Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

The Suhba was always active in thought and deed. It worked in various ways to deliver its message to the public at large. Hed HaMeorer, the organ of the Suhba, reached all the leaders and important people in the country. The existence of the Suhba as an active organization could therefore not be cast in doubt. My friends and I were always there wherever and whenever our presence was needed and desired. Our center or headquarters operated on the move, like soldiers in the field; we lived among our public, suffering their poverty and their pain. It activated us and we informed it of its rights. Our center would assemble in one of the houses in the neighborhoods and finish its discussions in one of the streets or popular cafés in the marketplaces or suburbs. Sometimes we received a call when we were in the north, and that same day we traveled to the south, and vice versa. In most parts of the country we met friends and Suhba, and sometimes the distant friends came to us. They all wanted to know what was happening, asked questions, clarified issues, and wholeheartedly and generously volunteered their assistance. The membership of the Suhba was diverse, including native Israelis, Ashkenazim, and people from all the ethnic communities in the country. For our part we never questioned them about their political party affiliations. This question was of no interest to us. Every new saheb had to know one simple thing: that the Suhba was the Suhba of The Solution? The solution in which we believed was the solution to the problem of peace, both internal and external peace .

These beliefs were proclaimed in a manifesto pasted up all over the country in the year 1964 .

I owe appreciation, respect, and admiration to all those who accompanied the Suhba on its difficult path from the beginning to the present day. These dear friends, despite all the obstacles of poverty, oppression, cruelty, etc., set on their path by a certain doctrine, despite the planned policy of division, reaction, and lying propaganda that was their daily lot, were able to overcome all these things and continue on their path. They stood firm and walked tall in spite of all the obstacles, the dangers, the risks, and the suffering inflicted on them in their private lives and in every step of the way with me .

THERE WERE TWO photographs of Piazza San Marco, one in his possession and one in hers. His conservation instincts were even weaker than hers, because of his personality and because of his history: his history was such that he almost always ran away, leaving everything behind except for a bundle of papers typed on his typewriter (“the memoirs I’m writing”), and afterward, when it vanished at some stage, on the little Olivetti that the mother once bought me as a gift.

He came one day (“one day”—the bubble of air in the bowl of time, the moment of his appearance, which was always “one day”) and said that the apartment he was living in at the time had been broken into, they had smashed everything up, there was nothing left. He was a wreck: the color of his skin, the lines of his wide mouth with its sensuous lips, the nostrils, the inside of his shirt collar at the back of his neck — everything was gray. “I was up all night searching in the mess for that picture of the mother and you when you were little and you came to visit me in Italy. I don’t care about anything except that picture, which I couldn’t find,” he said. His eyes filled. The little stick of ash of his cigarette held motionless in the air pointed down to the floor, dropping at the last minute on its way to the ashtray. “But what did they take?” I asked. He had nothing of value, and what he did have could be bundled up in a single sheet, which is what he did when he moved from one place to another. “I don’t care about anything,” he said again, reached for the plate of cookies, took one, and put it back again: “Only that picture of you and the mother, and the typewriter I work on. That typewriter is my work.” His lower, drooping lip trembled a little: for a moment he looked to me like he sometimes looked to himself, without the effort to make an impression on the world. He made a living then from writing applications to the municipality, to government offices, and to the courts, especially for the owners of stalls in the Aliya market and the Carmel market. He had five or six of these clients. I gave him my typewriter.

In the coming days I told her about the burglary, the photograph of Piazza San Marco, the typewriter. This was during the course of an afternoon outing: we were sitting in a café in Dizengoff Circle that served croissants the size of challas (she said) and coffee in huge cups (“What is it with these cups? Do they want us to wash in them?” she said). I told her. Her face lengthened and tensed at once: she abandoned the coffee, the croissant, everything. As she listened, lengthening and tensing, she raised her finger to a corner of her eye and pulled it down: the sign of a lie, a liar, a barefaced lie. “Nobody broke into his apartment. It’s a pity you gave him your typewriter.” I didn’t understand. “He told Sammy, Sammy knows,” she said. “He organized the whole thing with some friend, to get the insurance money.”

“IN THE COMING days” were words for the continuous present, the knowledge gradually coming into being, not the future understanding locked up in the story of the past. “In the coming days” we didn’t understand what we didn’t understand. We didn’t see what we didn’t see. We couldn’t see what we couldn’t see. The story of life constantly coming into being covered the contours of consciousness, not like a blanket, but like ripples upon ripples, new circles made by the new stone thrown into the water in the midst of the previous circles made by the previous stone.

So “In the coming days” nothing was closed, there was no closure, and the bottom line of the story, all the stories, was the start of a new story, not completely different, but different enough. “In the coming days” made no promises and kept none, especially not fixing an object or a figure in the violent flux of time. In this blurring, in the perpetual coming into being, there was a lot of mercy: in spite of everything it allowed for an open fate, or the illusion of an open fate. “In the coming days” was another sign of open-ended fate and the illusion of open-ended fate that they both, he and she, in their different languages, different ways of managing the world, desired: a mon seul désir , the sole object of my desire.

If that petticoat had still been flying over the red tiled roof of the shack to proclaim its identity, if that petticoat had been the flag of the one identity that was forbidden, if something had been written on the flag of that one forbidden identity, if what was written was a prayer whose words were forbidden, if the petticoat-flag-prayer had existed as an object in the world, then it would have been an aspiration, taken on the amorphous shape of hope pointing in a forbidden direction, so as not to foreclose or interfere with the illusion of open-ended fate, not to stand in its way with an explicit meaning, fixed in time and place: a mon seul désir —to my sole desire.

IT WASN’T ALL pale red, the roof, but patched with asymmetrical squares of tiles replaced here and there over the years, leaving dark brown-red stains among the faded pink. The mother was tormented by the patchwork of the roof but held back, because changing all the tiles would be a “headache.” Never, it seems, was so much bitterness and resentment and suppressed rage invested in the word “headache” as when it shot out of her mouth in this meaning: an impossible or near-impossible task.