Every House Needs a Balcony

by Rina Frank

  “In our home, Laura fries the schnitzels. Would you like me to surprise her?”

  She burst out laughing, grabbed his hand, and rolled him over the floor over the pile of checks, all the while pulling off his green velvet suit and he removing her cousin’s wedding dress.

  The following day they went to say good-bye to old Duchovny. On the way she met Batya and her little daughter, who promised her that they would come to visit them in Barcelona, since her husband was a seaman, and they could join him on one of his voyages.

  “Is she a friend of yours?” her husband asked her, and she told him that she had no idea what their family connection was, but that Batya had been a part of the landscape of her childhood.

  Operation Sinai

  At night, my sister and I dreamed the same dream. Exactly the same dream.

  In our dream we found a coin on the sidewalk. We bent down happily to pick up the coin and found beneath it another coin. We took that one too and, again, found another coin underneath it. That’s what they mean when they say you’ve got a penny in your pocket. We stood up to leave and suddenly stopped, went back to the spot of the hidden treasure, and began digging. We dug further and found another coin, and then we found coins of greater denomination, a huge pile of coins. Like someone who wins the jackpot in a casino and jumps in the air with victorious cries of joy; that’s how we felt in the dream, except that we had to dig in the ground to find our jackpot.

  Two sisters with a single dream.

  And so we wandered the length and breadth of Stanton, playing, inventing stories, and jabbering our childhood gibber, conducting our lives along the line that separated imagination from reality and everything that came in between.

  Fantasy plays an important role in poverty. It has the ability to slightly soften the deprivation, and I believe my parents were aware of this and never tried to bring us back to “reality.” I think that when they called us, for example, back for supper and we didn’t respond, Mom and Dad knew that we were in the midst of our fantasy time. Like today’s children have their “story time.”

  I loved my father’s story about the two fishermen standing on the edge of the pier, catching fish. One of them is exceptionally well dressed, the other very simply. The elegant fisherman asks his down-to-earth counterpart what he’s doing. The man replies that he’s doing what the other guy’s doing, fishing for fish. Says the elegant fisherman: since you’re here already, wasting your time with your fishing rod, waiting patiently for a fish to bite, why don’t you do as I do and set up two fishing rods; that way you’ll be able to catch twice as many fish.

  The simply dressed fisherman replies: And what will I get out of it?

  Says the elegant fisherman: You’ll have more fish to sell, and you’ll have more money to spend.

  The simply dressed fisherman asks: And what will I get out of it?

  The other fisherman replies: With the additional income, you’ll be able to buy a good fishing net; you’ll be able to spread out your net and catch a lot more fish.

  The simply dressed fisherman asks: And what will I get out of it?

  The elegant fisherman says: You’ll have even more fish, and then you’ll be able to buy yourself a big fishing boat, to employ thirty people to work for you, and you won’t have to work anymore.

  And what will I do all day? the simply dressed fisherman asks the elegantly dressed fisherman.

  I know, says the gent; you’ll be able to sit all day and fish to your heart’s content.

  The plain fisherman responds: And what am I doing now?

  Dad used to tell us all the stories until Rosi came and replaced him. Rosi was an amazing storyteller. She remembered every detail of every story and never left out a single magic princess, locked by a wicked stepmother in a narrow, windowless turret, with a tiny slit in the wall that only an eagle’s beak can get through.

  The Rosenberg family consisted of Rosi, the mother; Johnny, the handsome father; and Batya, their skinny daughter. Either Rosi or Johnny was a distant relative of my dad’s, and after they had scoured the country in search of work, Dad arranged a job for Johnny as a dockworker at the port and persuaded his sister, Lutzi, to rent the Rosenbergs Tante Marie’s kitchenette. It was out of respect for the elderly, Dad explained to his sister, and Tante Marie moved into the spacious room that faced the balcony, the room that had become vacant when Dorie went into the navy. Batya, Sefi, and I crowded ourselves into the Rosenbergs’ narrow bed, because the windowless kitchenette had no room for two beds, and floated off on a broomstick fueled by Rosi’s magic spells.

  We rode away on Rosi’s stories to cold and far-off lands, with kings and counts, princes and frogs, and knew that only love could save the world from evil.

  Smiling from ear to ear, we all fell asleep in the narrow bed, happily dreaming our dreams, certain that tomorrow morning our lives would be much nicer.

  In the morning we awoke to hear Rosi screaming and yelling. Johnny, her husband, had come home as drunk as a lord, exuding stinking alcoholic fumes, and full of inebriated cheer, he rounded off his evening by beating his wife to a pulp for daring to ask where he’d been all night.

  Batya, who was thin to the extent of plainness, used her small fists to separate her mother, the storyteller, from her father’s murderous fists. But Johnny shook her off as only general security agents know how to shake off people and started beating her to a pulp, too—taking it in turns, laying off one to lay into the other. We stood aside, watching, our bodies trembling with fear and, especially, insult. We felt insulted to the core; how could anyone be so cruel? We had gone to sleep with hope in our hearts and awakened to this horror.

