Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Sammy didn’t want to be the third person, or the second person, “a hired worker”: he wanted to be independent, the first person — he wanted it with all his might, and not so much because he coveted the real and imaginary power of the boss but because he dreamed of playing all by himself and deciding for himself. He, who until the age of four in Cairo didn’t speak, because all his wishes were anticipated and fulfilled by at least six adults before he even opened his mouth, and who took so much pleasure in breaking his toys that Maurice hired a girl especially to “play with him,” and in fact to smash them for him with a hammer — he played now with the mother with the biggest toy of them all — the welding shop.

They built it “hand in hand,” the two of them. Since they had to scrape together the money for the construction from nowhere, they watched each other with an eagle eye, correcting each other like two strict teachers, giving back pages corrected in red ink. He ordered building materials — and she ran to the warehouse to correct the order. She ordered the cement mixer for early in the morning — and he put it off to later. She called in an electrician — and he called in another electrician, better and cheaper, who never showed up. But most of the time he was on the ladder and she handed him the blocks from below: between her morning job and her afternoon job, and sometimes at the expense of one of them, she handed him the blocks, between working in the garden and working in the shack, in the middle of her “chores” and at night by the light of the big projector. Until the start of the Sabbath they worked, or at the most until half an hour afterward, because Sammy refused to work on the Sabbath; he was terrified out of his wits: the amm told him that the business would not be blessed if he desecrated the Sabbath.

The mother scoffed at the idea of the blessing, but she accepted Sammy’s work stoppage without blinking an eye, in the face of the stubborn, nonnegotiable element in Sammy’s character: his panic. Mostly he panicked at what he called “strange,” but what was actually bad, and bad meant whatever and whoever did not stand by his side and collaborate with him in his “consultations” as an actual or potential partner.

The whole neighborhood was his partner in building the welding shop, participating in the discussions that took place morning, noon, and night, now on the sandy floor of the roofless structure with its half-built walls, eating candies peeled from their cellophane or paper wrappings, offering sentences beginning “So what do you think if…” until the mother appeared in her nightgown and chased them all away: “Enough for today.”

They left and Sammy did everything the opposite way, inventing methods that cost three times as much in the end: the construction stopped. “Everything’s stuck,” said the mother bitterly, reviewing the ruins of the garden every morning: the dead roses destroyed by cement and lime, the corroded lawn, the bed of new seedlings whose names she didn’t know, crushed beneath the dumpster of building waste.

Again they sat on the living-room carpet until midnight: there was a new “What do you think about…”

He found extra work helping with the neighborhood soccer team, painted the lines of the field for the Saturday match, cleaned the clubhouse, and every Thursday he brought the mother two bags crammed with laundry: shirts, shorts, and dozens of socks stinking with sweat and full of sand, which went through the wash and left sand in the machine. On Fridays she sat the child and the Nona down to fold the soccer players’ uniforms: the stink of the sweat still lingered in the socks, and Nona washed her hands at least three times with soap during the course of the folding, dismissing the child who stood dreaming with a sock in her hand and summoning her back again: “ Yallah go, yallah come here.”

In the welding shop they laid the cement floor but did not yet raise the roof: a dense, dark rectangle of sky, the stars stuck deep into it like tacks, lay squeezed between the cinder block walls. Sammy made himself a little tent of blankets “for the time being” as a shelter from the rain, in the middle of the roofless building. He wanted to build a snow sled for four people. “What snow are you talking about?” fumed the mother. “Where do you see snow?” He shook his head pityingly, took his sandwich, returned to his tent, and welded until one o’clock in morning, until she disconnected the electricity, went to the welding shop, and dragged him away. Grumbling, he shuffled behind her, half asleep, in his big work boots with the laces undone.

The child saw them from the kitchen window, in the dark: the mother’s brisk barefoot steps, the outlines of her thick thighs showing through her nightgown when the light from the streetlamp fell on her, her short, sad neck crammed on top of her chest, the invisible threads that stretched from her to Sammy, encircling him as he shuffled, stooped, behind her with his curls white from plaster covering his eyes that could hardly see anyway, stopping for a minute to look back wearily at the blank rectangle of the welding shop and stretching his arm over his shoulder to scratch a spot at the top of his back, but not reaching it.

“Scratch me,” he says, offering his back to the mother. “Where?” she asks. “Here, here.” He raises his arm to his shoulder blades. They stand with their faces to the welding shop and their profiles to the shack, to the child: him in front and her behind him, absentmindedly scratching his back.

THE PILE OF nightgowns in her closet, one on top of the other, in a straight line with the shelf: pale, white, or off-white, sometimes pastel, if flowered — then only little flowers, flannel for winter and cotton for summer (half-synthetic, drip-dry), never satin, or silk, or red, or black, or lace that wasn’t a modest border at the neck, things only fit for a “madam.”

They always gave off a feeling of freshness, a longing for freshness: in their appearance, their arrangement, their multiplication — always more and more of the same thing, over and over again. There was an element of obsession, a silent and secretive single-mindedness, in this craving for freshness that danced before her eyes: she, who never spent a penny on herself, bought more and more of these nightgowns, for “next to nothing,” as she said, but still, she bought them. The nightgowns and the ritual putting on of the nightgowns turned into a symbol, a sign of the transition from the public to the private, the intimate, the shedding of her active, resourceful persona in favor of an abandonment — not chaotic, but orderly and anchored in law, the law of the nightgown.

The nightgowns and the language of the nightgowns drew a square whose four corners were herself, her sister, Marcelle, Corinne, and the Nona. The four of them knew the language of the nightgowns, bequeathed it to each other, and spoke it, to themselves and to each other: “I washed and put on my nightgown” was a statement whose real, deep meaning was clear only to them, a solemn, restrained echo that meant more or less, “I fired elaalam and retired in an orderly manner.”

Endlessly they gave each other gifts of nightgowns and passed nightgowns on to each other (“I found this for you”), especially the mother and Aunt Marcelle, who announced the ceremony and carried it out, showering one after the other at let’s say five o’clock in the afternoon, put on the long white orphanage nightgowns, and sat down at the kitchen table, ate bread and pickled turnips, and pretended to be playing cards: the aunt played “ crapette ” with herself and the mother looked on helplessly. “You’re already in your nightgown?” Sammy asks in astonishment when he arrives, sits down next them at the kitchen table, and thrusts his arm deep into the pickle jar, as if unaware of Aunt Marcelle’s hand affectionately rumpling his curls, but inclining his head slightly toward her in order to deepen the caress.