Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

HER SISTER IN France crammed seventy-six detective paperbacks into sixty-five “items” of various shapes and sizes: women’s plastic imitation leather handbags, copies of Louis Vuitton designer handbags made in Singapore. “How did I get all those romans policiers into the Louis Vuitton, how?” Aunt Marcelle beamed, delighted with herself, lighting another cigarette, forgetting the one slowly consuming itself in the ashtray. The mother waited for her “like the Messiah” to bring her “something to read” because that’s what those romans policiers were, “something to read.” The plots, the heroes, and the writers of these books in their dark, glossy, almost identical covers, were all fed into a giant blender and ground into a confused narrative with characters who came under the general heading of good guys and bad guys, with nothing to distinguish them from one another.

For long moments she stood in front of the low bookshelves in the bedroom, turning one of the paperbacks from side to side: “I really don’t remember if I’ve read this one or not,” she murmured, creasing her brow and returning the book to the shelf, pulling out two or three others and going back to the first one with a resigned sigh. The interval between the aunt’s visits was measured by the number of times she had read and reread the “something to read”: “When are you coming again, ya bint sitin kalb , you daughter of sixty dogs? I’ve already read the books you brought last time six times over,” she complained to her sister over the phone.

She dragged the books over half the world, that sister: from France to India, from India to Nepal and Singapore, and from there to Israel, almost always arriving on a night flight and landing in the wee hours of the morning.

In the erratic light of the living-room chandelier, shaped like a ship’s helm, spinning around itself and casting nervous epileptic shadows on the walls, the three of them — the mother, the aunt, and my sister, Corinne — stood sternly in front of the enormous open suitcases, examining the Louis Vuittons being extracted from the bolts of marvelous, glistening silk: Louis Vuitton for the morning, Louis Vuitton for the evening, Louis Vuitton for summer, Louis Vuitton in all shapes and sizes — school satchels, shopping bags, triangular, trapezoid, flattened balls. They wore magnificent Oriental robes embroidered in scarlet and gold, straight from the suitcase: the aunt in purple, my sister in white, and the mother in orange. The aunt and my sister, Corinne, smoked like crazy, stepped on the hems of their robes with the Louis Vuitton hanging from their shoulders or around their necks, talking business, business, while the mother tried to get in a timid word or two, but immediately withdrew in the face of the torrent of figures, economic forecasts, and hopes, like someone attempting again and again to jump off the sidewalk and hold on to a racing streetcar crowded with passengers.

They were working out the details of a business scheme with the Louis Vuittons, the aunt and my sister: this was the beginning. “Fetch a pencil and paper,” commanded my sister; she drew a long, crooked line across the page and stuck the tip of the pencil in her mouth. Her lovely face, whose elusive, almost abstract, delicacy was impossible to capture and fix in the mind and always gave a disturbing impression of not being located in the face itself but somewhere else — her face now hardened, froze in one movement of intense tension, and seemed to withdraw, to absent itself: the force of her imagination took her far beyond the columns of figures, dismissing them and leaping over them toward some high, flickering reflection, exalted and fateful, of herself. Within a short space of time this absence turned into a strange, distracted rage: “Fetch a pencil and paper,” she instructed me again, gathering her hair into a chignon above her nape, loosening the hairpins and gathering it up again.

The aunt sailed on. She unpacked rags and put them back, busy and serene as she received her public in the soft confusion of the Louis Vuittons, the coffee cups, the balls of cotton with which she cleaned her face, and the piles of books standing on the carpet. The Nona came in and sat down, the neighbor woman, my brother’s worker from the welding shop, the brother from the kibbutz.

Corinne went to “put something on”: at eleven o’clock, before the shops closed for the Sabbath, she and the aunt planned to drive to Tel Aviv, with the Louis Vuittons and what Corinne referred to as “the markup.” The aunt nodded responsively whenever Corinne said “the markup,” but on the way, sitting next to her in my brother’s battered Chevrolet, she dared to ask: “But what is this markup, ma chérie ?”

I sat in the back, watching over the enormous sack of Louis Vuittons so that it wouldn’t fall off the seat whenever my sister braked. Her hands gripped the steering wheel with such force that the veins on the back of her hands stuck out and turned blue, forging their way forward, as if threatening the ringed fingers, a ring on every finger. “Just let me get out of the shit of the job I’ve got now,” she said to the aunt, the cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, stained bright red by her lipstick. I looked at her nape exposed under the piled-up hair, gathered into the chignon that “always keeps its class,” she would say, changing the color of her hair every two weeks at the hairdresser’s where she worked in Petach Tikva, but never the chignon: she never touched the chignon even when the ends of her hair grew dry and brittle from the dye. Now her nape was reddish, almost scalded, as if a boiling hot towel had been laid on it. Marcelle was hungry, “dying of hunger,” she said. She wanted to go to the Petach Tikva market first to eat fava beans. For months she had been dreaming of those fava beans, with the onions and the green chili peppers: she swallowed them whole without blinking an eye. We turned off to the market: in the side mirror I saw Corinne’s face, stretching and stretching, thin and sharp as the blade of a knife. This delay cost her in blood, and her jutting cheekbones registered her hostility and sense of betrayal: the aunt was not with her, no, that woman was not with her.

Nervous and uncertain, she maneuvered the Chevrolet through the narrow street of the market where cars were parked on both sides and trucks were unloading their produce, scratching the left side and bumped on the right.

They left me in the backseat to guard the Louis Vuittons so they wouldn’t have to drag the sack with them to the restaurant: the trunk was full of my brother’s stuff, pipe sections, drills, and building scrap. I waited for them. I laid my head on the sack and stretched out, my feet sticking through the open window. Someone passing tickled my bare feet. I looked up at the top balcony of the sooty restaurant building and watched two girls in short pajama pants sitting on the railing, one of them winding the other’s long hair around her head and fixing it there with hairpins, one dark, oily band on top of another, shining in the sun.

I must have fallen asleep: Corinne’s face leaned over me, suspicious and tortured. “It’s already one o’clock,” she said, “after one.” She pushed me lightly aside to check if the Louis Vuittons were alright, her hands delving into the depths of the sack. For a moment her painted eyes met mine in a kind of hard, blank plea, and then she looked away again.

We set out again in the sweltering Chevrolet. Aunt Marcelle wasn’t feeling well. The beans she had polished off had upset her stomach, she complained, trying to move the seat back so she could rest her head. On Dizengoff Street, near the Handbag Boutique, the Chevrolet gave up the ghost. In the middle of the street it came to a halt, indifferent to the hooting horns, the worst already behind it.