Rooms Need Doors Read online

  To Shay and to Danit, my precious children

  To Amos, my love

  Rooms Need Doors

  Sisi Meir

  Copyright © 2018 Sisi Meir

  All rights reserved; No parts of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information retrieval system, without the permission, in writing, of the author.

  Producer & International Distributor

  eBookPro Publishing

  www.ebook-pro.com

  Translation from the Hebrew: Dina Saadon

  Contact: [email protected]

  Contents

  PART A

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  PART B

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  PART C

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Message from the Author

  PART A

  Chapter 1

  I was lying on my bed, staring into space, thinking about “Winnetou” and Old Shatterhand,” the book I just finished.

  From here, I could see my father sitting in front of the table in the hall, busy eating. The hall served as our living room, dining room, and sometimes as a bedroom. It was furnished with two iron beds, a table, and a small cupboard that my oldest brother Georgie gave us when he moved to Tel Aviv.

  I watched my father as he poured himself a cup of sweet tea from the small kettle. As he poured it from a considerable height, the tea spilled onto the table. As this didn’t seem to bother him, so he continued pouring his tea in the same way. Afterward, he grabbed half a loaf of bread that was lying on the table, and slowly pulled out the soft center. The bread crumbled all over the table, some of it falling onto the floor. He then tore off little pieces of the crust, added some salty cheese, and ate it. He noisily drank from his cup of tea, while the tea that had spilled onto the table slowly dripped onto the floor.

  I decided to start rereading my book from the beginning. My mother walked in through the open door carrying two shopping bags. As expected, it took just a few minutes for a very loud fight to break out between her and my father. Putting the book aside, I began watching my parents. My father cursed my mother profusely in Arabic.

  “Shh…. The neighbors can hear,” she protested. His response was to curse the neighbors, and he shouted even louder: “Those motherfuckers can go fuck themselves!”

  When Mother begged him again to stop, he yelled at her to give him two liras1.

  When my mother replied that she had no money, he argued that he saw Georgie give her money. My brother Georgie is the son of my mother’s first husband. My father despises him and never bothers to hide it.

  “Yes, you have!’ he shouted back at her. “And I need that money to get to Haifa because I have a new job.”

  My father has worked on and off, but he is unemployed more days than he works. He owned a store before he immigrated to Israel, and he would serve his customers all day. But here in Israel, he is considered to have no profession and can only get occasional jobs as a laborer. Whenever we need to fill out a form with our father’s profession, we would check the box “simple laborer.” So, where does he work? Sometimes at the Jewish National Fund, doing forestry work, occasionally in a factory, and once in a while paving roads. Usually, he doesn’t last long anywhere and ends up leaving each job voluntarily. His life’s ambition is to be a clerk like one of his relatives, who landed a clerical position at the municipality.

  Despite all the quarrels, Mother would sometimes feel sorry for my father: “Poor thing, working on a road on a boiling hot day like this,” she would say.

  But this time, my mother did not fall for Father’s story about the new job. She had good reason to be suspicious about the purpose of his trip to Haifa. She was sure he would lose the money as usual at cards.

  After their loud argument, however, she gave in and went to the kitchen.

  I heard her opening the door of the kitchen cabinet, which was always locked with a key. A moment later, I heard her locking the cabinet again.

  “Take a lira. This is all I’ve got,” Mother said, as she held out the lira note to my father.

  “I saw you have another one.” Father didn’t give up easily.

  “Really? And how am I supposed to buy food for the girls?” my mother dared to ask.

  “I don’t know. Am I responsible for the girls?” my father replied.

  My mother returned to the kitchen, and I heard her mutter: “How can he say such a thing?”

  Personally, his words don’t disturb me because I’ve heard him say that kind of thing before. For me, he is a disgusting creature whom I hate, and not much of a father. He’s a creature that curses and fights all the time when he is awake, yelling and hitting. This creature doesn’t close the bathroom door behind him. He hiccups and farts freely next to us, and he flusters poor Grandma, who lies in bed most of the time.

  Even when I was still a little girl, I was never upset about my father’s comparative absence from our lives. I admired my mother when I saw her running from here to there, from the transit camp where we lived to the town and vice versa, to take care of all our needs. She even made sure to clean my brother Georgie’s small teacher’s apartment in the housing projects that he lived in then. I have always looked up to her with respect, thinking, “I don’t need a father. Mother is both mother and father to me.”

