Every House Needs a Balcony

by Rina Frank

  English is an easy language to write. All you do is scribble up and down; here and there you draw in a circle, and you have to take special care to join the letters together and leave a reasonable space between them so the words are separated and there you have it, English. Easy peasy. Not like Hebrew, which is a hard language to handle.

  My sister wrote down her name and said that from now on she would be known as Josephine, because she had decided that her name should be the same as that of the heroine in Little Women. After all, she explained to us, the name Josephine is the equivalent of Yosefa, which she shortened to Sefi, except that people who call their daughters Josephine are not Jews, and we are. She even started showing off how she could enunciate the J in Josephine the way they do in American movies, and forced us to do the same.

  Dad explained to my sister that you can’t just go around changing your name, and that she had been named for her grandfather, Yosef, and it’s not their fault that she was born a girl and not a boy, and that a person’s grandfather’s memory has to be honored. And anyway, he said, names have to come from the Bible; you can’t just invent all kinds of other names. My sister complained that all she’d ever wanted to be was special and different from everyone else and it’s not fair that they had to give her a boy’s name and that it’s she and not they who’ll have to bear that name for the rest of her life.

  Sima wanted to be teacher too, but my sister wouldn’t let her because the blackboard belonged to me.

  “Then I want to be teacher,” I piped up immediately, but my sister said that I’ve got tonsillitis and am therefore not allowed to talk.

  In the evening, after they had forced me to eat some chicken soup, Mom leaned over me and recited the witches’ prayer in Yiddish, spat three times, tfu, tfu, tfu, and forced me to say the words after her, words in Yiddish that I couldn’t understand, and in the end, Dad and Sefi as well had to say Amen and Amen to the entire House of Israel. Four days later my temperature dropped and I was able to join in the Independence Day celebrations, the best holiday of our year.

  On the evening before Independence Day we went up to Herzl Street in the Hadar neighborhood to watch all the youth movement kids dancing the hora, our hearts full of pride for having achieved a sovereign state of our own, despite all the tyrants and in spite of all the enemies that surround us on all sides.

  We went to bed early so there would be no problem getting up at five o’clock the following morning.

  The annual Israel Defense Forces parade, pride of the Jewish nation, was being held this year in Haifa. One year it’s in Tel Aviv, the next in Jerusalem, and once every three years it takes place in Haifa.

  We all woke up in time. Mom and Dad had already prepared the sandwiches, and we hurried off to grab a good spot in the middle of Ha’azma’ut Street, where the parade passes at ten o’clock; we had to be in the front row so no one could block our view of our national pride. We clapped our hands when the tanks rolled by, and we shouted for joy when we saw our soldiers, so proud and so handsome, and just see where we are now, despite Hitler, may his name be cursed for all of eternity, tfu, tfu, tfu—spit three times and grasp a bunch of your hair, waiting for the first bird to arrive to save us from the curse so it shouldn’t come back on us, heaven forbid.

  After all, every toddler knows that when you place a curse on someone, you have to spit three times, grab a clump of your hair, and wait for the first bird that comes your way.

  My ever-practical sister explained that I should try not to do any cursing unless I was sure that there were birds flying in the sky; otherwise I might find myself holding on to my hair the whole day long, and when there is no bird, you get stuck with the curse. It’s the same when you see a black cat.

  There was a sudden downpour, and although Dad wanted to stay to see the end of our national pride parade, Mom wouldn’t let us, because of my tonsillitis and the fact that my temperature had gone down only a few days before.

  Her water broke at eight o’clock on Friday evening at their home in Rishon le Zion. The man was so excited as he tried to pack her a bag for a three-day stay in hospital that things kept falling out of his hands. “But you’re only thirty-seven weeks gone,” he said, trying to cover his fears.

  She asked him to make her a cup of coffee and calmly packed all the things she’d need for a three-day hospital stay: slippers, underpants, nursing bra, a dressing gown, and pajamas, since she hated those green polka-dot hospital-issue pajamas. She wouldn’t have minded wearing the blue pajamas that male patients received but couldn’t really imagine the hospital maternity ward providing her with men’s pajamas. She was happy as she packed her bag. Happy that she was going to give birth to her baby, and even happier for being spared an additional three and a half weeks of a heavy and cumbersome pregnancy.

