Every House Needs a Balcony (21 page)

“I want to move,” she told her husband during one of their quarrels, which had become more frequent over the last year, the fifth of their marriage. “I'm cut off here from the rest of the world. I don't have a phone, and because I want you to get home from work early, I don't even have a car; there are no shops within walking distance or cafés anywhere nearby, not even a decent supermarket, and I'm stuck here in a roof apartment with God, who doesn't give a shit about me.”

“But we've only lived here for two and a half years,” he replied.

“That's two and a half years too many,” she countered. “It was a mistake, and we've paid for it long enough.”

“Let's give the place another chance. They'll be developing the area soon,” he said with infinite patience.

“I don't want to give the place a chance!” she screamed at
her husband. “I need an apartment that has some connection to life and is close to the hospital. You just can't imagine the fear I live in whenever you're away from here with the car. What's going to happen to Noa? What'll happen if she suddenly doesn't feel well?”

“In Barcelona we moved only once during my entire life,” he said, reciting his credo.

“You obviously didn't need any more than that,” she said. “I want to move close to my sister; it'll help me with Noa's care. You, all evening you're stuck behind your desk doing those little private jobs of yours. You don't do nearly enough to share the burden of a sick child.”

“I have to support the two of you,” he said, “and I do all those silly extra jobs so we'll be able to see out the month. You know how important it is for me to get on in my profession, start a business of my own; I don't want to feel I'm a loser.”

But she was concerned only with Noa's illness. After the operation, Noa was able to breath through her nose and did indeed gain weight, trying to make up for a whole year of no growth, but she was still in need of heavy medication and frequent outpatient visits to the hospital, where she received intravenous immunoglobulin treatment to stabilize her immune system. They used to return from hospital after a long day of treatments, and she would scrub Noa in the bath, cleaning the hospital off her. Then she would fill the bath for herself and climb in, dead tired.

Over the years that her daughter was receiving treatment
in the oncology/hematology department, she often encountered child cancer patients, who would no longer be there on her next visit. Whenever she heard that a child had died, she felt deeply depressed, full of fears. All her frustration, anger, and helplessness, she turned against their roof apartment and its lack of telephone, and against anyone else who crossed her path.

The more she talked about moving house in ever-increasing bouts of hysteria, the more closed and introverted he became, telling her only that until she stopped being hysterical, he had nothing to say to her.

They were in the car when one of their quarrels broke out, on their way to the Davush beach, where they had planned to meet up with her sister and her family. It was a Saturday morning.

“I am not hysterical, and I want to move house. Otherwise I'll jump off the roof with Noa in my arms,” she threatened.

“I don't understand how you could have turned into—” He cut himself short.

“What have I turned into?” she asked in astonishment.

“Your mother. Her whole life, the only things she ever cared about were her daughters. She didn't care about her husband, she didn't care about herself, and she cared about nothing else. Only her daughters.”

“Are you trying to say that I don't care about you?” she asked him.

“You don't have time for me, and you don't care about me,” he replied. “You are always, but always, tired at night, and I don't even dare come anywhere near you.”

“You are so right. At this point in time, sex is just not at the top of my agenda,” she said.

“Your ‘at this point in time' has been going on for over two years,” he retorted.

“What are you complaining about? I cook you the food you like; you come home to an apartment that is clean and well cared for, even when I've been with Noa at the hospital all day long. Your clothes are always laundered and ironed. You never have to feed or wash your daughter, because I've already done it. What more can I do for you?” she asked. “But when I've been asking you for a whole week already to change a lightbulb in the bedroom, you say there isn't a spare bulb to be found. So damn well go and buy a new one and change the fucking lightbulb that died on us a week ago.”

“You're being hysterical again,” he said, but she went on shouting.

“And if I tell you even before the beginning of summer that the roof needs seeing to before it gets really hot, it takes you almost two months and only at the end of summer, after Noa and I have almost melted from the heat under the hot tin roof, for you to deign to do it. And even then, it takes two successive Saturdays. Saturdays, the only days on which you can give me some breathing space.”

“You see, that's what I'm talking about. You're always whining to me. If I don't do something, then why don't I do it, and when I do eventually do something, why does it take me so long. It's impossible to get out from under you. It's a big roof. It can't be done in just one day.”

“Oh, yes,” she hissed. “So how come our neighbors managed to get theirs done in three hours?”

“Because they just poured on some paint and smeared it around with a broom,” he replied.

“Whereas you painted it on with a paintbrush? The main thing is that it did me out of an entire summer and two Saturdays. And there's no getting back that time.”

“I'm sorry I don't meet your expectations. You should have married a man like your brother-in-law. Do you think I don't feel you all the time comparing me to him? What fault is it of mine that he's an Israeli and understands the mentality here, and I have to take home stupid work so we'll make it through the month?” Suddenly he fell silent.

“You don't need to be an Israeli in order to change a lightbulb,” she said. “To move house to the center of the country, you don't need to be an Israeli. You just need to want to, and you simply don't want to. Dear God, these quarrels remind me of the quarrels my parents had. And talking of parents, can't your parents give us a little help?”

“I don't want to ask them for any more. It's enough they bought us this apartment,” he replied, angry.

“I mean, help us a little with the child.”

“What do you want from my parents? They don't live here in Israel,” he said, and she thought to herself that if her father were alive and her mother weren't so sick, they wouldn't have thought twice about presenting themselves on her doorstep with an offer to help her with Noa.

