Every House Needs a Balcony Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 good-bye. 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 motherand 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 wasseducing 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.
    â€œShall I make you some coffee the way I like it?” she asked him.
    â€œHow do you like it?” he asked in return.
    â€œStrong. Really strong; so strong it penetrates deep down into my bones.”
    â€œSure,” 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