Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Impatient, pale, and taut as the mother’s coiled spring on the eve of holiday meals, she went to buy fabrics in Nahalat Binyamin, not simply fabrics, but the fabrics: the great awe with which she said “the fabrics” was beyond measure; she spread them out before the mother, carefully folding and spreading them out again for herself, as if she were afraid of even a second of forgetfulness, needing to remind herself all over again. The “sets,” as she called them, had been sketched beforehand on pads of white paper, and then passed on to the manufacturing department: for weeks the shack overflowed with the commotion of the enterprise, with the big nylon bags of stuffing with which all of them — Corinne and the mother and the child and the Nona and sometimes Mermel, too — filled the cushions, everywhere lengths and remnants of fabric lay about, threads and buttons, spools of satin ribbons, rolls of cellophane for packing, needles and pins, with the mother’s old Singer sewing machine, always open, ruling the roost.

In Corinne’s “sets” there was always one permanent motif and changing components “to play with,” she said: one long sausage-shaped cushion of gold or crimson brocade, and next to it two or three little ones made of different fabrics, in a range of changing colors and shapes: round, square, rectangular, or heart-shaped. Corinne thought up the various combinations, stopping the mother at her sewing every hour or so, arranging the sausage and its offspring on the living-room couch, surveying them narrow-eyed from a distance and saying: “You see? That’s exactly how the cushions should be thrown, they have to be thrown.” The mother nodded vigorously at Corinne’s “thrown,” looking apprehensively at the light blazing in her eyes as they rested on the cushions, knowing without knowing: it wasn’t cushions, “thrown” or not, that hung in the balance here, but a world, the entire notion of a world.

She returned to the sewing machine under the watchful eye of Corinne, who couldn’t sew a straight line to save her life, but who knew exactly what the “clean seam” about which she endlessly nagged the mother should look like. The child picked up scraps of cloth, needles and pins, following the creation of the “sets” in a tense expectation that eventually turned into dull boredom.

She sat next to them, close to the sewing machine, listening with half an ear to the hum of the machine and the flow of their conversation, absorbed in what her fingers were doing under the table, as close as could be to them and at the same time far away and hidden from the eye: again and again she secretly stuck the needle into the flesh of her palm, very slowly, so as to locate the exact point of the threshold of pain, almost pain but not pain itself, each time conquering one more millimeter and coming closer to the area of sharp pain in the center of the palm and carefully sticking in the needle, leaving it poking up like a candle on a birthday cake and then pulling it out with a frozen, unchanging expression on her face, detached from the pain and unaffected by it, until a drop of blood welled up and she buried her hand between her thighs, rocking her body to and fro.

In the meantime Corinne and the mother completed the final finishing touches on the first twenty sets of cushions, packed them up neatly in the cellophane, arranged exactly in the order in which they were supposed to be placed on the sofas or the beds, crammed them onto the backseat of the silver Lark belonging to Mermel, who set off with Corinne to do the rounds of the exclusive Tel Aviv shops.

They came back in the early evening: Corinne with an expressionless face and Mermel with two pounds of smoked salmon, Russian caviar, and crystallized orange peel from one of the delicatessens next to the shops. “They fell on her cushions, ordered more,” said Mermel, chewing salmon together with crystallized orange peel under the apprehensive eyes of the mother, who looked from him to Corinne. “Really?” she asked. “Everything’s fine,” snapped Corinne, and went to take a shower. She was afraid of the Evil Eye. The next day they sewed sets energetically: orders arrived. Corinne’s food stuck in her throat she was so excited. She ate standing up, next to the sewing machine, tubs of yogurt and cream. A week later she drove off with Mermel again, with more sets; again they returned early in the evening. Corinne went to bed with her clothes on, and Mermel ate the remains of last week’s salmon with old black bread smeared with butter. Corinne had quarreled with the owner of the shop, he said; she made a scene and took back the cushions. They had ruined her work, displayed the cushions wrong, sold them separately, undone the sets. “So what if they undid them?” wondered the mother the next day. “The main thing is they sold something.” Corinne looked straight ahead with expressionless eyes: “Don’t sew any more, okay? I don’t need you to sew for me,” she said.

LIKE THE SHACK, so, too, the trench Sammy dug next to the welding shop for the war deserved “first prize in the whole neighborhood,” said the Nona admiringly, even though she didn’t visit it much: she declared, and also stood by her word most of the time, that she would rather die from a “Muslim bomb” falling on her than spend hours with the “ asabayya ,” the nervous wreck, the mother, in that place under the ground, twenty-one square feet, even though it was relatively nicer than most such places.

“So die,” barked the mother. “We’ll write your name on that stone where they write the names of the poor dead soldiers.” The mother was really very nervous indeed because of the war, and because of her own character, which combined with the war: her huge anxiety, tireless resourcefulness, terrible grief, and absolute identification with the fighters and the spirit of battle induced in her a seething ferment. She took a course in first aid: they held a course in the neighborhood Labor Federation Center and she was the first to sign up. During the whole of the war she walked around with the first aid kit hanging from her shoulder or right by her head in her “light-light” sleep, dressed in her dark blue housecoat with the buttons down the front, “like a Soviet worker,” which she didn’t take off at night. She ordered everyone to sleep with their shoes on, at the first sound of the air-raid warning shining the light of the hundred-watt flashlight on their faces, which, according to Corinne, was capable of “waking the dead and killing them again with its blinding glare.”

Sammy split his sides laughing — first thing in the morning he went with his spade to dig trenches in Savyon and the surrounding area with Moshe and Mermel, both of whom had also been rejected by the army — he fell apart whenever the mother walked past him with her brisk tread, off to her fighter-plane engine factory, with her first aid kit and the rake whose handle was broken and which she had replaced with a six-foot-long pole. “ Ya hadret elzabet ,” he called her, “your honor the officer,” instead of his old nickname, “ el muhandes ,” the engineer.

For days on end she raced around like a weather vane, looking for a place to “volunteer.” She went to the Labor Federation Center with Georgette and Bracha to “lend a hand” at the Soldiers Welfare Association, and left after a while because “all they do there is gossip all day long; not a soul in the neighborhood escapes those big mouths of theirs,” but above all she devoted herself to improving the shelter.

She smoothed the sandy walls down with a spatula, hung sheets over them, organized a kitchenette with a hollow in the sand for the gas burner, laid down straw mats, made a bench to sit on and a cradle for Corinne’s baby, relayed electricity from the welding-shop generator for lighting, and endlessly raked the floor.