Читать книгу Every Home Needs A Balcony - Rina Frank - Страница 7

My father didn’t have a regular job and was forever changing professions. Well, not really professions; jobs. He didn’t have a profession. That was the problem.

When he entered a real estate partnership with someone, it was he who did all the work; he was familiar with all the houses in Wadi Salib and downtown Haifa and was brilliant at persuading people to buy; he ran around all over town, but in the end, his partner screwed him and threw him out of the business that Father himself had established.

Father then opened a restaurant, and he was once again screwed over. He opened a garage that sold tires, and Mom yelled that no one in the region owned a car.

He went into partnership with a Moroccan and opened a café, brought in the whole neighborhood to play backgammon, brewed strong Romanian coffee as only he knew how, poured his soul into that finjan, together with the best-quality ground coffee; the café lost money and had to be liquidated at a loss.

Between jobs, Father was the neighborhood graphic artist, painting store signs in colorful stylized Hebrew letters on cardboard marked out with lines, so the letters shouldn’t spill over. Whatever was asked of him—a barber here, a cobbler there, a café and a real estate office. Father was paid no money for this work but was rewarded in other ways, such as free movie tickets or ice cream for his girls.

Our dream was for Father to have permanency. To us, permanency was a word that held promise, and smelled of money; we loved our father so much, but knew that without permanency it was hard to rely on him—and the guy suffered from an excessively good heart. It just spilled out of him in all directions, and he was quite prepared to give away everything he owned—except his daughters—if it would help the human race. He was charming and charismatic and very, very funny. And everyone loved to spend time in his company.

With his black hair and slanting green eyes that dipped slightly at the corners in a kind of self-conscious sadness, my dad was an extremely good-looking man. It was no coincidence that my sister thought he resembled God. He bestowed his green eyes on me; Yosefa, whom I called Fila, got their slant. We both inherited the sadness.

In Romania they had owned a movie theater—Nissa—near the Cişmigiu Gardens. Back then Mom and Dad had been important people, especially since they got to see all the movies and were familiar with all the actors. At home they spoke about Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, and Frank Sinatra as if they’d been to school with them. In a way they felt some kind of patronage over the shining Hollywood stars, since without their movie theater, the people of Romania would have never been exposed to all that glamour.

Before the war that began in the late 1930s and came to an end in the mid-1940s, when he was twenty, Dad and his brother-in-law Herry did odd jobs in Bucharest.

They went from house to house and always found some broken gate or peeling plaster, crumbling paint or a wobbly table that needed fixing. Dad, with his honeyed voice, had no trouble persuading the Romanian housewife to prepare a surprise for her husband, who, on his return home, would find it stylishly renovated and revamped to the glory of the Romanian nation, and all in return for such and such a sum of Romanian lei and a cooked meal for two. The women were captivated by Father’s smooth and charming tongue and Herry’s skilled hands, and as the result of an aggressive marketing campaign of an intensity that was rare in those days in Romania, Father and Herry found themselves with a reputation for being efficient and reliable odd-job men.

One day they entered one of the more elegant buildings in Bucharest, and a very beautiful woman opened the door to them.

“We’re in the odd-job business,” Father said and looked at Mrs. Dorfman with his piercing green eyes.

“I have nothing in the house that is out of order except my husband,” replied Mrs. Dorfman.

“I’d be happy to mend your husband,” Father told her and smiled a smile that melted her heart. He entered the house, his brother-in-law Herry dragging behind, and she led them to a dark room, where her husband, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, sat in a chair, his head drooping on his chest.

“Since you are here already, you can help me take him to the lavatory. It’s quite difficult to do on my own,” Mrs. Dorfman said to my father and gave him a cheeky smile.

For two months, Father would drop by every evening after finishing all his odd jobs and help her take her sick husband to the lavatory.

After two months, Father persuaded Mrs. Dorfman to take him on as an active partner in her movie house, he being the only one who could save the business from bankruptcy, because her husband’s illness had forced her to stay home to care for him.

