Every House Needs a Balcony

by Rina Frank

  They put their apartment up for sale, and she started doing the rounds of realtors in Ramat Aviv. To exchange a roof apartment in Rishon le Zion for a four-room apartment with no balcony in Ramat Aviv, they would have to add twenty thousand dollars. She told her husband that they could make do with three rooms, but he insisted that he needed a study in which to do the extra work he was obliged to bring home. To her surprise, his parents agreed to the necessary sum, and his mother told her over the phone that she had never understood how they had survived so long in a place that was so cut off from civilization. At long last, after a two-and-a-half-year wait, they finally received a telephone line, which made it possible to respond to potential buyers. After seeing a variety of properties that were above their budget, she walked into an especially neglected four-room apartment and managed to bargain the price down to a sum that would leave them with five thousand dollars to fix it up and another three thousand to cover the mandatory betterment tax.

  Her husband agreed that the apartment, with its open vistas on all sides, had loads of potential, but that renovation would cost them much more money than they had.

  She persuaded him that they would repair only where absolutely necessary, and they bought the apartment; at the same time they sold their roof apartment to a very nice Argentinean couple. The entire transaction was negotiated and finalized within three months.

  When she went to the betterment tax office to check how much they were required to pay on the apartment, the clerk told her that they were entitled to a tax exemption for one apartment, since her husband was a new immigrant. He calculated the price of the new apartment and showed her the total of three thousand dollars they were required to pay.

  “And how much betterment tax are we supposed to pay on the Rishon le Zion apartment?” she asked the clerk.

  “You don’t have to pay,” the kindly clerk explained to her patiently. “You’re exempt from paying on one apartment.”

  “Still, how much is the betterment tax on the Rishon le Zion apartment?” she asked again.

  The clerk calculated the cost of the apartment they had bought three years before, subtracted, added; raised the interest, multiplied by a third, and arrived at the sum of one thousand dollars.

  “Is that the final sum?” she asked him.

  “A thousand dollars,” he said. “That’s the sum, but I must repeat that you are entitled to a tax exemption on one apartment.”

  “Good,” she said to him. “So I shall now pay you one thousand dollars betterment tax on the Rishon le Zion apartment, and I’ll take the exemption we’re entitled to for the new apartment.”

  “Suit yourself,” said the kindly clerk, and she went home thrilled at having in one instant earned a new kitchen for her new home.

  She then called Kushi, who was a Jerusalem building contractor, and asked him for a quote for breaking down walls between the kitchen and living room, between the living room and the extra room, and between the bathroom and the small balcony.

  “In Barcelona you quarreled with me because our living room was too big, and here you want to enlarge the living room?” said her husband, who objected to knocking down walls.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I’m inconsistent. Nothing I can do about it, I’m a woman.”

  “And how much does Kushi want for the renovation?” he asked.

  “He told me not to worry,” she replied.

  “I am extremely worried when I am told not to worry,” her husband said, and she agreed with him, except when it concerned Kushi.

  Kushi came down from Jerusalem with three workers, who worked on the apartment for a full month while she wandered about freely under their feet, happy that for the first time she was able on most days to leave Noa in a day care center, except for the days they had to spend in the hospital.

  Her husband had joined a well-known firm of architects and, to her joy, left the entire renovation project in her hands. Her sister came over and offered architectural advice that she immediately adopted without telling her husband that these were her sister’s ideas.

  Kushi brought some weed, and between smoking and breaking down walls, they sat back and examined the results, rolling about laughing. She began to feel that she was getting her life back and even agreed to go out a couple of times, galloping over the sand dunes in Kushi’s truck, letting the wind dry away her tears. She loved the platonic relationship she shared with Kushi, who brought back to her those feelings she’d had as a girl.

  “Why do we lose our minds when we get married?” she asked him as they watched the waves on a wet winter’s day.

  “I never lost my mind,” he replied. “I only ever do what I want to do.”

  “OK, you have that prerogative,” she said, meaning that it was also because he was a man, and because he made a lot of money as a building contractor, and especially because—thank God—he had two healthy daughters and a wife to raise them with unbounded love.

  She told Kushi that she had forgotten how she had once been. “Nowadays, everything I do, I have to consider if it’ll please my husband or not, and I don’t like what I’ve become. I don’t even know what kind of work I want to do. I don’t want to go back to the boring drawing board that never suited me in the first place, and I don’t know what I should do with myself.”

  Kushi, who as usual had the knack of explaining things to her about herself that she hadn’t known before, told her that she decided to study architecture at the school for architects only because her sister had studied architecture at the Technion. “I’ve never understood why you thought you were less talented than she is,” he said, and added that as a profession architecture suited her sister but not her.

  They finished the work after a month, and she loved what she saw. The small apartment had transformed into a single large space. Of the original three bedrooms, only two remained, theirs and Noa’s. The bathroom had become a kingdom in its own right once she had joined the small balcony to it, and after the walls had been tiled with local marble, the room took on a Mediterranean look, with clean and simple lines.

