Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Corinne went into the shop, leaving the child to watch the bicycle, next to the stone wall. Behind the glass she saw Corinne sitting very straight on a high chair, hardly moving her lips when she talked, tightening the clip in her hair gathered in a chignon on her nape. “What did she say? Did she take you?” she asked as she walked back next to Corinne pushing the bicycle. “She said I was pretty,” confessed Corinne reluctantly. “Is that all?” asked the child, disappointed. Corinne stopped and thought for a minute: “She gave me something to write at home, for some graphologist friend of hers to look at my handwriting and say if my personality is suitable.”

They walked down the middle of the wide road with the darkness arching above them, trapped inside the vault made by the tall branches leaning toward each other and meeting high above their heads, sending a fateful shiver through the child, paralyzing and inexplicable, as if she and Corinne had been walking since time began under the high dome of the branches and would go on walking there forever, in this silence of knowledge that brought down all the barriers between past, present, and future, and planted her in a place beyond time, from which she looked neither forward nor backward but down from the heights. She looked sideways at Corinne, at her firm profile that lightened and darkened alternately; because of the shadows passing across her face or because of some inner shift, she saw how the despair that had previously settled on Corinne’s face changed its nature and turned into something different — not the opposite of despair, not happiness, but a different despair, subtle and mysterious, resembling the height and darkness of the arch of the trees more than the shop and the owner of the shop in the commercial center.

* * *

WHEN THEY reached the part of the road next to the dirt track leading to the shack Corinne suddenly stopped, her eyes widening in terror: a dog fight. Three or four dogs attacking each other ferociously with dreadful barking, their bodies writhing on top of one another on the dirt track, merging into a single frantic mass, digging their teeth into each other’s necks, hanging on and not letting go, their tails projecting for a moment from a single violent trembling body and then disappearing. Abruptly Corinne dropped the bicycle and raced to the scene, threw herself into the jumble of fighting dogs yelling, “Pat! Patishon!” The child stood nailed to the spot next to the bicycle lying on the ground. She saw Corinne’s gleaming white blouse in the pile of dogs, her thigh, her arms trying to force open the jaws of one of the dogs locked on the neck of another. And then came the scream, or the shriek, a terrible, piercing sound that erupted from Corinne and quelled all the barking and howling. The dogs extricated themselves and fled. Corinne lay on the ground, bitten on her leg, close to the ankle. Back at the shack, Pat and Patishon lay in their basket, cuddled together.

Corinne spent most of the following days sitting on the porch, in the sun, her bandaged leg with the stitches resting on one of the wrought-iron chairs in front of her, her hand supporting her forehead bent over the white pages that she tore off the writing pad, crumpled, and threw away and tore off again, starting and restarting “that thing for the graphologist” in her handwriting that strained to be rounded but wasn’t, like the writing of a child trying to write like a grown-up, or the opposite, an adult who wrote like a child: “I was born in the month of November under the sign of Scorpio. They say that scorpions die in the end from their own poison but I don’t believe it. I have an aesthetic sense and in my opinion I have taste. Ever since I was a child I have been interested in everything regarding style in clothing and furniture and I wanted to be a designer.…” She stopped, recopied, stopped again, and started again with the hope of the new white page.

Mermel came to visit, having heard about the incident with the dogs and the bite. He parked the Lark on the dirt track and remained sitting in it until Corinne came out to him, and sat next to him on the front seat of the car. The mother came out to the porch a number of times and looked at the car from a distance, at their heads close to each other in the car, waiting. Mermel brought Corinne presents: a ring set with a pink opal and a pair of opal earrings to match. He left, but he arrived again toward evening, wearing a jacket and giving off a good smell. They went out to a “fancy restaurant” according to Mermel, and took the sleeping baby wrapped in a blanket, and Pat and Patishon in their basket, with them. The mother arranged the piles of clothes and shoes in the sheets, and tied them securely, to be ready for the next day, or the same day in the middle of the night, she didn’t know: “He’s buying her, that Corinne, he’s buying her again with a few toys,” she said.

THE BABY SLEPT swaddled in layers of white cloth, layer of white on layer of white, white merging into white, the broad plump white of the dress of the woman holding him on her lap, into the white of her headdress whose edges fell onto her dress. What’s called the “background,” too, was white, or almost white: the space behind the woman holding the baby, which looked like a garden covered in snow, or the opposite, like an arid desert verging on whiteness, almost achieving it. And then the white was interrupted: the photograph was torn, half of it was cut off. It was from Egypt, the photograph. It had the color and the mood of Egypt and photographs of Egypt. The mother didn’t look for it; she always came across it when she was looking for “some paper”—she would keep every single official document because she wasn’t sure of what was written in it, “maybe something from the bailiff.”

We sat on the floor, in front of the cabinet’s open door: she took out papers and more papers, “tell me what this is,” and “tell me what this is.” And the sleeping baby invariably popped up in the end; buried in some pile, hidden under some paper or other, he was revealed — he wanted to be revealed, instantly silencing the noise of the day-to-day, of the bureaucratic business. She always looked at him as if for the first time, and began to cry, but soundlessly: “That was Zizi,” she said, “and the one who’s holding Zizi, she was his wet nurse. Because I didn’t have milk for him.”

She didn’t know what had been torn from the photograph, who had been torn off, and why. Another time she did know, or thought she did: “It was Maurice who had his photo taken with him and the wet nurse on the day before he died,” she said. She didn’t remember who had torn Maurice from the picture: “It got torn. Stop asking me questions about ancient history, why it got torn. It got torn.”

The story was born bit by bit, in installments, with years separating one part from the other, white spaces. “He died at the age of three months, because of Maurice,” she said once, not in front of the picture, in its absence, after it was lost and no longer came to light among the papers. “Maurice fancied himself a gentleman. He didn’t want to take Zizi to the hospital. Only the so-called lower classes went to the hospital. Maurice was stubborn. The baby died at home, of stubbornness, in the arms of the wet nurse.”

AS SOON AS she saw Corinne’s baby she asked about his sleep, why he wasn’t sleeping. She wanted them to go to sleep already, the babies (“ Yallah, edardem ba’a ”), not only because their quiet sleep bore witness to their well-being and somewhat allayed her guilt over the world they had been brought into, which wasn’t anything to write home about, but also so that they wouldn’t get in the way of her overturning and reorganizing the house. How she would bend over a baby sleeping in his cradle or carriage, examining this great accomplishment with respect, even awe: “Look how he’s sleeping!” On the other hand, a baby that went on sleeping too long gave rise to a panic that expanded exponentially: in a matter of seconds the baby went from a state of exemplary health to near death. Then even she would run to “the doctors,” her usual aversion overcome by abject terror, and the Nona would celebrate a victory.