Every Home Needs A Balcony. Rina Frank

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СКАЧАТЬ the final weekend before he was due to leave, she promised to return from Haifa on Saturday night so they could spend his last night in Israel together, but Leon insisted on driving her all the way to Jerusalem, so she wouldn’t have to take a bus. Throughout the journey, she was troubled by her promise to the man and the knowledge that she wouldn’t be able to say good-bye to him before he returned to his fiancée in Barcelona.

      “Would you like me to stay in Jerusalem so that we can go house-hunting together?” Leon asked her, knowing how much she hated her two roommates.

      “I’m not sure,” she replied, irritated with him for insisting on driving her.

      “You’re not sure you want us to live together, or that I should stay the night in Jerusalem?” asked Leon, hurt by her sharp tone.

      “Both,” she replied, “I think I’m fed up with Jerusalem. My sister has suggested I come and live with them in Tel Aviv, and I think I might just take up the offer.”

      “And that’s how you thought you’d tell me? After I’ve already informed my work in Haifa that I’m leaving and moving to Jerusalem?” Leon was in shock.

      “What do you want? I didn’t plan it.” The only reason she was being nasty to him was that he was preventing her from saying good-bye to the man from Barcelona.

      “And when exactly were you planning to tell me?” he asked.

      “I’ve only just thought that I might move to Tel Aviv.” She squinted at his angry face. “Are you annoyed with me?”

      “I am furious with you for not taking the trouble to include me in your plans,” said Leon, who was making arrangements to join her in Jerusalem, at her request.

      “Would you like me to get out of the car?” she asked.

      “Why not?” he replied, and to her surprise, he pulled up sharply in the middle of the climb up the Kastel.

      She alighted, vaguely insulted that he was allowing her to walk away, rather than fighting to keep her with him—even stopping for her to get out halfway up the Kastel in the middle of the night, knowing of the terrorists and rapists roaming the region. She got out of the car and started walking, not looking back. In the corner of her eye she saw him overtaking her. She tried to hitch a lift, and the second car stopped for her.

      The driver asked if she wasn’t afraid to be hitchhiking at that time of night, and she asked him if he was planning to rape her.

      “No,” said the kind driver.

      “Then I’m not afraid,” she said, and within twenty minutes he had pulled up at the entrance to her block.

      Leon was waiting for her in the darkened stairway. She jumped when she saw him and said, “You frightened me.”

      “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t think you’d get out of the car,” he said.

      “I didn’t think you would leave me in the middle of the road,” she replied.

      “I love you,” he said.

      “I know. Would you like to come in?” She considered having sex with him, a final act of mercy.

      She unplugged the phone in case the man from Barcelona decided to call her to say good-bye. They walked into her room with its thin plywood divide and undressed quietly, not uttering a word or a groan.

      When he’d finished, he asked her if she’d slept with him out of pity, and she told him that she had met someone and was very confused.

      Leon got dressed quietly and left without saying goodbye. She’d wanted to ask him to stay the night, not to drive all the way back to Haifa, but she said nothing.

      She was at work the following day when the man called her from the airport, disappointed at missing her the previous evening; she lied and said she’d been obliged to spend the night in Haifa and had come straight to work from there.

      She remained in Jerusalem, and two months after he returned to Barcelona, promising that he would write to her, the Yom Kippur War broke out. He wrote her letters and even phoned a few times, but she didn’t feel like replying. He was sitting there nice and safe, locked in the arms of his fiancée, while here her chances of ever getting married were decreasing drastically as her friends were killed off daily. Once she even called Leon in Haifa, only to be told that he had moved away. She didn’t have the nerve to call his mother and ask for his new number. She was ashamed and imagined that his mother was angry with her—and rightly so.

      Every day she went to Nahlaot to visit the parents of Kushi, so as not to be alone with all this tension. They had two sons in the war—Kushi, who was with the paratroops and had been her best friend since way back, when he was a boarder at the military academy in Haifa, and his brother, who rescued wounded soldiers by helicopter.

      Ten days into the war, Kushi’s brother came home on a twelve-hour furlough.

      He described a horrific war in which soldiers were falling like flies, and she wondered how it would feel to be a mother whose son was returning the next morning to take part in a battle, with no way of knowing if he’d come out of it alive or on a stretcher, like the wounded and the dead that he evacuated every day. She decided she had to make her own contribution to the war effort, and especially to this Yemenite family she was so fond of, and who made her feel she was one of theirs. She was still watching him and listening to his horrible war stories when she decided that he would go back to the battle for the motherland with a personal gift from her. She decided to sleep with him, so that he would at least go back to that foolish war with a good taste in his mouth. Or in his memory.

      As soon as she had made her decision, she knew that Kushi, who was fighting at that very moment in the Chinese Farm, would not be overjoyed by the idea that she was seducing his little brother, but the little brother would be happy to receive a good screw as a farewell blessing. And indeed, he responded to her first overture.

      “Shall I make you some coffee the way I like it?” she asked him.

      “How do you like it?” he asked in return.

      “Strong. Really strong; so strong it penetrates deep down into my bones.”

      “Sure,” he replied. He wasn’t interested in wasting his last night on sleep.

      When his parents retired to their bed, they picked up their cups of strong coffee and went into his room, as if it was something they did every day.

      He was very sensual, and she felt her contribution to the war effort giving her a great deal of pleasure.

      Several days later she received a letter from the man in Barcelona, worried because he hadn’t heard from her for a while and wanting to know what was happening in Israel; she replied that everyone was doing his or her best and went on to describe what she had been able to do, without stressing just how much she had enjoyed her efforts. The day after receiving her letter, he called to say that he had just that moment landed in Israel. She was on her way to hospital to donate blood because the mother of a friend of hers had to have surgery. He suggested going straight to the hospital and meeting her there.

      For a full hour a nurse tried unsuccessfully to find a vein in her arm from which to draw blood. And then the man appeared, engulfed in the scent of Spain, lacking the signs СКАЧАТЬ