by Rina Frank
She worked for the architect from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, and at five o’clock she turned up at Duchovny’s bakery to sell high-quality rye bread to anyone who wanted bread other than the government-subsidized uniform bread.
She worked for Duchovny not because she needed the extra income, which never did any harm, but because he had called and almost begged her to come back to work for him because he couldn’t find any salesperson he could trust not to steal from his cash register.
Duchovny was a lonely, childless old man who owned and ran a flourishing bakery business from home and had no one to leave it to. She felt obligated to him because of all the money she had pilfered from his cash register; even though she knew that he knew that she had pilfered and was therefore not obligated to him, still she felt obligated. And maybe she just liked him and wanted to help him out.
She had started working for Duchovny when she was seventeen, during her final year at high school. He had been part of her life during all the upheavals of her move to Jerusalem. He loved her so much that he concluded with her that whenever she wanted, whenever she had an hour to spare, she would come to sell bread, but never for less than two hours. When she turned up for work, he was able to go up to his apartment for a break from his work, which began every morning at four o’clock. He trusted no one except her, even though she had no doubt that he was fully aware of the fact that she was nicking ten liroth from the cash register whenever she felt like going to the movies. On two occasions he even asked her the following day if she’d enjoyed the movie. And sometimes she would even tell him herself, as if to inform him that the cash register lacked ten liroth. She always took ten—exactly ten—liroth to cover the cost of two movie tickets, never a single lira more, not even for popcorn. After all, she had been brought up by her parents to love the cinema, and she took the money only so that she and her poverty-stricken friend who went to Haifa’s Reali High School could soak up some culture. But if she’d pinched some money for popcorn too, that would be proper theft.
Duchovny was happy to have her back, after she’d left him for Jerusalem after finishing her studies, and then for Tel Aviv, and lately, for Barcelona, even if it was only for two hours a day, and he wasn’t upset on her behalf that she hadn’t received a proposal of marriage, which as far as he was concerned would have meant final desertion. To each his own.
When she went back to work for him after a two-year absence, he told her that he’d had an acquaintance who used to steal from the cash register between one and two hundred liroth a day, as if to say that her ten liroth were peanuts.
He said this and went up to take a rest, feeling that his bakery store was in good hands. And she, who now worked for her living as a draftswoman, was fully able to fund her own movie tickets and didn’t nick another agora off him. Duchovny was so moved by the fact that his money remained intact that later, when she got married, he gave her a check for three thousand liroth, the same sum that would have accumulated to her credit if she’d helped herself to ten liroth every day, and even more. He always told her that he would have adopted her if, God forbid, she hadn’t had parents of her own, and she always replied that she had the best parents in the world.
When she started working for Duchovny at the age of seventeen, her loser of a boyfriend Israel used to come sometimes to pick her up, and Duchovny would look at him in disapproval. She could see that he hated the youth, just as her parents and sister thought that nothing good would ever come of him. And even when she went back to him with her tail between her legs after Israel had deliberately got her pregnant so she wouldn’t have to go into the army, Duchovny didn’t say, I told you so, just as her parents and sister didn’t say anything, only sighed in relief that the affair between her and Israel was well and truly over.
Whenever irritating customers complained about her hurrying them along to decide whether to buy rye bread or three onion rolls instead of wasting hours of her time and taking up valuable space in the small shop as if it was the most fateful decision of their lives, he would nod his head and explain to them that she’s just a kid, and when they left, he would pat her head and say, “Don’t pay any attention. They probably have hard lives, and the decision over which loaf of bread to buy is not an easy one for them.” But one day a particularly grumpy women came in straight from the hairdressing salon—with an elaborate hairdo piled on her head like a tower, held together stiffly with tons of hair spray—and shouted at her in Yiddish that the bread she had given her was apparently not fresh. She explained to the woman that she didn’t speak Yiddish, and the woman threw the loaf of bread down on the counter and asked, apparently, for it to be changed. She changed it and wrapped the bread in brown paper, and when the woman bent below the counter to place the loaf in her shopping bag, she gathered up all the bread crumbs on the counter and flung them at the grumpy woman’s hair-sprayed tower hairdo. There’s a limit, after all, to the amount of other people’s hard lives she can put up with without answering back. Her life too was hard—what with her man in Barcelona and her selling bread in Haifa.
He used to call her at least twice a week and talk about his yearnings, and she said nothing, not understanding why, if he missed her so much, he only called her on the phone. She missed him terribly, even though she was having an affair—nothing stormy or wonderful, but enough to soften her longing—with her boss, the architect.
“I’ve got a boyfriend, and I love him,” she told her boss when he started showing interest in her beyond the bounds of their working relationship.
“And where is he?” he asked.
“In Barcelona!” she replied.
“Barcelona is a long way off,” he said, and she thought, Out of sight, out of mind, and it wasn’t as if she had left Barcelona with any kind of commitment or even any talk in that direction, so she didn’t feel that she was cheating on him, unlike her boss, who was cheating on his wife with her.
