Every Home Needs A Balcony. Rina Frank

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СКАЧАТЬ I’ve noticed,” he said, and began suddenly to make trumpeting sounds with his mouth and playing the theme song from Love Story. She looked at him and started to laugh. He trumpeted the song so nicely, it sounded as if he really was playing a trumpet; he even blew out his cheeks like a real trumpeter.

      Then he covered both her hands with his and brought them to his chest.

      She had to escape this confusion. “Are there any other specialty restaurants you know of, in other parts of the world?” she asked, wishing for this moment, with him holding her hands in his, never to end.

      “There’s one in Zurich, and of course in Paris.” He said “of course” as if it was as matter-of-fact to her as to himself. “There’s a restaurant there that serves only entrecôte. There’s no menu, and the only thing you get asked is how you’d like your steak, medium or medium rare.”

      “What about well done?” she asked

      “No such thing.” He grimaced in disgust at the very suggestion.

      When he returned her to the apartment she shared with the two revolting students, he floated a kiss on her cheek and went off with a “See you tomorrow.”

      “Where?” she asked enthusiastically.

      “At work. Tomorrow morning,” reminding her that they worked in the same office, which is actually how they met.

When Mother Met Father

      My mother didn’t speak Hebrew. When they arrived from Romania, Dad joined an ulpan to learn Hebrew and Mom went out to clean houses; for this you don’t need Hebrew. In Wadi Salib you didn’t need to speak Hebrew for people to understand you. During the 1950s, with the huge assortment of languages in common use—from Moroccan to Romanian, Ladino to Yiddish, Arabic to Polish—everyone understood everyone else.

      But not only did Mom not know Hebrew, she was also hard of hearing, which made it impossible for her to pick up the language of the street.

      In Romania, apparently, they’d wanted to correct her slight hearing impairment; a “simple little operation,” they’d told her when she was thirty, “one hour under the anesthetic—you won’t feel a thing, and you’ll be able to hear.” But Mom wasn’t listening to them. She knew you couldn’t trust the doctors in Romania.

      When she was twenty, Mom had had an attack of appendicitis and was rushed to an operating theater in Bucharest, but not before the doctors had explained to her worried parents that it was a very simple surgical procedure, she wouldn’t feel a thing under the anesthetic and she’d come out of the whole thing as good as new. Two hours later the grim-faced doctors emerged and explained to my grandfather and grandmother, whom I never met, that something had gone wrong with the anesthetic, and the chances of Bianca ever recovering were extremely slim. Grandfather Yosef stayed by Bianca’s bedside, while her mother returned weeping to their home, where her ten-year-old younger daughter was waiting alone. She collapsed in the middle of the road, and a passing car drove over her.

      And so my grandmother’s dead body was returned to the same hospital where her beloved daughter Bianca lay recovering from a botched appendectomy—a recovery that had to be swift, because she was now left to care for her widowed father, her seventeen-year-old brother, Marco, and her ten-year-old sister, Aurika.

      Bianca raised Aurika as if she were her own daughter, with love and devotion that knew no bounds and with an overwhelming feeling of guilt.

      One day, when she was twenty-eight, Mom walked into David’s photography studio and laboratory and summoned him to the cemetery to take a photograph of her mother’s gravestone. David’s parents had died and bequeathed the photography studio to him and his brother, Jacko. David scrutinized the very thin, very elegantly dressed woman in the long brown coat and red hat, set at a jaunty angle. Mom had very curly brown hair, deep, highly intelligent brown eyes above high cheekbones, and fair skin. In those days women took great care to avoid tanning their faces, and a pretty woman was one who was interestingly pale. When they arrived at the cemetery and David saw that Grandmother had been fifty when she died, he asked Bianca what had been the cause of her death, and Bianca, out of a profound sense of guilt, replied that it had been “an appendectomy that went wrong.”

      David sympathized, “Those doctors, you can never trust them.”

      “And what about photographers, can they be trusted?” Mom asked in rebuke.

      “Of course,” he replied, “the pictures will be developed by evening. I’ll deliver them to you in person.” David was instantly invited to dinner and told to bring his younger brother with him. Because at that very moment, Mom had made up her mind that David was the man she was going to marry.

      What’s more, Mom had already decided, even before she’d met David’s younger brother, that this was going to be a double wedding, hers with David and his brother’s with her sister, Aurika.

      That evening David delivered the pictures, and everyone was thrilled at how sharp they were and how clearly Grandmother’s name showed up on the headstone.

      Mom laid a tasteful table for dinner and served a carefully prepared meal, since it’s a well-known fact that there is no better way to a man’s heart than through his stomach.

      Mom told David and his younger brother that she wished to send the photographs to her two older siblings in Palestine. She spoke with great pride of her brother Niku and sister Lika, who lived in Hadera and were engaged in drying swamps.

      David showed a lot of interest in the situation in British Mandate Palestine and the ways in which the inhabitants made a living, and even asked if he could correspond with Niku and Lika, since he had been raised on the Zionist ideal, and now that his parents were no longer alive, he wanted to follow in their footsteps by realizing their great love for the Land of Israel.

      Mom’s endeavor had succeeded. After that family dinner, David asked if he could meet her again. At their fourth meeting, he asked her to marry him, and Mom accepted happily, but made her acceptance conditional on waiting for Aurika to come of age so she could marry his younger brother, Jacko. David agreed to this very logical arrangement.

      In 1941, David told Mom that he had made up his mind to leave Nazi Europe, to emigrate to Palestine, and to set up a photography studio in Hadera, since her brother Niku had written that Hadera was now dry of swamps, there was a dearth of professional people in the country, and there was a demand for practically everything—or so he wrote. Mom knew that he simply wanted them all to join him in Israel, and that things weren’t quite as rosy there as he wanted them to think.

      It was agreed that David and his brother would be the first to go, and after they had settled in, Mom would join them with the rest of her family—and that is how my mother’s life was saved.

      David and his brother boarded the ship Struma in the Black Sea port of Constanza, together with a cargo of Jews wishing to make their way to Palestine. With its engine inoperable, the Struma was towed from Istanbul through the Bosporus out to the Black Sea by Turkish authorities with its refugee passengers aboard. It was torpedoed and sunk by a Soviet submarine on February 24, 1942, and all but 1 of its 768 passengers perished.

      Even after marrying Dad three years later, Mom refused to become pregnant—something that was virtually unheard of in those days—until Aurika found a husband to replace the СКАЧАТЬ