Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

I was at the bottom of the ocean, on a bed of absolute loneliness: the weight of the water above pressed heavily on my chest as I lay there spread-eagled, not daring to move, to turn over. Things climbed up my throat, heavy, viscous, and were pushed down again. Worst of all was the window on the right, which looked into the darkness, into the backyard. Out of the corner of my eye I saw them: enormous faces, flat, white, featureless, a circle of soft, whitish dough stuck to the windowpane, fixing eyeless eyes on me, then turning into a giant, flat white pillow, laid on my face, suffocating me. From above, above the surface of the water, came voices, distant echoes of voices, a stifled quarrel between the mother and the grandmother: she argued “ el bint ,” and Nona replied imploringly “ el bint ,” the child.

The flat white faces now turned into sheets of clinging plastic, sticking to my face. I tried to move but I couldn’t. Once in a while a hand was laid on my forehead, not the palm, the back of the hand: it was hers. I felt the roughness and the flinching of the hand on my forehead, its flight from that spot. That split second of the back of her hand on my forehead, careful not to slide down to my cheek, was panic-stricken, full of the fear of death, of her question, “Better now?” And again, from the doorway, when she escaped back to work, “Better now?”

HER HANDS WERE those of a laborer. Nona said, “A man’s hands, look at the hands she’s got, just like a man.” Nona’s own hands were so perfect they had attained the status of an ideal: white as white could be, almost unblemished, as if they had just been dipped in flour. The hauteur of her fingers, transcending the very idea of refinement, was breathtaking. I felt for Nona’s hands constantly, as if I were seeking confirmation of something.

Hands, what they were and could be, were a hard, bitter stone stuck in the throat of their dreadful quarrels, the mutual insults, the symbolic and once even real slashing of veins, the harassment, the silence that went on for days and sometimes weeks (never longer than a month), the marginal and substantive complaints, the grievances aired and not aired (not many of those), the magnificent, bleeding wounds.

Nona said, “I left the real, sweet Lucette behind in Egypt.” No, first she said, “She’s got the hands of a man,” and only afterward, “The real Lucette stayed in Egypt.” Who was the real Lucette? Nona remembered her, or thought she did. “That mouth she’s got on her, that tongue of hers, she never had that before. Nothing like that, opening that mouth of hers like she does now. She learned that over here. Like a doll she was, pretty as a doll with honey on her tongue, never mind what she said, only honey on her tongue. Yes Mother, no Mother, certainly Mother, only honey. And her cheeks, her skin. There was nothing like Lucette’s skin: when she came into a room, the room lit up from the glow of that skin. Wherever she went, people turned their heads. Basbusa they called her in the street. Basbusa , that cake with sugar and butter, sweet as can be. She was Basbusa and her cousin Janette, her they called Harisa , a dry cake that sticks in your throat. The two of them would walk home from school together, and Lucette was Basbusa and she was Harisa .”

These words in Nona’s mouth, repeated again and again, tasted like the snitching of an informer: informing on the good, not the bad. She betrayed the good Lucette, the grace she once had, because the good one was in hiding, not the bad one. Something great, the loss of which was nothing short of catastrophic, had fled from sight during their emigration: femininity had been sacrificed to this rough place, to its new, rough, male humanity. At the heart of this femininity were the hands, and more, the care of them as a womanly asset, at once manifest and mysterious. For the lack of their care Nona blamed my mother perhaps more than for the fact of having a man’s hands. That was it, that they hadn’t been a man’s hands at first, not at first. Nona might have resigned herself to a grace not granted, but not to a grace given and then ruined, again and again: “It’s as if she does it on purpose, that stubborn mother of yours, on purpose.”

THE BACK OF her hands were very dark, sunburned, and the palms were pink. Sometimes they looked like finger puppets in two colors, black and white, turning from side to side, two characters: the back that was also the palm, and the palm that was also the back. They were small, her hands, short, matching her small, round, compact body: Basbusa .

She worked with her hands only, she plunged them into everything: the loose and dry earth, the pail with the “blue” to bleach the sheets, the clay, the clogged toilet bowl, the dough, the mound of couscous, the garbage can in front of the house, where she had thrown something she regretted half an hour later, the cement, the nails, the fertilizer, a pile of tomatoes or green peas in the market, a can of olives, the fire water — a source of great delight (what exactly was “fire water”?).

“Put them in, put your hands in, don’t stand there like a statue,” she’d say.

Or worse: “He doesn’t put his hand in, that one, he just glides over the top of things.”

She rushed into physical matter with a passion, crazy to mix and merge with her very body. There was always “the goal,” a sacred duty that she turned into pleasure, the work that she elevated to an absolute value. Wrong: she was the work, there was no elevation.

Her hands’ agility, what’s called dexterity, was beyond imagination, almost superhuman, like a cartoon animation: it wasn’t just a characteristic, her agility, it was an entire category.

Watching the movements of her hands in the air and in the matter made you giddy: within seconds the distinctions between movements’ actions dissolved, turning into a pale, centrifugal mist, with flashes of color flying around, one after the other.

This is how I saw it the first time, at a hallucinatory predawn hour that stretched on until eight in the morning.

She woke me the way she usually did, shaking my shoulders at first hesitantly and then vigorously. I was in her bed, perhaps I had fallen asleep there or perhaps I had crept into it during the night, indifferently and sleepily suffering her pushing me to the edge of the bed, her heavy grumbling at me to stop lying at an angle, stop killing her.

The square of her bedroom window, the semitransparent curtain drawn to one side, was still full of darkness, and the points of the cypresses, one taller than the other, were barely visible. For a while I sat on the bed, wide awake, staring into the darkness, which grew less threatening at the sound of the domestic racket she was making all over the shack. She had put on that dress of hers buttoned at the front, which later on, mainly in photographs, reminded me of a Soviet worker’s uniform in a piston factory. She had three of them, the same cut in different colors, all inherited from her sister Marcelle in France: blue, mauve, and brown (my aunt was in the habit of buying almost everything in a particular style, if, in her opinion, it “fit her like a dream,” an impression that lasted a few weeks at the most).

Her face was stern, trapped in a train of thought circling around some necessary chore to be performed in the day rapidly coming closer, something that was almost always connected to her great yet impossible desire to get the task of life under control. Within moments she stood me on my feet, on the bed, dressed me; in the blindness of hectic haste, my arm almost always was caught up outside the sleeve or crooked inside the sleeve. I was four and a bit.