Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Trailing behind her like a wooden horse on wheels pulled by a rope, falling to its side and dragged upside down, I dreamed my dreams. Next to the vendors’ scales I dreamed, with the swollen string bag between my legs, standing in the middle of the alley and jostled on every side I dreamed, next to the chicken man, when the bag slipped from my hands, when she forgot her purse on the mountain of oranges, when I wet my feet in the puddle of muddy water that had washed the lettuce, the dill, the parsley, the coriander, and the mint.

I resisted. The dreaminess was my resistance. Slowly, secretly, and at some imperceptible point of balance between control and lack of control, between effort and relaxation, the absence that was my resistance swelled inside me, like a secret garden growing, deepening its roots: at first I slipped into the absence of daydreaming because it was second nature to me. Afterward, when the daydream faded, I pretended and continued to outwardly observe all the ritual requirements of absence (staring into space, passivity, chewing hair ends, deafness and silence when addressed). As I did so the pretense suddenly changed into something else, as if an electric current had been switched on, it stopped being a pretense, and the fake became real, even deeper and more comprehensive than before: what materialized from blurring the boundaries between pretending and not pretending, from my game of masks, was an absence of consciousness that was not only like sinking into a ready-made bed, but also something deliberately switched on in a convoluted inner process. In a matter of moments I could turn myself into stone or air: the market was my first training ground.

I couldn’t see her. Far away, between the melon stall and the side of a van unloading produce, she suddenly disappeared from view. The basket was still stuck between my legs on the ground and on my cheek I suddenly felt the cool dampness of hair plastered to it. I said to myself that I should call out, but I couldn’t: I knew I would not be heard in the terrible row, the noise of the engine, the crowds milling around among all the other cries, and even if anyone heard me, they wouldn’t believe me, because I didn’t believe myself. I looked at the vendor on my right: he crossed his arms on his chest, smoked a cigarette, looked at me but through me. I was transparent. I searched for the pattern of blue and brown diamonds on her dress in the crowd. When I looked up, to my surprise I saw the balcony of a residential apartment, a blanket thrown across the railing to air, normal life. I felt the pounding of my temples, I clenched my hands and opened them to stop the trembling and the strange tickling sensation crawling up from my ankles and advancing toward my neck. My sense of guilt was too great for me to feel its full force at that moment or any other moment, only the brief, ticklish touch of its hairy tail brushed past my face. In the emptiness and paralysis of my dread, the inanimateness of what could be called my “self,” the recognition dawned on me, the beginning of a sharp pain that grew sharper, burning my chest, that it was she who had given up on me, that she wasn’t looking for me and she never would. I leaped from my place, leaving the basket behind me, and charged down the alley, elbowing people out of my way with all my strength, until I arrived blind and breathless at the spice shop almost at the end of the market, which also sold loofahs of varying sizes and roughness. There was a little crowd gathered at the shop entrance. I came closer. She was sitting on a folding chair, her head falling a little backwards, pressing an ice cube to her neck, close to her chin. There was a faint, pale look in her eyes, and on her face, like the shadow cast by the lace veil of a hat, was a Corinne-like expression, fragile and delicate as glass. She smiled: “I was just going to buy the loofah when suddenly I didn’t feel well,” she apologized.

AT LEAST ONCE a week, when she got back from work at night, there was some kind of disturbance: neighbors, police, a doctor, the deputy head of the council, neighbors, the guy from the grocery, his brother who had dropped in to visit him and came along, too.

“The child!” the electric cables stretched above the street transmitted the voice, sending sparks flying as it passed through them with lightning speed, a rolling ball of fire. “The child!” growled the barrel at the side of the road, cracking the cast concrete beneath it. “The child!” spelled the stone fence in Spanish, checking the dictionary to be sure, “The child, the child,” whispered the faded leaves of the Persian Lilac tree to the clicking of the knitting needles of the butterfly cocoons, “The child?” asked the electric saws in Yossi’s carpentry shop, “The child!” asserted the empty dog kennel. “The child, the child, the child,” repeated the cigarette stubs of the workers who had laid the road, waking up under the asphalt to the sound of her steps, rising out of the earth and turning into leaden spurs that broke through the asphalt and hit the soles of her shoes, waking them from their rubber sleep and rubber dreams with mirror writing: “eht dlihc, eht dlihc, eht dlihc.”

“The child,” said Nona over and over, wringing her hands which were shiny with the Veluta cream she had rubbed on them absentmindedly a few minutes before, only because the tube was lying next to the armchair. The child sat with her shampooed hair at the table covered with a green oilcloth in Nona’s kitchenette eating a hard-boiled egg, only the white.

On the concrete landing at the top of Nona’s steps, people were still gathered, but only the close neighbors, whose garrulous voices merged into a broad, monotonous murmur from which the words “Madame Esther, Madame Esther” emerged in varying tones at different pitches. The sharp dryness of the mother, who elbowed her way in with the bag hanging from her shoulder, was like a cold shower: everyone was gone in a matter of minutes. “What happened? Who died? What’s all the fuss and bother about the child this time?” she asked. Nona decided to feel insulted: “If that’s the way you’re going to ask, I’d better not answer.” She put on the expression of self-importance that always accompanied the sentence that hung in the air, spoken or unspoken: “I’ll go to my corner and I won’t bother anybody.”

Her corner, however, was not only occupied by Sammy but had expanded to cover more territory: he had fallen asleep on her armchair with his outstretched legs on the bed, together with the cup and the plate from which he had eaten earlier, the last bite chewed in his sleep. Sammy was a good topic, a ladder to help her get down from the tree she had climbed: “He was so worried about the child, the poor boy almost had a heart attack,” she said. “Get up,” the mother shook his shoulder, “get up.” She looked at Nona, at Sammy’s sleep-stunned face and back again at Nona: “The two of you should be locked up,” she said, “you and him both.”

* * *

THE CHILD liked to hide, in other people’s beds, for example, or huddled in the corner of the closet on the eiderdown, sniffing the sheets and the hem of the mother’s winter coat, or under the bed, or in the deep narrow ditch Sammy dug behind the welding shop when he wanted to build a bowling alley, or on a bed of leaves in a little hollow in the depths of the orange grove, or curled up in an empty cardboard box in the neighbors’ yard. She liked to curl up in very small spaces, to shrink the volume of her body so there wasn’t a single slit of light between one limb and another.

For hours she would nestle in the hiding places that she didn’t call hiding places, in the dense darkness that covered her to the top of her head, in the inside of the inside of the inside of something, wrapping and wrapped, distant and deep and muffled as the bottom of a submarine on the ocean bed, when all that could be seen through the glass was darkness and all that could be heard was the sound of breathing listening to itself, even in the inside of the inside of something, until even it, the breathing, turned from outside to deep inside, where there was no sound at all, only the utter silence that was darkness and the darkness that was silence. She didn’t move: the echoes of Nona’s calls, of Sammy’s, of the siren, rolled like heavy stones high above her head, over the distant earth that was not her affair, no longer her affair, just as the panic, her own panic that swelled and shrunk like a bellows, was not her affair, she was separate and the panic was separate, wrapped in darkness like her, breathless, postponing the world from moment to moment, postponing the moment of responding and emerging from hiding, which, the more it was postponed, the more it receded into the distance, growing smaller and bigger at the same time.