  “How much do I owe you?” she asked Kushi, and he replied that it was a gift from him to Noa.

  When she insisted, he agreed to accept only the cost of labor, which added up to the sum she had budgeted for in the first place, but what they had now was a spacious apartment beautifully designed in the best of taste.

  She told her husband about Kushi’s gift, and he found it strange that she had agreed to accept something like this from a friend. She told him that anything regarding Kushi could never be construed as strange, and went on to tell him that Kushi had offered—when she was eighteen—to make her a gift of her baby, so she wouldn’t have to have an abortion.

  “What do you mean, your baby?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I told you that I got pregnant by my first boyfriend, Israel. Well, Kushi, who was an officer cadet with the Paratroop Division at the time, offered to marry me so I could keep the baby and then divorce him whenever I wanted. He thought I really wanted that baby, and what he offered was financial backing so I’d be able to raise it. If you ask me, that gift was much more special than this one,” she told her husband.

  “And why didn’t you accept?” her husband asked.

  “Because Kushi was wrong. I didn’t want Israel’s baby. You’re the first man I ever knew that I wanted to have a baby with.” Her husband hugged her and lifted her in his arms as they entered their new bedroom. Afterward he whispered to her that the renovation had come out extremely well. He said it in Spanish, to avoid making mistakes in Hebrew.

  She loved the new apartment even though it didn’t have a balcony. She especially loved the fact that there were lots of beautiful parks in the area where she could spend afternoons with Noa; and her sister and mother now lived close by. She felt that now—just maybe—after two and a half years, life was once again smiling on her.

  She went for a job interview at the International Bank and was accepted. She
wanted to work with people and still be home in the afternoons with Noa, and she had to work only two evenings a week. When she asked her husband to stay with Noa two evenings a week, he explained that he’d only recently started in this new job and he couldn’t very well leave at three thirty in the afternoon, so she hired a young student, who fell in love at first sight with Noa, and felt quite safe when she left for work in the afternoon.

  The bank manager was aware of Noa’s condition and didn’t bother her when she had to take her to the hospital for tests or treatment.

  She advanced quickly in the bank, and within a year she was already behind a desk in the stocks and bonds department. She decided that Kushi was right; it was quite likely that she, and not only her sister, was successful.

  In the bank she had several regular clients who insisted on dealing only with her; and then there were also those who pursued her passionately. She rejected them all, but admitted to herself that she felt once again like a woman. Flattered that she was desirable both in her job and as a woman, she was unable to share her feelings with her husband, whose professional success had fallen short of his expectations when he arrived in Israel. She tried to suggest subtly that he might consider switching to another profession, as she had done, but he insisted sharply that he had spent five years studying the profession he loved and had no intention at this stage of giving it up. A profession, he said, is not an apartment that you can change. Why not? she asked.

  One evening she asked him if he regretted that they had immigrated to Israel, while in Barcelona people who had studied with him were advancing at a much greater pace. He replied that he liked living in Israel, and that his time would also come, one day. But he was visibly upset by the fact that her sister was on the verge of success, and her highly impressive presentation had earned her a commission to design the Kodak building; she watched as her six-feet-tall husband shrank in stature before her very eyes. In their married life the cracks began to widen, as if in a badly renovated building.

  She enjoyed his parents’ annual visits to Israel, when he allowed himself to relax. She was the perfect hostess and often invited his sister and her family to join them in family meals.

  On one of his parents’ visits, his mother asked her if she wasn’t thinking of having another baby. She looked at the older woman in disbelief and told her that Noa needed all the time she could devote to her. His mother tried to tell her gently that in her opinion, she should be open to other things too.

  Her own mother used to look at her sadly and then at Noa and sigh, her look saying, “I am here for you, my daughter.”

  This is the way you raised me, her eyes responded to her mother.

  In the mornings she always arose early to cook Noa’s lunch, because she wanted her daughter to eat fresh food every day. She did the laundry, hung it out to dry, woke Noa, dressed and fed her, made her a sandwich, took her to her nursery school, and then rushed off to work. At the same time, her husband would wake up reluctant to go to work and spend half an hour in their lovely bathroom. On the few mornings that she wanted him to get up early and get Noa ready for nursery school, it was so difficult to wake him that by the time she arrived at the bank, she was tense and angry. In the evenings, she laid into him for spending all his time in his study, seeing only to his own affairs and not taking into consideration that there might be all kinds of other things to take care of in the house, including a little girl who would benefit from having a story read to her at bedtime, to help her development.

  “I don’t read Hebrew well enough,” he said, knowing that she was actually referring to the fact that her brother-in-law read each of his daughters a whole book every evening, even though the younger one was only six months old.

