Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

But the madam liked the “little one,” liked her very much, once she even gave her one of Cookie’s puppies. “Did you bring the little one with you?” she asked the mother, or complained: “Why didn’t you bring the little one today?”

The child was then four years old, and the mother brought her, mainly for Rabbi Nathaniel, “who hasn’t got any children, poor thing,” and whose face lit up whenever he emerged from his study and found the child lying on her stomach on the marble floor of the vast kitchen, taking the brown Bonzo balls out of the bowl and putting them back in, occasionally slipping one into her mouth behind the back of the mother who was scrubbing something nearby. The rabbi held out his soft, padded hand to the child and said: “Let’s go for a walk.” They walked down the sloping lawn to the flat ground below, which was also covered with lawn, and the rabbi pointed to a dry stone basin and said: “There’ll be goldfish here.” Afterward he called Madam Cookie and the mother to listen to the child singing in Hebrew, French, and a little in Arabic — the refrain from the Umm Kulthum song that Nona always sang — and how she recited a story she had heard on the radio at top speed and with proper emphasis, word for word. Rabbi Nathaniel picked her up in his arms, patted her lightly on the backside, and said solemnly: “This child will be the next Golda Meir when she grows up.”

The child came to the spacious house with the sloping lawns because of the smell, which pervaded the interior and all the things revealed and concealed in it, even wafting from the bag of soup almonds in the pantry and the calendar hanging in the toilet. The smell had no discernible origin, no body and no words to name it: the smell was of absolute transparency, pure, refined, and imperceptible as the elusive flutter of a butterfly’s wing on an eyebrow; it was different, odorless, the smell of an enlightened life, straight angles, calm orderliness, large-mindedness. The child wandered through the rooms after the mother, sniffed the tassels of a tablecloth, buttons, dusters, and pencils; she put one in her pocket to show Rachel Amsalem the smell. On Saturdays, early in the morning, she took Rachel Amsalem to the big house, to show her more. The iron gate was barred: Rabbi Nathaniel and his wife had gone to the synagogue. The little girls sat on the step and waited for them; they jumped up whenever they saw distant figures beyond the turn in the deserted street. It was noon when they returned, wearing white, arm in arm. “The child,” said Madam Cookie in surprise and fished two caramel candies from her jacket pocket, holding them out. The little girls accompanied them to the house but didn’t go in; they stayed on the terrace: each of them stroked Cookie once. Rabbi Nathaniel saw them to the gate, bowed down, and kissed the back of the child’s hand: “And say Shabbat Shalom to Mrs. Levana,” he said.

When the child returned Corinne was on the porch, smearing boiling hot wax on strips of white sheets to remove the hair from her legs. “Where were you?” she demanded. “I was waiting for Cookie,” said the child and held out the candy: “They gave it to me,” she added. Corinne threw down the strip of sheet in her hand, smacked the child’s hand, and sent the candy flying, shook her by the shoulders: “What do you think you’re doing standing at their gate like some beggar,” she yelled. “Don’t you dare do it again or I’ll cut your face.” She gripped the child’s wrist and shook it up and down, until the strap of the plastic watch Sammy bought her at Levy’s came undone.

SHE BABYSAT FOR Cookie when they went out at night. “You were at Nona’s,” she recalled for the child. She waited for them for hours on the armchair in the living room, with Cookie lying in her basket at her feet, with puppies or without. She fell asleep and woke up, fell asleep and woke up, her head falling heavily onto her chest, swaying from one shoulder to the other. Once, when she got up to have a drink of water, she stood and stared at the dog for a long time in the dim light of the room, and then she knelt down next to the basket, wrapped the checked blanket around Cookie’s neck, and tightened her hands around it. “I almost strangled her,” she said to the child.

RABBI NATHANIEL SAID: “Levana,” and she said: “Yes.” Rabbi Nathaniel said: “I want to talk to you about something.” And she asked: “What do you want to talk to me about?” Rabbi Nathaniel said: ‘You’re alone with two adolescent children and the baby. Maurice won’t come, and if he comes it will only mean trouble.” And she said: “No, he won’t come.” Rabbi Nathaniel said: “It’s hard for you. You have to worry about the two big ones so they won’t get into trouble, God forbid.” She said: “God forbid.” Rabbi Nathaniel said: “I want you to know that we’re here.” And she said: “I know. May God bless you.” Rabbi Nathaniel said: “How will Toni grow up, with your mother who can’t see anything, or in the street.” She said: “She isn’t in the street, and she won’t be in the street.” Rabbi Nathaniel said: “She could be. You can’t control her, you’re not at home all day.” She was silent. Rabbi Nathaniel said: “I want to suggest something to you, but don’t misunderstand me.” And she asked: “What?” Rabbi Nathaniel said: “I want to adopt the child, to give her a chance in life. That is to say, we do.” She was silent. Rabbi Nathaniel said: “It doesn’t mean that you’ll stop being her mother. You’ll always be her mother. She’ll simply grow up in better circumstances.” She was silent. Rabbi Nathaniel said: “Think about it. Don’t answer me now. Take your time.” She was silent. Rabbi Nathaniel said: “Just think about the good of the child, what’s best for her.” She was silent. Rabbi Nathaniel said: “You know that I love her as if she were my daughter. Almost my daughter.” She was silent. She talked to herself. She talked to Nona. She talked to Sammy. She was silent. She talked to herself. She talked to Rabbi Nathaniel: “You’re a good man,” she said to the rabbi. “But we don’t give away children. Whatever happens, we don’t do that, we don’t give away our children.”

THERE’S NO SUCH thing. There’s no such photograph. I won’t make that photograph speak, I won’t force it to be there because it isn’t there. There’s no such thing. Piazza San Marco or not, who knows if it’s really Piazza San Marco or some other piazza with pigeons, with photographers taking pictures of tourists and pigeons. Maurice a tourist? Who’s a tourist? Who are “the tourists”? By my calculation, she hadn’t seen him for over two years before Piazza San Marco: he left when she was pregnant, all of a sudden he got up and left the country. He must have planned it without telling anyone, almost anyone. Got up and left. In terms of his wardrobe, he prepared very well indeed. After he left she received a bill for the suits he had made by a tailor. Three suits. Silk shirts. Silk shirts? He wrote to her from there after she gave birth, maybe a year after: “Bring me the child for me to see her,” he wrote. “Go,” Nona urged her: “Go, who knows, yimken yitadel , perhaps he’ll return to his better self.” That yimken yitadel : as if he’d ever had a better self to return to.

The photograph is disappearing at the edges, especially in the lower left corner: this is the process of dissolution, a white mist that dissolves the colors, the contours, the figures. The flock of pigeons in the left-hand corner has dissolved in this mist that has the sheen of water, a pool of water flooding the square, reflecting flashes of light and dazzling the eye. The dissolution, the white mist are the real thing, the truth. Of all the deceitful sights in the photograph, the deceit of the so-called family, the deceit of a past that never happened, the thing that is least false, not false at all, is the hope. Her hope when she went there. Her hope when she lined up with him facing the pigeons, with the child. In the photograph she is the other woman, with the halo of the other woman, the hope of the other woman — a hope that is not complete blindness but complete clear-sightedness: then, perhaps only then, she stood and confronted face-to-face, trembling, she faced it — the fact, the hope, of being a woman.