Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

AT LAST SHE came to me in a dream, after years when she hadn’t. There was a coffin next to her, an expensive coffin, lined inside and out with dark blue velvet. She got into it as if it were nothing. She lay down on her back, her hands stretched out at her sides. “Close the lid,” she demanded. I didn’t move. I was trembling all over: her eyes were burning, surrounded by soot. “Close it!” she shouted. “Close the lid and throw away the basin already. Let me go!”

THE BLUE BASIN was actually sky-blue, and not much different from the many other basins in the mother’s shack and the Nona’s quarter-shack, because both of them were firm believers in basins and their unique and various uses, and the particular purpose of each and every one of them, which was enshrined in law, the law of the ways and habits of life known only to members of the household, the unspoken rules of how things were done and how they should be done, with the right rhyme, rhythm, and meter that gave elaalam its form, context, and volume. The basin in which the sheets were soaked in bleach was not the basin in which the broad beans were skinned, even though they were similar, and the basin for the bean pods was not the basin where the clean socks were collected after the wash in order to facilitate matching the pairs, and then there was the basin in which the mother soaked her swollen feet, and the one where the semolina was mixed for the couscous, and the huge basin in which the Nona dipped the lower half of her body and splashed water on the upper half, and the one in which the baby eggplants were pickled, and the little one in which the strips of cotton wool were soaked in tea for Sammy’s sick eyes, and the medium-sized green one in which the lace tablecloths were dyed in tea, and the other medium-sized one for cleaning the fixtures from the gas cooker in caustic soda, and the basin from the garden for collecting the twigs and the uprooted weeds, and the basin in which the bottles of cleaning agents were kept with the rag crammed between them, and the basin that was “not that one, that one”—they sent the child to fetch a basin from the little storeroom next to the welding shop and she brought that one and was told, “No, that one,” and she said, “Which one?” and Nona said: “That one, that one. You, if they sent you to get water from the sea you’d come back and say there’s no water,” and the child laughed at what she said, even though she was crying, because there was burning, and she said, “But it’s burning.”

The burning came in the middle of the night, after she had crossed the path a number of times from the mother’s shack to Nona’s quarter-shack and back again, and fallen asleep on one of their beds next to one of their bodies for two or three hours, and woken up from the burning, pulled down the blanket, and sat up on her knees, writhing in pain, in silence.

On the pillow next to her lay a head, the mother’s or the Nona’s, and a mouth that mumbled into the pillow, in the dark, “Is it burning you there again?” and a hand went out in the darkness to the little bedside lamp and the little light went on, and whichever one of them it was pulled up her nightgown under the blanket and sat up and got out of bed and went to boil water in the kettle and to fetch the child’s basin (which became the child’s basin after Nona announced: “That’s the child’s basin”), which they hardly ever remembered where they had put it the last time, and they began to wander in the middle of the night in their nightgowns and housecoats on top of their nightgowns, from Nona’s house to the mother’s storeroom, saying to each other: “It’s burning her again. Bring the basin.”

And they brought it. They stood the basin on the mat at the foot of the bed in the near-total darkness, with only the bedside lamp illuminating a strip of wall and not the whole room, and poured boiling water into the basin and then cold water to make warm water into which they poured the purple-red alkaline grains, producing the pinkish-purple water for the inflammation of the urinary tract “that’s driving the poor child mad,” said the Nona, and the mother said: “Don’t say ‘poor child’—it’s just an inflammation. It’ll pass.”

It didn’t pass, and even if it did, a little, the child didn’t want it to pass, and when the Nona or the mother asked her if it had passed she said no. The night passed, transporting the child soaking in the alkaline water with her eyes wide open, as if staring beyond the pain itself, the burning itself, in its changing degrees of intensity, and its gradual relief in the warm pink water that slowly cooled until it was completely cold, and nevertheless they didn’t take her out of the basin. Next to her, high up on the bed, were the heavy breaths of the mother or the Nona, who sometimes turned from side to side. The child dipped her hands in the water, burying her cheeks between her knees, feeling her wet thighs, knowing that she existed, even if all around her, in the breathing darkness, the substantiality of the room was fading, the substantiality of the objects or of the people who were receding into the distance but were still present in some strange way, surrounding the nighttime house, which was reduced to the basin she was sitting in, and not coming in, circling around, leaving her in possession of what was hers, gradually forgetting her nocturnal summons, until it was almost dawn, when the mother or the Nona got heavily out of bed, brought a big bath towel, dried the almost frozen child, and said: “That’s enough, enough for today.”

UNTIL ALMOST MIDNIGHT she and Sammy sat on the living-room carpet and talked and talked and talked, close to each other, competing for the warmth of the electric heater, after the mother had switched off two of the glowing coils that Sammy had switched on, “eating up the electricity,” and he had turned them on again, spreading his hands over the wire guard, touching and not touching. Perhaps he had tried to roast chestnuts on the heater and given up, charred them on the gas burner, and brought them back hot in his hands. “You could have put them on a plate,” scolded the mother, but not seriously, her legs tucked under her so long that she couldn’t move them when she wanted to get up, they were so numb. “Enough for today,” she said, trying to stand up, staggering and almost falling: “Look how we’ve forgotten ourselves.”

This was apparently happiness: on her face then was the relaxed absentmindedness of forgetfulness, full of faith in time precisely because she had allowed it to be forgotten — and there was a different roundness then in all her movements: even her look was round, not wanting to change anything, and altogether not wanting but simply being, resting in the room and the furniture as if in blindness, in suspension of judgment: the look of parents at their children.

UNTIL ALMOST MIDNIGHT she and Sammy sat on the living-room carpet, talking about it: it, it, and it — the welding shop. Row by row of cinder blocks it rose from the carpet at their feet, overshadowing the shack itself until it was almost invisible: for months and months, for the entire period of the “construction,” the shack became a footnote, the launching pad for the rocket being sent into space — the welding shop.

For hours at a time they sat on the carpet and chewed over the idea of the welding shop: why and how, how much and where from, and again, how? Once she asked: “But how, ya Sammy?” and once he did: “But how, how?” These exchanges, which Sammy called “consultations,” were not of content, but of tone, cadence, and music. They confirmed, argued, or drove each other crazy, but only because of the tone and by means of the tone, getting into a seven-minute quarrel over “his way of saying it” or “her way of saying it,” always changing to the third person.