Every House Needs a Balcony (15 page)

She awoke to see the religious woman nursing her baby. The girl had been named Rivka.

“Here's Rivka for you to feed,” said the ward sister to the religious woman and attached a black-haired baby to her breast; which is how she knew that the religious woman's baby was called Rivka.

Two days later, when she walked into the room they shared with two other women, she heard the religious woman refer to her behind her back as “that poor thing. She delivered a sick baby. Praise be to God that my own baby was born healthy.” She was nursing her Rivka and talking to two ultra-Orthodox women who were sitting on her bed. The three women fell silent as soon as they noticed her climbing onto her bed and turning her back on them.

She didn't understand at first why she was being ignored,
not having Noa brought to her to feed. When she saw the religious woman nursing Rivka for a third time, while she herself was still without a baby in her arms, she asked the sister about her Noa.

“Why aren't you bringing Noa to me so I can feed her?” she asked; could it be construed as an eccentric request, to be allowed to feed the baby she had given birth to more than twenty-four hours earlier and whose perfect face she had never even seen?

“I don't know,” the sister replied. “Ask the doctor,” she added, and walked out.

“Where's my husband?” she shouted at the sister.

The sister poked her head in and pointed out that some new mothers were asleep, and would she please keep her voice down. “Your husband is waiting outside until Rivka has finished nursing.”

She fumbled for her slippers and went out in her pajamas to the hospital corridor. She hadn't been able to find her robe and couldn't remember where her husband had told her he'd placed it. It was freezing cold in the corridor, and she was shivering all over, although it could also have been out of fear.

He was waiting outside, unaware of the storm raging in her soul.

“Have you seen her?” she asked him immediately.

“I haven't had a chance yet. They told me they'd talk to us soon.”

“What do they have to talk to us about?” she attacked him.

“I haven't a clue. Isn't it accepted procedure?”

“No. It isn't accepted procedure,” she replied, as if, after giving birth for the first time in her life, she cared what was accepted procedure and what wasn't. Besides, even in school she had never liked those people who were “accepted.” In fact, she quite loathed them, and everything that was “accepted” tended to raise her anxiety level.

“Let's go and see her.” She dragged him, tottering in her slippers at a speed that would have graced a participant in the Tel Aviv marathon. They reached the nursery and asked a nurse where their daughter was.

After checking the baby's name and that of her parents, the nurse went from bassinet to bassinet, only to return with the information that their baby was not there.

“Where is she, then?” she asked, her stomach doing an about-turn, feeling as if any second she would collapse right there.

“When did you give birth?” asked the pleasant nurse.

“Yesterday,” she replied.

“And they haven't brought her to you to nurse?”

“Yes, they brought her and I lost her,” she screeched in response. “Where on earth is my baby?”

The man supported her and asked if there was someone there qualified to tell them where their baby had disappeared.

“Maybe she's in the Premature Babies Unit?” replied the nurse, who may have been raised at home on 1950s tales of kidnapped Yemenite babies and realized that something was
not quite in order here. “Maybe she was born prematurely? Did you give birth early?”

“Is a birth weight of five and three-quarters pounds considered premature?” her husband asked.

“No,” said the nurse, “a little small, but certainly not a preemie.”

“Premature, preemie, where the hell is the Premature Babies Unit?” she asked.

“At the end of the corridor,” the nurse offered.

This time he was dragging her along quickly, her slippers slip-sliding relentlessly off her feet. They reached the end of the corridor and pulled up in front of a reinforced door with round windows, like a ship's. The door was locked. They knocked on the door, and the ward sister, who was dressed in operating theater greens and had a surgical mask on her face, came out to them with a warm smile on her face. They introduced themselves, and the nurse immediately said she would call the department head. Dr. Mogilner, according to the identity badge on his white coat, a silver-haired doctor with a heavy South American accent, informed them that their baby was suffering from respiratory difficulties.

“What do you mean, respiratory difficulties?” They both caught their breath at the same time.

“The baby turns blue, and we are unable to find the reason for it,” the doctor said and led them gently into his office. He asked her about the pregnancy and if it had been normal.