  My little twin sisters and I especially enjoyed the times when my mother cleaned Georgie’s small apartment. While Mother dusted and scrubbed the apartment, we would check what was in the small refrigerator. Usually, we found a few fruit juice concentrates: lemon juice, raspberry juice, and others. At home, we never had juice in the refrigerator. At best, there was ice for cold water. In any case, we would mix the concentrates with cold water and happily drink the tasty juices. Sometimes, we would find some black beer and would take a few sips of that. Afterward, we would go outside to the small yard and play leapfrog and hide-and-seek, turn cartwheels, and do handstands.

  Cleaning day at my brother’s apartment was a fun day for us.

  Chapter 2

  My mother was divorced from her first husband when she was still living in Iraq
, before moving to Israel. My oldest brother Georgie was her only child from her first husband. For me, he was a brother in every way, and not a half-brother, as they call it.

  When I tried to find out why she got divorced, she answered that her husband used to scream at her over every little thing – if she dropped something, if she broke a plate, if she didn’t serve him his tea quickly enough, and other things like that. Sometimes he would give her threatening looks which, made her tremble. I tried to imagine her as a fifteen-year-old girl with a husband ten years older, who would rage at her, screaming, and frighten her.

  It was an arranged marriage. Her parents and brothers liked him, and she agreed to the marriage without resistance.

  I asked her if that husband at least supported her financially, and she said that he did. Her financial situation then was ten times better than it was today. Her husband was a textile merchant, and they had a large, furnished house. She wanted for nothing. However, it was clear to me that if my mother took the step of getting a divorce from her husband in an Arab country like Iraq, it showed that she could not bear it anymore.

  My heart mourned for the young girl, left alone with a little boy. Nevertheless, her brothers and sisters-in-law tried to help her as much as they could. She lived in the home of her brother Shaul. Her sister-in-law, Pircha, taught her how to cook, iron, and perform other household tasks, and she even invited my mother to join them whenever they left the house.

  In the meantime, Shaul died and his wife Pircha, who lives in Tel Aviv today, got remarried and bore her second husband two children.

  The concept of death in my mother’s family was hard for me to understand and digest. Out of nine brothers, seven died, leaving only two. One lives in Ramat Gan, and the other is still in Iran, where most of my mother’s brothers immigrated from Iraq, as did she, with my father. My grandparents remained in Iraq and moved to Israel.

  Her brothers’ deaths were mostly caused by illnesses for which there was no medicine. I find it hard to understand how my mother survived all of this in the past, and how she manages to survive the conditions of her present life, with such a husband. But my mother has stressed more than once that what is important for her today and what keeps her going is us, her children.

  My little twin sisters, Rina and Yael, study and live at a boarding school. They are in the same class, but today they are on vacation at home, and I played with them outside. They aren’t identical twins, and they are very different from each other. Rina is tall, with short brown, curly hair, and a slightly long face. She looks a little bit like our father. Yael is shorter, with black, long, smooth hair and a small, pretty heart-shaped face.

  Luckily for them and for me, the boarding school is not very far from our small town, so they come home a lot. Their school has a transit bus for this purpose. Rina soon lost patience with our game of hopscotch, and she wanted to jump rope. I understood her. She needed to release all her excess energy. I went into the house to bring the rope, and each of us jumped in turn. Rina got a bit out of hand and wanted to jump more and more.

  I have thought about how different the two of them are, and not only in appearance. Rina is always moving around and restless. Sometimes she puffs out her cheeks and then smacks them till the air comes out. It could possibly be due to embarrassment. Yael is quieter. Like me, she loves reading books and especially likes to share secrets with the daughters of the neighbors. She loves Rina very much, despite the differences between them, and sometimes she tries to imitate her. She feels very comfortable with me. She tells me things about her life at boarding school and also asks my advice about her studies.

  When Rina tells me something, it sometimes seems as if she is making it up. For example, there was the day when she said to me with shining eyes that she got 100 on her math test. By chance, I came across her schoolbag, which was open, and I noticed two sheets of paper inside it. I took out the papers – her math test. Her grade was 85, and her teacher had written, “You are improving. Keep it up.” The truth was that this was a very good grade for her, and she should have been proud of it. But she had the need; I’m not always clear why, to lie or maybe to exaggerate.

  Yael has a very specific problem. She stutters. She has been stuttering since she was a very little girl. I remember that one day, she just started stuttering, and since then, the stutter has never gone away. What is interesting is that sometimes she stutters with every word, and sometimes her stutter is lighter.

  When we tired of playing outside, all three of us went into the house and lay down on my bed., I played airplane with them, swinging them on my knees while I lay on my back – first for Yael and then for Rina. Afterward, I tickled them like my friend Rozi does. Yael chortled her rolling laugh, and Rina giggled too. But she quickly pulled herself free and ran outside.

