Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

“ Yallah ,” said Corinne, “we’re finished for today.” She gave me her hand and helped me up, clothing my body covered with wire, which now, close and smooth and complete, looked like a diving suit. We sat down, Corinne and I, against the rounded side of the marble and began rolling with it toward the edge of the flying porch, up to the place where the floor tiles stopped and gave way to the starry infinity of the nocturnal landscape of hills and lakes, which Corinne called “the sky.”

“COME WITH ME,” Corinne nagged the mother for months. She wanted her to come to Cairo, to show her. “Show you what?” protested the mother. “What’s there to show after all these years?” “Well, there’s your house and all the places you said, Café Groppi and all of them,” said Corinne, who despite herself eagerly swallowed all of Maurice’s tales of Cairo, as told by Sammy: he traveled there once a month, Maurice, radiant with joy over the peace agreement. He had “his own affairs” there: the regular cafés where he met his friends, the renewal of old connections, cheap dental care by a Cairo dentist, books, newspapers, and nightclubs, buying and selling, and business schemes he dreamed up: the first was an agency for organized tours to Cairo under his guidance and inspiration, which he opened in his room in the Hatikva quarter, actually a reincarnation of the Suhba, only without the comrades, and the second, secret at least in definition — an attempt to export thousands of valium pills to Egypt, which suffered from a severe shortage of tranquilizers, as Maurice discovered to his regret (“What’s all this ‘to my regret’ all the time?” asked Sammy).

But the mother didn’t want to hear about it: “I have nothing to go for and nothing to show. The people I loved died or left, and what’s the use of a place without its people? You go,” she urged Corinne, to get her off her back, but Corinne nagged and nagged, and in the end she broke her. “She broke me,” the mother announced. “When that one wants something she’s got uwwat ozraeen , the strength of the devil.”

They went for five days with three suitcases, the mother’s one, and the two big ones belonging to Corinne, whose face showed the first sour signs of disappointment: the Mena House Hotel where she wanted to stay was too expensive, and she was obliged to compromise on the Marriott. “The Marriott’s class, too. What’s wrong with the Marriott? What are we, the prime minister, that we have to go to the Mena House?” The mother tried to mollify Corinne, who pursed her lips tighter and said, “All right, all right.” Corinne’s eyes widened with pleasure at the sight of the colonial-style room in the Marriott, but to the mother she went on saying, “All right, all right,” and went with her, at least for the first two days, to all the places that everyone goes to: the pyramids, the museum, the Khan el-Khalili, and to the mother’s old residential neighborhood in Sharre Elsakakini.

“What, is that all?” demanded Corinne, dismayed at the sight of neglect, the dirt, and, above all — the size. “The whole thing’s no more than a street in south Tel Aviv,” she said to the mother who stood rooted to the spot, looking around her: “Poor, poor Egypt, poor country, poor people,” she said in a choked voice. Nevertheless, they went up to the apartment building where the mother thought they had lived before they left Cairo and knocked on one of the doors. An old woman opened the door, stared at them for a long moment in the gloom of the corridor, until suddenly, after a short exchange, her face shone. “ Umm Sammy, Umm Sammy,” she cried and took the mother into her arms. They sat with her in the miserable room with its closed shutters and drank coffee from sticky little cups. She patted the mother’s thigh, held her hand: “Why did you leave us and go away?” she asked again and again. “Why did the Jews leave us alone with all the evil that came on us afterward and go away?” The mother unpinned the gold brooch with the amethyst stone from the lapel of her jacket and gave it to her, pinned it to the collar of her dress: “Keep us in your heart,” she said.

Afterward the two of them went to sit for a while on the bank of the Nile. The mother was pensive, her eyes veiled: “Look how she remembered, Umm Sammy, Umm Sammy,” she said over and over to Corinne, who was silent and morose, suddenly stung by a bee that left her ankle red and swollen and sore. She had had enough. In the coming days the mother roamed the streets of Cairo alone. Corinne didn’t want to leave the hotel. She spent all day at the pool or in the bar or in one of the halls of the lobby, and made friends with a doctor and his wife and sister from Abu Dhabi.

She dressed herself up; morning, noon, and night, she dressed herself up, making an appearance in the breakfast room or the restaurant, accompanied by the mother who was astonished every time anew, recoiling a little from the admiring silence that greeted Corinne’s beauty, the heads that turned toward her or after her, full of an almost fearful wonder at the regal halo shooting sparks like firecrackers around her oval face held high in huge, inexplicable yearning, at the graceful refinement of her walk, at the musical sweetness of her bell-like voice, and — above all — at the tension aroused by this fragile beauty, so delicate and transparent, which seemed to be held seamlessly together by means of her breath alone.

Between the pool and the thickly carpeted halls Corinne spent her time in the souvenir shop of the hotel, buying and buying: beaten silver jewelry, pure white kaftans, “handmade” embroidered tablecloths, and six or seven colored glass figurines of not quite recognizable animals, which for some reason mesmerized her. She bought two a day — dogs or cats that stretched their necks and pricked up their ears in a manner that suggested something between a giraffe and a deer. She arranged them on the dressing table in the room, crowded together as if in a narrow pen, keeping a suspicious eye on the mother when she brushed her hair in front of the mirror: “Be careful not to break them,” she said.

And then the mother went out to sail on one of the tourist cruise boats plying the Nile, giving up on Corinne and leaving her with the Abu Dhabis in the hotel bar, with a frozen wedge of crystallized orange on the rim of the tall glass of her San Francisco cocktail.

It was a very hot, humid morning, and the mother kept wiping her face, which seemed to her to be covered with a layer of sweat and sand, sitting on the boat next to a group of Israeli Palestinians from Umm al-Fahm on holiday in Cairo, and chatting with them. The dark-haired bespectacled young man next to her, with his arm around the shoulders of his young bride, who was green and nauseous with seasickness, listened to the conversation, admiring the mother’s fluent Egyptian Arabic. They spoke, he and she, slowly and absentmindedly unraveling a bundle of threads of origins and intersections. At a certain moment, she couldn’t say exactly when or how it came into being, she understood: Victor, this dark and pleasant-mannered young man, was the son of Sammy’s father from his second marriage after he came to Israel, Sammy’s half brother. Now belly dancing began on the deck, accompanied by rhythmic hand clapping from the vacationers. The boat swayed. She and Victor looked at each other in amazement; her hands shook. They exchanged telephone numbers and addresses, promised to hold a family reunion at the mother’s place, or Victor’s place in Ashdod.

She returned from Cairo with the coiled spring, the mother, but this time it was different: a joyful anticipation about to burst its bonds, the thrill of suppressed delight tiptoeing around itself. Something had suddenly emerged from the viscous tar coating her former life, come back in a different form, purified by time, innocent as bread.