Mrs. Dorfman, who was a very pretty woman, was a member of the Romanian aristocracy. She was a devout Catholic and came from a very well-connected family in Romania’s high society, with close ties in high places. Mrs. Dorfman took on Dad as a business partner and as a lover. And indeed, Dad saved her business. He devised novel advertising methods, and their movie house was soon bursting at the seams with patrons. His advertising campaign, with the slogan “Get out of the box and come see a movie,” promised two movies and a cabaret for the price of a single movie ticket. During the long intermissions, everyone ate at the bar, which his sister Vida, together with her husband, Herry, operated under franchise. It was in my father’s movie house that all the young talent—stand-up comics, male and female dancers and singers—were discovered, performing during the intermission between one movie and another.

My father’s friends included members of the Romanian Iron Guard, and he employed them as bouncers in his movie house. He paid them generously, as if knowing that one day he would need their services. And they in turn kept the place in immaculate order and made sure no drunks and hooligans found their way into the business.

When World War II broke out, all the men were sent away to forced labor camps except my father. His friends in the Iron Guard arranged for him to be issued the necessary documents recognizing his work in the movie house as vital to the war effort by maintaining Romania’s morale and fighting spirit. This exemption did not prevent the Iron Guard from persecuting other Jews and handing them over to the Germans; they justified their sympathetic attitude toward my dad by saying, “Well, you’re a different kind of Jew.”

My father’s sisters, Vida and Lutzi, worked mornings for an Italian company checking reels of film for scratches or tears; when any were found, they cut and pasted the film with gentle efficiency. This work was also regarded by Father’s friends as being important to the war effort. In the evenings his sisters worked in Dad’s movie house.

Vida and Lutzi were both very active in the Zionist movement in Romania, and throughout the war years they harbored Zionist activists on the run from the Iron Guard, who wanted to hand them over to the Germans. Under the noses of his Iron Guard friends and with Dad’s full knowledge, the sisters hid Zionist activists and, later, youngsters who had managed to escape the death camps and made it to Romania on their way to Palestine.

For several months Vida’s home provided shelter to four young Jewish youths who had escaped from Poland and Russia. During the day they were locked in the house; in the evening they went out to breathe some fresh air on a bicycle belonging to young Lorie.

Lorie was eight and desperately wanted to be accepted by her peers. When she was invited to the birthday party of the most popular girl in her class, she wore her best dress and brought an especially expensive gift. It was a birthday party in the middle of the war, in the middle of Bucharest, and they’d put on a magic show with a real-life magician. When the excited children clapped their hands, Lorie stood up in the middle of the room and said that she had some magic tricks of her own.

“What do you know how to do?” Lorie was asked.

“I can swallow medium-sized buttons and hairpins with nothing happening to me,” she replied, and promptly swallowed all the buttons and pins she was given. That night her temperature rose to 106 degrees Fahrenheit.

Her mother, Vida, was terrified of taking Lorie to the hospital; she was certain that, far from being cured, the Jewish child would be instantly put to death.

My father reassured his sister, told her not to worry, and informed her that one of the doctors at the hospital was a friend of his. He took Lorie straight to the doctor, his friends from the Iron Guard clearing the road for him with a motorcycle escort, horns hooting loudly all the way, as if the king himself was being rushed to hospital. Dad explained to his medical friend that this was his favorite niece and that he must operate on her immediately in order to remove the buttons from inside her abdomen. In any case, Dad promised the surgeon that he would “make it worth your while.”

That same evening, Lorie was taken to the operating theater, and the buttons and pins that she had swallowed in order to be loved by her school friends were removed from her belly. Later that evening, the pretty young vocalist who had appeared earlier in Father’s cabaret could be seen lying replete in the arms of the kindly surgeon.

