Every House Needs a Balcony (11 page)

All she wanted during the honeymoon in Greece was to call her sister to tell her about the wonderful things that were happening to her.

“We were in a hotel on a cliff overlooking the sea, and all the signatures in the guest book were of famous movie stars. I saw Paul Newman's signature and Glenda Jackson's,” she told her sister breathlessly over the phone. “Truth is, my heart aches at the thought that one night in the hotel costs the same as Dad's monthly salary.”

“So why does your heart ache?” her sister asked.

“Because we spent six nights there, and I couldn't stop thinking what Dad and Mum could have done with the equivalent of six months' labor.”

“You'll get used to it,” her sister told her, as if she knew all about the lives of the wealthy.

“Do you know how much one picture of the newlyweds
on their honeymoon cost, taken by the hotel photographer?”

“How much?” asked her sister, the student whose life wasn't easy financially.

“The same as the bespoke dress you had sewn for your wedding.”

“You don't say. I hope it was in color, at least?”

“Black and white. But big. We placed it in a silver-plated frame in the living room.”

“And how much did the frame cost?” her sister asked.

“As much as your entire wedding,” she replied.

“Nice,” said her sister. “You'll get used to this, you'll see.”

“Get used to what?” she asked her sister.

“To a better life,” she replied. “The main thing, though, is that you behave nicely and don't make a fool of yourself.”

After the honeymoon they landed in Barcelona, straight into a huge apartment with wall-to-wall parquet flooring. Above them on the fifth floor lived his uncle with his Italian wife and two children. The apartment was empty so that they could furnish it together, and he showed her proudly where he planned to place the living room, the dining room, the master bedroom and his study, and a further two rooms that he designated for guests from Israel and perhaps for their children, too.

When she saw what he intended to be their master bedroom, an enormous room that could be traversed on skates,
she said that she felt the room to be too large and lacking in intimacy, whereas the room next door, which he had designated for his study, would make a perfect bedroom.

She didn't like his plans for the giant living room, which was divided into two unequal spaces, and thought that the smaller would be more suitable for sofas and a TV. The larger space, she thought, would best hold a dining table, around which they planned to entertain his family and friends.

He didn't agree with her, and in order to prove his point he took her up to the fifth floor, to show her that at his uncle's, too, the larger space served as the living room, and the large bedroom was used by his uncle, while the smaller bedroom belonged to their son, Roberto, and their daughter had the one that was smaller still.

“So what?” she said. “They have children.”

Paula took her aside in the kitchen and tried to persuade her that his plan was compatible with interior design in Barcelona. But when she realized that she didn't agree, she summed up the matter in one sentence: “That's what it's like in a marriage.”

“It doesn't have to be like that. I, too, have an opinion,” she said adamantly.

“But it's his profession. He studied five years for this,” the aunt insisted.

“So what? I'm a woman, and I know what I like and what I don't like,” she replied, and thought to herself that even if
Paula thought she had some nerve, after being brought to such an elegant apartment, not accepting the majority decision over where her bedroom and the living room were to be located, she still couldn't bring herself to agree with them, in spite of her sister's request that she behave nicely.

They continued to argue for a week, until she told him that she felt a little lost in all these huge spaces, and she needed, at least in her own bedroom, to be able to get inside herself. I'm not used to a bedroom that measures more than three hundred square feet, she explained to him. At home my bedroom was the closed balcony, five by six feet, and she added that she was accustomed to the warmth that comes with overcrowding. He capitulated.

When she went down in the elevator and the uniformed doorman stood up and hurried to reach the door before her to open it for her, she felt terribly embarrassed and told him in Spanish that she was quite capable of opening the door for herself, but he just smiled at her politely and continued to hold the door open. When she entered the building carrying bags of shopping from Court Inglés, the doorman took the bags from her and made for the elevator quickly so that she wouldn't need, God forbid, to wait, and she wondered what her parents would have had to say at the sight of the courteous doorman treating their daughter like a princess.

But when she told his parents at a dinner at their home that she was embarrassed by the doorman opening the door for her as if he was her servant, his father admonished
her slightly and said that this was his job, and she had to adapt herself to life in Barcelona and behave like a lady, and not embarrass the doorman by preventing him from doing his job.

But she screwed up yet again. When his mother lent her Laura for one day a week to clean her apartment and cook whatever was necessary, she refused to allow the maid to cook for her. It's enough that she was cleaning; she should sit down with them to a lunch that she herself had cooked. But she could feel that Laura was unable to swallow anything in their presence and that she was embarrassing her, too.

One evening his parents announced that they were planning to celebrate their wedding in a swish function hall in Barcelona with all their friends from the Jewish community. She asked if it wasn't odd to celebrate twice, and they explained that the entire community was expecting to join in their happiness and to bring them wedding presents.

True to form, they prepared a wedding list in Barcelona's most prestigious department store, one that included everything they needed for their new home, and the wedding guests were invited to choose the gift from the list that was most compatible with their means and their own taste. This very logical arrangement meant that everyone came away satisfied. Instead of giving a check for an amount that you can never be sure is enough, and which simply dissolves into the pile of checks that all the other guests have given, you are given the opportunity to bring a wedding gift that is to your
taste and to the taste of the receivers, and the newlyweds receive a personal gift from each guest. Of the stylish list of gifts they picked out and with which they furnished their apartment, from the refrigerator to the sofas and down to the toaster, the only thing she chose in the fanciest store in Barcelona was a set of bathroom scales for weighing herself at home. When the man who had become her new husband said that it was a cheap gift, and who the hell would choose a set of scales, she laughed and said that it would be someone who wanted to bring some balance into her life.

