A month later two very sad things happened to my sister, and she spent all her time crying. Dad was unable to console her, not even when he explained that disasters always happen in August, because that was the month in which the destruction of the Temple took place. Our dad wouldn’t even let us go to the beach on Tisha b’Av, because it’s a day on which a lot of people drown, even though there were plenty of lifeguards around, because they weren’t on strike at that time.
My sister’s best friend Chaya, the most popular girl in the class, left Israel for America after her uncles who lived there had managed to persuade her parents that the future was much greener for the Jews in New York, and besides, it’s cheaper to give a doll as a gift without having to mail it to Israel and pay postage; and Hanna, my sister’s beloved homeroom teacher, was killed in a road accident.
The sudden and simultaneous loss of the two women she admired most was an unbearably heavy blow to my sister. Moreover, Chaya took with her all her dolls and the piano that my sister loved to run her fingers across the keys of. And for Hanna, who nurtured the neighborhood’s children even though she herself was from the Carmel, to suddenly disappear from her life was a terrible loss. Young people in those days got killed only in wars, not in anything as banal as road accidents.
In order to console her, Dad took us for a ride on the newly opened Carmelit light railway through all the stations from downtown Haifa and right up to the top of Mount Carmel.
Only after all four of us (yes, Dad agreed to take Mom, too) had watched to see that nothing bad happened to any of the other people did we muster the courage to step onto the escalator. It was then that my new shoe—one of the pair my parents had bought me for Passover—got caught in the escalator, and I watched it as it bounced over the stairs and was squashed on the other side. Brokenhearted, I cried for those stairs to stop moving so that I could go and rescue my shoe, but it was no good. The stairs continued to move, mangling to death one shoe of the first pair of new shoes I had ever owned.
I was still wailing when my sister burst out laughing, and Mom and Dad joined her; pleased to see her forget for a moment her tragic losses, they were keen to encourage her to laugh more.
We walked around the Carmel neighborhood for a while and then went down, on foot of course, with me hobbling along on one shoe, holding the other, ragged and ruined by the escalator in the new Carmelit light railway. My lovely new shoe had lost all its patent leather shine.
The next day we wore our new white pleated skirts from Passover even though it was a regular weekday, and Mom took us to the head office of the Carmelit light railway, with me grasping my disgraced shoe in my hand.
The manager looked at my sad eyes and explained to Mom that he couldn’t reimburse me for one new shoe. If I had been injured, or squashed to death, for that they have insurance. But not for a single shoe that got mangled because I didn’t know when to step on that modern escalator that moves of its own accord and doesn’t have to be operated.
“Still,” he said, in reparation, “the girl will get ten free rides on the Carmelit.”
Mom immediately told him to make it ten free rides for the whole family, and when, to her surprise, the manager agreed, she was quick to add, “Round trip. So we won’t have to walk down from the Carmel to Wadi Salib.” The manager agreed to this too, and we went away satisfied, determined to celebrate our victory.
On the street corner an Arab kid was selling prickly pears. We went over and joined the queue to buy some. In front of us stood a fat man who ate one and then another pear and yet another and another and another. And every time we thought he had finished eating, the glutton’s sharp eye picked out our prickly pear, pointed to it, and the Arab kid picked it up in his scratched hands and sliced it, peeled off the prickly skin, and handed it to the fat pig who stood in front of us in the queue. By the time my mother shouted at him to give pears to the girls as well, the fat slob had put back at least forty already. The boy peeled two nice juicy prickly pears and handed them to us. But no sooner had Mom pointed out other pears for him to peel than the boy noticed an approaching policeman, and since he had no license to sell prickly pears at the entrance to the Carmelit, he quickly gathered all his goods together and disappeared to the right, down the alleyways of the Turkish market. We were devastated because the fat man had eaten all our prickly pears, and hadn’t even paid for them; Mom reckoned that it was certainly he who had called the policeman, but not before he’d finished gobbling down all the prickly pears.
The policeman walked up and asked us if we’d seen the direction the Arab kid had run off in. The prickly pear thief pointed in the direction of the boy’s escape. Mom told the policeman that the man was lying and that she’d seen with her own eyes how that that man had stolen all the prickly pears off that poor kid who was only trying to make a living, and anyway, the boy had run off in the opposite direction. The policeman, who had no illusions about the ability of adults to lie, turned to my sister and asked her if she’d seen where the prickly pear seller had disappeared to. He must have decided that a nine-and-a-half-year-old girl in a white pleated skirt wouldn’t lie.
My sister pointed in the same direction my mother had.
The policeman hesitated for a moment, and I waved my mangled shoe and asked him why should he believe that liar who ate all our prickly pears and was also very fat.
The policeman set out in the direction Mom had sent him, and we made slowly to the right, where we found the Arab boy with the prickly pears and bought another one each, paid him, and went on our way.
We were very proud of our mother for misleading the policeman and defending the Arab boy. Not only did that fat bastard eat up his entire livelihood, but that he should do time in jail for it as well?
But Dad decided that a round-trip ticket on the Carmelit was not enough to make up to a girl for the loss of two important women in her life and a few days later he came home carrying a large cardboard box. We all gathered around it, trying to guess what was inside.
My sister was first to guess and said: “It’s a radio!”
Mom hoped it might be a small manual washing machine, one with a handle that has to be turned and then the laundry comes out clean and would relieve her of the revolting Thursday-night laundry burden. I thought it was a large doll that Dad had decided to buy for us to share, now that he had some money, because soon, in November, there’d be a general election, and Chaya had taken all her dolls with her to America, but it was indeed a radio. It was a brown radio with a plain wood case and rounded corners and a green dial that lit up when the radio was switched on and words that come out of it with music. Most of the time the radio was switched off, because electricity costs money, and once a day Mom and Dad listened to the news in Romanian.
And there was another surprise from Dad at the end of the month, when he took us to be filmed for an American movie. It was a real movie; and he even made some money out of it. For this he had needed nepotism, protekzia, and the party arranged for Dad and his family to be extras on the movie because this time, just before the elections, they were buttering him up more than usual after learning that our house had been the only one to avoid being sprayed with stones during the riots in Wadi Salib, unlike all the other Ashkenazi houses.
It was a movie about a thirtysomething American woman who realizes that her childhood sweetheart has survived the Holocaust and is living in Israel, and she has arrived on a ship from America to meet the love of her life, whom she hasn’t seen for about fifteen years. Of course she had refused to marry in America, because in her heart of hearts she had always believed that her beloved had survived the horrors of the Holocaust. And he hadn’t married in Israel, but had listened ardently to the daily radio program Seeking Relatives, until he’d managed to locate her. They meet on the wharf as she disembarks from the ship, dressed in a pale pink suit and pink hat and holding a white bag. Her beloved is waiting for her at the bottom of the gangway, holding a bouquet of fresh flowers. We were extras, waiting for our relatives who had just arrived in Israel on the same ship. The actress held on to the railing, trying not to pass out in anticipation of meeting up again with the man of her dreams. According to the stage instructions meted out by the director, we were required to applaud each time any of the travelers walked down the gangway. Over the course of several hours we watched as the actress went up and came down the ship’s gangway to the applause of the extras, until she was finally reunited in a passionate kiss with her beloved who was waiting below. They kissed time and time again, and each time the actor was provided with a fresh bouquet of flowers. Sefi and I soaked up every word that was said in English, relished every moment in the presence of genuine American actors, and prayed that it would never, ever end. Our happiness knew no bounds. Besides, we knew that Dad was making money just from our standing there. But the fact is that we would have stood there for days on end for nothing, the director need only have asked. In the end we even took all the bouquets back home with us.