Every House Needs a Balcony (20 page)

Noa suffered from serious trouble with her ears, which needed constant draining to clear them of the pus that accumulated in them. Since she was young and attractive, the doctor allowed himself to rub his leg against hers when she sat opposite him with Noa on her lap, having her ears drained. Still, she smiled sweetly at the doctor so he'd give her daughter the best care possible, even though all she wanted was to give him a sound kick in the balls. She remembered that time when she was standing at a gas station on the way out of Jerusalem, trying to hitch a ride to Tel Aviv, because she didn't have any money, as usual. She stood on the bend between the exit from the gas station and the spot where cars slowed down before blending into the traffic; she thought this was a good place to catch a ride because cars slowed down there anyway and drivers might not like to lie when asked if they were bound for Tel Aviv.

When she had decided to move to Jerusalem, she tried to get accepted to the Hebrew University and went there to take the psychometric exams, at the end of which she knew
she had failed. She knew she had failed because there was no way she could pass exams that test—among other things—a person's ability to fit into an academic framework; after all, where she grew up, she had learned only how to break down frameworks. So she wasn't surprised when a letter came from the university two months later, telling her, “We are sorry to inform you that you were found unsuitable to study at our institute for higher education.”

She stood there waiting for a ride, a young woman of twenty-one, straight-backed, her breasts firm, upright, and challenging, incapable of integrating into an academic framework, standing at the bend in the road where the road leading out of the gas station actually does integrate very well into the main road to Tel Aviv, when a car with five macho males, all having the look of being well entrenched in the Israeli crime scene, slowed down nearby. The car almost stopped when the man in the passenger seat stuck his arm out of the window and grabbed her breast with a strength that was humiliating, as if wanting to gain something out of the car slowing down and a girl with upright breasts standing by the wayside. Her Romanian blood rose to her head.

What she wanted was to give him a sharp slap on the face, but he started winding up the window, as if to say, “I've had my jollies, now I'm clearing off.”

She wanted to hit him, but a quick calculation told her that she might get her hand caught in the window. In the split second before the window closed and with the instinct
of someone who doesn't take lightly to being humiliated, she spat in his eye, a big gob of revenge. Because in Wadi Salib there was no way anyone would ever get the better of her, except for her parents, without her hitting back.

She watched as the spit dribbled down from his eye and his friends laughed at him and clapped their hands for her. They, too, recognized the value of force and the supreme value of “an eye for an eye,” or in this case, “a gob of spit for an eye.”

Noa was eleven months old and weighed eleven pounds when a new ear, nose, and throat doctor arrived in the department, claiming that he was prepared to risk operating on her. He had only just returned from a five-year term of study in the United States, where he had operated successfully on similar cases. Dr. Marshak agreed to take the risk of operating on a weak baby because he too believed that the baby would be able to gain weight only if she was able to breathe through her nose.

“What's new about your procedure?” they asked Dr. Marshak.

“I plan to make an incision below the palate, bring it down, and saw through the bone from inside. This way there is no danger of the nose getting blocked again. And at the same time, I shall sew up the hole in her palate.” He smiled at them.

“And how long with the operation take?” the man asked.

“About four hours. She's a very small baby, which makes
it much more complicated to operate on her,” explained the consultant surgeon.

With trembling hands, they signed the consent forms, declaring that they would have no claims if—God forbid—the operation did not succeed.

Noa was taken to the operating theater at eight in the morning. And when she went to the lavatory for a pee, she saw that the bowl was full of blood. From fear, she had peed blood.

Two hours later, Dr. Marshak came out and informed the worried parents that the operation had been a success, and they could go into the recovery room to be with their daughter.

“What about the hole in her palate?” the man asked the doctor, who was well pleased with himself.

“For me this was the aperitif,” he answered haughtily.

They watched her breathing on her own, her face relaxed, without the pain of constantly having to fight for every scrap of air. After five days in hospital, they went home with Noa, and within just a month she had gained over two pounds in weight. By the time she was two she had made up all the discrepancies.

My sister stayed at home to reread
Little Women
, and I went upstairs to our Syrian neighbors to play ball with Rocha.

Since we didn't own a ball, we made do with a watermelon. I sat on the edge of one bed, and Rocha sat opposite me on the other bed.

Unlike our own room, which was crammed to overflowing with stuff, the room occupied by the children upstairs contained only beds and nothing else. There was no table, no sewing machine, and no closet; only beds and a floor that was so shiny it could be eaten off of, as my mother used to say.

