by Rina Frank
“But really,” she replied earnestly, “with my very own set of bathroom scales I shall feel that I’m a wealthy woman, the kind that weighs herself whenever she feels like it.” Of all things in the prestigious Barcelona department store, it was the bathroom scale that symbolized her new economic status; a kind of luxury that you don’t need, but want.
The scales remained almost alone in the store until two days before they were married for the second time in Barcelona, when Kushi arrived suddenly on his way to the United States to visit her. When she asked Kushi why he chose the scales for her, he replied, “My dear, for someone who grew up in Wadi Salib and marries a guy from Barcelona, a set of bathroom scales is the epitome of wealth. It’s the epitome of showing off. I thought it was just like you to wake up in the morning and say to yourself: ‘Hey, I’ve got my own personal bathroom scale. I no longer need anything from anyone.’”
“Where did you get that knack of always being able to read me so accurately?” she said. “So you’re not angry with me anymore?” She referred to having slept with his brother during the Yom Kippur War.
“I was never angry with you,” he told her, knowing exactly what she meant. “I simply didn’t understand why you did it, and I’ll never be able to understand,” he said and dropped the subject.
Her sister and brother-in-law also stopped off in Barcelona to see her before flying off to New York to continue their studies, and she admitted to her sister as they stood together in the kitchen of her expensive home that she was beginning to feel a little lost.
“You’re just not used to being married,” her sister explained, and deserted her with her new family in Barcelona.
They corresponded; her sister never forgot in any of her letters to teach her decorum and to remind her to eat with her mouth closed, to chew and not gulp food down, to hold her knife in her right hand and the fork in her left, and to distinguish between fish and meat knives.
“Do you think the roast chicken on my plate will be offended if I cut it with a fish knife?” she wrote to her sister.
“The roast chicken won’t mind, but your mother- and father-in-law will,” said my sister, who was smarter than anyone else.
And in another of her letters she wrote to her sister about an interview she had with the architect Koderk. He’s the most highly thought of architect in Barcelona, she wrote. So his son explained to me that to be hired by him, you need to be clean and orderly. Do you see, he didn’t ask me if I know how to draft, or how many years experience I have. He only wanted to know if my work is clean and orderly. What do they think I am, their cleaner or their draftsperson? He explained that at the end of the day, each draft has to undergo two kinds of erasures, and then to be thoroughly cleaned with a piece of cotton wool soaked in benzene before being rolled up, ready for laying out the following day on the drawing board.
She remembered Leon, the bleeding-heart liberal from Istanbul whose drafts were the best in the class. He had an inherent talent for the profession that she had had to learn in spite of herself. She had met Leon at engineering school when she was studying architecture, and he spoke little Hebrew. At that time she invited a few South American students to her home, where she read out the material in easy Hebrew, before the exams.
Leon shared a rented apartment with a woman from Colombia who had immigrated to Israel after her younger brother had been abducted by the Colombian authorities and his body had never been returned. She had enjoyed visiting Leon’s rented apartment, which he had furnished with his good taste, and how, while he prepared tomato soup for her out of a packet, she taught him words in Hebrew.
Once a fortnight she would go with him to visit his mother and younger sister in Tel Aviv. She loved seeing the compassion in his eyes when he looked at his mother, whose husband had left her for his young secretary. He was full of anger for his father and had only sympathy and tenderness for his mother and lovely sister.
Later, having decided she wanted to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and not having been accepted, she felt an emotional need for a change of scenery, and Leon had helped her hunt for an apartment in Jerusalem. The prices were exorbitant. Eventually they found the apartment with the two women who were renting out the doorless lounge at an affordable price, and Leon bought a sheet of plywood and built a room divider with a door that opened and closed, so that what she actually got was the best room in the apartment at a reduced rent. When the other women saw her capacious private space, they insisted she should share it with them, but, waving her lease at them, she sent them to hell.