“How can you cheat on your wife like that?” she asked, with the naïveté of a twenty-three-year-old.
“When you are in my place, you’ll be doing the same thing,” he told her with the assurance of a forty-year-old.
“I would rather get a divorce than cheat on my husband,” she said, and he explained that he got married at a very young age, and by the time he was twenty-five he already had three children, and that life erodes and routine gnaws away at everything good and we are only passing through this world, and blah, blah, blah.
She decided that she had to do what was good for her and she wasn’t employed by her bosses to be the guardian of their morality, and anyway, if he wasn’t having it off with her, he’d be cheating on his wife with some other woman. And at that point in time, the affair suited her. It was close by, it was available, it was noncommittal, and it was pleasant to while away the time. Although she had suitors who were her own age and unattached, she was genuinely in love with the man in Barcelona, and her heart was not free for courting. Her married boss wasn’t really courting her, and he wanted only one thing, sex; and since he was extremely handsome, she was happy to go along with it. But when he told her about the Distinguished Service Medal he had been awarded in the Six-Day War and the way his best subordinate had been killed, he wept like a child and touched her heart that was full of yearnings for afar. She admitted to him that she was in the east while her heart was in the west, and it was pain that connected between them.
After a three-month separation, the man called and asked her to arrange their wedding for the following March. She asked if this was a proposal of marriage, and he said that it was. When she went, full of joy, to announce to her boss that she was getting married in March, she was certain that he would share her happiness, but he was obviously too depressed.
“You’ll soon find someone else for a fling,” she tried to console him, but he looked at her with even more pain and asked her, was that all he was to her, a fling?
“Yes,” she replied. “Wasn’t it?”
“Who
knows where it could have led to?” he replied, and she looked at him in astonishment.
“Lead to what?” she asked. “I’m getting married in three months’ time to the man of my dreams.”
“I have feelings for you, don’t you understand?” he said, and she didn’t understand, and resigned from his office without understanding.
Old Duchovny took her on gladly for an eight-hour working day at the same salary she had received in the architect’s office. She didn’t want to work for longer than eight hours, so as to leave her time for her wedding arrangements.
Since her sister was living in Tel Aviv, she was helped by Johnny and Rosi’s daughter, Batya, who had already been married for two years and most probably had plenty of experience in weddings and even had a little girl who went with her to all the function halls in Haifa until they chose one that she considered the most suitable.
When she told the man over the phone that she had found a lovely function hall, he immediately said that he and his parents would settle only for “Carmel Halls.”
“It’s expensive,” she said.”
“So what,” he replied over the phone, “you only get married once in your life.”
Over the phone, they decided that they would invite two hundred and fifty guests: one hundred from her side and a hundred and fifty from his, since he had a large family in Israel too, and it seemed quite logical to her, considering the fact that his parents would most probably pay for this wedding, in the fanciest hall in Haifa, just as, two years before, her brother-in-law’s father had paid for the wedding of her sister and his son with a hundred guests at a prestigious restaurant in Tel Aviv. Her sister and brother-in-law had refused to get married in a hall and insisted that only close relatives should participate in the event.
When the groom’s parents came to meet her parents a fortnight before the wedding, her father told them that he would pay for his own guests. He said this out of politeness, and also out of self-respect. Perhaps he hoped that they would dismiss the proposal out of hand, since it was not he who had suggested holding the wedding in the most expensive function hall in Haifa. But they didn’t refuse, and her parents rushed off to take a second mortgage on their apartment in order to pay for the wedding of their younger daughter in a venue that was far beyond their means.
It was lucky for them that only a hundred guests had been invited from their side. They flatly refused to accept from her the small sum she had managed to save over the last six months; better it should stay in her bank account, for any eventuality.
Later, they all took the Carmelit to the Carmel Halls to choose the menu, and when his parents chose an open buffet, which made the wedding even more expensive, her parents looked at her in vague desperation, too embarrassed to say that they were unable to pay that kind of money. Happiness is an expensive business, she thought suddenly. Sadness is a much cheaper commodity; for this only homemade tears are needed.
The groom’s family, including the groom, went to Jerusalem, and the future bride and her parents stayed in Haifa and gnawed their nails.
She canceled the dress she had wanted to buy because of the price, caught a lift from her father’s work at Autocars in one of the vehicles that went to Tel Aviv, and landed at the home of her cousin Yael, whose wedding had taken place six months earlier. Two months before, Yael had kindly offered her the use of her wedding dress, but she thanked her and said that she wanted a dress of her own. All hers, not shared.
She took Yael’s dress, which was two sizes too big for her, and returned to Haifa, straight to the dressmaker, to take in the dress.
When she came back from the dressmaker, Fima and Sammy were at her parents’ to hear how the first meeting with the in-laws had gone and to relate excitedly that they had taken the train from Tel Aviv to Haifa, after their weekly visit to their granddaughter and daughter, and struck up a conversation in Yiddish with a very nice couple of tourists, and what a small world—it turned out that they were from Barcelona, and here a relative of theirs was also getting married to a young man from Barcelona. Maybe you know him? they asked Ruth and Nahum Lilienblum, who told them happily that not only did they know the groom, who is the son of their friends, but that they were visiting Israel this time especially for the wedding.