Lorie was released from hospital three days later, and no sooner had she walked into her home than a powerful earthquake—nine on the Richter scale—destroyed half of Bucharest. As Lorie scrambled around on the staircase searching for somewhere to hide, all the stitches from her operation came apart. Father took her back to the hospital, and again she was rushed to the operating theater, where the incision was restitched.

Another earthquake shook Bucharest the next day, but this time Lorie stood, still as a statue, in the middle of the room, not daring to move. The fear of her stitches coming apart again was greater than her fear of any earthquake.

Dad’s brother-in-law Lazer, Lutzi’s husband, was sent to a forced labor camp, where he was put to work clearing away snow from the railway tracks outside Bucharest. He contracted a severe case of pneumonia and would have died were it not for Mom’s younger brother, Marko, who was a dental technician and “served” in the same forced labor camp. Marko nursed Lazer with great devotion and fed him antibiotics from the supply he kept in the dental clinic. Lazer was saved, although he had very nearly crossed the line.

In return for saving Lazer’s life, my mom’s younger brother, Marko, wanted to find his big sister a respectable shidduch. My mother was thirty-two already and decidedly unmarried, when Lazer announced that he had a brother-in-law, albeit a disheveled one, who was a thirty-four-year-old bachelor and ran his own movie house. Needless to say, he neglected to mention Dad’s non-Jewish mistress, Mrs. Dorfman.

Marko hinted to Lazer that a substantial dowry was on the books, and my father agreed to meet with the new prospect. He was annoyed at that time with Mrs. Dorfman for refusing to leave her sickly husband and marry him, even though he knew full well that his mother and sisters (and their husbands) would firmly oppose his marrying any woman who wasn’t Jewish.

Mom was a trim and slender woman, elegantly dressed and well educated, who was employed as an accountant. And although Dad’s family didn’t really fall in love with her, she made a good impression on them.

“She’s an Ashkenazi snob,” they told him, “not a warmblooded woman like us Sephardis, but she’s obviously intelligent and well educated and you can tell by her clothes that she’s well off.” And so Dad agreed to step under the chuppah with Bianca.

They got married without too much enthusiasm for each other, and Mom began immediately to manage the movie house, putting the books in order. She imposed her kind of order and made sure none of Dad’s many impoverished friends were allowed in without paying full price for a ticket. No free rides here, she would say.

Father employed his entire family and circle of friends in the movie house. He was used to making people feel good; when he came to live in Israel, he continued to help everyone. Except that he forgot that he no longer owned a movie house.

So he went into the coffee distribution business.

He would wander around in downtown Haifa with a three-tier conical tray, selling extra-strong Romanian coffee with an aroma that wafted all over Wadi Salib. He made a point of buying his coffee only from the Arab Nisnas brothers, who, while the coffee beans were being ground, would invite us in to taste their baklava and pistachio nuts before packaging the coffee in small brown paper bags.

The preparation of Romanian coffee was a very accurate and measured process. In a small finjan you measure the water and add two heaping teaspoons of sugar. To the carefully measured water, you add a heaping teaspoonful of coffee for each serving cup, and then you turn on the Primus stove. The coffee grounds take several minutes to sink into the water, and it is then that you have to stir carefully so as to prevent the viscous coffee that has been joyously incorporated into the black liquid from boiling over.

My mother, who saw my father’s extravagant use of heaping spoonfuls of coffee as an affront to the taste buds as well as to the family’s pockets, would lie in wait for him to step out of the kitchen for just a second, when she would skip over to the finjan to rescue a few spoonfuls of coffee, which she returned to the brown paper bag, before they had time to melt into the boiling water. She didn’t always succeed, however, because as soon as Dad’s eagle eye caught sight of the reduced coffee level in the finjan, he would replace the spoonfuls she had returned to the paper bag, plus an extra heaping teaspoon, to get his own back at Mom.

