Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

We knew about the island and the worship of the island, which rubbed abrasively against our flesh but also took place far beyond it, high above the arithmetic of sibling rivalry, above the petty details of biography and circumstances of life, even above love itself. We knew what we needed to know: the mutual embrace of the mother and her son was the embrace of orphans, and the worship of the island was the worship of orphanhood, my brother’s and her own, which were welded together.

Once, decades later, my brother’s biological father turned up, via emissaries. In the middle of the Six-Day War two men arrived, apparently the father’s brothers, standing at the end of the path leading to the shack, on the verge of the road. They stood and stood, in the end they sent the woman next door. They only wanted to know if he was alive, my brother; they thought they had seen his name in the lists of the dead. She didn’t go to them, she went on digging vigorously in the rose bed behind the house, not stopping for a minute. “Tell them it’s all right.” She sent me.

THERE WAS THE main path leading to the shack, but there were three more paths, coming from all directions, which meant you could reach the shack from the four points of the compass, but they were used mainly by animals, not people: stray dogs and cats, the mother hated the cats with all her heart — they were sly, impudent, thieving, bold, noisy, and they had kittens all the time. They overturned the garbage can at the entrance to the house. (“Damn that she-cat to hell, she’s knocked over the garbage again.”) It was a major concern, that garbage can next to the poplar tree, close to where the path met the asphalt road: she couldn’t leave it alone. Early in the morning, still in her nightgown, she ran to the can, to examine the damage of the night and in the same breath to correct it: she raked up the trash scattered by the “she-cat” (one or many, the cats always took on the singular feminine form, “the she-cat,” like a distillation of the satanic essence of the breed as a whole), washed the can down with the hose, leaving a little lake at the entrance to the house for us to tramp in, and finally weighed down the lid with a heavy brick she dragged from my brother’s welding shop, securing it with a rope tied to the handles on either side. For a day or two there was quiet, the she-cat was defeated by these measures, but so was Nona. They shared the garbage can, she and the mother, in Nona’s opinion at least. For long minutes at a time she stood in the blazing sun of the afternoon with her little garbage pail, waiting for someone, “some man,” to remove the heavy brick from the lid. “I’ll go to Jina’s,” she threatened.

“Go, ya sitti , go.” The mother waved her arm. “It’s a free country, everyone can throw out their garbage wherever they like.” But she said it just for the purpose of argument: if only she could have ( inshallah ya rabb if only I could), she would have cast every one of those people who “throw out their garbage wherever they like” into torture dungeons for the rest of their lives, or at least until they mended their ways. The corruption of the entire Jewish people, those being reborn in their land and those who weren’t, was embodied in the garbage and in their relation to the garbage, the excretions that were thrown out of the house to pollute the surroundings. “I don’t know what kind of people we are.” She would shake her head with an affected expression of bewilderment on her face. “I really don’t know what kind of people they are, these Jews, who spend a fortune on sofas and curtains in their homes, and don’t care about all the garbage and the filth right outside their door.”

“You, why should you care? What business is it of yours?” the Nona dared to call into question not the meaning of her words, but the spirit, definitely the spirit. Her reforming zeal, her crusading pathos, the way in which the mother instinctively saw almost every public issue as something personal, “her business”—all this gave rise in Nona to astonishment and revulsion at what she saw as common vulgarity and coarseness, unbecoming to a girl from a good family.

“You’ll see,” she whispered gloomily when the mother left the room to go to the toilet. “You’ll see, one day they’ll bury her in the garden, fi elgnena , with the hoe in her hand,” she said, spitting out the words “ fi elgnena ” like a spoiled pistachio nut, smoothing the towel spread over her knees with her hand and staring at the rectangle of dazzling light, which stared back at her and spilled over onto the crooked tiles of the floor.

The door to her room stayed wide open; all day long until night fell, open to two branching paths: the main path leading to the road and the other path connecting her quarter-shack to our shack. The mother could cross the path in a moment, devouring it with her stride, it took me three minutes, and Nona ten: slowly making her way down the slope, stepping on the broken tiles, left over from some uprooted floor and stuck together here, careful not to let her dress snag on the thorns at the sides of the path. She buried her hands in the pockets of her dress, her fingers busy, rubbing and crushing the fabric; she would have three or four jasmine blossoms there, plucked from the hedge for the smell, and a handkerchief. She would proceed down the path, her fingers moving as she walked, and when she reached the edge of the mother’s green lawn, the roses she had transplanted from the bed behind the shack to the front, to the right of the lawn, she would stop: the sprinkler. There she stood, the Nona, listening to the jets of the sprinkler, waiting for somebody to turn off the tap. The mother saw her from her porch, she did not move, she watched. Nona went on standing, wondering what to do. In the end she raised her voice: “Lucette, the sprinkler!” The mother did not move, trying to remove one of the thorns stuck in her fingers with tweezers. “Lucette!” Nona’s voice rose hesitantly, then firmly, finally despairingly: “Lucette! Lucette!”

IF ALL THE plants of the garden competed, the rose would defeat its rivals. For everything that the heart desires from a flower, the rose provides in abundance.

Beauty, delicacy, smell, and color. And not only its blooms. Its fruit is decorative, its foliage delicate, its bushes colorful, and its branches variegated.

The cultivation of the rose has always been challenging. It appears to be a special task, demanding careful attention, the combat of disease, plentiful watering, correct fertilization, professional pruning … on the other hand, a garden without roses is like a body without a soul. No other flower has given rise to so many legends. And no other plant has so many uses. From ancient times to our own day, the rose has been used for medicine and cosmetics, food and drink, and many other diverse purposes.

Roses are divided into a number of popular varieties:

Hybrid teas: these originated in a Chinese species imported to Europe by traders in tea, hence the name. When we speak of the classic rose, what we usually see is a rose of this type. It has tens of thousands of strains used for picking and other purposes.

Polyantha: the origins of this group are in various species and it is characterized by dense, herbaceous growth and low height. The inflorescence developing on the branches emerging from the base of the plant is plentiful and consists of clusters of many small flowers.

Floribunda: this is a species that combines characteristics of the hybrid tea with those of the polyantha. The number of clusters is small but the individual blooms are large and resemble those of the hybrid tea. They create an expanse of color in the garden but their flowers can also be picked for the vase.