Every House Needs a Balcony (7 page)

No wonder his mother was somewhat plump.

Another twenty minutes passed before a signal was given and the man stood up from the table, saying, “Thank you very much” in French, and she hurried to follow him in case someone brought in another final course that was good for the digestion, saying, “Muchas gracias.” She thanked her hosts, not because that was what the man had done, but because it was what her parents had brought her up to do: each time you get up from the table, say, “Thank you very much,” for the food that was prepared for you.

He took her on a tour of the house and showed her the large rooms; even Laura's room, which was attached to the kitchen, was a lot bigger than any of the rooms she had seen until then.

“Don't you have a balcony in your house?” she asked him.

“Of course we do,” he was quick to reply, and led her to a fifty-foot-long balcony stretching from the dining area to the red velvet reception room.

The whole length of the balcony was filled with tubs of multicolored geraniums.

The balcony overlooked a smart office block without balconies. When she looked down from the tenth story, she saw cafés and bars packed to overflowing, with people milling around on the sidewalks waiting to get in.

“Don't you ever sit out on the balcony?” she wondered, renowned aficionada of balconies that she was.

“Not really,” he replied.

“Pity,” she said, “you're missing a connection with the outside.”

He pulled her from the balcony to show her his own spacious bedroom, and when she saw that he had a suite all to himself, a lavatory for his own use, and a bath and shower that he alone used each morning, she remembered the once-a-week bath she used to share with her sister.

Mom stood on the balcony, calling us loudly in Romanian to come up to eat. We always had to be called up to eat; it made no difference if we were busy and in the middle of an important game, or in the middle of playing hide-and-seek and not yet ready to reveal where we were. It didn't matter if the gasoline truck had just arrived and the intoxicating smell was driving us half out of our minds. It didn't matter if the driver of the ice van had just split a block of ice in half or in quarters and was selling the pieces to everyone who wanted to buy; nor did it matter that we had caught a ride with the horse-cart driver, sitting up behind him before being discovered and getting a lash of his whip.

Mom was calling us, and—if only to stop her shouting in Romanian—we hurried up the stairs to our apartment, although we knew that it was Thursday.

We were ashamed to speak Romanian, we were ashamed
of people knowing that we knew Romanian, and more than anything, we were ashamed of being Romanian. We always insisted to whoever wanted to know that we had a Sephardi father, and when people wanted to know what country he came from, we always answered quickly, He's from Romania, but he's a Sephardi Romanian. At home he speaks Ladino.

And we omitted the disgraceful fact that Mom was an Ashkenazi Romanian.

“Ooof, how I hate Thursdays,” I said to my sister as we climbed up the stairs.

“Why, don't you like being clean?” she asked.

“No,” I replied immediately. “I'll only get dirty again anyway, so what's the point?”

“Actually, I'd like to be clean all the time,” my sister said to me. “I'd have a bath every day, if I could.”

“Are you crazy?” I said, horrified. “No one washes every day. Not even rich people.”

“I bet they take showers every day in America,” she said confidently, “and they change their knickers every day.”

“I don't believe that,” I told my sister, who always knew everything and believed that there were people in the world who had a daily shower and even used it as an excuse to change their underwear.

We burst into the apartment through the kitchen. Mom was busy preparing
mamaliga
and told us crossly to go to the table. We entered the room and saw Dad peeping in
from the other door, which led to Tante Lutzi's rooms. He held his finger to his lips, signaling to us to keep quiet, and tiptoed into the room and closed the door after himself, so Mom shouldn't hear. His hair was wet, and a large towel was draped over his shoulders.

I went to him and started sniffing, the way a dog sniffs at his master when he's just come home.

“You've been to the Turkish baths,” Yosefa whispered to him, and I sniffed my father and told him that he smelled of roses.

He asked us not to tell our mother, and hid his towel behind the pile of bedding on the sewing machine. “You know how she doesn't like me spending money.” We nodded our heads conspiratorially, prepared to defend him with our lives.

Dad asked us to lay the table and shouted to Mom, so she should hear, asking what she wanted him to do.

“I want you to stop wasting the girls' dowry,” Mom shouted back without even putting her head out of the kitchen. “I can smell the roses on you from here. Have you forgotten that people who are hard of hearing have a heightened sense of smell?”

