Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

In a matter of moments all was quiet again; he threw himself onto the carpet at the foot of my bed and fell asleep in his clothes. “Get up and go to bed,” she tried. “Get up.” In the end she gave up, covered him with a blanket, and went back to bed, switching on the towel-cloaked light again. Her sleep was over. Until half past five she went on lying with her eyes open, fixed on the same book, the same page. I got out of bed, skipping over my brother’s body, and went to lie next to her, but not close, on the edge of the bed. I closed my eyes, pretended to be asleep, feeling the lying tremor of my eyelids, the orange light of the lamp penetrating them. She lay on her back, staring at the gleaming Formica doors of the wall closet opposite her: “Why aren’t you asleep, you?” she whispered. The purple walls of the room closed in on us, or so I imagined when I saw them through my eyelids, moving closer toward us, surrounding the bed on all sides, standing at our heads as if they were waiting for us. At my side I felt the movement of her thighs, slightly jolting the mattress. I felt that she wasn’t sleeping, that she wasn’t going to sleep. A delicate despair, lonely as the head of a pin in the wastes of the wilderness, rose from something in the rhythm of her breathing, the position of her body, a despair that didn’t want anything, and wasn’t addressed to anything, not even to herself. I heard her get up, open the shutters, lean out of the window, get dressed in yesterday’s clothes hanging on the hook, bending down next to me, at the side of the bed, to straighten the pale green rug, the nephew of the dark green carpet on which my brother was sleeping at the foot of my bed.

SHE READ. SHE would lay with her eyes open all night, switching the bedside lamp off and then switching it on again, returning to the same book lying on its back, open at the same page. What did she read? Almost always detective stories, always in French. She spoke Hebrew but she barely recognized the letters: women of her class in Cairo did not read and write Hebrew, only men, and not all of them. At some stage Grandfather Izak, her father, suddenly felt a pedagogical urge to hire a Hebrew teacher to teach her and her brothers at their house. They learned nothing. “We made his life a misery, poor man”: they threw the Nona’s feather comforters on him from the top of the stairs, they hid away, they smeared his glasses with flour and water paste, they glued the pages of his books together, they planned an engagement party for him and the neighbor’s ugly daughter and invited the whole quarter. The teacher ran away. “I’ll pay you not to have to teach them,” he said to Grandfather Izak.

The story about the Hebrew teacher and his troubles filled the mother with satisfaction but not gloating. All the victims in the story were pitiable. “That poor teacher,” she would say, “My poor father, may he rest in peace,” and even “Poor Nona.” Even Nona.

“Poor Nona” would take her out of school to look after her little brothers while she herself went to the mountains to stay at sanatoriums and convalescent homes. “One week I would go to school, one week she would take me out, decide that she was sick,” the mother recalled resentfully. For years she swore that her hatred of doctors and medicine and illness came from all the fainting spells and weakness and swooning that attacked Nona as if she were the heroine of a nineteenth-century novel and sent her to bed for days on end. “The whole house would jump to attention, the whole house, because of her and her ailments.”

The truth was that she actually liked two or three nineteenth-century novels, especially two of them by a father and son: Alexandre Dumas père and Alexandre Dumas fils. The Three Musketeers and The Lady of the Camellias . Every few months she would take out the old volumes that Maurice had once bought her and read them again. Alongside the ordinary “everyday” books, the dozens and hundreds of detective stories her sister sent from France, she had the ones she kept for best, the really good ones, the musketeers and the camellias. She knew both of them almost by heart, even with her memory, which was usually short, erratic, and irritable but expanded when she owed someone something, never mind what: then she remembered in minute detail exactly when, where, and how much, “down to the last penny.”

She returned again and again to The Lady of the Camellias with a solemnity that was almost reverential; she spoke about her and even with her, in a low, discreet voice that became suddenly refined in the presence of the spectral tubercular thinness of the saintly courtesan Marguerite Gautier. When she told the story she would mainly dwell on one crucial, harrowing scene: Marguerite Gautier is crucified. She agrees to her own crucifixion, sacrificing herself for the sake of her beloved’s future, for the sake of pure and absolute love, which triumphs over every interest and earthly desire. Her sacrifice is a secret, something between her and the father of her beloved, who demands that she leave his son alone, but more important, it is a secret that she shares only with God, not with society. Marguerite Gautier the courtesan is pure, white as snow. Society is dirty, the society that judges Marguerite and crucifies her is dirty. Marguerite Gautier is a victim of dirty society, “beautiful and white as an angel, poor thing,” she said, her eyes filming over, perhaps with tears, perhaps because of the burning sensation in her left eye, her hand reaching for her cup of coffee, raising it to her mouth, but not to drink, only to rest her dry lips on its warm rim.

SATURDAY AFTERNOON, THE beginning of autumn, the living room dark with the lamp in the north window already lit at four o’clock: she and my sister, Corinne, sitting on the two sofas set at right angles, their feet tucked up beneath them, on the low table a plate of cookies stuffed with dates, drowning in lakes of white frosting. On the glass tabletop, around the plate, are little mounds of powdered sugar. No one wipes the table. They look sideways and down, not at each other, weeping for Marguerite Gautier.

WHEN THE CHILD was five years old, Maurice turned up at the shack for the first time. For the first time she could denote an event in her own mind, a clear, perceived event, with a beginning, middle, and end; she could remember it through her own eyes, not through anyone else’s, not in anyone else’s language. The event had an order, a sequence, one thing followed another: he came in through the door, he slept there for three days, he left through the door when the three days were over. That was his back, when he left, receding down the path, clad in a rayon “wash-and-wear” shirt in a grayish-blue color, with two big pockets in the front. He didn’t call her “the child” but Toni, which was more or less her name. “What’s this ‘the child’?” he said. “‘The child’ is like ‘the dog,’” he said, “or ‘the cat.’”

In the book Maurice brought her there was a picture of a dog and also a cat. They were both black. The dog had his tail between his legs and his ears pricked up, and the cat had a tail that stood straight up in the air and jagged ears, as if they had been cut with zigzag scissors. The child outlined the jagged edges of the cat’s ears with a red pen. “Why are you scribbling in the book?” asked Maurice, but he wasn’t cross, he was distracted. He was thinking about something else. He told her the other thing he was thinking about: “This is the beginning,” he tapped on the slender book with his long tanned finger, “it’s the basis. And when you learn the letters you’ll get to know the words. And afterward the sentences and after that the stories, everything that exists in this interesting world of ours.”