Every House Needs a Balcony

by Rina Frank

  “What’s new about your procedure?” they asked Dr. Marshak.

  “I plan to make an incision below the palate, bring it down, and saw through the bone from inside. This way there is no danger of the nose getting blocked again. And at the same time, I shall sew up the hole in her palate.” He smiled at them.

  “And how long with the operation take?” the man asked.

  “About four hours. She’s a very small baby, which makes it much more complicated to operate on her,” explained the consultant surgeon.

  With trembling hands, they signed the consent forms, declaring that they would have no claims if—God forbid—the operation did not succeed.

  Noa was taken to the operating theater at eight in the morning. And when she went to the lavatory for a pee, she saw that the bowl was full of blood. From fear, she had peed blood.

  Two hours later, Dr. Marshak came out and informed the worried parents that the operation had been a success, and they could go into the recovery room to be with their daughter.

  “What about the hole in her palate?” the man asked the doctor, who was well pleased with himself.

  “For me this was the aperitif,” he answered haughtily.

  They watched her breathing on her own, her face relaxed, without the pain of constantly having to fight for every scrap of air. After five days in hospital, they went home with Noa, and within just a month she had gained over two pounds in weight. By the time she was two she had made up all the discrepancies.

  Riots in Wadi Salib

  My sister stayed at home to reread Little Women, and I went upstairs to our Syrian neighbors to play ball with Rocha.

  Since we didn’t own a ball, we made do with a watermelon. I sat on the edge of one bed, and Rocha sat opposite me on the other bed.

  Unlike our own room, which was crammed to overflowing with stuff, the room occupied by the children upstairs contained only beds and nothing else. There was no table, no sewing machine, and no closet; only beds and a floor that was so shiny it could be eaten off of, as my mother used to say.

  I didn’t dare enter the room occupied by Nissim and Bracha. I was terrified of Nissim, who used to beat his kids with a belt, one after the other.

  When my dad explained to Nissim that child beating was a useless way to raise children, Nissim replied that when he was a child in Syria, his father had also beaten him, and in fact it hadn’t done him any harm. According to him, if you beat your kids, you are making them resilient and more able to face the harshness of life ahead.

  I threw the watermelon to Rocha from the edge of the bed I was sitting on, and she threw it back from the bed opposite. I threw it again, and she threw it back harder. I threw it harder than she did, and she got up on the bed and threw it to me with all the strength of a seven-year-old.

  Rocha was a year and a half younger than me, and I got annoyed, wondering where this little kid could have gotten the strength to throw an exceptionally heavy watermelon.

  I stood up on the bed and used all my strength to throw the watermelon, and missed. It fell on the clean floor that you could eat off and exploded into tiny red bits all over the room.

  Bracha came into the room and saw the bits of burst watermelon all over the floor, and I was sure she’d go out to get her husband’s belt and thrash me for ruining the big watermelon they had bought to eat when they got back from the beach on Saturday.

  But Bracha called all her children to come up home immediately and told me to go down and call my mother and sister and to come back with them. Mom was in the middle of preparing a pot of mamaliga, and I told her to leave everything and come upstairs with me, otherwise Bracha would beat me with Nissim’s belt.

  My sister agreed to lay down Little Women for a few minutes, and we went up together to the second floor.

  When we walked into the room, Bracha and her children were sitting on the floor, eating the watermelon that was smeared all over the room. Bracha invited us to join in, as it had been an especially large watermelon, and we sat down with the others and started feasting.

  My mother was right. It was perfectly OK to eat off Bracha’s clean floor, which she got down on all fours to scrub every single day, even if the end of the world was nigh.

  Dad taught Bracha how to play rummy, and she would sometimes join them as a fifth hand in a game. Why only a fifth hand? So she shouldn’t, God forbid, spoil the game. Because if Nissim came home suddenly and called down for her to come straight home, she would spring up in fright from the table and leave behind all the rummy cubes. She would run upstairs quickly before he went crazy and shouted at her to stop wasting all her time playing rummy all day with those Romanians. Bracha was always doing things for Nissim, taking off his shoes and smiling at him, as if she even liked him.

  The last time they played rummy, Dad persuaded Bracha to tell Nissim that the next time he raised his hand to her, she wouldn’t give him any at night. I don’t know what Bracha said to Nissim about no longer giving him any at night, but the fact is that it worked. Nissim stopped beating Bracha and only continued beating an education into his children with a belt. I never understood why they too couldn’t threaten not to give him any at night so he’d stop whipping them.

  By turning our home into a shelter for every battered woman or child who needed it, my dad effectively invented late-1970s feminism on Stanton Street.

  Opposite us lived the Abbas family from Morocco, a family of twelve with everyone beating everyone else. The parents beat the children, the older children beat the younger children, and the younger children beat the babies. They all wanted to grow up quickly so they could beat the next-in-line sibling.

  And of course, all the older and younger children got whipped by the parents.

