Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Maurice sat, still in his jacket, on the sofa that the mother had in the meantime put in the hall, until she found it another place or another home, and the child sat next to him with her legs crossed, in her pajamas. After he came they brought her in her pajamas from Nona’s quarter-shack, for him to see her. Before she had been sleeping in Nona’s bed, but now she was wide awake, turning the pages of the little book from right to left. Maurice corrected her, turned the book around: “It’s French, from left to right,” he told her.

On the first page were the vowels, without pictures. They began with the vowels, Maurice started and she imitated him:

A, E, I, O, U.

The child managed the A, E, I very well, but not the O, U. The pronunciation of each letter, and especially the transition between them, was like balancing on skates or a rolling barrel. Maurice said that she had to practice every day, three times a day, like brushing her teeth. “But I don’t brush my teeth,” said the child. Maurice laughed: “She’s got a mouth on her.” The hall was yellow, the walls were yellow, and the light shed by the lampshade dangling from the ceiling was yellow, too, but a different, murky yellow: in some dreams the yellow poured over everything in sight, and the dream said, “This is me,” letting the child know that she was dreaming.

Maurice sat on the edge of the sofa bed, his legs crossed, the halo of yellow lamplight above the silvery black of his hair, smoking. The mother stood with the kitchen towel in her hands, as if she had just popped in from the kitchen for a minute and was about to go back there, looking at both of them, listening to both of them. Afterward she sat on the armchair, next to the sofa bed, the kitchen towel still in her hand. They were all waiting, as if they were sitting in a dentist’s waiting room. The silence that fell after the pronunciation of the vowels was measured in Maurice’s cigarettes: cigarette by cigarette. The child looked at the pictures in the book, the letters, in silence. She didn’t look at her mother: she knew how pale she was. And then the mother said in French: “Why did you come?”

He didn’t know. Perhaps he shrugged his shoulders. His lean dark neck pressed into his chest, as if tightened by a coiled spring, leaving no gaps between the vertebrae. “Go to bed, yallah ,” the mother said to the child. “Which bed?” asked the child. The mother’s and Maurice’s eyes locked, for a long moment they held fast. “My bed,” said the mother, her gaze still gripped by his: “Get into my bed.” The child went to bed, taking the book with the French letters with her, switched on the mother’s bedside lamp, arranged the two pillows at her head, propped up against the headrest, and leaned against them to page through the book. Afterward the mother came and turned off the light, but she went on sitting up with her back against the pillows, holding the little book in her hands.

A faint, indirect light reached the room from the kitchen, where the two of them were sitting, the mother and Maurice: from the fluorescent light above the kitchen table the light crept toward the cubbyhole where she or her brother sometimes slept, turned into the side entrance leading to the bedroom, and came in from there, weak and crooked. Its weakness was the same as the sound, the voices coming from the kitchen, which sounded as sick as the light, and then they suddenly recovered, rose with renewed strength, and fell sick again, as weak as her hands holding the book, as her feet under the blanket, like the light, like the voices. Then a glass smashed. The child closed her eyes tightly, her face tense; she raised the pages of the book to her nose, to smell them. And then the noise of the toilet flushing. “But I can’t, I can’t, Lucette,” Maurice’s voice rose, vehement and pleading: “I can’t, I can’t.”

In the morning the side of the bed next to the child was tidy, undisturbed, and Maurice was sitting on the porch, wearing the same clothes as yesterday, drinking his coffee and staring through his dark horn-rimmed glasses at the revolutions of the sprinkler. For a while she stood and looked, especially at the nail of his left pinkie, which was very long, curved, and yellowish. She went and sat on his lap, but with her back to him, as if she was sitting on a chair, her calves hanging over his, gazing like him at the turning sprinkler. His hands clasped her waist. The floor of the porch was flooded with water: the mother had doused it with the hose. Then she swept the water up with vigorous movements of the squeegee, spraying it in all directions, her nightgown soaked, clinging to her thighs and backside. Maurice shifted his legs, now he set his left leg on his right, and the child wobbled, almost fell off his knees, but steadied herself again. “I brought you another book but I forgot it on the bus. It’s a pity I forgot it,” said Maurice. The child was silent, passed her finger over his long, curved nail, over its tip. “But I’ll send it to you by mail,” said Maurice. “As soon as I get there I’ll send it, and you’ll know that it’s the same book.” “What book is it?” asked the child, and the mother approached them with the squeegee and hit the legs of Maurice’s chair with it. “Move,” she said. They stood up and Maurice moved the chair to the corner of the porch, next to the two big potted plants, and dropped the ash of his cigarette into the pot. The child sat down on his lap again, but this time sideways, breathing in the smell of his clothes, his skin: tobacco, shaving lotion, and something else that smelled like roasted almonds. “The book is called David Copperfield and it was written by an English writer, Charles Dickens. It’s the first book to read, because it’s the best of all,” said Maurice.

She peeked at his face as he said this, his face with the horn-rimmed dark glasses and the broad, drooping lower lip that quivered slightly, she wanted to see his face when he said “the best of all,” and afterward, when she took her eyes from him and counted the paving stones on the path leading to Nona’s house, she became confused and started counting again from the beginning. Then, too, she thought “the best of all, the best of all,” shifting her gaze from the paving stones and the dizzying lines joining them, turning it to the roof, Nona’s hot gray-tiled roof, which now seemed to be melting in the sun, about to explode at any minute into a thousand sparks and then to melt, to pour like heavy lava over the outer walls, over Nona’s front door and three concrete steps, and the “best of all” poured too, the “best of all,” which was a thought and words poured into her, melted and turned into a thing, a vapor, or spirit, or the air joining and separating the things that had a name.

The mother got dressed and went to work, said, “Good, I’m going,” and went, leaving them alone. Until midday Maurice went on sitting on the porch with “the papers”: flimsy pages, printed on both sides and marked in blue ink, which he took out of his bag with the slightly rusted buckle, which the child opened and closed, closed and opened. The coffee cups stood next to him, cup by cup, the cigarette butts sank into their fleshy, muddy dregs like the corpses of worms. Once or twice he took a break, went to Nona’s to drink more coffee and listen to the radio. The child went with him, hand in hand down the path, as if he didn’t know the way; she sat at their feet as they talked, and dreamed.

That was the first day, or the second, or the third. A glass was smashed. The mother collected the shards in her hands; they cut her. The Band-Aids she stuck on her hands were soaked with blood. Maurice’s bag was on the lawn, wide open; all the flimsy papers, printed on both sides, were on the lawn. “Take your things and go,” screamed the mother. Her hair stood on end, all her thick hair, cropped not to the roots, stood on end like in the picture in the alphabet book Maurice had brought, next to the word: tête , head.