  She placed all her makeup in the bag, but not before quickly smudging on some black eyeliner to emphasize her green eyes, and coloring her lips in a shade her husband favored. It took him all of ten minutes to make her a cup of muddy black coffee, not the real Turkish coffee her father would have prepared for her, and when he brought it to her in a mug—who for hell’s sake drinks Turkish coffee out of a mug?—his hands were shaking. She felt her first contraction at that very moment. It wasn’t quite as weak she had been led to expect by those experienced in this kind of thing. On the contrary, the contraction was aggressive enough to send her hurling from her seat on the bed next to the packed bag. The coffee spilled, turning her white duvet into a muddy brown sludge. She stood beside the bed, grasping its sides, and the man took the soiled duvet and removed its white cover. A dark stain remained on the white duvet.

  This is not a good omen, she thought to herself, and she was scared. It would have been a luckier sign if the cup had at least been broken. But it’s in the nature of a mug not to break easily, and only the muddy coffee spilled out and stained the white duvet her mother had bought her as part of her marriage dowry.

  She wailed and laughed at the same time, thinking of the dowry the man had brought to their marriage: the apartment, the car, the furniture, a TV, a washing machine and dryer, dishwasher, kitchen utensils, an assortment of mixers and blenders, and a machine for making coffee; whereas the dowry her mother had given her consisted of the white duvet that she had paid for with the sweat of her brow, cleaning the homes of strangers on Mount Carmel.

  They reached the hospital that evening at nine o’clock. In spite of the increasing contractions, she was happy to be giving birth on a Friday, like the Sabbath bride, divinely inspired by God. She was told to walk up and down, up and down, in order to intensify the contractions, but she had no cervical opening. With a two-finger opening you get sent back home.

  Over and over she marched the length of the long corridor while her long-legged husband struggled to keep up with her. She was determined to give birth to her baby as dawn broke, and the swift walk was no more strenuous now than her daily routine with her cocker spaniel, Medi.

  “Where’s Medi?” she asked the man; she remembered that she hadn’t said a proper good-bye to her beloved dog, in the heat of the spilled coffee and the premature contractions.

  “At home,” the man replied.

  “What do you mean, at home? I could be held here for twenty-four hours.” It didn’t occur to her that her labor could take even longer.

  “So I’ll nip back home to take her down,” the man tried to reassure her.

  “And leave me here alone?” She was alarmed. “Where’s my sister when I need her?” she murmured to herself.

  “In New York. Would you like me to call your mother?” he asked her, hoping she’d refuse.

  “No,” she replied at once. “I don’t need her here to spur me on in Romanian.”

  “Voy a dar a la luz”—she said the sentence in Spanish that she had liked when she discovered she was pregnant. To give to the light. What a nice way to describe the act of giving birth. “You only need to add the letter y, and you’ll be giving your baby light as wel
l as air.” She huffed and puffed and took longer steps, her energy at boiling point.

  “Where are you running off to?” He chased after her on his long legs. In her design for their wedding invitation, her sister had drawn a pair of long legs and the train of a wedding gown. “Come on, sit down for a moment. You’ve been marching for three hours already. Drink your coffee,” he said, holding out a cup of coffee he’d taken from the vending machine.

  “What’s the time?” she asked.

  “Five past midnight,” he replied. “Shabbat.”

  She gave in and sat down to drink their machine-made Shabbat coffee. She loved that cappuccino they sold in hospital vending machines. It’s the only thing you can put in your mouth in a hospital; everything else is utterly inedible.

  “Do you know the Hebrew word for a machine that’s become obsolete?” her man asked her, trying to distract her from another contraction that was so powerful as to almost draw the very life out of her body.

  “Contraction after contraction and no opening,” she said, disappointed. “The whore, she swallows,” she added quickly.

  “Who swallows?” He was focusing on the contraction.

