Every House Needs a Balcony

by Rina Frank

  “She’s probably trying to get back at me for throwing away all her shmattes,” her dad explained to her with the healthy logic of an absolutely demented mind, the result of the multiple strokes he had suffered over the last year.

  “Mom can’t have thrown away anything of yours,” she tried to explain to him, with a logic that really was healthy. “Did she throw away the toilet paper from the attic?” she asked her father.

  “Not that,” he replied, “but those black shoes that I just finished polishing, she did throw away,” he insisted.

  “So, quick, before she gets back from the market, let’s throw out all the toilet paper.” She wanted to take the edge off her father’s anger, by disposing of those rolls of toilet paper that her mother had pilfered from the customs when she cleaned there fifteen years before and saved in the attic for a rainy day.

  This time too Bianca had arrived from Haifa bringing with her about five toilet rolls, so as not to waste hers. Her sister used to get angry at their mother and tell her that she had enough money to buy toilet paper for her too, but Bianca would say, “Pardon me, but my bum doesn’t need that soft pink papers of yours. It falls apart in my hands. My bum”—when she said “my bum,” she always qualified it with “pardon me,” because she thought it sounded like a rude word—“is used to the coarse paper I got from the customs.” She realized that it was not going to be possible to change the habits of a lifetime and bowed to her mother by placing the toilet rolls in the bathroom, for Bianca’s own private use. But as soon as her mother left the house, she was quick to get rid of the ancient toilet paper she had left in the bathroom.

  “Are you crazy?” said her dad fearfully. “She’ll kill me if I throw away her toilet paper.” In his befuddled mind, he understood that it wouldn’t do to annoy Bianca now, since she was the only one left to take care of him.

  She and her father began searching for the perfectly polished black shoes. They looked under the bed, under the blankets, on her mother’s sewing machine, on top of the closet, among all the albums, and there really was no sign of the shoes. She showed him his newly polished brown shoes. He fumed and said that he was referring to the black shoes that he had only just finished polishing. He remembered very well that these were the black shoes, and as proof, he produced the black polish and cloth, which quite clearly had just been put to use shining up a pair of shoes. She moved all the exhaustingly crowded furniture in her parents’ apartment and found nothing. She even checked the garbage can outside, not the one inside the apartment; maybe her father had been right for a change, and her mother had indeed thrown away the shoes. In the garbage can she was surprised to find a lot of carelessly discarded food, not even wrapped in plastic bags. There was an almost full container of cottage cheese, a wedge of the unsalted Canaan sheep cheese that her mother ate a lot of because of her hypertension, and even cucumber peelings that her mother saved in a bag in the fridge and used to place on her feverish brow. It seemed odd, but all the tenants in the house used the garbage can, and maybe one of them had cleaned out his fridge. She went back to her parent’s place and opened the fridge. It was completely empty. There wasn’t a thing in it. She opened the freezer door, and there, standing on the shelf, were the black newly polished shoes in all their glory.

  “Why did you throw out all the food?” she asked her father, who of course didn’t remember a thing.

  “So there’d be room for the shoes,” he replied.

  “But why in the freezer?” She wanted to understand his thought processes.

  “It keeps longer in the freezer, like meat,” her father explained.

  Difficult Language, Hebrew

  Quick as the wind, I slid down the banister on the way out of school and felt my flesh being slashed by the tiny pieces of glass stuck to it. I reached the end of the banister dripping blood. My bum was full of glass fragments, and I couldn’t remove them because they were stuck in my behind.

  Knowing that there was another hour before my sister finished school, I made for the office where my father worked. At that time he was a realtor, but at this too he made no money. Dad took me to the clinic, where they quickly put stitches in my bum. This time I didn’t need a tetanus shot, because I’d already had one only three months before when I had jumped over a railing and landed on a metal pole.

  The nurse recognized me and chastised my dad for not taking care of his little savage, and Dad said that a scar on the bum of an eight-and-a-half-year-old is quite sexy.

  We went home, and my sister flew at Dad, asking what Mom was doing at the school today.

  “She’s taking over from another cleaner who’s off sick,” Dad explained to my furious sister.

  “And why does it have to be in my school?” she asked.

  “Because maybe there she’ll finally get permanency,” Dad said, and my sister shut up.

  Accountant looking for a housemaid’s job, or any other exhausting physical labor, where knowledge of the Hebrew language is not required. Fluent in Romanian and Yiddish, some French, hard of hearing. This, no doubt, was the notice that Mom would have composed, had she chosen to seek employment in the classified ads in the daily papers. To her, the most important thing was permanency. She was permanently seeking a job that would give her permanency, and permanency was something you could get only if you worked for the authorities.

  She dreamed of permanency so she could at long last be able to take a day off work without having it docked from her wages. But to her the most important aspect of permanency was that it gave a person pension rights. A woman with a pension was a woman with status. A pension meant having security for thirty years ahead. It meant that she could easily save for her daughters’ dowries, because now that she’s got the matter of her old age sorted, she’ll get her pension, and she’ll never be a yoke around the neck of her two daughters.