Mom was forever yelling that his extravagance was gnawing away at his daughters’ dowries, but we always knew that, because of our father, neither of us would ever have a dowry, so what were we missing anyway—and apart from that, he had a knack of getting us on his side in all his quarrels with Mom. What did he want, after all? All he wanted was to enjoy life here and now; unlike Mom, who was forever thinking of her daughters’ futures.

On Saturday nights we went to the movies. Every Saturday the whole family went to see a movie. It was the only thing my parents had in common—their great love for cinema. And they always took us along with them so that we too could soak up this culture.

When the movie The Ten Commandments arrived in Israel, Mom was sure she could make a small fortune. She went out a week before the first showing and bought up twenty cinema tickets; on the day, when a long queue had formed at the box office and most people had no chance of obtaining a ticket, Mom sold hers at an exorbitant price. In short, here in Israel and with no command of the language, my mother, who had once been a movie house owner, turned into a ticket scalper. How proud we were of her; even Dad was proud of her. Of course we were sorry we hadn’t bought up fifty tickets; the demand was huge, and hundreds of people queued up in front of the movie house without a hope of getting in.

We saw the movie Oklahoma! three times. But the first time we saw it, we didn’t enjoy ourselves at all. The movie was being shown at the Tamar in the Upper Hadar neighborhood, close to the Carmel and very far from Stanton, which was located on the slopes of Haifa’s downtown region. By the time Dad, Fila, and I had climbed up hundreds of stairs and arrived, breathless and pale, at the entrance to the Tamar cinema, it became apparent that Dad had only enough money for two tickets and no more; it was a three-hour movie, and consequently the price of a ticket had been doubled. All of Dad’s pleas and explanations—that we had come a very long way to be there, that he had no more money on him, and how could they allow two little girls to go into the movie house alone?—were of no avail. The stone-hearted usher would not relent; my sister and I went in on our own, leaving our father outside to wait for us. In the intermission we rushed outside to him, and with tears and pleas we tried to persuade the usher to at least let our father in to see the second half of the movie—surely he’d been punished enough, forced to sit outside for an hour and a half. The usher refused to relent, while we, our hearts breaking at the thought of Dad having to spend a further hour and a half outside, just didn’t enjoy the movie. When it was over and we were making our way out, we cursed the usher with a visit to the grave of the black-hearted Hitler. At the tops of our voices, we said it, so he’d hear!

On Thursday our mother left us in the bath for a full two hours—as if the longer you soak yourself in the water, the more likely you are to be thoroughly rid of all the dirt.

“We’re expecting an important visitor tomorrow,” Mom explained to us as we were falling asleep in the water, as usual. “The famous playwright, Eugène Ionesco, is coming to visit us.”

“What’s a famous playwright?” I asked my mom. And even Yosefa, who was wiser than anyone, didn’t have an answer to my question.

“It’s someone who writes plays,” Mom explained. And I didn’t understand how you could write plays. You watch plays, like you see movies, don’t you? It’s not a book that you can read.

“Why is Ionesco coming to visit us?” my sister asked my mom. She’d always been practical, my sister.

“Because he’s a friend of Tante Marie’s, and he’s coming to visit her.”

“And will he live here with her?” My sister went on being practical and suspicious, knowing that it was crowded enough already in Lutzi’s house.

“No. He’s a tourist. He’s not immigrating to Israel. He’s only coming for a visit,” Mom replied, and left us too long in the bath.

The important guest arrived the following day. So important was he that even Tante Lutzi opened wide her red room, with all its chairs; she ran out the red carpet, as they say.

Tante Marie was my father’s aunt, as well as Lutzi’s and Vida’s. When she immigrated to Israel to live out the rest of her life near her nieces and nephew, she was housed in the kitchenette, and when Dori, Lutzi’s younger son, was recruited into the Israeli navy, she moved into the elegant room that faced the balcony; because she was elderly and because she was well educated, she deserved to have a room of her own.

