“Who knows?” Chaya had said lightly. “Maybe these old, retro tiles will come back into style”

"I love painting walls!” Nechami opens the can of light-gray paint.

She pours a generous amount into a plastic basin, dips the roller brush in, and runs it merrily over the wall. Up, down, up. She fills in the edges carefully with a small brush.

“I’m glad to give you the opportunity,” Chaya says, opening a smaller can of metallic glitter paint. She starts spreading it on the accent wall. “I have my shiur with Rebbetzin Skurnik at nine. Can you manage here without me for an hour?”

“Sure. I’ll finish the first coat of paint, and while it’s drying I’ll put up the lace edging in your closets.”

Chaya is feeling light as a butterfly. She takes off the old robe that’s protecting her clothes, washes her hands, shoulders her bag.

Nechami holds back for a minute or two, and only when the door is safely shut behind her sister and she’s sure she’s alone, she permits herself to mutter, “What an ugly apartment.”

“Your apartment was just as bad,” the walls retort.

The walls are right. Until that epochal renovation, she lived with Shua and three children in a hovel pretty similar to this. Then one day a surprise came, in the form of a neighbor from the building next door, permits for building extensions in hand. The neighbor was keen to make a deal: he would cover the costs of extending their ground-floor apartment, if they would sell him part of the extension as a unit for a disabled relative. That entailed redistribution of the property on both plots of land, and arcane negotiations for building rights on the roof. It all felt very risky (what if we end up without an apartment and without any money?), but at the end of that unnerving process, the Bernfelds had an apartment doubled in size, and all the renovation costs covered along with part of their mortgage.

Miracles like that used to happen, ten or fifteen years ago, before this part of Yerushalayim started sprouting high-rise towers.

She goes into the bedroom. It’s big, but shabby.

“You must be 200 years old,” she says to the closet.

The old wooden wardrobe is silent. They’ve painted it a nice, pale cream color, elegant and clean. The chassan’s brother had been here with a screwdriver, to straighten and reinforce the hinges. And she and Chaya had run around Beis Yisrael from one hardware store to the next, shopping for new handles to complete the makeover.

But it all still looks so old and withered.

The floor tiles are the old, small kind. Chipped, speckled, porous. An eyesore.

“Who knows?” Chaya had said lightly. “Maybe these old, retro tiles will come back into style.”