Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Life went on under the mother’s skin, where everyone rejected anything that wasn’t her, that wasn’t her violent warmth, only her face, her speech, the mother’s speech, which meant silence on everything that wasn’t the mother.

But it came out once, “without a man,” slipped out into the routine of the soft Friday night hours that the child remembered, a witness to all the hours as she sat at the kitchen table with the two of them, the mother and Sammy, crowded together: the mother on the stool between the table and the side of the fridge, Sammy on the stool between the table and the wall, and she between the two of them, but closer to Sammy, who ate all the soft part of her bread, slice after slice, because his teeth killed him when he ate the crust.

This is the time of the three of them, which is not absorbed by the rest of the week but floats on its surface, like a dumpling in soup, caught in the pale kitchen light, which sheds exactly the right amount of light, leaving a place for the shadows to exist. After the meal comes the lounging, each in his own shadow; each of them has his own sofa, except for the child, who lies on the carpet, watching the movement of the big living-room chandelier.

Sammy goes out with his friends, but later. The mother asks: “Are you going out with your friends?” and he says: “Later,” gets up, and goes to bathe at last, splashing for a long time in the bathtub, singing to himself and falling asleep in the water until it’s freezing cold. He comes out wrapped in a towel, his teeth chattering, and gets a big surprise.

Suddenly the mother is sitting comme il faut on the sofa, her legs crossed, dressed comme il faut : a cream-colored linen suit, skirt and jacket, a pearl necklace, her good shoes from Corinne’s wedding, a narrow little handbag, for going out.

Sammy’s wet curls cover his wide-eyed stare: “What’s this?” he demands, tightening the towel around his waist. The mother uncrosses her legs and crosses them again: “I’m going out for a bit,” she says in a voice that tries to sound as nonchalant as the shoe dangling from her foot and exposing her heel clad in a flimsy nylon stocking. “Who with?” He stands rooted to the spot in a puddle of water. The mother doesn’t look at him; she turns her profile to the window: “Somebody who asked me to go out with him. He asked me a few times, and in the end I said yes.”

Minutes pass. The child hears them from her place on the carpet, notices the almost imperceptible vibration of the mother’s calves under the nylon stockings — the vibration of Sammy’s shock, which becomes hers. “But why?” he demands. “Why?”

“What why?” She straightens up abruptly; her knee bumps into the corner of the table. “I’m going out, I told you, going out.” She bends over her knee, rubs it with the stocking, and sits up straight again, but this time without crossing her legs, gripping her black handbag tightly, pressing it to her lap. The Arabic news is on the television, Sammy gets dressed and goes out. She stays like that for a while, rubbing her knee from time to time, until she gets up and goes to the telephone, dials a number, and speaks in a low voice, sits down again but without her shoes, and stares at the television. Afterward she disappears for a while into her bedroom and comes out dressed in her nightgown, covers herself with a blanket, and curls up in the corner of the sofa. Sammy returns, looks: “What, you didn’t go out?” His curls are still wet, but combed to one side. He’s eating sabras, taking them out of a paper bag, swallowing them almost without chewing, sliding them down his throat. “Here.” He holds one out to the child. The mother doesn’t move. The dark fringes of the blanket rest on her chin like a beard sloppily drawn with a pencil. There’s a slight movement in her eyelids, a blink or a flutter: “I didn’t feel like it in the end,” she says.

MAURICE HAD A beard when he came to photograph them with the photographer of his newspaper, sat them on the sofa in a row: “Like on the bus,” said the mother. They called the child from Rachel Amsalem’s to come and have her photograph taken, and she came with Rachel Amsalem, both of them wearing the same dress that Rachel’s mother got from the woman she worked for, whose sister in America had identical twins. The child wanted herself and Rachel Amsalem to be identical twins, too, but like Rachel, a duplication of Rachel. “Let’s be identical twins,” she begged her, and she told Maurice, “We decided to be identical twins.” And Maurice laughed, his whole narrow face, with the thick dark eyebrows sheltering the slits of light that were his eyes, with his delicate earlobes, laughed: “Good, ya omri , go ahead,” he said. The child stood at a little distance from him, in the doorway of the room from which she made her announcement, even before she actually saw what she should have seen: his new, bearded face, which perhaps wasn’t new at all, because the old one wasn’t really settled in her mind, only flickered for a moment and disappeared again, taking with it, if not the beard itself, at least the possibility of the beard, the possibility of the tricks played by memory, not now — but then.

The child held tight to Rachel Amsalem’s wrist, so that Rachel, too, would see exactly what she herself saw at exactly the same moment, so that their eyes would be the same eyes, their heartbeats — the same heartbeats: the wispy white hairs of Maurice’s beard, which looked as if they had been stuck to his chin and cheeks, without any relation to his mane of black hair, parted on the side, glistening with an almost oily glisten. They went to fetch Nona from her room and Sammy from the welding shop, because Maurice wanted “the whole family” in the photograph. “So there’ll be one picture of everyone,” he said to the photographer, and they waited, and waited: Sammy wanted to finish something.

The child sat in the middle of the sofa, seating Rachel Amsalem next to her. She buried Rachel’s hand in her lap, feeling her strong, slender fingers, all the joints of her fingers, one by one: she was a tiger, Rachel Amsalem. Her short, supple brown body was all one smooth, taut muscle, conscious at any given moment of its suppleness and power, even in its most casual movements, of its ability to strike or to avoid being struck — with proud nobility, without a drop of sweat or undue exertion. She never leaned toward the other person beyond what was strictly necessary, only appraised him with her beautiful brown eyes, constantly seeking and quick to find the market price attached to everything and everyone. The child stared at her, riveted by the wide shadow cast by the span of her wings, her resolute, confident step, her soccer player thighs, and the captivating ease, feminine but at the same time boyish, with which she beat the boys in street fights and bicycle races: she waited for her all the time, but Rachel Amsalem never waited for her. Her heart, made of cast lead and slippery as a fish, had no expectations of the world. She acquiesced, now, too, sitting next to the child on the sofa, allowed her fingers to be played with, and accepted the warm look the child gave her, but she wasn’t warmed.

“The photograph is only of the family. Rachel can wait until we’re finished,” said the mother, giving the two of them a disapproving look.

The child looked at Maurice, who was standing with his back to them, debating with the photographer. She stared for a long time at his stooped, slightly hunched back, waiting for him to turn around, to sense her eyes on him, and appear before her and Rachel Amsalem the way he was supposed to be, the way she thought of him, both unexpected and expected at the same time, repeating to herself, “But we’re wearing the same dress,” sharpening the words to make them penetrate his stooped back and dissolve inside him like a drug. Nona and Sammy came and sat down next to them. The mother sat with half her buttocks on the edge of the seat, as if about to stand up at any moment. Maurice stood beside her, next to the standard lamp, his head the height of the lampshade, rested his hand lightly on her shoulder, and looked at the photographer without removing his dark horn-rimmed glasses: “Family, not family, the child said she’s family, her friend, so she’s family. Why make an issue of it?” he muttered in the mother’s direction, over her head, lowering his voice and blurring the words until they were barely audible, emerging incoherently from his mouth like a hum or a cough, in a language that wasn’t clear, either Hebrew or Arabic, but the child heard.