Before World War II, Tante Marie had been a teacher of French in Paris, and it was there that she met her Christian husband, who was later appointed French consul in Tunisia. They had a daughter, Odetta, and Tante Marie continued to teach French to the children of the French colony in Tunisia. In time, she fell deeply in love with a Tunisian army officer and spent more time alone with him than was respectable for the wife of a consul. When her husband discovered her betrayal, he sent her packing and returned with their young daughter, Odetta, to Paris. A sad Tante Marie went back to Romania without her daughter, who had been torn from her suddenly; she obtained a decent position in Bucharest as headmistress of the French school for daughters of the Romanian aristocracy. She reverted to her maiden name—Franco—and when war broke out, she was known by that name. Franco, which had a non-Jewish ring to it, enabled her to continue in her post in the school for Christian girls, despite the war. She met Eugène Ionesco at the school in which she taught; he taught literature in the same school. Now that she was retired, she had come to live in Israel to be near the only family she had left, her nephew Moscu and nieces Lutzi and Vida. Convinced that French was the international language that all educated people should be able to speak if they are to get along in the big world, she undertook the task of teaching French to the princesses of the house of Franco: Yosefa and me. She decided to instill in us—the last known members of the Franco dynasty—her accumulated knowledge and wisdom. Tante Marie told us that in Spanish the name Franco means freedom and generosity. She also told us that our family had been among the most established in Spain, and when the Spanish Inquisition began, the family had moved to Turkey and from there, one part of the family settled in Bulgaria and another part went to live in Romania.

Once we understood that Dad was the last in line of the Franco dynasty—since our mother didn’t know how to make sons—my sister and I were riddled with guilt for cutting short this aristocratic line; so I agreed to learn French. Yosefa agreed because she wanted to learn everything.

Because we were having private French lessons, Mom forbade us to go around looking like urchins and insisted that we had to be suitably dressed.

So we got ourselves spruced up in the clothes we owned, washed our faces, and crossed the landing from our room to Tante Marie’s.

Over ten lessons we learned to how to say “Bonjour,” “Comment ça va?” and “Frère Jacques,” until I rebelled and refused to continue with the lessons. Having to give up a whole hour of playtime out of only three at my disposal every afternoon between four and seven o’clock, coupled with the pungent smell of age that emanated from Tante Marie, just to learn a subject that was not included in the official school curriculum was just too much for me. Also, I had told my sister that in all the movies we went to see, they always speak English and not French, a sure sign that French was not so important a language as Tante Marie made it out to be. The lessons were discontinued. I don’t know why Tante Marie didn’t continue teaching my sister, who wanted to learn everything. She probably felt that teaching only Yosefa was too much like a private lesson, whereas having me there gave her more of a feeling of being in a classroom, which she must have missed.

My sister never forgave me; because of me she never learned French, because of our poverty she never learned to play piano, and because of the steep streets of Haifa she didn’t know how to ride a bicycle.

And then Ionesco arrived in Israel in search of the stimulation he hoped to find in our tiny little country. As a famous playwright, he was sure that the post-Holocaust Jewish state would provide the perfect inspiration for a new play, and the new landscapes would expose him to materials he could never have found in Europe.

For five full days, my father took Ionesco all around Haifa step by step and on foot. Ionesco was shown the vista from the top of Mount Carmel, spreading down toward the sea. He saw the golden dome of the Baha’i temple, a source of pride to the city, and went down the myriad stairs and slopes that led from the Carmel to Haifa’s downtown region, while the scent of coffee (from my father, no doubt) filled the air. Together they wandered among the laborers of downtown Haifa, a complex blend of colors, languages, and people; Arabic, Romanian, Yiddish, Polish, and Turkish ruled the street. And Moroccan—a lot of Moroccan.

And everyone was friends with everyone else, everyone went to the same place, even though they had not come from the same place, and most important of all, they were all Jews—well, apart from the Arabs, who in our eyes were also Jews.

