Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

SAMMY DOESN’T WRITE because he doesn’t write. There is no pen or pencil in the world that fits the non-grip of his knotty, swollen fingers: coarse, wounded skin on coarse, wounded skin, knotty layer upon knotty layer. He consumes whole tubes of Nona’s Veluta and scarcely succeeds in bending his stiff fingers, only a little and only for a while, until they forget how to be soft and go back to being hard again. Sometimes they burn. Sometimes he wakes up at night from the burning of his hands. This goes together with the burning of his eye, which was penetrated by a chip from the welding. He lies in the light of the night lamp. There is the murmur of sick people in the room, murmuring shadows of sickness against the walls. Poultices soaked in tea on the burning eye and cool, greasy cream on the burning hands, but not the cream prescribed by the doctor, which he forgot to buy, lost the prescription. He hasn’t got what’s called a “touch.” Only a scratch. “Better I don’t touch,” he says. And also: “Bring me a pencil to write something down.” The pads of his fingers fail to grip the pencil. Again and again they try, and again it slips and drops. Someone else writes for him: me, or Corinne, or the worker, or me. He always complains: “How did you write it, tell me, how?” he cries, lounging in the chair, devouring the soft part of the bread and imagining out loud: “Just imagine if I was a tailor, threading those thin needles all day.”

EVERY MORNING, WHEN she went out earlier than early, she said to Sammy: “Make the child her sandwich for school, you hear?” He didn’t hear, he covered his head with the thick blanket, his face scrunched up in pleasure. The child woke him, stood next to the bed dressed in the clothes that would have gotten her in big trouble if the mother had seen them: a fancy dress of bright colors, pulled out of the closet and patched together. He mumbled, pulled the blanket higher over his head so that his legs were exposed to the knee. At the big recess he’d turn up in the schoolyard with the sandwich he would have liked for himself, only the kind he would have liked for himself, wrapped in plastic and crammed into his pocket — two slices of bread, each about four inches thick, generously smeared with a pink paste of cream cheese and half a jar of strawberry jam. She threw it in the trash and bought herself a roll with sour pickles on credit at the kiosk next to the school, which she ate bite by bite: one bite for her, one for Havatzelet. Havatzelet pushed back her heavy black curls a little when she bent over the roll and held them loosely to her cheek. The child looked in wonder at Havatzelet’s slender fingers gathering a tress of hair, her hollowed hand hovering for a moment over her cheek, touching and not touching. Everything Havatzelet did or said cast a stone into a lake, leaving circles of wonder on the surface of the water. But she didn’t say much, and what she did say sounded like ground gravel: she was deaf and mute, Havatzelet, she sat in the front row to read the teacher’s lips, with the child always at her side, watching with bated breath as the lines of the notebook filled with Havatzelet’s writing, line after line, a pattern of embroidery.

The perfection of her handwriting was almost sublime, so superior that it left no room for envy, only gave rise to a desire to kneel in adoration: the letters were pure and clear even in their moments of greatest convolution, following each other neatly at a slight, even slant, continuing each other but not joined together, as if they had given birth to one another by breath or by sound, similar but not identical, attentive to their place in the word and at the same time to the broad tapestry of the line and the page, which was whole and symmetrical without being monotonous. The child brought Havatzelet gifts: Rosemarie chocolate, a bead bracelet she stole from Corinne, and the musical box in the form of a Swiss chalet that Maurice had once sent. Every day after school the two of them went to the child’s house, where nobody was home, took off their clothes and draped themselves in the mother’s ironed tablecloths and sheets, sipped the wine the child boiled in the coffeepot and served, because that was what the children drank in Model Little Girls by the Comtesse de Ségur. Their heads heavy with the hot wine, they stretched out on the lawn outside, still wrapped in the tablecloths and turbans, closing their eyes in consent when the pine tree shed its needles on their faces. Nona stood on her concrete steps and called to the child in a loud voice, but the child didn’t answer, she went on listening to the ugly obscure speech emerging from Havatzelet’s mouth, the words ground into a thick, coarse growl, strained, rising and falling, repulsive and fascinating at once, so foreign to her fragile wrists, to the etched, quivering lips that produced these sounds. She brought Havatzelet her notebook from her schoolbag, and opened it: “Write, Havatzelet, write,” she requested, putting a sharpened pencil in her hand and almost forcing it onto the paper: “Write.” Havatzelet wrote. There was a silence, which Nona’s stubborn calls only emphasized. Once more the rows of pearls flowed from Havatzelet’s hand, the slanting letters stretched their long necks like proud young colts.

The child kept on spoiling new notebooks. The first half of the first page, so fresh and pure, bore letters and words that tried to tame themselves, to aspire to emulate those of Havatzelet, but in the middle of the gleaming expanse of the page they collapsed, became themselves, broke with one jerk of the elbow the beautiful glass cage in which they had been placed, and galloped off wildly in all directions, distorted, clamorous, and blind as a famished mob falling on crusts of bread thrown to them on the road: one letter screeched, gaped with a black, toothless mouth or grew a monstrous growth on its forehead, another bent down to gather its scattered limbs, a third was spiky as a porcupine, a fourth lost the force of gravity and flew, while another bit its ankle with a sharp tooth. The child looked and saw filth: that’s what it was, filth. At night, when she lay with her eyes open, adding penny to penny — the money she had stolen from Nona’s purse and the money she would steal tomorrow from the mother to buy more new notebooks from Levy — assailed by the memory of the filthy writing from which there was no escape, she felt in full force the existence of the thing inside her and its constant expansion, the source of the contamination with which she was wholly infected, inside and out, expressed in the letters whose ugliness was evil, a sin that clung to her, that turned her into someone else and gave birth in her place to that other, corrupted child with the monstrous handwriting.

The spoiled notebooks with the writing on the first page piled up in the big drawer of the chest, covered with newspapers, but the mother found them and flew into a towering rage at the scandalous waste. The supply was cut off: she went to Levy and warned him not to sell the child any more notebooks. The child wrote in the spoiled notebooks at tremendous speed and almost with her eyes closed, so as not to see her handwriting, and only on one side of the page. Havatzelet evaporated overnight in the cold air now coming from the child, she was absorbed by the cement between the bricks of the child’s inner fortress.

THE PITS OF time, what were they, the pits of time? Wherever Maurice was, that was the pits of time. And also the rumors of where Maurice was. Now and then the mother threw a scrap into the pits of time: “Sammy found him sleeping on a bench in the street after his landlord threw him out.”