Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

THE FILM THAT covered the mother’s eyes from time to time wasn’t tears, but an emotion that almost came to fruition and then held itself back. It was always accompanied by a certain tilting of her head, that filming of her eyes, not as if she wanted to hide, but as if she wanted to dim what was happening. We never saw her really cry. But we never really looked either: it wasn’t “in her nature” to cry, it wasn’t “in our nature” to look. It was in her nature to scorn whining, complaining that was like crying, to really hate it. She didn’t put it in so many words, but she was vehement: at the bottom of the pit, in the blackest of the black, you didn’t cry because you had leapt beyond the hurdle of crying, and as for all the rest, the intermediate degrees of shit, crying was putting on an act, or worse, falling into self-pity. What she did permit herself, however, was to shed a tear over “nonsense”: The Lady of the Camellias , Egyptian films on television, the moment Enrico Macias’s voice broke slightly when he sang “ soleil de mon pays perdu ,” and at Corinne’s wedding in particular.

Sammy organized playing the record on the gramophone, silencing the three members of the band in the functions hall with the grayish-pink curtains in Petach Tikva. The mother waited, going back and forth — from the rabbi’s seat to implore him to delay the ceremony to the entrance to the hall, which opened onto a sidewalk full of garbage cans in the middle of the industrial zone.

She was wearing a long lavender-mauve dress, the color of her bedroom walls. This was what Corinne had decided, “lavender-mauve,” angrily wiping the mother’s eyelids, which Miriam had painted a peculiar phosphorescent blue. There she stood, the mother, in the lavender-mauve dress whose hem swept the filthy sidewalk, waiting for Maurice, taking off her gloves and putting them back on, scanning every passing cab in despair. For over two weeks they had tried to locate him, she and Sammy, to tell him about the wedding. In the end they found him, staying in a friend’s house in south Tel Aviv. “Come, Maurice, you can’t not come,” she said. He twisted and turned until he finally confessed: he didn’t have anything suitable to wear, he had left all his clothes in the rented flat he had abandoned in the dead of night because of the money he owed the landlord. He needed a new suit. They went together to the tailor, they chose material together: she bought him a suit.

At a quarter to nine, over an hour late, when she was back inside the hall, her dry cracked lips splitting the lipstick, he finally arrived, stood in the doorway looking in like someone who had landed there by accident, come to search for something or to ask for an address. Sammy had just set the needle on the song, brought the band’s microphone up to the gramophone. She went to Maurice, to where he was standing, stepped alone on the green carpet to the strains of “ soleil de mon pays perdu ,” wiping her damp eyes with the lavender-mauve gloves, almost the color of the dress; she tucked her arm firmly in his and almost dragged him toward the marriage canopy.

MAURICE SAID HE would come on Friday morning and he did come, only not on that Friday but another one, the one after, or the one after that, when “it could be arranged.” And the child wondered, when what could be arranged, what was the thing that had to be arranged, which appeared in her imagination in the plural: the things, the affairs. The things that piled up on top of one another, empty titles, giant boxes sealed with packing tape, containing something or not, obscure representatives of the obscure thing that was his life, his troubles, because that was what he said, “I’m in trouble up to my neck.” When the two of them walked down the asphalt road with the orange grove on the right and the thorn field on the left, on the way to the bus stop to Tel Aviv, he said it: “I’m in trouble, but I’m getting out of it.”

She waited for him from five in the morning, on the Friday he came and on the others when he didn’t come. The mother said: “Why are you waiting for him at five in the morning? How do you think he’s going to get here so early?” The child hated her, secretly she kicked the flowerpot in the corner of the hall and knocked it over on its side, pretended to bend down to pick up the broken pieces, but kicked them farther away with the toe of her shoe, toward the carpet. “Get out of the way”—the mother pushed her with the broom—“you’re just making a mess.” The child looked at the floor tiles, at the dirt collected in the cracks: “I’ll go and live in Tel Aviv, too, and make a newspaper with him,” she said. “With who? Who will you make a newspaper with?” asked the mother, going on to wipe the frame of the bathroom door. The child followed her: “With Maurice. I’ll live with Maurice and we’ll make a newspaper together.” “Go, salamat , we’ll cry over you, too,” said the mother. “What are you waiting for? The door’s open.”

Dressed in her Tel Aviv clothes, the ones he had once brought her from Tel Aviv, she went to stand at the turn, to look in both the directions from which he could come: on the bus from Petach Tikva into the neighborhood, or the one from Tel Aviv that stopped at Kiron, and meant a long walk to the shack. He said: “I hate Petach Tikva, I’d rather walk than pass through Petach Tikva.” She remembered those words now—“I hate Petach Tikva”—and what stood behind them and before them, the firm back of the words, what he called the “point of view,” or “my point of view”: that a human being, elbani-adam , did or didn’t do things without any connection to efficiency or saving time, that the distress involved in “I hate Petach Tikva” rightly overcame petty considerations of efficiency. But he didn’t say “petty,” he said: “Petach Tikva isn’t a town or a village, it’s nothing. The only people who live there are the petit bourgeoisie who I can’t stand.” She walked at his side, on the gravel verges of the asphalt road, and tried to adapt herself to the rhythm and tone of his progress, which was neither slow nor fast, but something else, sideways, striving sideways. “What do they do, those people in Petach Tikva?” she asked. He wasn’t listening. He had to have his coffee: “I have to have a cup of coffee,” he said. They were almost there; they could see two-thirds of the cypress tree in front of the shack. The mother was waiting on the porch but she pretended that she wasn’t waiting — she was busy sewing something and she didn’t look up. He stood there, his briefcase under his arm, the plastic bag with a few dirty shirts for washing in his other hand: “I came to take the child for the day. I’m taking her to the Hilton,” he said. “ Ya farhati ,” she replied, still not raising her eyes, “A real treat. Enjoy yourselves.” When the two of them left, returning to the asphalt road leading to the Tel Aviv bus stop, it was nearly ten o’clock, but Maurice said there was no hurry, he wasn’t worried. He bought her a falafel at the commercial center opposite the bus stop, and he didn’t see or pretended not to see her throwing away the bits of pickled cucumber from the salad, scattering a trail of cucumber slices behind them. “Am I allowed to throw them away?” she asked, and after a couple of minutes, with great satisfaction: “Am I allowed?” He shrugged his thin, hunched shoulders: “How can you order a person what to like and what to eat? Love isn’t an order.”

On the bus, sitting side by side, he told her where they were going and why. He said, “A friend of mine,” stressing the words with imposing dignity, and repeating “A great friend of mine.” His friend was a special doctor, called Dr. Berger, who had come to the Hilton from France, who cured people with special herbs and drugs of his own invention. He had only come for a few days, and Maurice translated what the patients said to him, and what he said to the patients. The child looked at him from the side as he spoke, at the narrow strips of his eyes, packed tight with shining sparks of radiance and flashes of lightning that rubbed against each other and ignited more sparks and flashes, especially when he said “my friend.” “My friend,” she knew, was the moment of his investiture, of his anointing with the priestly oil.