  My sister used to visit them and warned us not to dare go into their lavatory, even if we were dying to go, because we could fall into the hole. In our building on Stanton, all the lavatories had bowls, but across the road at the Abbas family’s apartment the lavatory consisted of a hole in the floor. My sister explained that we were liable to be sucked down into the black hole when were doing our business.

  Sima once asked Sefi where she thought the black hole led to, and my sister, who knew everything, told her, “To Auschwitz.”

  The apartment on the other side of the first-floor staircase—the floor we lived on—was occupied by Yeheskel the Pole. Yeheskel had a savings-and-loan hairstyle. He’d grow his hair long on one side and borrow it to drape over his head and cover his bald patch over to the other side, where it refused to grow. Yeheskel had two albino children, twins who refused to eat. Yeheskel used to take them out to our fancy yard, the private playground that belonged exclusively to 40 Stanton; he sat them on the stone step and let them watch us at play. He would ask us to hold a handstand competition, and as the small, very albino children were watching us in admiration, he would shove a dubious-looking brown porridge into their mouths. No wonder the albinos didn’t want to eat. It looked so repulsive, the poor kids spewed it out in disgust as soon at it passed their lips. Yeheskel or his wife would scoop up the now even browner porridge spewed up by the twins and continued feeding them the vomited-up mixture as if nothing had happened. Although I loathed the parents, I would always do the splits for the albino kids whenever they asked me to, because I felt really sorry for them and the way they were being force-fed. When the albino twins had finished eating, we all dispersed, each to his or her own home, because it was time for the sacred afternoon siesta between two and four. My sister and I went to eat our chorba soup, whenever the neighboring Mizrahi girls were invited; the Abbas family to their mufleta; the albinos had already eaten their vomit; only at Marina’s we never knew what was being eaten, because we never got invited.

  Marina was a model; I’m not sure if by profession, but certainly by the way she looked. She was blond, tall, and very pretty. She even behaved like a model, and I have no doubt that if Calvin Klein had known her today, he would have signed her on for life, since Marina was so
thin as to be transparent. Because she was obsessed with cleanliness, Marina never allowed her daughter Nava to play with us. Nava had inherited her mother’s transparency, but where her mother was serious, the girl smiled a lot and was very cheerful and impish. As soon as Nava came home from school she’d be placed straight into the bath, where she was scrubbed clean as if she were a horse after a wild, sweaty gallop. Her mother removed every grain of dirt that might have attached itself to the girl in school, including under her fingernails and behind her ears. When Marina had finished scouring her daughter, who was probably transparent from all that scrubbing as well, she fed her some fruit and sent her to bed. Nava was never fed hot food at home, only in school, because Marina didn’t want to dirty the stove with cooking. She was sensitive to gas and to cleanliness. After her afternoon rest, Marina allowed Nava to sit on the balcony and watch how we street children played. Of course she was never allowed to go down to the street to play with us, so as not to get dirty. Nor was she allowed to invite children home, since children make a mess. If Marina had been able to avoid sending Nava to school altogether, she would no doubt have done so, but she couldn’t because of the compulsory education law. In Wadi Salib, the compulsory education law was sacrosanct; since most of the wadi’s inhabitants had not gone to school in their countries of origin, it didn’t occur to them to send their own children to school now they were in Israel. But when school inspectors began appearing at their homes and they discovered that in order to integrate and learn Hebrew it was their duty to provide their children with an education, the parents capitulated. Moreover, in school, their kids were given a free ten o’clock meal of chocolate milk and fruit and a hot dinner, which was definitely worthwhile.

  Even we Ashkenazis were considered low-class by Marina; to her it made no difference that we were white and didn’t look like those other black barbarians. The fact remained that Nava was never allowed to play with us Romanian girls, either.

  I would watch her little face peeping through the bars of her roof apartment, watching us with envy, watching the neighborhood children playing in the street, seeing the promised land but unable to go down to it.

  When we asked Dad to do something for that poor girl, he just shrugged and said, “There’s nothing I can do, that’s the way she came back from the Holocaust.”

  And the story goes that Marina, who was a girl of about sixteen in the death camp, transparent and very beautiful, was the camp whore, fulfilling the sexual needs of the Gestapo officers. When the war was over, she spent her life scrubbing herself, trying in vain to clean her body—as well as that of her little daughter, who never knew who her father was—of the Nazi filth. I don’t know how Marina found her way to our building in the first place, since it had been meant to house police personnel, but she was also the first to move out.

  One evening Dad seemed sad and told us that policemen had shot at someone who was running wild in a café, and that there would probably be trouble.

  The next morning we awoke to shouting and rioting in the street. We all went out to the balcony and saw, from the bottom of the street, a mass of people moving upward, bearing black flags and our national blue-and-white flag, stained with blood.

  They threw stones at all the houses in which Ashkenazis lived, and Lutzi told us to get inside immediately because they’d be near our house soon and would throw stones at us too.

  We all went in, except for my dad, who continued to stand alone on the balcony, watching his neighborhood friends running amok.

  Mom shouted to him to get inside immediately, but Dad refused.

  “I’d like to see anyone dare throw stones at me,” he said. “I’m one of them, after all.”