Ionesco was very keen to know how a nation that had lost six million of its sons had succeeded in building such a state, albeit surrounded by enemies, but a homeland nonetheless. And Dad told him that he didn’t for a minute regret having left the fleshpots of Romania, the movie house that the Communists had confiscated from him, so that his daughters could grow up as proud Jews in Israel; and it made no difference that, just for the time being, he was making his living selling cups of coffee.

After five days, Ionesco informed Dad that all the material he had accumulated would enable him to write ten plays about Israel.

In the end, after everything that he saw and absorbed and smelled and was impressed by in Israel, Ionesco wrote the play The Chairs, about my aunt Lutzi and uncle Lazer’s front room. The room was described in great detail: the double bed at its end, the long table—about ten feet of heavy mahogany—with many, many chairs all around, as many chairs as such a long table can accommodate. And along the room’s western wall, as if these chairs were not sufficient, there stood a further row of chairs belonging to the same dining room suite. The chairs were heavy, their edges decorated with a carved circular pattern, hand carved, of course. And most important, their red velvet upholstery had the soft, embracing feel of a loving chair. Like soldiers, Tante Lutzi and her husband Lazer’s chairs stood regally along the wall, and this is what Eugène Ionesco wrote his play about. The play tells the story of an elderly couple setting up chairs, arranging and rearranging them like soldiers, in anticipation of the arrival of invisible guests.

The Chairs is 40 Stanton Street; at least that’s the story that was repeated proudly in our home.

And my father, who spent five whole days taking Eugène Ionesco all over Haifa to provide him with inspiration, waited a long time for the play to be released, only to discover that he didn’t get so much as a credit in the list of acknowledgments.

Mercedes was smiling broadly as she opened the door for them. “Hola,” Mercedes said, and kissed her on the right cheek, then the left, then the right again. She recoiled, jumped back, not understanding exactly—since when was she supposed to be kissing strangers?—and the man told her that in Spain people say hello and give each other three kisses. To her, it appeared very odd, and he went on to explain that in France the habit is to give two kisses, one on each cheek. In Spain it was three.

At night, when she was introduced to Jorge, who also kissed her three times, she asked the man if she was supposed to kiss all the men in Barcelona, and he said that such was the custom, and it seemed a much nicer one to him than the limp handshake meted out by Israelis, as if they were doing you a favor. She agreed, recalling his firm handshake when they were first introduced and how impressed she had been by it.

“So why didn’t you kiss me three times when we were first introduced?” She laughed.

“Believe me, I wanted to.”

“Well, why didn’t you, then?” she insisted, laughing.

“Because you would certainly have slapped my face.”

Beyond the mandatory kisses, the two women were unable to exchange a single word. Like many Spaniards, Mercedes spoke no other language than Spanish and Catalonian. Mercedes was gorgeous and kindly and dressed in well-cut jeans, a button-up shirt, and killer heels, her taste exactly.

The man took her suitcase into the very small bedroom she would be using. Mercedes’s room was much more spacious, and the living room was very pleasant. The apartment was extremely clean, and it was only after she’d learned to say a few consecutive sentences in Spanish and stayed for lunch with them a few times that she witnessed how the efficient Mercedes came home from work at lunchtime carrying shopping, stuck a chicken in the oven, washed down the floor, and served her boyfriend, Jorge, a glass of whiskey, straight to the armchair in which he was sitting watching sports on TV. When the meal was over, Mercedes would quickly wash the dishes and tidy up the kitchen; if Jorge was feeling horny in the afternoon, she would follow him into her bedroom and emit a few moans and groans before rushing off back to work, to unlock the office from four thirty until eight thirty in the evening. She could never understand where this pleasant woman got all the energy to do so much work singlehandedly, while her boyfriend just sat there watching TV, and even to smile at him. Sometimes he’d get through half a bottle of whiskey during a single afternoon break. On such occasions, when he pushed Mercedes into their room, she would hear her moaning—but not with pleasure.

