Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

A few days after this he stopped coming, because of the curfew, and he disappeared for long months. “I’m worried about Mustafa not coming. My heart is afraid for him. Who knows what happened to him?” the mother said repeatedly, and she persuaded Sammy to drive her to the village of Yaabad on the West Bank, to look for him. They set out in the morning in Sammy’s pickup and arrived in the afternoon, losing their way among the stone barriers outside the Palestinian villages and the army roadblocks. Mustafa “lost his color” when he saw them: his wife had given birth to a new baby that morning, his fifth. They entered the only room of his house apart from the kitchenette, sat down on the long sofas, which opened up into beds at night, and looked around them: an entire wall of the room was covered with the mother’s flower paintings.

They were stuck close together, rectangle next to rectangle, with no gaps between them, “like wallpaper,” covering the wall from floor to ceiling, only it seemed that they had been altered a little.

The mother came closer. She almost pressed her nose to the wall and looked: on the areas of the pictures painted brown for the soil, Mustafa’s daughters had stuck real reddish soil, on the green gouache of the leaves they had pasted green leaves from bushes and trees, and on the huge flowers painted burgundy, yellow, and purple — petals of red, yellow, and purple flowers, some of them fresh, most of them already wilted.

RONIT MATALON, the author of Bliss and The One Facing Us , among other books, is one of Israel’s foremost writers. Her work has been translated into six languages and honored with the prestigious Bernstein Award; the French publication of The Sound of Our Steps won the Prix Alberto-Benveniste. A journalist and critic, Matalon also teaches comparative literature and creative writing at Haifa University and at the Sam Spiegel Film School in Jerusalem. You can sign up for email updates here.