Every House Needs a Balcony (16 page)

For a long time they stood gazing down at their perfect little baby; then Noa began suddenly to turn blue and her tiny fists beat at the air as if asking, Whence would my salvation come? Her mouth was pursed tightly, and her entire body appeared to be struggling against something they couldn't see. In the incubator, all the instruments started beeping. The nurse tried to lead her out, but she refused to budge. The nurse pushed her lightly and inserted more oxygen into the incubator, but Noa turned bluer; she was twenty-six hours old.

The baby opened her mouth wide as if trying to shout, changed her mind, and started crying, a long silent wail. It wasn't the demanding cry of a hungry newborn baby, but the silent cry of a newborn wanting to live; a sad cry. The instruments stopped beeping. Her breathing gradually returned; her tiny, perfect mouth was slightly open. She looked at them,
and she felt that her baby was reassured and knew she was safe with her parents nearby, although this had been their first meeting. She inserted her sterilized hand through the round opening and stroked the baby's soft head. She loved her so.

Zohara said that it was about time she tried feeding her baby.

“Hasn't she eaten anything until now?” she asked, slightly vexed that they had been starving her so-tiny baby.

“She's been given fluids intravenously.” Only then did she notice the tube that was connected to the baby's minute foot. “We still don't know what is causing her respiratory problem, and we've run all kinds of tests on her, but we still don't have any explanations. Let's make a first attempt at feeding her.”

“With a bottle?” asked the new father.

“Through a tube,” replied Zohara, and tried inserting one into the baby's right nostril. After several attempts, Zohara, with her magical smile, called Dr. Mogilner and told him that she was unable to insert the tube through the baby's nostril. Dr. Mogilner stood next to the angel in white, watching her trying to insert a new tube, this time through the left nostril; again, she failed.

They were terrified, since it was at this very moment that they were beginning to realize that for some unknown reason their baby was unable to breathe, and it was also impossible to feed her. The man held her hand with all his strength, as if trying to draw courage from it. But Dr. Mogilner seemed very troubled. He asked Zohara to take two new tubes and
try once again to insert them into the baby's nostrils. Zohara tried again, but failed.

“The nostrils are blocked.” She looked at the doctor in desperation.

“Excellent.” For the first time Dr. Mogilner seemed to shine. “That's the reason for this baby's respiratory problems.”

He turned to them, pleased. “The baby's nostrils are completely blocked, and that is what is causing the blueness. This is the first such case I have encountered personally in the twenty years I have been a specialist in premature babies.”

“Is that good or bad?” she asked at once.

“It's solvable,” he said, and appeared extremely excited. “Now we can start treating the problem.”

Dr. Mogilner asked Zohara to bring an airway device, and with utmost gentleness, inserted into the baby a kind of small hollow tube whose sides were fixed to her mouth. “Now your baby will be able to breathe,” he said to the worried parents and watched her until her breathing was regular and relaxed. The device held the baby's mouth open and enabled her to breathe through it.

They looked in wonder at the child's regular breathing and her extraordinarily beautiful face.

“This is the most beautiful baby we've ever had in this preemie unit,” said Nurse Zohara, and Dr. Mogilner immediately agreed with her.

“She's the most beautiful baby we've ever had,” said the man, his eyes shining.

“You are looking at a miracle,” said Dr. Mogilner.

“A miracle that you discovered the problem?” she asked.

“No. A medical miracle that the baby has managed to remained alive for twenty-six hours without being able to breathe.” As they watched her wordlessly, the doctor explained that newborn babies don't have the instinct to open their mouths in order to breathe. “Only at one month old, sometimes only two months, do they develop the instinct to breathe through their mouth. I have no explanation for the miracle that your baby, with her nose completely blocked, has managed to survive all those hours without air.”

Hand of God, she thought to herself, and realized that she had given birth to a little angel with enormous blue eyes and God by her side.

According to standard procedure, she was released from hospital three days later; Noa remained in the Premature Baby Unit for an indefinite period.