“But really,” she replied earnestly, “with my very own set of bathroom scales I shall feel that I'm a wealthy woman, the kind that weighs herself whenever she feels like it.” Of all things in the prestigious Barcelona department store, it was the bathroom scale that symbolized her new economic status; a kind of luxury that you don't need, but want.

The scales remained almost alone in the store until two days before they were married for the second time in Barcelona, when Kushi arrived suddenly on his way to the United States to visit her. When she asked Kushi why he chose the scales for her, he replied, “My dear, for someone who grew up in Wadi Salib and marries a guy from Barcelona, a set of bathroom scales is the epitome of wealth. It's the epitome of showing off. I thought it was just like you to wake up in the morning and say to yourself: ‘Hey, I've got my own personal bathroom scale. I no longer need anything from anyone.'”

“Where did you get that knack of always being able to
read me so accurately?” she said. “So you're not angry with me anymore?” She referred to having slept with his brother during the Yom Kippur War.

“I was never angry with you,” he told her, knowing exactly what she meant. “I simply didn't understand why you did it, and I'll never be able to understand,” he said and dropped the subject.

Her sister and brother-in-law also stopped off in Barcelona to see her before flying off to New York to continue their studies, and she admitted to her sister as they stood together in the kitchen of her expensive home that she was beginning to feel a little lost.

“You're just not used to being married,” her sister explained, and deserted her with her new family in Barcelona.

They corresponded; her sister never forgot in any of her letters to teach her decorum and to remind her to eat with her mouth closed, to chew and not gulp food down, to hold her knife in her right hand and the fork in her left, and to distinguish between fish and meat knives.

“Do you think the roast chicken on my plate will be offended if I cut it with a fish knife?” she wrote to her sister.

“The roast chicken won't mind, but your mother- and father-in-law will,” said my sister, who was smarter than anyone else.

And in another of her letters she wrote to her sister about an interview she had with the architect Koderk. He's the most highly thought of architect in Barcelona, she wrote. So
his son explained to me that to be hired by him, you need to be clean and orderly. Do you see, he didn't ask me if I know how to draft, or how many years experience I have. He only wanted to know if my work is clean and orderly. What do they think I am, their cleaner or their draftsperson? He explained that at the end of the day, each draft has to undergo two kinds of erasures, and then to be thoroughly cleaned with a piece of cotton wool soaked in benzene before being rolled up, ready for laying out the following day on the drawing board.

She remembered Leon, the bleeding-heart liberal from Istanbul whose drafts were the best in the class. He had an inherent talent for the profession that she had had to learn in spite of herself. She had met Leon at engineering school when she was studying architecture, and he spoke little Hebrew. At that time she invited a few South American students to her home, where she read out the material in easy Hebrew, before the exams.

Leon shared a rented apartment with a woman from Colombia who had immigrated to Israel after her younger brother had been abducted by the Colombian authorities and his body had never been returned. She had enjoyed visiting Leon's rented apartment, which he had furnished with his good taste, and how, while he prepared tomato soup for her out of a packet, she taught him words in Hebrew.

Once a fortnight she would go with him to visit his mother and younger sister in Tel Aviv. She loved seeing the
compassion in his eyes when he looked at his mother, whose husband had left her for his young secretary. He was full of anger for his father and had only sympathy and tenderness for his mother and lovely sister.

Later, having decided she wanted to study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and not having been accepted, she felt an emotional need for a change of scenery, and Leon had helped her hunt for an apartment in Jerusalem. The prices were exorbitant. Eventually they found the apartment with the two women who were renting out the doorless lounge at an affordable price, and Leon bought a sheet of plywood and built a room divider with a door that opened and closed, so that what she actually got was the best room in the apartment at a reduced rent. When the other women saw her capacious private space, they insisted she should share it with them, but, waving her lease at them, she sent them to hell.

She and Leon agreed that if she decided to stay in Jerusalem, he would join her, and in the meantime she started working for Ackerstein and traveled to Haifa on the weekends to visit Leon and her parents. Then, when he wanted to join her in Jerusalem, she had betrayed his love with her relationship with the man from Barcelona, who trumpeted in her ear in English.

In her heart she thought that if Leon had known how to trumpet in English, she might never have left him, but she admitted to herself later that she had been bothered by the fact that Leon was thin and almost the same height as her, and
when he held her in his arms she felt she was being embraced by a boy and not, as she wanted, by a man. Go tell a silly twenty-two-year-old girl that a tall, Spanish-speaking man is no more masculine than short, Turkish-speaking Leon.

“Did you get the job with Koderk?” her sister asked in a letter from New York to Barcelona.

“I did,” she replied, “but not before asking him if I needed to come to work with a green surgeon's mask on my face. My Israeli chutzpah must have pleased him, because he started to laugh.”

“So everything's all right,” her sister wrote back. “What are you doing with the money?”

“Save it for hard times and send some home to Mom and Dad.”

“Why bother?” her sister asked. “You know they'd never touch your money.”

 

Their lives in Barcelona took on a regular routine. They worked in the mornings; at two o'clock in the afternoon he would come to pick her up for lunch at his parents', until she rebelled and they agreed to eat at home twice a week. In the afternoons he was busy with his Final Design Project, which took many months to complete, and she couldn't help comparing him with her sister, who had taken two months to complete her project for the Technion.

Any time she felt like doing something different with him in the afternoons, he would argue that he couldn't spare the time to leave his project, and he asked her to refrain from tempting him to do so. Sometimes she went out with Mercedes, her much-loved Spanish friend. Sometimes it was with a few of her workmates, and most of her time was spent with Paula and her children, or his parents, while he allowed himself a weekly outing with his friends.