“She was absolutely fine,” her husband said at once, as if
to make it clear that she had made no problems and that he had been with her all the way.

She looked at him and said she wasn't quite certain that the pregnancy was completely normal.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“I mean I was under terrible stress because I had dragged you to Israel and I was afraid you wouldn't be able to make it here and you'd have to give up a lot of the things you were used to, and maybe you wouldn't find a job and then your back ached and I had to do a lot of the house moving myself, even though I was pregnant, and then your aunt died…” She spoke in a stream of words, as if spewing up the last few months clean out of her guts.

“But everything is all right now,” he said, as if telling her not to worry. “I am glad we made aliyah and that our daughter was born a sabra.”

“Can emotional stress affect the health of an unborn baby?” she asked Dr. Mogilner, who replied, “Absolutely.”

“And what about the delivery, was it normal?” the department head asked gently.

“I gave birth here, in this hospital. Don't your records tell you anything about my delivery?” she asked. Maybe something had happened in the course of the delivery that she had been unaware of.

The doctor scrutinized the report in front of him and told them that the delivery had passed without any particular hitch.

“Would you like to see her?” he asked, and they both jumped out of their seats and followed him. They wanted to go in with him but were told that they would first have to wash their hands, put on a green gown that had to be tied at the back, cover their shoes with green covers that also had to be tied carefully, and of course tie a mask carefully over their faces, so as not to introduce a single germ into the preemie unit. When they first tried, they got confused with the back and front laces, but in time, over the three long months that their baby was hospitalized, they became very practiced and were always ready to enter the sterile room within seconds.

They looked down at her in wonder. Their baby was lying there like the most perfect angel they had ever seen in their lives. Every organ and every limb was in place; nothing was missing. She was naked.

“Isn't she cold?” she asked the blue-eyed nurse, to whom she had immediately taken a liking, because she had gone straight to the incubator and turned Noa, so they could to see her in all her glory.

“No. She's not cold.” Zohara smiled at her. She had noticed the nurse's name tag on her green uniform. “The incubator is the warmest place in the hospital,” she reassured the concerned parents.

She remembered the weekly visit in eighth grade to the Kfar Galim agricultural school, for a whole day working in the fields. That year winter had been particularly cold and wet, and when the town kids were given the choice of jobs—they
had, after all, volunteered; or more accurately, their services had been offered to the agricultural school—every one of them had chosen to work in the fruit harvest. As Haifa townies, they wanted to eat as much as they could off the trees. She asked their instructor if there were any other options.

He suggested work in the kitchen or harvesting potatoes, but she shook her head.

“Don't you want to be with all your classmates in the fruit harvest?” The instructor appeared to despair of her.

“I see enough of them all week,” she said.

“I have an incubator full of chicks,” he told her.

“What would I have to do there?” She was instantly interested. On a cold wet winter's day an incubator sounded good.

“Nothing much,” he said. “Just keep an eye on the chicks, make sure they don't get cold.”

He took her into a kind of dwarfs' hut, where she had to bend her head in order to get in and then could only either sit or lie on the straw that had been spread over the hard dry earth. It was nice in there. Not for nothing was the place called a hothouse for chicks, which scurried around tickling her feet, since she had immediately taken off her shoes. The place made her feel like Gulliver in the land of the little people, and she loved the sensation of all those chicks climbing over her body as if she was a sack of straw. She watched them for hours; at first they all appeared a uniform yellow, but she gradually learned to distinguish between them.

She identified the cock of the coop, the arrogant one, the
pampered one, and the lazy one. When she noticed the runt, the one who didn't know how to push his way to the food, she adopted him for herself and gave him a special portion of food, just for himself, so he'd grow big and strong. The next week she brought a book with her and read it out loud to her chicks, as if telling them a story. She took special care of the little runt she had adopted and made a point of feeding him before various other pushers-in could get to the food. According to the laws of nature, the weak survives only if it has someone to look out for it. Over six weeks, her chick grew to be like all his peers, and in the meantime the skies had cleared, and it had become too hot for her inside the hothouse. She told the instructor that she wanted to work in the groves, and she was able to bring home lots of freshly picked apples. Everyone was happy. Watching her beautiful baby lying naked in her incubator, she remembered that time at agricultural school and thought suddenly that the instructor must have devised this job especially for her so that she would learn how to take care of that weak little chick.

