Every House Needs a Balcony

by Rina Frank

  “You look like a shadow,” her sister said, and apologized for not having been able to change the time of her flight home to be with her through these difficult times.

  “It’s all right, Mom took care of me,” she told her sister.

  She climbed on the scales in the bathroom and discovered she had lost twenty pounds in nine days. More than two pounds a day; as if in solidarity with Noa, who wasn’t gaining any weight at all.

  The following morning they made their way to the hospital with the terrible feeling that there might no longer be anyone for them to caress through the windows of the incubator. For twenty-five tense minutes they didn’t exchange a word, all the way to Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot. It was if any unnecessary chatter would put their baby’s life in even greater danger. Out of breath, they arrived at the Children’s Department, and the man helped her tie on the green gown and fixed a surgical mask over her mouth, all the time propping her up to prevent her from collapsing; she had still not recovered from her pneumonia.

  Dr. Alkalai informed them that Noa’s condition was terminal. The airway that had been inserted in her mouth to allow air to flow in had become infected and caused gangrene in her face and oral cavity. The liver was distended, and the kidneys were not functioning. The baby was bloated from an excess of fluids, and if she did not pass water within the next twenty-four hours, she would not survive. Lack of oxygen was causing her to convulse, and it was hard to tell if there was any brain damage. He explained that she was receiving three types of antibiotics intravenously as well as plasma. “We are doing all we can; your baby is now in the hands of God,” the doctor added.

  They stood by the incubator for a long time, knowing that Noa was not aware of their presence. “Your baby is in good hands. There’s nothing more for you to do here today,” Dr. Alkalai said to them with unexpected gentleness for such a large man. “Her chances for survival are very slim, maybe only one percent. Only a miracle can save her. I hope you believe in miracles.”

  “What is the miracle supposed to look like?” she asked.

  “If she passes water during the next few hours, we’ll consider that a miracle,” Dr. Alkalai said again.

  The man wanted her to go back to her warm bed, but after some brief hesitation, they decided together to stay with their baby in the hospital. They went to the canteen for some tasteless, lukewarm coffee.

  When she called her sister to come to be with them, her brother-in-law informed her that her sister had gone to Haifa because her father’s condition had deteriorated and he had been taken to the hospital. With infinite selfishness, she thought only of herself; now she wouldn’t even be able to ask her mother to come to be with her.

  “Maybe it’s just as well we don’t have a telephone,” she said to her husband.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because that way you don’t get bad news,” she said. “We didn’t have a telephone in my parents’ home because we couldn’t afford one,” she told her husband as she sipped at the vile coffee, “and the only time someone called the neighbors and asked for me, it was to tell me that Varda’s sister had managed, finally, to commit suicide.”

  “Who’s Varda?” he asked, as if this was the most important question.

  “Do you remember the mother of a friend of mine that you donated blood for when they couldn’t find a vein in my arm in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem?”

  “So that’s Varda.”

  “No. That was her mother, who became very sick after her daughter, my friend Varda’s sister, had succeeded in killing herself. For a whole year she had been trying. Twice she walked into the sea and tried to drown herself; once she jumped from the third floor and only sustained some injuries; once she stood on the railway lines but lost her nerve at the last minute. The final time, she took an overdose of sleeping pills she’d been collecting for a year without her parents’ knowledge.”

  “But why?” he wondered.

  “She wanted to die,” she replied. “I was the only one that Varda told about her sister’s suicide attempts over the year. In the end she succeeded, and Varda called my neighbor to tell me that her sister had managed to do the deed. Those are the words she used to tell me.”

  “Did you get to go to the funeral?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied. “We had a SAT test the next day, and I hadn’t even started reviewing. So straight after that call, I sat down to study and didn’t stop until the exam. We had a break during the exam, and all the smokers dashed into the toilets to light up. Suddenly the principal walked into the girls’ lavatory, and we were all in there with cigarettes, and he asked us to step outside. As we started to walk out, terrified that he was planning to cancel our exam because he’d caught us smoking, he told me to stay behind, and after everyone else had left, he asked me how Varda was doing, knowing that I was her best friend.