She wanted to unpack her suitcase and hang up the clothes she had brought for the next three months, but the man said that his parents were longing to meet her and had been waiting from the moment of her landing in Barcelona. She felt guilty for the time she had wasted buying glasses.

She was hungry, a hunger accumulated over three months of going without food in order to save enough money to fly to the country of her bridegroom-to-be.

The arrived at a swish apartment block, and he pulled into an underground parking garage, where he parked next to a brand-new BMW. “This is my parking space,” he explained, “and that’s my father’s car,” and when they stepped out of the car and into an elevator, she felt she as if she were in a movie.

On the tenth floor, the man opened the door, calling out “Mummy” and announcing in French that they had arrived. She was sorry now that she had stopped her French lessons at Tante Marie’s, but she understood a little, because it wasn’t unlike Romanian. They entered a square hall, with one wall covered in mirrors and green marble pedestals; the other side had two shiny wood doors with painted flowers. Next to the entrance stood a red-velvet-upholstered chair, on which the man placed his briefcase. The hall was the size of her parents’ living room.

A plump woman with ingenuous blue eyes walked toward them, smiling, and he went up to her to give her three kisses. Next, a distinguished-looking man with piercing blue eyes and a Kirk Douglas dimple in his chin came up to shake her hand. He introduced his parents, Luna and Alberto, and they remained standing, a little embarrassed, in the elegant hall. His father spoke fluent Hebrew and explained that he had learned the language when he belonged to the Hashomer Hatza’ir youth movement in Bulgaria. She spoke a stilted English with the mother, but the father and the man broke out in simultaneous translation as soon as she opened her mouth.

They entered the salon, and she caught her breath. It was very large, with two separate reception areas, one with a television, where they sat most of the time, and another, for guests, with wall-to-wall red velvet furniture. Leading off the salon was a dining area, containing a long table with enough room to seat sixteen. So there would be enough room for anyone wanting to eat.

She remembered that when they’d had all the uncles and aunts over for the seder, they’d had to spill over into the neighbors’ apartment to accommodate all sixteen diners. The table was laid for a festive meal—a white tablecloth embroidered with delicate pale blue flowers and matching napkins, on which the cutlery had been laid. Each place setting consisted of a large plate under a smaller one and two kinds of drinking glasses, one for wine and one for water. A stainless steel bowl lined with a white napkin contained small slices of baguette; several other small bowls contained diced red pepper, tomatoes, cucumbers, and onion; and there was another bowl filled with croutons.

She looked up at the crystal chandelier hanging from the dining room ceiling, at the beautiful pictures hanging in the salon, at the large ceramic figure on the parquet floor in the corner of the room, and at the elegant dishes on the dresser and wondered if her gift would appear pathetic among all this splendor. Still, she put her hand into the bag she had carried close to her heart throughout the flight and pulled out a small blue porcelain figurine, which she had bought with her sister on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street. They had picked out the unique little piece simultaneously as soon as they laid eyes on it. The figurine was of a woman in profile, her head dropped sideways, a hand raised in doubt or pleading. Her body was soft, and her entire pose said, “Here I am, whether you want me or not.” A gentle woman, powerful, her clay eyes filled with compassion.

The figurine pleased his parents, and his mother gave it a place of honor on the dresser in the dining area. She felt wanted, and they sat down to eat their lunch. His mother sat at the head of the table, her usual place, and his father to her left, her son to her right, and she next to him.

Laura, the housemaid, brought in a large stainless steel soup tureen and laid it beside Luna at the head of the table. Luna served them all soup, first their guest, then herself, then her son and husband.

She was surprised to be served first; at home she had become accustomed to the men being served first, and only after them did the women get their food. Maybe it’s because I’m their guest, she thought, but in the evening, when the extended family arrived for dinner, she discovered that his mother made a habit of serving the women first and the men later, which she thought was an excellent arrangement.

