Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

In the democracy of suffering and diminishment decreed by old age, he could be considered a privileged citizen, because “he was used to it,” said Corinne: for years he had been practicing solitude, illness in solitude, vagrancy, hardship, with “nobody to make him a cup of tea.”

Actually there was. Two or three times a day the boy Dror dropped by his room in the Hatikva quarter, brought him things, delivered things for him, made tea, or, as Maurice liked to say, “a little tea.”

“ Behayatak a little tea,” Maurice asked him, following his every movement in the kitchenette opening off the room, from his cognac-colored leather armchair, crisscrossed with cuts as if someone had slashed it with a razor blade. The east-facing window behind him bathed him in a dazzling glare: in this cage of shattered light, surrounding him like shards of broken glass, sitting up with effort in an unnatural stiffness that was liable to give way at any moment, his wild eyes planted in his face with a stony look, he resembled nothing so much as the portrait of Pope Innocent X in the series of the screaming popes by Francis Bacon.

The cut-up cognac-colored leather armchair, the boy Dror, another loyal acolyte, Salomon, for whom Maurice had once done some big favor in the past, his old typewriter, his “papers,” the calendar that was also a wall clock, illustrated by a picture of a field of blazing poppies — a gift from the Migdal insurance company — had wandered with him for years from room to room, almost the only permanent features.

He sat for hours with his eyes fixed on the poppy field of the calendar, refusing the world with the firmness and politeness of his “ min fadlak ” and “ behayatak ,” “if you please” and “do me a favor,” words of politeness and request that were nothing but sentries guarding his inner non-world, silencing the inner conversation that had always gone on in his head but had stopped: it was a long, empty hall.

From time to time he left the hall that was his mind in the last months of his life, returning to it after a little while. In spite of everything he still found the will to gather up a little strength and go out: “I arranged to see him again,” he reported wearily to Sammy.

“Him” was Sammy’s uncle, the brother of the biological father from Cairo, who lived close to Maurice, “a few steps away.” Maurice was trying to get the brother to soften the recalcitrant father, to persuade him to meet his son at last, for there to be a sulha , some kind of reconciliation. But there was no sulha : every week, when he met Maurice at the café in Aliya Street, the uncle brought only “small change,” reporting in great embarrassment on slight shifts in the father’s rigid position, which came to nothing. Maurice refused to give up. He mobilized all his cunning, his resourcefulness, his charm, his eloquence, to bring about the meeting between the father and son, for some kind of healing to take place — he was fighting, it seemed, to keep some promise he had not made to the mother but had promised himself for her sake, against her express wishes, and for her crushed, secret wish that had no voice and could not be put into words.

But the father didn’t want to see Sammy until the day he died.

“He’s a dry tree, that man, a blockhead.” Maurice cursed him on one of the few times in his life that he cursed anybody except for the Ben-Gurionists, dragging himself off to meet the brother “for the last time,” getting dressed in his gray raw silk suit with the burgundy waistcoat, in which he swam, like at the mother’s funeral, when he wore it, too, collapsing and stumbling on the long dirt path in the cemetery, while Sammy and Mermel made a chair with their arms and carried Maurice between them, hoisting him high in the air like a birthday boy, or a big rag doll, when her body was cast into the pit.

SHE CALLED ALL shades of red “Bordeaux,” and not because she couldn’t tell red from Bordeaux, but because she saw red as a kind of superfluous pause on the way, and she wanted it to hurry up and be Bordeaux. In addition, she liked rolling the word “Bordeaux” around her tongue. “It suits you, that Bordeaux dress,” she said. “It’s red,” I corrected her. “Can’t you see that it’s red?” “You’re right,” agreed the mother, “you should always wear that Bordeaux.”

She upholstered the sofas in burgundy (“It looks like a brothel,” said Corinne), knitted a burgundy sweater for Sammy “for everyday,” which she abandoned halfway through, painted one of the walls in the yellow hall burgundy, when there was “that fashion for colored walls,” sewed a “ corniche ” for the bedroom curtain in burgundy, bought a bedside mat in burgundy, and countless tubes of gouache, a third of them red and black, to mix into burgundy, when she started to paint.

“I’m just painting a little, to pass the time,” she said coyly. The easel stood on the porch with the big sheets of Bristol paper, and she started early in the morning “quickly-quickly”: flowers, flowers, and more flowers. Flowers in the form of anemones, of roses, of cyclamens, of poppies. Even some of the cyclamens were painted in burgundy. From seven to eight in the morning she got through “maybe twenty.” Then she hurried to remove the easel, the paints, the paintbrushes, in order to flood the porch with water and “begin the day.”

This was the hour of Mustafa, the gardener who had worked for all the residents of the neighborhood until they all let him go, for fear of knife-wielding Palestinians. Only the mother went on employing him and occupying herself with him. “Let them fear for their ass if they want to. The only one I’m afraid of is God,” she said. Every morning she was waiting for him with the coffee, and they began with a review of her work: “Nothing to write home about.” She surveyed the paintings with a critical look. “Not so good this time, eh, ya Mustafa?” “Good,” he disagreed. “Why do you say not good? Straight from Paradise they are, those flowers you paint.”

On his face there was always a half-embarrassed, half-ironic smile, and his fingers were long and delicate and manicured as a pianist’s. But the mother envisaged a different future for him. She wanted him to be a muhami : “You should be a lawyer, ya Mustafa, with brains and a tongue like yours, a muhami ,” she exhorted him. He walked behind her to the rose bed at the back, the disaster zone. “You see?” She pointed in despair at the wilted bushes, bending down and turning the soil over with her fingers: “It’s all because of this lousy soil, sand and more sand, mafish fayida , there’s nothing to be done with it.” Mustafa knelt at her side, dug his fingers politely into the soil, not because he needed to verify anything, but in order to prove to her that his conclusions were based on empirical research. “Why do you say mafish fayida ?” he said after a prolonged silence. “The soil is good, there’s nothing wrong with the soil, very good soil.” The mother spluttered: “How can you say such a thing?” “ Behayat elnabi , by the life of the Prophet, the soil is good,” vowed Mustafa, brought new rose plants, planted them, and urged her not to touch them. “Leave it with me,” he said.

Now they visited the new roses, which had not yet bloomed, every morning after the coffee and the paintings: “Nothing,” pronounced the mother bitterly, “these will die from the soil, too.” Mustafa produced a metaphor of his own: “A man at work, does he like people standing over him all the time?” “He doesn’t like it,” the mother said reluctantly. “It’s the same with the roses,” concluded Mustafa. “They don’t like people standing over them either. They, ya sitti , are also working.”