I didn't dare enter the room occupied by Nissim and Bracha. I was terrified of Nissim, who used to beat his kids with a belt, one after the other.

When my dad explained to Nissim that child beating was a useless way to raise children, Nissim replied that when he
was a child in Syria, his father had also beaten him, and in fact it hadn't done him any harm. According to him, if you beat your kids, you are making them resilient and more able to face the harshness of life ahead.

I threw the watermelon to Rocha from the edge of the bed I was sitting on, and she threw it back from the bed opposite. I threw it again, and she threw it back harder. I threw it harder than she did, and she got up on the bed and threw it to me with all the strength of a seven-year-old.

Rocha was a year and a half younger than me, and I got annoyed, wondering where this little kid could have gotten the strength to throw an exceptionally heavy watermelon.

I stood up on the bed and used all my strength to throw the watermelon, and missed. It fell on the clean floor that you could eat off and exploded into tiny red bits all over the room.

Bracha came into the room and saw the bits of burst watermelon all over the floor, and I was sure she'd go out to get her husband's belt and thrash me for ruining the big watermelon they had bought to eat when they got back from the beach on Saturday.

But Bracha called all her children to come up home immediately and told me to go down and call my mother and sister and to come back with them. Mom was in the middle of preparing a pot of
mamaliga
, and I told her to leave everything and come upstairs with me, otherwise Bracha would beat me with Nissim's belt.

My sister agreed to lay down
Little Women
for a few minutes, and we went up together to the second floor.

When we walked into the room, Bracha and her children were sitting on the floor, eating the watermelon that was smeared all over the room. Bracha invited us to join in, as it had been an especially large watermelon, and we sat down with the others and started feasting.

My mother was right. It was perfectly OK to eat off Bracha's clean floor, which she got down on all fours to scrub every single day, even if the end of the world was nigh.

Dad taught Bracha how to play rummy, and she would sometimes join them as a fifth hand in a game. Why only a fifth hand? So she shouldn't, God forbid, spoil the game. Because if Nissim came home suddenly and called down for her to come straight home, she would spring up in fright from the table and leave behind all the rummy cubes. She would run upstairs quickly before he went crazy and shouted at her to stop wasting all her time playing rummy all day with those Romanians. Bracha was always doing things for Nissim, taking off his shoes and smiling at him, as if she even liked him.

The last time they played rummy, Dad persuaded Bracha to tell Nissim that the next time he raised his hand to her, she wouldn't give him any at night. I don't know what Bracha said to Nissim about no longer giving him any at night, but the fact is that it worked. Nissim stopped beating Bracha and only continued beating an education into his children with a
belt. I never understood why they too couldn't threaten not to give him any at night so he'd stop whipping them.

By turning our home into a shelter for every battered woman or child who needed it, my dad effectively invented late-1970s feminism on Stanton Street.

Opposite us lived the Abbas family from Morocco, a family of twelve with everyone beating everyone else. The parents beat the children, the older children beat the younger children, and the younger children beat the babies. They all wanted to grow up quickly so they could beat the next-in-line sibling.

And of course, all the older and younger children got whipped by the parents.

My sister used to visit them and warned us not to dare go into their lavatory, even if we were dying to go, because we could fall into the hole. In our building on Stanton, all the lavatories had bowls, but across the road at the Abbas family's apartment the lavatory consisted of a hole in the floor. My sister explained that we were liable to be sucked down into the black hole when were doing our business.

Sima once asked Sefi where she thought the black hole led to, and my sister, who knew everything, told her, “To Auschwitz.”

The apartment on the other side of the first-floor staircase—the floor we lived on—was occupied by Yeheskel the Pole. Yeheskel had a savings-and-loan hairstyle. He'd grow his hair long on one side and borrow it to drape over his head and cover his bald patch over to the other side, where it refused to
grow. Yeheskel had two albino children, twins who refused to eat. Yeheskel used to take them out to our fancy yard, the private playground that belonged exclusively to 40 Stanton; he sat them on the stone step and let them watch us at play. He would ask us to hold a handstand competition, and as the small, very albino children were watching us in admiration, he would shove a dubious-looking brown porridge into their mouths. No wonder the albinos didn't want to eat. It looked so repulsive, the poor kids spewed it out in disgust as soon at it passed their lips. Yeheskel or his wife would scoop up the now even browner porridge spewed up by the twins and continued feeding them the vomited-up mixture as if nothing had happened. Although I loathed the parents, I would always do the splits for the albino kids whenever they asked me to, because I felt really sorry for them and the way they were being force-fed. When the albino twins had finished eating, we all dispersed, each to his or her own home, because it was time for the sacred afternoon siesta between two and four. My sister and I went to eat our
chorba
soup, whenever the neighboring Mizrahi girls were invited; the Abbas family to their
mufleta
; the albinos had already eaten their vomit; only at Marina's we never knew what was being eaten, because we never got invited.

