“Going Up, Going Down ~ the Aliyah of an Ingénue”
Chapter 34 : The Tale of the Transatlantic Sofa
An American lady and her husband, so we were told, appeared one day in Ramat Yishai in the 1950s having bought a very small property standing on a large plot along our road. Before anyone could say Maazel Tov, builders had arrived and started extending the little place at a great rate and it was understood without proper planning permission. Our new immigrants were fresh to the ways of earlier immigrants looking to make a fast buck in the land of chutzpah and honey. The builders, it turned out later, were relatively new to that game and with decidedly less than the modest level of expertise necessary to undertake sound building works. Within fifteen years the entire house had cracked in the most salient places, leaving it truly unsound for dwelling. However, with the re-building nearing completion at that time, the few villagers regularly watching the progress of the works were surprised to see a lorry arriving from the port of Haifa stacked full of antique furniture shipped from a previous home in the United States.
Everyone then understood that this lady and her husband must have been important and wealthy members of a Jewish community somewhere in the United States but had obviously decided to leave all that behind to live as good Zionists in the new State of Israel in the basic settlement that was Ramat Yishai. That, at any rate, was the accepted interpretation of events. And indeed the American couple lived there quietly and rather parsimoniously for something close to twenty years. Both had died in the one or two years before we arrived in 1973.
The delivery of the lovely furniture had been an eye-opener for most of the villagers who had never seen anything like that before. Indeed very few of them had any memories of such grandeur. But the new immigrants lived simply enough and it was only when the old lady was left alone after the death of her husband, visited occasionally by one other equally elderly lady from the village, that thoughts of the furniture returned to the minds of village neighbours. What, they wondered, would happen to the house and its contents when the owner died as there appeared to be no children living in Israel, if indeed there were any offspring anywhere else in the world, or other relations. So the day on which it was rumoured that the elderly widow might indeed die was the day on which the word went around that she should be visited.
Whether or not our American lady, like Bouboulina in Zorba the Greek, had finally closed her eyes on this wicked world before the doors of her house burst open and the window shutters were flung wide, remains apocryphal. The fact was that, while blessing her as they passed by the bed on which her old body had been carefully attended to and lay stretched out under a sheet, most of the visiting ‘mourners’ were as busy as a quiet visitation of vultures, snatching at all the interesting contents of that solemn place. By the time the doctor and coroner arrived to indeed pronounce the lady dead the house was virtually empty of its contents. These had been smuggled away to other houses in Ramat Yishai where they would no doubt have been kept in the dark for a suitable time, recognising both the statutory mourning period for the passing of a good Jewish neighbour and the passing of any other interested parties who might be responsible under the law for the property, now vacant and cracking badly.
Before launching into the transatlantic sofa, so to speak, it should be stated that the curse of our American lady, alive or dead when the final visitation took place, remained alive. Or that is to say the woodworm remained alive. It would appear the immigrants from the New World had not taken into account the need to apply a certain lotion, known as Rentokil in England, to kill woodworm which loves boring holes into fine, or even less fine, wooden furniture. Consequently, and unbeknown to the thieving magpies, much of the furniture ‘rescued’ from the American lady’s home, the sofa being one exception, had already been invaded by worms, many of them dead but alas not all.
Within a couple of years of ‘storing’ this antique furniture in new homes, not only were the owners coping with its dusty disintegration but in some cases with their own furniture being ravaged by the pest. Of course one has to allow for exaggeration and the situation may not have been as dire as gossip suggested. In many cases preventative measures would probably have saved both antiques and newer furniture with which they came into contact. But as the curse would have it the ‘furniture removers’ were also unaware of the efficacy of Rentokil and chose instead ‘to toss out the baby with the bathwater’ making a bonfire of everything infected. So from time to time the village would be lit up with such bonfires and the additional curses of the cursed. The sofa, however, on inspection by its new inheritors was indeed free of wormholes and was saved for a different future. If this was not the curse reversed then it was pure karma reflecting, one hopes, the good deeds in a previous life of the present owners or owners to be! This is where our personal involvement in the story takes shape.
It so happened that a charming Yemeni family, the Yanai’s, living three doors away next to the Maman’s called my husband in when the married daughter living with her mother decided she would like Arni to draw up a house design for herself, her airforce husband and their tiny twin girls.
The grandmother, Miriam, felt that this extended family of hers needed more room than she could offer and especially so as one of the small rooms was made smaller by the area taken up with a magnificent, large mahogany sofa. This sofa remained shrouded in a sheet for its own safety and to discourage all her grandchildren from playing on it and wrecking it but it was shown to Arni with pride.
The fact was that the sofa was regarded with some awe so that few had sat on it since it had been installed at a time which happened to co-incide with the death of the American lady along the street, a matter discreetly ignored. The sprung seating of the sofa, covered in thick green upholstery, was in good order, as was the lovely carved and curving mahogany back frame and the eight carved feet which supported the four-seater with its two wide cushions and buttoned arms. It was a handsome piece indeed, dating back perhaps to the 1860s or ’70s.
When Arni came to present the daughter with a bill for his architectural design, which had met with family approval, the young mother was somewhat embarrassed for she had only managed to save the money she already owed and had promised to her mother Miriam for some considerable time, a sum which Miriam badly needed for the purchase of a new set of false teeth. Skilled dentistry in Israel cost then, as it does today, a lot of money.
