Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

AT THE END of the Egyptian movie on television, when she went on staring for a long time at the screen, still absorbed in the plot, she said: “That’s elaalam for you. Look where people end up. They rolled around and around, him and her — what didn’t they do and where didn’t they roll? — and in the end they fell on one another.”

TWICE A WEEK they took the bus to Corinne’s apartment in the young couples housing project to bring her things: two cardboard boxes full of canned food, rice, sugar, chocolate spread, noodles, cheese, margarine, cleaning agents. The mother said: “We’ll bring her a few things. Until she gets rolling.” About herself she always said that she was “rolling along.” When people asked her how she was she said, “Rolling along.” “Rolling” implied her ability to improvise, her endless inventiveness (“I took it from there and put it here”) and also what was most important in her eyes: movement between different areas of shade, different and changing degrees of darkness. The very principle of movement itself, even pointless movement, in hope or the promise of hope.

Corinne, on the other hand, did not roll. At five o’clock in the afternoon she fell asleep in front of the television with the baby, wearing the same pregnancy dress for week after week, because of the fifty-five pounds she had gained during her pregnancy and had not yet lost: a blue dress (“Navy blue,” said Corinne) shaped like a tent, with a white inset in the front that looked like a big baby’s bib resting on her breasts. Mermel said that he could tell by the stains on the white bib what Corinne had eaten during the day: jam, meatball gravy, ice cream, or the baby’s cornstarch porridge. She gave him a look through the honey-colored curtain of her uncombed, unwashed hair that silenced him at once. Even now, when she called to mind a sinking ship tilting on its side — with her heavy gait, shuffling in ugly slippers, in the tent dress, with the smudge of black eyeliner on her cheek, Mermel saw her as a great beauty and sent her anxious looks hungry for approval. But Corinne was sunk deep in a murky lake of disapproval, occasionally sending up her periscope to look out with a hostile eye, and then withdrawing it again. Most of all she scorned the “young couples”: her apartment, the apartments next door, the thin walls, the stairwells, the other residents. “The people here are garbage,” she burst out. “Where they got all this trash from is beyond me.” The mother tried to dam the torrent: “They’re just people like any others, like you and me, living their day-to-day,” she argued weakly. “What do you mean like you and me?” Corinne cried, beside herself. “Tell me, what’s the connection with you and me?” The mother said nothing (“better to keep quiet”), unloaded the cardboard boxes, and arranged their contents in the tiny kitchen cupboard with its peeling Formica coating, and opened the curtain to let in more light.

The child sat in the big fire engine Mermel had brought for the baby, put her book on the steering wheel, and read, as if to distance herself from Corinne’s gaze, getting under her skin and peeling off layer after layer. “How come you turned that page so quickly? Have you finished reading it already?” asked Corinne suspiciously, and the child nodded. “So tell me what’s written there. Let’s see if you read it.” The child told her what was written, but Corinne stopped listening and turned her eyes to the rubber band bunching the child’s hair: “What’s that ugly thing you put on your hair?” she demanded, and beckoned the child to come to her, on the sofa. She undid the pony tail, threw away the rubber band, brushed the child’s thick hair, and ran her fingers through it: “That’s how you should wear it all the time,” she said, pulled the child’s head onto her lap, and laid her hand on her cheek, feeling her cheekbone: “Are you the cleverest child in the school?” she asked, and went on running her fingers, the fingers of a blind woman, over her cheek, her forehead, her eyelids, her chin. “I don’t know,” said the child, without moving. “Of course you are,” said Corinne, her voice as tender as her fingertips, “you’re our princess. Just don’t brag about it and spoil everything. You show them,” she ordered in a stern voice. “Who?” asked the child, who was having a hard time breathing: Corinne’s hand was blocking her nostrils. “All those spoiled nothings who think they’re God knows what.” She stood up abruptly, with a gesture of disgust, letting the child’s head fall onto the sofa. Now she felt like having something good to eat. “Is there something good?” she asked the mother. The mother beamed. At last Corinne wanted something: “What, for instance?” she asked eagerly.

Corinne shuffled to the kitchen, opened and closed the cupboard doors, the fridge door, staring for a long time at the shelves. “You looked inside the fridge a minute ago, ya binti . No children were born there in the meantime,” said the mother, unable to curb her tongue. She put on her coat and looked for her handbag. “Come with me,” she said to the child. “Where are you going?” demanded Corinne tearfully, rubbing her neck, which had come out in a rash. “Why are you leaving already?” She took hold of the strap of the mother’s bag. “I’ll be back in a minute,” promised the mother, and took a cab with the child to the confectioner’s shop in the town center. “We’ll get her the best cream cake in the shop for her birthday,” she said to the child, her eyes fixed on the windshield of the cab. “But her birthday is in two weeks’ time,” said the child. “Never mind,” dismissed the mother. “Two weeks more, two weeks less, what difference does it make?” She debated with the saleslady in the confectioner’s for a long time, chose a layered cream cake, which was packed in a pink cardboard box with a green ribbon. “Pity the box isn’t green and the ribbon pink,” said the child regretfully, and hurried after the mother, who flew with the cake in her arms and pushed onto the bus with it before everybody else.

When they arrived, Corinne had made up her face at last, showered and scented herself and combed her hair, but put the navy blue dress with the white bib back on again. The mother set the tall box before her, on the folding aluminum table in the kitchen, without even taking off her coat, undid the ribbon with fumbling fingers. “For your birthday,” she said to Corinne, her face rigid with emotion. Corinne fell silent, looked, and all at once her face shone with a pure white radiance, as dazzling as the mounds of whipped cream on the cake. She sent out a finger, stuck it in the mound of whipped cream in the center. “All real whipped cream, no margarine,” stressed the mother, following the course of the finger covered in whipped cream to Corinne’s mouth. Corinne held the cream in her mouth for a moment, and then her lips twisted in disgust, and she ran to the sink and spat it out. “Margarine,” she said, “it’s all margarine. That bitch from the confectioner’s took you for a ride.” The mother refused to believe her, tasted for herself, and immediately spat it out: “Margarine. She took the price for whipped cream from me; she swore it was whipped cream,” she said.

Corinne put on her boots, packed herself in her coat, packed the cake in its box: “Come on, we’re taking it back,” she commanded. Again they rode to the confectioner’s, with the baby in his carriage. The child stayed outside with him, next to the entrance. She saw the mother and Corinne setting the cake firmly on the counter, demanding the money back. They called the owner: she conferred with Corinne and the mother to one side, spread out her hands helplessly. They came out, and stood there furiously for a while, looking inside: the saleslady cut two slices from the margarine cake, put them on two plates, and served them to a couple sitting and drinking coffee. Corinne’s eyes popped out of her head: “She’s still got the nerve to sell it,” she said, and burst back into the shop, with the mother behind her. The next minute their hands were digging into the cake standing on the counter, and throwing handfuls of the mess of dough and cream onto the shelf holding the cups above it: “Bastards,” yelled Corinne. “Bastards. First you cheat people and then you carry on as if it was nothing.”