Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

The woman was always late, arriving in the middle of the service and sometimes just before the end, shrinking her thin thighs as she passed through the narrow space between the benches, looking for a seat, her hands resting on the hip bones jutting out under her tightly fitting skirt, as if she had a stomachache, neither greeting anyone nor inviting a greeting, as if she had taken a strict vow of silence. The child looked at her, she looked and looked, feeling the dimensions, the volume, and the texture of her own gaze as if it were a thing, changing its shape and going from the smooth blank flatness of a slate to the dizzy rings of a spiral, energized by the magnetic field of inquiry that was the woman’s face.

It looked like nothing else, this face, as unique as a reproach that had put on a human form: her hollow cheeks, sunburned, nearly black, were cut. Almost the entire expanse of the face, from the chin to the eyes, was crisscrossed by symmetrical scars that had healed but still preserved the freshness of the cuts and their pink color, a little darker than the holes that punctured the skin between the scars, as if it had been pierced again and again by the prongs of a fork. On the bed of this wreckage the beaked nose and the eyes stood out, defiant, as if not belonging, especially the wide-open eyes with their broad, heavy lids, which rose and fell like the wings of a plane, bearing long lashes at their edges. Summer and winter she wrapped her head in a transparent nylon scarf, whitish or greenish, loosely tied under her chin, almost floating above her cheeks and not hiding them.

There was something disturbing, unclear, about this transparent head covering and the casual way the woman both did and did not wrap it around her wounded face: the more the child pondered its meaning, the more it evaded her grasp, refusing interpretation. Was the woman trying to hide her face with the transparent scarf but failing to do so because she was the victim of an illusion, seeing something different from what others saw, or was it the opposite, that she wasn’t trying to hide it but display it, to thrust her face defiantly at the observer, with the scarf acting as a mocking gesture toward those who expected her to hide, a kind of theater, as if to say, “Here, take a good look”? Throughout the service the child kept her eyes fixed on the woman, waiting for something, some sign that would solve the riddle of her ruined face and how she bore this ruin, what she seemed to be saying to the world — only partially and obscurely, but somehow without involving shame, or outright brazenness either; there was something else, resolved at another, higher level — something that had left shame behind a long time ago but had not become shamelessness, and that radiated warmth, great affection, and intimacy, despite the evident disconnection between her and the others, who talked and talked about her.

Rachel Amsalem told the child what they said: they said that once, when she was younger, the woman had fallen holding a glass, and the shards had pierced her face and ruined it. “Who said that?” asked the child. Rachel shrugged her shoulders, she got bored quickly. She was walking with the child through the thorn field on the way to the shack, but not by her side; she skipped from one edge of the sandy path to the other, bending down every few minutes to get the sand out of her white socks, her taut body, strong and supple as a sinew, turning and twisting in superfluous movements, not confined to any purpose, given up to the joy of movement for its own sake.

Even when she was standing still Rachel Amsalem’s body was charged, bursting with mobility and possibilities of movement. The child saw it: her father whipped her with his belt. Rachel Amsalem stood with her legs together and her father beat her with his belt on the calves, thighs, and arms while she stood there, not moving or blinking, open-eyed, only her taut skin jumping a little with every lash, with an imperceptible tremor, as if her skin were a kind of springy trampoline that sent the beating belt flying upward, repulsed simply by virtue of coming into contact with it.

Now Rachel wanted them to go to Savyon, to stroll down the empty streets. “But it’s a graveyard there, without even a dog in the street,” the child unthinkingly quoted the mother; nevertheless she went with her. Rachel explained on the way that they threw new toys into the trash cans there, they were so rich. “Who throws them?” the child asked doubtfully. “The people who live there,” said Rachel, threading her hands under her skirt and pulling down her blouse: her budding breasts with their prominent nipples were flattened toward her diaphragm. The girls walked down the empty road, under the high, dim vault of the trees. On the edge of the pavement, near the gates of the big, still houses, stood the garbage cans, and they gave rise in the child to a kind of nervous greed and a feeling of disgust at the greed, as if she suddenly wanted to eat the mess she regurgitated from her mouth. When she glanced at Rachel, at her too-sharp profile, her heart fell for a moment into a crack that had suddenly opened up inside her: between believing Rachel and not really believing her, only wanting to believe her. A car pulled up outside one of the houses. They stood and looked: a tall woman wearing glasses got out, holding three or four shopping bags in her hands, with two little girls trailing behind her. Rachel gripped the child’s wrist and pulled her toward them. “Here, I’ll help you.” She hurried up to the woman, almost forced two overflowing bags out of her arms, and stroked the head of one of the little girls with her free hand. They spoke English, the woman and her daughters; they walked up the paved path leading to the big house, the little girls behind them, Rachel leading the way, next to the woman, and the child bringing up the rear, shrinking at the sound of the new voice, high, almost shrill, coming from Rachel, an ingratiating, wheedling, obsequious voice. After they put the shopping bags down on the long kitchen table, Rachel asked the woman if they could play with the little girls: “Can we play with their hair?” she asked and undid the short honey-colored braids of one of them, and plaited them again, looking all the time out of the corner of her eye at the mother, to see what kind of impression she was making. The child did what Rachel did, knelt down on the kitchen floor next to the girls and pretended to be stirring something in a toy saucepan made of china. For a moment, over the heads of the little girls, her eyes caught the steely gleam of triumph in Rachel’s look. The mother, holding a hesitant, absentminded smile on her face all the time, whether of approval or reluctant acceptance, set the table with four bowls of cornflakes and milk. But the child didn’t want to eat; she shrugged her shoulders without saying anything and studied the miniature forks and teaspoons of the toy kitchen. Only when the mother left the kitchen for a while did she run to the table, quickly cram two spoons full of cornflakes with milk into her mouth, and return to her place on the floor. In the meantime the mother came back and told the little girls to go to their room, repeating the word “Sleep, sleep,” and Rachel whispered to the child: “She wants us to look after them.”

One of the little girls clung to Rachel and drew a flower on her hand in a blue marker, which looked like the long-stemmed tulips on the curtains in the room. A faint, filtered light penetrated the fully gathered curtains of the bedroom, wrapping the room in an additional layer of softness: the long, low shelves lined with furry animals and dolls, the rosy carpet, the blue bed covers with the piles of colorful cushions on them, the big round jar with two goldfish swimming in it on the chest of drawers. The child looked at Rachel and read it all on her face, the brass bed frames, the stuffed animals, every tulip of the pattern on the curtains, as if she were looking in a mirror. Now the mother was apparently telling the little girls to go and bathe, while at the same time glancing expectantly at Rachel and the child. “Come on, let’s go,” the child said to Rachel, who went up to the clothes rack, took down two pink bathrobes, and held them out to the mother.