Noa opened her eyes wide.

“They are blue. Like your mother's and your aunt Anna's,” she said to her husband.

“The color can change,” another nurse said as she walked by them—as if what mattered to them was whether the baby's eyes were going to change from blue to brown or to green or amber, and not the respiratory problems she suffered from, for which the doctors had no explanation.

A month later two very sad things happened to my sister, and she spent all her time crying. Dad was unable to console her, not even when he explained that disasters always happen in August, because that was the month in which the destruction of the Temple took place. Our dad wouldn't even let us go to the beach on Tisha b'Av, because it's a day on which a lot of people drown, even though there were plenty of lifeguards around, because they weren't on strike at that time.

My sister's best friend Chaya, the most popular girl in the class, left Israel for America after her uncles who lived there had managed to persuade her parents that the future was much greener for the Jews in New York, and besides, it's cheaper to give a doll as a gift without having to mail it to Israel and pay postage; and Hanna, my sister's beloved homeroom teacher, was killed in a road accident.

The sudden and simultaneous loss of the two women she admired most was an unbearably heavy blow to my sister. Moreover, Chaya took with her all her dolls and the piano that my sister loved to run her fingers across the keys of. And for Hanna, who nurtured the neighborhood's children even though she herself was from the Carmel, to suddenly disappear from her life was a terrible loss. Young people in those days got killed only in wars, not in anything as banal as road accidents.

In order to console her, Dad took us for a ride on the newly opened Carmelit light railway through all the stations from downtown Haifa and right up to the top of Mount Carmel.

Only after all four of us (yes, Dad agreed to take Mom, too) had watched to see that nothing bad happened to any of the other people did we muster the courage to step onto the escalator. It was then that my new shoe—one of the pair my parents had bought me for Passover—got caught in the escalator, and I watched it as it bounced over the stairs and was squashed on the other side. Brokenhearted, I cried for those stairs to stop moving so that I could go and rescue my shoe, but it was no good. The stairs continued to move, mangling to death one shoe of the first pair of new shoes I had ever owned.

I was still wailing when my sister burst out laughing, and Mom and Dad joined her; pleased to see her forget for a moment her tragic losses, they were keen to encourage her to laugh more.

We walked around the Carmel neighborhood for a while and then went down, on foot of course, with me hobbling along on one shoe, holding the other, ragged and ruined by the escalator in the new Carmelit light railway. My lovely new shoe had lost all its patent leather shine.

The next day we wore our new white pleated skirts from Passover even though it was a regular weekday, and Mom took us to the head office of the Carmelit light railway, with me grasping my disgraced shoe in my hand.

The manager looked at my sad eyes and explained to Mom that he couldn't reimburse me for one new shoe. If I had been injured, or squashed to death, for that they have insurance. But not for a single shoe that got mangled because I didn't know when to step on that modern escalator that moves of its own accord and doesn't have to be operated.

“Still,” he said, in reparation, “the girl will get ten free rides on the Carmelit.”

Mom immediately told him to make it ten free rides for the whole family, and when, to her surprise, the manager agreed, she was quick to add, “Round trip. So we won't have to walk down from the Carmel to Wadi Salib.” The manager agreed to this too, and we went away satisfied, determined to celebrate our victory.

On the street corner an Arab kid was selling prickly pears. We went over and joined the queue to buy some. In front of us stood a fat man who ate one and then another
pear and yet another and another and another. And every time we thought he had finished eating, the glutton's sharp eye picked out our prickly pear, pointed to it, and the Arab kid picked it up in his scratched hands and sliced it, peeled off the prickly skin, and handed it to the fat pig who stood in front of us in the queue. By the time my mother shouted at him to give pears to the girls as well, the fat slob had put back at least forty already. The boy peeled two nice juicy prickly pears and handed them to us. But no sooner had Mom pointed out other pears for him to peel than the boy noticed an approaching policeman, and since he had no license to sell prickly pears at the entrance to the Carmelit, he quickly gathered all his goods together and disappeared to the right, down the alleyways of the Turkish market. We were devastated because the fat man had eaten all our prickly pears, and hadn't even paid for them; Mom reckoned that it was certainly he who had called the policeman, but not before he'd finished gobbling down all the prickly pears.

