Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

“Sleeping?” asked Yaffa. “Sleeping,” said the child.

The shack stood in its solitude in the garden, next to the cypress tree and in front of the row of young pines at the back. Since early in the afternoon, when the child came home and the mother left, it was completely alone. The mother left food for the child on the stove, meatballs and rice, rice and beans, or liver and rice, covered the saucepan with a towel, but the child ate two slices of bread with chocolate spread, forgot the knife smeared with chocolate spread on the counter, next to the cleaning rag soaked in soapy water, which had stiffened as it dried, into a strange shape with hollows and bumps, like a rock or a crystal. She sat on the stool in the kitchen, chewing the bread and looking at it, at the little flies hovering over it and sticking to it.

This was the empty time of the shack, the long hours unraveling into non-time, until the night when the emptiness was interrupted twice, first when Sammy came home, and then when the mother came home. When the child looked at the polished objects and furniture standing in the polished rooms, it seemed to her that they were breathing air into the still spaces made glassy by the emptiness, filling them with the vapors of their breath. Now it was hers, the whole shack was ostensibly at her disposal, without anyone to tell her what to do, but when she went from the kitchen to the living room and then to the little room and the mother’s bedroom, she became a guest, interfering with the emptiness and the conduct of the emptiness, its welling and bubbling between the rooms, that fullness of the emptiness that turned into the presence of something, she didn’t know what, which slowly, the more time passed, changed from disapproving to terrifying. She entered the rooms with her back to them, walking backward, so that whatever was in there wouldn’t meet her at once, wouldn’t fix its eyeless stare on her face. Outside, outside the shuttered shack, were the ordinary sounds of the day — marking the hours, creating the illusion that everything was normal: the carpentry shop, Nona calling every now and then from her concrete landing, the tractor digging something up in the thorn field. It was then, in the afternoon or early evening, that she slammed the door behind her and ran to Rachel Amsalem’s half-shack, to wait for her. Yaffa, not Rachel, was there, sitting on the porch, cracking the thin skins of broad beans and humming quietly to herself. The child sat down next to her, waiting for her to finish, and collected the empty skins fallen to the floor, and as she skinned, hummed quietly, stopped humming, and started again, she told the child that her problem was that she had twelve faces. “Everybody says you’ve got twelve faces, that’s why nobody wants to be friends with you,” she said. The child was silent. She stared at a column of ants making its way to the anthill, in the corner of the porch, and wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “You don’t have to cry because of that,” said Yaffa, “you’ve got a really nice house.”

She said it again: “Your house is really nice,” when the two of them reached the shack, stood on the dark porch, and peeped into the kitchen window, from darkness to darkness. The child had forgotten her keys again, on the hall table. Yaffa waited by the front door until she ran to the living-room window, at the back, climbed in, and opened the door. Together they went from room to room and switched on the lights, also the standing lamps in the living room and the hall. Yaffa looked into the pots in the kitchen, fished a meatball in sauce out of one of them, and ate it. After that she looked at the shelves with the copperware, the glass figurines, and the music box in the shape of a wooden house, and peeked into the kitchen cupboards and the closet in the mother’s bedroom. The child lined up the three bald dolls on the hall table: she had cut off their hair. “Anyone who doesn’t behave herself today will sit in the thinking corner till lunch time and won’t get a slice of bread,” said Yaffa not in her own voice, but in the loud, jarring voice of the kindergarten teacher in the kindergarten where she sometimes helped the assistant. “But I’m the baby,” protested the child. “All right,” acquiesced Yaffa. She sat down on the couch in the hall, with the dolls next to her on the cushion, and the child curled up in her lap, covered herself in the dolls’ blanket, and sucked her thumb. She closed her eyes, and brought her lips to Yaffa’s breast: “The baby wants milk,” she said. When she opened her left eye a crack and peeked, she saw Yaffa’s broad face staring into space with its usual expression of good-tempered dullness and sleepy satisfaction. She put her hand on the child’s forehead: “The baby has a fever. That’s why he isn’t sleeping,” she said, and slid her hand over the child’s face, feeling her cheeks and chin: “He’s a sweet baby. If he stops desecrating the Sabbath people will stop saying that he has twelve faces.” Yaffa closed her eyes, her head swaying from side to side and her mouth hanging open as her hand slid down the child’s body, down her ribs and then her stomach, slipped under the elastic of her trousers into her panties and farther down, where her fingers massaged the smooth lips of her vagina and poked inside. The child opened her eyes and looked at her in suspense. “The baby’s asleep,” she said.

She stopped abruptly and took her fingers out of the child’s panties: “We’ll play again later. Now go and bring what you brought last time and we’ll go,” she said. The child went to the room that was her room and took the savings bank off the shelf. With the slot angled downward she began fishing the coins out with a kitchen knife. Yaffa put them in her pocket. They went outside, leaving the lights on behind them. In Yosef’s grocery shop, to the right of the bus stop, Yaffa bought a packet of sour tomatoes and paid with the coins in her pocket. They sat on the bus-stop bench and waited. Yaffa sucked the tomatoes one by one and then bit into them, examining her tooth marks on the tomato. She offered one to the child, too, but the child didn’t want it. She wiped her hands in the darkness on her trousers as if they were stained with the sharp-sour juice of the tomatoes. The mother got off the bus, but she didn’t bring waffles. She was carrying two bags full of books from the public library in Ramleh. Yaffa carried the bags for her as far as the dirt track winding up to the shack, dropping them on the ground and running home when the mother said: “Why are all those lights on? Who are they on for, the dead?”

THE CHILD THOUGHT, heard, and said things at a slant in the viscous hours from noon to night, when she was inside the shack, hushing her breath against the pale, barely audible breath of the strange emptiness, or outside it, when she went around and around, from the front to the back of the shack, looking for an open window to climb through.

The keys were inside, lying on the dining table in the hall, on the white lace tablecloth the mother had soaked in tea, in obedience to Corinne’s instructions, in order to dye it off-white, and it came out the color of tea. Through the window bars (Sammy installed them after a burglar once broke in — he didn’t take anything but he turned the place upside down) she looked at them, how they lay next to the bald doll, almost touching her bent rubber leg, so close, eighteen inches away, but out of reach. For a long time she stood there, her feet sunk in the mother’s flower bed with the new plants, her face pushed into the gap between the bars, hypnotized by the keys and the complacency of the keys, which at that moment was the complacency of the shack, its unapproachable lordliness, as if it had ejected her, expelled, rejected her — and not the other way around, when she had escaped from it before. And precisely because the keys were so close (when she reached in with her arm it touched the edge of the table), there was even something insulting in this closeness, and the intimacy implied by it — how could they have done this to her, to someone so close.