by Rina Frank
It takes about half an hour for the food to be served to the tables, and we take full advantage of this time. When we win, the guests complain that we use a code language to reveal to one another what cards each of us needs. It’s a lie, but we are used to hearing adults lying to save face. That’s why we don’t care, as long as we win.
After the food and after clearing away the plates, we still have a few minutes left to play while Dad prepares the strong coffee, as only he knows how. Only when he takes his seat and the finjan is heating on the stove does Mom hurry over to rescue a couple of spoonfuls of the excess ground coffee that Dad put in and return it to the bag, before the coffee manages to boil over slowly and the liquid starts to froth.
After coffee, Dad goes back to the game, and I am happy that he is in a good mood. The following morning, my sister reminds my father that she’s willing to stay behind with me at home next Friday, on condition that she gets to paint the red and yellow rummy pieces on her own.
“She can paint only the black, and you can do the green ones.” My sister tries to squeeze as much as possible out of her negotiations with Dad.
“Why does she get to paint two colors, and I get only one?” I go straight in, complaining. “So let me at least paint in the higher numbers.”
“It doesn’t go by numbers, stupid. It’s by colors,” my sister butts in. “And it’s only four colors.”
Dad takes me aside and asks if I want to go with them to the Berkovitzes’ the following Friday.
“You know I don’t,” I snap.
“So give in to your sister this time, and next time you’ll get to paint more pieces than she does,” he coaxes me—which in the end turns out not to be the case. Next time, too, my sister paints two colors and I only one.
“So I’ll paint the green and you the black,” I bargain with Dad. I don’t like black. And, besides, I don’t want to paint the blacks, just because my sister says that this is what I have to paint. I have always been contrary toward my sister, so as to stop her showing off for being a year and eight months older than me.
“Why don’t you like black?” Dad asks me.
“Because people who wear black are always sad”—I find an immediate excuse—“just as you were sad when Grandmother died.”
So we shouldn’t quarrel, Dad let us paint the rummy tiles every couple of months, even though they didn’t need painting more than twice a year. Romanian tile rummy is not played with plain old cards, as it is by the Poles, but with tiles, and the color of the numbers engraved in them fades with time. We had two good sets of rummy tiles from Romania, and didn’t use inferior, bought-in-Israel ones. Ours were heavier, made from much better quality stone.
Dad soaked the tiles overnight in soapy water. When we got up in the morning, the tiles were soft and faded, giving themselves up to the devoted care they were about to receive. We dried them off thoroughly, picked up a fine brush, and carefully opened the four jars of paint—red, green, yellow, and black. We dipped the brush in paint, just a little so it wouldn’t smudge, and painted in the number on the tile, each with its own color, giving renewed color to its cheeks. When the paint had dried, we used a razor blade to scrape off the excess color from the edges and polished the tile with a little benzene, to bring back its natural shine.
Only because of us were the rummy tiles shining and new-looking; my sister and I were forever arguing over which of us would get to paint more numbers.
When her husband allowed himself to lay aside his project for a few hours to take her out for an airing, they went to visit friends of his who bored her—especially Jakob, a Jew who had inherited a fortune and made another from his extensive business ventures. He was always dressed in the height of fashion, without so much as a speck of dust on any part of the dark suits he favored, always with a matching tie. Even when they visited him at home, he was always dressed in a suit, and his wife, a Jackie Kennedy lookalike, matched her style to his as a good wife should. Their house was furnished entirely in white leather that you were afraid to sit on in case it got dirty, and their children were never allowed into the lounge, so as not to make a mess. They were allowed to play only in their own rooms, and then only between five and six, after which they were washed and fed in the kitchen by their nanny, because they were not allowed into the dining room adjacent to the white lounge. She thought to herself, How miserable those rich kids are, growing up in a white house, where they are not allowed to touch anything and where they lead lives as disciplined as in a military academy.
After a year in Barcelona, the man informed her that they would be flying to Israel at Passover for a visit.
She was happy, but made it clear to him that she intended to have the seder with her parents.
“But we want to be with my sister,” he said.
“And I want to be with my parents,” she told him, “and I have no problem with you being in Jerusalem while I’m in Haifa.”
He looked at her dumbfounded, incapable of understanding how she could propose such an arrangement for a family seder.
“You are my wife, and I want you to be with me,” he said.
“I was my parents’ before I became your wife,” she retorted childishly, but capitulated in the end and agreed to be in Jerusalem for the seder, and go to her parents the next day. Otherwise, she knew, her parents would be made anxious by her wealthy husband and go out of their way to impress him.
The first thing she asked her parents was what was happening with Batya.
“What’s supposed to be the matter with her?” her mother replied cagily, not looking her in the eye.
“I’ve written her three letters already and she hasn’t replied, and I couldn’t phone her because I’ve lost her number.” She went to the telephone and asked her father for Batya’s number. Clearly embarrassed, he told her that Batya had died ten months before. “Shortly after your wedding, she was diagnosed with jaundice and passed away within a month.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, and her parents told her they didn’t wish to hurt her, knowing that she could just as well get bad news in Israel. It wasn’t necessary to send such painful messages all the way to Barcelona.
