Every House Needs a Balcony

by Rina Frank

  “And his lordship?” Mom asked Dad. “What can I offer him? Margarine or yellow cheese?”

  “Is there no cream left?” Dad asked, tempting fate.

  “Whatever’s left is for the girls for tomorrow. If you hadn’t gone and wasted that money on your Turkish bath—as if we don’t have a shower right here at home—maybe we’d be able to buy a jar of cream every day.”

  “You can shower in cold water,” Dad said to her. “I like my water to be hot.”

  “We all know what you like,” she retorted. “If you had a regular job, we’d be able to afford a boiler.”

  “As if you’d let me waste money on heating up water if we did have a boiler. You don’t even let us waste water,” Dad whined, looking at us girls to approve of his extravagances in the Turkish baths.

  I looked at the half-full jar of sour cream and thought to myself, When I’m grown up, I’ll buy up all the jars of sour cream in the world, just for him.

  The pretty glass jar that held the cream was shaped like a naked lady, like the oil refineries that could be seen in the distance from our balcony. The Haifa yogurt jars, we called them, and we wondered why they were yogurt jars and not sour cream jars. The heavy glass milk bottles were shaped like a slim woman and sealed with a chunky circle of silver foil, which Mom used to peel off very carefully so as not to waste a single drop of the kaimak that accumulated at the top of the bottle in a thick, dense layer that tasted of heaven. At first my sister and I used to quarrel over whose turn it was to get the kaimak. In the end we agreed on the sensible arrangement she proposed: me on even days, she on odd days. It was so logical as to prevent any confusion. Except that I didn’t notice that the even days always added up to three, and the odd days to four.

  “I look at everything in the movies. Their clothes, their makeup, the cars they drive, and especially the fancy houses they live in,” my sister answered my mother.

  I whispered to her that she was hurting our parents’ feelings because we didn’t have the money to own a grand house, and anyway, such houses exist only in America.

  My sister tried to make up to our parents for the insult by telling them that her teacher, Hanna, had written in her notebook that she was a very diligent, responsible, and well-organized girl, and asked her to read her composition aloud to the rest of the class.

  “What did you write about?” Dad asked, and my sister replied, “About what I want to be when I grow up.”

  Dad asked her if she still wanted to be a writer, and she said she did, “a rich and famous writer.” Dad told her that people who dream usually get to fulfill their dreams, especially since my sister didn’t lack imagination.

  “A very diligent girl. Beautifully behaved and a real example to her peers,” Dad read out of the notebook, once again stroking Yosefa’s hair.

  Fifth time in half an hour—I counted in my heart the number of times my diligent sister had had her head stroked by my dad.

  “Your teacher didn’t write that you were responsible and well organized,” I said to my sister. “You were just showing off.”

  “No, I wasn’t,” she replied. “She said it to me herself.”

  Mom, who was pleased by the teacher’s comment in the notebook, told my sister she didn’t have to finish off her mamaliga. I took advantage of the moment and said, “So I don’t need to either.”

  “We didn’t get potato cakes for lunch today, and it’s not fair.” I tried to think of something more interesting than the teacher’s praise for my sister.

  “Why?” my dad obliged me. “Wasn’t Dina there today to cook for you?”

  “No. They told us that her mother had died. When are you going to die?” I asked, and Dad said that it would happen when they were very, very old, and we too would be old by then, but still not as old as them.

  Mom tells us to get into the bath, and we get undressed. Two girls with their hair cut short and bangs; one’s hair is black, the other’s light brown; sad brown eyes and laughing green eyes. I throw my clothes on the floor, and Yosefa folds hers neatly and lays them on the wooden chair at the end of the bath, even though they are dirty. Probably to show me how responsible and well organized she is, and not just to show off.

  I loathed Thursdays—cleaning day—because I knew that dirt wasn’t going anywhere, as Mom was always saying to our Syrian upstairs neighbor, Bracha. Every day Bracha, mother of Sima, Rocha, and Yaffa, swabbed the floors of her apartment; after pouring out several bucketfuls of water, she would go over the floor with a stick and a cloth, poking into every dusty corner. Then she would squeeze the cloth and wring from it every drop of air and water, before going down on all fours and wiping the floor dry. On Fridays Bracha washed her floors twice, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, as a deposit for tomorrow’s day of rest.

