Читать книгу Every Home Needs A Balcony - Rina Frank - Страница 6

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 one she had lost at sea.

Dad, who was head over heels in love with a non-Jewish Romanian woman, was persuaded by his sisters to marry Bianca because she was single and had a dowry and because his mother, Tante Vavika, the one who died when I was nearly six and my sister saw God and the angels when they came to carry her off to the heavens, would never, but never, have allowed him to marry his Romanian shiksa.

By the time Dad learned that Mom had no dowry and Mom found out that Dad didn’t know how to take photographs, it was too late and they were already married.

When Yosefa was born in 1950 in the Romanian capital Bucharest, Dad swore at Mom and accused her of not even “being capable of giving me a son.”

Still, when he looked at the baby girl who had been born with the same black hair and slanting eyes as his, his heart melted, and he decided to raise his family in the land of the Jews. Mom protested fiercely; she didn’t believe that anything good could come out of a small country surrounded by hostile neighbors, especially since ships were being sunk on the way there, but Dad was adamant. He wanted his children to grow up in a Jewish state. My father, who was probably the only Jew in the whole of Romania never to have experienced anti-Semitism, because everyone loved him, didn’t want his children to ever know the humiliation of persecution merely for being Jewish.

All his life Dad was loved by everyone, except by Mom. But he didn’t really deserve my mom’s love, because he loved everyone except her.

In Wadi Salib my parents and my eight-month-old sister, Yosefa, were given the small kitchen, which lacked windows, air, and an outside view.

Mom whined to Dad, What could they expect already from his side of the family? And to shut her up, they had sex for the second time in their lives.

When I was born, and Father was annoyed with “that one who doesn’t know how to produce sons,” we were given the room that opened onto the balcony.

The room was a hundred and fifty square feet in size and had all the advantages of a studio apartment. It had a separate entrance from the yard that opened straight into the kitchen. There was a kitchenette that included a slab of marble worktop, with a length of fabric hanging from a wire spring down to the floor, behind which, next to the sink, the laundry basin used for boiling the baby’s diapers was hidden from sight.

Nearby stood the tiny refrigerator. When there was enough money to buy a quarter block of ice, it even managed to cool the watermelon that took pride of place inside it.

There was no need to store food, since the flour, sugar, mamaliga, and coffee were kept on the worktop, and everything we ate, chorba soup or mamaliga, was cooked and eaten on the day. Thursday, the day of the big clean, we ate chicken soup. Mom made the chicken soup from the wings and feet, after Dad had first chopped off the chicken’s toenails with an ax.

Yosefa and I ate the wings with our soup, Mother ate the feet, and Dad ate out. Mom saved the choice pieces of chicken, the breast and drumsticks, for Shabbat dinner.

A single stair, hinting that the kitchenette began two steps away, led into our front room. The room was chronically overcrowded, without a scrap of exposed wall. There were three beds in the room, a double for the girls and two singles for the adults; these were pushed up against a wall, for fear of not being stable enough to stand on their own. Dad refused to share a double bed with Mom because she snored. The brown wardrobe leaned against the third wall 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 could thoroughly scrutinize every movement or sound made or uttered by the inhabitants of the street.

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 work and every evening in each other’s arms in the apartment he was renovating for his sister, who was away in Barcelona. She spent the weekends with Leon and her parents and didn’t bother to invite the man, although he showed some interest.

She didn’t want to bring him to her modest little room in the apartment she shared with the arrogant students. The room was actually the living room, which opened onto the kitchen and was separated off by a one-inch-thick sheet of plywood that Leon had installed with considerable flair.

The man either trumpeted in her ear or sang to her in English, and she wept silent tears as she counted the days to their separation. No man before had ever trumpeted in her ear. She had been sung to in Hebrew, and some rhymes in Turkish repeated themselves occasionally, but there had been no trumpeting in English.

On 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 of the strain of war that were so evident on the faces of everyone in the hospital. He had lots of veins, he said, and volunteered to donate blood in her place.

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.

