Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

And what a place it was, the Hilton he took her to, walking quickly now, and the sea! At the bottom of the hill was the sea, the greenish blue of the sea — so alive and at the same time passive, spread out, full of vitality in its passivity, ceaselessly changing in its unchanging stillness, ordinary and at the same time mysterious, containing in some strange way the sense of the words “a great friend of mine,” the dignity and the majesty, not of the friend but of the one who said “friend.”

Maurice left her in the lobby, next to the windows that were walls looking out on the sea, more and more sea, saying that he would be back at lunchtime, when the doctor took a break.

She looked at the sea, she walked along the marble tiles of the lobby and looked at the sea, and even when she glanced at the people going in and out in their quiet, elegant clothes, she looked at the sea, and when she measured the wide corridors and sat on the velvet chairs in the lobby and on the long windowsill she still looked at the sea, visible at every moment and from every corner, filling the great room, the voices, the movements, the clatter of glasses and silver forks in the dining room (Maurice didn’t return during the doctor’s lunch break), the quiet fall of the blue satin curtains, the tapping of the high crystal heels of a woman covered in crystal who bent down to her when she fell asleep on the windowsill and stroked her cheek, the hunger, because at half past three she was hungry. Now a dusty glare covered the surface of the sea, the glare of the dust and the dazzle of the windowpanes and the silvery-white glare of the late afternoon sun on the water. Maurice emerged together with Dr. Berger. The child stared at the enormous signet ring on the doctor’s finger. For some reason he examined her hands, the tips of her fingers, when Maurice said “ la petite ,” this is my little one, and then the doctor thought for a minute, went back to the office where he received his patients, and gave her a present, notepaper and a ballpoint pen. Maurice stood straight, suddenly he straightened at the doctor’s side, beaming like a bridegroom. And then they left the hotel, to make it on time to catch the last bus to the neighborhood, but also to drop in to “a friend’s house” on the way, said Maurice, walking at her side, stopping every fifteen minutes to light a cigarette. They walked south, the sea on their right, but different, not communicative, withdrawn into itself and almost murderous in the sense of nothingness it prompted in her heart. Maurice sank, withdrawn into his shoulders, confined by the thoughts that trapped him like a fisherman’s net; he didn’t say a word. Among the stalls of the Carmel market, which were already beginning to close, they looked for the friend. Maurice thought he remembered something, but he didn’t remember. In the end they found not the friend but a friend of his, the owner of a stall selling children’s pajamas and underwear. Maurice took him aside, waving his arms and twisting his face, especially his wide mouth that twisted and gaped, pulling the rest of his face after it. Again they walked, this time down the side alleys of the market and farther south, to a broad commercial street with dark, hidden entrances to residential buildings. At one of them he stopped, said, “This is a friend’s house,” asked her to wait for him downstairs, in the street. The child waited. Once she went into the stairwell, looked up into the darkness, but the dark and the stench sent her back outside again. When he came out, his hair slightly mussed and with a new bundle of papers in a red file under his arm, with his briefcase, it was five o’clock. He gave the child a vegetable patty in a paper napkin, which the friend’s wife had fried. “It’s very tasty,” he said. “Perhaps you’ll think it’s very tasty, too.”

The bus was almost empty. It grew emptier from stop to stop, until they were the only passengers left: the child went to sit on another bench at the back of the bus, so that it wouldn’t look empty. And Maurice still had to go back to Tel Aviv, not to Dr. Berger, to somewhere else, to somebody else. He didn’t see a penny from Dr. Berger, “who took the money from the poor souls he promised to cure and ran away to France,” said the mother.

THE SUHBA, A group of comrades I established and led, shaped my private-family and sociopolitical personality for many years. Saheb is an Arabic word that means “friend, comrade.” Suhba : the plural of Saheb. The Suhba elected me unanimously as its sociopolitical and cultural-spiritual leader. As a result of my election, I took it upon myself to perform faithfully and in a volunteer capacity this modest role, with all the responsibility it implies. I remember that the first thing upon which we were all agreed and the first condition undertaken by every saheb and sworn to by his oath of honor was: a prohibition on revealing or talking about the membership or the modes of operation of the Suhba. It should be noted that all the friends, without exception, adhered strictly to this obligation. I have declared in the past and I declare again that I take upon myself the consequences of the well-known existence of the Suhba. The Suhba became a household word among considerable sections of our broader public. It is also quite well-known to institutions, political parties, public figures, and leaders in Israel and abroad .

The number of times I was questioned about the Suhba cannot be counted, nor can the number of times attempts were made to sabotage or destroy this body of friends. Some of the questions addressed to me were innocent; others were cunning, self-interested, diplomatic, and undiplomatic. To them all we had a simple answer: a saheb is a friend and suhba are friends. Would you like to get to know them? To the extent that this answer did not satisfy the questioner, who was intent on discovering our sociopolitical principles, we added mockingly: We are not at liberty to discuss our friends and it would be immoral to do so. Did we ask you about your friends? Obviously neither the questions nor the answers interested the authorities and the Ben-Gurionist circles, who never stopped hounding us in order to crush and destroy us. In pursuit of this vile purpose they employed all the methods and means at their disposal, both aboveboard and underhand. Their first target was the head of the Suhba, your humble servant and the author of The Solution? Volumes would not suffice to recount all the tricks they played on me and describe all the obstacles they placed in my path. They even succeeded in separating me from my family by means of libel, slander, and threats. This was the worst blow they inflicted on me, whose consequences and pain are still with me to this day .

Well aware as I was of the degree of cruelty, immorality, lack of conscience, humanity, and democracy inherent in the behavior of those in power, I hid whatever I could about the Suhba from them. First of all I resolutely refrained from officially confirming the existence of the organization in Israel or in the Diaspora, I refused to register the members, to hand out membership cards, to collect dues, and so on. This, in spite of all the “tempting” offers made to me personally and to many other members of the Suhba. It is probably due to these measures that I succeeded in preventing the forces of division and material and moral corruption from doing their contemptible work in our ranks.

My firm position with regard to the social-organizational problem of the Suhba and my vigorous rejection of all complacency and sociopolitical conformism saved us from certain ruin. Experience teaches that destruction and disintegration were the fate of all the ethnic-Sephardie organizations that arose in the State of Israel, after Ben-Gurionism succeeded in destroying the Federation of Sephardim, which was second in size only to the General Federation of Labor. It may well be, too, that only thanks to this firm stance I saved many comrades from falling victim to the degeneracy and cowardice that unfortunately characterized so many public figures from among the Sephardim and members of Mizrahi ethnic groups .