Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

She always said what she thought, and more. Especially when she was worn out, parked on one of the seats in the empty rectangle of the bus in the ghostly light of the late night, or standing in the ghostly light of the dim hallway. The yelling was more than what she thought, and the nails.

Her words were nails. “Her words pierce your body like nails,” my sister Corinne said, dropping her cigarette ash on the floor, listening for the steps.

The sound of her steps every night, night after night, for years. The ground she covered from the bus stop to the dirt path turning off to the left, leading to the house, and ending in a line of paving stones. The open square of the porch, the house. The front door with the two potbellied clay flowerpots painted green, sleeping toads.

She saw everything when she returned. She saw even before she saw, on the way, before she arrived, she saw what she hadn’t yet seen: scenes of devastation, a desert. The thirsty lawn, the shriveled rose beds. Their dryness was her parched mouth. Even before she came in, with her coat, her bag, her packages, she fell on the sprinkler, the rake, the hoe (“Where’s the bastard who took my hoe, where did my hoe go?”)

She entered with black hands covered in earth, she paused on the threshold, the tense, thick air that she brought with her, that she created. The watchful look of the mistress of the house, the prison guard, her miraculous memory for the smallest details of objects and spaces and the relations between them: she never remembered people’s names, only things. What did you miss, ya bint , what did you miss?

Perhaps it was not the house itself that she guarded, or the household objects and their arrangement, but the idea of the house that she pored over and over dozens if not hundreds of times, tested again and again the hope, the hope of home.

The entrance was the site of dashed hopes, of her injury, of her drama: she encountered the house only through her drama, slashing her veins in the presence of her lover, the house.

Our indifference, the complacency of our ignorant desecrations (our ignorance maddened her more than any knowledge) was to her an act of aggression. She wasn’t striking out, she was reacting. The destruction she brought, great or small, was a declaration of love, of faith. This was the pit.

On the brink of the pit was the bathroom. The pit had no time, only space. We never knew how long it would last, only its dimensions in space. At a certain moment she would stop, abandon everything, disappear into the bathroom for a long moment, emerge with her face washed, her hands washed, after swallowing something, some pill or other.

A different stage would begin, the slow, calmer stage of her pallor.

In the gradual spread of her pallor, on her hands and face, the house would break out of its shell, stop being a stage, and become a home. The low table lamp cast a concentrated beam of light on the tablecloth, the carpet threadbare but acceptable. My sister searched for her tweezers.

We would look at her, now she let us look: we were afraid of her ferocity, but we were in awe of her pallor. This is her second entrance, her true arrival: she sat down on a kitchen stool, took off her shoes, dipped a piece of bread into tea with milk. There was other food but she didn’t feel like it. This is what she felt like: yesterday’s bread dipped in tea with milk.

TEA WITH MILK is what she drinks when she can’t drink a thing, not a thing. Tea with milk is the sign of emptiness, which has at its heart a longing for comfort, a kind of babying that she usually denies herself but now will accept: something warm, sweet, murky, and white like thin porridge, a colorless color of nothing forceful. That’s it, tea with milk is what she drinks when she refuses to speak forcefully: not “refuses,” but dissolves in the face of it.

Tea with milk is a rare moment of consent. Her consent to weakness, softness, motherhood. She is most a mother when she’s drinking tea with milk, dunking a slice of yesterday’s dry bread in it, fishing out the soggy bits of bread with her fingers. Tea with milk gives her a sense of the true proportions of what she has and, mainly, what she doesn’t have. She admires austere modesty, but as a matter of style, not substance, really not substance.

Now I recall the oilcloth that covered the kitchen table with the aluminum legs, a square table with a new oilcloth. The cup makes a print on the oilcloth, a round ring that she quickly wipes away, not getting up to do it, just reaching for the sink, for a rag, and wiping. The pattern on the oilcloth: symmetrical squares, symmetrical flowers, symmetrical lines. She hates the material but puts up with it for its practicality. This is one of her great inner dramas, the struggle between the aesthetic and the practical. She resolves the conflict for a while when she changes the oilcloth on the kitchen table. Every two weeks a new one, spotlessly clean.

We sit on stools with aluminum legs, which she calls tabourettes (“put the tabourette back in its place when you get up”), doing nothing, saying nothing, a limited moment of grace while she puts off going to bed, going to sleep. She hasn’t got the strength to go to bed, to perform the necessary acts preceding sleep, not because she’s too tired to get up, but because it’s hard for her to stop, to accept the big break that is sleep. Her sleep is short and intermittent; she puts it off longer and longer simply because she is afraid of it.

This is what hangs in the air among us in the kitchen as we sit on the tabourettes by the gleaming oilcloth in which our faces are outlined, abstract and featureless. This is what hangs in the air at night at the end of the day: her fear.

I see her on the tabourette, it is late, the hour seems to reach beyond the limits of time; from a distance of years of life and death. I see her there, in the kitchen of the shack, on the tabourette, in a state of complete surrender within the inevitable surrender of the end of the day’s work, surrender within surrender. Her broad backside on the stool, still in the skirt with the broken zipper, overflowing the small round seat, her stomach overflowing onto her thighs, her breasts on her overflowing stomach. She is bowed, huddled, I should say, her short plump chin buried in her bosom, in her neck, her arms lying in her lap, without desire or will, touching her bare knees beneath her skirt. I don’t remember the season, summer or winter or fall, but she leans over, hunched, as if she wants to warm herself at a heater at her feet. The features of her face are hidden from me, effaced in her bowing down, in the shrinking of her body. It is a picture of mourning. She is one keening.

It’s quiet in the kitchen. The barred window is painted green. One of the cats that live in the yard pokes its head through the bars, looks in. On the other side of the kitchen, in the hallway, the clock keeps up its jolting, maddening tick. She bought it on twelve installments from a peddler who passed through the neighborhood (it turned out she paid four times more than it was worth). One night, when the clock was driving her crazy, she wrecked the mechanism and silenced it. In the morning we saw the wounded clock, still hanging on the wall. “I shut it up,” she confessed matter-of-factly, a gleam in her eye. “I made it shut up at last.”

AT LAST SHE came to me in a dream, after years when she hadn’t. There was a long, empty hall, a kind of barracks or a hut in some sort of camp, a wing in an orphanage or old age home. I think an old age home. It stretched on for miles, the hall, long and rather narrow, beds lined up on both sides, with narrow regular intervals between each bed and the next. Two long lines of iron beds, sheets gleaming white, not a bright color but a terrible glare. She was in the last bed at the end of the hall. She was sitting on the edge, dressed in a gown that was open at the back, the kind they give you before an operation. Her legs dangled in the air, not reaching the floor, like a little girl’s. Her face was fresh, whole, as if her life had not yet begun, as if she were on the threshold. I spoke to her: “I came to take you for the holiday, come spend the holiday with us, come be with us.”