Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Our neighborhood (“Ours?” Yes, ours) was full of places and things that began as memories discarded at the moment of their birth, because they never, not from the first, carried any belief in the future. Everything seemed momentarily suspended, as if it would at any moment continue onward, without noticing either the suspension or moving on. There was a lot of air between the objects, between the memories, between the objects and memories of them. The reservoir gaping open at the top, riddled with holes at the sides, was full of air; even the concrete floor, with the changing reflection of the sky in the pools of rainwater, seemed to be floating in air. The reservoir’s past, as a working functioning reservoir, interested nobody, not even the old people whose great past almost always overshadowed the smaller immediate past: it was as if the reservoir had been built from the start as an insignificant remnant of something that was insignificant in the first place.

But there were echoes in the ruined reservoir. We got a kick out of the echoes, Rachel Amsalem and I, she as a game and I as a nightmarish hallucination made real. We stood in the middle of the round floor, in the puddle of water, and called out to ourselves. Animal droppings lay on the bare parts of the concrete. Water lilies floated in the water. When we called out together I wanted to call just to myself, but when I went there alone something was lost; there was an echo but not the right echo, the one that was lonely but also had a sense of self. My loneliness required another pair of unseeing, disinterested eyes, indifferent as those of Rachel Amsalem: a blindfolded audience.

We did not keep on going to the reservoir for long, Rachel Amsalem and I: there was too much imagination there, which in the end impoverished the imagination. Our different and alien lonelinesses were increasingly deposited in other, hidden places: in the dank, shadowy areas alongside the bleeding dramas of our families and shacks, in the lies we told and the truths that pretended to be lies.

SHE, THE MOTHER, said that there were lies and there were lies. She had a special tone of voice for the phrase “and there are lies,” not ironic but emphatic, like the exaggerated motions of the lips when speaking to a deaf-mute: the “and” said with a rising inflection and after it a sharp drop. This second kind of lie she called a “white lie.” “But why is it white? What’s white about it?” Corinne demanded. For her, the range of moral possibilities was subjugated to questions of fashion, what to wear where, how, and in what color. Apart from that, she was almost incapable of the sidestepping involved in the daily strategies of life: her inner drives, like her desire for theatrical expression, were so powerful and intense that they defeated the calculations of self-interest. Corinne told people “to their face” exactly what she “thought of them.”

The contradiction between the delicacy of her face, which looked as if it had been woven from threads of air, and her proven ability to “open her mouth,” and what a mouth, was almost scandalous. In the mother’s crises, when they didn’t cause her to collapse to the floor, and mainly when they didn’t concern her, my sister was often the enthusiastic audience cheering her gladiator on from the balcony of the arena.

“Tell them, if they come again, that there’s nobody home,” the mother said to me. Corinne rummaged in the big wooden box where she kept the dozens of pairs of earrings she bought by weight at the central bus station. “Don’t say anything, don’t answer them at all,” she added. “But they ask,” I tried again. “What do they ask? What have those people got to ask?” Corinne flared up, “Tell them he’s dead. Dead. Do you understand? Dead.”

The next day I returned to my post on the thorn hill, opposite the bus stop, waiting: not for them, for somebody. I sat on a patch of sand on the edge of the hill, forbidding myself to move, in muddy pants, wet with urine. Around me, buried in the ground, were my graves, four or five of them. I sat there after lunch working on them, every day anew, keenly aware of what was happening at the bus stop, not with my two normal eyes, which were fixed on the sand, but with some other, third eye. First I collected and piled up broken bottles and then flowers whose petals I had pulled off. Then came the digging. I dug a deep little hole in the ground that I had previously watered, and on the bottom I arranged the petals in a colorful spiral. On top of them I laid the broken base of the bottle: a transparent gravestone through which the petals were revealed. I covered the graves with sand, one after the other. Now I began an elaborate and mysterious procedure of uncovering and discovering: I dug in the ground again, as if at random, as if without the faintest idea of what lay buried there, suddenly discovering the cool, smooth glass, slowly scraping the sand until the petals were exposed, acting out the discovery and the surprise over and over with each grave.

In the dusky light of late afternoon the right bus stopped and the right people got off: he a short young man with a mustache, she in her last months of pregnancy, holding on to his elbow, bearing her huge body with difficulty on white, swollen legs. It took time for them to arrive, advancing with extraordinary slowness from the bus stop in the direction of our house. At the foot of the hill they stopped, paused, and considered for a moment. “Is your father at home?” the man finally asked. I shook my head. “Where is he?” he asked. “I don’t know,” I replied. “And your mother?” asked the woman. “Is your mother at home?” I covered the fourth or fifth hole with sand and didn’t answer. I peeked at them out of the corner of my eye: the woman was sweating, she was dripping with sweat. The neck of her dress, from which a strip of gathered cloth stuck up, like a clown’s ruff, was soaked through, plastered to the top of her chest. Anxiety trembled in the damp, still air between us like vapors. I wallowed luxuriously in the warm stream wetting my pants again, all the way down to the back of my knees. In the end they would leave. Again the woman took hold of his elbow; again she tottered on her swollen legs, giving him her handbag to hold. I waited a moment or two, watching their receding backs, and then I got to my feet, passed them, and ran as fast as I could toward the shack. I stood at the end of the path, hiding behind the garbage can, and waited. They reached the shack, this time for some reason via the neighbors’ yard, and stood next to the low wooden fence separating the two houses.

“Maurice, Maurice,” they called loudly, in chorus, the man in a deep baritone and the woman accompanying him in a rather squeaky voice, stressing the last syllable. Corinne came out of the shower, wrapped in a yellow bathrobe, her hands digging deep into the pockets; in a minute they would make a hole. The mother came out, too: “Why have you come again? He isn’t here, I told you he wasn’t here,” she said in a lowered, almost confidential voice. “We were told that he’s here, that he’s been seen around here,” the man insisted. “Who told you?” Corinne rushed into the fray. “Who’s the liar who said that? Go look somewhere else. When you find him tell us, we want to know, too.” The pregnant woman burst into tears and wiped her red face with the sleeve of her dress: “He took all our money, all of it. He talked and he talked and he talked, and my husband gave him all the money for the business deal. I haven’t got anything to buy a bed for the baby, a bed for the baby.” She smacked her stomach, rattling the gold bracelets on her wrist. The man came closer. He almost stuck his face into the mother’s face: “I’ll go to the police, let the police come and take you, thieves.” I saw Corinne leap: she flew to the end of the porch, her robe came open, exposing her thighs, snatched up the broom, and began to hit — the man, the woman wailing behind him, the man again, the mother who placed herself between them, the neighbors’ dumb dog who ran around them in circles, barking without stopping. The man seized Corinne by her hair and neck, while the wailing woman suddenly bent down and stuck her teeth into my sister’s arm. The mother pulled the broom out of Corinne’s hands and began to beat them herself. All the way to the road she chased them with the broom, yelling: “He’s gone, gone, gone.”