Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

There was the big “up there.” Sammy said: “I’m going to up there.” The big “up there,” ten minutes’ walk from the shack along the asphalt road or through the thorn fields, consisted of a cleared patch of land, worn wooden benches, two kiosks, a grocery store, and a cinema. But these details were just the framework for “up there,” not the essence — that involved “everybody” hanging around and waiting for “everybody,” the stories people told themselves or each other, pointless stories that went nowhere and wanted nothing but to create friction, a mild, gentle flame that never developed into a real fire. Their talk was the babble of babies. They lounged on the non-lawn or on the benches, Sammy and his friends, drowning in this gibberish until the wee hours, feeding each other. Then they went together to piss in the field, putting off as long as they could their parting from the place, from the thing that was the best of themselves. That was what “up there” once was: the place where the best of themselves was aired and aired again.

I wrote “once”: I thought of “once,” walking side by side with Sammy “up there,” not hand in hand, to see the movie we had seen yesterday and the day before and the day before that, sitting in our regular places in the movie theater, the air fresh and empty, heartbreaking in its emptiness. Sammy tests me on the multiplication tables as we walk through the thorn field or along the asphalt road to up there. “Five times five, seven times eight, nine times six, four times three, five times nine, ten times twelve.”

THE FURY THAT “once” prompted in her, the past, any wallowing in the past: “Once” she shook her fist at someone, never mind who; “Once it was. Now it’s dead.” With its good and bad, she saw the past as weights of concrete on her legs, impeding the movement of her forward-striving body, of her mind, which closed its eyes and hastened its steps as it passed the still faces of stone monsters. “Once” was the stone monsters, embodied in memories, in objects that held the memories and objects that held nothing, squatting like dead weights. She threw things out all the time, to make room: there was never enough room. She could never throw out enough to satisfy her.

She divided the human race into people who threw things out and people who didn’t, who wallowed. The ones who threw things out were positive, optimistic, industrious, straightforward, clean inside and out, and full of consideration for others, not imposing their “mess” and torment. The non-throwers were the opposite: dreamy, lax, lazy, clinging, “sitting on their souls,” muddy and muddying and missing the most important thing in life, clarity.

With that wild gleam in her eye that couldn’t wait another minute, full of eagerness and passion, she said: “ Yallah , parcel it up and throw it out already.” Every two or three days, “ Yallah , parcel it up and throw it out already”: she was tidying up.

She emptied the closets. She emptied the storage space above the closets. She emptied the linen chest under the bed. She emptied the kitchen cupboards. She emptied the pantry. She emptied the glass-fronted sideboard and the chest of drawers with papers. She emptied her little storeroom next to my brother’s welding shop. Before and inside the piles she carried out a ritual purification that lasted for hours, governed by the ostensibly simple principle of: “What do we need this for?” Immediate need was god: cruel, uncompromising, impatient, and brief. Anything slightly damaged, shabby, crippled, or for which the immediate need was not immediately evident was sent to the “parcel.” The repeated sorting and sending to the “parcels” were a mirror image, a precise reflection of her mental map at a given moment, which could change a few days later: she never tired or despaired of this work of coordination between her outer and inner selves, of the indefatigable striving for a material reality whose features represented, with the greatest accuracy, the changing landscapes of her mind. She wanted to be “light, light,” she wanted to acquire possessions not for the sake of accumulation but exclusively on the basis of need.

At midday (the sorting, like all important things, took place in the morning) the discarded possessions rested on the porch, bundled in big sheets, waiting for their final removal. She sat among the bundles, eating a little rice with beans, surveying them with the thoughtful frown that always presaged energetic action, trying to make up her mind. “Who to give them to?” Immediately after announcing, “I can’t make up my mind who to give them to,” she would untie the knots in the sheets, open the bundles, and sort out their contents again, this time according to the recipients summoned to come “now” to get their things.

In the evening, when she turned on the sprinklers, which would flood the porch, there were only two bundles left without owners. They were dragged to the garbage can in front of the shack, where they stood like two potbellied sentries on either side. Everything was fresh: the mown lawn; the moist leaves of the lemon tree, which only ever yielded hard lemons without any juice; the new tablecloth waiting in its wrapping in the closet for the old one to be thrown out; the dull gleam of the polished copper vessels now lined up in a different arrangement on the kitchen shelf; the empty white spaces in the exemplary closets; the clean nightgown she put on after bathing; her hair washed and her mind quiet.

But a sleepless night followed the quiet and clarity: four or five times the bedside lamp was switched on and off, the pages of her book rustled. In this quarrel between darkness and light hesitations, doubts, and regrets emerged and metastasized from hour to hour, until the dawn broke. At five in the morning she stood next to the garbage can in her nightgown, rummaging in the bundles and the can itself to salvage and retrieve things that had been restored to grace during the conflict of the night.

Suspended between the two fates, deprived of citizenship and papers, the retrieved objects lay on the porch while she moved them one by one from corner to corner, where they wouldn’t catch her eye and remind her by their presence not of the sin of throwing them out but of the shame of changing her mind. Every morning, as she drank her coffee, she glanced at them out of the corner of her eye and looked away again, muttering to herself: “I always act and then regret it, act and regret, act and regret.”

“ONCE”: THE ENEMY of resilience, a luxury, the margins of the soul, the reserves. She had no reserves, no savings, real or symbolic. Alone, two adolescent children and a baby, a mother (hers) three quarters blind, a mother (Maurice’s) three quarters crazy, up to her neck in debt. She said: “A person ( elbani-adam ) has to know his day-to-day, what his day-to-day is.”

THE SECOND, THIRD, or fourth day before her death, in the hospital. I found her: the only days of her life when she was really there to be found, immobilized, situated where they had left her, only the light on her face changing and shifting with the passing of the hours. I found her crouching by the side of her bed, emptying the metal hospital locker. Tidying up a little, she said, downplaying the “little.” Piled on the bed were bags of fruit, cookies, wet wipes, a box of chocolates, a towel, three pairs of underpants, a tube of Voltaren for the pain in her back, two or three books, nail scissors, a checkbook, opened envelopes of telephone and electricity bills, an empty, decorated, gilt cardboard box, very elegant. She looked inside it, turned it upside down: “What was in it?” she wondered, a smile of relief dawning on her face: “Those petit-fours your sister brought,” she recalled.