“You have a very sick baby,” the doctor said, trying to explain the gravity of the situation. “Fortunately we have successfully solved the issue of the blueness, but the blockage of her nose is only a symptom of another fundamental problem that we haven't yet managed to locate. Her blood tests lead us to suspect a problem in her autoimmune system, but we still have to check other things, and she has to be under observation twenty-four hours a day.”

“Can I come back every two or three hours to nurse her?” she asked.

“Right now you have to rest at home,” Dr. Mogilner told her in his heavy South American accent, with the gentleness that is apparently typical of heads of Premature Babies Units.

“Why?” She was offended. “Isn't my milk good enough?”

“She's breathing through her mouth,” her husband pointed out at once.

“She won't be able to breathe if she's at the breast,” the doctor explained, when she still didn't understand that Noa's mouth mustn't be closed over a breast or the teat of a feeding bottle.

“The only way she can be fed is through intubation,” said the doctor. “We'll supply you with a breast pump so you can express your milk, which we'll then feed to your baby through the tube. There is no substitute for mother's milk if the baby is to get all its immunities.” And he added, “All the mothers in the preemie unit express milk so that we can feed their babies.”

“And when will Noa be released?” She insisted on knowing his prognosis.

“I haven't a clue,” the doctor told her candidly. “Certainly not in the near future.”

She went back home with the things she had packed for the birth, and on the way to their car, they saw the religious couple about to drive off, their fourth baby in its mother's arms. They looked on enviously.

Leaving their hearts in the Premature Babies Unit, they returned to an empty house. A large coffee stain graced the mattress of their bed. He put fresh sheets on the bed and
inserted the white duvet into a blue cover, so she wouldn't see it in its shame. He knew how fond she was of blue. He filled the bath with hot water and mineral bath salts and wanted to help her undress, but she preferred to be alone with herself when she washed the hospital off her body, a term that turned over the years into a catchphrase they both used when they returned from hospital after a long day of treatments—to take a shower in order to wash away the hospital and to vigorously scrub off the germs they had brought with them. Completely immersed in the warm water, she lay quietly, motionlessly, checking how long she could lie underwater without air. She was a heavy smoker, so her possibilities for airtime without air were rather limited. It's no wonder that since the telephone companies took control of airtime, they've been charging so much money for it. It's an expensive commodity, air. She surfaced from the water all at once with a cry of agony. At that very moment, the man came into the bathroom with a pair of clean underpants and pajamas and laid them on the side of the sink. He knew her aversion to mixing up clean and dirty clothes in the bathroom—it reminded her of poverty—but he didn't want her to step naked out of the warm bathroom; February is the coldest month of the year in Israel, and in the empty house, without their baby girl, the cold penetrated her soul. In spite of the hot bath, she shivered all over as she climbed in under the blue duvet, unable to control herself. She consoled herself with the knowledge that the preemie
unit was centrally heated, and in the incubator, her Noa wasn't suffering from the cold.

“How is she going to breathe, our baby?” she asked the man from out of the furnace of her body.

“Like deep-sea divers,” he replied. “She'll get used to it, she's a strong baby.”

“I wasn't able to just now, in the bath,” she said.

“You had a choice,” he told her.

“Have you tried it too?” she asked him.

“Three days already I've been holding my nose closed with my fingers to see what it's like.”

She fell asleep and awoke in the middle of the night, her entire body shivering and her teeth chattering uncontrollably. She was burning up with fever. The man brought her a thermometer; her temperature had shot up to 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

“I think you might have pneumonia,” he said.

“What's it like?” she asked.

“Pneumonia?” he asked.

“Stopping up your nose and not breathing?” she asked back.

“A nightmare,” he replied.

For nine days she lay in bed with a severe case of pneumonia, a raging fever, and a terrible sense of guilt for being unable to stand beside her daughter's incubator. Her husband visited the preemie unit every day and didn't bring back any encouraging news. Anything Noa was fed through
the tube, she vomited back up again; she continued to lose weight, and still there was no clear picture of what she was suffering from, except for a mother deficiency. Because of the pneumonia and the antibiotics she had been obliged to take, she was unable to express her milk, and her breasts shrank as her milk dried up. She felt like an empty vessel, utterly useless.