  “All right, then, you do the dishes, and I’ll read her a story,” she would suggest to him, but when she saw the piles of dishes still in the sink at eleven o’clock at night, while he was still in his study, she attacked them angrily, deliberately making as much noise as she could, so as to disturb him. He would stomp over irately, asking what difference it made to her if he did the dishes at one in the morning, and she’d reply that it would then be altogether impossible to wake him up in the morning.

  “What do you want from me? Just ask for whatever you want,” he would say feebly in the end.

  “I shouldn’t have to ask you to do things. You should be able to see for yourself what needs doing and what doesn’t,” she would say.

  “What am I asking of you already? That you tell me what it is you want me to do to help you?” he’d repeat.

  “That’s just it—you see it as helping me, while I want you to share the work with me and not have to wait for me to issue orders. It’s embarrassing,” she said in Hebrew, and he asked her what “embarrassing” meant. Noa started crying, and she didn’t want the child to think of herself as a burden.

  She particularly loathed asking him to take Noa to the hospital in her place, because she too couldn’t absent herself from work too frequently. There was a limit, after all, to her boss’s patience in the matter. He told her that at his job he had to inform them at least a week in advance, and he really didn’t like doing it. She really didn’t want Noa growing up with parents who were constantly bickering over who had to do what.

  At least her parents’ quarrels had always been around her father’s squandering and her mother’s fear that there would not be enough for the girls’ dowry. She had married her husband because she loved him, so why the hell did she have to feel as if she was his sergeant major, delegating chores all day long? Why couldn’t he decide for himself what he had to do?

  “Maybe we should get divorced,” she suggested.

  “Why?” He was shocked.

  “Because there is something wrong between us,” she said.

  “It’s normal,” he said. “They say that all couples go through a crisis after seven years of marriage.”

  “It didn’t happen to my sister,” she said quietly, “and with us it only seems to get worse as time goes by.”

  “I don’t understand why you are forever complaining. Lots of people in the office tell me that I am a model husband.”

  She was completely taken aback by this. “How do they know what kind of a husband you are?” she asked.

  “I work with them all day, don’t I? They see me calling you at work every day to ask how you are, and in the afternoons when you are at work, I call the babysitter and have a long conversation with her to make sure that Noa is all right. Every Friday I bring you flowers. How many husbands do you know who bring their wives flowers after seven years of marriage? I never forget your birthday or our wedding anniversary.”

  “Well, thank you very much for that, really,” she replied.

  “You see. I can’t even hold a conversation with you, without you putting me down with your cynicism.”

  She looked at him and felt like giving him a good slap, but she didn’t like to because he really did remember her birthday, whereas she had forgotten his. He even remembered her sister and brother-in-law’s birthdays, and those of her nieces, and she herself was really bad at these things.

  “I don’t know what else to do,” she said to her sister, weeping, “he’s so hard to live with. I sometimes think that it must be because of the differences in mentality between us. Because of our different upbringing.” Her sister said she didn’t think that was the reason.

  “So what is the reason?” she asked her sister, who replied that she thought it was simply that he couldn’t keep up with her. “You are quick to solve problems, and you have initiative, while he is heavy and hesitant and slow to decide, and it drives you crazy. Do you remember that neighbor of ours, Albert, in our house in downtown on Hadekalim Street, how he kept on harassing you?”

  “Of course I remember. Why have you suddenly brought him up?”

  “You were only twelve, and he was forever lying in wait for you in the staircase and trying to fumble with you, and you were resourceful enough not to go
to whining to Dad but to go straight to his wife and threaten her that if her husband didn’t stop harassing you, you’d go to the police. And he stopped immediately.”

  “Sure.” She started laughing. “I knew he’d be more afraid of his wife than of Dad.”

  “And you were only twelve,” her sister reminded her. “I’m sure that now, too, you’ll find a way to sort out your problems.”

  “It takes two to tango,” she told her sister.

  And one day she noticed that he had spent much longer than half an hour in the bath and emerged perfumed from top to toe and whistling a happy tune.

  “I’ve noticed that you don’t like me working at home in the evenings,” he told her, “so I’ve decided to take on another job. I’ll be home late.”

  “Has something good happened?” she asked, and he gave her a peck on the cheek and asked if one had to have a special reason to be in a good mood. For two weeks he whistled and hummed and set off for work even before she had finished dressing and feeding Noa; and when he returned home at ten o’clock in the evening, she asked him if he had a mistress.

  “Are you crazy?” He was horrified. “Can’t a guy be in a good mood without being suspected of having taken a mistress?” he said and added that from then on he would be returning home every evening at ten o’clock because he had decided to work longer hours at his second job.

  The next day she called him at his second office at seven in the evening, and he answered. She was immediately filled with remorse; her husband was working extra hours to increase their income, and she was suspecting him of having an affair.

  On Friday he brought her flowers as usual, and she suggested that they take a holiday abroad, since they’d now have some spare cash. “I can leave Noa with my sister,” she said, and he replied that he was just about to suggest joining a group of his friends from work, who were organizing a vacation at Club Med in Ahziv.