  After school the following day, my sister and her friends Malka and Tova waited for me at the school gate so we could go home together. Dad had made her swear that she would always come home with me so I wouldn’t slide down again and open the stitches in my bum.

  Tova asked my sister if our mother was cleaning the classrooms now.

  My sister was ashamed to say yes, so I said to Tova that yes, she was, “and they’ve even promised her permanency if she does it well.”

  When I saw Mom arriving at the school with the last bell, I went into the first classroom she had to clean and helped her place the chairs on top of the desks so she could swab the floor.

  Those kids, no matter how many times they are asked to show some consideration for the cleaners by placing their chairs on top of their desks at the end of the day, just hear the bell and make a mad dash outside before the teacher can even think of giving them any more homework to do.

  My sister pretended not to see our mother cleaning in our school and quickly made her way out with her friends. I, who had never cared what anyone thought, stayed behind to help my mom. According to my sister, it was because I was pretty that I could allow myself not to bother with what other people thought.

  The next day too I stayed behind after school with Mom and lifted all the chairs while she washed down the floors with a lot of water, because it wasn’t costing us anything. Those were the days when we didn’t spend all day worrying about the level of water in the Sea of Galilee.

  My sister left with her friends as usual, and after saying good-bye to them at the end of our street, she returned to the school, entered the classroom quietly, and helped me pick up chairs and place them on the desks.

  On the fourth day of our mother’s cleaning job in our school, both of us stayed behind after the final bell, lifted up the chairs, and swept out the classrooms.

  Floor washing was something that Mom didn’t allow us to do until we were seventeen, so as not to ruin our hands—not at home, and certainly not where she worked. Your hands are your dowries, she always said. And I had thought that towels and cooking pots made up a dowry. For the same reason, she wouldn
’t let us wash the dishes at home. Anyway, dishwashing was Dad’s job.

  Mom resigned from her cleaning job at our school at the end of the week, even though they had promised her permanency. She didn’t want her young daughters cleaning classrooms after school hours. Or at all.

  Mom was given a job at the customs service and was happy. At the customs, not only could she say at least one day a month that she was sick, but she was also able to take things away to her heart’s content.

  Every place where Mom worked, she used to steal something. She didn’t when she cleaned private houses, because people always suspect the cleaning woman, and besides, people were always very generous toward her and gave her all kinds of things for her cute little girls. A government place, on the other hand, is something else altogether. The Establishment has money, and it’s no problem stealing from them. So Mom pilfered a few pencils, some pens, papers, several teacups, a little sugar, some saccharin, coffee; all for our own personal domestic use, of course.

  From the customs, Mom made a regular habit of taking away toilet rolls. Every day she’d come home with two rolls of toilet paper in her bag. After two years of work for the customs, there wasn’t a corner in the apartment that wasn’t packed with toilet rolls. The attic was already stuffed with enough toilet rolls to save us from a third world war.

  Mom worked at the customs from six in the morning until midday, and when she came home she sat down to take up white pleated skirts.

  This was her second job, shortening hems on pleated skirts. These skirts required special dressmaking skills, and Mom was not really a dressmaker. It was necessary to un-pick the belt with the lining at the top of the skirt, not the bottom, where the skirt was pleated. She then had to cut off the required length before arranging all the pleats into the belt with the lining, and then sewing together all the pleats on her sewing machine.

  At five every evening, Mom hurried off to her third job in a café on the corner of Hanevi’im and Herzl, where she worked in the kitchen, making sandwiches, washing dishes, and picking off the heads of the rolls so as to allow the insertion of frankfurters into the decapitated rolls. At eleven o’clock, when the café closed for business, she lifted the chairs onto the tables and washed the floors so the place would be clean for the following morning.

  At midnight Mom came home on all fours with a large plastic bag full of heads. The heads of the rolls that had been decapitated in order to insert wieners into them were the treat my sister and I waited for all day. We gobbled down so many heads that we went to sleep with a terrible stomachache. Sometimes, in order to shake things up, Mom would fry the pieces of bread and sprinkle sugar over them. American toast heads, Mom used to call it, and we often called Sima, Rocha, and Yaffa from upstairs to share and enjoy our fried heads.

  At school, after the government had stopped providing us with a free ten o’clock meal, my sister and I took out our heads and were the envy of all the others.

  But Mom had a knack for making us embarrassed. When she brought my raincoat into the classroom because I had forgotten it at home—or more accurately, I had refused to take it because it was monumentally hideous—Mom knocked on the door and apologized in a heavy Romanian accent, “It’s for Ifale, so she won’t be wet in water.”

  Needless to say, I wanted the earth to swallow me for the rest of my life, and never to be exposed to the ridicule of my classmates, for not only was I Romanian, but at home they call me Ifale!

  We were ashamed when Mom pulled out the sandwiches in the middle of a movie, handing them out to us, rustling the wrapping paper and the plastic bag with the rubber band, to keep it all fresh so it shouldn’t get dry; with her cries of encouragement in Romanian, everyone in the audience knew not only that we were Romanian but exactly what we had in our sandwiches.

