Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

The room was dark. There were no windows apart from the rectangle of light from the front door open onto the concrete landing overlooking the mother’s shack at the bottom of the path, behind the thorns of the amm ’s backyard, behind the brick fence of the welding shop, behind the cypress tree. The child went out to call Rachel Amsalem, so that she, too, could hear all the things Nona told her about herself, and found her next to the guava tree, sorting out the fallen fruit that wasn’t rotten and collecting it. She came with the child reluctantly, cradling the guavas in front of her in her shirt. The two of them sat on the floor at the Nona’s feet. “Well?” demanded the child, and looked at Nona expectantly, afraid that Rachel would get bored and run away. The Nona cleared her throat, and opened: “ Ya wai wai, ya baruch Adonai ,” she said in an unenthusiastic, perfunctory tone: her mind was on her “change of air.” “Not like that,” said the child in disappointment. “say it all from the beginning.”

She began again: “You, ya bint , with you it’s either wai wai or baruch Adonai —bless the Lord.” The child roared with laughter and glanced at Rachel Amsalem who was sitting cross-legged with a blank, embarrassed expression of incomprehension on her face. “She said that I’m either ay-ay-ay or baruch Adonai , did you understand?” she pressed Rachel, and the Nona contributed: “That’s what you say about someone who either sees everything black as black or white as white.” Rachel barely smiled and took three caramels from the jar standing on the little table. The Nona went on to the next bit: “Pity the poor madrub who marries you. He probably wanted to hang himself, and went to get married instead, the madrub .” This was even funnier, and the child laughed till tears came to her eyes. Rachel laughed, too, but she whispered to the child: “What’s a madrub ?” The child wasn’t sure what a madrub was and she looked at the Nona: “I don’t know exactly,” she said. Nona paused for a moment, lit her cigarette, took a puff without inhaling, and said the third part: “You, ya bint, elriglen fil-khara walraas mtartara .” Rachel Amsalem tensed at the word “ khara ”—shit. “What did she say?” The child couldn’t answer, the laughter was choking her. “What are you laughing at? You laughed yesterday,” the Nona scolded her, and she turned to Rachel and explained: “ Elriglen ,” you know what that is — feet. So the feet are in the shit but the head is up in the air, “ mtartara ,” going around and around,” she explained.

Rachel Amsalem wasn’t pleased about something. She arranged the guavas in her shirt and got up and left. The child saw her home. “Wasn’t it funny, what she said about me?” She looked at her anxiously. “No,” pronounced Rachel, kicking a stone with the toe of her shoe: “She insulted you and you laughed like an idiot.” “She didn’t insult me,” protested the child. “Yes she did,” insisted Rachel. “She said you were shit, that’s what she said. Why isn’t that insulting?” She stood still and stared straight into the child’s face. From so close up her eyes seemed to squint, coming together toward her nose. The child was silent. She thought for a long time: “Because it was her who said it.”

MAURICE’S TIME WAS a time of absence: the past and the present had no headstone. This timelessness was flat, with no footholds to hold on to: when he came, when he went, what came first and what came afterward, when he stopped coming, at what age and what year — all this was not history but metaphysics.

His sudden appearances and disappearances were welded in the child’s mind into the one great, burning appearance that consumed itself even as it was taking place, vanishing into the whiteness of absence. The longing was not an arrow sent into some future or past. It had no map: it was a longing for longings, for the white absence itself.

And then, at some point along the length or breadth of the flat expanse, he stopped appearing for a very long time, which was called “years”—and then he popped up, after the “years,” emerging like the tip of a mountain that had been covered by the sea, when the child was eleven or twelve years old. This was his final appearance: after that there were meetings, but no appearances.

He didn’t come to the shack; he could no longer just come to the shack and flee from it: that movement was over. He went to Corinne one afternoon and sent Mermel to tell the child to come and see him there, at Corinne’s place.

It was after Purim but nevertheless Mermel found her on the lawn of the mother’s shack in her costume, dressed as a nun, sitting up straight on one of the wrought-iron porch chairs and kissing the wooden cross covered by the mother in silver aluminum: Sammy’s friend who couldn’t make it on Purim was taking a photograph of her like this, and then another one of her standing between the rosebushes, holding an open Bible, the ends of the black head scarf flapping behind her back and the hem of the black dress hugging her calves, exposing the tops of her white socks that had slipped down into her shoes. Mermel peeled a banana and looked at her being photographed: “That’s a nice costume,” he said to the mother, putting off what he had come for. But she knew him only too well, especially his inability to keep his mouth shut: “What’s up?” She gave him a look. “Out with it.” Mermel squirmed a little and peeled another banana. “Maurice wants to see her,” he said in the end.

Now the photographer told the child to pray. He sat her on the stone fence outside the welding shop. “But how?” she asked. “Like this.” He put her hands together next to her stomach. “That’s how they pray,” he said. Instead of doing as he said, she did what she had once seen in a movie: she pressed the palms of her hands tightly together against her clavicle, closed her eyes devoutly, and mumbled something. Mermel stepped up to the stone fence, sat down beside her, and Sammy’s friend photographed them both: Mermel eating a banana with his thighs open, and the child with her profile turned toward him, the black scarf covering half her face.

“He wants to see you,” Mermel said to her. In the meantime the mother got dressed, locked the door of the shack, leaving the key for Sammy in the big flowerpot next to the door and forgetting the coffee cups on the porch table. “Take off that costume so people won’t think you’re crazy, walking around in a Purim costume after Purim,” she said to the child. “No,” replied the child, pulling her socks up to her knees. “What do you mean, no?” demanded the mother in astonishment, and thought for a minute: “Then you’re not leaving the house, you’re staying here.” The child sat down on one of the wrought-iron chairs and held her tongue. The mother sat down on a chair herself: “We’re not going anywhere. Let her not see her father,” she announced to Mermel. “What do you care if she goes like that?” Mermel tried to persuade her. “She can go, I’m staying.” The mother rose furiously to her feet and went inside. “You can’t break that child,” she muttered.

Mermel and the child went off, got into the silver Lark standing at the side of the road. When Mermel started the car, they saw the mother coming. She got in and sat down wordlessly on the front seat, and the child in her nun’s costume moved to the back, pulling the white fabric swaddling her neck up to her chin, so as not to leave a scrap of skin showing. Nona, who grew up among the nuns in Cairo, said that it was forbidden to see their bare flesh except for their faces, the only part of themselves they were allowed to reveal. She didn’t say “bare” but another word, pursing her lips, as if she had betrayed something against her will, and the child tried to remember what the word was, as she fingered the cross on her chest and stared at the orange groves of Gat Rimon, through which the Lark drove as if it were undoing some zip, which opened wider and wider as the car went on driving, cutting through the heavy density of the greenness.