Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

All this paled into insignificance beside the most perverse and uncontrollable of all: the Evil Eye that “ elbani-adam ,” human beings, inflicted on themselves. This, the Nona thought, was the greatest catastrophe of all, the Evil Eye that people gave themselves, with envious, annihilating looks sent by one to the soul of another.

Nona’s head spun. For hours she lay in her high iron bed, a prey to her thoughts, her eyes open and absent.

At the foot of the bed, on the floor, the child crawled or tottered, playing with the white or red beans fallen from the jar. She was a little over a year old and she knew the songs. Once in a while the Nona checked to see if she was all right. She started singing “ au pres de ma blonde ” and the child continued “ qu’il fait bon fait bon fait bon .”

And once, in a tale told in the present continuous, perhaps more than once, the Nona on the verge of falling asleep sang “ au pres de ma blonde ” and was greeted by silence. The child had quietly disappeared: put on her lace-trimmed bonnet, dragged her Bourbon-rose blanket behind her, slipped out of the half-open door, and crawled down the three concrete steps of the quarter-shack. It was midday, the dirt track at the entrance to the shack was boiling hot, the asphalt road blazed. The child walked down the middle of the road, barefoot, the pink train of the blanket trailing behind her, sweeping the asphalt. She went past Jina’s house, the nursery, and the hill of sand and thorns opposite the bend in the road leading to Savyon, and reached the bus stop. There they found her, somebody found her. “Where are you going, Toni, in the middle of the road?” the somebody asked her. “I’m going for a walk,” the child replied. He picked her up and carried her back to Madame Esther, who had simply fallen asleep after the opening sentence of “ au pres de ma blonde .”

The mother knew about this from the neighbors, not from the Nona: the Nona “turned everything around” so it came out like nothing, as if it were nothing at all. “How can I be quiet when you let her wander round like that, how?” the mother raged. “You’re never quiet, ya sitti , why should you be quiet now?” Nona retorted. But she spoke to the child, the Nona, in three languages: “It’s a good thing he never found you, that one,” she said. The child pricked up her ears: “At night he’s as big as a house, but transparent. By day he’s as small as a cat’s tail, but he’s still as big as big can be,” the Nona continued. “Who?” asked the child. “The white man. He’s been seen lots of times in the neighborhood, lots of people have seen him. Guetta’s daughter who’s deaf and started to stammer? It’s all because she saw him and ran away.” The Nona fell silent and took a puff of her cigarette. “What does he do?” asked the child. Nona thought for a minute: “When you walked down the road, did you feel a wind, like a kind of hot wind next to your face?” The child nodded. “That was him. That’s how he begins to swallow, with a wind, because of not having any teeth, he swallows with a dry tongue.”

That night the child couldn’t sleep. She lay next to the Nona, in the high iron bed, and after a few minutes she sat up, lay down, and sat up again, staring at the rectangle of glass on the door. Nona cooked her semolina, sang songs, counted the little pads on the tips of her fingers, put a damp towel with drops of valerian on her forehead.

When the mother returned from work on the last bus, she found the child on Nona’s lap. The Nona’s dress was open in the front: she had bared a huge white breast with a dark pink nipple, which lay between the child’s lax lips. The mother stood and looked. Nailed to the spot, she stood and stared and suddenly came to her senses. Her eyes darted round the room and found the Bourbon-rose blanket neatly folded on a chair. She snatched up the blanket, pulled the sleepy child off Nona’s wide nipple, wrapped her in the blanket, and charged outside, the child in her arms, flew down the dark path under the dark tent of the sky between the two houses, breathless, her heavy bag hanging from her arm swaying from side to side, hitting the backside of the child who was half asleep with her eyes open.

ALL NIGHT SHE would lie with her eyes open, waiting for morning; she would switch on the bedside lamp and switch it off again, read another few pages until her eyelids drooped. She couldn’t fall asleep with the light from the little lamp, and she couldn’t do without it: the nights were an interrupted sequence of flickers of light, between which lay areas of darkness. At some point she reached a compromise in her bargaining between light and dark: she threw a towel over the lampshade, half covering it. The light was very dim but it was still there, veiled and orange. My brother, Sammy, was afraid the towel would catch fire in the night, when everyone was sleeping, when she was sleeping. “But I never go to sleep all the way,” she argued, “my sleep is light as a feather.” He looked at her suspiciously out of the corner of his eye, shaking his head in an affectation of shocked disapproval: “The things you do, God save us from the things you do.”

Hand in hand they went, Hansel and Gretel, up and down in the land of the endlessly terrifying possibilities of conflagration: when she was at the bottom of the seesaw, he was on top, when she was on top, he was at the bottom. No less theatrical than she, and in some ways far more so, quick to take fire, rushing in his imagination to the scene of the catastrophe, not rooted to the spot like her, but on the contrary: full of eagerness, great enthusiasm behind every roar of fear. He lived in the movies. That’s what she said: “He lives in the movies.”

He did live at the movies, in the cinemas in the neighborhood or in Tel Aviv: matinees, first show, second show, the same film. Surfing in their third-row seats, he and his friends polished off whole cardboard trays of chocolate-coated banana candies, sliding down and falling asleep on one another’s shoulders. Afterward, sitting in the car crowded like puppies, until three or four in the morning, they went over what had happened in the movie and what could have happened, acting out whole scenes, choking with laughter at their inventions. They parked on the dirt road leading to the shack, close to the rectangular orange building of the welding shop, among the construction pipes lying on the ground outside the building, ready for work the next day. Once in a while one of them left the car to pee in the thorn field and ran back so as not to miss anything. We heard them from inside the house, the mother and I: voices rising and falling in the dark, dissolving into a murmur, blaring forth again in wild shouts of laughter. Afterward silence fell. Her little bedside lamp went on again, and I heard the shuffle of slippers. She went out to them. From the kitchen window I saw her outside, on the dirt road: completely white in her white nightgown, knocking on the car windows: “Get up already, yallah .” They rolled out, still half huddled in sleep, my brother first and two others behind him, and fell on the ground in a huddle, moaning as if they were dying. “Enough with the acting.” She aimed a light kick at Sammy’s shoulder. “You have work tomorrow, how are you going to get up?” He went on lying on his side in the sand for a little while longer, then he rose on all fours, and all the way he followed her on all fours, barking, drooling, and trying to bite her ankle to the sounds of giggling from behind. “What are you laughing at, at your own foolishness?” She pretended to be insulted, trying to suppress her laughter and to escape from Sammy, lifting up her long nightgown.