I took out four plates and laid them on the table, and my sister removed them and went to the cupboard to take out an orange tablecloth with a pale print. She spread the cloth over the table, and Dad asked her what the occasion was. My sister smiled at him and said that the cloth would protect
the family photographs beneath the glass tabletop. I didn't understand how a cloth could protect photographs. Doesn't the glass protect them? But I said nothing. Dad smiled and patted Yosefa's head fondly, and I was jealous at the way my big sister always managed to please our father, whereas I only caused trouble.

My sister arranged the plates, brought over the jar of anemones we had picked the previous Saturday, and placed it on the table.

Mom emerged from the kitchen carrying a pot of
mamaliga
and asked my sister, “What are the flowers in honor of?” As if she already knew that there was no way I would ever place a jar of anemones on the table. My sister explained that she had seen it in last Saturday's movie. And Dad patted my sister's head again, glad that he had a daughter who shared his American dream.

“Keep your mouth closed when you're eating, and don't make any noise when you chew. It's not polite,” my sister said to me when all the attention was on her.

“I'm not chewing the
mamaliga
. I'm just swallowing it. But it's terribly hot.” I sulked.

She was always educating me. Stand up straight. Pull your neck up from your shoulders. Don't use bad language, and don't spit. Don't be rude, and don't look adults straight in the eye. They don't like it. Nod your head in submission as if you agree with them—and then you can do whatever you like.

“What else do you like in movies?” Mom asked my sister as she served out generous helpings of the yellow
mamaliga
bubbling in the pot. One tablespoon and then another until the plate was filled to the rim; then she added a dollop of sour cream to the torrid yellow mass, melting, blending, and folding it into the mountain of
mamaliga
until it got swallowed up, without a trace. She served Yosefa first, and then I received an equally generous helping.

“And his lordship?” Mom asked Dad. “What can I offer him? Margarine or yellow cheese?”

“Is there no cream left?” Dad asked, tempting fate.

“Whatever's left is for the girls for tomorrow. If you hadn't gone and wasted that money on your Turkish bath—as if we don't have a shower right here at home—maybe we'd be able to buy a jar of cream every day.”

“You can shower in cold water,” Dad said to her. “I like my water to be hot.”

“We all know what you like,” she retorted. “If you had a regular job, we'd be able to afford a boiler.”

“As if you'd let me waste money on heating up water if we did have a boiler. You don't even let us waste water,” Dad whined, looking at us girls to approve of his extravagances in the Turkish baths.

I looked at the half-full jar of sour cream and thought to myself, When I'm grown up, I'll buy up all the jars of sour cream in the world, just for him.

The pretty glass jar that held the cream was shaped like
a naked lady, like the oil refineries that could be seen in the distance from our balcony. The Haifa yogurt jars, we called them, and we wondered why they were yogurt jars and not sour cream jars. The heavy glass milk bottles were shaped like a slim woman and sealed with a chunky circle of silver foil, which Mom used to peel off very carefully so as not to waste a single drop of the
kaimak
that accumulated at the top of the bottle in a thick, dense layer that tasted of heaven. At first my sister and I used to quarrel over whose turn it was to get the
kaimak
. In the end we agreed on the sensible arrangement she proposed: me on even days, she on odd days. It was so logical as to prevent any confusion. Except that I didn't notice that the even days always added up to three, and the odd days to four.

“I look at everything in the movies. Their clothes, their makeup, the cars they drive, and especially the fancy houses they live in,” my sister answered my mother.

I whispered to her that she was hurting our parents' feelings because we didn't have the money to own a grand house, and anyway, such houses exist only in America.

My sister tried to make up to our parents for the insult by telling them that her teacher, Hanna, had written in her notebook that she was a very diligent, responsible, and well-organized girl, and asked her to read her composition aloud to the rest of the class.

“What did you write about?” Dad asked, and my sister replied, “About what I want to be when I grow up.”

Dad asked her if she still wanted to be a writer, and she said she did, “a rich and famous writer.” Dad told her that people who dream usually get to fulfill their dreams, especially since my sister didn't lack imagination.

“A very diligent girl. Beautifully behaved and a real example to her peers,” Dad read out of the notebook, once again stroking Yosefa's hair.

Fifth time in half an hour—I counted in my heart the number of times my diligent sister had had her head stroked by my dad.

“Your teacher didn't write that you were responsible and well organized,” I said to my sister. “You were just showing off.”

“No, I wasn't,” she replied. “She said it to me herself.”

