Every House Needs a Balcony Read Online Free PDF Page A

and contained clothes and various objects; among them, hidden carefully in a used and oily cardboard box, was the Turkish delight that Mom kept for special guests. Loosely scattered next to the Turkish delight were a number of pungent-smelling mothballs that even as candy-deprived children we never mistook for anything other than what they were, even though they were round and white and just the right size to fill a mouth yearning for something sweet.
    In the middle of the room stood the brown wooden table with the elegant slab of glass on top, as if it was the glass that protected the table from scratches or fading. The table was the focus of the room and fulfilled all the household’s needs—a space for dining, regular games of rummy, and three-monthly painting of the rummy cubes; our drawing board and Dad’s poster graphics table; and a place to sieve rice or flour, shell peas, or trim spring beans—and all this was conducted on top of the glass, above the family’s photograph album.
    Mom and Dad, handsome and elegant on their wedding day, looked out from beneath the glass on the table.Mom in Romania, striking various poses, always fashionably dressed in a warm coat and a hat placed at a jaunty angle on the side of her head. A picture of her in her white summer dress showed off her very shapely, very slim figure, which may not have been considered pretty in those days, but Mom, like Dad, was ahead of her time by being thin at a time when being thin was tantamount to being poor. Family pictures from Romania showed Mom’s extended family, including her five brothers; we girls were provided with an extensive description of the three who stayed behind in Romania because the Communists refused to grant them emigration permits, and the two who had come to Israel in the 1930s and drained the swamps in Hedera. In time, the Romanian pictures were joined by others taken in Israel, especially of us in our Purim costumes. In the corner of the room Mom’s sewing machine stood under a pile of sheets and blankets that had been aired on the balcony earlier in the day before being folded neatly. At night, when we went to sleep, the sewing machine was freed of its burden of bedclothes and Mom was able to repair whatever needed to be mended, reinforced, patched, or turned.
    The apartment’s western wall faced the sea, with tall windows to the ceiling, rounded arches over the windows in keeping with modern Arab architecture, and a glass door that opened onto the balcony and provided a view of everything that was happening below or opposite; we couldthoroughly scrutinize every movement or sound made or uttered by the inhabitants of the street.
    Â 
    The third time they had sex was on the day that Grandmother Vavika died. The noise woke me up in the middle of the night, and I saw Dad naked, with his bum in the air, lying on top of Mom.
    The following morning I asked him crossly if he was beating Mom, the way our Syrian neighbor upstairs, Nissim, spent his days beating up his wife.
    Dad told me that he was massaging Mom’s back, which ached from all the housework she had to do, and because we were selfish girls who didn’t take care of our mother during the day, he was obliged, when he returned from a day’s work, to rub spirit into Mom’s sore behind.
    I told Dad that it wasn’t true that he came home late from work, and that Mom always comes in later than he does, and I went to play hide-and-seek downstairs.
    They quarreled all day. Not a day went by without my parents quarreling at least once. Their quarrels were loud, and the whole of Stanton could hear them yelling and screaming at each other. But there was never any violence; not like in other families, where they didn’t shout at each other, only beat each other up. And because they didn’t beat each other, my sister and I believed that Mom and Dad were very happy.

 
    For the next two months she and the man met every day at