Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Maurice said “ elaalam ” loudly and aggressively, as a rebuke and even a demand, the sound of which the child remembered but not the words or the meaning, just like Maurice himself, who was mainly the sound of something that was apparently elaalam , an absent world that he confronted with infinity: infinite expectation, infinite absence, infinite elaalam .

“ELAALAM, ELAALAM.” THE Nona tried to share with Sammy, too, her usual gloom, which was a coat with reversible sides, one dark, one light, but he was absorbed in his own nonsense: sticking a button into the folds of flesh of her swollen arm, several times bigger than the other one, to see if it would stay there without falling while she spoke.

“Stop it, stop it, you’ll never learn anything, you.” She slapped his arm with the kitchen towel lying on her lap and he burst out laughing, rolling around on the mat at her feet, his knees close to his chin, swaying from side to side.

“Say it again, what you said before,” he groaned. “What did I say?” she wondered, feeling the skin between her upper lip and her nose, to see if the five annoying hairs of her little mustache had grown back. “What did I say? Just say it in Hebrew, because of the Arabic you talk I can’t understand a word. It’s as broken as the Arabic of the Greeks in Cairo,” she complained, echoing his roars of laughter with an occasional obligatory titter, but actually busy maintaining her self-respect, repeatedly straightening the voluminous folds of her dress as she restrained herself from bending down to scratch her ankle, which he was tickling with a stalk. “Come on, Nona, let’s test your eyesight.” He stood up, took a few steps backward, and held up his fingers: “How many?” “Three,” she said crossly, stood up at last, and shuffled to the kitchen. “You know very well I haven’t got my eyes. And you, you start something and don’t finish it,” she muttered. “Yes you have, yes you have,” he called after her, “you just pretend not to see.” Sammy stopped abruptly, got into her bed in his work clothes, and covered himself with the blanket.

The bed was always made with the big blanket on top of it, day and night, receiving the child, Nona, and Sammy alternately, or all three at once: then Sammy lay with his head at the bottom of the bed and his feet between them or on top of them, and Nona pushed them away until he took them back and curled up in a ball. Sometimes the child ran her finger over the hard, rough skin of his sole, trying to tickle it, but he didn’t feel a thing: “Even if you stuck a nail in, he wouldn’t feel it”—Nona stated her opinion—“all he wants, that one, is to forget himself.”

And he did forget himself — especially at work, stripping himself of everything that got in the way, confronting “the work” exposed, almost naked. He couldn’t stand having a watch on his wrist — he would take it off and forget it, throw it out or give it away, together with the medallions the mother and Corinne would sometimes buy him for his birthday. “Maybe he’ll grow up now.” Most of the time he walked around the welding shop barefoot, forgetting where he had put his soaking wet shoes to dry, or simply taking them off and throwing them out because he didn’t have laces, disdaining the greasy welding gloves and especially the mask. He welded without a mask to protect his eyes, dragging the mother or being dragged by her twice a week to the emergency room, to have the chips in his eyes removed: the bad, left eye, which had been damaged by herpes when he was a child, was completely ruined, and the good, right eye grew weaker and weaker. “If you don’t put on that welding mask you can run to those hospitals alone,” the mother threatened. He didn’t listen; two days later he was welding without a mask again: “It’s impossible to be accurate with that mask,” he argued, “to get to the exact millimeter of the join.”

He got the “millimeter of the join” into his head when he was still seventeen, working in Faiga’s big welding shop in Kiryat Aryeh, before he went into business on his own. Faiga had an office on the top floor, above the hall where they worked, with a window the size of the wall: he stood in his office and looked down at the workers through his window, from time to time calling over the loudspeaker: “You there, come upstairs,” or “You there, come upstairs to me.” To Sammy he called, “You come up here to me” only once, but for good, not ill. He gave him a special design for a special cart without telling him what it was for, and Sammy worked on it for a week outside regular working hours, during which they put together big carts for bakeries, for taking the bread in and out of the ovens. When Sammy and one of the other workers who assisted him had finished making the special cart, Faiga summoned them to his office again, but not over the loudspeaker. He stood and watched them working for a long time in silence and in the end he said to them, “Come up here please.” He offered them refreshments: wine and cookies. “Let’s drink a toast,” he said. Sammy was shy, but he didn’t hold back; he polished off the whole plate of cookies. They were his favorites: two rounds of pastry with jam in the middle. “What’s the special cart we made for?” he dared to ask Faiga. “For Eichmann. They put Eichmann’s body on the cart you made,” said Faiga. He held out his hand and shook their hands, pressing them for a long time: “Hats off to you, boys.”

MAURICE WAS ELAALAM; intentionally or unintentionally he brought elaalam with him when he came.

He brought a Hebrew newspaper when he came (the child looked for the hidden child in the picture: “Where’s the child?”).

He brought a French newspaper, which was also elaalam: Le Monde .

He brought the newspapers he wrote in Hebrew and French, HaMeorer The Wake-up Call (“But what’s it supposed to mean? Who’s sleeping?” asked Sammy).

He brought out-of-season mangoes (the child exchanged a mango for ten cubes of sugar with Sima, whose father drank tea holding a cube of sugar in his mouth).

He brought a camera and photographs taken by a different camera than the one he brought.

He brought the profound, experienced sadness of a perception that was wiser than himself.

He brought Tel Aviv clothes for the child, exactly the right size even when years passed between one of his visits and the next.

He brought things that people had given him as presents.

He brought other opinions, saying: “A person should always listen to other opinions, not accept them, but listen to them,” looking at the mother when he said “a person.”

He brought a certain urban weariness, with a halo that was dull but still glinting.

And the hatred of parochialism. He, who never based his politics on hatred, only on honor.

And the longing for the remote and the foreign, the desire for the remote and the foreign, the desire for desire: a mon seul désir .

He brought a photographer, a friend from the Suhba, who photographed them all in the mother’s living room: they crowded together on the couch, including Nona and Mermel, shoulder to shoulder; the picture came out almost black — they looked like the family of a wanted man.

He brought secrets, secrets about the secrets, and a certain knowledge he gave off that in elaalam there were always layers beneath layers, double meanings, drawers with countless double bottoms.

“Don’t tell anyone about that cart you made for Eichmann, for that Revisionist you work for,” he said to Sammy, with a grave expression. “But why?” asked Sammy. “What’s the secret?” “Just don’t tell anyone. Don’t ask why. When you understand — you’ll understand,” said Maurice.