Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

They sent her to play with Rachel Amsalem, the Nona and Maurice. “Go, go and play ya bint ,” said Nona, wiping her glasses with the greasy towel, and Maurice smoked Nona’s cigarettes, pulling a disgusted face as he smoked: “How can you smoke these cigarettes?” he complained, giving the child an absent look through the smoke and looking away again: “Go on, run along now. Afterward I’ll give you something nice,” he said. “Rachel isn’t home,” said the child, and she sat on the floor at their feet and played pick-up sticks with herself, putting the tips of her fingers on the points and pressing down hard until the sticks bent. The white gladiolus were lying on the white bed in two bunches wrapped in cellophane, long and dead: one bunch for the mother and one for the Nona. The child sank as she heard the words and refused to take in their meaning; time was reversed like a sock turned inside out. When Maurice got up to go to the toilet, Nona said that perhaps he would come home. “All the children have a father and a mother. Don’t you want your father and mother to be together?” she asked in a wheedling voice. “No,” said the child, “I don’t.” “Nobody’s asking you.” The Nona’s face hardened. She crossed her legs: “It’s only here in this country that people ask children about everything,” she said, undid one yellow braid, and plaited it again, throwing it over her shoulder.

He wanted to do it “properly” this time, Maurice, to give and take, not to just drop on them. “I, ya sitti , didn’t come to drop on anyone,” he said to Nona in the end, after one of the ends in the conversation, which had a lot of ends, punctuated by heavy silences. This the child heard, “to drop.” She peeked at him when he said it, at his wide lips distorted in disgust or pain: impossibly thin he stood on the edge of a well, his feet over the side, one little push to his back and he would fall, he had already fallen — swept inside as if he had been flung, not pushed, swallowed in a second into the mouth of the well.

That afternoon in the shack was full of politeness. The mother took off from work. They talked in the living room, couch facing couch, they talked in the kitchen, they talked on the porch, they talked again in the living room, carrying full or half-full cups of coffee. There was a new, solemn embarrassment in the shack, full of suppressed, agonizing expectation. The air grew denser and denser; it reached a point where it almost erupted, as if it had been filled with a pump, leaving room for nothing except his gaze, fixed on the mother and only on her, narrow and focused as the point of a pin and wide as the sea, brimming over — beyond his eagerness, hunger, supplication, yearning, and sorrow. When he retired to the bedroom to rest awhile, lying on the bed in his clothes, with a handkerchief soaked in cold water on his forehead because of a headache, the mother went to the Nona, to sit with her, shifting her thighs nervously on her chair. This time she spoke in a lowered voice, like a schoolgirl caught copying a test, drinking in Nona’s words, which had the flavor and the tone of spells, of oaths: “ Tawli ruhek, tawli ruhek ,” she repeated over and over again: “Be patient.”

Corinne and Sammy had vanished, they were nowhere to be seen: one thing seemed irreconcilable with another. Things were somehow out of joint and the shack stopped being “home,” stopped being itself: doors and windows were shut, closed to something. The child was impossible; whatever they said to her she answered, “No, no,” she wanted nothing, not to come in or to go out. Maurice wanted to go out, he wanted them to get dressed up and take the bus to the cinema in Ramat Gan to see Doctor Zhivago . They went to call the child, behind Rachel Amsalem’s house, in the thorns. There was an old tap there that didn’t turn off, and she and Rachel crouched under the running water, in the mud, competing to see who could eat the most crammed into their mouths in spoonfuls and washed down with water. The mother dragged her away, pulled her by the arms and dragged her lying on her stomach as she dug her feet into the ground. The mother pushed her into the shower, filthy and crying, scrubbed her body, and shampooed her hair: twice she escaped wet and covered in lather and twice she was forced back under the boiling jet of water that stung her skin more than the mother’s pinches and slaps.

Maurice sat in the living room, leafing through the newspaper, but a few times he came to peep into the shower, leaned against the door in his light gray suit, and looked at his face reflected in the mirror above the basin, smoothing his narrow mustache with his yellow finger: “But it’s Dr. Zhivago,” he said in surprise.

He liked Omar Sharif, he had even met him once, he told the mother on the bus, when the two of them sat on their bench in front of the child. His arm, she noted, encircled the mother’s shoulders but didn’t touch them, it rested on the back of the seat. The mother nodded, drinking him in, her shoulder blades moved under her dress: her back was a quivering map of feelers and open mouths, a tension of intent and intense devotion, intense tenderness. She had been taken, the mother: the child saw it with horror, how she was being taken.

For long moments before they entered the cinema they stood and licked the ice creams Maurice bought for them (he took a few pennies from the mother), they stared at the giant picture of Omar Sharif on the giant poster. He and the mother suddenly held hands, looking at the poster, not at each other, united in a profound agreement — Maurice and Omar Sharif were two peas in a pod.

Omar looked at Omar. No, Omar looked at the mother looking at Omar in the darkness of the movie hall, watching the screen only out of the corner of his eye while he looked at her, only at her, watching the screen but not really watching it, seeing through the Omar on the screen the Omar sitting next to her and gobbling her up.

They almost missed the last bus back to the neighborhood. The child fell asleep and Maurice carried her for a way in his arms, panting. It was night, but the next day had already begun, in the night, the tiny cog wheels of the next day.

The mother got up early to go to work, but the child didn’t go to school; she said she had a stomachache, covered herself with the blanket, and scratched lines on the sheet with her fingernail as she listened to the sounds and noises made by Maurice in the shack, marking his passage from room to room, the metallic clatter: the mother’s copperware that he overturned as he passed. The child got up, lay under the cypress tree, and pretended to read. She didn’t say a word to him. She noted with hostility every move he made, every expression on his face. He told her he would prepare rice fit for a king, or a queen. He didn’t ask her to come with him to the kitchen, but she went, sat down next to him, and asked if he believed in God. In the kitchen he was on wheels: pots, pans, ladles, boxes of spices, bits of parsley stuck to the counter and the floor, towels he kept taking out of the drawer because he forgot where he had put the one before. “I believe in man and in his free will, not in God,” said Maurice. “There’s nothing like the will of man.” In the meantime he fried the ingredients for the rice fit for a king, or a queen: chicken livers, hearts, gizzards, onions, pine nuts. To the rice he added saffron. A wintry sun came in through the low kitchen window; light poured onto the floor. Maurice ate with his hands, scooping up rice and livers with his long dark fingers and putting the food in his mouth without dropping a single grain. Even his fingers, it seemed, stayed dry, not greasy. She did as he did: she gathered the rice in her fingers but she kneaded it a bit until it turned into a little ball, feeling his radiant smile shining on her, his whole smiling face spraying glowing sparks, like Sammy’s blowtorch. “I believe that there’s a God,” said the child with her mouth full of rice. He took her hand, brought it to his lips, and kissed it, holding it for a long moment: “It’s good that you believe, never mind in what, it’s impossible to live without believing,” said Maurice. That evening he stayed with her till late, at the table in the hall, until she finished her math homework, or almost finished it; he chain-smoked, with that smile from the afternoon, with the sparks of light, still on his face, waiting with gentle patience, not pressing her even when she sat for a long time daydreaming, chewing the tip of her pencil. He daydreamed, too, and woke up suddenly to the sound of his own voice: “What did you say, ya omri ?”