Mom, who was pleased by the teacher's comment in the notebook, told my sister she didn't have to finish off her
mamaliga
. I took advantage of the moment and said, “So I don't need to either.”

“We didn't get potato cakes for lunch today, and it's not fair.” I tried to think of something more interesting than the teacher's praise for my sister.

“Why?” my dad obliged me. “Wasn't Dina there today to cook for you?”

“No. They told us that her mother had died. When are you going to die?” I asked, and Dad said that it would happen when they were very, very old, and we too would be old by then, but still not as old as them.

Mom tells us to get into the bath, and we get undressed. Two girls with their hair cut short and bangs; one's hair is black, the other's light brown; sad brown eyes and laughing green eyes. I throw my clothes on the floor, and Yosefa folds hers neatly and lays them on the wooden chair at the end of the bath, even though they are dirty. Probably to show me how responsible and well organized she is, and not just to show off.

I loathed Thursdays—cleaning day—because I knew that dirt wasn't going anywhere, as Mom was always saying to our Syrian upstairs neighbor, Bracha. Every day Bracha, mother of Sima, Rocha, and Yaffa, swabbed the floors of her apartment; after pouring out several bucketfuls of water, she would go over the floor with a stick and a cloth, poking into every dusty corner. Then she would squeeze the cloth and wring from it every drop of air and water, before going down on all fours and wiping the floor dry. On Fridays Bracha washed her floors twice, once in the morning and again in the afternoon, as a deposit for tomorrow's day of rest.

Mom often told Bracha off for keeping her floors so clean—and why for God's sake did she have to go down on all fours to wipe them dry?

“Anyone would think you were eating off the floor,” Mom said to Bracha.

And Bracha told her that this was how she had done it in Syria. My mother never understood the logic, or more accurately, the lack of logic, behind daily housecleaning.

Bracha argued back that Mom also cleaned houses on a daily basis, and Mom answered that with her it was “to make a living, not as a hobby,” like it was with Bracha.

 

We are naked, waiting for Mom to come in with the basin of boiling water she has heated on the Primus stove. She pours the hot water into the bath and adds some cold water. My sister measures the heat of the water with her little finger, and Mom puts in her hand and turns off the cold-water tap. We get into the bath and dive under the water and make sounds like ships and Dad puts in the paper boats he makes for us and goes out to lift up the entire house onto the beds.

The chairs, he places upside down up on the table, and he puts everything that can move about freely on the beds, together with the shoes and the vases. The carpet he had beaten that morning, he folds up and takes out to the balcony to hang over the banister. Thursday is the big washday for us, for our mother, for the weekly laundry, and for swabbing down the floors.

My sister reminds me that we have to soap ourselves thoroughly behind our ears, because tomorrow Fima will be examining us; I even scrub out the dirt under my fingernails.

As she raises her head from the water, I ask her anxiously if Mom and Dad are not already very old. Fila explain that
Grandmother Vavika was seventy, which was terribly old, but Mom and Dad are only forty-five.

“So how many years do they have left to live?” I ask and my sister asks me what's seventy minus forty.

“I don't know, I'm only in first grade,” I say, annoyed with her for not understanding that in first grade they don't teach you how to subtract forty from seventy.

“Anyway, I've told you that Mom and Dad are not our real parents,” says my sister, who has seen God and certainly knows how to do arithmetic.

“So who are our parents?”

My sister repeats for the hundredth time that Bianca couldn't get pregnant; it's a fact that she gave birth to us at a relatively late age, and I ask, “What's relatively?” and Fila, who is called Fila because I was unable to say a word as long as Yosefa, says that it's a man called Einstein, and I can't understand what that has to do with the fact that Bianca couldn't get pregnant, but I don't ask her anything else so as not to appear stupid.

Fila says that probably because Bianca couldn't get pregnant, Moscu, who wanted to make Mom happy and give her kids, kidnapped us from our real parents.

“So who are our real parents?” I ask my sister again, and she says that our father is a sea captain, and he's looking for us all over the world.

“And what about our mother?” I ask.

“Our real mother,” replies my sister, “is sitting by the
window in the dark castle we own somewhere in England, surrounded by lawns, and weeping for her beloved daughters who've been kidnapped, as she waits for her husband the sea captain to bring them back to her.”

I say that it seems stupid for our real mother to spend her time just sitting beside the window weeping and not doing anything about searching for us. The fact is that in the movie
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, Doris Day and her husband searched for their kidnapped son until they found him.