Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

When she came home from school the next day, he was no longer there. The shack was empty of him, of his few belongings. The mother didn’t say anything. She read her book, lying on her side, curled up with her knees close to her stomach. The child threw down her schoolbag and flew outside, to the bus stop. She reached it breathless just as the bus was leaving. For a moment she was sure that in one of the windows she had glimpsed the edge of a burgundy sleeve and carefully combed dark hair, with a part on the side. She ran after the bus to the next stop, a little before the parched square of “up there.”

SHE HAD THE little “ msandara ” and the big “ msandara ”: the little one was the storage space at the top of the clothes closet, the big one in the attic under the tiled roof of the shack. The big msandara , which was reached from outside, by a long ladder, she called “up there.” There were differences between the little msandara and the great big up there, separated only by the tiles from the sky.

The little msandara at the top of the closet was a temporary hiding place, while the big one was a refugee or quarantine camp.

The little one was a lockup for objects that behaved badly but whose sentence had not yet been passed, while the big one was the penal colony to which they were exiled after being convicted (there were appeals).

The little one was crammed, without a crack of air between the objects, while the big one was two-thirds empty and full of air.

The little one was all immediacy and present tense, a direct and natural continuation of now, while the big one was all past tense: still, dark, full of cobwebs, dust, and lost glory.

The little one was visited every day, things were put in and taken out, while the big one only twice a week, and after a difficult journey.

The little one was the mother’s flesh and bone, first person, an extension of the word “me,” while the big one was the absolute other: she annexed it, but it refused to be part of her.

The little one was everyday, secular routine, while the big one was magic, a temple.

Everyone knew about the big “up there,” they were accomplices, or witnesses, or something: the big “up there” was almost the only site in her life that she couldn’t direct and create on her own, the way she preferred and was accustomed to, which demanded cooperation, linked arms, that “lend a hand” of hers.

The thing was that she hardly ever saw it, the big “up there,” saw it with her own eyes, except for the few times when she took her courage in both hands and climbed the high ladder leading to the small opening with its little wooden door, and peered trembling inside, into the tall, empty darkness. She was afraid of heights. She — who hardly knew the meaning of fear (“for myself I’m not afraid”) — became dizzy at the mere sight of the ladder leaning against the wall of the shack at an ominous slant. But she volunteered to hold it, gripping the lower rungs hard and pushing the ladder toward the wall and into the rose bed where its feet were planted, and urging on the climbers from below, her eyes on the ground: “Climb, climb!”

Everyone without exception was a possible addressee of those exhortations: Sammy, Corinne, me, Sammy’s worker, the neighbor, Corinne’s boyfriend, the man from the council who came to check the water meters, and once even the boy who came to collect money for what she called “the paralyzed children”: first she gave him juice and cookies and then she sent him up the ladder. To be ready for the moment when somebody showed up, she arranged the objects intended for “up there” in a corner of the porch or on the back path, closest to the ladder, and watched brokenhearted as the volunteer trampled her roses (in anticipation of the destruction, she prepared new roses to plant, in season or out): a compelling necessity was at stake, overriding all other considerations.

The vast space above the ceiling, this dark upper domain spread over the entire area of the shack, was a perpetual invitation, a call: it called out to her to “take proper advantage” of it, but also to subdue it. As far as she was concerned, “up there” meant the possibility of extending her range of movement, enlarging its scope: she “showed” the narrow, rectangular opening to the attic what was what. Against the will of the opening, against the will of the “things” (sideboards, dining tables, bookshelves, chairs, and armchairs), she succeeded in accomplishing the impossible and shoving them through the narrow opening, in squaring the circle, but not for long: “up there” was no ordinary storeroom, it was a storeroom for stage sets, and what went in after a while came out again, visited the shack or other houses, and was taken back “up there” again, after the usual quarrel with Sammy about the ladder (“You’re taking my things from work”).

She dragged the heavy ladder herself, set it down next to the doorway to the attic, a little to the right, so that it would be possible to close the wooden door again with the crooked nail stuck in the frame. The upholstered and reupholstered armchair that had wandered from place to place until it was banished from the shack was now waiting below.

I climbed six rungs of the ladder and stopped, peering down over my shoulder, at the prints left in the rose bed by my shoes: the colors began to blur, the green merging with the brown. “Climb!” She smacked my calf, climbed one or two rungs herself, hoisting the armchair over her head. I took hold of the legs of the armchair and climbed with my back to the ladder. I saw a quarter of her face, distorted by effort and willpower, looking out from behind the back of the chair, below me. If I loosened my grip for a moment the armchair would slip and fall straight onto her head. “Climb!” She roared, but not at me, from pain: her knuckles were blue. We climbed heel to toe, the armchair between us, to the last rung, next to the opening. The armchair stuck in the doorway, its legs in the air. “It won’t go in,” I said in despair. “Yes it will,” she fumed from below. “There’s no such thing as won’t. Use your brains and it will go in.” I pulled the arms as hard as I could, swaying on the ladder, and freed the chair. We began again from the beginning, this time with the chair slightly at a slant, pushing one leg after the other, with little twists and turns, until the whole chair went in, lying on its side. I went in, too, closing the little wooden door behind me. I heard her muffled shouts, her instructions regarding the arrangement of the furniture, and I lay down on the plywood floor, crisscrossed by the heavy supporting beams of the shack.

Till evening fell I sat “up there,” curled up in a corner on a pile of cushions that had once decorated the chairs in the dining nook. There was a magical silence, amplified by the darkness, a silence stretching from the low tiled roof above my head, from the long hall that was for the most part empty, left to its own devices, freed from the piles of objects assembled next to the opening, not policed, obedient to a secret inner order, to the logical disorder of a dream, but not my dream — I was a visitor in the dreams of my mother.

THE ROSE SEEDLING is usually planted in the winter, when the temperatures are low and the growth of the rosebush is slowed down. This is the most suitable time for removing seedlings with exposed roots from the ground of the nursery and planting them in the garden. The physiological state of the seedling is then suitable for transference. Without causing physiological damage, it is important to plant roses with exposed roots, since this gives us the possibility of examining the root system and its shape, the degree of its branching, its health and relative size. This is also the time when there is a large selection of species in the nurseries, enabling you to select the popular species without compromising on the seedlings remaining in the nurseries or other distribution outlets. In the winter there is also no need for frequent watering of the young plant.