Every House Needs a Balcony (19 page)

Noa smiled at them again and at the bright blue shining balloon.

At midnight their neighbor knocked on the door and said that there was an urgent phone call for them, and when, with trembling hands, she picked up the receiver, her sister told her that their father had died. She started to cry, and when her husband grasped her shoulders, afraid she would collapse, she said that it was a relief—a relief that it wasn't Noa, and a relief that her father's share of suffering was over.

At long last, the Circus Madrano arrived in town. Every year it went first to Tel Aviv, then to Jerusalem, and finally, to Haifa, even though Haifa is the most beautiful city in Israel.

It was the same as the military parade on Independence Day; first it went to Jerusalem, our capital city, then to Tel Aviv, before ending up in Haifa.

My sister and I wanted to wear the clothes we'd received from Fima and Sami's last shipment from America to the circus. But Dad said he was very sorry, because the butcher who had promised him two tickets to the circus in return for the lovely sign he had painted over the door of his store hadn't been able in the end to obtain the tickets that he was supposed to have received from his brother-in-law who worked for the municipality.

My sister was crestfallen, and I straightaway lied to my dad and said that I couldn't care less about that stupid circus, so he
shouldn't get heartsick for not having the money to take his darling daughters to the circus. I looked him straight in the eyes, to stop him from feeling that I was really disappointed to death.

The next afternoon, as we were outside playing our usual game of hide-and-seek, Fila told me that we were going to the circus on our own.

“But we're not dressed nicely,” I said.

“We can't get in anyway. We'll just walk around, maybe get a glimpse of the elephants,” my sister told me.

Back and forth we circled, until suddenly we saw a tiny hole in the fence.

A hole in the wall is an open invitation to a thief—that's exactly what that hole looked like.

We couldn't make up our minds what to do. Should we continue circling, or should we steal our way into the circus? Suddenly my sister grabbed my hand hard and dragged me after her through the hole in the fence.

I was horrified. Of the two of us, Fila was the coward. Where did she get the nerve to steal into the circus, when it's obvious to everyone that the place is crawling with police all waiting just to nab kids who have stolen in illegally and take them back to their parents and make them ashamed of themselves? My sister ordered me to keep my back straight, the way she forced me to practice at home, walking with books on my head so I wouldn't develop a hunchback like Avram from the grocery store. We walked through the circus like a
couple of robots, taking tiny steps like Japanese ladies and pretending not to be looking from side to side in fear. When we reached a water faucet, we rinsed our faces and passed damp hands through our hair and clothing so as to smooth over the poverty, and continued walking straight-backed and trembling with fear, mingling with the happy crowds.

There was an intermission, so everyone was wandering around with cotton candy, balloons, nibbles, and red toffee apples, and all to the magical sound of the music that they always play in circuses.

Suddenly we saw Auntie Lika and Uncle Max looming up in front of us. Auntie Lika was Mom's oldest sister, and they lived in a house in Givat Olga with a garden full of fruit trees. My sister made me swear not to reveal the fact that we had stolen in, so they wouldn't tell on us, and when they asked us if we were enjoying ourselves so far, my sister exhibited amazing acumen and I nodded my head briskly, not uttering a word.

Then my wise sister told them she'd run out of patience and couldn't wait to see the second half of the show, which was absolutely true.

Max took some money out of his pocket and gave it to us to buy ourselves some cotton candy or a lollipop.

I was over the moon with joy; not only were we getting to see the circus without its costing our dad any money, but we were also going to have some cotton candy. It was the absolute fulfillment of all our dreams.

We said good-bye to Auntie Lika and Uncle Max, and I
made straight for the cotton candy stand. But Fila pulled me back hard—she was, after all, a year and eight months older and therefore stronger than me—and explained that we still weren't out of danger, and anyway we looked suspicious in our faded clothes that came from the parcel Sami and Fima had received from their relatives in America, and any minute a policeman could turn up and catch us out as soon as he asked to see the tickets we didn't have.

“So what are we going to do?” I asked my older sister who had stolen us into the circus, and she explained that with the money we had received from Uncle Max, we had to buy a shiny silver balloon, the kind of balloon that is very expensive and prestigious and only rich people can afford, and with a balloon like that in our possession, she believed, no one would ever suspect that we were underprivileged and had stolen into the circus.

