Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

This is what drove her crazy in all the parched summer months of parched thorn fields surrounding the shack: the thought that it was about to go up in flames. When I saw her hostile narrowed eyes surveying the thorny gray expanse stretching out to the north of the shack, as far as the reservoir and beyond, the twitch at the corner of her mouth, the stance with legs apart and hands on her hips, like the leader of a street gang preparing for a fight with a rival gang, a ship’s captain watching an approaching storm through his telescope, I understood (no, I knew) the meaning of the word “enemy.”

She quarreled about the thorns with the council, the neighbors, with everything and everyone who refused to see the catastrophe as she did. At the heart of her intense panic was her wounded consciousness of the fragility, the flimsiness of the home, the shack: the wood, the thin plywood walls, the materials that could be consumed in a second. She never forgot them for a moment; she thought about them with profound compassion, with great, detailed concern, as if her pity were for them, for shack, not for herself, as if it were a being in its own right, an elbani-adam .

The terrible, blazing afternoon hour was the worst of the day, when she would “smell something,” jump out of bed, interrupting her rest between one job and the next, race outside barefoot, wrapped in a housecoat. Standing on the burning asphalt of the street without feeling it, she stared at the faint puffs of smoke, this time from the thorn fields on the east, on the other side of the main road, wringing her hands. Sometimes she would shout: “Fire! Fire!” The street was empty. The road was empty. Inside the house I stopped my ears with my fingers so as not to hear her. The carpenter neighbor came out of the carpentry shop, reassured her. The carpenter’s wife, Frieda, came out, poked her head through the bars of the gate, staring with eyes that remembered the nightmare so constantly that in the end they forgot it. She didn’t reassure her, she was from the Holocaust.

For a long time the mother would stand there, gazing into the distance, at the red glare of a fire engine, and she went on gazing afterward, too, after the fire fighters had finished their work and driven away.

Once every few weeks she would take the initiative: she burned the thorns herself, the ones close to the shack, poured gasoline on them and set them alight. Terrified scorpions and lizards escaped from under the stones and thorns, fleeing in all directions. She stood there with the rake, black as a miner but with soot, conducting her own good fire. Once the flames got out of control, reached the path leading to the shack and took hold of the wooden fence. “You’ll burn the house down in the end,” my brother raged, throwing sand on the flames and looking for the hose: “In the end you’ll destroy it with your nonsense.” She looked as if she’d been woken from a dream. Distracted, wringing her hands, but this time in embarrassment, she justified herself in a small voice: “It’s so it won’t burn down because of the fire.”

THERE WERE THREE of us in the shack: my big brother, my big sister, and me. She didn’t count, she was the shack. Because she had no sense of history, there was no moment when the shack came to life: it had existed either forever or not at all, because she never stopped creating it. There were bits and pieces of reality and semifiction, secondhand leftovers of pioneering folklore: she remembered, for example, the sand dunes. She remembered them with acrimony, because they were still there and in her opinion had even spread.

Sometimes she referred to a time as “when we came”—just that. “When we came.” Dates were beyond her: the year of her birth, like the month and the day, were shrouded in mist, because in Egypt her father had been negligent registering the arrival of his children. He would go to “the office” months and sometimes years after they were born, make up dates and towns of birth. She was registered as having been born in Livorno, Italy. She wasn’t. But she had sentimental feelings for Livorno as the supposed town of her father’s birth. When she wanted to make an impression she would say: “We’re originally from Livorno.” You might think she was trying to disguise her Middle-Eastern-Levantine background, but that would be nonsense: what she thought made an impression was not Middle Eastern or European, but the idea of being “originally” from somewhere. The idea that we had origins, a pedigree, a foundation. The question of foundations bothered her greatly. She would say, “Him, he’s got a good foundation.”

“When the foundation is rotten, everything else is rotten.” (The object of this remark was usually Maurice.)

Or, “Don’t clean from the top, start from the foundation.”

Or, “How did you expect to turn out? We never had what’s called a foundation.”

A foundation moved her not only as an existential metaphor, but mainly as concrete reality. Concrete to the marrow of her bones, she loathed the vague, the clouded, and especially the convoluted. She lingered for hours (hours? long enough) at the great caverns of building sites, excited and wide-eyed as a child. staring at the cement mixers slowly making their way down the mounds of earth to cast the foundations, at the great cranes topped by a swaying glass cabin with a swaying man inside it, at the big trucks of sand and gravel stopping the traffic, riveted by the curtains of pure yellow sand streaming from the truck into the pit, which, unlike the sand dunes surrounding the shack, were distant and beautiful, and above all knew their place. The hated sand dunes did not know their place, they stood in her path in every sense. Impossible to eradicate, the sand dunes defeated all attempts to cover them up, to conceal or tame them, like the first layer of paint in an oil painting, which peeps out of the subsequent layers, a reminder of the past, forcing the past, the foundation, into the present.

The shack had no foundation, not really. It had been simply set down in the dunes. Sometime at the beginning of the fifties, trucks arrived and unloaded prefabricated shacks, putting them down at random on the sand dunes in the new immigrants’ transit camp: “When they got tired, they stopped and put one down,” she said.

The sands were all the same and the shacks were all the same. During the long dark nights people got lost in the dunes, knocked on strange doors, looking for their shack. People sometimes wandered lost in the moonlight until three o’clock in the morning. Until Maurice arrived (he stayed then for about half an hour) and came up with an idea: all the men, the heads of households, would put a flagpole on their roofs and fly a petticoat or nightgown belonging to their wives. Nobody would get lost. And that’s what happened. “Yes, believe me, that’s what happened,” said the mother, with a grave, stern expression on her face that seemed to match a different thought and a different story, which had apparently gone astray in her mind and ended up in the wrong neighborhood, at the wrong door, like the people in the story about the petticoats in the sand dunes, which of all the stories about Maurice was the one she chose to tell.

THE CHILD WAS woven by a thousand visible and invisible threads into Nona’s story, because the mother was silent. In the spaces of the silence left by the mother Nona talked and talked. The power of the imagination, which Nona possessed in plenty, did not defeat the power of memory, which she also possessed in abundance: she repeated the story, written and directed and acted in her mind, letter by letter, word by word, with the same pauses and stresses, the same theatrical pathos, the same transitions from language to language in exactly the same places, even the same technical hitches, a power outage that darkened the stage for a moment at exactly the same place in the plot.