She and Leon agreed that if she decided to stay in Jerusalem, he would join her, and in the meantime she started working for Ackerstein and traveled to Haifa on the weekends to visit Leon and her parents. Then, when he wanted to join her in Jerusalem, she had betrayed his love with her relationship with the man from Barcelona, who trumpeted in her ear in English.
In her heart she thought that if Leon had known how to trumpet in English, she might never have left him, but she admitted to herself later that she had been bothered by the fact that Leon was thin and almost the same height as her, and when he held her in his arms she felt she was being embraced by a boy and not, as she wanted, by a man. Go tell a silly twenty-two-year-old girl that a tall, Spanish-speaking man is no more masculine than short, Turkish-speaking Leon.
“Did you get the job with Koderk?” her sister asked in a letter from New York to Barcelona.
“I did,” she replied, “but not before asking him if I needed to come to work with a green surgeon’s mask on my face. My Israeli chutzpah must have pleased him, because he started to laugh.”
“So everything’s all right,” her sister wrote back. “What are you doing with the money?”
“Save it for hard times and send some home to Mom and Dad.”
“Why bother?” her sister asked. “You know they’d never touch your money.”
Their lives in Barcelona took on a regular routine. They worked in the mornings; at two o’clock in the afternoon he would come to pick her up for lunch at his parents’, until she rebelled and they agreed to eat at home twice a week. In the afternoons he was busy with his Final Design Project, which took many months to complete, and she couldn’t help comparing him with her sister, who had taken two months to complete her project for the Technion.
Any time she felt like doing something different with him in the afternoons, he would argue that he couldn’t spare the time to leave his project, and he asked her to refrain from tempting him to do so. Sometimes she went out with Mercedes, her much-loved Spanish friend. Sometimes it was with a few of her workmates, and most of her time was spent with Paula and her children, or his parents, while he allowed himself a weekly outing with his friends.
His mother taught her how to cook dishes from her vast repertoire of recipes and shared many of her culinary secrets. In time, she learned to cook so well that she sometimes invited his parents and all his uncles and aunts to eat at their home, and her food was always warmly complimented. When Ruth and her husband came to dinner, they were served an eggplant salad with a lot of garlic, and rice-stuffed vine leaves with a yogurt sauce on the side, and Nahum said he’d always known she would turn into a good balabusta.
“How did you know that?” she asked, charmed.
“It’s all in your eyes,” he said, “especially since I have an eye in my own finger and I can wander about with it, in the tops as well as in the bottoms.” He laughed, and she answered him by saying that there isn’t a Romanian woman alive who doesn’t know how to cook, it’s inherent in their genes.
Rummy
Damn. Next Friday is rummy night at the Markovitzes’ house.
I hate going to their place. They live so far away, and if Dad loses at cards he won’t feel like carrying me home in his arms, and I am fed up. I am fed up having to schlep home with them at two in the morning because of their stupid card game.
Why can’t we have rummy night at our place every Friday?
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br /> Why should I have to be dragged along with them, just because Fila is frightened of being left alone at home? I’m not afraid of burglars. What can they steal from us, anyway, except for our rummy tiles, which are shinier and more lovingly polished than all the tiles owned by any of the others?
I told my sister I wasn’t going to the Markovitzes’ next week. Not after what happened to us with their daughter, Shila; I said that she should stay at home with me. My sister promised that it would be just one more time, and Dad promised that we’d be allowed to paint the rummy set on Saturday.
By the time she was twelve, Shila Markovitz was already five feet eight inches tall, a fact that gave her a huge inferiority complex, because of her height and because of her pimples. It was because of her pimples that Shila slapped on packs of makeup, in the staircase so her parents wouldn’t see when we went out. And her height, together with her makeup, made her look sixteen.
Shila, who was an only daughter, went to great lengths to please the boys, because of her inferiority complex and because her parents didn’t really love her.
