Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

She crammed the superfluous items into the box, pushing them down, making a parcel: “Take it when you go,” she commanded. Again she crouched down next to the locker, trying to release the jammed door: “These hinges need to be oiled, nobody’s oiled them for years. Go and bring a little oil from the kitchen,” she said. “What oil?” I didn’t understand. “Any oil will do, cooking oil, we’ll oil these things a bit.” Her face was pale, her neck too, a grayish pallor continuing from the faded gray mane of her hair. I brought a little oil in a plastic cup. She dipped a tissue in it and oiled the hinges, opening and closing the locker door: “You see?” she crowed. The family of the patient from Kalkiliya in the next bed looked at her in trepidation and awe. All of them were sitting on the bed: the father, three little girls, a two-year-old toddler, and a woman who appeared to be the patient’s sister. “Just like the rest of the hospital, nothing works like it should,” the mother confided in them. They were silent. The sick mother smiled at her with a certain effort, her face looking out over her husband’s arm. “Come, I’ll oil yours, too,” the mother volunteered, “so you can open and close it at least.” In the slippers that were too big for her, the big woolen shawl trailing behind her, she approached the next bed, growing paler with every step. The patient from Kalkilya’s locker was empty. There were four bottles of cola and Kinley standing on top of the locker. She oiled the hinges, opened and closed the door a few times, and then put three of the bottles into the locker, leaving one on top. “That’s better,” she said, passing her hand over the white surface, wiping away the rings left by the bottles.

THE FIRST “ONCE,” the first (perhaps) memory standing before every other first (like the tallest student in the class), not as a secret, but as a mold setting the shape of other memories, giving them their general appearance, mood, color: Sammy casting the three concrete steps leading to Nona’s quarter-shack, to the new entrance on the other side of the quarter-shack.

They opened up a door in the back to make the access from the mother’s shack more convenient. They cast the steps and the little concrete area above them. They paved the path winding from Nona’s to the mother’s house. The child watched Sammy casting the steps, installing the curving iron railing next to the steps for Nona to hold on to as she went down. She was one and a half and a bit: the warm touch of the flannel pants on her thighs, the sweater with the zipper in front, the smell of the wool with the smell of Nona’s ointment that stuck to everything, her eyes almost completely covered by her bangs, and her white socks sliding into her boots, leaving a gap of exposed skin between the hem of her trousers and the top of her boots (from a photograph of the child sitting on the carpet at the foot of the bed in the mother’s house).

The Nona stood and watched Sammy casting the concrete, too, the child clinging to her thigh. Then Sammy went to the welding shop, until the concrete hardened. Nona went inside to go about her business, deaf to the sound of the radio. Then came the call.

I CAN SUMMON the scene down to its last detail: he flew. He was fifteen and a half and barefoot. The call came from outside, from beyond the half-tarred road, beyond the row of single-story shacks, reaching him in the welding shop that isn’t his, it’s the neighbor’s, a windowless orange building with a sliding iron door the width of the building and almost the height of the wall. The call was absorbed by the heavy door of the welding shop, where it echoed dully. I heard it unwillingly. I stood rooted to the spot, frozen into what I was doing, into what I was at the moment it came: “Sammy! Sammy!”

I was the omniscient narrator, I could anticipate the action step by step, propelled by the call: he was welding something when they called him. The call broke through the noise of the blowtorch. He ran to the house and there, at the entrance to Nona’s shack, at the bottom of the concrete steps he himself had cast, he saw the child lying in a pool of blood.

He couldn’t understand where the blood was coming from, whose it was. Nona said: “She opened her head. It’s her blood from her head.” He held out his arms straight in front of him. Nona laid the child on his outstretched arms. The child lay almost straight on his arms, her lower back a little curved, her head drooping toward the ground, past his right arm. They bandaged her head, taken a towel off the clothesline and wrapped it around her head. The towel didn’t wrap well, it was too thick, it slipped off the narrow forehead, off the head. “The child will die,” said the Nona. “If you don’t take her she’ll die.” “I’m taking her,” he said, staring at the bloody towel, at the flattened face covered to the lips by the towel, “I’m taking her.” “She’s dead, she’ll die,” repeated the Nona, “she’ll die if you don’t take her.”

When his feet left the ground, racing toward the thorn field, he could feel the warm, swarming touch of the anthill he had trampled once before. He was barefoot, his arms stretched out in front of him, carrying the almost horizontal child with the heavy limbs of an unconscious body without a will of its own. Her big head, split at the temple, swung from side to side, and down toward the ground. The wet towel had slipped. His hands were covered in blood; his feet were covered in a mess of soil, blood, and grass. The path through the thorn field was hardly visible; the thorns had spread. He opened up the path with his legs, momentarily forging a passage that was immediately effaced again, conquered once more by the thorns after the bare, wounded feet departed, their skin cracked and burned by the blazing sand. He chose the shortest way to the top of the hill, to the clinic; he told himself that he was choosing the shortest way. From time to time he raised his eyes, to measure the distance to the top of the hill, which was blurring in the sun.

He didn’t say “hill,” or “blurring”: the landscape was as plain as bread in the parched afternoon.

In the single-story shacks strewn over the plain, women and boys did things with bread. They took a whole loaf, scraped out the soft, white inside, and filled the space with beans in a spicy tomato sauce. That’s what the boys liked to eat, that’s what they were eating while he carried the flat child resting like a tray on his outstretched arms, his eyes suddenly falling on her Adam’s apple projecting from her throat and pointing at the sun.

That was apparently the beginning: a sturdy boy carries a bleeding child in his arms. He is fifteen and a half and a bit, she is one and a half and a bit, his little sister.

Over the years the picture is rewound over and over again, someone rewinds it, not me, it’s an anonymous memory that doesn’t exclusively belong to anyone.

The boy and the bleeding child slowly leave the ground as his running carries them not forward but up, forward and up at the same time; slowly they take off, entering the low sky above the thorn field, above the single-story shacks, carried higher, above the taut black electric wires, the old water tower and next to it the new one, above the luxuriant orange groves of Kfar Maas and onward, to the high sky, above the clouds, where the two of them linger, the boy and the child, circling around in what looks from below like a monotonous dance in slow motion, the movement of their bodies skywriting white vapors against the murky blue of the hazy sky, huge trembling letters overlapping one another, erasing one another; only Nona knew how to read them as she looked up at the sky without seeing a thing. “The child’s alive, she’s not dead,” said Nona, “she was dying but she didn’t die. There was a miracle.” “Not a miracle, not a miracle,” said the mother. “There was an effort. The effort was the miracle.”