Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

The substitution of a general idea for the particular name Maurice led no one astray but herself: this indirectness, too, as a rhetorical principle of the first order, was the essence of el-lisan elhilweh .

The mother detested el-lisan elhilweh , she saw it as an alliance against her, a many-armed octopus: “Why are you beating around the bush, just say what you want to say.” The Nona drove her crazy. She would put on her sphinx expression, pretend to be sunk in reflection. “Everyone has his own opinion,” she said at last, giving the agreed signal for the second or third act of the argument: what exactly was “his opinion?”

They quarreled most of the time and about everything under the sun: about food and money, intervention and nonintervention, the neighbors, sicknesses and cures, the political situation, manners and etiquette, a word spoken or not spoken, children, God, hypocrisy and sincerity, daughters-in-law and sons-in-law and cousins, the weather, the garden, the maintenance of the shack, “the child,” my brother’s friends, education in Israel and abroad, the length of Nona’s hair, how often a person should shower, fasting on Yom Kippur, what exactly had happened “then,” whether bears were vegetarians or carnivores.

But they really tore into each other about one thing only: him. He was the one underlying subject, hidden or half-revealed, waiting in the wings to make its appearance behind all the lurid masks in the theater of their bitter quarrels. It was all him and everything led to him, however remote, foreign, and ostensibly irrelevant.

Him and his lisan elhilweh.

Him and his tip-top suits, his Omar Sharif, Doctor Zhivago mustache.

Him and his jawful smile, gaping from ear to ear.

Him and his demented mother.

Him and his swindler father.

Him and his unhappy, abandoned sister.

Him and his lordliness.

Him and his cunning, slippery ways.

Him and his criminal friends.

Him and his important friends.

Him and his debts, past, present, and future.

Him and his extravagant, grandiose gestures.

Him and his politics.

Him and his limitless egoism.

Him and his desertions.

Him and the women he had and didn’t have.

Him and the looming catastrophe — the catastrophe he was himself and that he brought upon others.

Him and his eternal, congenital vagrancy, the way in which the Nona embraced it. Around this there was absolute silence, around the dark circle surrounding the figure of the vagrant. Maurice the vagrant was the hidden, secret subject of the hidden subject that was Maurice in general: the secret within the secret. When this figure appeared before their eyes, emerging from the churning froth of the talk “about him,” the two of them were speechless, gazing wordlessly at the figure of the vagrant who did not look back at them: the elusive thing, hidden from the eye, waiting for its turn, was not the bitter reckoning of their bitter grievance, but their compassion.

THE MOMENT WHEN the shack was the victim of a shocking mutilation that remained for many months, the moment when the shack stopped being what it was and became something else, as if something poisonous: even the story she told and retold about what happened and how, it became the horrifying thing itself, as if it wasn’t a story about something that had already occurred, history, but a prophecy soon to fulfill itself through the mere pronouncement of the words.

It slithered into the house at noon: she didn’t say “slithered”; the twisting arm, the hand moving from side to side, said it. Out of the corner of her eye she saw it: a yellowish rope, quick as lightning. She was standing in the garden, hoeing the rose bed, she didn’t really believe she had seen it, she thought she was imagining things. But still, she put down the hoe and went inside. The house was quiet, spick-and-span, the floor still damp from the mop. For long moments she stood in the doorway and scanned the space in which she was familiar with every object, every stir or stillness, even the wind passing between the objects. There was no sign, but the very absence of a sign signaled a menacing meaning: it was there.

“There’s a snake in the house,” she announced in the welding shop. Sammy didn’t hear, he was in the middle of welding. “There’s a snake,” she yelled. The three of them went into the house, Sammy, his worker, and she, stepping hesitantly as they peeked under the beds, behind the chests, in the corners of the rooms, behind the fridge, into the big plant pots. “There is,” she insisted, “I saw it, I wasn’t dreaming.” “You were dreaming, you were,” said Sammy, sticking his black fingers into the saucepan on the stove, fishing meatballs out of the sauce for himself and the worker. When they left she checked the house again, even pulling out the big linen drawer: “You were dreaming, ya bint , you were dreaming,” she said to herself, and dropped onto the sofa in the hall, to rest awhile before she went to work, stared unseeingly at the book in her hands, and immediately shifted her gaze to the wall with the window in front of her: “You were dreaming, ya bint .”

The faint breeze of early fall stirred the folds of the curtain, ruffling them a little: the curtain was new, striped in a spectrum of shades of yellow, from dark to pale. For a moment she closed her eyes, giddy with the wavy motion of the strips of yellow color sliding into each other, and immediately opened them again and saw it: hanging between two stripes on the curtain, “straight as a column,” its tail curled around the curtain rod. She thought they looked at each other. “He looked at me,” she said. She remained rooted to the spot for a moment longer, riveted by its alien gaze, and then she jumped up, burst out of the door, and flew to the welding shop at a speed that defied the force of gravity and the powers of speech. When the three of them returned to the house with hoes a profound silence met them, different from the one before: the yellow curtain still stirred, the snake still hung motionless on the curtain rod. It was the worker Binyamin who saw it, not Sammy: “There he is,” he said. Sammy stood staring and blinking with his one good, seeing eye: “Where?” he asked. They began hitting with the hoes. She stood behind them, covering her eyes with her hands, peeping through her fingers, terrified. They beat the curtain, the window frame, the wall of the shack, in which a big hole immediately opened, revealing the shriveled rose beds and lawn of the end of summer, the wall of the welding shop, the clotheslines. She saw no more, she ran outside: she was not a witness to the decisive stage in the battle “against it.”

We didn’t go into the shack for a week, we slept on the floor in Nona’s room, where she trampled on our arms and legs when she groped her way to the toilet at night. For a week the pallor never left the mother’s face, the tremor never left her lower lip: “His head had already been cut off with the hoe, but the thaaban kept going without its head, he kept going with his tail and all the rest of him,” she repeated what she had been told, what she hadn’t seen.

THE MONTH OF July is one of the hottest of the year and maintaining the freshness of the plants and flowers during this season is no easy job.

The life cycle of a number of plants ends in this season and they turn yellow and brown and lose their beauty and do not add to the charm of the garden. All we can do in this season to beautify and freshen the appearance of the garden is to plant annual flowering shrubs.

Annuals are purchased at nurseries in little cups that do not hold much growth substrate, and therefore when planting them care must be taken to dig a hole one and a half times the size of the cup, to return soil not tightly packed to the hole and fill it with water, to fit the size of the hole to the size of the roots, and then to insert the plant and water it immediately and go on watering every day in the evening or morning hours and even twice a day, until it takes hold in the ground. It should be noted that most of the annuals developed in the nursery in conditions of semi-shade, and the existing leaves will therefore wilt or shrivel in the glare of the sun, but with proper watering the plant will recover and become accustomed to the new conditions.