Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Dripping, wrapped in a thick shawl over her coat like a refugee, she rummaged in her handbag and fished out a lipstick with which she proceeded to paint her lips without looking in a mirror. It was a pink lipstick given to her by Corinne before the trip, which made her lips look like a congealed wound. “Those tapestries tell you what she says, that princess,” she suddenly said out of the blue. “What princess?” I asked, confused. “The one in the tapestries in the museum, with that unicorn, but it’s not so easy to understand what she’s saying. A mon seul désir ,” she quoted with suppressed pleasure. “How do you say that in Hebrew?” she asked. “To my sole desire, or perhaps, my heart’s desire, the thing I yearn for above all,” I tried to translate. She went on, interrupting me. “Strange how you don’t understand what she means when she says it. Do you know what she meant?” She raised her eyes to me, narrowed against the wind, surrounded by wrinkles closing in from all sides in their pale of settlement, setting them apart from the rosy and smooth expanse of her cheeks. “I don’t understand,” I said.

IN THE RAIN the shacks got lost, they lost the thread of the syntax that made them into a sentence, a residential neighborhood, and returned to their previous existence, in the time of the sand dunes, when they were scattered almost at random, each to itself, blind to the others, as if it were alone in the world. Before the rain we saw the nature that was strewn between the shacks as tame, subdued islands, a background to the shacks, not the foreground. In the rain nature emerged untamed; it exposed its true, uncompromising, jealous character. The mild slope of the hill between the shack and the old reservoir was no longer mild — it plunged. Waterfalls rushed from the hill down toward the shack below, sweeping up everything in their path, flooding the brick wall the mother had built to arrest the erosion, streaming, to the lawn and then the porch, coming into the shack through the gap at the bottom of the door, through the towels and floor rags crammed into the gap to bar the water’s way.

It was five or six in the morning, the hour of the flood when we woke up to it: the mother plied the mop. In her wet nightgown, plastered to her thighs, she beat the mop at the sides of the beds and under the beds, in the still-dark room, splashing in the water that flooded in from under the door and the water leaking from above in a trickle from the ceiling, coming in through the roof tiles, soaking the attic, and raining into the rooms. “Get up!” she yelled at Sammy in despair, “Get up! Water!” And he got up, threw the blanket over his shoulders, and went out with the hoe into the rain, to dig a drainage canal between the paved path leading to the shack and the steep thorny slope of the hill.

The child did nothing, she stood on the soaked carpet and watched. “Move,” the mother scolded her, hitting her lightly on her ankles with the mop, “move already, lend a hand.” She didn’t move, she didn’t lend a hand, looking at the flooded floor, at the old notebooks with the writing on the first page, which she had hidden under the bed, how they floated now wide open, facedown in the water, or faceup, with the ugly letters smudging and blurring, turning into a blue stain.

WHEN HE GOES out to work on construction sites in the rain, she’s beside herself. And at night, too. She says: “At night, on the pipes, in the rain.” He always works until nighttime on the building frames. If he has to start in the morning, he starts at noon; if at noon, then in the afternoon; if in the afternoon, then at night. But it makes no difference when he starts, he always keeps going till nighttime. “Do you have constructzia today?” she asks. “I do,” he says, “only the guy from the building materials is holding me up. Give us a check for the building materials guy so I can get pipes out of him.” “No checks,” she says, “you never gave me back what you took two weeks ago, you’ll get me into trouble with those checks.” “Till tomorrow,” he promises, bringing her handbag from the hall for her to take out the checkbook, “tomorrow I’ll get my money from the contractor. I’ll pay you back.” “No,” she says, snatching the bag from him, “your word is water in a sieve, that’s how much I believe your promises. Your word isn’t worth a damn, it’s water in a sieve.” “By tomorrow, I’m telling you,” he begs. He grabs the checkbook, writes the sum down in his crooked writing, and gets it wrong, tears up the check, and writes another one, which she signs. “You’ll get me into trouble, you,” she says again.

But she’s already implicated, waiting anxiously in the corner of the couch for the implication that has already in fact occurred, on the nights of the construction with the rain outside. She doesn’t let the facts confuse her: the fact that she’s here, deep in the heart of the warm room, huddled in a sweater and a blanket in the corner of the couch with the electric heater at her feet (“you have to sit right on top of it, that heater, to get warm, it’s just for show, not worth a damn”), doesn’t deny the cold, the terrible freezing cold outside that makes her teeth chatter. “He’s up there on the constructzia , in the rain,” she says. “Who knows where he is in this rain.” It isn’t only that she’s there on the “ constructzia ” in her heart, she’s there in her body, too, the body that is the heart, in the chattering of her teeth, in the shivering that seizes hold of her even when she covers herself with three layers and puts on two pairs of socks. Every half hour she goes out, in her nightgown, her robe and umbrella, to the path leading to the shack and from it to the road, to wait, to check a false hope. “Maybe he’s already on his way back, that idiot. Maybe he already came back and he’s sitting in the pickup, talking to the worker,” she says.

Sometimes he really is there, in the pickup with the worker, waiting for the song on the tape to end, and then another one and another one, eating the steak sandwich they bought at the Tiger Inn and then five containers of Bavarian cream: three for Sammy, two for the worker. She knocks on the window, sticks her face to it, furious with relief: “Why don’t you come inside, why?” “In a minute,” he says, poking his head out of the door (the handle that opens the window broke a year ago), “In a minute I’m telling you, madam boss.”

On other nights of pouring rain she can’t stand it anymore: she throws off the blanket, switches off the heater, gets dressed in a minute, and takes three buses to the building site, to see how he is. She wanders in the dark between the skeletons of the silent, deserted buildings in the middle of some little town, searching for his building.

Sammy is at the top of the skeleton, 100 or 125 feet above ground, only his shirt on his back, pouring with water, welding something. For a moment he straightens up, swaying on the girder in the rain and bending down to his welding again. She stands at the foot of the building looking up, straining her eyes, seeing nothing but the sparks of the blowtorch shining in the rain.

ON OTHER RAINY nights nobody expected anyone, and the rustling sounds and voices outside were none of our business, evidence of nothing and signifying nothing, because “everybody” was already at home, all of us sprawled or semi-sprawled in the living room, competing for proximity to the heater — even Corinne, who on these nights suspended her usual care for her appearance and walked or lay around with her hair mussed, a single loose clip on her head that didn’t hold anything up, wearing long white flannel underpants, and, draped over them, something between a shawl and an old blanket.