Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

Did the child sit on her lap while she told the story? No, the place on Nona’s lap was taken by the ashtray. This was the time for her cigarette, after eating and before resting. The child sat at her feet, on the thin mat her uncle had once brought from the Bedouin market in Beersheba. The Nona couldn’t see the colors that the child told her: red, yellow, blue, green, brown. The Nona practiced the colors with the child in French: rouge, jaune, bleu, vert, brun .

The child repeated the colors every day, even when the mat was no longer there: the mother threw it out one day in a rage after it got tangled up in Nona’s feet, not for the first time, and she tripped and fell. “That’s all I need, a wheelchair,” said the mother. Nona was silent, puffing on her cigarette without inhaling the smoke, the blank lenses of her glasses misting over (by this stage she couldn’t see a thing and the glasses were for show). “ Indi karami ,” the Nona said to the child after her silence came to an end, after the mother left the room. “I have my self-respect.”

The child couldn’t understand the connection between the mat and the “ karam ,” Nona’s self-respect. She asked, “But what’s the connection. Tell me what the connection is.” Nona turned her head aside and hid her face: the face that had been turned toward the child before was now turned away, to look blankly at the glass panes in the front door. Perhaps the Nona didn’t understand the word “connection” or perhaps it was one of her moments of deliberate deafness. In the end she said something. She said: “Only God sees what I have in my heart.” But that wasn’t true. Everyone saw. “Everyone” was the mother and the child, the child’s brother and her sister. “But Maurice,” said the Nona, “he sees for himself, he’s like me. He’s your father,” she went on. “You remember that Maurice is your father?” “Yes,” said the child. “Tell me what you remember about him,” she asked, “tell me things.” “I don’t remember things,” said the child. “You do remember things about him, I know you do,” said Nona, stretching out her hand to touch the child on her forehead, but touching her eyelashes instead. “Whenever your heart sleeps for Maurice, wake it up, because he’s your father and his heart is awake for you. Do you understand?” “Yes,” said the child, and she pinched Nona on her right arm, which was both withered and swollen. Nona had to have a special sleeve made for her dresses. “Make room for me.”

Now they were both sleeping in Nona’s bed, covered up to the neck by the heavy blanket. Nona slept on her back and the child slept on her side, burying her forehead in Nona’s arm, not the swollen one, the normal one, smelling her elbow through noisy breath. “What a good smell,” said the child. “It’s from the good soap they brought me, I kept it in my clothes. Until yesterday, when I said to myself, Yallah ya bint , who are you keeping the good things for, the dead?” the Nona explained as her eyelids closed, the white, transparent lids covering her metallic blue eyes. “Don’t sleep,” the child requested. “I’m not sleeping, I’m resting,” said Nona in a heavy voice. The child waited a moment or two, footsteps pounded in the next-door house to the right of Nona’s quarter-shack, or to the left, in Rachel Amsalem’s father’s house. “You’re sleeping, you’re sleeping,” said the child. “No I’m not, I’m just closing my eyes for a bit, to let them rest,” said the Nona with difficulty.

The child turned onto her back, distancing herself, marking a border between herself and the Nona with her finger on the mattress so their bodies wouldn’t touch, a deep long moat between two now-hostile states. She examined the map of moldy stains on the dank ceiling: the fat one on the right was angry when they brought it food not from a can, it ate the amm ’s cow but only the skin, without the meat, so it would have black cow fur on the inside, too, and whenever it wanted it could turn itself inside out and both sides would be the same, but its aunt on the left, who was browner, saw that everyone was running away from her — her fingers, head, arms were all running away — and she began shooting at them so they would come back quick, but only the fingers came back, all except the thumbs, which hid inside something and only came back after they had grown all by themselves in an envelope full of sugar.

A voice suddenly emerged on her right, from under the layers, as if from the depths of the floor. It was the Nona continuing some train of thought: “Maurice brought me that good soap. He knows how to bring all the good things.” She paused for a moment: “When he wants to, he knows to bring the best things.” She rubbed her stocking feet against the feet of child, who was now close under the blanket and lay her head on Nona’s broad, soft, liquidy stomach. “You came out of my stomach, you did, said the Nona from far, far away, from the open air inside the room, and then added reluctantly, “It’s as if you came out of my stomach.”

The child sat up, “as if” at the beginning of a story, the beginning of the beginning. The Nona, too, raised herself heavily from lying to a sitting position, leaning against the two flat pillows propped up against the wall. The iron railing of the bed pressed against the base of her spine, but she didn’t notice. The child leaned over to the side table, took a cigarette out of the packet, lit it, puffed on it once, and handed it to Nona with the ashtray. The Nona looked straight ahead, with great preparation and a certain veiling of her eyes: it wasn’t the concentration of an effort to remember but of self-hypnosis.

Her voice was thick, hoarse, saturated with the vapors of a mix of grief and enthusiasm. “She got rid of them all before you came, the mother. Zizi in Egypt she didn’t get rid of, he died on his own, but all the others that came afterward she got rid of like kittens, because Maurice left. How would she raise them? When you were in her stomach she wanted to get rid of you, too. “Enough,” she said, “I’ve had enough.” She fell silent, as if listening to the faint voice of the radio. “And what happened then?” asked the child, playing with the Nona’s hand lying on the blanket, counting the hollows in the place where the fingers ended.

“And then I had a dream. One night before she was going to get rid of you I dreamed. In my dream the white man came to me. He came from the back, not from the front, he spoke to me and I didn’t see his face, the words came from behind. Don’t let her get rid of this baby, he said, this baby will bring good luck.” She stopped again, gently withdrawing her hand from the child’s grip, stroking her chin, her lids closing over her eyes, leaving a narrow slit. “Well?” asked the child.

“I went to her. I picked myself up and sat with her all night before she went to get rid of it, till three o’clock in the morning I sat with her and told her what the white man had said. I said to her, ‘Have this baby for me, give it to me. It will bring us luck, you and me.’ And she agreed. She cried and cried, and I cried with her, and she agreed, and that’s how you came.”

“And what happened afterward?” the child asked, disappointed. “Nothing, life,” said the Nona. “As if you came out of my stomach.”

The front door opened, forcing a ringing slap of air into Nona’s sealed room. The mother appeared, one quick look, only for a second. “ Yallah , home, enough for today,” she said to the child, abruptly pulling off the blanket. “Get up, let’s go.” “Get up ya habibti ,” the frightened Nona hurried her. “Go to your house.” The child laced her shoes with exquisite slowness, wet the laces with spit, and pulled them very straight before threading them into the holes, stealing a sidelong look at the mother’s calves in their thick brown nylon stockings, the memory of whose slippery touch sent cold shivers down her spine. “Why is the child shivering, does she have a fever?” asked the mother from on high, in the dense air above the child’s head that grew hot and cold by turns.