Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

They both danced attendance on Corinne’s baby, who always arrived at the shack with his bundles “just for an hour” and stayed for eight — a dance that consisted of arm-wrestling, open and disguised, over authority, and especially the source of authority. The dance steps obliged the mother, who secretly recognized the Nona as the source of authority on babies, to do whatever she could to avoid the humiliation of explicitly acknowledging this recognition, while Nona for her part spread her net of cunning tricks and verbal evasions under the mother’s feet, without asking for recognition of her authority, not at all — as long as they did things her way.

Corinne’s baby, who first slept and slept in his carriage on the sunny porch, his wrinkled red face (“like an old man’s face,” said Corinne) occasionally distorted by the grimace of a smile or momentary distress as he slept, suddenly woke up with shocking screams. What happened? What was it? “The end of the world, the end of the world,” muttered the mother in despair, changed him, fed him, turned him on his stomach, his back, his side, walked him in his carriage and in her arms, stuck a suppository in his rectum, sang to him, scolded him, put him down in his carriage and ignored him for a few minutes, put a cold compress on his forehead, swung with him on the neighbors’ creaking swing — and nothing. His screams only grew louder, his little arms and legs fought the air, he turned blue with crying and then red and then blue again, losing his breath. Nona sat in the corner of the porch in affected detachment, looking in front of her or not, and hardly seeing anything anyway, muttering as if to herself words that could be clearly overheard, clasping her long white fingers and waiting for the moment to ripen. The moment ripened: in her slippers and housecoat the mother ran to the clinic with him, to the doctor. The blood drained from her face on the way up the hill with the screaming baby and on the way down, with the still screaming baby: “I’d rather be a construction worker, it’s easier, I swear,” she said.

She sank into a chair next to the Nona, her eyes glazed, apathetically rocking the carriage with the screaming baby. Now the stage belonged to Nona; nobody could stop her. “You saw that this morning, when the neighbor dropped in, she said, what a lovely baby, you saw that?” the Nona said slowly and quietly. The mother nodded in agreement; she laid down her arms, surrendered unconditionally to what she called Nona’s “old-fashioned nonsense.” “And when she left the child turned over,” the Nona continued, and fell silent. In the rich, saturated silence that descended between them the baby’s crying sounded all the louder — still determined but a little hoarser, glazed like the look in the mother’s eyes. “ Mafish fayida , put salt ya Lucette.” The mother dragged her feet to the kitchen, brought the big salt-cellar with the cooking salt, and began to sprinkle salt on the carriage, the blanket, and the baby’s clothes. “On the head, on the head,” urged Nona, “put salt on his head against the Evil Eye she gave him, mafish fayida .” She sprinkled salt on his head and inside his little hands. The weather changed, the sun withdrew from the sky and the porch, and the air darkened. They went inside with the salted baby, sat on either side of the carriage, and stared. “At that minute he slept, like from God. He calmed down in a minute,” recounted the Nona.

THE CHILD WASN’T simple-minded, but she sometimes thought, heard, and said things at a slant. Rachel Amsalem’s big sister, Yaffa, told her that she made herself look simple-minded by believing everything people said. “What people?” asked the child. “Tell me what people?” They were sitting at the bus stop, waiting for the next bus. Perhaps the child’s mother would be on it, bringing the waffles left over from the party at the student center, which the child had promised to give to Yaffa. Yaffa herself, on the other hand, was said to be a little simple: she was fifteen and she still played with dolls with the little girls, with the child and with Rachel. Their feet dangled in the air when they sat on the bench, shoulder to shoulder: the dogs had dug a deep ditch next to the bench, so that it was possible either to jump over it or to stumble into it. Yaffa did neither. When they wanted to get up, the child jumped first over the ditch, and Yaffa said, “Give me a hand.” The child gave her a hand and Yaffa gathered up her long skirt so it wouldn’t get in the way, closed her eyes, and took a long step forward, throwing the whole weight of her body onto the child and almost making her fall. She had a big body. She wore her mother’s clothes: skirts to below the knee, blouses buttoned to the neck, and sleeves reaching past the elbows, thick brown nylon stockings. “Closed, closed, all closed up,” the child’s mother said about her, raising her hand to her throat in a gesture of suffocation. Yaffa’s frizzy hair, coarse as steel wool, was stuck all over with dozens of hairclips, to keep the curls from jumping up. From Friday night to Saturday night she straightened her hair in an abu-aguela , pulling it tight to one side and then the other, with a scarf tied tightly around her head, singing Sabbath songs out of tune in her choked, rusty voice, alone in the dark half-room with the Sabbath candles, on and on until she was interrupted by her brother David’s despairing roar: “Enough, ya rabbak , enough! You’re sawing through my brains with those songs of yours!” and silence fell, settling on the Amsalem half-shack and crushing it, sinking it even farther down into all the barrels, junk, old bicycles, and the cinder blocks they wanted to use to extend their kitchen and got stuck in the middle.

They walked through the thorn field on the shortcut to the child’s house, which passed by the reservoir at the edge of the hill. The darkness was shallow, full of sounds; faint lights shone from the distant shacks, almost at the end of the horizon, as if from dying ships about to drown. Yaffa told the child that God would punish her for lying, for saying that she would bring her waffles and then not bringing them. “But I wasn’t lying,” protested the child. “I wasn’t lying, I wasn’t lying,” she repeated, shuddering a little at the sound of the metallic clatter of her own lying voice — not the lie referred to by Yaffa but a different, far greater lie, hidden and fortified as a secret, but a secret that was a lie, not the truth, a truth that was a secret lie. In front of them shone the reservoir: a cat was walking along the flat upper wall; it walked as if it were blind, swaying from side to side, but it didn’t slip. “So you don’t want to play mother and baby?” asked the child, picked up a long stick from the ground, and began beating the tall thorns on either side of the path, on the right and the left. “Just a minute,” said Yaffa, and she stepped off the path, onto a clearing between the thorns, pulled down her panties, squatted, and peed. The child looked at the strong jet making its way onto the path and collecting in a puddle. “Don’t you need to pee?” asked Yaffa. The child shook her head, she held it in. “You never need to pee,” said Yaffa, pulling her nylon stockings up from her calves.

Her broad, expressionless face, dissolving into its own blurred expanses, bent over the child: “Who’s there in your house now?” she demanded to know. “No one,” said the child. They stood next to the reservoir and looked at the big holes torn in the round stone wall, as if it had been smashed with heavy hammers. The child averted her eyes from the dark holes and looked at Yaffa, who also turned her face away in order not to see the footprints left by the white man when he walked on the wall: the holes were his footprints. “I’m dying of hunger,” said Yaffa. They walked down the hillside, toward the pointed silhouette of the cypress, which was suddenly covered by a strange, alien film, which now passed through the child, too, turning into the nagging doubt of “perhaps”: perhaps not here. But out loud she said, “Perhaps Sammy’s at home.”