Sadly I said good-bye to the cotton candy stand, and we went to buy a fancy silver balloon that would remove all suspicion from girls who steal into the circus. My sister immediately picked out a red balloon, and I, who preferred a blue one, didn't dare argue with her this time. After all, it was thanks to her that we were here at all.

We entered the Big Top, two girls dressed in faded clothes with a large silvery red balloon, which later disappeared in the skies, with a grumbling stomach that dreamed of a sugar stick and sweet pink cotton candy. And really, no one suspected us. It was lovely, the other half of the circus show.

She went with her sister and their mother to the hospital, and they looked down at Moscu's lifeless body. Around the bed next to their father's, an entire extended family was nursing a patient. One of them, a man of about fifty, walked over to them and told them in a voice full of reproach that throughout the Sabbath, their father hadn't stopped asking for his family.

“How did he ask?” her sister wanted to know. “Did he call out for us?”

“He was waving his arms as if to say, ‘Where will salvation come from?' Several times my wife or I went and gave him something to drink. I even fed him some compote. It was the only thing he agreed to eat. Toward the end he really wept, as if begging to say good-bye to you. He suffered, poor man. All through the Sabbath he suffered. May his soul be gathered in eternal life.”

“Why didn't you ask one of the nurses to call us?” asked her sister angrily of the only person who had cared for their father in his final hours.

“I asked. The nurse looked at his records and said she couldn't find your telephone number.”

“And didn't the nurses go to him?” Her sister was furious at the whole world, but mainly she was furious with herself.

“You know what it's like in hospitals on Shabbat. A dog feels less abandoned than a sick person,” said the man who had taken pity on their dad.

“All our lives he lived only for us, and we couldn't even take the trouble to be with him when he needed us,” she said to her sister sorrowfully, and her sister told her that she was not to blame. She was, after all, taking care of her daughter. “It's all my fault,” said her sister, and fell into a deep melancholy for having abandoned her father.

During the shivah, she asked the rabbi of the Sephardi synagogue that her father had attended on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur what, according to Judaism, the uvula was used for. She knew that, unlike doctors, rabbis have answers to everything.

“The uvula is the covenant forged between the Creator of the Universe and the select few,” said the rabbi, when he came to the shivah to console them over the death of their father.

“The uvula is the barrier between the soul and the voice that emanates from a person's mouth. It is like a barrier that says to a person: think very, very carefully before every
word you utter, because the moment it has left your mouth, it is no longer yours. It is in the public domain.

“According to Kabbalah, it is through wisdom, or as some call it, the spirit, that God created the world and that there are ten
sefirot
, ten Divine Emanations in the spirit. In the book of creativity that relates to the Patriarch Abraham, it is said: Ten
sefirot
of concealment correspond to the ten fingers: Five against five, they act in unison, as a union between them acts, through the power-word of revelation and the power-word of concealment.

“The covenant that was forged between us and God, as a word of the foreskin—the bris milah—we are all familiar with, but as the word of the tongue, only a very few have received it. You see, my daughter, only a very few, only the selected, the elite, have received the covenant of the tongue between man and God. And it is in this covenant that the uvula is carved. Why are you asking?” asked the rabbi.

“Because my baby daughter's uvula was amputated,” she replied.

“You have a very special daughter,” he told her, and she said that she just wanted her baby to be healthy and hurried away to the hospital to be beside her sick daughter.

When she was two months old, Noa tasted mother's milk for the first time. Zohara said that she had to learn how to suckle and breathe alternately, and that it was not good to continue feeding her through a tube straight into her intestine. She practiced for hours, and with much love and devo
tion she managed to get Noa to suck, then breathe, and again to suck, and again to breathe. Most of the time Noa puked up the food through her mouth, or through her cleft palate.

Dr. Mogilner wanted Noa to receive mother's milk and, since she was unable to provide the goods, they were told that religious women considered it a mitzvah, an act of human kindness, to supply mother's milk wherever necessary. They made inquiries in the religious neighborhood of Bnei Brak, but found nothing. Until she remembered baby Rivka, who was born five minutes after Noa. The hospital gave her their telephone number, and she hoped their generosity would be greater than any she could find in her own neighborhood.

