Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

When did it open up? When did it agree to say something, to tell the story? When did one of the possibilities of the possible stories rise from it? When did they hear the word “hell” from the mother’s lips, think they heard it, and the night before the morning in the photograph, the morning in Piazza San Marco, suddenly erupted?

It was a night in a hotel room, in the suite he took for the three of them. There were two rooms in the suite, one the bedroom and one the living room. They quarreled, Maurice and the mother, raised the roof with their yells. Maurice beat her, left marks all over her body, and disappeared. He locked her and the child up all night until the next morning in the empty room, the room she said was empty simply because “he” wasn’t in it.

THE PARTY WE gave for her seventieth birthday at Sammy’s almost-finished house, which took its inspiration from the White House (the pseudo-Greek columns alone took weeks: they built and demolished them, demolished and built again). We sat and planned, Corinne, Sammy, and I, in Sammy’s kitchen with the dreamy, pale purple light filtering faintly through the purple lampshade, among the household goods packed in cardboard boxes for months, the entire period of the building, moved from place to place, growing a little shabbier with every move, their contents spilling out of limp, lolling cardboard tongues like those of exhausted animals. “But what’s there to plan?” said Sammy dismissively. “There’s nothing special to plan here. It’s not as if we were doing it in Sinai, like I wanted.” He lowered his voice to a melodramatic whisper, which reached a climax at the word “I” and then dropped down. Corinne didn’t hear well because of the tall black turban that completely covered her ears, crushing the lobes inside it: the hairdresser had dyed her hair “baby-blond,” which came out “the color of orangeade” and she had shaved her head in a fury. “What?” she asked again and again. “What did you say?” She was sitting right under the purple lampshade, in the turban that emphasized the lines of her tanned oval face with the sharp cheekbones and the arched eyebrows penciled in too high, rising to her forehead — and she looked like a beautiful, astonished Indian prince.

He forgot what he had said, leaned back in his chair, and began to bring up memories of Sinai — actually a single memory from a single trip that dragged the whole family with it and fed long hours of stories. He began with the story of Yusuf the Bedouin’s camel, which suddenly fell down dead of a heart attack, but Corinne was impatient; she was in a hurry. “What’s the hurry?” he asked with a show of exaggerated, almost impersonal resentment: he hated it when people were in a hurry. People who were in a hurry and, even worse, people who were “busy” were the tight-lipped, persecuting agents of everything that embittered his life and spoiled its joy: “In Sinai and Egypt they aren’t in a hurry. You should see how they take their time, slowly, slowly, slowly,” he said, and he would have been happy to go on saying “slowly” if Corinne hadn’t sat up, straightened her long coatdress, whose hem reached the dusty floor, and interrupted him with a brisk: “So what’s the plan?” His face fell: “Whatever you like. We’ll have one of those big parties everyone has,” he said in a glum voice, sinking into a heavy silence for a minute or two and suddenly waking to new life, his face brightening: “The people you see there, you can’t imagine. When I was in Cairo I met someone from Holon with his wife — they won the lottery and went on a trip around the world. They took an Egyptian kid along with them, maybe fourteen years old, who filmed them with a video camera. Wherever they go, never mind where, the kid with the video goes with them, and he says to the camera: ‘The time now is twenty-three minutes past two, and we’re facing the pyramids, the time is thirty-six minutes past twelve and we’re facing the Eiffel Tower,’ and so on all over the world, with the Egyptian kid who sleeps in the same room with them, eats with them, everything,” recounts Sammy, crumbling between his fingers one of the long slender cigarettes Corinne left on the table. She took off, leaving behind her a sour-sweet mist of perfume that mingled with the sharp smell of the turpentine and the paint, but still remained distinct, coming and going. We went on sitting at the dining table, which in the middle of all that mess was for some reason covered with a spotless, imitation-cloth disposable tablecloth.

Sammy rubbed his increasingly reddening eye and tried to open it, but it stayed half-closed. “Stop rubbing,” I scolded him. He stopped for a moment but his fingers went there of their own accord. “We’ll bring Maurice to the mother’s party,” he said, mulling it over. I thought for a moment, or perhaps the thought had already been in my mind: “On no account. It will only destroy him. Her with all the celebrations in her honor, and him with nothing,” I said. “What do you mean?” Now he opened both eyes wide in astonishment, one blue and unseeing, one red, half-seeing. “I mean that Maurice shouldn’t know about it,” I said. He went on staring at me: “Where do you get all that nonsense from, tell me. What’s that supposed to mean, that he won’t come? What’s that supposed to mean?” he demanded indignantly. “It means that he isn’t going to come,” I retorted furiously. “You listen to me.” We fought. I left the house, walking past the Greek columns, like Corinne. For the first time in our lives we fought.

On the evening of the party Corinne brought her early, and spoiled the surprise. But the mother didn’t care about the surprise. She glowed, stood in the middle of Sammy’s fifty-five-yard square, almost completely empty living room, and didn’t know what to do with herself, fingering the collar of her blouse in embarrassment, but nevertheless noticing that the line of the skirting in the right-hand corner of the room wasn’t straight. “Tell them to fix it,” she said, looking for Sammy. “You hear? Tell them to take it apart and do it again.” But Sammy wasn’t there. He had gone to get Maurice from Hatikva. He phoned him three times: for some reason he couldn’t find the way.

When he came back with Maurice, the first of the guests had started to arrive, clustering under the portico of the Greek columns, which had finally been finished, decorated with sparklers and chains of colored paper, to the annoyance of Sammy, who had no sooner returned than he climbed on a ladder and tore them down, so they wouldn’t hide the splendor of the columns. Maurice entered, wearing one of Uncle Henri’s dark blue suits from Lufthanse, which the mother had brought him from her last visit to Marcelle and Henri in France.

They stood facing each other, almost alone in the empty room, a few yards apart. Maurice stared at her and went on staring, tore the tissue paper from the package he had been holding under his arm, his nicotine-stained fingers trembling: the years of coffee and alcohol had wrought havoc on him. He took out a sheet of gauzy, semitransparent white cloth and spread it out before her, stretched between his arms like a matador’s cape before a bull. It was a veil.

Then he approached her, laid the filmy white veil on her head — and there it lay, limp, unfastened, drooping down over her forehead and covering her eyes. “I brought it for you from Cairo, Lucette, the last time I was there,” he said. Sammy passed through the room on his way to the lawn, carrying two cardboard boxes of cola: he was right.

EACH OF THE rooms in the shack had an extension, invisible and empty, empty margins of the room itself, the empty part continuing from the full room, dense with the different air of a different knowledge. The empty room had a different time, lacking a plot and the development of a plot, but not in opposition to the humans or above them, on the contrary, more and more inside them.