Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Lawns: in these hot days the lawn should be watered twice a week in order to prevent it from drying up. It should be mowed two or three times a month and fertilized once a month with small amounts of nitrogen-rich fertilizer. The blades of the lawn mower should be raised a little so that the lawn remains higher than in the spring. Mowing too low is liable to expose the roots and cause damage. At the same time, care should be taken to mow the lawn frequently. When the growth is too high the air cannot penetrate, causing the lawn to shrivel.

In this season of the year due to the increased humidity, the lawn should be regularly examined for various diseases of the leaves. The most common of these is wheat rust, which is characterized by the appearance of brown spots on the grass and which calls for spraying with Mancidan or Saparol.

Roses: all the wilted blooms should be removed. The ground around the roses should be padded in order to keep it wet and keep the roots cool. The roses should be given extra fertilization with soluble fertilizer. The rosebushes should be sprayed against pests and leaf diseases and it is recommended to spray regularly once every two weeks, or as required according to the nature of the garden. A good time for spraying is in the early hours of the morning.

THE CHILD WAS told that she was growing up at a good time, and afterward this was corrected to a “better” time. The mother and the Nona said this sadly, and Corinne reluctantly, with a kind of shrug. “Corinne,” they said, “didn’t grow up at a good time. There were problems, issues, Corinne grew up in the middle of the problems.” About Sammy they didn’t say whether he grew up at a good time or a bad time: he was outside time, outside the shack that was the home in its first stammering decade, before the sadness. It was clear: the time was the shack, the home, the issues. “Sammy,” they said, “was in the street all the time, he ran away from the issues.” But the words “ran away” gave the game away. The child caught hold of it: “But why did he run away, Sammy?” she asked Nona. “He didn’t run away,” the Nona corrected, “he ran around. He didn’t see. Corinne saw, she sat at home then. She saw everything, poor girl, everything that happened.” “And she didn’t run around?” asked the child. “She did, and how,” pounced Nona, “and how she ran around. She was of the streets, btaat elshwiri she was. Just like you’re btaat elshwiri , and if you don’t stop I’ll have your head. With us, girls don’t run around in the street.” “With us” meant the mother and Nona and Sammy. The three of them asked, “Where have you been?” and over and over again: “Where have you been ya btaat elshwiri ?” But Sammy didn’t scold. Unlike the two of them he had no opinion, good or bad, about bitaat elshwiri : in general he had no opinions, Sammy, only anxieties and fears, almost exclusively fantasies, anxieties, and fears.

He was fourteen when the child was born, he still liked wallowing in the dirt with his friends. “He would come home black as pitch,” said the mother, and she would scrub him in the shower with the hard loofah until his skin was red. As soon as he saw her approaching with his good clothes, especially the ironed white shirts, he would burst out crying loudly: “Not nice clothes, not nice clothes.” Nice clothes always ended up the same way, with furious beatings. This is how he came to identify freedom with tangible poverty and poverty with cheerfulness: there was no property to defend and nowhere downhill to go.

Years after the childhood distress of the “nice clothes” he would still feel overcome with anxiety when he saw a stack of fresh new shirts or trousers in the closet, and he made haste to throw half of them out or give them to his worker. The mother would run after him, rummage in the garbage can to salvage the garments, which he would just throw away again. “He’s not normal, that boy,” she said, but her face beamed: he was the one who was always in tune, by virtue of what he was and what he did or didn’t do, with her hidden agendas, hidden even from herself. He was the one who read her instructions correctly. She said: “Look after the child when I’m not here, don’t leave her alone with Nona.”

He didn’t. In the evenings, in his work clothes as an apprentice welder in the industrial part of Petah Tikva, he would barge into Nona’s room, pinch her swollen arm, undo her braids plaited around her head, dip into the saucepan on the stove, eat standing up, and drop down exhausted: onto Nona’s bed, next to the child, the carpet, the armchair, the concrete step on the threshold of the quarter-shack, or on the toilet seat, with the water running over his head in the improvised shower, a tiny alcove toilet with a shower tap stuck in the wall. “Let’s wake him up, ya bint , he’s fallen asleep in there,” said the Nona, and the two of them called out: “Sammy! Sammy!”

Dragging his feet, a towel wrapped around his waist, he threw himself onto Nona’s bed, making himself out to be more exhausted than he really was, but he was quickly chased off the bed and removed to the carpet. The bed was the stage, and the hour was the hour of the child’s performance: “ Yallah , get it over already so we can go to sleep,” the Nona prompted her.

Almost every evening the child would stand on the bed in front of Nona and Sammy and sing “Tombe la Neige,” until from behind the wall, from the Amsalems’ house, the banging and the groaning would begin: Father Amsalem demanded quiet and got it, Rachel Amsalem split her sides laughing.

Sammy wanted to go out, his friends were waiting for him, sitting on the stone wall in front of the house. He waited for the child to fall asleep, lay next to her on the Nona’s bed, and made up a story to distract her. She didn’t listen to the words, only to the melody, forcing her eyes to stay open, staring at the steamy, hazy air that filled the windowless room and gave rise to a dense white mist. For a moment Sammy thought she had fallen asleep and he sat up silently, but she sat up, too: “I want to sleep in our house,” she said. He wrapped her in a blanket, tucked it tightly around her in her pajamas, and the two of them went down the path joining Nona’s quarter-shack to the mother’s shack, leaving behind them the rectangle of opaque white glass set in the Nona’s door, which the child looked at as they walked away. The mother’s shack was clean, empty, and dark. The emptiness of hours was in the air and it didn’t go away even now, undisturbed by their presence. Again Sammy lay next to her on the bed, one of the beds, again he told her a story, stopping every now and then, when his friends knocked on the door, to call out, “Just a minute.” After an hour they made their way back again to Nona’s. He carried her in his arms, lying on his shoulder, running along the path to the quarter-shack on top of the mild slope of the hill.

IT’S POSSIBLE THAT the neighborhood was as flat as the palm of your hand. Perhaps we only imagined its hollows and curves, its slopes and wadis and hills, inventing a topography that didn’t exist, or, more accurately, superimposing a mental topography on the physical one, referring to distortions and exaggerations of scale, to concepts that had been coined in relation to other places and had frozen in language and consciousness, with no connection to anything, addressing only themselves. We never actually said these words, we never said “hills,” “hollows,” “wadis,” we were not acquainted with the words and what they represented. We said “up there” or “down there,” we said “go up” but never “go down.” For some reason we never said “go down.”