Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Through the window, from outside, the hall looked the same, complying in every detail with the picture she knew — and at the same time it looked a little different, as if it had been tilted a little sideways, as if it remained as it was, but with a transparent mask on its face. There was something strange about the curving legs of the dining table, with the ball in the middle, which she now, from her new point of view, noticed for the first time, and the narrow doorway leading from the hall to the little room opposite her looked allusive, promising, as if it hid many rooms behind it, countless passages and vestibules and rooms leading off one another. When she tilted her neck to the left she saw the edge of the picture in the bathroom passage, with the tip of the white dress of the sad woman standing to the left of the one with the burning look in her eyes, at whose presence the child now guessed, straining her neck sideways in the attempt to see another part of the picture retreating into the darkness, to the limits of her field of vision, suddenly jealous of the people painted there — the man with the mustache and the sad standing woman and the young woman with the witch’s eyes — who stayed in the shack, who would always stay there, while she came and went, everybody came and went, and only they remained in the picture, would always remain the real inhabitants of the shack, the eternal witnesses of the real life of the shack that took place when there was nobody there.

The pail she was standing on sank a little deeper into the flower bed and noises came from the welding shop after a long period of quiet. She went there and found Sammy’s worker, Binyamin, and asked him to force the door open, like last time. He said no: “Your mother nearly killed me last week for ruining her door, but I didn’t ruin it. Come and look. I put the lock back just like new,” he argued. They went together to the front door and Binyamin showed her how he had installed the lock. “You can’t see a thing. Can you see anything?” he demanded triumphantly. The child shook her head politely and asked in despair: “But how am I going to get in?”

He went back to the welding shop and brought a long wire, hooked at the tip like a fishing rod, and the two of them stood in the flower bed again and threaded the wire through the window bars, toward the keys on the table. The wire wandered over the table like a blind man’s cane, to the right and the left, searching. “What do I see there?” hummed Binyamin to himself, leading the wire in circles over the tablecloth as if he were trying to draw, not to trap something: “What do I see there? Somebody forgot a baby on the table. That’s what I see. Left the baby sleeping and went away.” “What baby?” demanded the child. Full of gratitude, she examined Binyamin’s profile and climbed on the pail to get a closer look at the table. “That one, that one.” He hit the naked doll lying next to the keys with the wire: “How do you leave a sleeping baby like that?” The child’s eyes filled; she gripped the window bars with her fingers: “But I didn’t leave him on purpose, I would never leave him, I only…” “I only, I only,” Binyamin imitated her mockingly: “We’ve heard that before. Now he’ll die with nobody to feed him. He’ll die of hunger and not being covered.” He reached the keys with the wire, almost succeeded in threading it through the key ring, but failed. The child felt the blood draining from her cheeks: “He won’t die, he can’t die,” she said. “He’ll die, he’ll die,” insisted Binyamin, finally succeeding in hooking the key ring on the wire: “He’ll die because of you.”

She let go of the window bars and sank to her knees in the flower bed, covering her face with her hands: “It’s not because of me that he’ll die,” she sobbed.

“Don’t cry,” said Binyamin in alarm. “It was just a game. It isn’t true. Did you think it was true?” She parted her fingers and looked through them at the broad leaves of the mango tree, the broad leaves spreading to the sides. Bitterness spread through her, terrible resentment, not at the lie, but at the breakdown of the partnership between herself and Binyamin with the lie about the sleeping baby. “It is true,” she said coldly. “The baby’s true.”

THE BUNCH OF keys she always carried with her, the keys of the mother superior of a convent, which at their height reached maybe fifteen, attached to an iron ring. Each key — a vocation that became a door: the keys to the shack, the huge wrought-iron key to the door to Nona’s quarter-shack, the two keys to Sammy’s welding shop, the key to “her” little storeroom next to the welding shop, the key to the main entrance of the student center, another four keys to other rooms in the student center, the three keys to Rabbi Nathaniel’s villa — one for the front door, one for the side door, and one for the basement — the key to Corinne’s one-room flat in the young couples housing project, the key to the bicycle lock, and another little one, to the lock of the attic, the msandara “up there,” which was completely rusted and neither opened nor closed, and which she kept with her as a reminder that it had to be changed. “I have to get it changed, the me’affan ” (the key? the lock? the entire door?), she would say whenever she came across it on the key ring, an expression of urgency, but also relief, almost happiness, crossing her face: there was something else to do, something that had not yet been done.

The keys left the ring over the course of the years, one by one or in droves: in the drawer of the hospital locker, after she died, the only keys left on the ring were the key to the shack and the key to the outside storeroom, which had been dismantled long ago and turned into a kind of cupboard, but which she kept on calling “the storeroom.” The keys rested at the bottom of the plastic bag containing the things removed from the locker drawer, under the open envelopes of letters from the municipality and the National Insurance, which Sammy brought her from the shack. On one of the envelopes were scribbled in pencil two telephone numbers, which I didn’t recognize. I rang them both. The first was answered by the automatic answering service of the local council, the second by the social worker in the sheltered housing for the elderly in south Tel Aviv, where Maurice lived.

I didn’t know what to say. I asked her how he was. She knew me, the worker (he called her “the worker”), from my occasional visits; she was always lying in wait for me when I came out of his room: a born-again religious Jewess who kept a pack of cigarettes in her desk drawer, and quickly threw her cigarette stub out the window whenever anyone came into her office. Now, on the phone, she complained a little about Maurice: he didn’t want to take part in activities, shut himself in his room all day, she reported. “He never took part in activities,” I consoled her: “It’s from way back.” She was silent. I could almost sense the rich, dense texture of her silence on the other end of the line. “Strange,” she said in the end, “that’s exactly word for word what your mother said a week ago when she called to ask how he was. Word for word.” She fell silent again. “She died, may she rest in peace, right?” “Right,” I said. “Maurice has hardly touched his food since she died, may she rest in peace,” she said.

I didn’t touch the keys, I didn’t have permission. Sammy had: he shoved them absentmindedly into the pocket of his work pants (with the hole), taking her death on himself and to himself with the same naturalness that he took her on himself and to himself when she was alive.

CORINNE REPEATED WORD for word what she had once heard from Aunt Marcelle, who had elaborated, not word for word, on something the Nona had once thrown out. This was in a moment of complete relaxation, of self-forgetfulness: for a moment Corinne forgot her daily schedule, raised her face to a different star. She really did raise her face when she said it — a face shining with passion and intense longing, steeped in the molten gold of the inspiration, the invention of the moment, the sudden birth of the inspiration of the moment: she was Maurice’s daughter. Like him, she knew how to lend a quotation the force and inspiration of the invention of the moment, to turn the copy into the original by virtue of the belief, natural and unwilled as breath, that everything was original or everything was a copy, and what mattered was the emotional investment, or the depth of the emotional investment in what was said, what was taken, what was given. The dreaminess of her voice when she said what she said, repeating what she had heard but in her own way, steeped in longings that had no beginning or middle or end, translucent, open to infinity and opening with the conjunctive “and”: “And he loved her so much, Maurice,” she said, “and he loved the mother so much. And when he entered the room he looked only at her when he spoke, only she was there, nobody else but her. And he spoke only to her.”