The last time we went to their home, my sister told my dad that she wasn’t going down with Shila to play hide-and-seek because in any case Shila didn’t really play with us. Mom persuaded her to go down to the street anyway; otherwise the “little one” (in other words, myself) would go crazy with boredom and frustration watching them playing rummy. Shila soon joined the chorus pressuring my sister, because she knew that her parents wouldn’t allow her to go down alone, and she was desperate to be considered cool. My sister agreed grudgingly, angry with me because it was my fault that we had to go.
“And it’s only because of you that we are here at all,” I answered her at once, which shut her up.
We walked out of their apartment, and the first thing Shila did was to sit herself down in the staircase for a whole hour to smear makeup all over her face to hide her pimples, and it was my job to turn on the light whenever it went out.
As soon as we stepped out on the street, we were surrounded—or to be more accurate, Shila was surrounded—by four large sixteen-year-old hoodlums.
I suggested playing tag and didn’t understand why they were looking at me in disdain and saying that tag was a game for five-year-olds.
“I’m eight and a half, and I love playing tag,” I protested, but they only wanted to play hide-and-seek, and Shila said they were right. Tag was a babies’ game. I gave in and agreed, so long as I got to be the seeker. I stood next to the wall and counted, one, two, three, up to fifty. Anyone before and after me, to my sides and underneath me, is caught.
I opened my eyes and started looking for the others. I found my sister within a second because she was always afraid to wander too far away; she was also afraid of dark places.
We started looking for Shila and couldn’t find her. As we approached the empty and deserted space that we didn’t usually dare go anywhere near even in daylight, we heard whispering, and on the street corner we saw the four boys all over Shila, fumbling with her breasts.
We stood aside so as not to be seen. Now we were hiding from them. We thought at first that she was giggling along with them, and thought of going back without her.
As we were turning to leave, we heard her crying and telling them, “Leave me alone.”
We watched as they dragged her toward a truck at the edge of the field, and one of them stayed nearby on the outside. Fila said we should hurry home and call Shila’s parents, and I said that Shila’s parents would probably beat her when they discovered her hanging out with those hoods.
“Let’s go talk with them,” I said to my big sister, and forced her to come with me.
We went up to the one who was waiting outside and were pleased to see that it was Ya’akov, who was a member of the Abbas family that lived on our street.
I told him to tell his friends to let Shila go immediately, and he asked, “Why?”
“Because if you don’t, I’ll tell your dad that you stole chewing gum from Avram’s grocery store, and your dad will beat you to death with his belt. Even more than usual.” Ya’akov was almost convinced, because everyone knew that his father had a whole lot of self-respect and didn’t allow his kids to steal.
“Anyway, we’re on our way to the police right now.” My sister suddenly found her courage.
Ya’akov, who was a bit more afraid of his father’s belt than of the threat of the police, climbed into the truck and brought out a crying Shila.
“Your mascara has smudged all over your face,” I told her, to make her laugh, but she didn’t stop crying.
She didn’t have to ask us not to tell her parents. We took it for granted that we wouldn’t snitch on her. My sister only told our dad, after making him swear not to tell Shila’s parents. And he really didn’t, because he knew that the poor girl would get another whipping, and my dad hated it when parents beat their children.
When Shila graduated from grade school, her parents sent her to work as an office clerk. My mother argued with Shila’s mom that she should have let her daughter go on to high school, or at least do a secretarial course, but Shila’s mom said that she had supported her daughter until she was fourteen, and that was enough. It was time for Shila to support herself, find a husband, and leave home. Apart from that, high school costs a fortune, she said—I mean, not only will there be no more money coming in, but we’ll have to scrimp and save for another four years before our not-too-bright daughter finds herself a decently educated husband. And who’s to say she’ll find herself a better husband; what guarantees are there in life? “Look at yourself,” said Shila’s mother to my mother, “you’re an accountant, and where did your education get you? Here in Israel you’re cleaning houses to support your children; that’s a life?”