So Arni’s client was torn between paying him and paying her mother. It was Miriam who came to the rescue. She had suffered for long enough with her poor dentures which neither cut nor chewed well and hurt her mouth. Going without dentures was more than her pride could bear and she was not in a position to make the purchase from her own meagre income. She mentioned the sofa that Arni had freely admired and asked him if he would be prepared to accept the sofa in lieu of payment in cash from her daughter. That would free up space in the house and enable her to use the money her daughter owed her to immediately purchase a new set of teeth. She was positively beaming with anticipation at this sensible and clever compromise.
Arni hardly needed to make a quick calculation to realise that he was probably the winner in such a bargain but suddenly had another idea as he really wanted the cash, or so he thought. He told Miriam that his sister-in-law in his ex-kibbutz was collecting antiques and would surely buy the sofa for the price of the dentures. Arni would organise the business.
Aliza was married to Arni’s brother Yigal who was a member of the kibbutz where they lived in a flat provided by the community. On her marriage to Yigal she had not accepted kibbutz membership as was the custom upon such alliances because she had a private income from rented property her immigrant mother from Latvia had left her when she died. On becoming a member, Aliza would be obliged to render or surrender this income to the kibbutz treasury, responsible for providing every member with all their communal living requirements. She had frequently been requested to change her status but to that time had refused to do so, holding on to her private money which she spent as she wished.
So with this interesting arrangement underway Aliza paid a flying visit, unbeknown to me, to look at the sofa and happily agreed the price. No money exchanged hands at that time but everyone was content with the proposition and Arni promised to sort out the collection, delivery and payment in due course. Miriam went straight off to get her new dentures.
To that point of the proceedings my dearly beloved had not discussed any of this business with me but before cash changed hands and delivery was made he imprudently told me about this clever deal, being unable to resist sharing a good story. He was dumbfounded when I exploded with indignation saying that although we’d intended to have three children that number had unexpectedly increased to four (the twins then barely a year old) and how could we possibly manage with just our little Victorian two-seater any longer. That charming sofa, which we had re-upholstered ourselves in gold brocade before leaving England, was greatly loved but rarely used, being too delicate to withstand our romping older boys aged six and four.
It seemed to me so fortunate Arni had been offered such a bargain on a piece of furniture we really needed. How could he think, without even consulting me, of selling the sofa to my sister-in-law for whom all things were provided in her communal life on the kibbutz? Not surprisingly, he was shocked and abashed by this impassioned outburst.
“The deal’s already done,” he replied as firmly as he could.
“Oh no it is not”, I answered equally firmly, “leave it to me.”
I went on the instant, leaving him with the kids, and rushed up to Miriam’s house where I examined the sofa, with which I promptly fell in love, explaining how Arni had arranged the deal without telling me about it and how we had now decided that we needed the furniture for our own family. This would be perfectly acceptable in lieu of her daughter’s cash. Miriam either way was set to get her new dentures but apparently fully understood how I felt and in any case we liked each other.
“That’s a man all over”, Miriam volunteered, “putting his wife last” and laughed heartily, her ample body shaking as she did so.
To save me embarrassment, Miriam offered to phone my sister-in-law and getting her straight away explained to Aliza that she was sorry but the sofa deal was off because the money had been found to pay Arni, adding, while winking at me, that this was a blessing because she really loved that sofa. Aliza accepted this explanation without much ado and it was then left to Miriam and me to decide how the sofa should be transported from her property, a few plots from ours, without any damage being done to it.
After I had returned home triumphant, Arni and another able-bodied neighbour were asked to find the largest wheelbarrow available anywhere along our street, which they did. They then securely fastened the sofa to the barrow and in a hands-on effort steered it carefully, under my watchful eyes, a hundred yards or so along the rough road to our house. At that point a decision had to be made regarding where it should be placed in the house. In truth there was not much space available but some could be made by shifting our little sofa into another room. Then I clasped my hands to my mouth with an inward gasp. The crew stared at me obviously wondering what next!
“Oh, my God,” I whispered, “supposing Aliza comes to visit and finds the sofa sitting in our house?”
“Be sure your sins….” quoted Arni at me with a malicious smile.
At that point it was decided that the only place the sofa could be put out of sight until we moved again was in the roof space entered by the flat roof above the wash-house attached to the back of the property.
“How do we get it there?” Arni peevishly asked, thoroughly fed up with the machinations of women by this time.
“You’re the engineer,” was my prompt reply “what about making a proper hoist with ropes?”
So at the end of a long day, ropes were gently placed around the well wrapped sofa and it was duly hoisted to its temporary roost in the roof space. As it happened from that day in 1976 to the day we left Ramat Yishai in 1977, a full twelve months, Aliza never paid us a single visit. The sofa, after being gently descended on its hoist at the appropriate time to be loaded into the container shipping our
belongings back to England, has since been greatly admired and provided elegant comfort to the family
and friends over three decades. I hasten to add that Aliza was told the full story a few years later, to absolve a twinge of conscience on my part and my sister-in-law neither remembered the incident nor showed the least interest in it. She had obviously moved on mentally immediately the deal was off and had filled her kibbutz flat with other furniture before she finally became a member of that institution.