  “The machine. You asked for a word to describe a machine that’s become obsolete. I hope I won’t become obsolete after giving birth to this baby.” She was suddenly gripped by an obscure fear, remembering the mug of black coffee spilling all over the white duvet her mother had given her as a marriage dowry.

  A religious couple came and sat next to them, and the religious woman told them that this was her fourth baby but the first time she was giving birth on a Shabbat; she was happy as she said this.

  At two in the morning they took her into the delivery room. The religious woman had been taken in half an hour before. She would no doubt give birth first, as she had plenty of experience and knew how to do it.

  In the delivery room they could see the religious woman’s husband in the cubicle next to theirs. She could hear the woman screaming at him, “What have you done to me, you bastard?” and was surprised to hear such language from an observant Jew. Where the hell did she learn to use such words? Her husband was embarrassed for her and told the man who was about to become a first-time father that he was used to his wife pouring out her anger on him with every contraction. She uses such profanities only when she’s giving birth to a baby, he said, defending his wife.

  In sorrow you shall bring forth children; and yet your fury shall be on your husband, she thought to herself as she competed with the other woman over which of them could shout the louder.

  “I should be pregnant all my life, if that’s the only chance I get to curse the whole world and its wife,” she said to the two men standing nearby. “But on second thought, with pains such these I don’t wish myself more than one more birth. It’s far too painful,” she said, trying to amuse herself and her baby’s father.

  He held her hand, blew on her tormented face, wiped the sweat from her brow, and caressed her.

  “Would you like me to massage your feet?” he asked, and she said no, her feet didn’t hurt.

  A good man, she thought to herself. I’d marry him, if we weren’t already married.

  Noa was born at five in the morning. Five minutes later, the religious woman also gave birth to a baby girl. It was as if the two women were in competition, and her Noa had beaten the religious woman’s baby, to be born on the holy Sabbath.

  “It’s a girl,” her man said to her, and there were tears in his eyes.

  “Why are you crying?” she asked him. “Are you disappointed?”

  “If you’d seen the scissors that doctor used to cut you up like a chicken, you’d be crying, too,” he replied.

  “Ay, ay, what does the pain matter now? The baby’s out, isn’t she?” She looked at the man suspiciously; maybe she wasn’t out?

  “It’s the placenta. Push down hard,” the doctor ordered, his face in front of her wide-open legs.

  She pushed hard and screamed like a banshee.

  “The placenta’s out. I’m cutting. Don’t move,” said the doctor. “I’m starting to sew you up.”

  “Will it hurt?” she asked, exhausted.

  “Even if it does, you won’t feel a thing,” the doctor said as he was stitching her up.

  “My mother would never do any sewing on the Sabbath,” she whispered to her man, who was holding her hand, burrowing into her, at one with her agony.

  “He’s stitching you up exactly as you do with your rice-stuffed chicken dish,” he said.

  “With pine nuts and raisins,” she added.

  “Best in the world, the way you do your stuffed chicken.” He had learned her idiosyncratic, ungrammatical way of speaking, and sometimes spoke Hebrew the way she did.

  “You like my stuffed chicken,” she stated.

  “It’s you I love,” he said and gave her a long kiss on her lips.

  When he let go of her lips she told him that stuffed chicken would be the first thing she would teach Noa to cook when she took her first steps in life. “I have a Romanian recipe that is passed down from one generation to another,” she explained, and he placed his long fingers on her mouth. “Don’t talk now; just rest,” he said to the woman who had just given birth to his baby daughter.

  “Is he still sewing me up?” she asked, feeling nothing except his fingers on her lips.

  “I’m almost done,” said the doctor, “you can close your eyes and fall asleep.”

  “How does she look, my baby girl?” she remembered to ask her husband, with her eyes closed.

  “Perfect. Beautiful, just like you,” he replied.

  She drifted into blissful sleep.

  New Shoes

  I awoke in the middle of the night happy with the knowledge that something good had happened. I tried to think what it could have been, and then remembered; I peeped under my bed and saw my new shoes, sparkling away even in the dark of night. I stroked my shoes and smelled their new smell and then laid them down carefully on the floor so they wouldn’t get dirty. I fell asleep again, happy.