The first course was gazpacho, and it was accompanied by a detailed explanation from Luna that this was a Spanish dish, a cold soup made from all the vegetables on the table, finely blended, with added water, vinegar, and ice cubes. The red soup looked especially refreshing to her and was eaten together with the diced vegetables on the table and the fried croutons. She watched the man to see what he was doing and did as he did, exactly as her sister, who had accompanied her to the airport, had instructed her. So as not to make a fool of herself, she was to watch everything the others did and do the same; place her napkin on her lap, take up a small amount on her spoon—not so little as to appear insulting or so much as to appear a glutton—take note of the cutlery they were using for each course, and of course, not confuse the water glasses with the wineglasses.

The soup was delicious, but when his mother asked if she wanted a second helping, she was too shy to accept. She was glad in retrospect that she hadn’t had another helping, because she was already full up after the second course, a Russian salad consisting of cooked vegetables in mayonnaise and coarsely cut pickled cucumber. Laura came around and collected the soup plates before handing the woman of the house the bowl of Russian salad, which she proceeded to serve first to her, then to herself, and finally to her son and husband.

The salad was tastier than the dish her mother made at home from cooked vegetables left over from the chicken soup. Here, obviously, the vegetables had been cooked especially for the salad.

“Is this a Spanish salad?” she wondered, and Luna explained that she cooked an eclectic variety of dishes from recipes she had picked up over the years. “The salad is a recipe I got from Ruth, my friend,” she said, “and I always make my own mayonnaise.” She didn’t understand how you could make your own mayonnaise, rather than buy it in the grocer’s shop.

The mayonnaise salad she ate with the small slices of baguette was so delicious that she was no longer annoyed at not being allowed to live with the man in a separate apartment.

Without asking, his father poured her a glass of wine, and they all said, “L’chaim.” The man asked her if she liked the wine, and she said, “Very much,” although she had no idea how to tell if a wine was good or not.

And again, Laura came in to collect the salad-soiled plates, and she didn’t know if she should get up to help; as the man didn’t stand up, she didn’t either. She thought later that she should have helped, and at dinner she did stand up to clear the table in spite of the housemaid, which in retrospect salvaged her reputation in his parents’ eyes.

Luna saved a portion of everything she had served for Laura, who ate her meal in the kitchen.

And again, Laura came in with a long stainless steel carving dish containing tender veal, which his father carved and his mother served out. Two small bowls, one with peas and the other with potatoes and onions, arrived alongside. The man piled her plate with generous portions of everything, as if suspecting that she was too shy to help herself; the veal was the most delicious meat she had ever eaten in her life.

She made a point of chewing everything carefully, as per her sister’s instructions, and most important—but really most important—not to forget to eat with her mouth closed. With every bite, she repeated over and over not to forget to keep her mouth closed. It’s very difficult to chew with your mouth closed. She didn’t say a word, worried that if she opened her mouth, she would forget to close it again when she was chewing. In any case, she was quite shy about saying anything, so she sat there, meekly listening to those who were wiser than she. This too was in accordance with her older sister’s orders to avoid making embarrassing gaffes in the home of a bourgeois family abroad, one of the pillars of the Barcelona Jewish community.

“Would you like to have some more garlic?” His mother interrupted her closed-mouth drill.

“No, why?” she said uneasily.

“Because I don’t cook with garlic. Alberto doesn’t like it, but I know that Romanians eat a lot of garlic.”

“Bulgarians, too,” added his father. “It’s just that I hate garlic.”

“Does your mother cook with garlic?” Luna asked.

“Yes, a lot of garlic,” she said. “My mother starts her morning with three cloves of garlic. For her blood pressure.”

“It’s healthy, garlic,” said Luna, “and really good against high blood pressure. I, personally, like garlic.” Later, with time, she taught Luna how to introduce garlic surreptitiously into her cooking without her husband noticing it; after all, good meat really does need to be cooked with some added garlic.

“Alberto has diabetes, so nothing we eat contains sugar.…” His mother continued to share the family secrets with her.