Every Home Needs A Balcony. Rina Frank

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      For the next few days they met in the small bedroom with the plywood room divider that Leon had built, making no attempt to be quiet. Every evening the two students flirted and flattered and invited them to the kitchen for a meal, but they demurred in Spanish and stayed locked in her room.

      He went back to Barcelona ten days later and called off his engagement; he wanted to make his own contribution to the war effort by raising her morale. In those days, everyone contributed to the war effort to the best of his ability.

      Only after they were married did he tell her that for a long time he had been mulling over his engagement to that wealthy woman, who took herself far too seriously and was concerned mainly with how she looked and her designer clothes and with inane chatter with her girlfriends in Barcelona cafés. But although he had already fallen in love with her during those summer months they spent together in Israel, he didn’t have the nerve to call off the wedding at the last moment. It was only when she wrote to him about her contribution to the war effort and he arrived in the country he loved so much and was suddenly in mortal danger and could actually feel for himself the awful tension of being in a war zone that he was able to muster the courage to face his family and inform them that, actually, he didn’t want to marry his fiancée.

      His parents breathed a sigh of relief. It turned out that they hadn’t really liked his choice, but had never dared tell him so.

      But even before he made a formal proposal of marriage, and even before she had gone to spend three months with him in Barcelona, he called her at her sister’s apartment, where she was staying because her brother-in-law had been called up for a long term of service, and informed her that he was coming with his parents to spend Passover at his sister’s new apartment in Jerusalem and was inviting himself to the seder at her parents’ home because he wanted to get to know her family.

      “Wouldn’t you rather be with your own family for the seder?” she asked, and he assured her that after spending most of his time with them, it was more important for him now to meet her family.

      After some intense consultations with her sister, it was decided that if they were to avoid frightening off the prospective bridegroom right at the beginning, it would be best not to invite him to their parents’ apartment in Haifa, but to conduct the seder at the home of their aunt who lived in Bat-Yam, the excuse being that it is easier to get to Bat-Yam from Jerusalem than to Haifa.

      She remembered that just a few months earlier, Leon had told her how shocked he had been the first time he entered her parents’ apartment in Hapo’el Street in Haifa, by how stark, not to mention wretched, it had appeared; that same apartment that her parents had succeeded in purchasing after huge effort, mortgaging away their lives to move from downtown Haifa to the Hadar neighborhood on the Carmel.

      Her sister had explained to their father that if they didn’t move house, the little one was liable to turn into a pushtakit, or petty criminal, and there’d be no chance of her ever finding a wealthy husband. Alarmed, the parents hurried off in search of an apartment that would suit their means, and after much effort and crippling loans, they managed to find one in an excruciatingly ugly building on Hapo’el Street. And it was of this very apartment, which she and her sister saw as a significant step up the social ladder, that Leon, the bleeding heart, had spoken after a six-month relationship, telling her that he was shocked by its paucity when he visited it for the first time. Leon, together with his mother and sister, had immigrated to Israel straight from an opulent house in Istanbul, which they had left after their father abandoned his family and ran off with his young secretary; sensitive Leon persuaded his mother to move to Israel, in the belief that a change of location could well herald a change in fortune.

      This time the sisters, not taking any chances, decided to hold the family seder with their distinguished guest at Aunt Aurika’s in Bat-Yam.

      Her parents took up residence at the home of Aurika, Bianca’s sister, about a week before the seder in order to dust away every crumb of unwanted chametz, and Yosefa sewed them both new dresses. She didn’t like the look of her own dress, and even though she didn’t want to offend her sister, she went to a stall on Dizengoff Street where the prices were similar to those in the Carmel Market and bought herself a gray-green dress the same color as her eyes that flattered her figure, despite its below-the-knee length. Her sister was wise enough not to take offense, and they managed to persuade their mother to have a new dress made and to go to the hairdresser.

      “But my hair is so sparse,” Bianca said, trying to convince them that a professional haircut, which would last for three days at the most with her fine hair, was a waste of money, but they insisted, waiting at the entrance to the hairdressing salon in Bat Yam until she emerged with her hair stiff with spray. The whole family, including her uncles, invested an entire month’s salary in making a good impression on the tall man from Barcelona and waited, squeaky-clean and dressed to the nines, beside the table that had been laid to the very best of their ability. At seven thirty, instead of the doorbell, the telephone rang, and he said that he was terribly embarrassed, but his sister was furious that he wasn’t staying at her place for the seder, especially since she had been slaving the whole day so that they could all sit together around her table in Jerusalem.

      “Didn’t you tell them you’d be spending the seder with me?” She tried hard to understand.

      “I didn’t expect my sister to be so incensed about it,” he admitted truthfully.

      She told him that it didn’t matter and glanced at her mother’s elaborate coiffeur. Her sister’s husband smiled and said that in Spain people apparently obey their parents, and that he’d grow out of it, but she was terribly upset because she had worked so hard for this holy day to be perfect, to make a good impression on him.

      “You could tell your sister that my parents have made a special journey from Haifa in order to meet you,” she said, still trying to persuade him, peeved at the dozens of phone calls he had made, insisting on meeting her parents. Over the phone, she could hear him talking to his sister in French, and her angry response in the same language.

      “She says that my parents made a special journey from Barcelona for us all to be together,” he told her in English, and she was obliged to explain to her parents in Romanian why the “intended” had canceled his participation in their seder.

      “I can come over for coffee later on,” he said, but she refused; she thought to herself that there was no point in everyone sitting around nervously until eleven o’clock at night in the hope that he might turn up. “We can meet tomorrow,” she said, repressing the disappointment he had caused her family.

      He arrived at her sister’s home the next day with a huge bunch of flowers, and they set off for a tour of the country in the tiny car that belonged to her sister and brother-in-law. Needless to say, they had a puncture on the way, and no one protested at all when he offered to change the tire. They felt they deserved some kind of reparation for the disappointment of the night before and had no pity for him when his hands stayed black and sooty throughout the rest of the trip. They were cramped together in the backseat, but when he wanted to put his arm around her, she told him that his hands were dirty and she was wearing a white shirt.

      For ten days he courted her with a European fervor that she found very flattering: he opened the door of her sister’s car for her; he opened the door to their building; and he was on her right side when they walked in the street, so that if God forbid, a building should blow up nearby, he would take the main brunt of the explosion. When they visited a well-known fish restaurant, he cut the fish down the middle, pulled out the spine, and taught her how to cut into the sides of the fish to get rid of the small bones. Then he fed her fish from his own plate, so she should at least taste it.

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