  Yesterday the whole family had gone down to the wadi, near the movie house, to buy me and my sister shoes for the first time in our lives.

  I wanted black patent leather shoes like the ones my sister’s friend Chaya had, because they had a permanent shine; and my sister wanted red shoes.

  Mom tried to persuade her to go for black or white shoes, because they go with everything, but my sister was adamant that red goes with everything too.

  The shopkeeper measured my foot on a metal shoe gauge with numbers running up its middle and told my mother that I was a size 28.

  “So what size shall I bring?” he asked. Dad said to bring a size 29, but Mom wanted 31, so they’d last for the next three years, as my feet grew.

  They compromised in the end on a size 30. The shopkeeper brought out a pair of black patent leather shoes, pushed a lot of cotton wool into the shoes so they wouldn’t fall off, and let me try them on. He brought a pair of red shoes for my sister, not patent leather.

  “I don’t have red patent leather,” he apologized.

  “So what?” My sister snatched a shoe from him and sat straight down to try it on. “I don’t like shiny shoes,” she said, and looked at me in disdain.

  I stroked my black patent leather shoes, and my sister stroked her red shoes, so that Mom and Dad would see that we loved our new shoes and wouldn’t suddenly change their minds and decide not to buy them for us.

  Dad told the shopkeeper that he would pay for the shoes in nine installments, and that he needn’t worry.

  “I’ll have the money to pay for the shoes,” he said; “don’t forget there’s a general election in November.” And the man nodded his head in understanding and straight away wrapped up our shoes with no misgivings whatsoever.

  It was the first Passover in our lives that my sister and I had new shoes that had been bought especially for us. In subsequent years, they bought new shoes for my sister, whereas I got to
wear her castoffs.

  It was also the first Passover that my sister and I were each given a new white pleated skirt. Instead of being paid in money for shortening dozens of such skirts, Mom had received two new white pleated skirts that just needed taking up, for her two daughters.

  Mom packed our new skirts and new shoes in a suitcase, and we took the train to our uncles and aunts in Hedera for the seder.

  She was pleased that her daughters were dressed in new clothes for this seder and proud that she was able, at long last, to show them off to Niku, her brother, and Eva, his wife.

  We arrived at the railway station and joined a very long queue at the ticket counter. The train carriages were also already packed with people traveling to Tel Aviv.

  Dad squeezed me, my sister, and the suitcase in through the open window and we saved seats until he and Mom could buy tickets.

  When the train set out at last from the station, I stuck my head out of the window, and Dad shouted at me that I would get my head chopped off by a telephone pole. But I didn’t care. I loved the feel of the wind on my face, and to watch all the houses seeming to fly past as we gathered momentum; sometimes I’d see people waving to the train from inside their homes, and I would wave back enthusiastically.

  A bus waited for us at the station when we alighted in Hedera, and I didn’t understand why an entire bus would be waiting for only four people, or even a few others, getting off the train, or how the bus driver knew the time of our arrival with such accuracy, so that we didn’t have to wait for it four hours as we sometimes had to wait for a bus in Haifa.

  My sister explained to me that the bus knew in advance when the train was due to arrive, just as in Haifa we knew when the train was setting off in the direction of Hedera, but I didn’t really understand what she was saying.

  Niku and his wife, Eva, had immigrated to Israel in the 1930s. Before obtaining a senior position with the Histadrut, the General Labor Federation, Niku had been a ghaffir with the Jewish Settlement Police. After doing their bit drying the swamps, Niku and Eva settled in Hedera, where they built their own little corner of heaven and raised their three children. Niku and Eva believed that if they couldn’t succeed in turning Mom and Dad into instant Israelis, then at least we, the girls, would rid ourselves of all our Romanian mannerisms and become prickly little sabras with all the necessary Zionist idiosyncrasies built in. They were annoyed with Mom for not taking the trouble to learn Hebrew, when she should be speaking only Hebrew with us. Mom argued with Niku that he should have taught his children another language; if not Romanian, then at least Yiddish, since it’s always important to know another language, apart from Hebrew.