She called Rivka's mother, who was happy to hear her and asked after Noa. She told her that she and her husband often wondered how their baby girl was getting on. Yes, thank God, Rivka already weighed over twelve pounds. When she understood that Noa hadn't passed the seven-pound threshold, she asked what could she do to help.

“I need your milk,” she said, “not I, I mean, my daughter.”

Rivka's mother agreed immediately. Said that she had too much milk anyway, and that her breasts after her fourth baby were loaded with milk and that she'd be happy to express some of it for her.

“Whoever saves one person is considered as if he saved an entire world,” she added, and told her that she considered it an honor that they had come to her for help.

“We didn't have anyone else to turn to,” she said truthfully.

Every day after work, the man would drive to Bnei Brak to pick up two full bottles of mother's milk, and she, who had been given by Zohara the task of feeding, fed baby Noa, making sure to give her plenty of breaks to allow her to breathe.

Aged three months and weighing seven pounds, Noa was released from hospital to take up residence with her parents, who promised to bring her back three times a week for checkups and therapy.

They decorated her room with colorful wallpaper, to give her something cheerful to look at, instead of all those green gowns and transfusion stands she had seen since the day she was born. She dressed her baby in all the beautiful clothes she'd been sent from Barcelona, the clothes that she looked at every evening with yearning, praying for the day that her daughter would be able to wear them. She hoped that in her own home, with her parents who loved her, Noa would grow strong and flourish, and gain weight.

They bought pacifiers, in which they punched a hole to enable Noa to breathe through her mouth. But their baby didn't want a pacifier and preferred to suck her thumb and choke for lack of air. The complete blockage in her nose became a serious problem now she was at home and it was no longer possible to tube-feed her. Far too many times she witnessed Noa's tiny fists rising, desperate for air, and there was none to be had. She went to open the baby's mouth and Noa would look at her with a grateful expression, as if
to say, “Thank you for the air you give me.” For hours on end she would stand by the cot, holding her baby's mouth open to enable her to breath. At night they did shifts. Some nights she would wake from a bad dream, in which her daughter was fighting for air, and run to the cot, only to see her husband standing there holding Noa's mouth open, enabling her to breathe. Nothing interested her apart from her daughter. Her husband went out to work and did his best to acclimatize himself to life in a new country and to learn the language and customs, with which he had been familiar as a tourist, but which, now that he was a citizen of the country, were quite alien. She was sorry they had allowed themselves to be persuaded by a friend of his, who had made aliyah two years before and lived with his wife in Rishon le Zion, to buy an apartment nearby. Since the friends had children, they thought they would have fun together. But this was before Noa was born. Once she was born, they never saw those friends again; it was as if those people thought that their home and their sick child might contaminate them.

She had wanted the apartment in Rishon le Zion mainly because of its large balcony that overlooked a rural landscape. But in order to get a telephone from the telephone company, they had to join a long waiting list, and all the documents they brought from the hospital proving that they had a sick daughter made no difference at all; the telephone company had no telephone to supply them, and they continued to be cut off from the world.

She felt sorry for her husband for leaving an easy life in Barcelona, while here in Israel everything was so hard. Compared with his former income, his job in Israel paid very little; he had no friends; his parents were a long way away; his wife was sad and easily irritated, and his daughter was extremely sick. His life had turned upside down, like the Hebrew he spoke, and if he ever wanted to relax in her arms, it was never a good time for her, after she'd been feeding her daughter for hours just to see her vomit it all up afterward.

He would leave her the car—so she could take Noa to the hospital in an emergency—and take three buses in each direction to get to his work in Tel Aviv, and although he finished work at five o'clock, it was seven o'clock before he came home every evening, only to find his wife as pale as his daughter. But he stayed optimistic, even after it was obvious that Noa was suffering from a chronic blood disorder and a weak immune system.

