Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

The room that was the living room seemed to be holding something, guarding the light that was shining on us indirectly, bringing exactly the right warmth of here and now, testifying that there was nothing missing, that we lacked for nothing. There we sat, close together, in the only space in the shack that was free of the rubble of the building site that was the shack: the mother was renovating, again, again she turned the house upside down to make it even more of a home. We sat among the dusty cardboard boxes that filled the living room, the furniture removed from other rooms (two in all), the groaning Friedman fridge (“Friedman is a good firm”), the standing and table lamps, the pictures taken for the time being off the walls and leaned against each other, according to height, the one from the little passage to the bathroom first in line, peering at us from the gap between the cardboard boxes: Le balcon .

The evening was endless, merging into the night without us noticing; we were confined to our places not like prisoners or the sick, but like people recovering from life, even if only for a few hours, this life of which the mother and Sammy and sometimes Corinne said: “Life, life, life.”

Sammy wanted fried eggs even though he had already had two for his breakfast, but there was no bread to have with the eggs, except dry bread from yesterday. We went out to the starry sky of the kitchen, Corinne and the mother and I, the roofless room in the process of renovation, over which the sky spread dense with rain, split by lightning as if by a knife. The mother fried the eggs, Corinne held the umbrella over her head, over the stove, and I shone the flashlight on the sizzling frying pan. We used all the eggs in the fridge, maybe eight, and toasted the dry bread over the gas flame of the stove until it turned black. The water had already reached above our ankles, but it hadn’t passed the low wall of cinder blocks placed between the entrance to the kitchen and the living room. There everything was still dry. We made our way back, with the pan and the bread and the plates, threading between the furniture and the cardboard boxes (the corner of Corinne’s shawl caught on the chest and she almost tripped with the pan) to Sammy waiting sleepily for his eggs. We spread a towel on an empty rectangle of the carpet and sat cross-legged around the pan and the blackened bread and the washed scallions and sharp red peppers for Corinne. Sammy dipped first, leaned over and tore open the skin of the yellow yolk with the bread, and we followed him. Sammy explained something to us, but mainly to himself: the most important thing with fried eggs was to calculate the exact relation between the eggs and the bread, so that the bread was consumed at exactly the same pace. The bread wasn’t all consumed; there was still some left after we had scooped up all the bits of egg in the pan. The mother brought the last piece of bread reverently to her lips and blessed it before she threw it into the trash can standing in the middle of the kitchen, in a puddle of rainwater.

THE WISHES OF the three in the picture, that’s what was so mysterious. What kept the child’s eyes riveted to the picture for hours on end: what did they want? What did they really want?

In the way they sat and stood there was something both intentional and accidental at one and the same time, as if they had been caught in the middle of something — an event or an incident — that had happened again and again, since the beginning of time, and they experienced it as it happened but also presented it. The man stood gazing at some point in the distance, over the heads of the women, perhaps connected to them and perhaps in their company by chance. The expression on his face was masklike, almost frozen, and he held his hands in front of him as if he were unable to move them, as if they were in plaster casts. The more the child looked at him, the more she understood: he was so connected to the two women, the elder and the younger, that he had no need to show it; the connection was taken for granted, part of the complete, natural randomness. The dark jacket he wore merged into the dark background behind him, only the triangle of his white shirt, the immobilized hands, and the pale skin of his face stood out in this darkness: he wasn’t standing, he was emerging out of the darkness, the man with the narrow mustache, but as if bit by bit, not quite complete, like a ghost, but not an alien — a domestic ghost.

The older woman, dressed in white, and the young woman sitting next to her, she, too, dressed in white — were they there under compulsion or of their own free will, on the balcony with the green railing? Were they responding to the man with the immobilized hands, seeking to please him, or was he responding to them, agreeing to join them, as if they had called him out of some inner room, for the purposes of the picture, saying “Come here for a minute”? Was she sitting or standing, the older woman dressed in white, whose puffed-out skirts, blown up like a balloon, hid the contours of her body, the bend of her hips as she was sitting, if indeed she was? The child hated the older woman’s expression; it disturbed her so much that in the end she loathed it, like the piece of a puzzle that refused to fit in, unsolved despite all attempts to place it: the older woman’s face remained annoyingly enigmatic. She held her head slightly to the side, her fingers touching each other perhaps in affectation, perhaps in some pretended meekness. Her whole attitude, standing or sitting, radiated a kind of meekness, an infuriating self-abnegation, or a pretense in order to keep a secret. There was a secret. The child knew it: she had a secret, the older woman; she was concealing herself on purpose, making herself pale and bloodless, to keep people away from her secret. And her partner in this secret was the black-haired young woman with the blazing eyes who set herself apart from them, from the man and the older woman, distanced herself from them demonstratively, almost defiantly. She is sitting in the billowing flounces of her white dress, but these flounces are not really hers; she consents to sit in them, to lend herself to them, but they are not really hers. What is she gazing at, and why does her gaze have to set her so far apart, to distance herself so much? What is she separating herself from, in her gaze? The young woman’s powerful face shows the traces of a struggle, whose conclusion is this setting of herself apart, this demonstrative, apparent detachment — of this the child is sure: the detachment is only apparent, for the black-haired young woman sees everything, sees from behind even when she looks in front, she sees every twitch or shift in the expressions of the man at her back and the older woman on her left; she sees, she sees, filling the scene with her blazing, absent vision, a seething passivity full of blocked sorrow, a grief that blocking itself turned into a mire of oppression.

THERE WAS ONE time when he came for a few days, he came in good faith, had not been thrown out of his life into the shack in the dead of night, from one abyss to another, but simply knocked on the door, in the normal way, not our house but on Nona’s door. Holding a plastic bag in one hand and flowers (gladiolus) in the other, his briefcase tucked under his arm, Maurice stood in the doorway, looked at the child who was sitting right in front of him, on Nona’s armchair facing the door. They looked at each other, he and the child, and didn’t make a move. Nona was busy in the kitchenette, oblivious, while the child took in what he was wearing: a burgundy-colored shirt and beige trousers. Burgundy socks the same color as his shirt. Summer shoes with holes in them, but made on purpose, in a kind of close pattern, the leather supple as the shoes of a dancer. He didn’t say a word and went on looking at her intensely, but the intensity of the gaze suddenly changed, becoming a slack, watery indifference, as if the puppeteer holding him up had loosened his grip. “Nona!” the child called.