Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Corinne stormed out, catching the hem of her dress in the door as she slammed it behind her, dragged the sack of Louis Vuittons from the backseat, and ran across the street to the boutique. The aunt and I, still in the car, kept our eyes on her: her tanned calves on six-inch heels kicked out sideways, her broad backside encased in Bermuda pants rose and fell, the huge plastic sack suddenly came apart at the seams and burst open, scattering the Louis Vuittons over the road, under the wheels of the approaching cars. I ran to her, the aunt behind me. Corinne stood where she was, not moving, her legs now straight together, as if she were standing in the schoolyard in the morning lineup, staring at the road, at the Louis Vuittons on the road, covering her mouth with her hand. She went on standing there, moving her lips under her hand, even when Aunt Marcelle and I began collecting the Louis Vuittons from the road. I approached her. “What happened?” I asked. She took her hand from her lips, opened her mouth wide: the front tooth was missing and in its place was a black hole. “I think I swallowed my temporary crown,” she said in a strangled voice.

AMONG THE THINGS she bought with twelve or twenty-four payments: fridges, washing machines, stoves, sofas and dining tables and chairs, carpets, cabinets, heaters, an Olivetti typewriter, and, in the beginning, from a door-to-door salesman, the Tarbut encyclopedia and a series entitled The Young Technician for the child’s brother, Sammy, when he studied welding for a few months (how few?) at the Max Fine school.

Once they liquidated the public library in Ramleh, and they brought the books to the student center where she worked. She let the child into a room on the top floor, which she called “the storeroom.” The books were stacked one on top of the other, in towers that reached almost to the ceiling. “Choose and we’ll take them with us when we go,” she said to the child, and locked her in for a few hours, so “they” wouldn’t know (“they” or “them up there”: the authorities, the ones in charge, the powers that be. Even an anonymous petty clerk in the municipality was “them”).

The child spent most of the time sitting between the stacks, peering at the spines of the books nearest to her in the almost absolute darkness of the room: there was a long, narrow strip of light in the gap between the two sheets of coarse black material draped over the windowpanes that were covered with black cardboard, torn here and there. The room had once been used as a darkroom for the photography club, and the windows had been sealed.

She sat on a pile of books, rested her cheek on her knees, and didn’t touch anything. She had agreed to be in this darkness, interrupted only by the strip of soft, early-afternoon light, in the confines of the silence underscored by the muted sounds of the street below, which defined and fixed its contours, in the air dense with dust and the weight of the memory of long confinement, and the cramped, stifling corridors created by the towering stacks of books. A different kind of loneliness grew inside her, reserved, neither hot nor cold, a feeling of helplessness and resignation to the helplessness: nothingness was within reach, it was so close, so fierce, sapping her strength to want, the strength to say “I.”

After about two hours there was the sound of a key turning in the door. The mother had come to see how she was getting on, bringing a loaf of sweet challah and a bottle of milk from the grocery next to the student center. Now the two of them sat in the darkness, dipping pieces of bread in the milk and eating. “Did you take what you want?” the mother asked. For a moment the child hesitated, then she pointed to a random, medium-sized pile of books: “Those,” she lied.

The mother brought them home not all at once, four or five books at a time, stamped with the seal of the Ramleh Public Library. She put up two shelves opposite the child’s bed, at eye level, and placed the books on them, arranged according to size, from tall to short. Years passed, almost three, until the child made them hers and read them. She tore out the first pages with the library’s stamp on them, a mark branded on the books, a stain and sign of something, a germ of uncertainty and unease connected to the stifling gloom of the darkroom, the heaviness of the bread dipped in the cold milk, the strange smell, unlike anything else, that rose from the mother’s parted thighs when she sat beside her, dipping the bread in the milk.

Every day on the radio at two o’clock in the afternoon, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils : if she could have, the child would have tied a rope around her neck and throttled herself to silence any sound of her breathing, to make room for those voices and those voices only. The painful void that came in the wake of the voices, after the end of the broadcast, the idleness of her hands. The child sat on the wet floor with the squeegee in her hand, next to the radio, and waited; perhaps they would change their minds. The floor was flooded with water, the mother’s command forgotten. The child tottered over the slippery floor to look for the picture of the writer whose name they said in the Tarbut encyclopedia: Selma Lagerlof.

That was how the mother found her when she came home from work: sitting in the water, her trousers dripping, with the encyclopedia on her lap. The terrifying yell, the mother of all yells, would have shaken the windows had they been there — but they weren’t, because in summer the mother removed them from their hinges so they wouldn’t collect dust, leaving only the shutters. She took off her shoe, the mother, and shoe in hand approached the child, who dropped the book into the water, and ran outside barefoot, into the thorn field behind the welding shop. The mother chased her, she took Corinne’s one-year-old son’s iron rocking horse from the porch and ran after her in the thorn field, barefoot, waving the rocking horse in the air with her strong, furious arms. She came closer. The child heard the sound of her breathing, glanced behind, and ran faster. The mother, too, ran faster with the rocking horse and threw it at the child’s back when she was six feet away from her. The child leaped sideways, a hairbreadth separating her from the iron horse lying on its side in the thorns at her feet, and went on running to the edge of the hill and the abandoned reservoir. Until evening fell she sat there on the concrete floor of the round reservoir, with the echo passing through its riddled walls, with the excrement and the newspapers at the other end next to the opening, and the round sky above her, a blue plate turning red.

In the evening the mother came and stood in the hole that was the entrance to the reservoir. “Come home now, enough,” she said. The child didn’t answer, she ran her fingers over the chalky side of the stone she was sitting on, examined her white finger smeared with chalk. “Come out of that dirt,” said the mother, not moving, looking at the child; her face suddenly twisted to the left, squashed sideways as if someone had taken hold of her chin and cheek and twisted, squeezing out the sobs and pulling them sideways together with her chin: “I could have killed you. Thank God I didn’t kill you,” she said.

LIKE HER, I have no places that fill me with nostalgia, and the notion of going back “there,” in thought or in reality, depresses and paralyzes me. I am prepared to know the face of nostalgia when I come across it, but not to remain there, not to put down roots. Roots — something else the mere idea of which distresses me.

A bulldozer drove over the stinking old reservoir, leveled the ground, and replaced the reservoir with a park. Brightly colored terraces. Waterfalls cascading in zigzags from the terraces. It’s a good thing they removed the reservoir. I’m glad they replaced it. There is nothing vindictive in this: this is not the hoarse cry of memory demanding a reckoning. Memory stands on the escalator going up, and turns its face to look down at the bottom of the stairs, giddy with its erasure, the merging of the bottom and the top. There are no ghosts and no revelation in this merger, because everything — the future, the horizon of the present — is already happening. My sense of simultaneity (of the three dimensions of time, which are more than three) is my earliest sense of myself, more personal than my own name. There was never really a “there,” and from the floor of the old reservoir on which I sat, I could see the reflection of someone gazing at me, inscribing me as I was inscribing her into the backward-looking future. I received the citizenship of being a guest in my own life. Since the beginning of time, the element of pathos in the world of objects has always manifested itself in nostalgia, in the yearning heart, which was born with the first gaze at the first object: the pathos of the reservoir. The future, in the guise of the yearning backward gaze, was also the past and the present, a memory that I must discard if I am to preserve it.