Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

On the front seat Mermel was telling the mother about various job offers he had received, repeating, “I’ve made up my mind to change, enough,” dangling his left hand out of the window with the cigarette whose ash blew back in the child’s direction. She heard the mother say, “If only, if only,” and her voice sounded dull, veiled, as if it were emerging from layers of cloth.

She didn’t come up to Corinne’s apartment with them, the mother; she said that she would wait outside. “Where outside?” asked Mermel. “Outside,” she said, turned toward the little playground in the sweltering lot next to the building, and sat down on a bench with her back to them.

The child went up. The child came down. The mother was no longer sitting on the bench; she was standing and waiting outside the stairwell. She had bought herself a jam tart at the nearby grocery store, but she had eaten only half and was looking for a garbage can to throw the rest away: “Too sweet,” she said, examining the parcel the child was holding under her arm. “What did you get?” she asked. The child showed her: a white summer dress with red and blue polka dots and a low waist, red patent-leather shoes, and a package of finger biscuits dipped in chocolate. Mermel couldn’t start the Lark. He said he would get hold of a friend to take them home, but the mother didn’t have the patience to wait. “ Yallah , we’ll manage,” she said, and started walking to the bus stop with the child, who almost tripped a few times, stepping on the hem of the black nun’s habit, looking straight ahead without blinking an eye in the face of the amused astonishment of passersby.

Night fell as they waited for the bus, sitting on the gloomy bench. The mother took the dress out of its tissue paper again. “At least you got something out of him this time,” she said to the child who looked across the road, at the housing project that was being built there: the ragged buildings were drowned in the darkness like dentures in a glass. She scratched the silver paper off the cross with her fingernails, until they were scratched with the sharp edges cutting into them.

WE REMAINED ON our own, Corinne and I, on the flat porch of the flying shack, thrust up toward the clouds like a fingerless hand of a beggar, the clouds recoiled, retreating backward or forward — it was hard to tell — the closer the porch came, carrying just us trapped inside one of the big transparent marbles that had rolled off Corinne’s hair and caught us inside it, inside the rich dense water that almost entirely filled it and was happily very warm. The mother and Sammy had abandoned us or been left by us, taking the flying shack with them and leaving us the porch as a favor or deposit on some unfriendly future to come, loading the shack onto Sammy’s patched-together bicycle, which up in the air, for some reason, did not fall when turning but succeeded in flying “straight, straight ahead,” obeying the mother’s wishes.

We remained there, Corinne and I, me and Corinne, inside the fertile water in the marble, which provided us with all the necessary nutrients to keep us in precisely this state, neither growing nor diminishing, with our eyelids stuck to our eyes with spit, through which we saw each other as if reflected in curved mirrors, confirming our existence to each other, especially when Corinne leaned over me, and she leaned over me all the time, almost prostrating herself on me, as if the spherical conditions and the roundness of the water in the marble allowed it, in the absence of flatness.

The spiral rings of Corinne’s breath on my face turned into shining glass toys as they left her mouth, into undefined hybrid animals grafted together, a head to a tail, and they grouped politely at one side and waited, while Corinne said what she said, and this is what she said: “I’ll tell you the truth. Someone has to tell you the truth at last.” I shut my eyes inside my closed eyelids and saw how Corinne’s face so close to mine was sucked into the beam of my eyes, disintegrating and then reconstituted: “What truth?” I asked.

The glass animals whose beauty broke my heart stretched their necks and raised their heads together in the water of the marble, not to hear us better but to lick with their glass tongues the strawberries that began to sprout above them, at the rounded top of the marble. I noticed that Corinne was brushing her fingertips lightly over my face, a gesture that gradually grew more aggressive, pressing harder and harder on my cheeks, my forehead, and my chin, on the space between my upper lip and my nose: “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Maurice and who and what he is,” said Corinne. “All right,” I agreed, hoping that this would bring the matter to a quick end, “but tell me only with a sweet tongue, because without ellisan elhilwa I won’t have a face left to show or hide.”

Now Corinne left me alone, collected her toys, and licked them one by one, picked up from the round floor of our marble a pair of cymbals, which were actually the covers of emergency openings. Because that was what was written on them: “emergency openings.” She fitted the cymbals onto her hands, brought them to the sides of my face, struck my cheeks with them for the first time, and said: “Maurice sucked our blood.”

She struck the cymbals for the second time: “Maurice has poisoned our blood.”

She struck the cymbals for the third time: “Maurice drank our blood.”

She struck the cymbals for the fourth time: “Maurice drained our blood.”

She struck the cymbals for the fifth time: “He is the blood. The blood must be spilled.”

My head spun, or perhaps there was something else in me that spun. I was seized with a terrible thirst and I started to drink more and more of the water in the marble, grateful to the glass animals, which now came and surrounded me on all sides so that I could look clearly at their internal organs visible through their glass skin and copy the right answer. The right answer was: “So what should I do now?” And I said it quickly to Corinne who was busy with something else and hardly listened. She was feeling the cymbals, looking for the end of the wire, and she began to pull it and pull it. She unraveled the cymbals into a spool of gilded wire that she began to coil around my body, starting with my feet and moving up to my calves and thighs. “You don’t love him, you can’t love Maurice,” she said in a rhythmic chant whenever she concluded coiling, tightening and tying the gilded wire of the cymbals around another part of my body: “You can’t love him if you want to be ours,” she said as she pushed the coils of wire together on my skin with her fingers, so there would be no strip of skin exposed, all of it covered with an impermeable layer of gilded wire: “Does it hurt you, Toni?” she asked, wiping her tears with her shoulder. I felt the blood stopping in my thighs, congealing in place. “But I love him and I always will.” The glass animals sang in chorus, clustering around me, their food bags crammed with strawberries hanging and swaying on their necks, signaling me to join in the refrain: “But I love him and I always will.” “No, no.” Corinne shook her head, moving the spool up to my arms, coiling the gilded wire around my wrists and pulling hard to tighten it: “You mustn’t love him. You don’t love him.” She straightened my arms to cover my elbows closely with the wire: “You mustn’t, you mustn’t, you mustn’t,” she muttered as she coiled. I could see the beads of sweat breaking out on her forehead even in the dark water of the marble, glittering like sapphires, and staying there on her forehead, radiant and solid, not trickling down, just like the tear drops that remained suspended from the corners of her eyes. “But I do love him,” I tried again, gazing at the marble eyes of the beautiful glass animals kneeling next to me on the rounded floor and letting me stroke their pricked-up ears.