On another occasion, he ordered shrimp for her—something she had never tasted before—and showed her how to pull off the heads and peel off the hard crusty outside, and when they were brought lemon-scented water in a small bowl and she asked how they were supposed to drink out of something so small, he explained that the lemon water was for dipping their fingers in after handling the shrimp. He poured wine for her—when she had ordered cola—pulled out the cork and poured it into her glass and her heart skipped a beat. He was a man of the world, thoroughly versed in all the niceties; at night, after devouring her body without bothering to first remove her bones, he sang her lullabies as she fell asleep happily in his strong arms. She felt protected and loved, and she loved him for it.

After a week of shrimp, sex, and lullabies, he returned to Barcelona with his parents, but not before making her promise that next time she would come to visit him. Almost every evening for the next three months he called to say how much he missed her, but she was too tired to miss him. Working at two jobs in order to save money for the airfare and a pair of contact lenses left her completely exhausted.

She lived with her sister and brother-in-law in Tel Aviv during the entire period; they too were working hard to save enough money for postgraduate studies in New York, and when they all returned home at night, tired and starving, the only thing they found in the fridge was some 9-percent-fat white cheese. Only when their mother came to visit and filled the fridge did they realize that they were putting away every penny they earned toward their trips abroad—she to her “intended,” and they to further their education.

She paid the equivalent of a month’s salary for a pair of contact lenses and loved the fact that people could see her eyes at long last. Over the phone she informed the man that he wouldn’t recognize her without the glasses that had been stuck to her nose since she was fourteen. She was so strung up on the night before her flight that she closed the cover down on one of the lenses as she was replacing them in their small plastic container, and tore it right in half. All through the flight to Barcelona, her first ever flight, she cried her heart out over the ruined contact lenses. She had so wanted to impress the man who would be waiting for her with all his family. A whole month of hard work had gone down the drain, and now she would have to arrive in Barcelona looking ugly and bespectacled; and she was especially upset because she had promised him that he wouldn’t recognize her.

He recognized her easily, with her ugly glasses and red-rimmed eyes.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s go and buy you some new glasses. But first you must promise that when we do, you’ll smile for me.”

She chose frames that didn’t appear too expensive, but he picked out some black ones with tiny diamonds in the corners and asked her to try them on.

They suited her perfectly.

“We’ll take these,” he said to the saleswoman, and she noticed that they cost three times as much the ones she had chosen.

She smiled at him, feeling pretty again.

“The laughter’s come back to your eyes, just as I remembered,” he said and hugged her.

“Where are we going?” she asked as they climbed into his small SEAT car.

“To the apartment you’ll be staying in—just so that you can drop off your things—and then I’ll take you to my home, where my parents are waiting.”

“Aren’t we going to be living together?” she asked, horrified; after all, he’d invited her to spend three months in Barcelona so they could get to know each other.

“That was what I had intended, but when I told my parents that I wanted to live with you, they objected strongly and said that it’s not done here for a young man to leave home before his wedding.

“My father was furious with me,” he told her naively, “for thinking that it wouldn’t matter if you were to spend the nights in a room of your own. Anyway, we’ll be spending all our days together.”

A man of good intentions, she thought, doing her best to console herself.

“The room I’ve found for you is in the home of my secretary, who has been looking for someone to share her apartment,” he said. “She’s very nice; her name’s Mercedes, and her boyfriend’s called Jorge, and their neighborhood is also nice and not far from where I work.”

“So how come Mercedes and Jorge are living together?” she couldn’t help asking.

“Well, they’re not Jews. It’s more complicated for us.” She didn’t really understand why a twenty-eight-year-old man, who had been engaged to be married for five years and who supported himself financially, couldn’t simply inform his parents that he wanted to move in with his Israeli bride-to-be, who had left her homeland for the sole reason of being with him in a foreign country.

“Your sister left home when she was twenty.” She was finding it hard to understand the man she had fallen in love with.

“She immigrated to Israel in order to go to college. If I’d left Barcelona for the same reason, there would have been no problem. But my parents object to my leaving home to move into a rented apartment with you. It’s just not done here. Spain is a very conservative Catholic country,” he added.

“But you’re a Jew,” she said, so quietly that he didn’t hear. Or perhaps he did.