  Fila and I tried to push Rosi out of reach of Johnny’s blows, but we didn’t succeed even in tickling the ends of his fingers, and he pushed us off with the ease of a sumo wrestler flicking off a feather.

  The noise and shouting drew our father, and he too caught a blow from the inebriated Johnny.

  We had no telephone with which to call the police, and my sister and I ran to the balcony and started screaming at six in the morning, “Help! Help! They’re murdering our dad.”

  It was a warm morning, and all the windows on Stanton Street were open; from each house, there suddenly appeared a large number of heads, eager to see the source of our cries that our father was being murdered.

  The first to arrive on the scene was Nissim, our Syrian neighbor from the floor above, and since he was a big expert at domestic violence and not a day went past without him taking his belt to all five of his children, he managed easily to release our small and beloved father from the terrifying fists of Johnny.

  Dad told Johnny to take his wife and daughter and bugger off out of his sight as far as possible.

  Beaten half to death, Rosi got down on her knees and begged Dad to forgive Johnny, because he didn’t really mean it. He had accidentally drunk a little too much and lost control of himself.

  “It won’t ever happen again, I promise you,” Rosi swore to Dad.

  Dad refused to listen and said that it was enough that people were beating each other in every other house on the street. In his own house, he wasn’t going to put up with a man beating his wife and children.

  Johnny lay on the small bed and wept like a child admonished. He said he was sorry and that he would never raise his hand again to anyone and that he had nowhere else to go.

  “That’s the reason you’ve been wandering all over the country. Everywhere you go you get thrown out after you’ve beaten the living daylights out of everyone there.” Suddenly my father understood why Johnny and his family had never managed to settle down in any one place.

  “I only beat my wife and daughter to let off steam,” Johnny said in his own defense.

  Bruised, tearful, and sad-eyed, Rosi looked at our dad the hero and whispered that if he threw us out of the house, Johnny would murder her and her skinny daughter.

  Then Dad said to Johnny that they could stay, but the next time he beat Rosi a
nd his skinny daughter Batya, he’d have him put straight in jail. “In jail you won’t have anyone to beat. And you won’t have anything to drink, either.”

  Then Dad took us, his beloved daughters, to our own room and hugged us close to himself, where we fell asleep in his arms, protected from all evil.

  The following evening, Rosi came into our room with her skinny daughter Batya, and as we lay in bed, she told us her wonderful fairy stories.

  When we fell asleep, she took her daughter and went back to the windowless kitchenette.

  That night we heard the rise and fall of an air-raid siren.

  Fila cried that Johnny was killing Batya again, but Dad said this time it wasn’t Johnny. It was a siren, and we were at war.

  The war in the Sinai Peninsula had begun.

  A police car drove through the street with a loudspeaker, calling on the inhabitants to go down to the shelters. Haifa, our city, was being bombed.

  Within seconds, Johnny appeared in our room with his daughter in his arms, took my sister and me by the hand, and led us down to the shelter. Dad took Grandmother Vavika, who was still alive but died a year later, and our sensible mother grabbed some blankets.

  In the shelter, I discovered that one of my slippers had slipped off my foot during the great escape down the stairs, and I broke into an anguished wail—“I want my slipper. I’m going back up to look for it”—and tore myself free of Johnny, who was still holding on to the little girls as if he could protect them against the bombs.

  The adults’ pleas that the Egyptians were bombing us and that I would have no use for slippers if I were killed on the stairs had no effect on me.

  Johnny offered to go up and bring me the slipper, and Mum asked him, if he was going up anyway, to bring some Turkish delight down from the closet, second shelf to the left, where it was hidden for exactly such occasions. So we can at least die with something sweet in our mouths, Mum said to Johnny, and he went back upstairs.

  After what seemed like an eternity, Johnny returned with my slipper and the box of Turkish delight.

  “What took you so long?” my mother complained.

  “You hid the Turkish delight so well that you yourself don’t remember where you left it,” Johnny said. “I turned over the whole closet until I found the box on the bottom shelf on the right.”

  We gobbled up the Turkish delight, and I said I was thirsty.

  Johnny went upstairs and returned with two bottles of seltzer.

  After drinking, all the children started crying that they needed peepee.

  Johnny went back up and returned with a potty, and we all lined up for a pee. When the children had finished, the adults took it in turns to use the potty.

  When the sirens went off again the following night, Dad said we might as well stay in our nice warm beds rather than spend the night chasing after a potty. Luckily for us, the war ended a few days later, and we went back to hearing Rosi’s fairy tales at bedtime, until Johnny had earned enough at the docks to move his wife and daughter to another apartment, where he could continue beating them without my dad’s constant interference.

  All she wanted during the honeymoon in Greece was to call her sister to tell her about the wonderful things that were happening to her.

  “We were in a hotel on a cliff overlooking the sea, and all the signatures in the guest book were of famous movie stars. I saw Paul Newman’s signature and Glenda Jackson’s,” she told her sister breathlessly over the phone. “Truth is, my heart aches at the thought that one night in the hotel costs the same as Dad’s monthly salary.”

  “So why does your heart ache?” her sister asked.

  “Because we spent six nights there, and I couldn’t stop thinking what Dad and Mum could have done with the equivalent of six months’ labor.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” her sister told her, as if she knew all about the lives of the wealthy.