  And of course we were mortified on the bus when she took off the best years of our lives to get the driver to let us travel for free. And if the driver insisted, Mom would ask us to do our eye trick. Practiced and genuinely ashamed, we looked at the driver with piercing pain-filled eyes; his sympathetic Jewish head wouldn’t allow him to put us off the bus, and he made do with the children’s ticket that Mom handed out to him. We really did have sad eyes, if only from the thought of having to climb up all those hills in Haifa on foot, instead of the luxury of traveling by bus. When she didn’t get away with it, we hissed quietly, “Nazi,” to make him know exactly what we thought of him; but he was upset at us for calling him a Nazi, and we hadn’t really meant to hurt him.

  When we arrived at our stop after having traveled for free on the bus and Mom saw a street beggar, she used to give him all the fare she had saved from the journey and tell us happily, “You see, we made that beggar’s day; now do you understand why it’s so important to steal your way onto the bus?”

  When we were finally accepted into the summer school run by the nepotistic Israeli Labor Party, Mapai, it was only after Dad had carried out so many missions for them, “lending” them the apartment for their party gatherings and lectures and filling it with all the neighborhood’s Moroccan and Kurdish inhabitants and everybody else from Wadi Salib who could fit into our single room (Dad told them simply that there’d be good food to eat, so it was worth coming, and they could take home whatever was left at the end). Election time was a time when Dad flourished, and during the two months preceding the elections he’d earn enough money for the whole year. But Dad got most of the money out of the party during the very last week running up to the elections. And that is how we got the fancy residential summer camp, with board and food and activities and macramé and ceramics—in short, Club Med gratis for Franco’s daughters.

  Mom accompanied us to the pickup point for the summer camp, where she shoved everyone aside, lied that she’d been there before but left for a moment, and pushed us onto the bus first. She thought that if you’re first on the bus, you get the best beds, and certainly the best food. Mom didn’t forget to tell the counselor in perfect Yiddish to make sure that we ate everything we were given, because she was paying a fortune for the summer camp.

  We were ashamed of Mom in the long queues for the doctor when she regularly forged her number in line, or when she said in a voice full of confidence, after making sure of the number that was in with the doctor, that hers was two numbers hence. She took the risk of someone else saying that he had that number, when she would say, “Oh, so sorry, my mistake!” And so, when we were number ninety-eight in the queue, we’d go in instead of number forty-three, when it was exactly his turn to go in.

  We were embarrassed when Mom didn’t hear what was being said to her because she was hard of hearing, when she didn’t understand what was being said to her because she didn’t know Hebrew, or when she pretended not to hear or understand when it suited her not to hear or understand.

  When Mom shook her head vigorously, we knew that she didn’t understand a word of what was being explained to her, and we were obliged, in a loud voice and, of course, in Romanian, with all the world’s eyes on us, to explain to her what every baby understands in Hebrew.

  Most of all we were ashamed of our mother for not knowing Hebrew. Because the fact that she didn’t know Hebrew meant that my sister and I were forced to speak Romanian.

  Since in our house there were many more Sephardi friends than Ashkenazi, they learned in time to speak with Mom in Romanian, especially about food, of course. In our home no one quoted Bialik or Alterman; people weren’t familiar with the works of Shalom Aleichem, and apart from the occasional reference to Ben-Gurion, they all spoke about food.

  When Mom called us from the balcony, “Fila, Renutza, vinu smanchetz,” the whole of Stanton would mimic her. To this day it’s possible to wander through Stanton, which is now occupied only by Arabs, and hear my mother’s voice calling us in to eat in Romanian. We were so ashamed, and Mom couldn’t care less.

  Whenever Yael, our cousin on Dad’s side, came to our place for lunch, she was always served the smallest drumstick, and we wer
e ashamed of Mom and of Yael’s small drumstick. It made no difference even when we used camouflage tricks to swap our plates because Mom, as if suspecting something, would sit down next to us until we’d finished eating everything on our plate, and we’d swallow and suffer and choke and swear that one day we’d compensate Yael for all the pieces of chicken that our mother had denied her.

  On the other hand, when Yossi, our cousin on our mother’s side, came to visit us from Hedera, he was always given a piece of meat equal in size to ours; sometimes his portion was even larger than ours, and we were so pleased. Not only was Yossi from our mother’s side, he was also her oldest brother Niku’s youngest son, the child of his old age. Still, my impression was that Mom was doing her usual cold calculations, and taking into account the frequent vacations we spent in Hedera, she wanted to avoid a situation whereby in Hedera, we would be allocated the smallest drumstick.

  After she’d been nine days at home with pneumonia, and twelve days following Noa’s birth, the man returned, grim-faced, from the hospital. Noa had contracted an infection in her blood. They had changed her blood but were unable to overcome the infection. Her condition was serious.

  That evening her sister, who had just flown in from New York, came to visit and was horrified by the way she looked.

  “What’s happened?” she asked, suspecting that her sister had been to the hospital and was shocked by Noa’s critical condition.