  My father got angry and shouted from his bedroom, “Quiet! What’s all this noise?” I know that he was just jealous because we were having fun. Instead of being happy that his children are enjoying themselves, he gets jealous and angry. My father also sometimes taunts Yael about her stutter. When she stutters, he sometimes repeats her words and imitates her speech.

  I, on the other hand, feel pressure in my own throat when she stutters. I feel as if I am the one who is stuttering.

  In contrast to the way he treats us girls, almost with disgust, my father loves my older brother Sammy, who has been living on a kibbutz2 for the past few years. Father gives him whatever he wants. More than once, my father had told the neighbors and anyone else who agrees to hear that when Sammy was little and still living in Iran, he fell into a swimming pool and my father jumped into the pool without hesitation, while wearing an expensive suit, to save him.

  I, in my innocence, believed that all men from Arab countries were like that, preferring their sons to their daughters or even worse, hating their daughters. However, much later, when I saw how the fathers of my classmates, also from eastern backgrounds, treated their daughters, I understood that I was very much mistaken. I understood that my father was the exception and not representative of eastern fathers at all. Moreover, there were some fathers who cared about their daughters even more than their mothers did, such as Chana, my classmate, who was closer to her father than her mother.

  Chapter 3

  I made my way to a scouting activity.

  I discovered “the scouts” shortly after we moved from the transit camp to our current apartment in the housing projects. From the first moment, I fell in love with the scout movement and its programs. The activities took place in the new clubhouse, which was not far from our house. The two hours that we spent in the clubhouse usually sped by.

  Typically, the activity was divided into two; a talk or a practical lesson of some kind, followed by various social games. The counsellor, Musa managed the program. Once, I won first place in a quiz and received a khaki uniform with a green tie as a prize. I was so happy.

  The only one thing that spoiled the scouts for me was that Micha also joined. What this meant is that I needed to be alert, in case something happened to me that was similar to an incident with him in Grade Four.

  There was an exercise class that took place outside on the grass next to the auditorium. We were asked to take off our shoes, and we happily did so. I remember looking at the soles of the children’s bare feet, and I noticed that some had very white bottoms, while others had very dark bottoms. I verbalized my thoughts out loud, and Yotam said to me, “Well, of course. That’s because you’re Arabs.”

  “What do you mean, Arabs?” I quickly retorted. “We’re Jews!”

  “Yes,” Yotam replied. “Religiously you are Jews, but racially you’re Arabs.” This left me feeling confused.

  In any case, that same day the teacher said we would play a game. The children were supposed to run around freely. As soon as she called out, “Rain!” all of us had to lie down as fast as we could on the grass.

  I was in
a very good mood. The winter sun was benevolent. A free, pleasant feeling spread through my body, and the soft grass tickled my bare feet.

  “Rain!” the teacher called out suddenly, and I quickly lay on my tummy on the grass. Almost immediately, I felt someone lying on top of me along the length of my body: head to toe, and he was heavy. I trembled and moved him with my hands. In the end, I managed to shake him off me and get up. I saw that it was Micha – the quietest kid in class, a kid who almost never said a word.

  Micha went off without saying anything, and I grabbed my bag and ran home. “I hope I don’t meet anyone on the way home,” I thought to myself. I felt so ashamed and humiliated. I knew that from now on, there was a kind of “stain” on me, and at any random moment, maybe during one of our quarrels, my friends would say, “Micha lay on top of you.”

  In any case, Zohara caught up with me on the way. Then, she was a new pupil who had immigrated to Israel from Argentina five years before.

  “Wait a minute, Tiki. I’ll come with you.”

  To my relief, Zohara did not talk to me on the way about what happened. She told me about her family, who lived for five years on Kibbutz Ayalon. Then, when her parents got divorced, she, her older brother, and her mother came to live in our town. Her father stayed on the kibbutz. He works in the dairy. She told me these things with honesty that captured my heart.

  “Do you see your father?” I dared to ask.

  “Of course I do. Once a week, we go to the kibbutz. He also comes to visit us sometimes,” she added.

  On the way, Zohara pointed toward one of the houses. “I live here.”

  I saw that Zohara did not live far from me – about a ten-minute walk from our house. However, she didn’t stop at her house but continued walking with me, to my dismay, toward my house. I pointed out my house, which was toward the end of the road along which we were walking. Suddenly she asked, “Will you tell your mother about what happened on the grass?”