Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

She had two tendencies that were not crystallized into a rigid ideology but remained as a toolbox from which she might have taken out a hammer or a screwdriver: a revolutionary-utopian spirit, which wanted to destroy the old and replace it with the new and perfect; and a reformist-liberal inclination, which aspired to improve and correct, even a little, the existing state of things.

For example, she sewed and hung curtains over the flaps of the tent in the immigrant transit camp where they were housed “when we arrived,” she got hold of a rake somewhere or other and raked the ground: the surroundings of her own tent, and then of other tents. This was a “correction,” which expressed in a profound sense what always outraged her: allowing a temporary and transient state to give free rein to mental and physical neglect, an excuse for letting go. This she found intolerable. In the bundle of aphorisms translated from Hebrew or French that she brought with her (another toolbox), there was one for this, too. “There is white poverty and black poverty,” she would declare with dramatic pathos, and always twice in a row: “white poverty and black poverty.” White poverty was poverty itself, while black was wallowing in it, in the dubious spiritual profits accruing from it, the self-indulgent liberties allowed themselves by those who had been beaten. Together with all this went the deep knowledge that home, the experience of home and the sense of home, were not things granted to elbani-adam , but something that he bestowed on himself, and not only once, but in a process of repeated reinforcement.

That was it — the process: she tore down and moved the walls of the shack as renewed confirmation of belonging, of home. An idea would suddenly sting her in the middle of something, never mind what, and then it wouldn’t let her go; she would make everyone’s life a misery. The moment when an idea would hit her registered on her face with a sudden stare at a wall, a window, a door, and her eyes would glaze, dreaming and scheming at once. “What do you say to moving that wall and opening things up a little”—she would turn to whoever was sitting next to her “at the time” (“he was with me at the time”): Sammy, or Uncle Robert. Which soon turned into “I wouldn’t let him go until he did it”: the hammers, the saws, and the drills were brought, the banging and drilling began, and the rooms and furniture to circle around. The hall turned into the living room, the living room into an enlarged hall with a kitchen, the passage opening once into the kitchen and once into the living room, the wall dividing the kitchen from the little windowless room that remained undefined, once Sammy’s, once Corinne’s, once mine, and once all three of ours, was moved forward and backward — enlarging the room at the expense of the kitchen and the opposite, and the same went for the porch, invading and then retreating from the territory of the kitchen and the entranceway. The ceilings were covered with decorative beams of wood that were removed two years later, after being painted for the third time, and the same went for the wallpaper, which was replaced or stripped off completely, together with the wall-to-wall carpet, which gave way to a straw mat laid on the new ceramic tiles, and the chandeliers (“What did you do to my lustres ?”) wandered from room to room and were reattached to the flimsy, sagging ceiling, pulling it down and bumping into tall heads — especially Mermel’s, which was bruised again and again by the heavy chandelier in the living room and its twin in the dining nook.

She had “business” with those “at hand” (Sammy, Uncle Robert) and the tradesmen who were not “at hand” (painters, plasterers, carpenters, roofers, plumbers, and general renovators): checks were written in the middle of the night or the crack of dawn, and on the day the last payment was made, she was already writing new checks to pay for a new desire.

Sammy looked on and took part in all this with horror: it kept him awake at night. “If you move one more wall, you’ll bring down the roof beam. The whole roof will fall on your head. When will you give it up, when?” he warned. “In the grave,” she replied, sticking the hammer into his hand: “Do me a favor, knock this nail in for me.” “This nail” was a way of belittling, ridiculing, and making light of a big or medium-sized operation: “What’s all the fuss about, one little nail?” she would say dismissively, dismantling and afterward moving with his help the wall closet to its new place, arguing all the time about “the right way to do it.” Sammy wasn’t like her, he was “thorough.” “When he does something, he makes such a thorough job of it you can never move it again,” she said in admiration and hostility, stealing an anxious look despite herself at the sagging ceiling with the big damp stains that had defeated the whitewash, knowing what she refused to know: that above the ceaseless renewal lurked disintegration, the tiles that kept on cracking, first in one place and then another.

“Climb,” she ordered Sammy, who climbed the ladder to the roof with the box of new tiles, to make repairs. He stood on the pointed top of the roof. We saw him from below swaying for a moment, his feet sinking into the disintegrating tiles, collapsing into the attic, and then the loud thud of his body on its flimsy floor, which was the ceiling. The heavy chandelier in the living room broke free of its chains, pulling pieces of wood and plaster with it, and shattered on the floor.

MAURICE MADE AN effort when he came this time or that, but the mother saw through him. “I see through him. All that so-called effort of his is from self-interest. He thinks it’s a hotel here,” she said. But the child didn’t see the kind of effort Corinne talked about, she saw something different — something close to abject submission. She saw him literally bow his head, with his thighs apart, his head buried between his shoulders, and his eyes fixed on the row of tiles at the bottom of the opposite wall: “Yes, ya Lucette, right, ya Lucette, you’re right, ya Lucette,” he said to her when she raged about something, the something, the fact that he didn’t work like everyone else. She wanted him to put bread on the table like everyone else. Go out in the morning with some briefcase or other, not his usual one, and come back in the evening, at regular hours. “Where’s the shame in putting bread on the table like a man?” she yelled. The curtain blew a little in the breeze. The child sat under the window, behind the curtain, in the flower bed of the backyard, and peeked into the room. And then he said, in French: “You want to say that I’m not a man, is that what you want to say?” And she said: “If you like.” And then there was a kind of silence again: the mother was seeking another way. The child looked inside and saw her looking for a kinder way. And then she said in a voice that was almost gentle: “You had a good job there in the Labor Ministry, with that director looking out for you, if only you’d kept it, you.” And then he said: “They’re all corrupt there. They’re all thieves,” and he didn’t lift his head, still looking at the line of the tiles at the bottom of the opposite wall.

And then she said: “So you steal, too, Maurice, for your family. Why shouldn’t you steal, too, like everyone else?” And he raised his eyes and looked into her face for a moment. The child saw the surprise on his face when he raised his eyes and looked at the mother as if he had just noticed her, suddenly intruding on his loneliness.

From outside, through the semitransparent curtain playing in the breeze, the child could see that picture, the picture of his loneliness, close her eyes at the sight to see it at last as it was. To see it without wanting to enter into it, just to stand on the threshold of the sight of that loneliness and observe its foreignness, which was made up of the alien letters of loneliness that denied the word “father,” and made it impossible to pronounce or feel.