Ronit Matalon - The Sound of Our Steps

THE NIGHT BEFORE the morning of her death, in the hospital. We gathered without coordinating in advance, coming together for a moment on common ground, because of a common concern — her. My brother in work clothes that were so ostentatiously work clothes as to be a cartoon of work clothes. My sister with the luxury of petit fours that my brother polished off in the blink of an eye and the casual luxury of her outfit, her platinum blond hair combed back with oil, her crocodile, or leopard, or something skin handbag. In those flat hospital room colors, in that visual bleakness, she appeared like a radiant strip of halogen, my sister Corinne.

“Why are you in work clothes? Didn’t you go home to clean up a little?” the mother asks Sammy with obvious satisfaction, her face glowing: how she loves his work outfit, the demonstrative shabbiness, the declaration of manual labor. He understands what she is saying: he is the beloved son. My sister-in-law sent strawberries, warning him not to eat them on the way but he did. He lay the green plastic basket with the handful of remaining strawberries on the mother’s sheet. “I’ll wash them,” Corinne said sternly, rebuking my brother with a look for not paying attention, not to the strawberries or to the dance of looks and hints that is going on. Oblivious he fished a dirty check folded in three from his trouser pocket and smoothed it out. “Sign it,” he said to the mother, “I need a signature here.” She signed. She had a habit of wetting the tip of the pen with her tongue, which left a little blob of blue ink behind. “Is it for that building materials guy?” she asked. My brother nodded with immense weariness, rubbing his eyes with grease-stained fingers. The pickup got stuck on the way; he left it in Gat Rimon and came here on foot. With the strawberries.

In the meantime my sister washed them and put them on one of the blue plastic hospital plates. She looked with revulsion at the permanent brown stains on the plastic, and placed a paper napkin on the plate to hide them. “It was a nice day today,” said the mother. “I got up for a bit and saw that it was a nice day.” A light cloud passed over her face. “Did you water the roses, so they won’t dry up, poor things?” she asked my brother. He didn’t answer, having fallen asleep on the armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him, his head tilted sideways, his mouth open. I sat on the edge of the bed and Corinne stood, stood, stood, looking at the mother in supplication, in boundless rage. “There’s no doctor, we can never find the doctor here,” she said. The mother examined a hexagonal cookie tin. “The way they know how to make these tins today,” she marveled absentmindedly, stroking the tin with one hand while the other bunched the sheet in her fingers, bunched and let go. She gave off a kind of nervousness, but different, not the old kind, a nervousness of suspense and expectation in anticipation of something that held a big surprise for her, a prize. I looked at her with a certain apprehension, embarrassed by the new language of her body, the expression on her face: tension and tenderness, a suppressed gaiety, her cheeks seemed freshly ironed, glittering. She glittered with something, inside something, perhaps a promise. She held out the cookie tin to me: “Take.”

I took one, sniffed absentmindedly, and bit into it. She looked at me. “ Allahu aalam , you’re just like your Nona. She’d sniff everything like that before she put it in her mouth. You remember how she used to drive me crazy by smelling everything like she was being poisoned?” she asked. Corinne came tapping on her high heels, bringing in dark tea from the kitchen. “Drink. It’s good with those cookies.” Her fingers were still bunching the sheet but not moving, in their muteness almost rebutting the animated gaiety of her look. “Why have you brought me tea, am I sick?” she said.

OF MY BROTHER Sammy she said, “When he gets hurts, it’s me who says ay.” My brother was her firstborn son, her portrait of herself from a different geography, a different fate. She looked at him as if at dark water that reflected someone if not exactly herself then some woman standing before her with a face obliterated by sorrow. She looked at him with infinite yearning, with dread, with longing for her dread, for her love. He was the “wound-child.” The child who was a wound. I said to her once, “mon fils mon horreur” (a quotation from a French translation of Akhmatova, I don’t remember which poem); she thought for a minute and repeated the words, holding them in her mouth:

“ Mon fils mon horreur . Yes.”

This notion, “my son my dread,” reached deep into her soul, deep into the well where the hook on the end of the rope hits the hard cement at the bottom, and the hook bangs on the cement, trying to get through to the water beneath the water: the child who is the son, who is the dread, who is the young girl. The son who is the girl.

She was a girl when she became pregnant, a child-mother, sixteen years old. Nona married her off at fifteen to a man years older, wealthy, religiously observant, from harat el yahud , the Jewish quarter in Cairo. There was a situation at home: Grandfather Izak lost the family property to gambling debt, and Nona took the initiative and did something about it. “It was her decision. My father didn’t have a say in the matter,” said the mother, when she said anything. The facts related to that marriage and to the circumstances of the marriage only came up in subordinate clauses to the main clauses spoken by others, not by her; they emerged from the flow and were submerged beneath it like the tips of basalt rocks, whose great bodies were sunk in the ambiguous waters of the phrase “apparently.”

Apparently she was married against her will.

Apparently she was tortured.

Apparently she was beaten during her pregnancy.

Apparently she escaped from her husband’s house in the dead of night, dressed only in her nightgown.

Apparently she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy with my brother when she ran away.

Apparently there was a scandal: Egypt, Cairo, a girl from a good family.

Apparently her husband divorced her, he never saw her again, he never acknowledged the child as his son.

Apparently Maurice (a close friend of her elder brother, a frequent visitor to her parents’ home) was waiting only for this, for her, never mind her condition.

Apparently they got married, she and Maurice, when she was about to give birth.

Apparently “he was the only one who would have done such a thing,” only Maurice: to not give a damn about convention or blood ties, to take the child as his son, to love him like a son, to raise him or not, just as he didn’t raise his biological children, with no discrimination.

She banished the father of her son from her existence, just as he had banished her; she never mentioned his name, neither his given nor his family name. Faceless, good or bad — he was and remained anonymity incarnate: not even “a man” but “manhood” in the abstract. The reckoning of pain and rage sealed in his banishment was only the beginning, a pathway leading to something else. And this thing was her deep perception, physical and non-verbal, of the natural order of things. In the natural order of things there was an island. And an ocean surrounding it. And on the island were a mother and her son, a son and his mother, only them, a single soul. The son and the mother were the island, and all the visitors who came were nothing but a disturbance: the fathers, biological and non-biological, the children who were not the son, mon fils mon horreur , which became the name she gave herself, not the one she was given at birth.