The policeman walked up and asked us if we'd seen the direction the Arab kid had run off in. The prickly pear thief pointed in the direction of the boy's escape. Mom told the policeman that the man was lying and that she'd seen with her own eyes how that that man had stolen all the prickly pears off that poor kid who was only trying to make a living, and anyway, the boy had run off in the opposite direction. The policeman, who had no illusions about the ability
of adults to lie, turned to my sister and asked her if she'd seen where the prickly pear seller had disappeared to. He must have decided that a nine-and-a-half-year-old girl in a white pleated skirt wouldn't lie.

My sister pointed in the same direction my mother had.

The policeman hesitated for a moment, and I waved my mangled shoe and asked him why should he believe that liar who ate all our prickly pears and was also very fat.

The policeman set out in the direction Mom had sent him, and we made slowly to the right, where we found the Arab boy with the prickly pears and bought another one each, paid him, and went on our way.

We were very proud of our mother for misleading the policeman and defending the Arab boy. Not only did that fat bastard eat up his entire livelihood, but that he should do time in jail for it as well?

But Dad decided that a round-trip ticket on the Carmelit was not enough to make up to a girl for the loss of two important women in her life and a few days later he came home carrying a large cardboard box. We all gathered around it, trying to guess what was inside.

My sister was first to guess and said: “It's a radio!”

Mom hoped it might be a small manual washing machine, one with a handle that has to be turned and then the laundry comes out clean and would relieve her of the revolting Thursday-night laundry burden. I thought it was a large doll that Dad had decided to buy for us to share, now that
he had some money, because soon, in November, there'd be a general election, and Chaya had taken all her dolls with her to America, but it was indeed a radio. It was a brown radio with a plain wood case and rounded corners and a green dial that lit up when the radio was switched on and words that come out of it with music. Most of the time the radio was switched off, because electricity costs money, and once a day Mom and Dad listened to the news in Romanian.

And there was another surprise from Dad at the end of the month, when he took us to be filmed for an American movie. It was a real movie; and he even made some money out of it. For this he had needed nepotism,
protekzia
, and the party arranged for Dad and his family to be extras on the movie because this time, just before the elections, they were buttering him up more than usual after learning that our house had been the only one to avoid being sprayed with stones during the riots in Wadi Salib, unlike all the other Ashkenazi houses.

It was a movie about a thirtysomething American woman who realizes that her childhood sweetheart has survived the Holocaust and is living in Israel, and she has arrived on a ship from America to meet the love of her life, whom she hasn't seen for about fifteen years. Of course she had refused to marry in America, because in her heart of hearts she had always believed that her beloved had survived the horrors of the Holocaust. And he hadn't married in Israel, but had listened ardently to the daily radio program
Seeking Relatives
, until he'd managed to locate
her. They meet on the wharf as she disembarks from the ship, dressed in a pale pink suit and pink hat and holding a white bag. Her beloved is waiting for her at the bottom of the gangway, holding a bouquet of fresh flowers. We were extras, waiting for our relatives who had just arrived in Israel on the same ship. The actress held on to the railing, trying not to pass out in anticipation of meeting up again with the man of her dreams. According to the stage instructions meted out by the director, we were required to applaud each time any of the travelers walked down the gangway. Over the course of several hours we watched as the actress went up and came down the ship's gangway to the applause of the extras, until she was finally reunited in a passionate kiss with her beloved who was waiting below. They kissed time and time again, and each time the actor was provided with a fresh bouquet of flowers. Sefi and I soaked up every word that was said in English, relished every moment in the presence of genuine American actors, and prayed that it would never, ever end. Our happiness knew no bounds. Besides, we knew that Dad was making money just from our standing there. But the fact is that we would have stood there for days on end for nothing, the director need only have asked. In the end we even took all the bouquets back home with us.