Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

SOMETIMES SHE SAID: I really need a dog here, to keep guard. From time to time someone brought her one or she acquired one: all of them pure-bred pedigrees: German shepherds, cocker spaniels, poodles, once even a Siberian husky. It’s impossible to describe what Sammy called “her attitude” toward dogs, just impossible: shameless instrumentality, anxious concern that bordered on panic, cruelty. The first two weeks with “the dog” (she always called it “the dog,” male or female, forgetting or ignoring its name) were a golden honeymoon. She was excited: “the dog” looked at her as if it understood everything. “The dog” was clever, bless it. “The dog” sensed everything — it waited for her, stood at the door and waited for her to come home from work. Sometimes she would scold it lovingly, with a kind of display of petting that consisted of clumsy pats on its head: “What do you want, ya mshahwar , you’ve already eaten, mshahwar , go to sleep, mshahwar , that’s enough for today.” (“ Mshahwar ,” an exaggerated expression of affection: a combination of dumb, sooty, and black.)

And then the mshahwar didn’t want to eat the special food she bought for it. None of the mshahwars would eat it. In astonishment, in worry, in budding resentment, she would watch the dog sniff the bowl and go away without touching the food. She said: “I don’t know where I got this luck that none of them want to eat their food.” For a day or two she maintained a firmly pedagogic stand vis-à-vis the canine resistance: “You won’t get anything else ya mshahwar , you hear? You’ll go without food.” In the end she broke: she gave it bread and cheese, or fried chicken livers. These it ate eagerly, which enraged her and prompted her to put it back on the diet of dog food “as a matter of principle.” And again she watched outraged as it sniffed, raised its tail, and went away without touching the food. This was the moment when “the dog” turned into a “he”: “he” was stuck-up, selfish, spoiled, thought himself too good for her. “He’s doing it to me on purpose,” she said. Or with undisguised hostility: “Who does he think he is, that I’ll spend so much money on him, ibn el-fashari ?”

Nevertheless she brushed its coat every day and washed it once every two days, so it wouldn’t have “that smell.” It would take another few weeks, not many, for her to discover to her amazement that the dog was not a piece of furniture or an object and never would be. It moved. It chewed carpets, chairs, books, and the leaves of the potted plant. It shed fur and did its business on the new mat in the bedroom. (Five times she scrubbed it with vinegar and water and put it out to air on the lawn. The smell of the vinegar pervaded the shack for weeks.) It didn’t impress the criminal cats that went on invading the kitchen and turning over the pots on the stove, and worst of all it destroyed her roses in the garden, digging up the soil around them. “This is no life,” she said, chasing it with a slipper and hitting it until it hid under the sofa and refused to come out all day, despite her coaxing. “He’s sulking,” she announced bitterly, “his honor is sulking.” And she went and planted a new plant to replace the one the dog had eaten.

The shack and its routines unraveled from day to day before her eyes; she unraveled: dejection and despair took the place of rage and insult. She gave up, looked for “someone to give him to,” lobbied the possible recipients, and also believed with all her heart that “the problem is me, it’s me that’s crazy. I’m not suited to dogs. He’s a good dog really.”

The dogs were given away and passed from an uncle in Petach Tikva to a distant nephew in the north, from my brother to my sister, Corinne, and to my sister’s neighbor. The ones that weren’t given away were ruthlessly banished when the blood rose to her head: “Take him, take him,” she thrust the dog into the arms of my uncle with the commercial van, cramming the dog’s bowls, blanket, and food into a bag. “Let him out somewhere.”

THERE WAS LENNY, one of a series of strays the child collected and brought home. When she talked about Lenny the mother’s eyes clouded over: “I don’t know what it was about that mshahwar Lenny that got into a person’s heart like that.” She gave him away shortly before the child was hospitalized with severe pneumonia, and then she went and brought him back. The next day he was run over by a car. She lay on top of him, on the road, covered with blood. It was impossible to pull her off the mangled body of the dog on the road.

FIVE MORNINGS A week she cleaned the house of Rabbi Nathaniel and his wife, a childless couple, in the suburb of Savyon. If they summoned her to show up on a Friday, too, because of a reception or something of the kind, it was the end of the world: “My Friday is mine,” she fumed, “It’s mine, without my Friday I can’t tell my head from my feet.” But she went, she never said no to Nathaniel, everything about whose demeanor and person spoke of civility and good manners, even the surprisingly crooked parting in his scant, greasy hair. The madam wore checked suits, of linen or tweed: a checked skirt and a short jacket, nipped in at the waist, whose last button, the one lying on her bulging stomach, was left unbuttoned. She had that little dog, Cookie, a vociferous black poodle who wore a kind of little checked coat in winter and sat in a straw basket with a checked mattress. They kept mating her with male poodles and she kept littering puppies, black and curly like her. Rabbi Nathaniel patted her absentmindedly on her head; he didn’t let her get to him, unlike his wife. Her pale, rice-paper-thin skin creased, her nostrils trembled with insult when she said: “Cookie didn’t touch her food all day, Levana, you know she didn’t touch it?” And the mother, impatient but resourceful, mixed Cookie’s brown Bonzo dog biscuits with a little cream cheese, “to get it into her in a different way.” “She gets sick and tired of the same thing every day, those little brown balls,” she scolded-coaxed the madam. “You think she isn’t sick of seeing the same thing all the time?”

The madam didn’t answer, trapped in her own absentmindedness, which was different from the rabbi’s and murkier, directed outward in nervous tension and even dread, especially when Corinne came to help the mother with the ironing. She, Corinne, sat on the spacious terrace of the spacious house, surrounded by fresh, sloping carpets of lawn, her calves resting on the chair opposite her and her golden thighs, where Cookie lounged, exposed, chatting with Rabbi Nathaniel about her “plans.” With her smooth back exposed almost to the tailbone, framed by the long straps of her blue summer dress, one arm hugging the other shoulder, touching and not touching the slender earlobe with its earring sparkling with cheap stones, with her hair loosely, sensuously gathered above her nape, and above all, in the way she was sitting, with her ankles rubbing each other on the seat of the opposite chair, there was something brazen, not in a deliberate defiance, but precisely the opposite, in its utter naturalness, completely relaxed and apparently unself-conscious: the lordly naturalness of the mistress of the house or a child. And she saw it, Madam Cookie, she stood in the French window and she definitely saw it, her painted eyes widening in astonishment, and she rushed off to the walk-in closet and returned with an armful of garments and put them on the table in front of Corinne: “There are a few things here that I don’t wear and I was going to throw them out, but perhaps you’d like them,” she said. Corinne didn’t move. She reached out with one hand to rummage casually in the pile, examined it with a cursory, sidelong look, and said: “They’re not my style, thanks.”