Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

When they all lay in their beds breathing the nocturnal breath of the full room, known to the eye and the body, they were joined by the clear breath of the empty room, not known to the eye and the body, born from a clarity that could hardly be borne — two or three outlines and a white space between them, which made the child giddy from contact with the truth, not the truth hidden in the full room, but the one evident yet still transparent as air in the empty room, which went on standing, after the shack was destroyed, defeated at last by the sadness and the weight of the years.

There was no need to go and see the ruins for herself, to lie about the boredom prompted by the sight of the destruction and call it loss. On the ground where the shack once stood, now leveled by a bulldozer in preparation for a new split-level villa, the bare, slender lines of the empty room arose in the air, conveying one of the main aspects of the truth, what the child in the fullness of time had come to consider the truth: that the secret, hidden from the eye yet transparent, was the good, not the bad, that the secret was love and not the absence of love, that the seductive carnival of suffering concealed a subtle revelation of the grace of joy like the empty room that told its own story: that what was captured in the empty room, hidden yet transparent, was not criminal or evil, but the opposite — grace.

IT DROVE THE mother crazy that the money changer on Lilienblum Street had cheated her when she changed dollars there, and that when she went to complain to the police, they made her “wait two hours for that so-called detective in some empty room in their police station at the end of the world.” For days on end she ground herself down between these two millstones: the injustice on the one hand, and the folly of the people who were supposed to remedy it on the other.

She cooked up the story from beginning to end, leaving early in the morning, running around, coming home: not a word to anyone, until in the end she served up the finished product, the well-baked plot, but without the prologue, because she didn’t have the patience to bother with the details of the self-evident. And the prologue was the “I prepared myself.”

Her preparations commenced months before the date of her intended trip in July or August to visit her sister Marcelle in France. In her secret and continuous preparations, two tendencies vied: the excitement of a six-year-old at the prospect of the “airplane” and everything that accompanied it, and the deliberate calculations, mainly financial, of the manager of a small business, all her “taking it from here” and “putting it there.”

In April the suitcase was taken down from the msandara and sat on the little mat in the bedroom for a week, at the end of which it was put back up, only to be taken down again at the end of April, filled, emptied, and in the end thrown out and replaced by a new one, which was dragged off to have the clasp repaired because it had been broken in the constant openings and closings. Until the date of the journey the suitcase sat in the bedroom, where it was moved from place to place: from the mat next to the bed to the corner of the room, near the coat hanger, and from there to under the bed, “so I won’t see it right in front of me.” And then there were the plants, which to her annoyance she was forced to wait until the very eve of the flight to cram into her shoulder bag: Aunt Marcelle wanted plants. Especially she wanted the detestable cactuses that injured the El Al security officers when they searched her hand luggage.

In the middle of all this she took the bus to Lilienblum Street in Tel Aviv, to buy dollars from the money changer — she was there at eight in the morning. And he cheated her. Incredulously she counted the notes again and again, going over everything: how he had counted the notes one by one in front of her, once and once again, wetting his fingertip as he flipped them over.

In her outrage there was also an element of admiration for something she could not fail to appreciate: the dexterity, the wizardry of the sleight of hand. When she repeated to herself “the crook” and went to complain to the police, she both believed and did not quite believe her story, unable to see herself finally in the role of the victim: the whole thing was more like an invitation to a duel between two equal forces, he and she. But at the police station she saw how the heroism of her sense of injustice, and the urgency of remedying it, was reduced to three pages with carbon paper between them and a bored police clerk, tired of interviewing people like her in an empty room furnished with nothing but a desk and two chairs. She understood that they would not get her money back.

That night she slept even less than usual, and early in the morning she returned to Lilienblum Street and stood at a little distance from the money changers there, trying to identify the culprit. That morning he wasn’t there, but the next day, when she came again, she saw him, a fat man wearing a beige sweater with a zip in front, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth as he led his customers to a secluded spot between two buildings and counted out the notes. She skipped the next day, which she needed to get organized: she went and bought a blond wig and enormous, dark sunglasses, and borrowed Miriam the manicurist’s red raincoat. Thus disguised, she stood on the street corner and waited till noon, when he arrived. She went up to him and asked to change money, insisting on staying in a busy spot crowded with passersby. “And then I showed him,” she recounted with a gleam in her eye: the minute he took the bundle of notes from her and started to count them, she yelled, “Thief! Thief!” grabbed hold of the collar of his sweater, and didn’t let go even when people tried to separate them. He begged for his life, gave back all her money, and ran away. “I got what was mine out of him,” she said with a tired smile, smoothing or skipping over something. Only years later the end of the story suddenly appeared out of nowhere: after the fight with the money changer she lost consciousness, overcome by the excitement and the effort. After a while she found herself sprawled on the filthy pavement, strange faces bending over her, her face and neck bathed in water, and when she opened her eyes she couldn’t see anything: the hair of the blond wig, sticky with mud and water, was plastered over her face, covering it to the tip of her nose.

RACHEL AMSALEM PUT ideas in the child’s head; the mother said so. “She puts ideas in your head all the time, that one,” she said. She really did put in ideas, but she took them out quickly: in a matter of minutes she passed from one climate zone to another, from blazing heat to Arctic cold, pushing her agile hand into a crevice where she had buried something and immediately pulling it out again. They talked and talked, she and Rachel Amsalem — on the way to the synagogue on Saturday morning, on the way to the kiosk up there that had a machine where you played games for money that Rachel liked, and when they were just going for a walk on the way to nowhere. The child talked a lot but not importantly, and Rachel Amsalem talked a little but importantly, narrowing her eyes that were narrow anyway, narrow and slanting, slanting upward to her temples and the tight topknot at the top of her head: “So what are you trying to say?” she asked. The child didn’t remember or didn’t know what she was trying to say; she made something up to hang on a little longer to Rachel, who was always slipping away, disappearing into her own affairs.

In the synagogue, in the women’s gallery that always gave off a sour, crowded smell, Rachel went to sit with her friends from the religious school, and the child sat by herself next to the grown-ups, on the bench closest to the torn lace curtain through which she peeked at the worshippers below. But she soon abandoned the monotonous backs wrapped in prayer shawls and fixed her eyes on the narrow door leading into the women’s gallery, waiting for the woman who had no name, and if she had one the child didn’t want to know it, because she was all appearance — an appearance that matched the murmuring prayers — and she waited for the moment of longed-for transparency that came with the woman’s entrance.