  “Do you know how much one picture of the newlyweds on their honeymoon cost, taken by the hotel photographer?”

  “How much?” asked her sister, the student whose life wasn’t easy financially.

  “The same as the bespoke dress you had sewn for your wedding.”

  “You don’t say. I hope it was in color, at least?”

  “Black and white. But big. We placed it in a silver-plated frame in the living room.”

  “And how much did the frame cost?” her sister asked.

  “As much as your entire wedding,” she replied.

  “Nice,” said her sister. “You’ll get used to this, you’ll see.”

  “Get used to what?” she asked her sister.

  “To a better life,” she replied. “The main thing, though, is that you behave nicely and don’t make a fool of yourself.”

  After the honeymoon they landed in Barcelona, straight into a huge apartment with wall-to-wall parquet flooring. Above them on the fifth floor lived his uncle with his Italian wife and two children. The apartment was empty so that they could furnish it together, and he showed her proudly where he planned to place the living room, the dining room, the master bedroom and his study, and a further two rooms that he designated for guests from Israel and perhaps for their children, too.

  When she saw what he intended to be their master bedroom, an enormous room that could be traversed on skates, she said that she felt the room to be too large and lacking in intimacy, whereas the room next door, which he had designated for his study, would make a perfect bedroom.

  She didn’t like his plans for the giant living room, which was divided into two unequal spaces, and thought that the smaller would be more suitable for sofas and a TV. The larger space, she thought, would best hold a dining table, around which they planned to entertain his family and friends.

  He didn’t agree with her, and in order to prove his point he took her up to the fifth floor, to show her that at his uncle’s, too, the larger space served as the living room, and the large bedroom was used by his uncle, while the smaller bedroom belonged to their son, Roberto, and their daughter had the one that was smaller still.

  “So what?” she said. “They have children.”

  Paula took her aside in the kitchen and tried to persuade her that his plan was compatible with interior design in Barcelona. But when she realized that she didn’t agree, she summed up the matter in one sentence: “That’s what it’s like in a marriage.”

  “It doesn’t have to be like that. I, too, have an opinion,” she said adamantly.

  “But it’s his profession. He studied five years for this,” the aunt insisted.

  “So what? I’m a woman, and I know what I like and what I don’t like,” she replied, and thought to herself that even if Paula thought she had some nerve, after being brought to such an elegant apartment, not accepting the majority decision over where her bedroom and the living room were to be located, she still couldn’t bring herself to agree with them, in spite of her sister’s request that she behave nicely.

  They continued to argue for a week, until she told him that she felt a little lost in all these huge spaces, and she needed, at least in her own bedroom, to be able to get inside herself. I’m not used to a bedroom that measures more than three hundred square feet, she explained to him. At home my bedroom was the closed balcony, five by six feet, and she added that she was accustomed to the warmth that comes with overcrowding. He capitulated.

  When she went down in the elevator and the uniformed doorman stood up and hurried to reach the door before her to open it for her, she felt terribly embarrassed and told him in Spanish that she was quite capable of opening the door for herself, but he just smiled at her politely and continued to hold the door open. When she entered the building carrying bags of shopping from Court Inglés, the doorman took the bags from her and made for the elevator quickly so that she wouldn’t need, God forbid, to wait, and she wondered what her parents would have had to say at the sight of the courteous doorman treating their daughter like a princess.

  But when she told his
parents at a dinner at their home that she was embarrassed by the doorman opening the door for her as if he was her servant, his father admonished her slightly and said that this was his job, and she had to adapt herself to life in Barcelona and behave like a lady, and not embarrass the doorman by preventing him from doing his job.

  But she screwed up yet again. When his mother lent her Laura for one day a week to clean her apartment and cook whatever was necessary, she refused to allow the maid to cook for her. It’s enough that she was cleaning; she should sit down with them to a lunch that she herself had cooked. But she could feel that Laura was unable to swallow anything in their presence and that she was embarrassing her, too.

  One evening his parents announced that they were planning to celebrate their wedding in a swish function hall in Barcelona with all their friends from the Jewish community. She asked if it wasn’t odd to celebrate twice, and they explained that the entire community was expecting to join in their happiness and to bring them wedding presents.

  True to form, they prepared a wedding list in Barcelona’s most prestigious department store, one that included everything they needed for their new home, and the wedding guests were invited to choose the gift from the list that was most compatible with their means and their own taste. This very logical arrangement meant that everyone came away satisfied. Instead of giving a check for an amount that you can never be sure is enough, and which simply dissolves into the pile of checks that all the other guests have given, you are given the opportunity to bring a wedding gift that is to your taste and to the taste of the receivers, and the newlyweds receive a personal gift from each guest. Of the stylish list of gifts they picked out and with which they furnished their apartment, from the refrigerator to the sofas and down to the toaster, the only thing she chose in the fanciest store in Barcelona was a set of bathroom scales for weighing herself at home. When the man who had become her new husband said that it was a cheap gift, and who the hell would choose a set of scales, she laughed and said that it would be someone who wanted to bring some balance into her life.