Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

In the noonday heat she circled the garden, dug something up, hoed soil that was already hoed, went to the welding shop to sharpen the pruning shears, pruned the parched rosebushes, decided to set up a rock garden next to the rose bed. She carted rocks in the wheelbarrow, one by one, from Marco’s nearby plant nursery, and tried to uproot and transfer the giant cactus with the curling fleshy leaves that was standing in the way of the rock garden, struggling with it for a long time in the blazing sun, in complete silence, despairing and determined — her against the cactus.

“It can’t be beat. It needs some man to get it out.” She finally gave up, surveying the abandoned battleground around the cactus — the clods of earth, the ropes, the rakes, and the hoes lying on the ground. With her arms and legs scratched and slightly bleeding up to the thighs, with her hands pierced by the thorns of the cactus, she retired at last to the shower: exhaustion had defeated the coiled spring, the pain stretched to the limits had passed from the mind to the body.

Toward evening, shortly before “everybody” arrived, she went and stood by Sammy’s head as he stretched out on the couch to rest: “Go fetch Maurice to come sit with us,” she said.

And Sammy went, he searched and searched and didn’t find him, or he found him in the end, and brought him after darkness descended, after the mother had turned on the gas to heat up the food and turned it off again, from time to time going out to the road where the breathless stillness of the holiday eve held sway.

Sammy came in first, and Maurice long moments after him, muddling his way in rather than walking — battling with the front door until he succeeded in opening it, standing in the dim passageway, next to the cupboard, his hair wet and combed back, mouthing a reluctant “Happy Holiday” in a low voice, with a distraction that was contagious, absorbed by the mother, sending a series of shocks through her, moving from her bloodless lips to her arms, to the dish in her hands, which fell and shattered into gravy-smeared splinters on the floor.

The splinters scattered, all the way to the end of the room, some almost underneath the carpet next to the window, where they were discovered and collected by the broom and the dustpan after everybody left.

PRUNING ROSES IN the garden is essentially different from pruning roses in the hothouse. The form taken by the pruning stems first of all from the aims of the cultivation and our demands of the rose in the garden. When pruning we must take into account the intervals between the plants, the nature of the bush, and its function in the garden: whether it is a bush for cutting flowers, for blooming in the garden, as ground cover, or as a climber. While it is difficult to give a comprehensive or precise recipe for pruning, the underlying principles are the same for almost every type of rose, with small changes adapted to each group.

“Water branches”: in most cases the rose in the garden is grafted. Close to the place of the graft, which is called the “heart of the rose” or the “apple of the rose,” young new branches grow, starting out as strong, upright “water branches.” These “water branches” can be easily recognized. In most cases they are thinner and more thorny, and they don’t bear flowers. The regular removal of these branches will assist in the correct and healthy growth of the rose, and the production of a greater number of blooms. These branches must be removed as close as possible to their base, without harming the “heart of the rose.”

In order to achieve the best results, the pruning should be performed in stages:

First all the superfluous branches should be removed, dry branches, “water branches,” and branches from the upper body bearing flowers up to a height above which we do not wish to leave any branches in any case. Pruning a very long-standing branch should be avoided unless we wish to replace it with a younger branch growing next to it, and it is very important to take care that this young branch is not a “water branch.” The gardener should think twice before pruning a long-standing branch, something that is liable to cause it severe damage and even lead to its death. It is important to remember that the harm caused to the rose by not pruning is less than the damage of incorrect pruning, or pruning at the wrong time. To the extent that there is any doubt about the pruning of a certain branch, the gardener should leave it and remember that he can always prune it, if necessary, later on in the season.

And lastly, an extremely important sentence that cannot be repeated often enough:

A branch that is pruned can never be returned!

“WHAT ARE WE, mountain or plain?” the child asked the mother, putting her hand through the hole in the wall to catch the tail of a passing cat. The mother hesitated for a minute, perhaps wondering what a “plain” was. “A mountain we’re not,” she said in the end.

THERE WAS A hole about the size of a tennis ball, but with jagged edges, in the wall of the shack, right next to the square window of the yellow hall. Through the hole you could see a section of the unplastered brick wall of the welding shop, the broad smooth leaves of the mango tree, and through them the green door of the mother’s little storeroom stuck onto the welding shop, clinging to it like a baby tied to the back of its mother working in a rice paddy.

Sammy made the hole once when the blood went to his head because of the child and her homework. He remembered the homework at ten o’clock in the evening, after they had all been sitting for hours — Sammy, Sammy’s friends, and the child — on the verge of the dirt road leading to the shack, talking nonsense and eating snacks, sweet, salty, and spicy, and then reversing the order and beginning again: spicy, salty, and sweet.

The mother had not yet come home from work but her warning filled the air, rising and falling with the inhalations and exhalations of the shack: “Remember, you, to see that the child does her homework,” she said to him. And suddenly he remembered, dismayed: “What about your homework? Why didn’t you remind me about your homework?”

Together they searched for her schoolbag, turned the shack upside down, and in the end they went to get it from Havatzelet, waking her parents who were already in bed: the child had forgotten it there on her way back from school. They sat at the dining table, under the low lampshade that spun slightly above their heads, tracing circles of light, and began taking things out of the schoolbag. Sammy took them out and the child watched: sandwiches wrapped in paper turning green with mold, a half-eaten rotten apple, hair clips and elastic bands, a lipstick of Corinne’s that had melted and stained the inside of the bag with a thick red paste, mixed with flecks of tobacco from two cigarettes Rachel Amsalem had stolen from her brother and given the child to keep for her.

The math book lay at the bottom of the bag, crumpled and stained. Sammy sharpened the pinkie-sized stub of a pencil with a kitchen knife, because they couldn’t find the sharpener, and read the question out loud — and they both waited, and waited: a fly buzzed with an ugly noise as it flew from one slat of the plastic blind on the opposite window to the next.

“Write it down,” yelled Sammy, “Write down the sum you said.” “But I didn’t say anything,” said the child, and wrote down a few figures anyway, and then rubbed them out with her thumb wetted with spit, because she couldn’t find the eraser. A sooty stain with a damp little hole in the middle remained on the page. Sammy tore it out: they began again, but now they couldn’t find the pencil. Sammy’s eyes hurt. He covered them with the black airline eye-mask someone had once brought him and his hands groped over the tablecloth, the notebooks, and the books in search of the pencil. “You’ll send me to my grave,” he said, “to my grave,” and told her to look for a pencil.