They arrived at the beach and he stomped off into the water, disregarding the black flag waving over the waves. And she stayed on the beach with Noa, waiting for her sister to arrive. She watched him from a distance, swimming in the Mediterranean Sea, wondering what was happening to them. But as soon as her sister arrived with her family, they immediately set about building sand castles with the girls.

After a while the man emerged blindly from the water and said that a large wave had pulled his prescription glasses from his eyes. She didn't like to ask him what responsible adult goes into a stormy sea with his prescription glasses on, but only asked if he'd searched for them.

“Of course I searched for them,” he replied tetchily, angry over their conversation in the car as well as at the loss of his glasses. “Didn't you notice I was in the water for over an hour?”

“No,” she said. “I'm sorry, but I didn't notice. You're not a little kid that I need to keep my eye on.” She was as angry as he was over the loss of the new prescription sunglasses he had bought recently for what she considered to be a price beyond their means.

“Whereabouts in the water were you?” she asked. “Why don't you keep an eye on Noa, and I'll go in to look for them?”

“There's no hope of you finding them. Can't you see how high the waves are?”

Now he was annoyed that she wanted to go out searching for the glasses, when he had failed to find them.

“What difference does it make? I wanted to dip in the water anyway,” she said, and he pointed at the last place where he'd seen his prescription glasses in the water.

She went into the water and dove close to the sand when she was threatened by a large wave ringed with white foam.

When the wave passed, she dived again with her eyes open and saw something shiny in the water. She grabbed the object and swam up to the surface to take in a gulp of air. She thought all the time about Noa and how she had been able to survive a whole year without the ability to breathe. Just the thought made her stomach shrink. When she opened her hand, she discovered a wide gold wedding ring. With one hand she held on to the ring, and with the other she continued to sift through the water, this time without diving. Soon she was holding on to something. She hoped it wasn't a jellyfish she was holding by mistake, and when she opened her eyes, she saw her husband's glasses. She climbed out of the water, showed her husband the wedding ring, and asked him if he hadn't by any chance lost one.

“I told you it was a waste of time,” he gloated.

“So maybe you lost a pair of glasses,” she said, pleased, as she opened her other hand to show him his glasses.

She walked over to the lifeguard and gave him the lost ring; afterward she thought to herself that maybe the man or woman who had lost the ring was just one more half of a frustrated couple, and in fact hadn't lost the ring at all but had thrown it into the sea on purpose. When she joined her family in the shade, her sister told her that her husband had said of her that wherever she was thrown—even into stormy waters—she would always come out standing.

“So that's good, isn't it?” she asked her sister.

“I think he was pissed off at you finding his glasses,” her sister answered.

That night Noa ran a high fever. They flew to the hospital, fearing that Noa had become dehydrated from her day in the sun. The doctors in the emergency room immediately hooked the child up to an infusion and said they suspected meningitis and wanted to conduct a bone marrow test to determine if it was viral or—heaven forbid—bacterial.

“And what's the treatment going to be?” she asked.

“Usually when it's viral, we don't give antibiotics intravenously, but in Noa's case we will give her antibiotics because of her inferior immune system.”

“If you're going to medicate her anyway, what's the point of a bone marrow test?” she insisted on asking, and the Saturday-night-duty doctor in emergency explained impatiently that they needed to know in any case.

“Why in any case?” she continued to insist. “Will it change the treatment?”

“No,” said the enthusiastic duty doctor.

“Then I'm not going to sign a consent form for the test,” she said.

“It's a procedure we always do in emergency when we suspect meningitis,” the duty doctor tried to explain to her.

“So take us out of your regular procedure box. I'm not signing!” she yelled at the doctor, aware of the fact that she was venting on him all the anger left over from the morning's quarrel with her husband.

“I think we need to know.” Her husband said his piece.

“We don't need anything!” she screamed at him, and the entire Saturday-night emergency room staff came over to see where all the noise was coming from. On the verge of a complete nervous breakdown, she picked Noa up in her arms, as if holding her hostage, and shouted that no one was coming anywhere near them.

The man tried to get close to her, and she screamed that he was the last person she'd allow anywhere near her. He stopped at a distance from her, hissing at her belligerently to calm down. “I don't want to calm down!” she screamed.

“I want you to call the head of hematology, who's in charge of Noa's treatment,” she said to the duty doctor in a split second of sanity.

“She's not on call today, and I'm not going to disturb her at eleven o'clock at night.”

“Then I'll disturb her,” she said. “What's her phone number?”

The duty doctor refused to give her the number, and she said to the nurse at reception that if they didn't give it to her, she'd take her daughter back home at this very moment, and the responsibility was all theirs.

The doctor nodded, and the nurse handed her the phone number of the head of hematology. She called Professor Zeizov, apologized for the hour, and said she had to hear her opinion, since she didn't believe there was any point in subjecting Noa to a difficult and dangerous test if she was going to receive antibiotics intravenously anyway. The professor listened, asked how the symptoms had begun and when Noa's temperature had started to rise, and then said to her that she thought she was right, and there was no reason to subject the child to the torture of a painful medical procedure.

The professor asked to talk to the duty doctor. She handed over the telephone, and he nodded his head throughout the conversation, writing down the medication the professor prescribed over the phone. After hanging up, he told the nurse that from now on, when a child from oncology/hematology arrived at the emergency room, treatment had to be coordinated with the department doctor in charge. “These are the new directives,” he explained.

The test was canceled, and she went aside to break down in silence.

Afterward, and for the rest of the week until Noa was released from the hospital after completing a course of antibiotics, she was beside her daughter's bed day and night and didn't exchange a single word with him. She didn't reply when he spoke to her, and she refused to let him take over from her at the hospital at night. She wanted to punish him.