Every House Needs a Balcony
Page 24
Adi, who knew of course who she was—because people don’t usually take the trouble to introduce themselves when they are about to clout someone with six months’ worth of accumulated fury—tried to shut the door. She pushed the door wide open and laid into Adi, one vigorous blow after another.
“Hadass,” Adi called out, and Fatso tried to hit her from the right.
“Don’t you touch me,” she said to the chubby roommate. “I have no business with you,” and she continued beating Adi with all her strength; she pushed Hadass a little to the side so as to get her out of the way. Hadass continued to wave her little fists in front of her, while Adi, who had managed to recover from the first shock, dealt her several hefty blows to the face, and even scratched her on the shoulder when she turned toward Hadass, who continued to pester her. The sight of Fatso fighting with all her might on behalf of her whore of a friend inflamed her even further—how dare she prevent her from carrying out the job for which she had come here? She grabbed Fatso by the shoulders and pushed her into the depths of the corridor with a strength she had never known she possessed.
“Don’t you move away from there or I’ll kill you,” she told her, and Fatso dug herself deep into the corridor, no longer to be seen. And then she turned her attention back to Adi.
She beat her as she had learned as a girl growing up in Wadi Salib. Whenever her sister felt threatened by some other kids, all she had to do was say that she’d call her little sister, and they would immediately stop picking on her.
Adi of course put up a fierce resistance and hit back, but there is no one alive who can triumph over a woman burning with the fury of a mother who has just learned that her daughter is hard of hearing.
They lashed out at each other with all their might. For a moment it occurred to her that she might after all love her man, and that by beating Adi, she was actually fighting to get him back.
When she decided that she herself had taken enough of a beating, she put a stranglehold on Adi and knocked her to the ground, kicked her a few times in the stomach and legs, followed up with some juicy name-calling—bitch, whore, cunt, and all the text necessary to remind the girl where she had come from—and went back home to her hearing-impaired daughter.
The following morning she got a telephone call from the police to say that a complaint had been lodged against her for grievous bodily harm and she was required to go down to the station.
She arrived at the station, where she was directed to an investigations officer who told her that she was being questioned under caution. She didn’t know what this meant, but he proceeded to read out the long list of accusations against her, followed by another list provided by the hospital, where Adi had gone to have her wounds dressed. She listened intently and nodded her head. When he finished reading, she told him that all of it was true, except that he had omitted one important thing.
“What was that?” the officer asked.
“It says nothing about the fact that she was my husband’s mistress, and that I had gone to her place to have a conversation with her. I wanted to explain to her my situation with my sick daughter, who has also lost her hearing. All I did was to insist on my right to talk to her logically, to impress on her the need for her to leave the place in which she and my husband are employed, and to stop destroying my family.” Of course she wasn’t being entirely accurate with the facts she presented to the officer.
“And what happened?” He wanted to know a little more.
“Well, you know, things heated up, and one thing led to another, and I slapped her on the face and she gave me one back and we ended up having a fight. It happens among you men too, doesn’t it? What would you have done if you’d been in my place, if your wife had taken a lover? Wouldn’t you have gone and tried to have a heart-to-heart conversation with him?” she wondered.
He wanted to know how her daughter was doing, and when she told him the truth about the way they spent days on end in hospital while her husband was fucking his brains out with his whore, the police officer was so sympathetic to her and hated Adi so much that in the end he said he didn’t understand how anyone could cheat on a woman like her.
“So what are you going to do with the complaint?” she asked the police officer who so wholeheartedly sympathized with her.
He scrunched up the paper into a tiny ball, which he then tossed at a wastepaper basket a short distance away.
He hit. The paper ball dropped straight into the basket.
“Just let me see her dare show her face in the police station,” said the police officer. “I’ll have her thrown out on her ear, the nasty little bitch.”
Her husband called her that evening.
“You see, it’s because of things like this that I no longer love you,” he told her.
“What things?” she asked.
“Because you are uncivilized,” he said, sounding extremely agitated. “It seems no one ever took the trouble to educate you properly.”
“Yes, it does seem so. Do you want a divorce?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he told her.
“So do I,” she said.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said to Noa, and took her to the beach. They stood on the breakwater and watched as the waves exploded against the rocks. The sea was especially stormy. She pulled off her wedding ring, threw it into the sea, and told Noa that she was giving her dowry back to God.
Noa asked her what a dowry was.
“It’s a piece of baggage that you carry about with you from childhood,” she explained to her four-and-a-half-year-old daughter.
When they arrived back at the apartment, the telephone was ringing stubbornly, and she was afraid that the anonymous caller would hang up before she could get the door opened.
The telephone went on ringing, and she picked up the receiver.
“Hello,” she said.
“Rina that in the Bible means joy and in Ladino means a queen?” she heard on the other end of the line.
“Hello, Shmuel,” she replied. “How are you?”
“Couldn’t be better. My wife has just given birth to a baby boy, and I wanted to invite you to the bris milah.”
“Thank you, Prophet Samuel. Congratulations. Mazel tov. I’ll be happy to come. Where are you holding the bris?”
“At home. In our garden,” Shmuel answered her.
About the Author
The author of three novels, RINA FRANK was born in Wadi Salib, the poorest neighborhood in Haifa. She worked as a technical architect, marketing director, and television producer with Israel’s Channel 2 before founding her own production company, Matan TV Production. Every House Needs a Balcony is her first novel. She lives in Tel Aviv.
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Credits
Jacket photography: © Lesley Aggar
Copyright
EVERY HOUSE NEEDS A BALCONY. Copyright © 2006 by Rina Frank. English translation copyright © 2010 by Ora Cummings. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
First published in Israel in 2006 by Miskal-Yedioth Ahronoth Books and Chemed Books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
EPub Edition © May 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-199799-0
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