Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

The minute the mother and daughters disappeared into the bathroom at the end of the long corridor, Rachel Amsalem flew to the toy shelves and stuffed a teddy bear into her shirt. “Hurry up, take something and run,” she said quickly to the child, and then she was gone. The heavy front door slammed loudly. For a long moment the child went on standing in the empty room, with the soft light and the curtains waving in the breeze. She heard the sound of water running in the bath and murmurs in English. There was a strange heaviness in her legs and head, as if they had been stuffed with cotton wool. As if hypnotized, she went up to the toy shelves, looked at the dead, glittering, glass eyes of the dolls, and her hand reached out of its own accord for a fire engine with two wheels missing. Silently she crept down the corridor, past the half-open bathroom door, closed the front door silently behind her, and walked down the paved path to the main road under the arching trees. For a moment or two she held the fire engine at a little distance from her body, and then she threw it into one of the garbage cans hidden discreetly behind the thick hedges. Rachel Amsalem was nowhere to be seen.

When she reached the main street of their neighborhood she suddenly saw the woman with the cut face and the transparent head scarf coming toward her, limping down the middle of the road. She was only wearing one shoe, holding the other one, which had lost its heel, in her hand. Her eyes — the prow of a ship looking far into the distance — were veiled in a film of blissful pleasure; air rose from her lips, like steam from an engine.

SAMMY SPENT HOURS in the bath, unlike the mother and Corinne. “That bath doesn’t get anything off, all it does is leave the dirt in the water, dirt in dirt,” denounced the mother, and Corinne’s silhouette nodded vigorously, not Corinne herself, whose expression had set in some turn of thought two hours before. There was also the business of quick-quick. The mother bathed quick-quick, and she liked to say so: quickly and powerfully she scrubbed her skin with the “hard” loofah, quickly she rinsed herself off and got out of the soapy water, quickly she dried herself and put something on, as if she couldn’t stand being naked a minute more than necessary.

Corinne, on the other hand, dried herself thoroughly, even the spaces between her toes, passing the tip of the towel between one toe and the next with the same pursing of her lips that a moment later accompanied the gathering of her wet hair into a tight knot on top of her head opposite the steamy mirror, leaving her face, with the eyebrows not yet penciled in, in an absolute nakedness that was beyond naked. The mother regarded Corinne’s delicate, barefoot tread, the smell and the appearance of her cleanliness. “So you took a bath?” she inquired-confirmed, grateful for the symmetry that now existed between Corinne’s beauty and her cleanliness, between her cleanliness and her beauty — a symmetry that she saw as the personification and essence of virtue, a moral category that resulted from “taking a bath,” which actually meant a shower elevated to the dignity of a bath.

The bathroom was built onto the shack; it grew out of the wall into the yard like a wart, but with right angles. For months after it was built, with huge urgency, glittering with the glare of its green tiles, the mother breathed life into it; in other words, she thought about how to change or repurpose it: to move in the toilet, to uproot the bathtub and replace it with a washing machine and the laundry hamper, or to reduce its size and thereby enlarge the passageway, so that there would be more room. “But more room for what? To throw parties in the passageway?” demanded Sammy, looking for the tape measure to show her that all she would gain was two feet. “All that for two feet, two!?” he yelled. She was flustered. Her face showed signs of retreat. “All right,” she conceded. “But you, your problem is that you get attached, you get attached to things.”

He really did get attached, Sammy, to things as they were, as they had always been, since the beginning of time, which in his eyes ensured the stability of their future, so that things would go on in exactly the same way; if only he could, he vowed, he would screw, weld, or glue them to the floor, so nothing would move right or left, which appalled the mother even as a joke. With her “attachment” was expressed in the permission it gave her to change, shift, uproot, and rebuild: the possibility of change was the “attachment,” the seal of belonging.

Nevertheless she left the bathroom alone, contenting herself with changes in the interior without moving the walls, and not because she was really persuaded by Sammy’s “two feet,” but because of Sammy himself: the bathtub was his sandbox.

He didn’t spend his time there to get clean — the truth was that he quite liked dirt — but to play or to sleep, two activities that led to each other, or turned into the same thing: to play was to sleep. Soaking in the foamy water that had grown cold, sleep fell on him in the middle of his singing: we knew this by the long silence that descended on the bathroom. “He went to sleep,” pronounced the mother in sorrow and wonder. “He simply went to sleep.” Her hands were tied — all she could do was knock loudly on the door or send me, but she couldn’t go in. This enforced inaction led her to moments of clumsy cunning: “Go and tell him that the contractor Gabai came, that he’s waiting outside,” she instructed me. I stood outside the closed door in the dark passage and recited the message in a bored voice: I didn’t want him to believe it. But Sammy reposed in realms beyond belief and disbelief: he didn’t hear a thing. Even when the sirens went off in the Six-Day War he didn’t hear a thing. Shaking, to the sound of the rising and falling sirens, we huddled in the dark bathroom passage, the mother, Corinne, and I, banging on the door: “There’s a war on, Sammy, a war.” Long minutes after the sirens stopped, he arrived at a run at the shelter he had dug in the yard, a towel wrapped around his waist, his bare feet coated with mud.

HOW RESTLESS SHE always became before a holiday meal, every holiday, all the holidays, since the beginning of time: she, who rarely said “always,” and had only heard rumors of “the beginning of time,” heard that there were people who had “their habits and customs from long ago.”

The shack was spick-and-span hours ahead of time, you could eat from the floor, and her saucepans were closely guarded, especially from Sammy’s greedy hands (“You’ve left nothing in the pot, two teaspoons is all”).

There were hours left until evening, until “everybody” arrived: again and again she said to Nona, or to Sammy, or to the child, “everybody,” almost believing it herself. A tight spring was coiled all along her short body: she tried to take a rest with the coiled spring; she lay on her side in bed with an open book, she got up and rearranged the cups and plates in the kitchen cupboard: what was on the bottom shelf went to the top and vice versa. But the spring was still there, almost nothing but the spring, even when she went around to Nona’s and woke her from her afternoon nap to make coffee.

“ Yallah , get up, make coffee,” she prompted her, sat down in the armchair next to the radio and immediately turned it off: the talking gave her a headache. Nona smelled her. “I can smell her when she’s in a state, I can smell her from the road,” she said, and tried to come up with some innocuous thought, for example, that it was a good thing the holiday came just in time for the end of the artichoke season, because there was nothing so tasty as artichoke hearts with lemon and garlic. “It’s the end of the season for them. The hearts came out big this time,” the mother answered glumly, rubbing her bare feet against each other, staring hostilely at the chair standing in the middle of the room with the Nona’s underclothes spread out on it to dry: “You have to put your underpants here for everyone to see? Would it hurt you to hang them up on the laundry line?” spat out the spring, while the mother suddenly rose to her feet, without finishing her coffee and escaped outdoors, leaving the Nona muttering, “ Ya tawli ya ruh ,” be patient my soul.