Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

SAMMY DIDN’T LIKE it when the child touched the tip of her nose with her tongue: “Stop it”—he pulled a face—“don’t do that.” “But why?” she asked, taking advantage of the darkness in the street to do it again. “Maybe it will make you sick,” he said. “It’s a fact that most people don’t do it.” The child looked at him from below and from the side. She knew that he wasn’t serious, but she hesitated: he had his own way of saying things, always with a kind of crooked shadow confusing laughter with fear, shifting clothes. They’d gone out, the two of them. After bathing and shaving he put on his only surviving jacket after he had got rid of all the others, and said, “Let’s go out.”

First they went “up there,” to the movies, entering half an hour after the beginning of the movie they had seen the day before, and taking their regular seats: Sammy slid down in the seat, stretching his legs out in front of him, watched the movie, or dozed off, until he remembered something and had to go out, forcing everyone in the row to stand up. He went to get chocolate-banana Popsicles and came back. After fifteen minutes he went out again, for cola, and then again — this time to the toilet, after which he hung out on the plaza in front of the movie house with the others who were sitting on the steps and chatting, going in and out like him. In Westerns he only went out two or three times, and in “ Ichikidana ”—which is what he called the Indian movie — five or six times, because it was long, maybe two and a half hours long.

The child didn’t budge, she sat on the edge of her seat, staring hypnotized at the screen even when Sammy pushed past her and hid it, hitting her knees to make her move. She sat next to Madame Guetta, her two daughters, and her mother-in-law, who also had permanent places, next to theirs, but who never bought anything at the kiosk: they kept on taking things out of the plastic shopping baskets between their legs, sandwiches with chicken, meat patties, or hard-boiled eggs, bottles of root beer, pretzels, cookies, and a plastic tub of eggplant and tomato salad. “Take, take.” They pressed sandwiches and pretzels on the child, who almost always refused, and Madame Guetta fished strips of chicken out of the sandwich with her fingers and urged her to taste, poking her with her elbow: “Here, without bread, have it without bread.” And nevertheless they all cried together — she, and Madame Guetta, and her mother-in-law, and her two daughters, who almost screamed, accompanying their weeping with mutual pinches on the arms and suddenly stopping, both together, when the singing stars got married in the end.

The child, however, didn’t stop crying, she went on even harder, for a long time after the movie ended and the lights went on: the brief picture of happiness was immeasurably more painful than the long sorrows preceding it, eating into her heart as if it had been burned by acid. “Stop crying,” Madame Guetta scolded her, “everyone’s happy now in Ichikidana , there’s nothing to cry about. Why are you still crying?”

Sammy dried her face with his sleeve, took a handful of pumpkin seeds mixed with empty shells out of his jacket pocket and gave them to her. They walked side by side down the dark, deserted road, to look for Moshe, Sammy’s friend, in his parents’ shack at the end of the neighborhood, at the bottom of the wadi, which looked like a hat someone had sat on. Next to the dirt path leading to his house they saw Moshe shuffling in front of them cuddling a wailing puppy in his arms; he found it next to the house, he explained, and his father was afraid of dogs. The three of them returned to the road on their way back “up there,” to sit there for a while. Now they walked strung out across the road, the child in the middle with the puppy in her arms, and Moshe and Sammy on either side of her. Whenever the lights of a car flickered in the distance and the sounds of an engine reached their ears, Sammy and Moshe froze, looked at each other, and said, “Military Police,” ran off the road, and hid in the yard behind one of the shacks. They left the child at the side of the road, in front of the shack, to keep guard: “Don’t say anything about us if they ask you,” Sammy warned her before disappearing into the darkness after Moshe, taking off his shoes to run faster.

The child stood on the side of the road, on the curbstone marking the pavement that for the time being was only sand, pressed the puppy into the hollow between her shoulder and her neck, and waited. The Military Police patrol car slowed down, dazzling her with its headlights. The two policemen sitting in the front looked at her for a moment and went on driving slowly, cutting the dense darkness of the road into three rectangles with the two beams of light from the headlights.

AT FIRST SAMMY didn’t want to stay in the army; he requested a transfer to the navy, and they told him that the only way to leave the Golani infantry brigade was on a stretcher, and he retorted, “I’ll show you a stretcher,” and bit the officer’s leg. He painted the officer’s dog black with boot polish, and cried that he was afraid of the dark and couldn’t go to sleep without his mother, and made himself out to be so crazy that in the end he thought he really was crazy, and both he and the mother were afraid that he was actually losing his mind what with all the playacting and the jail, where he sat with Mermel and all the others, in and out, in and out, until they got rid of him for good, but afterward, when he wanted to go back — because the Six-Day War broke out and he was ashamed of being the only man on the bus and everywhere else, with the women and children and old people — the army didn’t want him: he went to the town major and begged them to take him back for the war, and the town major took Sammy’s file, opened it, and slowly turned the pages: “Look, if the Arabs reach Petach Tikva, we’ll take you, but as long as they’re not here, I don’t think so,” he said slowly and deliberately to Sammy.

THE SATURDAYS THAT fell on us like a thick blanket, the cypress tree congealed in the blue dust, when the mother said, “Everything’s standing still,” pressing her hand to her chest as if she couldn’t breathe, going out to the yard, or the road, the neighbors, to see if everything was still standing still and coming back and confirming it, “Everything’s standing still,” lying down, getting up, sitting down, standing up, going out to look at the garden in the desolation of everything standing still, with the air dense as cement wiping out any distinction between indoors and outside, between the shack and what wasn’t the shack, between going in and coming out, emptying action and movement of meaning, purpose, and reason, and “slowly eating up your soul, little by little, with a teaspoon,” said the mother.

CORINNE HAD THIS idea of making cushions: “We’ll buy material, I’ll design them, you’ll sew them, and we’ll sell them to luxury shops,” she said to the mother. “I’m not so good at sewing,” the mother reminded her mildly, but there was nobody to talk to: Corinne had been whirled up and scattered to pieces with her inspired vision of the cushions, of “the killing.” That’s what she said: “I have to make a killing, to hold up my head.” The “killing” meant money but it wasn’t only money, it was decisive recognition by the world of Corinne’s talent, her ability, and her inspiration — not just recognizing it with a smile and a handshake, but by bringing the world to its knees, by making it crawl to her at last. But the world was in no hurry to crawl, at any rate it wasn’t so simple: when she wandered around those shops in North Tel Aviv, with their fake or not fake grandeur, to “get ideas,” as she said, she would come back looking green and seasick. She hadn’t missed a detail: she photographed it all in her mind, which had become a bloody battlefield where a bitter war raged among her conflicting emotions: contempt and disgust for the bad taste that pretended to be something else, admiration for the few “really” beautiful items and the nonchalance of the proprietors, inner urgency and certainty that she could do immeasurably better, and the black mood brought on by the awareness that all this, the whole “killing,” was very far from being within her reach.