Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

WHERE WAS HE when he wasn’t there? He was never “there,” he flickered on and off, in the lives of others and in his own life, too.

“WHAT DO YOU think? Was he a spy?” asked my brother, closing one eye, the good one, with a half smile, dying to take off, he just needed a bit of gas. “Who?” I made myself un-knowing, deliberately putting off what was coming anyway, with or without gas. “Maurice. In the neighborhood they said he was a spy.” I laughed. He laughed, too, but only halfway. As a professional, he knew not to laugh with the audience. “Listen, I’m being serious now, he acted like a spy. Disappearing like that, where did he disappear to?” My brother creased his brow, settled down: “And the way he talked, too. He had that way of talking in hints. He never stopped hinting. Hints, hints, all the time hints,” said my brother, covering his fourth banana with chocolate spread and taking a bite. “Eating all those bananas will make you sick,” I warned him. He took no notice, carried on: “But the interesting thing is, who was he spying for?” “For himself,” the mother contributed, “only him, him, and him.” My brother leaned his elbows on the table, pressed his hands hard against his cheeks, and went on: “I, for instance, would break in a second. The minute they put me in the dungeon with the ropes to hang you from your feet, I’d tell them everything, spill all the secrets. Even before the dungeon I’d tell, just for a piece of chocolate or something.” He stopped, reflecting for a minute: “But not him, he had a strong character, he wouldn’t be broken by torture,” said my brother, dwelling enjoyably on the word “torture.” The mother wiped the table with a cloth, removed the basket of bananas from under his protesting eyes: “He wasn’t a spy,” she said, “he was a crook.” “So how come they said he was a spy?” my brother persisted. “So what if they said?” She waved her arm. “People say all kinds of nonsense. If I listened to everything they said, hairs would grow on the palms of my hands.” “So you, in other words, never sensed anything suspicious in his behavior?” “Anything suspicious?” she snorted contemptuously. “What are you talking about, anything suspicious? Everything about him was suspicious, he was suspicious from head to toe,” she said. She might as well have been talking to the wall. My brother suddenly grinned from ear to ear: “What a character, that Maurice. Remember you told us how in Egypt, in the war, he and your brother bought silk parachutes from the British soldiers at bargain prices and went into business with about a thousand shirts they’d sewn, remember?”

“YOU COULD SAY he grew up in the street, from a child he hung out in the streets of Cairo. Cafés and cafés. His mother, poor woman, was an aristocrat, half-mad, the whole house was at sixes and sevens: you went in and saw everything heaped up in piles on the floor. His father would take women into her bed; he drove the poor thing crazy and then left. He was a lawyer, his father. His mother would send Maurice to his father’s office to ask for money. He’d let him wait outside for days until he let him in. He’d sit there like a pauper with all the other paupers and wait for his father to give him money. His sister was highly educated and a bit off her rocker, too. What a life, with that mother and brother. She tried to kill herself once, the sister, she was as beautiful as Laila Mourad, the actress. He studied, didn’t study, worked, didn’t work, who knows what he did? He learned in the street, he learned in the cafés from those people who were communists, all day long politics, he didn’t want to come here to Israel. I wanted to because of my brothers, and he came. As soon as we got off the ship in Haifa he got that obsession with the Mizrahim into his head, from the minute we landed. Discrimination. He was right, but he didn’t do anything sensibly, he spoiled everything. Who didn’t come to our house to talk to him? Yigal Allon himself, the minister of labor. But Maurice couldn’t take the high road. Not him. They gave him a great job in the Labor Ministry, put him at the top, with his education and fine talk. So what did he do? Protested outside the Labor Ministry, ‘Bread and work.’ So they fired him. How could you do such a thing? I asked him. Doesn’t the bread you bring home come first? ‘My principles,’ he says. His principles. Nothing was good enough for him except for prime minister. Prime minister, that’s what his majesty wanted to be. With all the fancy jobs they gave him, the respect people paid him in the beginning. And the papers. The whole house full of papers and more papers. No day and no night, the coffee and the cigarettes and the papers, the papers.”

AFTER IMMIGRATING TO the land of our fathers and settling in it, I never severed my connections with the country, even when I was abroad. I went abroad frequently, in my professional capacity as a journalist and scholar. These travels in the wide world helped me to broaden my knowledge and my horizons in every sense, both professionally and in the connections I succeeded in establishing with high-level people in the world. Even during the long period of my self-imposed exile I kept in constant touch with my comrades in thought and ideals. For the most part this connection was maintained by correspondence, but there were also visits from my friends from Israel. They came to meet me in various countries in Europe. I earned my living as an independent journalist working for various news agencies and European newspapers, especially in France. I also worked for the United Nations in Geneva. I set up a press and public relations agency in Italy, where among others I represented the government of the Shah of Persia at the independence celebrations of that country in Milan.

The friends from Israel who came to visit me had one goal: to persuade me to leave everything and return to Israel. Their reasons were our sociopolitical and educational-economic situation, which was going from bad to worse, in the absence of any criticism worthy of the name. They all lamented the cessation of the publication of our social affairs organs HaMeorer and Kesher , the only independent platforms for the ethnic Mizrahi groups in Israel.

All their attempts to persuade me fell on deaf ears. I held to my opinion that it would be very difficult, very difficult indeed for me to bring about any change in our situation in Israel. The experience of the past was not encouraging. I was well aware that resistance to the Ben-Gurion regime and conducting any kind of opposition, however constructive, to the status quo would be suicidal on my part. There were two things that were forbidden to Mizrahi ethnic groups in Israel: 1) To establish any independent socio-political body, and 2) To take part independently in any kind of opposition. These things would be fought tooth and nail by all the political parties in the country as well as the so-called Sephardic leaders, the vassals of the said political parties. Together they had agreed to maintain the status quo in everything concerning our dire and worsening situation, as long as these “leaders” remained in the positions awarded them, which we regarded as that of puppets.

No man can defy his fate, and my fate determined that in spite of all my reservations, and in spite of the doubts and difficulties involved in my return to Israel, I returned there in October 1962.

IT’S NOT THAT the photograph of her and Maurice with the child in the Piazza San Marco was chosen to be the one. It was the only one.