Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

“YES, I LOVE you, my own Armand,” she murmured, throwing her arms around my neck; I love you as I never believed I could love. We will be happy, we will live quietly, and I shall forever abandon a life for which I now blush. But you will never reproach me with my past career?”

My tears prevented me from answering; I could only reply by pressing Marguerite to my heart.… Marguerite ceased to be the girl I had known. She avoided everything that could have recalled those scenes amongst which I had met her. Never did a wife or sister show to a husband or brother a greater affection or more care. Her morbid temperament took quickly every impression and was susceptible of every feeling. She had broken with all her friends and no longer had the same habits, used the same language, and spent as much money as formerly. People who saw us leave the house to go on the river in the charming little boat I had bought, would never have believed that this woman, dressed in white, wearing a large straw hat, and carrying on her arm a plain silk jacket to protect her against the cold and damp air, was the same Marguerite Gautier who only four months ago had been notorious for her extravagance and riotous way of living.

Alas! We made haste to be happy, as if we foresaw that it would not last long.

For two months we did not even visit Paris. No one came to see us except Prudence and this Julie Duprat, whose name I have already mentioned to you, and to whom Marguerite entrusted the touching diary, now in my possession.

I spent whole days at the feet of my mistress. We opened the windows which looked out on the garden; and while the sunny summer made the flowers bud, even underneath the trees, we stood side by side and inhaled a breath of that real life which neither Marguerite nor myself had understood till then.

This young woman displayed a childish astonishment at the smallest trifles, and on certain days would run about the garden like a girl of ten, chasing a butterfly or a dragonfly. This courtesan, on whose bouquets more money had been spent than could easily have supported a whole family, would sometimes sit down on the grass examining for a whole hour the simple flower whose name she bore.

ON THE LAWN in front of the shack, on a sunny Saturday morning in winter, when the mild light, shrouded and indirect, and the shrouded, indirect warmth grant a general amnesty to everyone and everything: the shack and everything belonging to it; the field, which is the field of thorns next to Sammy’s welding shop and beyond it, up to the white of the reservoir, which is not white — only from a distance, in the flat, uniform grayness of the thorns, does it look white; the shacks beyond the hill of thorns, which seem to be planted on the slope of the hill, tilting like cups about to spill their contents; the quarter-shack of the amm with the cows, next to Nona sitting on the space above the concrete steps that she calls her porch and talking to Rachel Amsalem’s father, who is inside his house with only his voice emerging from the window; the asphalt road with the long beds of sand on either side; and the emptiness of the road that now seems happy rather than sad; and the mother and Sammy and Corinne and I, who are not sitting together on the yellowing lawn, and if we were then only for a few minutes, leaving our impressions and other traces in the shape of cigarette stubs ground into the lawn by Sammy and Corinne, Corinne pretending to be asleep with her face to the wall, and Sammy really sleeping the guiltless sleep of the just, undisturbed by dreams, a sleep complete and satisfied, needing nothing, extending the stillness of the shack and its rooms, which the mother and I were spewed out of, on our feet from six in the morning, Sabbath or no Sabbath, she doing and doing and I watching or not, going back and forth, from Nona’s porch to the mother’s veranda and the yellowing lawn bordering the veranda, which propped up the mother with her legs stretched out in front of her, her feet encased in Sammy’s short woolen socks, with the knitting she took up because all the women knitted, adding crooked row to crooked row, in despair and irritation because this knitting got on her nerves in the end, and with one eye open to the road and the street, to the pounding of the steps on the road and the paved path leading to the shack, and what might become of them at any minute, what could they be, which is the prophecy of the anxious heart and the muffled hope, the constant expectation of something that would shatter the silence of the garden, which was not actually blooming but which could be, someone’s steps on the path, which could be the hasty steps of the neighbor who might have called to her, conferred with her for a few minutes, and whom she might have accompanied to the big road, leading to the big city, not the private road in the neighborhood, abandoning her knitting on the lawn and following him with pursed lips to the place he pointed out, where perhaps Maurice was waiting, after getting a ride from Tel Aviv, standing there in his crumpled suit, in which he had spent the night on somebody’s sofa, waiting for her, leaning on the trunk of a tree in his dark horn-rimmed glasses, watching her coming as she stopped in her tracks five steps away from him on the other side of the road, saying in her heart what he could have said and said and said.

NO, HE DIDN’T make a good impression on Rabbi Nathaniel, Maurice, precisely because he tried so hard; he sat at the edge of the sofa in the spacious house in Savyon, his legs crossed, and he “showed off,” said the mother, “how he showed off.” She took him there one of the times when he emerged from his darkness and came to the shack for a few days “on a trial basis”; he wanted to find a refuge for a while and he found one, until he left or was made to leave again. Why did she take him to Rabbi Nathaniel, why, really?

They came like a couple, him and her, toward evening, sat on the sofa in Rabbi Nathaniel’s living room, which she had cleaned in the morning. She dressed nicely, specially. He always dressed nicely, always stylish, never mind the time of day, even when he didn’t have a penny in his pocket. They rang the doorbell: ting-a-ling . And again: ting-a-ling . Maurice’s lean, carved face shone under the entrance lamp like galvanized tin in the sun: he decided to be alive there in the meeting because he wanted badly to die, to bury himself in the ground. He had to swallow a frog the size of an elephant at the idea of this ghastly meeting and at the meeting itself: he was going to meet his wife’s “employers,” the ones whose house she cleaned, his wife. “How can you lower yourself like that?” he shouted once, not then: “How can you go and be a housemaid?” “What am I going to live on?” she answered him. “Where’s the shame in it? It’s shameful to steal, that’s shameful, not to earn a living by the sweat of your brow.” She said what in her opinion she should have thought and felt, and which to some extent she did think and feel, but only to some extent. For her, shame came from another place: it wasn’t the conceit of class or the pride of a girl from a good family that triggered it, but the pure generosity and warmheartedness, the generosity of Rabbi Nathaniel, that always left her speechless and ashamed.

They conversed, Rabbi Nathaniel and Maurice; they bandied words in an exchange that had the appearance of a conversation, during the course of which Rabbi Nathaniel asked questions and Maurice “twisted and turned,” his narrow gleaming eyes glancing sideways at the reflection, at the giant imaginary mirror standing at their right, next to the long, non-imaginary sofa in the non-imaginary living room, in which were reflected not their figures, but the silvery metallic flashing of the swords in the imaginary duel silently taking place between them. The rabbi didn’t say much, he mainly listened, laying his little traps, while Maurice said and said, and the more he sensed the net spreading at his feet, the more he talked: he talked about his journeys in the world and the people he met and became acquainted with, about his friendship with Picasso and his friendship with Yigal Allon, about his social and political views and about what he repeatedly referred to as his “philosophy, which is different.” In this outpouring of himself he lost his footing and sank deeper and deeper, disappearing in front of the sharp, direct clarity in the look of the rabbi, this new protector of “his wife,” whose frankness and friendliness he saw as pious, patronizing hypocrisy. He said nothing when they left and made their way to the neighborhood, but when they arrived at the shack he wouldn’t go in. He got the last bus to Tel Aviv without even taking his shaving gear.