Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

The photograph is split: three deep creases run down its right side, passing through Maurice, the square, the group of pigeons on the right. It looks as if it has been glued together, or as if it has been fished out of something, rescued despite itself, as if it has become fiction or was always fiction. A fictitious photograph. She says: “It was when I took you to Italy, for him to see you when you were about two years old.” It never happened.

THERE WERE THREE of us in the shack: my big brother, my big sister, and me, el bint , the child, the eternal third person. She herself wasn’t another person, she was the shack. In one sense she took up no room, light as a feather, almost floating in space; in another she took up all the room. This lightness was, by the way, another of the rules of proper behavior that she had brought with her from over there, part of the “mentality.” She would say, gravely knitting her brows (there wasn’t much left of them, my sister plucked them with lethal diligence after she had finished annihilating her own): “Human beings should make themselves light, not weigh heavily on people.”

But in the shack she wasn’t a human being and we weren’t people — all that pertained to the world outside and the way to behave in the world, to the need (the categorical imperative, in fact) to maintain a constant, effortful, near-paranoid sensitivity to the other person’s “situation” in all its aspects: economic, social, cultural, legal, psychological.

She was this other person, she was not, as she said with her usual vehemence, elbani-adam , the human being: erasing the first person, the “I,” was also part of the code of sensitivity.

Mostly she barked her reference to elbani-adam in Nona’s direction, at what she perceived as callous selfishness that left no room for any other elbani-adam . This was one of the variety of forms that their indirect disputes took, quarrels based on codes and hints and semantic fields common to them both, which covered half a century and three continents. But it was impossible to trip Nona up with any talk of elbani-adam and how they should be, because, among other things, Nona believed she indisputably held the copyright to the proper behavior of elbani-adam , and, with the same relaxed firmness with which her enormous snow-white thighs rested on the armchair, she would repossess it, in a sleight of hand of sly, false agreement that drove the mother mad.

But the mother went on confronting her, sitting on the bed next to Nona’s bed, or dragging in a stool from the kitchen, a seething bundle of nerves, her own thighs trembling as if attached to electrodes, looking for a fight and finding one.

“She only comes over to quarrel, that one. She shouldn’t come. She sends my blood pressure right up,” the Nona exclaimed in disgust. But when quiet descended for two or three days and the asabiya , the nervous one, failed to show up for her daily visit, Nona sent ingenuous messages. “Tell her I peeled the broad beans. Let her come and get them.”

“I can take them,” I volunteered.

“No, no. Let her come. The beans are ready.”

And she would come, composed this time, and sit with Nona for longer than usual while they devoted themselves to soothing topics of conversation: condemnation of a common enemy, usually some unimportant sister-in-law nobody had seen for years.

I stretched out at their feet on the cool, newly washed floor, listening with one ear to the murmur of the conversation, which now spread out at the sides instead of rising to acrimonious heights; they sailed from subject to subject, conjuring up before me a crowded, busy, convoluted world, full of “relations” between men and women, women and their children, men and their parents, arabesques overlapping and intersecting one another, all etched on the silhouettes of women, both menacing and fragile, exchanging strength for weakness and weakness for strength. Nona’s room (the quarter-shack) with the tiny kitchenette and the improvised shower above the toilet, with the army of loathsome green flies drawn by the two skinny cows belonging to the amm , our neighbor (nobody, perhaps not even he himself, knew his real name, he was always called amm , uncle, and his wife amma , aunt), the radio playing day and night, and the high iron bed reminiscent of a hospital — this was the natural site for this unending conversation, mythic and trivial at once, conducted between the two of them every day, during the course of which they erected and destroyed and agonized over entire worlds.

The floor tiles in Nona’s quarter-shack went on sinking into the ground, and the closet leaned slightly to the side because of the sinking of the tiles (the mother once smashed its feet with a single hammer blow), and the moldy lump on the plywood ceiling went on swelling—“It’s pregnant, that ceiling, soon it will bring us a baby”—and the words, words, words, of both of them and each of them grew smoky and charred with the pots Nona burned on the stove because of her forgetfulness and dreaminess, only to rise from the ashes and return, restored and replenished with the vitality of pain and beauty, as if to prove again that pain is trauma and beauty is, too. Especially beauty.

And as I lay there on the tiles, year after year, with my eyes closed but not in the least sleepy, dividing my attention between what was happening in the room and the sounds and whispers coming from behind the flimsy wall separating it from the apartment of the neighbors’ daughter, Rachel Amsalem (Has she come, my darling, is she back already, my queen?), I had a hallucinatory vision, troubling and seductive, that I was adopted, a foundling, and that the entire conversation that took place next to me, with all its loops and labyrinths and changing, many-layered landscapes, all of them were nothing but a convoluted code pointing to this fact, leading to this simple fact, unequivocal and not convoluted at all. I was adopted. None of this was mine by virtue of blood and never would be. I didn’t move, I dug my fingernail into the grooves between Nona’s tiles, trying to scoop up dirt, to see my fingernail turn black. It was a strange moment of inner triumph, in which my foreignness, the possibility of being foreign, was a celebration, glittering, intimate, conflicting with nothing, at least as mysterious as the secret itself and just as silent.

THE SHACK WAS her one and only, because that was what she decided, not with words, but with what gave them their validity: actions. The shack was one and we were three: my brother older than me by fourteen years, my sister by thirteen years, and the child (“Has the child eaten?” “Has the child come back?” “Have you seen the child?” “Keep your eye on the child, so she doesn’t wander off,” “The child is dead, she’s dead, she’s dead”).

Between me and my sister stretched a train of dead children. The two-year-old baby who died in Cairo (Zizi, “When I had Zizi,” she remembered), another one who died in her womb as a result of eclampsia in the eighth month, and abortions, between five and eight of them (when exactly, where?). “I got rid of them, I got rid of them like kittens and ran off to work,” she said as if to herself, her gaze veiled and blank, looking into itself. There was no note of confession, admission, or guilt: it was a shrug, that’s life, hardly the blink of an eye, on the strength of which she forced herself to bow before necessity, to break her own collarbone if need be, in order to “carry on,” to get somewhere or other that held yet more of the same in store.

She set out and came home, set out and came home, diluting her deed (“I got rid of them”) with dozens of other things she had done that day, refusing to give it any precedence, any priority. She simply put off feeling anything, as if to say, “Not now, later.” But there was no later, no hour of distilled grief, sorrow that was not hindered or diluted: the whole of life, all the space, absorbed that “later”—every deed she did and thought she thought and joy she felt became drawers with double bottoms, in the depths of which lay that “later,” ablaze inside the shack, prone to burst into flames at any second.