Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

She clasped her hands delicately, shook her head with reserved, almost bureaucratic regret. “I won’t,” she said.

I was astonished: For the first time she was completely separate, in some place, over there, that I couldn’t even imagine, speaking through a wall. “But why not?” I tried to keep hold of her. She smiled a weary, knowing kind of smile, resigned, and pointed to the end of the hall, not far from her bed. My eyes followed her finger: an ageless man was standing there, wearing faded but not shabby work clothes, holding some kind of tool in his hand, a broom or a rake. He must be one of the workers here, I figured. “I love him,” she said in flat tone, through the wall, with a faint smile whose meaning I didn’t understand. “He’s poor, sick, lonely, he doesn’t talk, he’s younger than me. He’s nothing. He won’t amount to anything, but I’ll stay with him. I won’t come to the familia , finished.”

THE FAMILY WAS almost familia but familia wasn’t the same as the family, because of the dim, winding, two-way corridors that pass from one language to another. “The family” was only ever a kind of prosthesis attached to the body in place of the missing limb, which, despite the practiced, almost natural use she learned to make of it, never lost its strangeness, its twisted smile, just as her Hebraized name. (It was Lucette, but when she arrived in the country they told her, you’re Levana. For years she would turn around whenever someone called her Levana, looking for the person with that name.) When she said “the family” instead of familia it was as if she were watching from the side, as if she had become, for a moment, the authorities.

There was no bitterness or ill feeling in this change, only the cheerful appearance of cooperation. She excelled in the cheerful appearance of cooperation, which was not an act but a deep truth, she would say. This was part of what she called our “mentality.” “It’s our mentality” she said, with a sigh that was both proud and resigned.

Among other things, “our mentality” involved the ability to adopt an appearance, to put on a face that a person showed to the world, which was not a negligible thing. She would say, “We eat with our eyes.” Or “A person eats first with his eyes.” Among other characteristics, this was the “mentality”: she came from a culture of the gaze.

With all this business of the gaze, it’s strange to remember how she was plagued all her life by eye troubles: her father, Grandfather Izak, suffered from bad eyes at a relatively young age, in his forties, due to severe diabetes.

Her mother, Nona Esther, lost more than 80 percent of her vision, making her almost blind.

Her first husband, my big brother’s father, lost his left eye either to a disease or to a work accident, it’s not clear which.

My brother Sammy was afflicted with herpes as a child and lost the sight in his left eye due to medical negligence.

She herself, in her sixties, suffered paralysis of half her face, which damaged her left eye.

The history of the familia and her place in it tiptoed around holes, pits of heavy, ambivalent silence: the eye troubles were there in the silence, the partial blindness, the flaws.

In my childhood our home was full of little plastic tubs containing dark lukewarm water; three or four tea bags floated in the liquid, and sodden dripping bits of cotton that someone — she, my brother, or my grandmother — would put on their eyelids as they half-reclined, stretching their necks with their Adam’s apples sticking out as if for the slaughterer, using the corner of a towel to wipe the liquid trickling into their lips and chins. They hardly moved, pressed the cotton to their eyelids, waiting for relief with faces bathed in brown rivulets: silent eyeless weeping that seemed to well from their foreheads, the tears of gods or rocks, not of people.

I would sit on the carpet at their feet, each of them with the dripping tea compresses, and I’d watch their stillness, in suspense — it was the stillness of big wild animals laid low for a moment. When with effort they finally opened their eyes, blinking in the light, their eyelids were circled by dark rings, as if they had been punched or hadn’t slept for nights. They would rise to their feet, swaying, dizzy from lying down for so long with their eyes closed. There was nothing healthy about this tortured procedure, but in her rushing impatience, she would quickly pronounce her eyes “Better,” or “Better now,” or, in moments of expansiveness but not waiting for the answer, “Better now?”

SHE WAS “MY mother,” a phrase that had the taste of something foreign, because among ourselves and sometimes to her face we called her “the mother”—the mother’s coming, the mother’s gone, the mother said, where’s the mother? Maurice, too, especially Maurice (my father, another phrase with a foreign flavor) called her “the mother,” but then he would say, “You know what the mother’s like.”

We knew what the mother was like. Our knowledge of her, which was made up of countless inner withdrawals, silent understandings and agreements, a weave of dread and love that kept changing its colors, had us riveted. Each of us in his own way was riveted by her, all our lives, anticipating her, but more accurately anticipating her changing from one thing to another. Those transformations of hers, the contradictions reversing themselves from one minute to the next, defined us and then defined us again.

In my imagination I sometimes saw the threads that tied us to her, both flexible and durable, like threads pulled from a lump of gum: the more you stretched them the thinner they grew, almost invisible but still holding to the original lump. This glue, the huge lump, stuck in your mouth, making it impossible to move your jaw; it crammed your mouth and pushed into your throat — this is connected to an image of sickness. To what happened when I was sick.

I was very sick with some kind of illness when I was four or five years old. I had a very high fever that didn’t go down for days, with the delirium that went along with it. I lay in her bed, in her room, the bedroom. Hers was the only room in the shack referred to with a certain ceremony as “the bedroom.” She allowed me to lie in her double bed, in which for years — forever, in fact — there had been no mate. While I lay in bed she was at work. She had two jobs: from early in the morning to midday she cleaned a house in the affluent suburb of Savyon, and from early in the afternoon until almost midnight she worked at the youth center in Petach Tikva, where she acted for years as the house mother. At noon she came home for an hour, “to put her head down,” blink at two pages of Simenon in French, change her clogs for the afternoon lace-ups, and grab a bite “standing up.”

The days were mauve, with no day or night, as if they had been soaked in a tub of dye; this period of profound illness was for me the time of childhood: there was no past or future, I was aware only of eternity, a heavy sleep of the soul, an eternity that was nothing but a constant sense of suffocation. The walls of the bedroom were painted a soft lavender, a little faded: this was her mauve period. For hours, days at a stretch, I lay in her bed with my head on a pile of pillows arranged by Nona Esther, to make it easier for me to breathe. Facing me were the white Formica doors of the clothes closet, reflecting the pale light from the bedside lamps. On my right, to the right of the bed, was the window looking out on the backyard. The Nona had closed the blinds, but she opened one in a rage whenever she “dropped in” to see how I was. Every day, one of them closed, one open in protest.