Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Sammy looked again at the note, at the address written down in Victor’s handwriting: “And you say he’s my brother, this Victor?” he asked again and again in embarrassment, in the anxious expectation that for the first time in his life had granted him the dubious asset of adulthood: a sleepless night. All night long he sat on the wrought-iron chair on the porch, dressed in his pajama pants, narrowing his burning eyes opposite the amm ’s thorn field, which in its stubborn lonely neglect in the dark looked so hopeless and pitiful.

The next morning he called Victor and invited him to visit them on Saturday. Victor wasn’t sure, and neither was the mother. She wanted to go and see her brother on the kibbutz, and she went. But in the end Victor came that Saturday. He sat in the wintry sun on the lawn of the mother’s shack without the mother. Sammy barbequed meat; he burned his finger in his excitement. They sat side by side, Victor and Sammy, compared their damaged eyes: both had been infected with herpes in the left eye, at about the same age, and lost their sight in it. About “the father, may he be healthy,” Sammy and Victor’s father, they hardly spoke: he wanted nothing at all to do with Sammy or Umm Sammy.

In the evening the mother returned, saw the remnants of the luncheon party, and went off the rails: she overturned the barbeque grill, threw and broke the plates left in the sink, chased us with the broom: “You wanted to cut me out of the whole thing, do the whole dirty business behind my back,” she yelled at us. “What dirty business?” asked Sammy on the point of tears, avoiding the broom and covering his face with his hand: “Why dirty? You wanted me to meet this brother, you brought the phone number and everything.” She went inside, slamming the door and locking it behind her: “I didn’t want anything, anything. Who gave you permission to get into my bones like this and decide behind my back?” she cried from behind the locked door.

For over a week she didn’t speak to a soul, shut herself up in the shack, went only to the grocery store and back, slammed the phone down on Corinne, me, and Sammy. “But what’s going to happen?” Sammy scratched his arms savagely, making the rash worse — eczema had broken out all over his body. His lips were gray, cracked with panic. He knocked on her door twice a day and she refused to open it. He crept around to the back window, tried to look inside and talk to her. She closed the blinds an inch from the tip of his nose: “Go away, I don’t want to see anyone,” she said.

The stone closing the cave of the past had been removed for a moment and then returned to its place with the same breathtaking and inexplicable suddenness with which it had agreed to move a little, to open and be opened.

One night Sammy implored me to come with him, to go to her together, he and I and Corinne. Perhaps the three of us would be able to get her to climb down. The shack was padded with darkness. Only in the passage a little light went on and off again a minute later, as soon as the sound of our steps rose from the flat porch surrounded by the pale, sickly patch of lawn whose baldness had been laid bare by the mower.

PERHAPS WE WERE deafened to the sound of our steps in the rain at the time of the event, walking abreast along the road at night, at measured intervals, which enabled us to spread across the road, from sidewalk to sidewalk, stepping in time, at a measured pace, neither fast nor slow, but with precision — not like people escaping from something or someone, buffeted by the movement of the pendulum between the past and the future, between what had been and what would be, but like people who had been granted the grace of the moment, bathed for a moment from head to toe in the golden drizzle of the present, warmed by its humble furniture: the rain, the road, the night, the cat, the dirt path, a random sentence spoken or not, the crooked branch of a Persian lilac tree, the shack we passed without making anything of it, and walking on.

The mother marched in the center, if there could be said to be an actual center, walking between Sammy and me, keeping an ear out for Corinne, at Sammy’s left, without turning her head to the side or being tempted in some other way to appear to be watching her, which was not necessary now, because everything was over — not “everything” in the sense of the course of life, but the “everything” of the skin’s quiet knowledge, the skin that keeps watch through the inattention of the mind, the heart, circumstances, and fate.

We didn’t drag our feet in any way, our bodies whole and determined even in the rain, not surrendering to the feebleness of defeated withdrawal, and not to false stiff-backed bravado either; no surrender was needed here, since there was no battle, no friction between what we were and what we weren’t — man, object, or nature.

The glistening asphalt of the road expanded our hearts, especially since it stretched on and on, beyond the twists and turns in the road that hid more road, stretching out before us with all the beautiful, tremulous sadness of the unknown.

We stepped in the scandalous silence of a pact of love, be what it may, faithful at last to the same vision, the same oath, the same story that had resigned itself to being a thread, a remnant, a vestige, a flicker: the rain, the unforgettable experience of the rain.

It took us time to understand it, this experience, its particular and magical purpose as we walked: it came down our heads in fine, continuous threads, in tiny drops, and then, when it approached the surface of the road, about eighteen inches above the road, it changed direction and drifted upward again, not touching the ground at all, collecting in the air, at about the height of our knees, and turned into a thin, airy lake, flat as pita bread, with no dimension of depth, shedding an unworldly radiance, golden and transparent.

“ Allah yistor ,” God help us, said the mother, looking at our dry feet on the dry road, whose smooth glittering appearance came not from the rain but from the reflection cast by the thin lake of rainwater that lay above it like a polished glass roof, and she repeated “ Allah yistor ,” in a dry, matter-of-fact tone without dread, awe, or any other excessive emotion, since where we were at that moment and what we saw in the rain left no room for excess, or the hollowness of heart that gives rise to it. We walked for more than two hours, knowing the time by instinct and not by the clock, crossing the thin lake cutting the line of our knees, whose rainwater retraced its course and rose into the sky, back to the rain clouds, without diminishing or changing its volume or radius, so dedicated was it to the precise and unchanging mindfulness of its measure and its quality.

FOR THREE DAYS before he died, Maurice listened around the clock to passages from the Koran read on the radio. Corinne said that he turned his back and died, waited for death with his face to the wall, “or else death was the wall,” she said after thinking for a minute. She also said that after the mother died, he didn’t want to live a minute longer, and he even said, to her or others, the words “the husband” is supposed to say: “After her I have nothing left,” Corinne said that he said, and even if he didn’t in so many words, explicitly and out loud, his whole being said it, giving a convoluted, arabesque meaning to the words “after her” with their inference to “before her,” as if there really had been a “before,” whose presence had vanished, and an “after.”

It wasn’t as if his hollowing out — his matchstick limbs eroded in his white flannel underwear — was completely a consequence of the death of the mother: it had been coming for a long time and was only waiting for her death to complete itself, to reach the remote and godforsaken suburbs of his body and fill them with emptiness.