Mom said she didn’t care. She was definitely sending Yosefa to high school. As for me, she wasn’t quite sure. “But between you and me,” she whispered to Shila’s mother, “she’s so pretty, she’ll know how to get on. But your Shila, you know…” And my mom fluttered her hand in a “so, so” gesture. “Shila should at least get herself some useful skill,” my mom added.
Friday it’s our turn to host the rummy game. I love it when it’s our turn. The entire house is up on its hind legs, and with the eager anticipation of seriously heavy gamblers, we set up the three card tables for our distinguished guests. We spread out the green baize card cloths that Dad brought from Romania and collect the red-upholstered chairs from Tante Lutzi. We then help Mom with food; a variety of sandwiches with kashkaval cheese and black olives, Romanian red eggplant with a lot of garlic, ikra that Dad prepared himself with finely diced onion on the side, and slices of plain Shabbat challah. Salty Bulgarian cheese with sliced tomatoes on top, to soften the saltiness. Sometimes there are burekas, served with brown hard-boiled eggs, fruit and watermelon, and of course, my mom’s fabulous cozonac.
On Thursday, when it’s our turn for cards, I’m even willing to forgo playing downstairs, if it means I can help my mom with the cozonac.
Mom separates the egg yolks from the whites, careful not to break them; even a tiny speck of yellow in the whites could cause the foam, which is Dad’s job to whisk, to break. With her fingertip she scrapes out the very last scrap of white from the half eggshell, leaving it shiny in its emptiness. Even when it’s only an ordinary fried egg or omelet being cooked, a finger has to be placed inside the shell to draw out the white to the very limit of its ability.
The yeast dough is left to rise overnight, wrapped in two layers of toweling, like a child who can’t go out with a wet head after being shampooed. The wrapped parcel is placed ceremoniously in the warmest spot in the house, next to the Primus stove. When the dough has risen to three times its original size, we roll it out together and add the delicious filling that Mom has prepared from cocoa, sugar, cinnamon, and ground nuts. We tried to get out of using raisins; never liked raisins.
When the dough is rolled and filled, we place it gently in the round baking pan w
ith a hole in the middle and join the two ends. Mom covers the pan with its lid—as they say, every pot has a lid—and we wait a few more hours for the dough to rise once again. Only then does Mom place the pan on the flame, and we wander around it, checking every five minutes to see if the cake is rising as it should and sniffing the glorious smell of cozonac.
When the guests arrive, Mom shoves some dulceata into their hands (good job she doesn’t push it into their mouths) to get their appetites moving. As if you know a lot of people whose appetites are static, apart from anorexics. Dulceata, accompanied by a glass of cold water. My mother places this very sweet delicacy, a jam she prepares herself some time earlier, in beautiful small crystal bowls that she brought from Romania, with a glass of cold water to wash out the intestines.
No self-respecting Romanian home would welcome you without an offer of dulceata, and I always said no. I refused to even taste it.
“Try it at least—otherwise, how can you tell you don’t like it?” Dad tries to coax me.
“I know, because it’s brown,” I reply, and refuse to touch it.
Once the players are seated at their game, we take up positions to the side, carefully scrutinizing everyone’s cards.
I enjoy sitting next to Dad and learning from him how to play. Dad likes to take chances, so there’s always a lot of tension surrounding him. At the end of the evening, my parents count up their money. Between Mom’s caution and Dad’s risk-taking, they usually come out quits; indeed most of the time they win more than they lose, which makes my sister and me very happy.
The food is served at about ten o’clock in the evening. For this moment my sister and I have been waiting for six weeks, for our turn to come, when Dad and Mom get up from the card table to do the final preparations and we take their places in the game. We play instead of them with real money—not make-believe—and we get to keep whatever we win. Anything we lose is our parents’. Even in a game of cards, our mother and father trust us not to lose.