Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

“Believe me, I don’t understand your daughter,” he usually said in the moments of ostensible appeasement and reconciliation that came and went in the stream of his volubility like tacking stitches in cloth: “Kill me if I understand what she wants.”

“What does she want, what does she want?” Corinne’s voice mocked him from inside the house: “What she wants is to cut off your head and stop your tongue from lying.” The mother wanted them to explain to her, she made Mermel sit down on one of the wrought-iron chairs on the porch and explain to her, gaining time: “But explain what happened,” she said, giving his finger a little slap, “and stop making a noise with those keys — it leads to quarrels.”

“There’s already a quarrel”—Corinne’s voice rose from inside again—“don’t listen to him, you hear? He’s a gambler,” and then, throughout the hour or more that Mermel unburdened himself into the open kitchen window, bursts of “he’s a gambler” broke out from inside the house like rounds of fire from a machine gun — in the middle of his sentences, at the end, and in the very short pauses between them, without any connection to what he said or what he didn’t say: “He’s a gambler, he’s a gambler.”

At ten o’clock in the morning silence usually fell, the day-to-day silence of the shack, which was a low chorus of sounds and noises: the sprinkler, the washing machine, the radio, the dripping of a tap, the crackle of the noodles slightly seared in the pan before they were added to the Syrian rice for the meatballs with garlic and cumin that Corinne liked.

The bundles in the striped sheets (“American, the good sort,” said the mother, who bought them for Corinne before she got married) stayed in the corner of the porch, static as Corinne: she, standing, sitting, walking around the shack or the yard — was actually lying down most of the time, her limbs outspread and eyes staring at the ceiling. Once every two days she was seized by a strange impulse of activity and fell on her clothes: dyed a blouse, cut up a skirt, or pulled the buttons off a jacket to replace them with others. And then she stared into space some more, as if she were still standing on the threshold of her life story, and not in the middle of it, her olive cheeks with their high cheekbones stretching up to the hollow temples, frightening in their fragility. “She isn’t with us now, she’s in her dreams,” murmured the mother, cooing at the baby who tried in vain to attract Corinne’s attention, climbing onto her lap and cupping her cheeks in his little hands, or banging loudly with a ladle on the saucepans he took out of the kitchen cupboard and then crawling into it, curling up on the empty bottom shelf. At night he screamed almost without a pause; the mother picked him up, walked around the dark neighborhood with him in her arms, patting him on his squirming buttocks, leading his insistent, ceaseless wailing up and down the streets. Around Corinne she walked on tiptoe, everyone tiptoed around her: the metallic brittleness she gave off and the unexpected bursts of rage filled the air around her with fear and pity. Corinne said that she wasn’t waiting for Mermel, and as far as she was concerned he might as well be dead. “Don’t say that,” the mother protested, “he’s the father of your child.” “He isn’t anybody’s father, he’s zero,” retorted Corinne, got dressed up, put on high heels, and took the bus to the gambling joint next to the market to look for Mermel and ask him for money. It was morning, Mermel wasn’t there, but his friends were. She overturned a table, she took a stack of bills and crammed them into her purse, after she tore their cards up one by one and threw the baize cloth out of the window, into the busy street of the market. On her way home she passed the pet shop next to the bus stop, and stood for a long time riveted to a pair of honey-colored Pekinese puppies, male and female, with certificates and pedigrees. She bought them both, with all the money she had taken from the club. On the bus home she held the puppies on her lap, under her buttoned coat. Their names were Pat and Patishon: Patishon was the plump and rather stupid male, Pat the bad-tempered female, who bared her sharp teeth and growled whenever anyone came near her, but didn’t do anything.

“See what a scowling little face she’s got,” Corinne cooed, kissed her on her nose, and then kissed Patishon, too, so he wouldn’t be jealous. She slept with them in her bed at night, fed them from her hand, delighting in their pink tongues lapping the soft bread dipped in milk from her palm, but was overcome by terrible anxiety whenever one of them disappeared from sight. “Where’s Patti, where’s Patishon?” she cried, morning, noon, and night, prowling wild-haired and swaying around the rooms of the shack and afterward the front and backyards, the baby crawling behind her with his diaper undone, his face smeared with grape juice and mud, wailing like her.

The mother grew more resentful from day to day, from the general upheaval of the invasion of the shack, and especially now, with this Pat and Patishon, which was “all she needed.” They filled her with bafflement and hostility, these pedigreed pups: “They’re like bibelots , so pretty you could put them on a shelf,” she announced once a day to please Corinne, who beamed in gratification, but then she came out with the truth: she wanted to drown them, that’s what she wanted, for them to stop standing “in front of her eyes” with their pampered little faces, those strange squashed faces of theirs, distracting Corinne, who was like “some kite” anyway, from the tasks of life. She told Corinne she should find a job: “Get up already. How long are you going to sit there without a penny to your name, cleaning up after those dogs all day?” she scolded her. Corinne held Pat and Patishon close on her chest, near her neck, burying her chin in their fur, her light brown eyes with their thick lashes gazing into the distance, wide open in astonishment and disbelief.

The mother brought her a notice she had torn down from one of the trees in Savyon, after reading the word “wanted”: “Wanted, a saleswoman for a new book and record store in the commercial center.” Corinne was silent. But she couldn’t get enough of the advertisement; she read it again and again until she had to throw it away in the evening after Patishon overturned a cup of coffee on it.

The next day the two of them, she and the child, rode the bicycle to the commercial center. They arrived too early and sat and waited on the stone wall for the shop to open. Corinne smoked cigarettes halfway, and ground them out on the stone wall: “I don’t want the owner of the shop to see me smoking,” she said, lighting another cigarette. There was hardly anyone else in the commercial center: three times they circled the little square overgrown with yellow weeds, looked into the few display windows, to which Corinne, after a scrupulous examination, said as if to herself: “Anyone would think God knows what they were selling here. No style. Lousy taste.”

At exactly four o’clock a plump little woman opened the door of the book and record shop, placing a stone in front of the door to keep it open, and turned on the light. Corinne didn’t move; she examined the woman like a spider waiting for the right moment to ingest its insect: “Quick, tell me the names of books,” she instructed the child without taking her eyes off the owner of the shop, whose silhouette was visible moving heavily behind the windowpane. “What names?” demanded the child in confusion. “Names, names”—Corinne pinched her arm—“If she asks me about books.” “ Three Loves ,” blurted the child. “More, more, tell me another two or three,” urged Corinne. Crime and Punishment, Angélique, The Foundling ,” the child added quickly.