“How can anyone die so quickly from jaundice?” she asked her father in anguish, and her husband held her hand firmly.
“No one knows. She just died very quickly,” her father said.
“I bet it’s because of those thrashings she got all her life from her father. And how did Johnny react to her death?” she asked.
Her father looked at her mother, who said that Johnny had shot himself on his daughter’s grave. “He must have loved her after all,” her father said.
“And Rosi?”
“She’s still telling fairy tales to everyone who’s willing to listen and to anyone who isn’t. She’s slightly out of her mind. We go to visit her every week and take her some food. She’d have died of hunger, otherwise.”
Their meal was a sad affair; she said she needed some air and left the house. Maybe if she went to the same place where she had met Batya a year ago, the day after her wedding, she might still see her, she thought. Maybe she wasn’t dead at all. She didn’t see Batya, but met a girl she had been to architects’ school with. The girl told her that Leon was married and the father of twins, and he was now living in London, where he was a very successful architect.
“You know, life goes on,” the girl said smugly.
“So it does,” she replied, happy that Leon seemed to be doing a lot better with his life without her.
She hurried back to her parents’ home, where her man was waiting for her. He was worried about her, and she asked him to trumpet for her in English. Two weeks later she was happy to return to Barcelona.
That summer they went to the Costa Brava resort of Lloret de Mar with Mercedes and Jorge, who were happy to share their vacation in the house owned by his parents and uncle. She ate paella, drank sangria, peeled shrimp, and gobbled squid and various other kinds of seafood as if t
hey were sunflower seeds. He husband laid aside his Final Design Project and allowed himself to spend the entire vacation with her, and she remembered why she had fallen in love with him. He brought her flowers in bed, just for the sake of it, and carried her on his back like a sack of flour up the steep stairs of the house, which was built on the side of a hill. In the sea, he dove beneath her and raised her to his shoulders before throwing her behind him back into the water. They frolicked and laughed like a couple of kids in love, and only when his parents came for weekends did he suddenly become serious and behave in a way that befits a European man of constraint.
On her twenty-fifth birthday, which fell on Rosh Hashanah, the first day of the Jewish New Year, her husband surprised her by taking her to the airport without telling her why. She thought they were flying to Rome or Paris, until she saw her little parents walking toward her with their suitcases.
Bianca immediately took over her Spanish kitchen and cooked them a few choice Romanian dishes, which his parents also enjoyed, once she had pointed out to her mother that she would have to reduce the amounts of garlic she used.
She enjoyed showing her parents the wonders of Barcelona; even more enjoyable was to see their enjoyment, even though her mother spat out the seafood, unable to understand how her daughter was able to eat that nonkosher, treif food. Her father loved everything he was given and chatted with their doorman in Ladino.
After a month in Barcelona, her parents flew to Paris, since not only had her husband wanted to surprise her on her birthday, he also wanted her parents to enjoy a taste of the big wide world, and for a whole week they were guests in the home of his uncle and aunt, who showed them all over the City of Lights. Her parents returned to Israel like two people awakening from a dream, and she loved her husband all the more.
When her friends Gingi, Amiram, and Moshe came to visit, her husband took them to see a bullfight, and she took them to an amusement park and the Las Ramblas boulevard.
But when winter came and everyone had gone home, her husband returned to his Final Design Project for the next six months, and once again she felt alone in a foreign land.
One evening they were invited to dinner at the home of Jakob and his wife. The meal wasn’t particularly filling, but the plates it was served on were impressive. She was hoping that the dessert course would provide some compensation, until the maidservant arrived—in that home it was most definitely a maidservant—bearing four unpeeled oranges and placed one on each of their plates, as ceremoniously as if she was dishing up the finest Russian caviar. She looked down at her orange, then watched Jakob pick up a knife and fork and peel his with amazing dexterity, using a single set of cutlery. He didn’t touch the fruit with his fingers, and when the orange was peeled, he cut each segment in half with his knife and used his fork to pop them into his mouth. Her husband did the same, and so did Jakob’s wife.
“Don’t you like oranges?” they asked her.
“Of course I do, I was brought up on oranges,” she said, and picked hers up with her left hand, peeled it, and ate each segment separately with her hands, ignoring her knife and fork.
The three looked at her silently, and she said, “Where I come from we eat oranges with our hands. Like chicken, with our hands only.
“By the way, how are Marc and Gabi?” she asked suddenly, wondering why she hadn’t had a glimpse of their children.
“Marc is in his room, grounded for two weeks,” Jakob replied.
“Why, whatever has he done?” She always wanted to know everything.
“He went into our room and dismantled all the drawers in the closet,” Jakob said, and she thought to herself that the kid must have gone crazy, justifiably; but she said nothing and made a silent oath that her own children would be brought up in Israel.