Her mother came from Haifa for a few days to care for her, leaving her sick husband in the care of a good neighbor, even though she herself suffered from extremely high blood pressure.

Bianca recited her silent prayer, words in an unknown language, spit three times at her burning head and Amen, three times. But her temperature didn't drop.

Bianca was extremely depressed, what with her husband sick in Haifa, her daughter consumed by fever and a severe case of pneumonia, her newborn baby granddaughter hospitalized in a serious condition, and her witch's prayer not proving itself.

Between one hallucination and the next, she tried to make her mother laugh with stories about her father, when his senility had already passed the brink of tears and there was nothing to do but laugh at his antics. She had visited them unexpectedly in their home in Haifa when she was in the eighth month of her pregnancy, and her mother ran off to the market to buy food so that the fetus inside her would become familiar with Romanian cuisine. Her father,
who seemed uncharacteristically angry, complained to her that Bianca had thrown away his black shoes that he had only just finished polishing. During the last year of his life, he had loved polishing shoes. He would sit for hours, completely focused on his shoes, brushing them forward and back, back and forth, with the polish and the cloth from side to side, then with the brush, polishing them to a high shine, as if the shine he gave to his old shoes reminded him of the shining highlights of his life.

“She's probably trying to get back at me for throwing away all her
shmattes
,” her dad explained to her with the healthy logic of an absolutely demented mind, the result of the multiple strokes he had suffered over the last year.

“Mom can't have thrown away anything of yours,” she tried to explain to him, with a logic that really was healthy. “Did she throw away the toilet paper from the attic?” she asked her father.

“Not that,” he replied, “but those black shoes that I just finished polishing, she did throw away,” he insisted.

“So, quick, before she gets back from the market, let's throw out all the toilet paper.” She wanted to take the edge off her father's anger, by disposing of those rolls of toilet paper that her mother had pilfered from the customs when she cleaned there fifteen years before and saved in the attic for a rainy day.

This time too Bianca had arrived from Haifa bringing with her about five toilet rolls, so as not to waste hers. Her
sister used to get angry at their mother and tell her that she had enough money to buy toilet paper for her too, but Bianca would say, “Pardon me, but my bum doesn't need that soft pink papers of yours. It falls apart in my hands. My bum”—when she said “my bum,” she always qualified it with “pardon me,” because she thought it sounded like a rude word—“is used to the coarse paper I got from the customs.” She realized that it was not going to be possible to change the habits of a lifetime and bowed to her mother by placing the toilet rolls in the bathroom, for Bianca's own private use. But as soon as her mother left the house, she was quick to get rid of the ancient toilet paper she had left in the bathroom.

“Are you crazy?” said her dad fearfully. “She'll kill me if I throw away her toilet paper.” In his befuddled mind, he understood that it wouldn't do to annoy Bianca now, since she was the only one left to take care of him.

She and her father began searching for the perfectly polished black shoes. They looked under the bed, under the blankets, on her mother's sewing machine, on top of the closet, among all the albums, and there really was no sign of the shoes. She showed him his newly polished brown shoes. He fumed and said that he was referring to the black shoes that he had only just finished polishing. He remembered very well that these were the black shoes, and as proof, he produced the black polish and cloth, which quite clearly had just been put to use shining up a pair of shoes. She moved all the exhaustingly crowded
furniture in her parents' apartment and found nothing. She even checked the garbage can outside, not the one inside the apartment; maybe her father had been right for a change, and her mother had indeed thrown away the shoes. In the garbage can she was surprised to find a lot of carelessly discarded food, not even wrapped in plastic bags. There was an almost full container of cottage cheese, a wedge of the unsalted Canaan sheep cheese that her mother ate a lot of because of her hypertension, and even cucumber peelings that her mother saved in a bag in the fridge and used to place on her feverish brow. It seemed odd, but all the tenants in the house used the garbage can, and maybe one of them had cleaned out his fridge. She went back to her parent's place and opened the fridge. It was completely empty. There wasn't a thing in it. She opened the freezer door, and there, standing on the shelf, were the black newly polished shoes in all their glory.