Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

For a long time she went on standing there, staring at the spot that marked the verge of the disappearance and then the disappearance itself, and then she went back to Nona’s bed and covered herself with the blanket. Nona lay down beside her, unbuttoning the child’s sweater under the blanket, and laying her hand on the ribs that were shaken by weeping: “ Bitayeti leh ya omri , why are you crying?” The child sat up, quickly pushed her feet into her shoes without tying the laces, raced in her pajamas down the dark path to the shack, straight through the unlocked door to the bedroom, to the mother’s bed, and lay down next to her in the empty, solitary place. Her teeth chattered a little from the sharp transition between cold and heat, between the cool, flat freshness of the sheets — so different from the warm, deep hollows of the Nona’s bedclothes, steeped in smells of urine, medical ointment, chamomile, and lavender water, and from the pity for Nona and Nona’s loneliness inside those bedclothes. The mother switched off the bedside lamp and turned over on her side. Time passed; the child got out of bed in the middle of the night, every night, ran back up the path to Nona’s quarter-shack, and knocked loudly on the shaky door with the glass: “It’s me,” she said.

THE CYPRESS TREE announced the shack, heralded it from far away, from the turn in the road to Savyon. Tall, calm, collected, it was the guard, the strict-yet-reasonable nanny of the wild, out-of-control child that was the shack. Corinne had brought it home with her from Arbor Day at school when she was small, and it was small, too, that’s what they said.

IT SOMETIMES STUCK in her craw, that cypress tree, when she didn’t appreciate it. Either she was praising it, or it stuck in her craw: obdurate, solid, hard to move. She had her reasons for why it did that: “Its roots spread in the ground and block the drains,” she said.

Consultations took place on the sunny porch, what to do about the cypress tree and the roots. Taking part were Marco the gardener, Benny Levakar from the plumbers, Sammy, Nona, and her. Marco said that they had to lasso it with ropes from top to bottom and find the exact angle for it to fall. “Otherwise it could fall right onto your roof tiles, bring the whole house down, smash all the fancy lamps in your living room,” he warned. She paled, wiped her hands on her housecoat even though they weren’t even wet. “But there are special people for that,” she argued nervously, “there are special people from the council for things like that.” “Not from the council,” intervened Benny Levakar, chewing his fifth date cookie, “It’s the ones from the Beautiful Land of Israel that take down trees like this, it’s only them that do it.” Sammy was beside himself, against the whole idea in principle, even though he took part sporadically in the discussion, running back and forth from the porch to the welding shop: “But why take it down, why do you want to take it down, what’s the point of taking it down?” he yelled. “What’s the point?” she retorted, “Every second day the drains get blocked and you ask what’s the point? He’s blocked as the drains”—she turned to the others, waving her arm in Sammy’s direction—“I explain to him and he doesn’t take it in, the blockhead.”

Sammy was given over to the skeptical, suspicious shaking of his head; he didn’t hear a word, or else he heard exactly what he was supposed to hear, like they always heard each other’s words: ready-made rhetorical flourishes in lovers’ quarrels. He feared what he called her “extremism,” the rash acts from which there was no going back, how he detested them! In a matter of minutes she would defeat him in their passionate debates over “doing or not doing,” that almost always took place after she had already decided or done the deed, and he would withdraw, or pretend to, turning to some third party present in the room, or to some piece of furniture: “That’s her problem, she’s so extreme. Never consults anyone, just goes ahead and acts. Me, I take advice about everything, I like to hear what people have to say. Not her. She charges ahead, doesn’t give a damn.” Now he turned back to her, as if he had just remembered something, and opened a second round: “But why do you have to go to special people, pay them money? Can’t we bring the tree down ourselves, me and the worker, in a couple of days? You have to deal with it now, right now?”

She really did. “Now” or “immediately” was her middle name. For her there was no pause between the thought or the wish and the act — the act was the simultaneous fruition of the wish and its fulfillment. Every delay, even the slightest, was an act of cruelty, a deliberate torment. She always acted alone — an entire Foreign Legion that deployed on its own behalf, to win. “That’s me,” she’d say after it was over, which was at one and the same time full of an arrogant sense of will that brooked no obstacle and arch amusement: “That’s me. I don’t wait, ni un ni deux . I act, and that’s it.”

But the cypress tree was not uprooted. “Something” stopped her. What was that “something”? She didn’t know herself, she was apparently overcome by a rare sense of respect for inhibition, she couldn’t dismiss it, and she uncharacteristically invented a false sentimental pretext: “Corinne brought it when she was small in an olive can and planted it. I remember how she planted it,” she said. Corinne raised the two brown-penciled arches that were her eyebrows. “It wasn’t me who brought it, it was Sammy,” she said, in the indifferent voice of a court recorder. They could uproot the tree or not — it made no difference to her, because, every thing and every act were doomed from the outset to obey what was inherent and preordained — annihilation, catastrophe, and getting uglier all the time, canceling out the spectrum of difference between action and inaction, something and nothing.

FOR WEEKS MAURICE hung from the top of the cypress tree, wearing his necktie but not hanging from it: a strong, thin, transparent rope was tied around his neck, holding him up so he appeared to be attached to the tree from behind. These were weeks of the year that never was, that wasn’t counted among the years, since in some sense all the years existed not as a sum but an image. Up to now I’ve been rambling, but now for the facts: it wasn’t the mother who hanged him. And he didn’t hang himself. The thing happened of its own accord and came to light early one morning, the way things do. She, the mother, found him there, at the top of the cypress tree, at first the shoes: she saw them first, polished, toes turned out like those of a ballerina. She didn’t recognize the light gray suit he was wearing, which caused her to heave a sigh of relief: at last he had something that she didn’t know, that allowed him to disappear into the crowd. Will you have coffee, Maurice? she asked tenderly. He accepted. Every blue swollen vein in his dark drooping face accepted. She placed the little cup of coffee on the lawn, stuck a straw as long as a ladder inside it, and the three sparrows that came to her aid moved the straw carefully until it entered his mouth. When he finished the coffee he had to have another cup, and this time she didn’t feel resentful and only put in too much sugar out of absentmindedness. He took a sip and made a grimace with his lips. Amazing that she noticed the grimace of his lips in the general grimace of his face. “I like my coffee mazbut, ya Lucette,” he said, “as if you don’t know that I like it mazbut .” She stopped him, listened for a moment to something, to sounds that reached her from above, like his voice: “We’re talking so nicely, Maurice,” she said, “at last we’re talking really nicely,” she said, and began to dig up the deep basin around the bottom of the cypress tree, to mark seats with the iron pegs she took from the welding shop. Each seat was marked by an iron peg and was an iron peg. He lit a cigarette, not with his dangling hands, which looked longer than ever, but by rubbing it against the coat of plastic that was beginning to cover him, heating up in the morning sun, which was already quite strong. “I’ve never been afraid of death, Lucette, you know that,” he said, his eyes fixed on the tiled roof of the shack. “Of course you weren’t afraid, why should you be afraid? You weren’t afraid of life, why be afraid of death? It all comes from not believing in God,” she said, counting us as we filed in front of her on the way to the basin: Corinne, Sammy, and me. We brushed our teeth in the saucers of sand she set before us and sat down on the pegs, each in his place under the cypress tree. We looked up at the feet swaying in the breeze inside the polished shoes.