Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

“I wrote about it,” he said, years later.

THE SUHBA, THE political organization I established to deal with the issue of the ethnic Mizrahi groups and their situation, zealously carried out the resolution to take action to exhort and arouse our public and explain our problems to it. The staff of the organ HaMeorer , which I edited, and the intellectuals among us activated the rest of the members of the Suhba in the neighborhoods. Together and hand in hand they established a kind of national secretariat that took frequent action on a regular basis. The members of this secretariat met with me on an almost daily basis, and together we would analyze the situation and prepare for action. In the meantime, to our great regret, the economic condition of our community did not benefit from any positive developments and only deteriorated, especially from the point of view of morale and morals, which were severely impaired by the Ben-Gurionist propaganda and “education” policy. The persecution, the deception, and the anger increased the pressure on the masses of the Sephardie population, who were subject to virtual imprisonment. The press and the various propaganda agencies were still under the exclusive patronage of Ben-Gurionism, which forbade any publication of our activities and our very existence. This despite the fact that for our part we took care to send them all pamphlets and bulletins explaining our situation and our position on controversial questions.… After the many abortive attempts by the Ben-Gurionists to co-opt me with all kinds of corrupt bribes, and when they realized that I personally would not renounce the principles I believed in, whatever the cost, they turned their arrows on my family, the members of my household, and those dear to me.

Knowing that my wife and my three children were the only property and assets I had left, they decided to take that, too, from me. In this way it was easier for them to carry out their ultimate design, which was to kill my soul through a method of mental torture culminating in spiritual and moral death. Therefore they chose my wife, my children, and the members of my household as the most convenient way of carrying out their dastardly design. In order to commit this murder, they aimed all their cannons of separation, intimidation, and slander at the walls of my home. They did this with a systematic cunning that would have shamed the vilest racists and anti-Semites. Because spiritual and moral death in its suffering and criminality is a far worse catastrophe than the murder of a man in cold blood.

Let me mention the fact that one of the cannons they employed in the execution of their design was a highly respected chief rabbi and well-known writer, who was also close to the government, the espionage agencies, the Jewish National Fund, the Labor Federation, the Jewish Agency, and so on and so forth. As mentioned above, this wealthy and respected rabbi was only one among the many agents who acted to destroy my family life and to sow separation and mistrust between me and the members of my household. Unfortunately for the important rabbi, I later came into possession of a document in his handwriting that confirms these accusations. This contemptible warfare, in which my wife served as the puppet whose strings were pulled by the Ben-Gurionists, left its mark on the letters I received from her in Athens as well. Every letter contained an ultimatum, admonishments, threats, and warnings, such as: 1) Since you have decided to continue along this path, you should return to Israel forthwith to finalize the divorce proceedings between us. 2) The rabbinate in Athens has been required to take legal steps against you, including your arrest, in order to return you to Israel for the purpose of granting me a divorce. 3) The children hate you, they are ashamed of your opinions, and they don’t even want to know you. You have no chance of overcoming the situation, because there are important people supporting me and helping me to finish with you.

A FEW MONTHS after she died, in a nine-foot-square room in an assisted living facility for the elderly in the Hatikva quarter: Maurice’s narrow eyes with their exaggerated glitter, which is now the glitter of the fear of death and not of vitality, try to crack the stiff scab of his face. As on all the days when he doesn’t leave his room, he is dressed in long white flannel underpants and a long-sleeved flannel undershirt, and over them a burgundy-red sweater with a deep V-neck. This slightly Bohemian sweater with the boyish neck is the only marginal note to recall his previous existence.

The room is stuffy, closed, an electric heater emits white vapors at his feet, even though it’s already May. “Your birthday’s in May,” he suddenly remembers, sending up a bubble in the dense, still water of his withdrawal. He says that he’s been waiting for someone for an hour but the someone hasn’t shown up: the social worker, the nurse from the clinic who’s supposed to give him a shot, Dror, his messenger boy and disciple, or Solomon, that friend of his who brought him his last canary. Solomon breeds canaries in a giant cage in the yard of his house in Kfar Shalem, and from time to time he gives him a canary to keep him company. They were all eaten by the cats. He can’t keep the room closed all day long, and when he sleeps they get in, break into the cage somehow, and eat the birds. “It’s a pity about that one,” he says. “She sang sweetly.” His brown arms, horrifying in their thinness, grip the arms of the chair as if at any minute he would be uprooted and shot forward. There is an incomprehensible gap between the impression of strength radiating from the grip of the arms and the emptiness of the body, the sketch of a body hinted at underneath his clothes. He often closes his eyes in weariness, pain, sorrow, or for show. I prefer the fourth possibility. Again he takes off from the no-place of talking, which is the place we are standing in now, where we have always stood: “Nobody came to take me to her there in the hospital, not Sammy, not your sister, and not you. I asked and asked and nobody came,” he says, staring at the coatrack opposite, where a wet towel is hanging, with an expression of wonder on his face, as if he has just noticed something he never noticed before. In this new tone of complaint (he never complained, even at his lowest hours, and there were plenty of them), which struck a note not of nagging but of dread, there is something chilling: flat, lacking intonation, gray, the unheroic, unembellished voice of the summing up of an unheroic, unembellished life. He is at the finishing line of his rhetoric. “And I didn’t see her with my own eyes at the end,” he says, his face — with his enormous mouth splitting it in the middle as if it had been cut in half with a knife — moves very slightly, a faint twitching of the left cheekbone under the dry, open eye.

SHE WENT TO the market on Thursdays, taking me to help her: “Hold this for a minute,” “Keep an eye on this for a minute,” “Bring me the basket,” “Go and stand in front of that woman,” “In the meantime pick out the good ones, the good ones” (putting whatever I had chosen back in the barrow). Like almost everything else, the market was a battleground, but this time the battle was not only hers: over the money, over the quality, over the upper hand in the bargaining, over the line, over gaining access to the produce, over negotiating the crowds, over the seat near the door on the bus, over stopping “not at the station” but in front of the house, because of the heavy baskets. How contemptible and terrifying all this was: and the more contemptible, the more terrifying it was. I walked two steps behind her, so no one would associate me with her. The revolting beige plastic clogs she wore on her calloused feet with the polish peeling from the toenails (“I didn’t have time for Miriam this month”), her battledress, a housecoat with buttons down the front, which was already faded and frayed by washing, the rings of sweat under her armpits, lengthening toward her waist, her impatience, her pushing and shoving, the haggling over pennies, and especially the insults she showered on the vendors, to their faces and behind their backs (“as ugly as his ugly mug, the tomatoes today”), which were accepted with surprising indifference, as part of the rules of the game.