On their way home from the dinner party, she told her husband, “Look how unhappy their children are.” He disagreed with her, saying that children need a framework in which to be brought up.
“Children need love,” she protested.
He agreed that Jakob might be a little too strict in raising his children, but was sure he loved them. She wasn’t so sure, and she wondered to herself if Jakob’s children loved him, their own father. She was sorry she had never asked Batya if she loved her father in spite of all the beatings she suffered at his hands.
“I want to go back to Israel,” she said.
“Aren’t you happy here?” he wanted to know.
“That’s not the point. I want to live a small apartment in Tel Aviv with four children who eat oranges with their hands,” she said instead of replying to his question, and later over the phone, she told her sister that she was suffocating.
“What are you suffocating from?” her sister asked, realizing that she must be suffering if she was phoning her rather than sending a letter.
“From the rules. There are too many rules here. Too many politenesses. All day long I find myself having to work out what I can and what I can’t do. What a lady is permitted to do and what she isn’t. I am not allowed to laugh with the owners of the local grocery store, and certainly not with the doorman, because I am a grande dame and it is not done here for a grande dame to consort with the lower classes. All those knives and forks are driving me nuts, and I even have to use them for eating an orange. An orange, do you get it? An orange, that’s all. And the kids here are miserable.”
“Aren’t you exaggerating just a bit?” her sister asked her.
“I am not exaggerating at all. I am getting so pissed off.”
“Maybe you’re just bored?” her sister suggested.
“Maybe,” she replied.
“Get yourself a dog, like I did,” her wise sister advised her, and she went out and bought herself a delightful cocker spaniel puppy and named her Medi, which is short for Meidale. Now she had a reason to wander the streets in the afternoon with her new puppy. Except that his parents had to know what she needed this extra burden for.
“I love dogs,” she said, “and besides, I’m pregnant,” she announced to everyone at lunch, after Laura had brought in the lettuce salad.
Her husband looked at her, as did her mother and father-in-law, and silence reigned.
“How nice,” said her husband, and went up to her and hugged and kissed her.
“Isn’t this rather too soon?” Luna asked, and his father said nothing.
“Soon for what?” she asked.
“You know,” Luna stammered, “you’re young and only just embarking on your careers, and,” she went on, “you’re not even established yet.”
“We’ll get established as we go along,” she replied, and looked into her father-in-law’s silent eyes.
“We’re both working, making good money,” she added quietly.
Her husband continued to hug her and said nothing. In the end his father said that they had been married only a year and a half, and that it was a good idea to give the matter some serious consideration. “Look here,” he added, “you’ve got a dog.” And it sounded like, “What do you need a baby for? You’ve got a dog to keep you amused.”
“Children like dogs,” she said, and added that she was tired and wanted to sleep.
She called her sister in the evening, and then her parents, who screamed with joy at the news. Paula the Italian aunt came down to their apartment and told her emotionally that Luna had already reported the pregnancy; “Bracha tova,” she said, “and I’m really happy for you. Children bring joy.” She started telling her what she should do to handle her morning sickness.
Later Luna called to apologize for their chilly reaction that afternoon and that she thought that she had every right to decide whatever she decides.
She said that she had made up her mind, and that was that.
That night she told her husband that he had six months to complete his Final Design Project if he wanted to be with her, because she was going back to Israel; she was taking the pregnancy and Medi, and she hoped he would be with her as well. “I want to ha
ve my baby in Israel, with my parents and my sister by my side,” she told her husband.
Our National Pride Day
I stood on the balcony watching Ya’akov being beaten by his father with a belt and feeling terribly sorry for him. Someone must have snitched to his father that he was stealing from the grocer’s. My sister came out to the balcony with a glass of milk and told me that I ought to drink milk, too.
I told her I didn’t want to, and she said I must, or I would never grow.
“So what,” I said and continued to feel sorry for Ya’akov, whose father was beating the life out of him. My sister told me that if I didn’t drink my milk, she’d pour hers all over my head.
“I dare you,” I replied, and she poured a whole glassful of milk all over me.
That evening I ran a high temperature, and my mother told my sister that it was because she poured milk over me, but on the way to the doctor’s the next morning Mom explained that it was probably because I had caught tonsillitis again, and she hadn’t meant it when she told my sister that it was because of her, but she was cross with her for wasting a glass of milk.
There was a long queue in the doctor’s office, and we got number eighteen even though we’d arrived there first thing in the morning. Mom tried to fib by saying that she was number nine in line, but someone else was number nine and people started shouting at Mom that she was a liar. I was terribly ashamed.
When we left, we saw a policeman, and he asked me why I was crying. I told him I was sick, and that I was afraid I wouldn’t get well before Independence Day.
He said of course I’d get well, because there’s a whole week to go until Independence Day.
Because I was sick, Dad bought me a blackboard and colored chalks and my sister immediately called Sima, Rocha, and Yaffa down from the floor above us and said that she was the teacher and she was going to teach us how to write our names in English.