At six months old, Noa was hospitalized again for a period of three months, at the end of which she was released from hospital weighing less than nine pounds. At nine months she weighed the same as a newborn baby. Throughout this entire period, Noa did not digest any food and was constantly hooked up to transfusions so as not to become dehydrated. Again it was hard to find her veins, and she had to be pricked several times a day, and each time tore her parents to pieces.

Every day she would turn up at the hospital at seven in the morning and stay until seven in the evening, when her brother-in-law arrived to take over from her until ten o'clock; that was when the man arrived and stayed the night with Noa. She used to meet her husband for a brief period every evening between eight and nine o'clock, when she would report on the baby's hemoglobin count and if again she'd been given a transfusion after three or four attempts at finding a vein. Only on Saturdays did they spend the day together, nursing their daughter. All week she was on guard, like a lioness defending her daughter against unnecessary germs; there was not the same level of sterility on the children's ward as in the Premature Babies Unit. She was terrified that with her sub-standard immune system Noa could catch any of the diseases in the vicinity. She had brought Noa's bathtub from home to avoid having to wash her baby in the hospital's facilities, thus offending the nurses, who insisted that they were fastidious about sterilizing the sink between bathing one baby and the next and used the most powerful antiseptics available. But she was adamant that Noa should have her own bathtub and wouldn't allow anyone else come near her. Noticing a nurse about to change Noa's transfusion bags, she was not too shy to ask her to first wash her hands—and made sure that the nurse did so—especially if the nurse had just finished attending a child with an intestinal problem. Above all, she made sure that it was the correct transfusion and that no inadvertent mistakes occurred, God forbid. She was
going to allow nothing inadvertent anywhere near her sick daughter. On some days she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and wouldn't allow any of the medical staff to approach Noa. Her husband told her that she was turning everyone against her, but she said that she would rather they feared her craziness than that “any intern should get the idea that he can experiment on our baby.”

During the long hours she spent in the hospital she watched with envy as the nurses changed shifts, handing on instructions from one to the next and returning, after a day's work, to their husbands, their children, their homes. During the night shifts she'd hear the nurse giving instructions to her husband, to bathe their son, to make him an omelet in the shape of a face, because that's the only way he'll eat it, to place two olives instead of eyes and a cucumber for a mouth, so he'll get some vegetables into him. She was crazy with envy of ordinary healthy people, living in regular houses and eating regular homemade food and not a tasteless sandwich from a vending machine, and she prayed for the day that her daughter would be able to eat without vomiting up everything she took in.

One night, when her husband was sick with flu and slept at home, her brother-in-law spent the night at Noa's bedside, and when she arrived at the hospital at six in the morning, he welcomed her with cries of joy; Noa had been weighed an hour ago—life in hospitals begins at dawn—and she had crossed the nine-pound threshold. Her brother-in-law was
as happy as if the night he had spent with Noa had finally caused her to gain weight.

“And apart from that, how did the night go?” she asked her brother-in-law.

“Nothing special,” he admitted. She'd had to have a blood transfusion, and because they couldn't find a spare vein in her body, but only in her neck, he had been obliged to hold Noa's head on its side with her neck straight and motionless, so the transfusion didn't become disconnected.

“You held her head for four hours?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied, “and then I passed out.”

She insisted to the doctors that Noa would never be able to keep any food down and gain weight until she had an operation to unblock her nose. The doctors were adamant, however, that such an operation would help for a short time only; the bone would grow back and continue blocking her airways, and since the baby was weak, there was a serious fear that she wouldn't make it through the operation. The chicken and the egg; what went before what. To their credit, though, the doctors learned in time to consult with her and never changed a treatment or a medication without asking for her opinion. They understood that the instincts of a mother like her are sometimes stronger than medical science, which often finds itself fumbling in the dark. Besides, that damn germ had caused so much damage that there wasn't a department that Noa wasn't treated in: ear, nose, and throat; mouth and jaw; neurology; gastroenterology;
ophthalmology; and, of course, hematology. She was trundled from department to department, from a lung X-ray to draining pus from the baby's ears. She knew all the doctors in the various departments, and she didn't like them. With the exception of the pediatricians, she loathed the doctors' high-handed arrogance. Worst of all in her opinion were the doctors in the ear, nose, and throat department, and they, to her misfortune, were the ones she needed most.