Every Home Needs A Balcony. Rina Frank
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were pushed up against a wall, for fear of not being stable enough to stand on their own. Dad refused to share a double bed with Mom because she snored. The brown wardrobe leaned against the third wall and contained clothes and various objects; among them, hidden carefully in a used and oily cardboard box, was the Turkish delight that Mom kept for special guests. Loosely scattered next to the Turkish delight were a number of pungent-smelling mothballs that even as candy-deprived children we never mistook for anything other than what they were, even though they were round and white and just the right size to fill a mouth yearning for something sweet.
In the middle of the room stood the brown wooden table with the elegant slab of glass on top, as if it was the glass that protected the table from scratches or fading. The table was the focus of the room and fulfilled all the household’s needs—a space for dining, regular games of rummy, and three-monthly painting of the rummy cubes; our drawing board and Dad’s poster graphics table; and a place to sieve rice or flour, shell peas, or trim spring beans—and all this was conducted on top of the glass, above the family’s photograph album.
Mom and Dad, handsome and elegant on their wedding day, looked out from beneath the glass on the table. Mom in Romania, striking various poses, always fashionably dressed in a warm coat and a hat placed at a jaunty angle on the side of her head. A picture of her in her white summer dress showed off her very shapely, very slim figure, which may not have been considered pretty in those days, but Mom, like Dad, was ahead of her time by being thin at a time when being thin was tantamount to being poor. Family pictures from Romania showed Mom’s extended family, including her five brothers; we girls were provided with an extensive description of the three who stayed behind in Romania because the Communists refused to grant them emigration permits, and the two who had come to Israel in the 1930s and drained the swamps in Hedera. In time, the Romanian pictures were joined by others taken in Israel, especially of us in our Purim costumes. In the corner of the room Mom’s sewing machine stood under a pile of sheets and blankets that had been aired on the balcony earlier in the day before being folded neatly. At night, when we went to sleep, the sewing machine was freed of its burden of bedclothes and Mom was able to repair whatever needed to be mended, reinforced, patched, or turned.
The apartment’s western wall faced the sea, with tall windows to the ceiling, rounded arches over the windows in keeping with modern Arab architecture, and a glass door that opened onto the balcony and provided a view of everything that was happening below or opposite; we could thoroughly scrutinize every movement or sound made or uttered by the inhabitants of the street.
The third time they had sex was on the day that Grandmother Vavika died. The noise woke me up in the middle of the night, and I saw Dad naked, with his bum in the air, lying on top of Mom.
The following morning I asked him crossly if he was beating Mom, the way our Syrian neighbor upstairs, Nissim, spent his days beating up his wife.
Dad told me that he was massaging Mom’s back, which ached from all the housework she had to do, and because we were selfish girls who didn’t take care of our mother during the day, he was obliged, when he returned from a day’s work, to rub spirit into Mom’s sore behind.
I told Dad that it wasn’t true that he came home late from work, and that Mom always comes in later than he does, and I went to play hide-and-seek downstairs.
They quarreled all day. Not a day went by without my parents quarreling at least once. Their quarrels were loud, and the whole of Stanton could hear them yelling and screaming at each other. But there was never any violence; not like in other families, where they didn’t shout at each other, only beat each other up. And because they didn’t beat each other, my sister and I believed that Mom and Dad were very happy.
For the next two months she and the man met every day at work and every evening in each other’s arms in the apartment he was renovating for his sister, who was away in Barcelona. She spent the weekends with Leon and her parents and didn’t bother to invite the man, although he showed some interest.
She didn’t want to bring him to her modest little room in the apartment she shared with the arrogant students. The room was actually the living room, which opened onto the kitchen and was separated off by a one-inch-thick sheet of plywood that Leon had installed with considerable flair.
The man either trumpeted in her ear or sang to her in English, and she wept silent tears as she counted the days to their separation. No man before had ever trumpeted in her ear. She had been sung to in Hebrew, and some rhymes in Turkish repeated themselves occasionally, but there had been no trumpeting in English.
On the final weekend before he was due to leave, she promised to return from Haifa on Saturday night so they could spend his last night in Israel together, but Leon insisted on driving her all the way to Jerusalem, so she wouldn’t have to take a bus. Throughout the journey, she was troubled by her promise to the man and the knowledge that she wouldn’t be able to say good-bye to him before he returned to his fiancée in Barcelona.
“Would you like me to stay in Jerusalem so that we can go house-hunting together?” Leon asked her, knowing how much she hated her two roommates.
“I’m not sure,” she replied, irritated with him for insisting on driving her.
“You’re not sure you want us to live together, or that I should stay the night in Jerusalem?” asked Leon, hurt by her sharp tone.
“Both,” she replied, “I think I’m fed up with Jerusalem. My sister has suggested I come and live with them in Tel Aviv, and I think I might just take up the offer.”
“And that’s how you thought you’d tell me? After I’ve already informed my work in Haifa that I’m leaving and moving to Jerusalem?” Leon was in shock.
“What do you want? I didn’t plan it.” The only reason she was being nasty to him was that he was preventing her from saying good-bye to the man from Barcelona.
“And when exactly were you planning to tell me?” he asked.
“I’ve only just thought that I might move to Tel Aviv.” She squinted at his angry face. “Are you annoyed with me?”
“I am furious with you for not taking the trouble to include me in your plans,” said Leon, who was making arrangements to join her in Jerusalem, at her request.
“Would you like me to get out of the car?” she asked.
“Why not?” he replied, and to her surprise, he pulled up sharply in the middle of the climb up the Kastel.
She alighted, vaguely insulted that he was allowing her to walk away, rather than fighting to keep her with him—even stopping for her to get out halfway up the Kastel in the middle of the night, knowing of the terrorists and rapists roaming the region. She got out of the car and started walking, not looking back. In the corner of her eye she saw him overtaking her. She tried to hitch a lift, and the second car stopped for her.
The driver asked if she wasn’t afraid to be hitchhiking at that time of night, and she asked him if he was planning to rape her.
“No,” said the kind driver.
“Then I’m not afraid,” she said, and within twenty minutes he had pulled up at the entrance to her block.
Leon was waiting for her in the darkened stairway. She jumped when she saw him and said, “You frightened me.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t think you’d get out of the car,” he said.
“I didn’t think you would leave me in the middle of the road,” she replied.
“I love you,” he said.
“I know. Would you like to come in?” She considered having sex with him, a final act of mercy.
She unplugged the phone in case the man from Barcelona decided to call her to say good-bye. They walked into her room with its thin plywood divide and undressed quietly, not uttering a word or a groan.
When he’d finished, he asked her if she’d slept with him out of pity, and