Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

The child went from the bedroom to the living room; she stood in the doorway without switching on the light, staring into the darkness that stuck to her eyes even when she reached the kitchen where the light was on, gazed absentmindedly at the kitchen cupboard, stared blindly into the open fridge. “I couldn’t find one,” she told Sammy, and put up her hand to scratch the back of her head: the pencil was there, stuck in the elastic band of her ponytail. She pulled it out and handed it hesitantly to Sammy. All of a sudden Sammy jumped up, tore the mask from his eyes with a terrible roar, and punched the air violently in the direction of the wall. The roar came instantly to a stop, as if someone had choked it with a pillow: Sammy’s hand stuck out, past the wall, into the yard. He looked in astonishment at the hole in the wall, at his fist that wasn’t even scratched, and then at the child: “You see what you did?” he said.

TWO OR THREE weeks after she died, Corinne’s telephone calls start, the ones that begin as if on the second or third page, after the blank page. A minute or so of silence announced the ritual like the muffled beat of a gong saying: kneel. Her voice seemed to come from her knees, a sound for which there are no adjectives.

“Is she in her grave, Toni?” she began. “It seems she’s in her grave,” I said. Again a silence, but different, animated: “But why?” “What do you mean, why?” I fixed my eyes on the window, on the balcony of the dental technician in the building next door, which had been turned into a laboratory: he was spraying a phosphorescent green substance onto a set of dentures. “Why did she die?” Corinne’s voice came again. “She was sick,” I replied. “I can’t eat,” she said. “I bought a grilled chicken and gave it all to the dog, the whole thing. It stank like a chicken with the plague.” She fell silent, thought for a minute: “But she didn’t show any signs.”

The dental technician closed the top and bottom of the dentures, checked the fit. “But why did she die?” her voice pleaded. I held the earpiece away from my ear, which was suddenly burning. “Maurice is very sick. I’m going to see him,” I said. Again a silence, longer than the previous ones, disturbed by the sounds of the television that she kept on twenty-four hours a day. “That day,” said Corinne pensively, or the opposite, reaching for something with great concentration, undoing the loop of a sentence. “What day?” I asked. “The day when she was pregnant with you and they hit each other over him wanting to go abroad. The way she poured gasoline on herself and almost set herself on fire in the yard after he left the country, when she was pregnant with you,” she said.

INTERESTING THAT THIS time Corinne was harnessed to the shack at the front, not the back: her never-ending hair, attached to the tiled roof like reins, suddenly stretched out and displayed the whole spectrum of its colors, changing areas of color from black, brown, chestnut, and orangeade-orange, all the way to baby-blond and white. And it was so much hers that it made us forget that perhaps it wasn’t really hers, that she had cut it with her own hands from the heads of all the women in all the hairdressing salons where she had worked for years upon years. And now all that hair had come back, first sticking tress to tress, in nonchronological order, and then sticking to Corinne’s head. It spread out upward, in front of us, like a long, narrow sheet of awning, carrying all the raindrops that turned into a shower of glass marbles as soon as they touched the sheet of hair, their color matching the color of the patch of hair they had landed on, colliding but not mixing.

From the front window of the shack, which was actually the kitchen window full of sky, we watched Corinne flying in a high, straight line, far away from us, at the end of the long sheet of hair that pulled her neck back with her chin thrust upward, straining our eyes in the direction of the event whose details we could only guess at, but we could not see clearly because of the distance, the haze, and the glassy dazzle of the marbles: apparently she had changed her clothes during her flight, and not by herself, but murmuring instructions to the flock of cranes gliding next to her, almost encircling her, opening and closing with their beaks the zips of skirts and dresses, buttoning and unbuttoning buttons, flying under her flapping skirt to tuck her shirt in nice and tight.

And Corinne tore a way for us through the sky, forging in her flight a narrow path exactly the size of her narrow body, but giving us an opening “to get a foot in,” in the words of the mother, who stood at the kitchen window in the middle, between Sammy and me, marking in black ink on our bare shoulders the exact spot reached by her head, waiting a minute or two to grow a little, and marking the place again, leaving a row of close black lines that turned into a thick stripe on our shoulders.

There wasn’t enough space but we didn’t complain, the three of us crowding closer and closer to the window of the kitchen, which was the upper deck of the flying shack, feeling the shifting of the wall before us as it moved toward the flat porch vanishing into the great sea of the sky, ignoring, or at least pretending to ignore, the awkward attempts of the character from the bailiff’s office to strum on Corinne’s white grand piano — he refused to give up, went on and on hitting the keys, constantly changing his gloves — white for the white keys, black for the black—“just to make things clear” as he repeated, hurtling toward us on the piano stool, in the wake of the piano itself, as a result of the air pockets.

From time to time, we noticed, Corinne tried to turn her head back, even though it was stuck inside a cloud in the shape of a hair dryer, and to make eye contact with us and with the piano, to make sure that we were connected to her, and by the innermost threads of the internal alphabet, which had almost nothing in common with its accepted and in the end arbitrary order, especially with regard to Corinne, who always began with the Hebrew letter het : “dreamy” for me, “bullshit” for Sammy, and “spicy” for the mother, because of Corinne’s love for spicy things.

When we reached the very top — and without panting, because the ascent to the highest of the high did not require any strain or effort on our part, on the contrary, the surrender of willpower — the parts of the shack began to fall away one after the other, first the walls, which responded to the stratospheric pressure of the good kind and simply dissolved, leaving us with nothing but the floor we stood on, which followed in the wake of Corinne’s hair like a flying carpet, and in a certain sense played to our advantage, because the man from the bailiff’s office found an article granting tax relief to people on a magic carpet — which we weren’t really, but for taxation purposes we were, especially Corinne, who would have been ready for any arrangement that left her in possession of the white grand piano, which in its earthbound life filled almost the entire space of her new living room, standing in the middle of the room, on the carpet she bought especially in its honor, bearing the silver candlesticks wreathed with laurel leaves made of silk, also purchased in its honor “just to make an impression, impression, impression, who do you want to make an impression on?” cried the mother in the direction of Corinne, who was now flying far in front of us, vanishing into the dense sky until all that could be seen was the long, winding ribbon of hair, protruding from Corinne’s head like a tongue stuck out impudently at the mother.