Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Of course, it is possible to plant roses in the late spring and summer, too, if the conditions of the terrain demand it. But in this case they must be planted with the earth around their roots. It is possible to plant selected seedlings in pots in the winter, in order to transfer them with their earth to the garden in summer. Planting in hot seasons must be carried out with great care, and be accompanied by frequent watering until they take root.

At the end of the planting the seedling should be held at the point of the grafting and lightly pulled to ensure that the “bud” of the graft is at the correct height. To straighten the roots after packing the earth, a wide basin should be dug around the plant. Watering is by a gentle stream at the side of the basin (in order not to disrupt the earth clinging to the roots). The day after planting, the basin is filled in again. Some people make a mound to cover the place of the graft and the base of the branches in order to guard the seedling and the exposed arms from wind and dryness. The mound will be flattened by water from the hose after the plant has taken root.

AT THE AGE of seventeen Corinne got up and got married, left the shack only to return to it time and again, but with the halo of “the married woman with problems,” which radiated even more powerfully than simply “the married woman.” “Got up and got married” is exact, because most of the time, when she wasn’t working or wandering, she spent lounging in the corner she claimed for her own, steeped in the still, silent waters of her visions, in the realms of infinite, stylish solitude where stylish faceless figures ignored each other or bowed stylishly to each other — all of them reflections of Corinne herself. Once in a while, when someone addressed her or when she thought someone addressed her, she shuddered and woke up: “What?” she demanded. “What?”

She married Mermel. His name was actually Sammy Mermelstein, but, in order not to confuse him with Sammy, everyone called him Mermel, a name invented by Nona, maliciously or innocently, because she couldn’t pronounce his surname. She, Nona, objected violently to the idea of the marriage: “She’s getting married to run away from home, poor girl. That’s why she’s getting married,” she pronounced. The mother started jiggling her thighs, cascades of flesh shaking under her dress: “What do you mean ‘run away’?” she fumed. “What has she got to run away from? Did anybody do anything to her?” She herself thought and also said that Corinne was getting married because of the dress. “It’s that msahwara of a dress that she wants to wear. She’s driven herself crazy with that dress,” she said.

And the truth is that Mermel crossed the path of the dress and not the opposite: for months before she met him, maybe half a year, Corinne had strewn the rooms of the shack with pages torn out of drawing pads, full of sketches of that figure with the dress, which succeeded in living only up to its knees, where the hem of the dress dissolved into the whiteness of the fine paper. Corinne lacked any talent for drawing or sketching — or perhaps she actually had a great talent, because she took no notice at all of any rules of proportion or perspective, subjugating the body of the replicated woman completely to what she saw in her mind’s eye, which seemed to see the world of things and creatures from upside down, like a child bending down and looking out with his head between his knees. Again and again she drew her, not obsessively but automatically and absentmindedly, gliding from unchanging sketch to sketch in the endless repetition of what was already fixed in her mind and wanted to fix itself as a fact in the world by means of one drawing after the other. The figure had no features, only the oval contours of a face, filled with cross-hatching pencil lines that reached the edge of her forehead and stopped, in honor of the hair combed back severely to the top of her head, where it was gathered up and shot out like a fountain in tongues of streaming, cascading curls. At the sides of the head, on a line with the chin, a pair of long earrings dangled, the shape of the spirals of her hair, which were not connected to anything since she had no ears or earlobes. The front of her body covered with what was the main thing — the dress — was flat as a board, and the slender, string-like straps of the dress hung on the round shoulders, dropping slightly downward and always at the same angle — two lines cutting across the exposed arms like scars.

The arms dangled lengthily at the sides of the figure down to the hem of the dress, and then bent to make long, flat hands, spread out horizontally on either side, like a pedestal fixing the figure to the floor and holding it up in the air. The mother looked at the dozens of drawings, turning them over, one after the other: “But what’s so special about this dress? It’s just a petticoat,” she wondered. “That’s exactly what’s special about it.” Corinne snatched the pages from her impatiently and wrote in her spidery hand in the middle of each dress “raw silk,” underlining the words with two thick lines.

It was Sammy who first brought Mermel to the house: they met in military prison when they served for about half an hour in the army and were arrested again and again for being AWOL, or cheeking the officers, or something. The conversation between them was as follows: Mermel walked past Sammy in the holding cell and hissed, “Have you got a cigarette?” and an hour later Sammy walked past Mermel and pleaded, “Have you got a cigarette?” Later on they were both about to be released, but Mermel was immediately arrested again — in a rush to meet Corinne in her hairdressing salon he stole an army truck and drove straight into the wall of a nearby building. He didn’t have a driver’s license.

He worshipped Corinne, Mermel, as if she was some sacred object: sometimes, when he fixed his hungry gaze on her, seeing her and only her, it seemed that if he had to cut off his head with his own hands in order to preserve this worshipful stance toward her, he would cut it off. Her laconic coldness, the uncompromising, sinewy element inherent in everything she said or did, and everything she didn’t say and didn’t do, her haughtiness full of the restrained pathos of an exiled princess, and above all her beauty, unattainable and inconceivable even to herself — all these things hypnotized him. He brought her piles of brass and plastic jewelry that he bought by weight at the central bus station, flowers, fine chocolates that she didn’t touch because she couldn’t stand sweet things, stuffed animals, fans, handbags, stolen bottles of perfume, and once even a pair of Persian cats, male and female, which he asked for in exchange for a fitted closet he installed in some villa.

He was a carpenter by trade, but what he really did, according to the mother, was play cards. He spent hours in seedy gambling joints next to the market, betting the shirt on his back, until his parents turned up and made a scene in vociferous Yiddish — especially his mother, who had the control of her tear ducts down to a fine art and could bring herself to shed decorative tears at the drop of a hat, which infuriated Corinne and immediately ignited bitter exchanges between them: within a few weeks she learned to quarrel in Yiddish, Corinne; she picked up foreign languages out of thin air, with the accent and everything.

But Mermel was beautiful, tall and beautiful — the most beautiful, said Corinne, actually she didn’t say, she screamed, covering her ears with her hands. Sammy and the mother sat or stood opposite her, while she curled up in the corner of the couch, her feet tucked under her, and lectured her. “I know him, he’s not for you,” Sammy drummed into her. “He’s not for you, I know him,” and the mother repeated after him like an echo, “He knows him, Sammy knows him.” Corinne’s face was frozen, obliterated, as if it had been covered by the blurred and blurring cross-hatching on the faces of her drawings — all the muscles of her face were stiff while she pretended to listen, until she suddenly released her face and burst into that sharp, jagged scream, a terrible bellow loud enough to shake the rafters, pressing her hands to her ears: “But he’s beautiful! He’s beautiful! He’s beautiful!”