by Rina Frank
Lorie was released from hospital three days later, and no sooner had she walked into her home than a powerful earthquake—nine on the Richter scale—destroyed half of Bucharest. As Lorie scrambled around on the staircase searching for somewhere to hide, all the stitches from her operation came apart. Father took her back to the hospital, and again she was rushed to the operating theater, where the incision was restitched.
Another earthquake shook Bucharest the next day, but this time Lorie stood, still as a statue, in the middle of the room, not daring to move. The fear of her stitches coming apart again was greater than her fear of any earthquake.
Dad’s brother-in-law Lazer, Lutzi’s husband, was sent to a forced labor camp, where he was put to work clearing away snow from the railway tracks outside Bucharest. He contracted a severe case of pneumonia and would have died were it not for Mom’s younger brother, Marko, who was a dental technician and “served” in the same forced labor camp. Marko nursed Lazer with great devotion and fed him antibiotics from the supply he kept in the dental clinic. Lazer was saved, although he had very nearly crossed the line.
In return for saving Lazer’s life, my mom’s younger brother, Marko, wanted to find his big sister a respectable shidduch. My mother was thirty-two already and decidedly unmarried, when Lazer announced that he had a brother-in-law, albeit a disheveled one, who was a thirty-four-year-old bachelor and ran his own movie house. Needless to say, he neglected to mention Dad’s non-Jewish mistress, Mrs. Dorfman.
Marko hinted to Lazer that a substantial dowry was on the books, and my father agreed to meet with the new prospect. He was annoyed at that time with Mrs. Dorfman for refusing to leave her sickly husband and marry him, even though he knew full well that his mother and sisters (and their husbands) would firmly oppose his marrying any woman who wasn’t Jewish.
Mom was a trim and slender woman, elegantly dressed and well educated, who was employed as an accountant. And although Dad’s family didn’t really fall in love with her, she made a good impression on them.
“She’s an Ashkenazi snob,” they told him, “not a warm-blooded woman like us Sephardis, but she’s obviously intelligent and well educated and you can tell by her clothes that she’s well off.” And so Dad agreed to step under the chuppah with Bianca.
They got married without too much enthusiasm for each other, and Mom began immediately to manage the movie house, putting the books in order. She imposed her kind of order and made sure none of Dad’s many impoverished friends were allowed in without paying full price for a ticket. No free rides here, she would say.
Father employed his entire family and circle of friends in the movie house. He was used to making people feel good; when he came to live in Israel, he continued to help everyone. Except that he forgot that he no longer owned a movie house.
So he went into the coffee distribution business.
He would wander around in downtown Haifa with a three-tier conical tray, selling extra-strong Romanian coffee with an aroma that wafted all over Wadi Salib. He made a point of buying his coffee only from the Arab Nisnas brothers, who, while the coffee beans were being ground, would invite us in to taste their baklava and pistachio nuts before packaging the coffee in small brown paper bags.
The preparation of Romanian coffee was a very accurate and measured process. In a small finjan you measure the water and add two heaping teaspoons of sugar. To the carefully measured water, you add a heaping teaspoonful of coffee for each serving cup, and then you turn on the Primus stove. The coffee grounds take several minutes to sink into the water, and it is then that you have to stir carefully so as to prevent the viscous coffee that has been joyously incorporated into the black liquid from boiling over.
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, Eugène 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 Lut
zi’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 Eugène 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 ça va?” and “Frère 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 Eugène 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 Eugène 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.