Every House Needs a Balcony by Rina Frank Read Free Book Online

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.
    â€œWe’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.
    â€œThe laughter’s come back to your eyes, just as I remembered,” he said and hugged her.
    â€œWhere are we going?” she asked as they climbed into his small SEAT car.
    â€œTo 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.”
    â€œAren’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.
    â€œThat 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.
    â€œMy 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.
    â€œThe 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.”
    â€œSo how come Mercedes and Jorge are living together?” she couldn’t help asking.
    â€œWell, 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 hisparents 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.
    â€œYour sister left home when she was twenty.” She was finding it hard to understand the man she had fallen in love with.
    â€œShe 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.
    â€œBut you’re a Jew,” she said, so quietly that he didn’t hear. Or perhaps he did.

When Father Met Mother
    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