Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

She went inside and sat down next to him, next to his bowed head, which was not terminally bowed: he had only laid down his arms for the time being. His fingers lay spread out on his very thin thigh, and she touched them, their long yellow nails. Now he looked at the mother — but differently, not with that former surprise, but with his face, his hollow cheeks, sinking into himself: “I can’t be like everyone else, Lucette, I can’t. If you want to kill me, kill me,” he said.

“And she killed him, with his two left hands,” said Corinne, sucking hard on her cigarette, her eyes narrowed watchfully. At six o’clock the next morning she woke him up, to drink his coffee quickly and “start work.” In the middle of the hall she set up the ladder, ready with the trowel, the hammers, the paintbrush, the can of paint. She wanted him to fix the ceiling, waterproof it, and then paint it.

He took off his shirt, remaining in the white undershirt that emphasized the sharp angles of his lean, swarthy body, the body of a Sudanese boy. He covered his head with a bandana knotted at the four corners; his Adam’s apple protruded when he raised his eyes to the ceiling, with the trowel in his hand and his tongue sticking out, touching the tip of his nose with exertion. Every fifteen minutes he needed a break, got down from the ladder, dirtying the shack with the prints of his feet and hands full of white paint: coffee, cigarette, coffee, cigarette. At midday, when she came home from work, there were maybe eight coffee cups standing at the bottom of the ladder, ashtrays full of stubs. The ceiling was still wounded, riddled with holes.

“And she threw him out. The blood went to her head from the mess.” Corinne sometimes told the story, when she emerged from her silence full of stories, but not the specific story, and not specifically to the child — she told the generalized story, which was a melting of all the stories together, to a generalized audience consisting of herself or the child listening from the side.

Maurice crossed the path, climbed to Nona’s quarter-shack, slept over there for two or three nights on the folding bed. The two of them got along; they kept the same hours. The child liked being there with them. Listening in the relaxed atmosphere to the conversation without edges, not from here and not from now, from some “once upon a time,” not exactly reminiscing, but the echo of a spacious life with many entrances to many rooms. She lay on the floor at their feet, on the striped rug over whose creases Nona stumbled whenever she got up to fetch something from the kitchen. The door to the quarter-shack was always open, to the high concrete landing, to the wind, to the smell of the honeysuckle, which Nona called fula , jasmine. In a book the child read “time stood still,” she said to Maurice, but it wasn’t right. Maurice said it wasn’t right. It stands still and moves at once, time, said Maurice, and he translated for Nona: “ elzaman, elzaman ,” said Maurice.

ON THE FLOOR in Nona’s room, moments after Maurice was kicked out: how the mother threw herself down, first falling to her knees, appealing to someone or something, and then facedown on the floor, banging her forehead on the floor. “Seeing her is like seeing a building fall,” said Nona, “a building.”

SHE HAD A small forehead, a narrow strip between the line of her eyebrows and her hairline. A small nose. A small mouth. Small gaps between the small features of her face. The mother’s smallness was praised both in Nona’s quarter-shack and in the mother’s shack as well: small was good. In Egypt, when a woman was small she was more of a woman. “Big” in a woman was shocking, in other words, like a man. Everything was determined by the feet, and by the limbs in general: big feet (“boats”) and big hands dragged in their wake the curse of the big, the unwomanly. The child was scolded for having a big mouth, especially when she laughed. “Don’t laugh,” the Nona warned her. “You’ve got a mouth on you like Isma’il Yasin, God save us.” Isma’il Yasin was an Egyptian comedian with a mouth that stretched from ear to ear, even when he wasn’t laughing. “Tell me again who my mouth is like,” the child asked Nona again and again, and she told her, and made both of them laugh.

SHE SAID WHAT was forbidden to say (she said it twice), forbidden to repeat (the child repeated it), forbidden to give any kind of force to, true or false (the Nona said: “It’s a lie, a lie”), because of the fabric of life — which even if it was stuck together with spit and joined what couldn’t be joined, even with spit, was still the fabric of life, stretching between those who were in the shack and those who weren’t, filling the air between door and door, the mother’s door and the Nona’s door, imprinted on a person’s face, the face by which each person knew himself.

From the moment she said it, hurled the words into the room, they tasted flat, or the opposite, so strong that nothing could follow them, only an emptiness that wasn’t even silence, the silence of the Nona, but simply speechlessness — it was something unspeakable that you die with, not live with, that you take to the grave, because what she said, what she had to say, was a kind of grave.

The child invented the circumstances of this utterance, the place, and the time: she planted the circumstances, the place, and the time, exactly when Maurice left Nona’s quarter-shack, after the mother kicked him out, and then fell on the floor.

She wanted the event to boil in her memory, she wanted the mother’s words to boil in her heart, immediately and urgently, for the boiling to purify the awfulness of the words, to amount to extenuating circumstances. But then, when the mother threw herself down (Nona said: “she threw herself down”), perhaps she said something else out of the boiling of her heart, not “that,” not the thing that had been gestating inside her for years, true or false, half-true or half-false, and emerged all at once, fully formed, perhaps in different circumstances, at another time and place (how many other places could there have been?): “I know everything, everything,” said the mother. “Maurice told me everything,” she said. “The Nona kept persuading him to go to bed with her,” she said. “The woman who calls herself my mother wanted him to go to bed with her all those nights he came to her,” she said. “Behind my back all that filth of his and hers,” she said, “all that filth.”

BUNDLED IN THREE sheets tied at the corners, Corinne’s clothes and her baby’s things wandered between door and door: the door of the mother’s shack and the door of Corinne’s and Mermel’s one-room apartment in the housing project for young couples on the way to Amishav. He would drop her off early in the morning, driving his silver Lark: first the bundles would land on the washed porch, and then Corinne with the baby, following Mermel with a closed face. “ Yallah to your mother, salamat ,” said Mermel, because he had started to talk like them, the way they talked in the shack. The usual day began.

Usually the mother was watering the rosebushes, and she hurried to turn the tap off when she saw the silver Lark coming (he painted it silver in honor of Corinne, who thought and also said that this color, with its class, toned down the hishik-hishik of the Lark, which was altogether a gangster’s car).

Mermel went on standing on the porch, very tall, with his shifty look and the car keys dangling from his finger, moving nervously from side to side as he spoke by means of and through the mother to Corinne, who by now had usually entered the shack. Through the noise of the electric saws in Moshe’s carpentry shop across the road, and the beating of the iron in Sammy’s welding shop, the whole neighborhood heard every word that was said: his voice was really something.