  “I told him she was all right, and I was thinking only about how I could hide the waves of smoke that were rising from the cigarette I was hiding behind my back. I was hoping he might not notice all the smoke emanating from me.

  “‘Are you sure?’ he asked me.

  “‘Maybe things will be easier for them now,’ I said with the stupidity of an eighteen-year-old.

  “‘Do you think I could go to the shivah?’ the principal, who imposed his authority on the entire school, asked me.

  “‘Under different circumstances I would have said they’d be glad,’ I replied.

  “‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘you can go on smoking.’ And he walked out of the girls’ toilets. The school principal that a whole school was terrified of had revealed himself to be a sensitive and considerate person when asking me about Varda. It turned out that he genuinely cared for her and her family; and do you know what’s even sadder about this whole story? That school principal, who was quite old, had only one son, and that son died of cancer when he was only eighteen. An only child,” she said quietly.

  “Let’s talk about happier things,” he said to her.

  “What, for example?” she asked.

  “For example, that my parents are arriving next week to be with us,” he said.

  “Lovely,” she said, and in her heart she hoped she could cheer up for them.

  They were spending the night on a bench in the waiting room next to the Premature Babies Unit, locked in each other’s pain, when Dr. Mogilner shook them gently awake at four in the morning to tell them that a miracle had happened and Noa had passed water.

  “And what now?” the man asked the doctor.

  “Carry on praying,” he replied. “That germ has caused havoc, and we’re now going to have to repair all the damage. We seem to have overcome the infection in the blood, but the germ has settled in the face, because of the plaster that was holding the airway in place, and caused gangrene in the baby’s cheeks and oral cavity, which created a cleft in the palate and a severe ear infection.”

  Over the next three weeks, she turned up every morning at seven in the morning at the preemie unit, with the man joining her later after he’d finished his work; depressed, they returned home together to an empty house. He would fill a bath for her and massage her back, but he no longer trumpeted in her ear. Most of the time they were alone with the paralyzing fear and pain of the long wait. Her sister came for brief breaks from her father’s bedside—he had suffered a major stroke—to be with them; sometimes his sister stood next to her by the incubator but was no less helpless. His parents arrived for a ten-day stay, looked at Noa in the preemie unit, shook their heads, and said nothing. It was as if they feared that anything they said would only worsen the situation.

  All day and every day she sang to her daughter the song, “The prettiest girl in school has the prettiest eyes in school and the prettiest braids in school,” and it made no difference that Noa had no hair, and her braids hadn’t grown yet. Noa was the prettiest girl in the preemie unit, in spite of the bandages on her face, and she never stopped singing her that wonderful song. She wasn’t particular
ly familiar with the words of other songs, never having been a great fan of all those sing-alongs, and on school trips when everyone sang their beautiful-Israel folk songs, she would quietly hum Beatles tunes or Cliff Richard songs. Then Yudit Ravitz appeared on the scene and restored her self-respect with “The Prettiest Girl in School” and provided her with proof that she too was prepared to sing songs whose words touched her soul.

  The doctors and nurses treated Noa with a devotion that was nothing short of heartwarming. Five times a day they performed suction on her, draining the pus from her vocal cavity and ears, but sometimes they had to prick her three or four times a day before they found a vein for an intravenous dose of plasma or antibiotics, or just for a daily blood test. It is inhuman for a young mother to have to watch her minuscule baby, less than seven pounds in weight, being subjected to needle pricks in her head several times a day. It is inhuman even for an experienced mother. In time, she learned from the intensity of Noa’s crying which of her caregivers had a magic touch that caused her less pain, and firmly refused to allow any inexperienced intern to stick needles into her baby.

  Every such prick and every cry cut straight to her soul. She thought to herself that if it were possible to examine someone’s soul under a microscope, they’d find in hers a myriad of cuts and scratches, equal in number to the times that Noa had been pricked.

