM THE HEBREW BY

ORA CUMMINGS

Dedication

To Sefi

I can see you

Laughing or crying

Reading the book—

If you were alive

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

The Day My Sister Saw God

When Mother Met Father

When Father Met Mother

Dirty Thursday

Recycled Clothes

Operation Sinai

Rummy

Our National Pride Day

New Shoes

August Disasters

Difficult Language, Hebrew

Circus Madrano

Riots in Wadi Salib

Moving House

Lies

Copyright

About the Publisher

The Day My Sister Saw God

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 café 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.