  Mom often told Bracha off for keeping her floors so clean—and why for God’s sake did she have to go down on all fours to wipe them dry?

  “Anyone would think you were eating off the floor,” Mom said to Bracha.

  And Bracha told her that this was how she had done it in Syria. My mother never understood the logic, or more accurately, the lack of logic, behind daily housecleaning.

  Bracha argued back that Mom also cleaned houses on a daily basis, and Mom answered that with her it was “to make a living, not as a hobby,” like it was with Bracha.

  We are naked, waiting for Mom to come in with the basin of boiling water she has heated on the Primus stove. She pours the hot water into the bath and adds some cold water. My sister measures the heat of the water with her little finger, and Mom puts in her hand and turns off the cold-water tap. We get into the bath and dive under the water and make sounds like ships and Dad puts in the paper boats he makes for us and goes out to lift up the entire house onto the beds.

  The chairs, he places upside down up on the table, and he puts everything that can move about freely on the beds, together with the shoes and the vases. The carpet he had beaten that morning, he folds up and takes out to the balcony to hang over the banister. Thursday is the big washday for us, for our mother, for the weekly laundry, and for swabbing down the floors.

  My sister reminds me that we have to soap ourselves thoroughly behind our ears, because tomorrow Fima will be examining us; I even scrub out the dirt under my fingernails.

  As she raises her head from the water, I ask her anxiously if Mom and Dad are not already very old. Fila explain that Grandmother Vavika was seventy, which was terribly old, but Mom and Dad are only forty-five.

  “So how many years do they have left to live?” I ask and my sister asks me what’s seventy minus forty.

  “I don’t know, I’m only in first grade,” I say, annoyed with her for not understanding that in first grade they don’t teach you how to subtract forty from seventy.

  “Anyway, I’ve told you that Mom and Dad are not our real parents,” says my sister, who has seen God and certainly knows how to do arithmetic.

  “So who are our parents?”

  My sister repeats for the hundredth time that Bianca couldn’t get pregnant; it’s a fact that she gave birth to us at a relatively late age, and I ask, “What’s relatively?” and Fila, who is called Fila because I was unable to say a word as long as Yosefa, says that it’s a man called Einstein, and I can’t understand what that has to do with the fact that Bianca couldn’t get pregnant, but I don’t ask her anything else so as not to appear stupid.

  Fila says that probably because Bianca couldn’t get pregnant, Moscu, who wanted to make Mom happy and give her kids, kidnapped us from our real parents.

  “So who are our real parents?” I ask my sister again, and she says that our father is a sea captain, and he’s looking for us all over the world.

  “And what about our mother?” I ask.

  “Our real mother,” replies my sister, “is sitting by the window in the dark castle we own somewhere in England, surrounded by lawns, and weeping for her beloved daughters who’ve been kidnapped, as she waits for her hu
sband the sea captain to bring them back to her.”

  I say that it seems stupid for our real mother to spend her time just sitting beside the window weeping and not doing anything about searching for us. The fact is that in the movie The Man Who Knew Too Much, Doris Day and her husband searched for their kidnapped son until they found him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What smell?” her sister asked.

  “Of old people,” she replied.

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

  “I’ll come by tomorrow morning to take you touring,” he said. “I’ve taken a week off work to spend time with you.”
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  She slept happily through the night. She had this feeling that something wonderful was happening to her, the same feeling that she had had when she was eight and her parents bought her a pair of new shoes for Passover, the first pair that were bought just for her, with no partners to share with. She fell asleep with joy in her heart, tempered by fear that it would turn out to have been only a dream. But when she awoke and saw the shining new shoes under her bed, she picked them up and placed them next to her pillow; she wanted to feel and smell their newness close to her head. Nothing equals the smell of something new.

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

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

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

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

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

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