Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Corinne started first, even though nobody asked her to, especially not the mother who was busy wrapping the chain of sheets tied together around our feet, tightening them in the loose soil. The coat of plastic began to cover his shoes, too, and through their soles we saw his feet, the bottoms of his narrow, relatively small feet, the feet of a boy or a small man. Corinne started first, she was the first to raise the candle she was holding high, until its violet flame lit his feet but didn’t touch them. In the light of the flame she read aloud the lines, curves, and cross-hatchings printed there: A mon seul désir, a mon seul désir , she read very slowly, stressing every word for me and for Sammy, whose translation we understood even less than the source, blowing on our candles to put out the flame that refused to be put out, but went on burning all the time, with the low intensity of a flame on the point of going out. The mother came with the upholstery brush, climbed the ladder, and brushed his suit, to clean the dust falling from the branches of the cypress tree. “Let him keep his self-respect at least,” she explained to us, took a pair of scissors out of her pocket to cut off a lock of his mop of silver hair, and scattered the fine hair over our heads. “You prayed for his rain, here it is,” she said, knelt down next to us, in the basin, gathered up the hair that had fallen to the ground, separated each strand, and kissed them one by one, sticking the hair to the transparent words seared into the soles of his feet, a mon seul désir .

Now she gave the sign. Corinne was the first and we followed her: we raised our arms with the lit candles until they reached his feet and the words with the hair stuck on with spit.

HER VISIT TO me in winter in New York, perhaps a year before she died, the thin fall coat that she wore in a shade of aubergine, which she bought at a sale in the shopping center in the aunt’s country town in France, “two yards from the house.” There were two things she never stopped doing: looking up at the heights of the buildings in amazement, until her neck hurt, and searching the shops for all kinds of knickknacks for the house, such as tins for spices, rice, and sugar, decorated with Christmas pictures, Santa Claus with white snowflakes. She had set her heart on these, for some reason. We found only five little ones for spices, and she, according to her calculations, needed three more: for tumeric, cumin, and bay leaves. We strode down the cold city streets where the snow froze in a matter of hours into a murky, slippery layer of ice. At first, perhaps, she brought up the rear, panting a little: “Why are you walking so fast?” she complained, stopping for a moment at the corner, where the wind was particularly vicious. She stood still, wrapped her face in her woolen scarf right up to her eyes, spreading out her fingers swollen with cold inside her gloves. “It’s jehennom here,” she said in a tortured voice, through the two layers of scarf. “What do you like about this hell?” We went into a diner to warm ourselves, ordered chicken soup with noodles. She sank deep into the padded seat opposite me, with only her very round shoulders and her neck appearing above the tabletop, turning the knife and fork wrapped in a paper napkin around and around.

The apathy with which she stared at the interior of the diner, at the door to our right opening and closing, at the blurred snowflakes in the blurred street beyond the windowpane, the new film clouding her eyes, in which her pupils were bathed as if soaking in a pot of hot water, softening: she looked as if she had no purpose. For the first time in her life without a purpose in the world, stripped of her purpose. A thought occurred to me: “Are you sick?” I asked. She didn’t answer, bent over her bowl of soup and blew carefully, in respectful gratitude. I didn’t know if she had heard me. She wiped the corners of her mouth with the napkin, suddenly sat up straight like a tortoise sticking its neck out of its shell: “Don’t talk to me about sicknesses, you hear? I had enough of that with your uncle and aunt in France before I came here,” she shot out. Her eyes flamed, her whole face flamed to the roots of the wavy silver hair above her narrow forehead. The visit with her sister in France before she came here had upset her. They had gone to Nice, she and Aunt Marcelle and her husband, to spend a few days there with Uncle Marco and his wife, sitting on the handsome balcony overlooking the sea, playing cards. She didn’t play cards, she was bored in half an hour: it was only the competition with herself, with her own fate, that she could engage. When they weren’t playing cards, or eating, or watching television, or reminiscing, they talked about sickness and medicine. “All the time sickness and medicine, she talks about how many pills and vitamins she swallows a day, and he talks about how many medicines he takes. They sit there with their bottles before eating, after eating, pills and more pills,” she said furiously, in deep disappointment. She tilted the soup plate toward her, drank the last spoonfuls. Her face dimmed again. “Perhaps it’s their age,” I ventured, I looked at her, at the vague fog settling on her face again, it frightened me — as if I were holding on to the hem of her coat so she wouldn’t slide down a cliff. “Don’t tell me age, it’s got nothing to do with age,” she argued, falling silent in the middle of the sentence. When they brought the check (the argument about who was going to pay, her arm violently pushing my wallet off the table, thrusting it back into my bag), she remembered as if by the way: “I threw them out, I flushed them all down the toilet. I didn’t keep a thing,” she said. “What?” I asked. “That whole amayat of heart and blood pressure and cholesterol pills the doctor gave me. I threw out the lot. No pill will ever pass my lips again,” she announced triumphantly. “You’re out of your mind,” I said. “No, no.” She shook her head. “They’re out of theirs.” She wagged a warning finger at me: “Don’t tell a soul, you hear? Not Sammy, not your sister, no one. I haven’t got the strength for their nagging.”

We went on trudging through the frost, pretending to be tourists. She looked like someone sick with influenza who had come to work out of a sense of duty, determined to stick it out to the end of the day. We went up and down the Empire State Building. When we were going up or down, in the murky yellow light of the elevator that made her face even yellower, she told me about the tapestries, the wall hangings she had seen with Aunt Marcelle in the Cluny Museum, before they went to Nice. She loved those tapestries with the princess and that animal with the horn and the long neck, the unicorn. Afterward she and Aunt Marcelle sat in the little garden next to the museum, ate crepes, and looked at the brochure she had bought in the museum, as a souvenir. “She counts every penny, that Marcelle. Don’t spend money on that,” she said to the mother when she wanted to buy the brochure. “It’s a waste of your money. That’s what she’s like: on the rags she buys in the market she spends and spends without a second thought, like a person who lets all the camels pass, and only says no to the female camel. When she comes he says, no, you won’t pass.” We left the building and emerged onto Fifth Avenue, into the stream of passersby hurrying from something to something else, where we were more foreign than ever: we didn’t hurry, and we didn’t enjoy dawdling either. It started to rain, and the rain came down harder, whirling around in the strong winds: our umbrellas broke and were cast into the trash cans to join their mangled sisters. We took shelter under an overhang of one of the buildings until the rain stopped or abated.