Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Or: “He goes from one friend to another, sleeps on their living-room couches, until they get tired of him, too.”

Or: “Did you find him, ya Sammy?” And again, lying on the couch, pale and muddled, half asleep, waiting for hours for Sammy to return from his search: “Did you find him?”

Once they put a notice in the paper, the mother and Sammy, small but on the first page: “Maurice, call home.”

They needed him to get a passport for the child.

THE BEDROOM WAS tip-top, but sometimes she fell asleep on the living-room couch, like a babysitter waiting for the children’s parents to come home, making this sleep and falling asleep something snatched, taken illegally, in parentheses, ready at any moment to get up and move on. In this way she managed her insomnia; she tricked it by moving from place to place. She wrapped herself in the airplane blanket that Aunt Marcelle once brought from one of her flights, and sometimes not even that: she covered herself only with the blue shawl knitted by someone, not her, keeping one eye open even in her sleep, alert to the footsteps outside, not hers.

Sleep on the couch was sentry sleep. She never stopped being the shack’s sentry, its life. But anyone else sleeping on the couch drove her crazy. “ Yallah get up and go to your beds,” she upbraided Sammy or Corinne or me, sometimes keeping to herself the knowledge of what exactly were “your beds,” after having changed the rooms and the beds or both of them around that very morning.

Her rearranging stopped at the threshold of the bedroom. She hardly touched the bedroom, but this “hardly,” too, left wide margins of possibility for change and yearning: the bedspread, the color of the walls, the location of the chest, the position of the mirror, the coatrack, the curtain, the blinds, the framed tapestries with the roses she had once embroidered in a rare fit of feminine patience. Once the tapestries had been separated, looking at each other from opposite walls, once they hung side by side, or one above the other; another time they were reframed, with a wooden support behind them, and set slantwise on the chest, in semi-profile, sympathetic witnesses to the changing pastel shades of the room: pale mauve, mauve pink, peach pink, sky blue, porcelain, pale green (only for a week), and pale mauve again.

All these changes and small shifts did not upset the bedroom’s status as a reserve, the kind of site that is visited but not invaded by life’s daily events. The bedroom was a kind of dollhouse arranged and rearranged, with all the details required for the game carefully set in place, but for some reason the game never concludes, is suspended forever in expectation.

At midday, in the afternoon, and sometimes in the morning, whenever she wasn’t there, I would lie on the double bed on the quilted bedspread without taking off my shoes, staring at the rippling of the semitransparent curtain in the breeze. The room was always pervaded by the smell of something new, not yet completely removed from its wrapping, peeping out, hovering like a halo over what stood heavy and muffled in the room: the mother’s expectation. And something else stood there, too: forbidding expectation.

The room was the reserve for expectation and its prohibition, empty most of the hours of the day and night — a place of anticipation without anyone to anticipate.

Who was she waiting for? At first, the one whose name we were forbidden to mention, it conjured him up too vividly; afterward just “him,” the great nameless “him,” which detached from its subject turned into a disembodied longing, the glimmer of a different fate. Longings for longings.

The expectation that filled the room drove her from it: often she moved to the couch in the middle of the night, after she had stopped waiting for Sammy or Corinne, and the shack finally sank into its essential silence, which she loved so much, because then and only then she could hear the beating of its heart, when she was by herself, inside the walls and between the floor tiles, undisturbed.

NONA ANNOYED HER by saying: “ Yallah ya binti , enough, it’s the middle of the night, nuss ellayl .” “What nuss ellayl , what do you mean nuss ellayl ? It’s eight o’clock,” the child argued with her back to Nona, standing on the stool up against the rectangle of glass in the front door, between the white and the black, the dense cloudy white of the room and the heavy darkness outside, the tall waterfall of darkness sliding down Nona’s concrete steps to the ground, toward the path leading to the shack, the cypress tree, the road, the houses on the other side.

Inside, in the windowless thirteen-by-sixteen-foot quarter-shack, Nona was always boiling something, fanning the hot, stifling haze rising from the pots, the tubs, from the jet of water boiling in the tiny, improvised shower, from the bonfire lit by the amm in his yard right under the narrow window of her kitchen, from her breath. She moved through the fog, the Nona, like a big ship stalled in the middle of the sea, waiting for a signal, arrested in its rocking, its heavy swaying from side to side in the white blindness. The radio played, but its playing was not a signal for anything different, only more of the same thing, more of the fog that had turned into a sound, embodied in the wheedling voice of Amm Hamdan delivering his daily sermon on the Arab-language station of Kol Yisrael: “ Ikhwani, ya wlad masr eltayyibeen ,” my brothers, the good sons of Egypt.

The child strained her eyes at the darkness in front of her, wiping the vapors off the glass with her sleeve, waiting for a figure to appear, for the sound of the steps climbing the path that would turn into the figure. But the mother had not said exactly when she would come. She said: “Perhaps I’ll finish early today.” Or: “Perhaps I’ll slip away early today.” “She said perhaps,” the child informed Nona, still with her back to her, “that perhaps she would slip away early today.” “Perhaps,” repeated Nona with her bitter sigh. “ Yimken ,” she reflected for a moment and said again, “ Yimken .”

The child rubbed the toes of her bare feet together, suppressing the resentment welling up in her against the Nona, against her “ yimken ” and its heavy irony filling the room like the white haze, beating against the windowpane and stopping there, retreating from the darkness outside, which, for the time being, contained no “perhaps,” but only unequivocal bleakness that was unlikely to give rise to anything except more darkness.

She tensed: another bus came down the road, stopped beyond the shack, at the bus stop. The darkness ripened now with juicy promise, like the seeds of a pomegranate. Now the child could make out the dark contours of the shack, Sammy’s welding shop, and the garbage can, looming up in the dark.

A thin stream of cold air stole in under the door, freezing the child’s feet and calves. Perhaps it was winter. Yimken . In winter there was more of everything: more darkness, more white haze, more long blanks between the expectation, more murmurs and imaginary sounds and false alarms, more urgency when the mother suddenly opened the door at last, poking the dripping umbrella in first and after it her dripping self, wrapped in a big shawl over her coat. The child fled to Nona’s bed, pulled the blanket over her head, tucked her hands between her thighs when the mother pulled the blanket down, standing next to the bed still in her dripping coat: “Are you coming?” The child didn’t answer; she shut her eyes tight, felt the transparency of her eyelids through which she saw the mother’s face, high and distant, as if stripped of its skin. She didn’t answer, and pulled the blanket up again. “Good,” said the mother and left. The child jumped up and flew to the window: slowly and with difficulty, as if pushed from behind, the bulky, huddled figure of the mother advanced down the path leading to the shack and was swallowed up in the darkness close to the edge of the lawn, next to the cypress tree.