  One day when Noa opened her mouth wide as if trying to shout to everybody to stop hurting her, she noticed suddenly that her daughter had no uvula.

  “She has no uvula,” she pointed out to Zohara, the head nurse.

  “No uvula?” asked the nurse.

  “That little grape in the very back of the mouth,” she said, reminding the nurse what a uvula was.

  “Ah, yes. That’s right, we’d noticed. But don’t worry, there’s no medical significance to a uvula.”

  Still, she asked Dr. Alkalai about the uvula’s role in the human body, but he too insisted that, as far as they knew, the uvula had no medical significance.

  On Friday morning, three weeks later, she entered the ward and stopped still as a block of salt. The space in which Noa’s incubator had stood was empty, and she already knew from all those weeks in the hospital that an empty space meant that the baby hadn’t survived the night. She remained standing in the empty space. Frozen. Until Zohara, the charming nurse she had taken a shine to from the very beginning, noticed her. Zohara was feeding a baby girl or boy in an incubator near the widow. Noticing her puzzled expression, Zohara smiled and called her over to join her by the window.

  “We’ve moved Noa to be near the window so she can soak up some sun. Come, you can finish feeding her through the feeding tube.” She walked to the window hesitantly, trying to bring herself back to life, and saw the sun’s rays painting Noa’s naked body with a pinkish tinge, as if only half an hour in the sun had already given her a slight tan. Even her bandaged face had taken on a pinkish hue.

  “She feels a lot better today, so we decided to move her to the light,” Zohara explained, and passed her baby to her.

  “Thank you,” she said to Zohara, but she was talking to God.

  She glanced at the lawns outside the window and prayed for the day when she would be able to dance out there with her Noa, who would no longer be connected to pipes and tubes and blood transfusions.

  That evening was Purim, and they went to her sister’s for a holiday meal. Her sister had brought their mother over from Haifa, to give her some respite from sitting vigil at their father’s hospital bedside. Bianca told them she had spent the morning at the cave of the Prophet Elijah, where she prayed for the safety and full recovery of her sick husband and baby granddaughter.

  When they arrived back home, she told her husband that she wished to donate the thousand-dollar gift they had received from his aunt and uncle in Paris for Noa’s birth to the Premature Babies Unit at the hospital. He didn’t object, even though she knew he had wanted to use the money to buy a video camera.

  The next morning, a Saturday, five-week-old Noa smiled at them for the first time. It was only on them, her parents, that Noa bestowed her grateful smile. Whenever anyone else approached her, a doctor or a nurse in a green surgical gown, Noa would start crying, as if knowing that she was about to be pricked again.

  “Well, they all look like something from outer space,” her man said to amuse her. “I too would be crying all day if I had all those green people wandering around under my feet.”

  She picked her daughter up in her arms and glanced toward the round window of the preemie unit, where she saw a clown waving at her. She looked at him and thought she must be hallucinating; how did a clown land in the hospital straight out of the blue? The clown waved his arms at her and pulled some funny faces. He signaled to her to come up close, and when she stepped out toward him, he handed her a very shiny blue balloon. She saw that the letters on the balloon read, “I love you, Mommy.”

  “This is for you,” said the clown. She stared at him in disbelief and saw three more clowns wandering around the wards, handing out balloons and candy to the children. And then she remembered that today was Purim. She returned to the preemie unit and tied the balloon to Noa’s blood transfusion stand.

  Noa smiled at them again and at the bright blue shining balloon.

  At midnight their neighbor knocked on the door and said that there was an urgent phone call for them, and when, with trembling hands, she picked up the receiver, her sister told her that their father had died. She started to cry, and when her husband grasped her shoulders, afraid she would collapse, she said that it was a relief—a relief that it wasn’t Noa, and a relief that her father’s share of suffering was over.