“She’s a beautiful woman, the bride,” said Nahum to Sammy, who explained that even as a child she had been beautiful, “but she’s too willful,” he added.
“What do you mean by willful?” asked Ruth. “I found her to be a very gentle girl.”
“She’s charming, and she has a good heart, but she’s rebellious,” Fima explained, “She does only what she wants to do.”
“That’s what is so nice about her,” concluded Nahum, the Pole from Barcelona, who had been captivated by the future bride the first time he met her. “She seems a strong woman, and I am sure she’ll make an excellent balabusta and housewife.”
“He loves her, and that’s all that matters,” added Ruth.
Fima and Sammy told her all this in her her parents’ home, adding that when they got off the train, excited by the chance meeting, they agreed between them that this was a Cinderella-style love story.
When the man called her in the evening from Jerusalem and asked if the dress she had bought was ready, she didn’t tell him that in the end she’d be getting married in a secondhand dress, lent to her at the last moment by her cousin, and only said that the dress fit her figure perfectly.
She told her sister about the exorbitant price of the meal that her parents had committed themselves to, and said she felt like calling off this whole wedding, which had become unbearably expensive, and instead getting married as her sister had, by the rabbinate, with only close family present.
“Too late. Tell him the truth,” suggested her sister, but she explained that if her sister had seen the way they live there, she would understand how impossible the truth would be to tell.
The designated day arrived, and he came to pick her up to go to their wedding in his sister’s VW Beetle, dressed in a deep green velvet suit and a blue bow tie. He was the handsomest bridegroom she had ever seen, and she was so proud that he was her bridegroom.
They entered the hall where his parents awaited them, festive and elegant, and her small parents beside them, slightly lost in the fancy function hall.
His mother told her that her dress was very beautiful, and his father asked with anger in his eyes who had changed the catering they had chosen together from a free buffet to a sit-down dinner with waiter service. She wanted to tell them that they hadn’t decided together, and that it had been more their decision, but she didn’t know what they were talking about and looked straight at her mother.
Her mother told her that they had made the change because they felt that people were naturally bashful and would therefore refrain from going up to the free buffet to serve themselves.
“I’m sorry I took it upon myself to change the catering. But you aren’t familiar with the mentality of people in Israel. They are used to being served at the table, not standing in line to get their food,” she said, attempting to excuse the last-minute change she had decided on without involving any of the others.
“But how did you have the nerve to change things without even telling me?” she asked her mother quietly afterward in Romanian.
“I’ve cleaned a lot of houses to arrive at this moment, and no one is going to take it away from me. You know I’m right, and that it’s much more respectable to be served at the table by a waiter.”
His parents were furious at her mother, and his father didn’t exchange a word with her throughout the wedding, except for a “Mazel tov” after the chuppah. His mother was more forgiving. And she herself, by the time everyone came up to her to kiss and congratulate her, had forgotten the unpleasant incident.
After the chuppah, she and her husband were lifted up in chairs, and they looked into each other’s eyes from the heights of their wedding hall, and she thought in her heart, For better or f
or worse. The food seemed to have been good, even though very polite waiters served it straight to the tables, but they didn’t taste any of it because they were too excited to eat. And when everyone had loosened up from the wine that flowed like water, his father handed out cigars to the men. It was a complete surprise, and all her friends went around with cigars in their mouths, feeling like men of the world. She looked at her parents, who had given birth to her at the age of forty in order to arrive at this moment when they could boast about their daughter and her impressive bridegroom, and especially because they had not been able to boast about their older daughter’s wedding, which was only a meal in a restaurant without a chuppah and a wedding service and all their card-playing friends. And when had they ever been to a wedding where they handed out cigars?
When the rabbi came up to her, because he could see that the groom didn’t speak Hebrew, and asked who was paying, the father of the groom or the father of the bride, she said, “Whoever has it,” and pointed to the father of her new husband from Barcelona.
The last of the guests left at one in the morning, and they drove to the nearby Dan Hotel, where he lifted her up according to tradition, and when they crossed the threshold they spread the checks they had been given all over the bed and the floor. They lit a cigarette and enjoyed calling each other “my husband” and “my wife,” and she wanted him to stay in his green velvet suit because he looked so handsome in it.
But when he wanted to have sex with her, she said she wasn’t able to.
“Why, are you menstruating?” he asked, disappointed.
“No. It’s just that I can’t have sex in a regular way, going to bed before going to sleep. I hope our sex will be a surprise, and not in the evening, at the end of the day, before falling asleep.”
She had surprised him suddenly with this response. Maybe if he’d known that this is how she felt, he wouldn’t have married her.
“For example, if I’m frying schnitzels and you come up to me and hold me and pull my panties off me and then, you know, surprise me. In the middle of my frying schnitzels.”