  We stood peeping out of the window and saw the masses approaching our building, 40 Stanton.

  Suddenly someone shouted: No one touches Franco’s house.

  “He’s one of ours, he’s Romanian.”

  And they all continued to march up the street toward the Hadar neighborhood, throwing stones at anyone they suspected of being Ashkenazi. They skipped our house.

  OK, you don’t have to be a genius to figure that out—my dad genuinely wasn’t Ashkenazi.

  “I want to move,” she told her husband during one of their quarrels, which had become more frequent over the last year, the fifth of their marriage. “I’m cut off here from the rest of the world. I don’t have a phone, and because I want you to get home from work early, I don’t even have a car; there are no shops within walking distance or cafés anywhere nearby, not even a decent supermarket, and I’m stuck here in a roof apartment with God, who doesn’t give a shit about me.”

  “But we’ve only lived here for two and a half years,” he replied.

  “That’s two and a half years too many,” she countered. “It was a mistake, and we’ve paid for it long enough.”

  “Let’s give the place another chance. They’ll be developing the area soon,” he said with infinite patience.

  “I don’t want to give the place a chance!” she screamed at her husband. “I need an apartment that has some connection to life and is close to the hospital. You just can’t imagine the fear I live in whenever you’re away from here with the car. What’s going to happen to Noa? What’ll happen if she suddenly doesn’t feel well?”

  “In Barcelona we moved only once during my entire life,” he said, reciting his credo.

  “You obviously didn’t need any more than that,” she said. “I want to move close to my sister; it’ll help me with Noa’s care. You, all evening you’re stuck behind your desk doing those little private jobs of yours. You don’t do nearly enough to share the burden of a sick child.”

  “I have to support the two of you,” he said, “and I do all those silly extra jobs so we’ll be able to see out the month. You know how important it is for me to get on in my profession, start a business of my own; I don’t want to feel I’m a loser.”

  But she was concerned only with Noa’s illness. After the operation, Noa was able to breath through her nose and did indeed gain weight, trying to make up for a whole year of no growth, but she was still in need of heavy medication and frequent outpatient visits to the hospital, where she received intravenous immunoglobulin treatment to stabilize her immune system. They used to return from hospital after a long day of treatments, and she would scrub Noa in the bath, cleaning the hospital off her. Then she would fill the bath for herself and climb in, dead tired.

  Over the years that her daughter was receiving treatment in the oncology/hematology department, she often encountered child cancer patients, who would no longer be there on her next visit. Whenever she heard that a child had died, she felt deeply depressed, full of fears. All her frustration, anger, and helplessness, she turned against their roof apartment and its lack of telephone, and against anyone else who crossed her path.

  The more she talked about moving house in ever-increasing bouts of hysteria, the more closed and introverted he became, telling her only that until she stopped being hysterical, he had nothing to say to her.

  They were in the car when one of their quarrels broke out, on their way to the Davush beach, where they had planned to meet up with her sister and her family. It was a Saturday morning.

  “I am not hysterical, and I want to move house. Otherwise I’ll jump off the roof with Noa in my arms,” she threatened.

  “I don’t understand how you could have turned into—” He cut himself short.

  “What have I turned into?” she asked in astonishment.

  “Your mother. Her whole life, the only things she ever cared about were her daughters. She didn’t care about her husband, she didn’t care about herself, and she cared about nothing else. Only her daughters.”

  “Are you trying to say that I don’t care about you?” she asked him.

  “You don’t have time for me, and you don’t care about me,” he replied. “You are always, but always, tired at night, and I don’t even dare come anywhere near you.”

  “You are s
o right. At this point in time, sex is just not at the top of my agenda,” she said.

  “Your ‘at this point in time’ has been going on for over two years,” he retorted.

  “What are you complaining about? I cook you the food you like; you come home to an apartment that is clean and well cared for, even when I’ve been with Noa at the hospital all day long. Your clothes are always laundered and ironed. You never have to feed or wash your daughter, because I’ve already done it. What more can I do for you?” she asked. “But when I’ve been asking you for a whole week already to change a lightbulb in the bedroom, you say there isn’t a spare bulb to be found. So damn well go and buy a new one and change the fucking lightbulb that died on us a week ago.”

  “You’re being hysterical again,” he said, but she went on shouting.

  “And if I tell you even before the beginning of summer that the roof needs seeing to before it gets really hot, it takes you almost two months and only at the end of summer, after Noa and I have almost melted from the heat under the hot tin roof, for you to deign to do it. And even then, it takes two successive Saturdays. Saturdays, the only days on which you can give me some breathing space.”

  “You see, that’s what I’m talking about. You’re always whining to me. If I don’t do something, then why don’t I do it, and when I do eventually do something, why does it take me so long. It’s impossible to get out from under you. It’s a big roof. It can’t be done in just one day.”

  “Oh, yes,” she hissed. “So how come our neighbors managed to get theirs done in three hours?”

  “Because they just poured on some paint and smeared it around with a broom,” he replied.