  Circus Madrano

  At long last, the Circus Madrano arrived in town. Every year it went first to Tel Aviv, then to Jerusalem, and finally, to Haifa, even though Haifa is the most beautiful city in Israel.

  It was the same as the military parade on Independence Day; first it went to Jerusalem, our capital city, then to Tel Aviv, before ending up in Haifa.

  My sister and I wanted to wear the clothes we’d received from Fima and Sami’s last shipment from America to the circus. But Dad said he was very sorry, because the butcher who had promised him two tickets to the circus in return for the lovely sign he had painted over the door of his store hadn’t been able in the end to obtain the tickets that he was supposed to have received from his brother-in-law who worked for the municipality.

  My sister was crestfallen, and I straightaway lied to my dad and said that I couldn’t care less about that stupid circus, so he shouldn’t get heartsick for not having the money to take his darling daughters to the circus. I looked him straight in the eyes, to stop him from feeling that I was really disappointed to death.

  The next afternoon, as we were outside playing our usual game of hide-and-seek, Fila told me that we were going to the circus on our own.

  “But we’re not dressed nicely,” I said.

  “We can’t get in anyway. We’ll just walk around, maybe get a glimpse of the elephants,” my sister told me.

  Back and forth we circled, until suddenly we saw a tiny hole in the fence.

  A hole in the wall is an open invitation to a thief—that’s exactly what that hole looked like.

  We couldn’t make up our minds what to do. Should we continue circling, or should we steal our way into the circus? Suddenly my sister grabbed my hand hard and dragged me after her through the hole in the fence.

  I was horrified. Of the two of us, Fila was the coward. Where did she get the nerve to steal into the circus, when it’s obvious to everyone that the place is crawling with police all waiting just to nab kids who have stolen in illegally and take them back to their parents and make them ashamed of themselves? My sister ordered me to keep my back straight, the way she forced me to practice at home, walking with books on my head so I wouldn’t develop a hunchback like Avram from the grocery store. We walked through the circus like a couple of robots, taking tiny steps l
ike Japanese ladies and pretending not to be looking from side to side in fear. When we reached a water faucet, we rinsed our faces and passed damp hands through our hair and clothing so as to smooth over the poverty, and continued walking straight-backed and trembling with fear, mingling with the happy crowds.

  There was an intermission, so everyone was wandering around with cotton candy, balloons, nibbles, and red toffee apples, and all to the magical sound of the music that they always play in circuses.

  Suddenly we saw Auntie Lika and Uncle Max looming up in front of us. Auntie Lika was Mom’s oldest sister, and they lived in a house in Givat Olga with a garden full of fruit trees. My sister made me swear not to reveal the fact that we had stolen in, so they wouldn’t tell on us, and when they asked us if we were enjoying ourselves so far, my sister exhibited amazing acumen and I nodded my head briskly, not uttering a word.

  Then my wise sister told them she’d run out of patience and couldn’t wait to see the second half of the show, which was absolutely true.

  Max took some money out of his pocket and gave it to us to buy ourselves some cotton candy or a lollipop.

  I was over the moon with joy; not only were we getting to see the circus without its costing our dad any money, but we were also going to have some cotton candy. It was the absolute fulfillment of all our dreams.

  We said good-bye to Auntie Lika and Uncle Max, and I made straight for the cotton candy stand. But Fila pulled me back hard—she was, after all, a year and eight months older and therefore stronger than me—and explained that we still weren’t out of danger, and anyway we looked suspicious in our faded clothes that came from the parcel Sami and Fima had received from their relatives in America, and any minute a policeman could turn up and catch us out as soon as he asked to see the tickets we didn’t have.

  “So what are we going to do?” I asked my older sister who had stolen us into the circus, and she explained that with the money we had received from Uncle Max, we had to buy a shiny silver balloon, the kind of balloon that is very expensive and prestigious and only rich people can afford, and with a balloon like that in our possession, she believed, no one would ever suspect that we were underprivileged and had stolen into the circus.