Marina was a model; I'm not sure if by profession, but certainly by the way she looked. She was blond, tall, and very pretty. She even behaved like a model, and I have no doubt that if Calvin Klein had known her today, he would have
signed her on for life, since Marina was so thin as to be transparent. Because she was obsessed with cleanliness, Marina never allowed her daughter Nava to play with us. Nava had inherited her mother's transparency, but where her mother was serious, the girl smiled a lot and was very cheerful and impish. As soon as Nava came home from school she'd be placed straight into the bath, where she was scrubbed clean as if she were a horse after a wild, sweaty gallop. Her mother removed every grain of dirt that might have attached itself to the girl in school, including under her fingernails and behind her ears. When Marina had finished scouring her daughter, who was probably transparent from all that scrubbing as well, she fed her some fruit and sent her to bed. Nava was never fed hot food at home, only in school, because Marina didn't want to dirty the stove with cooking. She was sensitive to gas and to cleanliness. After her afternoon rest, Marina allowed Nava to sit on the balcony and watch how we street children played. Of course she was never allowed to go down to the street to play with us, so as not to get dirty. Nor was she allowed to invite children home, since children make a mess. If Marina had been able to avoid sending Nava to school altogether, she would no doubt have done so, but she couldn't because of the compulsory education law. In Wadi Salib, the compulsory education law was sacrosanct; since most of the wadi's inhabitants had not gone to school in their countries of origin, it didn't occur to them to send their own children to school now they were in Israel. But
when school inspectors began appearing at their homes and they discovered that in order to integrate and learn Hebrew it was their duty to provide their children with an education, the parents capitulated. Moreover, in school, their kids were given a free ten o'clock meal of chocolate milk and fruit and a hot dinner, which was definitely worthwhile.

Even we Ashkenazis were considered low-class by Marina; to her it made no difference that we were white and didn't look like those other black barbarians. The fact remained that Nava was never allowed to play with us Romanian girls, either.

I would watch her little face peeping through the bars of her roof apartment, watching us with envy, watching the neighborhood children playing in the street, seeing the promised land but unable to go down to it.

When we asked Dad to do something for that poor girl, he just shrugged and said, “There's nothing I can do, that's the way she came back from the Holocaust.”

And the story goes that Marina, who was a girl of about sixteen in the death camp, transparent and very beautiful, was the camp whore, fulfilling the sexual needs of the Gestapo officers. When the war was over, she spent her life scrubbing herself, trying in vain to clean her body—as well as that of her little daughter, who never knew who her father was—of the Nazi filth. I don't know how Marina found her way to our building in the first place, since it had been meant to house police personnel, but she was also the first to move out.

One evening Dad seemed sad and told us that policemen
had shot at someone who was running wild in a café, and that there would probably be trouble.

The next morning we awoke to shouting and rioting in the street. We all went out to the balcony and saw, from the bottom of the street, a mass of people moving upward, bearing black flags and our national blue-and-white flag, stained with blood.

They threw stones at all the houses in which Ashkenazis lived, and Lutzi told us to get inside immediately because they'd be near our house soon and would throw stones at us too.

We all went in, except for my dad, who continued to stand alone on the balcony, watching his neighborhood friends running amok.

Mom shouted to him to get inside immediately, but Dad refused.

“I'd like to see anyone dare throw stones at me,” he said. “I'm one of them, after all.”

We stood peeping out of the window and saw the masses approaching our building, 40 Stanton.

Suddenly someone shouted: No one touches Franco's house.

“He's one of ours, he's Romanian.”

And they all continued to march up the street toward the Hadar neighborhood, throwing stones at anyone they suspected of being Ashkenazi. They skipped our house.

OK, you don't have to be a genius to figure that out—my dad genuinely wasn't Ashkenazi.