Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Then comes the second era, the middle period of the first years of immigration and dismantling the portrait, every portrait: she has no face in the few photographs of that first decade in Israel. She is always bending over something, and even when she is not bending she is bowed. Her face appears in the photograph as the background, not the subject, lacking contours and dissolving like a puddle of milk on the surface of a tablecloth. The photograph in Piazza San Marco is from then, from the era of the portrait without a subject.

MORE THAN AN unalloyed so-called family photograph, this is a moment of unalloyed motherhood coming out of nowhere: her exposed hand, sticking out of the green coat and resting on the front of the child’s body, keeping her from falling to the ground, to the square with the pigeons, while the other hand supports her back. Her face is turned to the child, not to the photographer, in semi-profile. The pleading intensity of her face as it is turned toward the child is like an act of theft: she has stolen this moment of family reunion and replaced it with motherhood, the moment belongs to the mother and child, to what they alone share.

She kneels by the child’s side as if she always kneels, as if she bends down, first in her imagination and then in her body, to the height of a child. She didn’t. She possessed a strange kind of panic and great impatience toward infantile neediness, which calls for a response made distinct by a thousand nuances, a thousand gestures and finely tuned attentions in which there is no room for yallah . And how could she live without saying yallah ? She, who was built to be only the mother of large-scale, heavy undertakings, with bulldozers, rescue teams, helicopters, and cranes.

“Me, I never had the patience for babies,” she said. “In Egypt, with Sammy and then Corinne, I would beg the cook to change places with me, for her to be with them and I would clean and cook,” she said. “Doing nothing all day but take care of all those baby things drove me crazy,” she said in moments of total honesty, which were also total lies. Babies died in her womb and in her hands. She was afraid of the babies’ deaths and she was afraid of the fear. After twenty days, with urgency and a sense of relief, she handed the child over to Nona, like an explosive device.

PEOPLE SAID ABOUT her: a beautiful woman. She’s a beautiful woman. Corinne added: “When she wants to. When she wants to, she can hold her own,” said Corinne with a certain resentment, the residue of resentment she harbored not against anyone specific, but against the world in general, against disintegration, the decline and ruin inherent in things from the outset. She did not count what others considered beautiful (“Everyone says. So what if they do?”). Her thoughts on “beauty” were convoluted and obscure, while at the same time she strove for the clarity of an executioner: life or death. She detested the awkward efforts, whose clumsy stitches were visible from miles away, connected to the appearance of beauty. Not that she thought the appearance of beauty was rooted in anything casual or absentminded. Not at all. Only for her striving for beauty took a different course, a different orientation, stemming first of all from one’s inner bearing. “It’s the way she wears it, how she carries herself,” she explained, when she took the trouble to explain, giving the mother the benefit of her strict, slightly sour, discerning eye, snapping: “Put on the coat. It’s better when you wear the coat.” She was right. The moment the coat went on was a moment of metamorphosis, an immediate transformation from being a faded “nobody in particular,” from her deliberate self-effacement, into a “lady.” The coat and the moment of putting it on gave her a new and longer spine, which straightened her back not in a stiff and belligerent way but with a calm and powerful radiation of awareness of “Who she was,” which suddenly came awake, from within.

The coats hung side by side in the depths of the closet, near the side, almost all of them hand-me-downs from her sister Marcelle, except for the green one, which wasn’t green except in the photograph and according to Corinne. She was the one who said, “the bottle-green coat from Venice,” and the mother after her, “the bottle-green,” expunging “Venice.” Corinne admired it always, she never tired of examining the big brass buttons and the part of the belt behind the buckle: “It’s a good coat, this coat, at long last you’ve got something really good,” she said to the mother, scolding her for putting it into the parcel to give away five or six times; each time she took it out for fear of the fuss Corinne would make, Corinne, whose fanaticism had detached the coat from its context, ripped out the threads of memories woven into it, and placed it on the lofty pedestal she reserved for “really beautiful” things.

It wasn’t bottle-green, the coat: I carried out a thorough inspection of its olive-gray shade of mohair when I cut out a big rectangle of the fabric, from the hem to the pocket, to make a shoulder bag in handicraft class at school. Afterward, for fear of being found out, I crammed the remains of the coat into a plastic bag and buried it deep in the construction dumpster behind the shack.

HER NON-WRITING, HER wounded handwriting, tormented by the Hebrew letters. Her shame at the wounded writing. At night, with the milky tea, the electric heater at the foot of the bed, the crust of bread dipped in the milky tea, the nightgown she put on as quick as she could in the cold room, slipping off her underwear once she was in the nightgown, still in her work shoes with the short socks, thinking of tomorrow, getting ready for tomorrow: postdated checks, payments on account, a debt due. At first her graying head bowed over the checkbook, her hand gripping the pen as if it had never held a pen before, writing the numbers in the box and then stopping, reflecting, waiting for the letters to reveal themselves. “Come and write these checks for me,” she finally asked, but not in anger or impatience but complete surrender. At the bottom of the check she signed, wet her fingers, and handed over check after check: intervals of air separated each weak, ungainly letter. This gap between the letters, the white space she was careful to leave between them, was her acknowledgment of the strange language, of its foreignness: in French the letters are joined.

THE SHACK WOULDN’T allow anyone to have nice handwriting, not that it forbade them, it simply exuded not-nice handwriting, because unlike the mother and her wishes, the shack wanted to freeze movement in time, to freeze our faltering, difficult beginnings, the lack of progress along the lengthwise axis of time hobbling the advance along the widthwise axis, the growth. Unlike the mother, the shack adhered to tradition, a tradition of eternal childhood, which it kept simmering on a low flame in the great storehouse of eternal childhood, that is, the attic above the shack, which we reached by a ladder from the outside and where the letters were folded askew inside the crammed cardboard boxes, where the bent screws and nails of old tables, the old sideboard, the shelves made of fiberboard, not wood, were exiled among the other things that belonged to the past — the past embodied in matter, in the mass of things that squatted on the plywood ceiling, making it bulge and sag over the living room and the other rooms.

The sagging, slightly dark bulge in the ceiling — a dark spot that defeated all the layers of paint that tried to cover it — rained down the age of six-seven, the letters of the age of six-seven, in a ceaseless shower, the precise notes of the choreography of the movement of the hand and the ungainliness of the movement, and the thing that was abandoned, the crooked abandoned letters that were abandoned precisely because they remained as they were, in the frozen quivering of the movement that is never completed and never grows and remains behind in its awkwardness, even when the speech is nice or as-if nice, Corinne’s as-if nice speech, and Sammy’s don’t-want-to-be nice speech, and the too-nice speech of the child, who saw the fall of the letters, the imperative of the ungainly, not-nice letters that was right like the groan was right, the groan of the shack renewing itself and regretting its ceaseless renewal, trailing behind, dragging behind itself as it ran forward in the wake of the mother, who gave birth to the command of the crooked letters and the unintelligible writing, but gave birth to it from the rear, not the front, like a stepchild, and, without seeing, either the command or the denial of the command, nailing us to the rain of crooked letters that were the duty of loyalty to the mother and the mother’s shame, which the shack remembered in every one of its stages of accumulation, because it never stopped being itself for a moment at every stage, in height, breadth, and length, carrying the one unchangeable, remembering face, under all the other faces stamped on it, against the mother’s will or in obedience to it, remembering the debt of shame and the debt of the handicap of the weak, limping handwriting, growing fainter until it almost disappeared, and turned into a transparent thread tying the four of us together.