Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

CURLED UP ON her side in the fetal position, her knees coming up to meet her chin. One hand buried between her thighs and the other under her cheek. Her eyelids transparent, still painted, she was too lazy to remove the eyeliner. The almost disintegrating towel she couldn’t sleep without had slipped from her fingers, but it was still close to her face, lying on her neck. From close up you can see: a delicate trickle of saliva is dribbling from the right side of her mouth, wetting the towel.

In what bed was she sleeping, where? In what room and what metamorphosis of a room? Where was I sleeping?

HER FACE DIDN’T change at all, either when she was hanging behind the flying shack or underneath it, like a tail stuck in the wrong place, gripping the mother’s ankles with two straight arms, her body horizontal, almost parallel to the ground below us, her chin thrust forward, into the air, and her eyes closed against the wind; the longer we went on flying the deeper they sank into her skull, making their way through the two tunnels intended for this purpose and popping out on the other side, through the hair flying in the wind, looking backward, staring at the air, remembering all the contacts we tried to forget.

We weren’t in the least surprised; we went along with what was happening to us when it all began, or was about to begin, with little tremors foretelling the road opening before us: at first the door frames shook, especially the frame of the front door, twisting into itself and freeing itself of the wall only to rejoin it again a few minutes later, in order to take flight as a whole and not as a part, as the mother wished without even asking. She conducted the whole thing, that was clear, in a sleep that wasn’t hers but ours; she conducted it all while sleeping our sleep, none of us in her own bed, shivering in our heavy blankets, silently counting the thuds of the legs of the bed on the tiles and the thudding of the tiles getting ready to join in the great flight. Everything was joined to everything else: the door frames to the walls, the walls to the floor tiles, the floor tiles to the panels, the panels to the cleaning rags, the kitchen utensils, the stove, the tables, the pictures, the sewing machines, the one they’d bought already and the one they were going to buy.

We flew as we were, doing nothing, following “ elmuhandis ,” the engineer, with our eyes shut, elmuhandis who was the mother, because that’s what we called her — my brother first, he said it first and he flew first: “ Elmuhandis is lifting the shack,” he called and leaned out of the window, half his body outside in air that was getting thinner and thinner, high above the orange welding shop, the health clinic, above the thorns that covered the rectangle of land we left behind us, going up in flames at last, above the neighborhood and the shacks cut through by the curving asphalt road and the boys inside the shacks eating what they liked to eat in the blazing hours of the day with the beans in tomato sauce dripping from the half-loaf of bread they had stuffed after removing the soft inside, above the tapping of the heels of the girls on their way to the synagogue, above the Nona’s quarter-shack trapped between Amsalem’s half and the amm ’s quarter with the cows, and a special multipurpose cloud that screened the Friday afternoon Arabic movie with the character of the important man in the suit who was always called elmuhandis . And it was he who accompanied us, elmuhandis , in the movie in the cloud, orange, yellow, or gray-green, on our flight, bowing and straightening up, straightening up and bowing to the mother elmuhandis , who bowed back to him, muhandis to muhandis , he with a cigar-shaped lollypop, and she trying to put our shoes on our feet, snakeskin shoes she had brought from God knows where: pale green for Corinne and blue-black for me, long and black, entire snakes, with an opening in the middle for the foot, that writhed when we walked, but not too much, managing the corners nicely and lying in a long straight line when we took them off, Corinne next to her bed and me in the middle of the room, praying for them to be returned to the shop.

And with the special binoculars that only registered people, not landscapes, the mother elmuhandis looked down at everyone waving to us and throwing us black grapes that fell back into their open mouths. “They can say good-bye to the most beautiful house in the neighborhood,” said the mother elmuhandis , “the most beautiful that ever was and ever will be,” she said and pulled my brother away from the window with the elastic of his underpants, to prevent him from being sucked into the movie-cloud flying next to us, and packed him into white clothes on the carpet, white but not festive. The tiled roof rose and fell above our heads, rose and fell, as if the shack were doffing its hat to us, exposing a strip of sky whose color we were too exhausted to guess, not knowing if it was day or night, and mainly if it even mattered whether it was day or night, following the mother elmuhandis come what may, watching her peel her skin off in strips, move heavily with Corinne hanging onto her legs, clinging to her ankles without letting go, crawling flat on the floor behind her, between the two snake-shoes, and licking the mother’s calves imploringly until the highest, sharpest, most dangerous air to which we rose, the glass air that started to crack the floor, ripping it open between the kitchen and the hall and sucking Corinne out, without any clothes on, her body flying through the glassy air and her hands on the ankles of elmuhandis , hanging on.

SHE FEARED SNAKES more than fires, but only a little more: the two most obvious enemies of the shack posed completely different styles of destruction. She was afraid of fire, of its rapid and resolute powers of annihilation, but she respected its honesty, its lack of pretense. When it came to fire, what you saw was what you got. Unlike the snake: its slipperiness, its agility, its stealth, the thing that pretended to be something else, the personal promise of death it bore in its poison — all this sent cold shivers down her spine. She was appalled by the personal aim of the snake, the aim that had your name and your name only in its sights. The fire raged, it made no distinctions between things and people, it was impersonal and therefore not completely vengeful and vindictive; it didn’t have a black heart. The fire she understood. Not the snake. “The black ones don’t do anything, we only have black ones here,” my brother Sammy reassured her. She listened suspiciously. “But the way it looks, just the way it looks, black or white,” she said, and shivered.

ABOUT MAURICE SHE sometimes said he was “like a snake,” in Arabic, which was much more snakelike: “ elthaaban .” “The thaaban ,” she said, “when you cut off its head the tail goes on playing,” she said: “That’s elthaaban , put him in the ground for a hundred years, and his tail goes on playing,” she said, unconsciously combining two central images of Maurice: the twitching snake’s tail and the tree with the crooked root, that even after a hundred years, wouldn’t grow straight.

Maurice was thin, very thin, and over the years he grew even thinner: his dark cheeks were sucked in so much that they seemed to meet in the cavity of his mouth and join between his upper and lower jaws. The burning of his narrow brown eyes was like no other burning, as was the sweetness of his tongue: no one had ever talked like Maurice. No one swooned at that sweet tongue like Nona. “ El-lisan elhilweh ,” she sighed yearningly once a day, with that veiling of her watery blue eyes: “That sweet tongue.”